Karen Hess, 1918-2007. It is a sign of just how distracted, scattershot, spacy and just plain lost I’ve become that I am only just today learning of the death of one of my food-studies heroes, Karen Hess, who passed away on May 15 after having suffered a stroke the previous week. I have mentioned in this space before, and mentioned it so regularly that it has almost become a biorhythm, that Mrs. Hess is responsible for the sea change in the way I look at food, at cooking and at culinary history, brought about by my reading of The Taste of America, the passionate, furious, though ultimately hopeful philippic she co-wrote with her husband John in 1974. I read The Taste of America for the first time in 2000, having spent years picking it up and almost immediately putting it down upon reading that the authors had harsh words for the reigning culinary lions of the time: Julia Child, James Beard and Craig Claiborne. I idolized Julia Child, considered James Beard to be an unimpeachable font of knowledge and sat up straight for Craig Claiborne, at the time the most powerful food editor in the U.S., and I wasn’t particularly interested in watching what seemed to be a pair of humorless cranks tearing them down.
Ultimately, though, I found myself seduced by the first paragraph, and quickly found myself unable to put the book down. There was indeed plenty of harsh language for Child, Beard and Claiborne, to be sure, but there was also plenty of beautiful language, too, language I would not have thought possible for a pair of writers so frequently described as angry, vindictive and vituperative. There was the love of beautiful produce: the corn salad and sorrel found in Thomas Jefferson’s market diary; perfectly-ripened tomatoes and strawberries; plump chickens; “flapping-fresh” fish. There was the love of beautiful cuisine: the long-cooked, nuanced cuisine grand-mere produced by generations of Frenchwomen; the wondrously fragrant bouquet of Indian cuisines; the beautiful regional variants of good old American dishes like oyster stew, clam chowder, hoppin’ John, succotash. There was indeed anger at what they called the debasement of the knowledge of our forebears, but there was also pride and love for those forebears, and for that knowledge. For the first time, I felt as if the food I ate and the way I’d learned to make it was part of a continuum, and I wanted to keep the knowledge alive. If I couldn’t actually roast meat on a spit, or make my own butter from the nasty ultrapasteurized cream available to me, I would do the best I could with what I had; I would raise my voice for better-quality meat and milk and vegetables, not just for urbanites with access to farmer’s markets, but for as many of my fellow countrymen as possible; and I would acquaint myself with the literature of the past, with the cookbooks, household manuals and gardening manuals from which America’s—and the world’s—best cooks obtained their knowledge.
Not everybody shares my appreciation of the Hesses. One of the smartest fellows I know—and on whose good side I hope to stay with all my heart 
—has not only stated, eloquently, his disputes with the Hesses and with their book, but has also encapsulated it in a villanelle. I won’t deny that the Hesses were often just plain mean about Julia (although I will disagree with his assessment of their Nation review, “Icon Flambe,” as a mere dyspeptic attack on an 85-year-old woman, and more of an attack on the New York foodie establishment, who, at the time, were falling over themselves to vilify Julia’s biographer, Noel Riley Fitch, even though Ms. Fitch shared said foodie establishment’s adoration of Julia), and that their distaste of her methods and her scholarship led them to overlook the genuine good she did in instilling confidence in millions of American cooks. I will also grant that the Hesses could be martinets, and if they thought that someone’s work was not up to snuff, they could turn on him/her on a dime, no matter how favorably they had once looked upon him/her. (In The Taste of America, the Hesses referred to Mimi Sheraton as “one of the few food writers who do honor to the trade,” but during her tenure as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, she became, in the Hesses’ words, “the Times’s reigning Oxymoronic Critic.” John Hess describes Sheraton in surprisingly—although should I really be surprised?—mean terms in the footnotes to My Times: A Memoir of Dissent.)
Nevertheless, I’m going to wear the Oxymoronic Blogger mantle with pride, and suggest that there is room in one’s canon for both Julia Child and Karen Hess. While I might not read Julia with as unquestioning an eye as I once did—I’m sorry, but I’m never going to see risotto as a good repository for leftovers, and I will never laugh at the “Flied Lice” anecdote—I still love her for that “whoops and elbows” approach that left the Hesses cold, for her suggestion that one practice flipping omelets by flipping a washcloth in the omelet pan, for the meticulous French bread instructions in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol 2, for her voice and engagement and unbounded enthusiasm. Likewise, I cannot take all of Mrs. Hess’s culinary proscriptions—she would be horrified by the presence of Heinz ketchup and HP sauce in my fridge—but I can take her core message to all would-be cooks and students of food history: Learn from where your dishes came; learn from where you came; study the work of those that came before you, not only because it’s useful but because it’s just plain fun, and strive for honesty and care in your own work. I’ll say it again: there is room in one’s canon for both Julia Child and Karen Hess, and I wish that they could both still be here.
Did I mention distracted, scattershot, spacy and just plain lost? Once there was a time when I wouldn’t just disappear for two weeks without a) leaving the country and b) asking if anyone would be interested in guestblogging for me. I wish I could say that it’s been quiet around here was because Lloyd and I were off to Scotland again, or because I was off to some sheep-and-wool festival or other, or that I was busy with some fabulous new project that would be keeping me offline for a few weeks, but honestly, it’s fabulous, I promise!, but I fear that the truth is more prosaic. I will mention LuthorCorp only to say that much of the recent quiet has been due to events at LuthorCorp, but I will not speak another word about LuthorCorp, not only because I’m not interested in being dooced but also because complaining about my job makes for both boring reading and boring writing. In general I remain philosophical about all of it by reminding myself that I have a plan of action to get myself out, but that plan of action was dealt its death blow at the beginning of May, and ever since then, I’ve been at loose ends: exhausted, broody, sad and bone-dry every time I sit down to write.
I suspect that I need some time off. Lloyd and I are planning some time away in September, but I think I need a little time before then, as well. (I did have the great good fortune to take the day off on Thursday, when, after years of merry correspondence, I finally met IRL the beautiful and brilliant Kimberly and her beloved Paul, whose company went a long way toward sending me into the weekend in a good mood.) I also need—possibly concurrently with the time off—time to consider my options, including but not limited to going into business with a dear friend, retaking the LSAT and reapplying to law school, resuming research on the egg book, staying at LuthorCorp until one of these things comes to fruition, or leaving LuthorCorp and taking the chance that one of these things can come to fruition while I’m working somewhere else. Eventually, possibly after I’ve had some more sleep, I’ll see all of these options as the brilliant possibilities that they are, but right now, frankly, I’m too tired to see said brilliance. In the meantime, I have good friends, and plenty of them, on my side, as well as the unwavering support and true love of Lloyd and my family. Here’s hoping I still have them by the time the miasma passes.
When in doubt, go with what you know. I’ll say this much for states of distraction and disorientation: they’re absolutely perfect for knitting. The mountain of knitting you see below is the now-infamous Michael Kors sweater I started in September. I had wanted to learn how to knit an Aran sweater, and in the pages of the fall 2006 Vogue Knitting, I thought I’d found it. In hindsight, it occurs to me that a 32” tunic might not be the best option for a first sweater. In February, while knitting the front, I made a mistake in the pattern, then made it worse in an attempt to fix it, then ended up ripping out the whole problem area, 7 1/2 inches of it, representing approximately three weeks’ work. It was at about that point that I flung it into my closet and announced that I’d work on it when I hated it less. The night I received my rejection letter from CUNY Law, I pulled it back out of the closet. I am now half a sleeve away from being done with the back, front and both sleeves, which means that once the sleeve’s done, I only have to sew the shoulders together, pick up the neckline stitches, knit the turtleneck ribbing, set in the sleeves and, uh, sew it all together. And then block it. Gulp. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I do know that it’s 90 degrees in New York City, and I could be knitting myself a pair of socks, or a fetching little cotton top, but no, I have to finish this big-ass sweater. Then again, would you expect any less from someone who picked the hottest day in July to make eclairs?
Of course, there’s been baking, too. There’s always baking. Yesterday I finally poached the rhubarb I bought at the farmer’s market. I had planned to use it today as the fruit of choice in the jelly cake, which becomes “[Fruit of the season] cake” when plum or apple season arrives. The plan changed, however, when I stopped at the health food store on my way home from checking in on Bunni’s cat, and found a little pile of white peaches on sale, soft, wrinkly, deeply fragrant, and perilously close to overripe. Of course I couldn’t say no. I brought them home; peeled them (cut x’s into their bottoms, drop them into boiling water for 15 seconds, drop them into a bowl of ice water, slip the skins off); made the basic jelly cake recipe below, substituting 1 1/4 ounces (1/4 cup) of the flour* with an equal amount of ground almonds and the vanilla extract with about 3/4 teaspoon of almond extract; cutting 4 peaches into quarters and embedding them, cut side down, into the cake batter; and then baking the cake for an hour and 15 minutes. It has taken every last scrap of willpower to not do a little quality-control tasting of this cake. Were I alone tonight, I’d probably be eating it for dinner. Luckily, I’ve got Lloyd, who has these nutty ideas about sugar for dinner being a bad thing, and that cake is always better when it follows a nice savory dinner. What an odd duck is that Lloyd.
*A note, and apologies, to Kathleen, who asked me two full weeks ago to address the dip-and-sweep issue. Dip-and-sweep is a method for measuring flour, in which you stir the flour in your flour canister, dip the cup into the stirred flour and sweep the flat end of a knife across the surface of the cup, knocking the excess flour over the cup and back into the canister. When I measure this way, I get a cup of flour that weighs about 5 ounces.