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This week marks two months since I received my happy news from Dairy Hollow about the Egg Board fellowship, and 2 1/2 months until I pack up my notes and my equipment and my chef’s whites and leave for a month’s stay in the Ozarks.  In that time, I have begun to panic at just how quickly two months can pass; yet, at the same time, I can see a plan begin to take shape, both in the book I am writing and in the demo class I will be teaching at Dairy Hollow.  As I was drifting off to sleep one night, the idea came to me.  Three breads: an eggless white sandwich loaf, a white sandwich loaf with eggs, a brioche.  Three lemon curds:  a lower-fat curd, a “regular” curd, a rich curd lower in eggs but much, much higher in butter.  If time and oven space permit, three custards:  a stovetop creme anglaise, a flan, a creme brulee.

The pictures below are the results of the lemon curd test, in which I went through a pound of butter, 1 1/2 pounds of sugar, 15 eggs and a dozen lemons.  Each of these versions has approximately the same amount of sugar (2/3 - 1 cup) and lemon juice (3/4 - 1 cup).  On the bottom right-hand corner of the plate is the lower-fat curd, based on a recipe by Sally Schneider. In addition to the sugar and lemon juice, it contains a small amount of egg and no butter; it is thickened by gelatin and additional egg white.  It is intensely lemony and puckery, with a texture almost like lemon jelly.  The curd on the top right-hand corner is a traditional lemon curd, this one created by Sherry Yard.  It contains a higher proportion of eggs and is enriched with additional egg yolks and half a stick of butter.  It is the eggiest of the bunch, and it shows.  The one on the left is less a curd than a cream, created by the brilliant French pastry chef Pierre Herme.  It contains much less egg than the traditional curd, but the difference is made up with butter, nearly 3/4 pound of butter.  It is not nearly as tangy as the other curds, but it is both richer and lighter, richer for the butter and lighter for that butter being beaten in, piece by piece, with a portable blender.  It tastes like a sublime lemon pudding, or like the best lemon buttercream you’ve ever had.

If I had to pick one, though, I would go with the traditional curd.  It has the right amount of snap, the right amount of smoothness, the right amount of sweetness.  It begs to be spread on a piece of toasted pound cake, or better yet, gingerbread, a dark, damp gingerbread so spicy it makes your mouth tingle.

Late-Breaking PTMYB News: After four years of temping, Lloyd has been offered, and has accepted, a permanent job with the company he’s working for now.  This company, which I used to refer to as Giant Financial Services Monolith, shall hereforth be known in this space as Number One Happy Good Fun Time Company.  Thank you, Number One Happy Good Fun Time Company, for recognizing a good thing when you see it.

This is the most accurate quiz I’ve ever taken.  Thanks and blessings to Snowball and Pam for sharing it.

Dear friends,

Apologies and sighs, sighs and apologies.  It has been a tricky week for playing with y’all.  I wouldn’t blame you for shaking your head in disgust.  Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina?  Prepare to Meet Your Slackerina, more like! You’re right, of course, but all I can do is beg your indulgence just one more time.

I am on my way to the library, to once again do battle with the Rare Book room.  I have found some amazing things in the catalogue, such as a manuscript copy of The Form of Cury, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) extant cookbooks in English, a collection of recipes by the cooks at the court of Richard II, edited by Samuel Pegge.  (Cury means “cooking” in Middle English, and is pronounced “kewry.") I am dying to get my hands on this, to sit in an overheated room and actually touch history, but the catalog notation contains that dreaded appendix:  PERMIT REQUIRED.  As I told a friend, I’m hoping that the process to get that permit does not mirror that of Jane Juska, author of A Round-Heeled Woman, who had to plead her case to a pair of snotty misogynists before she was allowed access to the Berg Collection to look at the Anthony Trollope manuscripts.  True, I do have the Egg Board watching my back, and I have a nice reference in the form of Andy Smith, who taught my New School class, but I still fear it may take more than that.

Dear friends, I knew that I would not emerge from this fellowship, this month in Arkansas, with a fully-formed book, but the more I read, the more I understand how a project can snowball.  (Hi, Snowball.) I could easily see giving up five years of my life to pursue the history of the egg.  Anne Mendelson, the author of Stand Facing the Stove, the biography of Joy of Cooking authors Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, said that she had anticipated taking a year to research and write her book.  She took ten.  And my ne plus ultra culinary heroine, Karen Hess, has apparently been working on a book about Thomas Jefferson for close to ten years, and has produced a text that would make Clarissa look like Life’s Little Instruction Book. When Andy Smith told us this story in class, everyone laughed, but I knew.

Since I am in a Karen Hess mood, I’ll leave you with a passage from her introduction to Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (Columbia University Press, 1981), transcribed and annotated by Mrs. Hess.  This passage, about the bounty of fish available in Atlantic waters in the seventeenth century, is a distillation of everything I love about Mrs. Hess’s writing:  her meticulous sense of scholarship, her amazing palate, her respect of sound kitchen technique, her love of beautiful produce (meant here in the broadest sense of ingredients, not just fruit and veg), her anger at the degradation of our food supply and our palates, and her desire to memorialize what we have lost forever.  If you wonder why I piss and moan about my own writing so much, it is because Mrs. Hess set the bar very, very highly for me, and even though we have never met, I am loathe to disappoint her.

The fish recipes are of exceptional interest.  You may not be tempted to try the virtually medieval way to boyle a Carpe in its Blood (C 187), but you surely will not be able to resist reading about it.  Most of the recipes are perfectly suitable for today, or would be if one could but find the fish.  It is not so much the problem of the varieties available.  It is true that we have neither true sole nor turbot, and that our oysters are quite different, but that is hardly serious compared to the problem of quality.  Some of the finest fish of the great Atlantic swam within sight of English shores and, for the rest the English were intrepid seafarers, and fishing boats were often equipped with ingenious sea water flow-through “keeps.” There were fine streams everywhere and all estates had large ponds where lake fish were kept.  It beat refrigeration.  What fish had to be kept was pickled (there are delightful recipes in our manuscript), dried, or salted.  Again, it beat refrigeration.  And there was no pollution to speak of—no oil spills, no insecticides, no chemical wastes, no atomic fallout.  All salt and fresh water creatures must have had a fine clean taste that none of us has ever tasted, nor ever shall. 

As soon as I finished typing that paragraph, I found an even clearer distillation of Mrs. Hess’s talents, at the end of a paragraph on game cookery, one that speaks volumes to me:  “Not one of the sauces is sludged up with a grain of flour.” Testify.

First and foremost, an example of what is not comedy.  To anyone else at LuthorCorp who thinks it would be funny to play a little joke like this on me...it’s not.  Trust me.  Anyone who was at work today and was within earshot of me, think of the tone of my voice and tell me if I was amused.  Or as Paul Westerberg said, look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied.  In short, just don’t do it.

What is comedy?  My refrigerator, for starters.  My refrigerator is a colossal freaking laugh.  It’s one of those nasty little urban fridges for a nasty little urban kitchen.  To be fair, it is a vast improvement over the first fridge the landlord gave us, which used to frost up about six minutes after we’d finished defrosting it, and which nearly broke my foot when the door fell off its hinges.  When the nicest thing you can say about your fridge is “the door never falls off!,” then you know you have sunk to Bukowski-like depths, fridge-wise.  The fridge, it fills me with shame.  I couldn’t step back far enough to take the whole fridge in one shot, so I had to opt for pressing my bottom against the edge of the kitchen table and taking in as much of a shot as I could.  Well, geez, Jen, if you’re so embarrassed, why post these at all? Because I am hopeless in the face of peer pressure, that’s why.

Without further ado, let us check out the freezer.  Note the three loaves of bread, the quart of stock with the popped-off lid, and the pound of salted butter that Lloyd bought by mistake, and which I will never use, yet somehow refuse to throw away.

Next comes the freezer door, full of lime leaves, pignoli, pumpernickel flour and proper butter.

From here we move to the fridge, home of two and a half-dozen eggs and a big-ass capon.

Jen, do you really use all that stuff on the door? Damn right we do.

And last but not least, my favorite fridge accoutrement:  a photograph taken by my friend and former colleague Jim Lee, who toiled with me at the newspaper in my little whitebread redneck mountain town in the Poconos.  The lovely young woman in the photo is Miss Scranton/Wilkes-Barre; the scene is the 1988 Greene-Dreher-Sterling Fair.  That is ice cream she is eating, by the way.  I will refrain from making an easy and obvious joke, but you may certainly feel free to do so.  It *is* Comedy Night here at PTMYB, after all.

One of the 1,001 reasons that I’m glad I married Lloyd is that he is a dream to feed.  Because his mom was, to put it kindly, not a cook, he pretty much likes anything I put in front of him; in 12 years, the only thing he has ever left unfinished was a plate of shu mai dumplings dressed with a very garlicky, very musky hoisin sauce, which was a little too strong for him.  He has a terrific palate; whenever I know something is missing from a dish or a sauce, he can either tell me the ingredient it needs or suggest the flavor note that needs to be highlighted.  (I am convinced that he is synaesthetic, because he will say things like “this tastes red” or “this would be better if it had a little more of a brown flavor to it,” and I know exactly what he means.) Best of all, he is not one of those guys who demands a tripartite meal on the table every night at 6:30, like too many of the husbands of my high school girlfriends.  Although he never complains when I do a full “Sunday lunch” dinner (meat, two veg, spuds, pudding), he is just as happy eating cheese toast for dinner, which is why meals around here never have a common theme:  we pinball from Adult Meals with Courses to One-Bowl Extravaganzas to, well, cheese toast.  Thus it will be tonight. 

Tonight was supposed to be Sunday lunch day, starring the monster capon I bought at the Greenmarket yesterday.  I am a dangerous woman at the Greenmarket sometimes.  I showed up yesterday full of good intentions:  just some eggs, just some apples, plus any nice greenery that presented itself, cabbage or kale or mustard greens.  Unfortunately, we are now in that interesting time of year which I always think of as Roots’n’Tubers, or “Mmmm, Parsnips *Again*!”, or “I Can’t Look at One More Fucking Cabbage.” I resigned myself to buying more broccoli of indeterminate national origin at the Grand Central Market later this week, and proceeded to buy what I could buy.  Yellow onions.  Red onions.  Five pounds of Nicola potatoes (a relative of the yellow buttery tatties like Yukon Gold and Carola).  A piece of horseradish to grate into the mashed potatoes I’ll make with those Nicolas, probably midweek.  Because I longed for something crunchy, I picked up some apples, ten pounds of Winesaps and Baldwins. (Ironically, all of the Baldwins and a few of the Winesaps ended up in a pie, in which the only crunch is provided by the crust and the butter crumb streusel I patted over the top midway through baking.  I remind myself that we still have plenty to eat raw.) A couple pints of clam chili from the Doxsee Clam stand to take home and heat up for lunch.  Shuffling like Caliban against the weight of my bags, I headed to the poultry guys and snagged my eggs.  As I was about to leave, I spotted the last capon on the table.  I am embarrassed to give exact numbers, but let’s just say that it was almost as big as our Thanksgiving turkey, and about as expensive.  It took me all of about 15 seconds to make up my mind.

My original plan for this big birdie was to make my absolute favorite soup, cock-a-leekie.  Considering what capon is going for these days, it is an indulgence soup, but it is so glorious, so rich, so plain and yet so beautiful, that I never fail to feel transformed every time I make a batch of it.  My favorite way to make it comes from Jane Grigson’s Good Things.  Mrs. Grigson’s recipe calls for beef shin, capon, leeks and prunes. You cook some of the leeks, wrapped in cheesecloth, along with the beef and capon, remove everything when the meat is done, skim the stock, add the remainder of the leeks (white and light green parts only) and the prunes, cook until the leeks have softened in the broth, then add the meat and chicken, each stripped off their bones, back into the pot.  If you prepare it with care, you are rewarded with a rich brown broth that feels almost like syrup going down and turns to jelly in the fridge.  I have seen a lot of recipes for cock-a-leekie that omit the prunes, that call for barley as a thickener, or rice, or potatoes.  I will grudgingly allow for starches, but I draw the line at revisionist monstrosities like the one I saw on a famous public TV chef’s show, which he called cock-a-leekie but was actually some fusion nightmare full of roasted red peppers, tomatoes, harissa, a head of garlic and several sprigs of thyme.  Dear friends, I know I am being that most tiresome of creatures, the foodie snob, but as far as this beautiful ancient soup is concerned, the line gets drawn here:  No garlic.  No thyme.  Nothing red.  If you want all of this stuff in your soup, then create a new name for it—isn’t that supposed to be the joy of creating something new and good, that you can get credit for it?

In the end, though, all of my righteous indignation was for naught, because Lloyd asked if we could roast it instead.  Sure, honey.  I ended up making the capon version of hot turkey sandwiches, featuring one of last weekend’s eggless white sandwich breads, the birdie, and as close to perfect gravy as I’ve ever made in my life, and will probably ever make again.  It was less a thick, nasty gravy than a jus:  caramelized pan drippings, a little pan fat, a little port to deglaze, plenty of stock made from chicken broth plus the contents of the giblet bag and a pair of shallots.  No flour, no cornstarch, no arrowroot.

In other kitchen adventures, I put some of those new eggs to use by making passion fruit curd, one of the goodies I want to demo at the Writers Colony this summer.  I also made a big batch of hoppin’ John for dinner last night, with plenty left over for a week’s worth of lunches.  Hoppin’ John is one of my favorite one-bowl meals, and making it is easier than kissing.  As with cock-a-leekie, there seems to be dozens of permutations of it, but for me, simpler is better:  blackeyed peas, basmati rice, a ham hock to season the water in which everything cooks.  And, yes, there is pie to be had:  those beautiful Baldwins, vanilla sugar (with the husk of the vanilla bean embedded in the apples to perfume the filling; that bean will eventually be rinsed off and added to the other vanilla bean husks in my bottle of cognac), lemon juice and half a jar of cherry preserves I put up last summer, all baked underneath a blond streusel.  This pie comes from my favorite book of pies, Ken Haedrich’s Apple Pie Perfect.  Yes, it is, it really is.