I’m in a list-making mood, dear friends. This is good for three reasons: 1. It’s T-9 today, and I have a lot of packing and shipping and printing and lecturing and wailing and boogieing over the next 9 days. I always fancy myself as the kind of person who doesn’t need a list to pack; no, I have an innate sense of what I really need, so innate it’s like a biorhythm. Then I get to my destination and discover that I’ve forgotten something like socks, or my head. 2. Since I’m so busy working on these lists, I need not feel guilty about not tackling the sink full of dishes. Of course, I will still feel guilty about it, because hey, that’s my idiom, but I don’t have to feel guilty about it, which makes all the difference. Thank you for not asking me how. 3. Since I’m already in a listing frame of mind—whoops, almost tipped over that time (rimshot)—I can share with you another list, a list of some particularly fine and noteworthy posts that have crossed my path. Do check them out, as they make for good reading.
We can (and most of us do) get cake on our birthdays, but leave it to Vicki (a/k/a Calgal) at Just in from CowTown to give us cake on her birthday. Take a gander at that recipe for that buttery, tangy chocolate chip tea cake, which you had better believe I’d be mixing up now had I not just baked two pound cakes from an 18th century recipe. Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I’ll probably bake this one, too. While you’re there, help keep Vicki’s birthiversary celebration going; with any luck, we can stretch it out to a week!
I can’t believe I almost missed this one, from Dragon Bear Cave. Back in February, when it looked as if I might have to give up my job in exchange for accepting the Egg Board fellowship, I sent an e-mail to a good friend who is also my baking/foodwriting mentor. She wrote back to me with a piece of advice about risk-taking that I just love: sometimes, she said to me, you just have to step off the cliff and trust that you will be the Road Runner, rather than Wile E. Coyote. Anne took this idea and ran with it, and the result just lit me up with pleasure, lit me up like a Christmas tree.
All of our shopping trips should end this well: One day Bunni, browsing in Barnes & Noble, happened upon a copy of J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan. These essays were the result. Read these essays and find out why Bunni’s students are the luckiest little ingrates out there.
One of my favorite writers, the late Laurie Colwin, once said that cooking was like love: you don’t have to be particularly beautiful, or smart, or attractive, or skilled, but you do have to be interested in it. Colwin’s heroines were interested in love, and thus love found them. Taken to extremes, this kind of thinking can lead you into Norman Vincent Peale or Napoleon Hill territory, but on a small scale, I wonder if we do put out feelers to draw certain emotions or bits of knowledge to us. I never set out to study eggs; it was the purest bit of luck that enabled me to study them, but now that I am studying them, I find myself the recipient of all sorts of egg lore: recipes, trivia, questions. Sometimes I look for it; sometimes people send it to me; and sometimes I find myself casually perusing blogs like the plumbutt chronicles, where I find things like this. I’m still laughing at it.
I’m also laughing at this, but I feel mean for doing so. The inimitable Pauly D at Words for My Enjoyment has a cautionary tale to tell us about s’mores—and really, how often do you get to use a sentence like that in conversation? Seriously, Pauly, I’m laughing with you, not at you, or would be if you were actually laughing. Uhh...are you actually laughing?
With a few noisome and tedious exceptions, my colleagues at LuthorCorp are some of the kindest people one could ever work with. I realize what a rare thing this is, working with such kind people, and when the time comes for me to leave the company for good, I will not miss the job but I will miss them. Thus it is that I wish I could muster more of an enthusiastic response when they share their good wishes with me. Don’t get me wrong; I certainly know what great good luck it was for me to receive this fellowship, and I certainly have no regrets for it. But it has been such a long journey, getting here, that now that it’s almost upon me, I don’t quite know how to react to it. In the past three days, I have heard multiple variations on a few themes: “You must be so excited!” (Well, yes, I am. Or I will be, as soon as I stop obsessing over how many chargers I’ll need to pack for all of my electronic equipment, and wondering if I have time to pick up extra socks and underwear at Macy’s, particularly those little charmpot socks with chain-stitch renderings of sushi all over them.) “I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out of this office.” (Considering that the last day off I had from the office was my grandfather’s funeral on October 31, yes, I can’t wait to get out of the office. As soon as I meet with all the people who will be covering for me while I’m gone. Am I forgetting anything? What if I forget to warn people that a big order is coming up, and it doesn’t get run? We can’t lose any more business this year...) “Will you even want to come back?” (*sound of crickets*) “Is this the first time you’ve flown since 9/11?” (*more crickets, maybe with the cry of a hawk added for resonance*)
The biggest question, though, has been “what are you going to write about?” This one is actually fun to contemplate. I had planned to write the outline for the whole book, but the more research I do, the less idea I have for what the final structure of the book will be. This led to several weeks of mewling, puking and generally making Lloyd wonder why he hadn’t married an easier woman. Yes, yes, go ahead and say it. “Didn’t think there was an easier woman out there than you, Bakerina.” Rimshot. Har de har har. Okay, let’s try this again..."several weeks of mewling, puking and generally making Lloyd wonder why hadn’t married a woman of sweeter temperament, particularly one whose great-grandfather invented and patented something useful, like oxygen or razor blades. (In case you’re wondering, Lloyd has earned his marital Purple Heart with me this year. His reward for all this is getting to live in peace and quiet for four weeks, by himself in beautiful uptown Astoria.) But I digress. I have decided there’s no shame in writing just one chapter of the book, suitable for journal publication, that examines the paradox of the availability:use ratio. Once upon a time, eggs were much more seasonal than they are now: because chickens’ laying cycles depend on light, they tend to lay eggs like mad in the summertime, only to scale back dramatically as the days get shorter. Now, of course, the egg industry has found a way to muck about with the available light in their hatcheries, subjecting chickens to near-constant light to encourage near-constant laying; yet despite this, if you follow the development of certain bread, cake and custard recipes, the ratio of eggs to other ingredients has dropped considerably. Thus we are at a point where eggs are cheaper and more plentiful now than at any time in history, and yet we are hedging our bets with flour or cornstarch in our custards and chemical leaveners in our cakes, rather than use greater quantities of those increasingly-affordable eggs. I’m sure there are a lot of factors, including the cholesterol panic of the 1970s and 1980s, and the replacement of hearth cookery with iron stove cookery in the 19th century. (Iron stoves were not nearly as effective as the hearth for roasting meats and preparing stocks and sauces, but they were great for cakes. If you read 19th century cookbooks, you can trace the spread of the iron stove by the increasing number of recipes for large, fluffy, sugary cakes.) There is a tale waiting to be told here, I’m sure of it.
In the meantime, dear friends, I ask you to consider this: Since my online time will be greatly curtailed while I am away, I had contemplated closing PTMYB for the duration, even though I found the thought somewhat depressing. Fortunately, the kind and excellent Snowball, another victim of my puky mewlingness, asked me if I had considered guest hosts to blog on PTMYB. This is why Snowball is the Queen of the Roost ‘round these parts, and why I merely tread water in her wake. So consider this a call for papers: If you are interested in guest blogging in this space between June 15 and July 14, please click on that handy dandy “e-mail me” link to the right and let me know. I don’t have a particular suggested theme, but if you do, feel free to share it. (I already know that at least one of you has done this. Confidential to You Know Who You Are: your suggested theme is interesting but ultimately daunting, as I think I’d discover just how ripe for parody I am. But I like the idea of you guest-blogging here. Come on, dear, say yes.) Unless there is overwhelming popular demand (and thus I hear the sound of a million swigs of cola being snorted through a million noses over a million keyboards), I will probably try to pick a list of six guest bloggers. All proceeds benefit the “Keep Bakerina’s Page Hits From Falling Into the Basement” organization. Shameless, yes, but I never claimed to be otherwise.
For my next trick, I will continue fretting over what to pack. I have already committed an error by buying the only mosquito repellent I could find at my local drugstore behemoth chain. (Note to my fellow New Yorkers: Is it an accident that these places are sprouting like mushrooms, and that the company name rhymes with Pain/Bleed?) I snatched up a packet of mosquito repellent towellettes and added them to the basket full of Q-Tips and Coppertone. When I got home, I took the packet out to pack it in my suitcase and read the following instructions on the back: DO NOT GET ON CLOTHING. DO NOT USE INDOORS. WASH HANDS THOROUGHLY AFTER USE. WASH ALL CLOTHING AND BED LINENS AFTER TREATMENT. DO NOT LET CHILDREN OR ANIMALS NEAR THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT DRIVE HEAVY MACHINERY OR COOK OVER A GAS FLAME AFTER APPLICATION. DO NOT SMILE AT IT. DO NOT WEAR OVER MAKEUP. DO NOT WEAR UNDER MAKEUP. DO NOT—WELL, JUST DO NOT. JUST DON’T, OKAY? Hmmm, I thought. I wonder what the active ingredient is? I turned the packet over and looked at the front label. Sure enough, these things are full of DEET. I might as well just go to the spa where I will be getting my hydro/aromatherapy treatment on June 18 and ask them to throw a little DDT in with the grapefruit and lavender oil mist. Do not ask me why I didn’t bother to read the package before buying the damn things. Just don’t, okay?
In the last post—not the lagniappe one but the ExpoFestO’Rama one—I was in such a hurry to get the damn thing posted that I neglected to mention what made this a multimedia ExpoEtCetera, rather than just a weekend of watching dvd’s. Having been allowed to exeunt LuthorCorp at 3:30 on Friday afternoon, I decided to dodge the raindrops by riding the bus up Third Avenue and heading to Kitchen Arts and Letters, my home away from home, my office away from office, one of the trinity (along with King Arthur Flour and Penzeys Spices) to which LuthorCorp should be addressing my paychecks; really, putting my name and address on them is just a formality. I have been shopping at Kitchen Arts since I moved to New York 15 years ago. Since I received my happy news from the Egg Board, I have been spending some significant time there, flipping through bibliographies, snapping up 18th and 19th-century cookbooks in facsimile, farming tracts, English and French court histories, translations of Cato and Platina, all of which will be joining me in Arkansas in a couple of weeks. Friday, though, Friday was special: I’d made a promise to myself, nothing but fun reading for you this weekend, babe, and damned if I wasn’t going to keep it. This, I realize, makes me sound just a little pathetic: here I am, in the self-described Greatest City in the World, and when I want to go wild, I buy books! Much like Elizabeth Leopold in Laurie Colwin’s short story “An Old-Fashioned Story” (which can be found here), it feels like a luxury now to flout the syllabus and read something just for the hell of it.
Having decided I wanted to relax a bit, I found myself falling headlong into Barbara Santich’s Looking for Flavour (published in Australia by Wakefield Press in 1996). It is not relaxing reading; it is rigorous and scrupulous and thoughtful and keenly observant. While I don’t believe you can judge a book by its cover, you can tell volumes about it by the first sentence, and this one, the first sentence of the title essay, is a lulu: “I didn’t think so at the time, but I recognise now that in the environmentally sensitive 1990’s the title I had chosen for one of my articles was highly provocative: ‘Flavour first, rainforests second.’” Provocative, yes, and made more so by the essay’s epigraph, a quote from Dylan Thomas: “What’s the smell of parsley?” In other essays, Santich ponders the nature of Australian cuisine and its study; regionalism in Australia; the thorny issue of recipe ownership; kangaroo steamers and carpetbag steak. The temptation to quote the whole book is strong, but because I’m not that crazy, I will share with you my favorite examples thus far:
The flavour fanatic Dr. Max Lake has developed a theory to explain all this [the idea that flavor is an evocation, that certain tastes embody certain memories and meanings]. Primitive animals, such as the earthworm, began with simply a ‘taste brain’ that responded to chemical sensations—the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (a savoury quality represented by MSG). Later came the ‘smell brain’, which reached its greatest development in the koala, one of the most particular of animals in its choice of food. We still possess a rudimentary ‘taste brain’ and ‘smell brain’, though these are overshadowed by the intelligent brain. The ‘smell brain’ complex includes a component known as the hippocampus which, among other things, preserves our past; Max Lake calls it ‘the library of long memory.’ This elegantly complex organ serves as a logical base to the magical power of flavour and smell—aromas that construct whole cities, tastes that call up friends as effectively as Aladdin’s magic lamp. It’s the hippocampus, sparked by messages from a sip of lime tea and a crumb of madeleine, that started Proust on his nostalgic reverie. Further, the integration of the ‘smell brain’ with various other parts of the cerebral system means the involvement of emotions, so that a particular aroma or flavour might influence the way we feel. Reciprocally, our emotional state also has a bearing on how we taste; absorbed in the monochromatic underworld of self-pity, we lose all sense of smell and flavour.
This is the way I write in my dreams, words so lucid and potent that I read them over and over, just to absorb the sheer rightness of them. Lest you think Santich is only about brainy considerations, let me assure you that she has a puckish sense of humor indeed. Here she is again, on the development of a food-writing language:
The naivety of children often allws them to make, more easily than artful adults, the imaginative, sensual-literalist leaps of language that magically and instantaneously transform a taste experience. Christopher Driver’s four-year-old daughter reported that a salad of baby squid tasted of spiders; and my three-year-old son, waking up to a batch of cherry tartlets—I had used pale pink cherries which, on cooking, had become fleshily translucent—exclaimed with pleasure, ‘Nipple tarts!’ Baudelaire would, I’m sure, approve.
It was an entirely different first line that led me to Abe Opincar’s Fried Butter: A Food Memoir. (The title refers to the sunny-side-up eggs his mother lived on while she was pregnant with him, and the butter in which those eggs were fried.) I will confess that I have been wary of food memoirs ever since I encountered one whose charms still elude me, and the fact that Opincar’s book has an impressive publishing pedigree (Soho Press) did little to assuage my fears. I picked it up and turned to page 1 and read: “I baked a chicken the night I left my wife.” I knew at that moment what Tolstoy meant when he spoke of Art as Infection. I was infected. Again, I have to fight to not quote the whole book, Opincar’s tales of his aunt who threw a plate of mamaliga at his father’s head and went insane shortly thereafter; of his friend Niang, whose first exposure to candied yams at Thanksgiving triggered harrowing memories of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; of his Iranian friend Reza’s offering a plate of saffron rice to his neighbors, who wordlessly left the dirty empty plate at his doorstep; of the orange grove planted by a pair of lovers, one of whom died, the other of whom left a note in the house one day: “To Whom It May Concern: I don’t want this house”. Instead, I will leave a fragment, but only a fragment, of that stunning essay with that stunning first line:
“He monopolized my time on my honeymoon,” is what my wife told Star and Bob, our marriage counselors, by way of expressing her past and present dissatisfactions. I sat there and wondered about my wife’s use of the possessive, ”my honeymoon.” But what did I know? I wasn’t sure of much. The only think I knew for certain was that I was paying $185 an hour to a husband-and-wife team named Star and Bob to listen to my wife complain that I’d monopolized her time on her honeymoon.
“Interesting,” murmured Star, toying with her chunky ethnic necklace. Bob picked imaginary lint off his taupe corduroys. Star, eyes wide with bland compassion, turned to me. “What are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling,” I said, “that I have to go home and bake a chicken.”
I suppose every failed marriage has its own Dealey Plaza, Texas School Book Depository, grassy knoll. Its own Star and Bob. A mystery point where fatigue, despair and anger find triangulation. Motives forever remain murky; history changed nonetheless. When I left Star and Bob’s office, I knew I would never come back.
Because I’ve been so enamored of these books, I haven’t had a chance to crack open Peanuts: The Illustrated History of the Goober Pea by Andrew F. Smith, who taught my culinary history survey class at the New School. Andy Smith has also written books on tomatoes (two of ‘em), ketchup and popcorn, and he is working on a book about turkeys. His scholarship is exhaustive, but his writing style is accessible and enthusiastic. While these books should definitely be read as a coherent whole, I can guarantee you that if you just flip open to a page at random, you will learn something you never knew before, something that you will be glad to know. I open Peanuts to page 60: ‘In a 1912 issue of Good Housekeeping, Gertrude R. Lombard provided a recipe for “Cabbage and Peanut Salad, in which she sprinkled ‘one cupful of salted peanuts freed from their skins’ on shredded cabbage. She also recommended that peanut butter and mayonnaise be combined to make a dressing for salads.” I am glad to know it, but gladder still that I’ll never have to eat it.
Because it’s worth an entry all its own, I will not elaborate now on my purchase of the late Alan Davidson’s essay collection A Kipper With My Tea. It is enough, for now, to say that I have it and I’m thrilled. But I can’t mention Alan Davidson without mentioning that the new issue of PPC, the magazine he founded, is on sale now, and it contains a new essay by Alastair Bland, who charmed me so with his essay “Eating Wild in Urban America.” This time out, young Mr. Bland discovers the joy of “Making Your Own Wine in Two Weeks.” The secret is to ferment anything but grapes: tomatoes, ginger, ginger and peppercorns, beets, onions, lemons, lima beans. His wines are based on the wines he encountered in Belize, including but not limited to cashews, mangoes, breadfruit and carrots. In his words, “It was all pretty decent and certainly had alcohol in it, and from what I understood, the process was simply to dump some sugar and fruit into a bucket, seal the top, and get drunk a few weeks later.” It is an exciting thing, witnessing the emergence of a writer I could read happily for years. He is a scholar and a pilgrim, and though he doesn’t know it yet, he is my pal.
