Login | Register

Is it shallow and decadent behavior to mourn a piece of jewelry?  How about two pieces of jewelry?  I am in jewelry mourning tonight, dear friends.  I could try to scratch the surface for deeper meanings, in a way that would make my mental health professional proud.  I could observe that we are living in uncertain and perilous times.  I could point to deep-seated election anxiety.  I could contemplate the fact that I have three friends who are seriously ill, and two friends recovering from serious illness, and acknowledge how powerless I feel in the universe, how unable I am to help them.  I could remember that for all this, I am sitting in a comfortable position in a comfortable life in a comfortable country in a comfortable period of history, and I should just button that lip and count those blessings.  Or I could just say, well, that’s all true enough, but, see, I had these earrings...

The earrings, along with their matching necklace, were a memento of my Labor Day weekend trip to Snowballville, specifically the day that the lovely and talented Snowball drove me to Little Resort Town, CO, and we went to visit a glass studio.  I had planned to buy myself just a nice little talisman like a marble, and I did.  Then we spied the jewelry case, where I found them:  a set of earrings, a matching necklace with a silver chain, each holding a perfect glass replica of a blackberry.  These were almost perfect botanically correct glass blackberries.  Each berry included a drupelet or two that was a shade lighter than the rest of the purple-black drupelets, just like you would find on a real blackberry.  I took a deep breath, signed on the dotted line, and instantly put these beautiful pieces of art on.  Since then, I have pretty much only taken them off to sleep or work out.  They are so beautiful, showstoppers, conversation pieces, perfect bakerina jewelry.  You look at the blackberry on the chain around my neck, and it looks ready to jump off the chain and into your waiting mouth, exploding into tannic-yet-sweet blackberry juice.  Again, I am not engaging in sophomoric poesies:  I have been told this by at least two people at the office.

You would think that for all this love, I would take a little more care, but apparently I have a strand of Damn Fool running through my DNA, and it will not be denied.  Last night I went to a reception at my culinary alma mater, hosted by the Culinary Historians of New York, to celebrate the release of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, edited by Andrew Smith, who taught the culinary history survey class I took at the New School in February.  These receptions tend to be low-key affairs, not particularly blasty, but I had a blast anyway.  I picked up my copy of the OEAFD; I talked to people I hadn’t talked to in years, including an old friend with whom I’d lost touch, and who offered to help me find an agent so that we can start shopping the egg book to publishers (eeeeek!); I ate bialies with whitefish spread, blackcurrant jelly on cream crackers, tiny slices of noodle kugel filled with vanilla and rum and sultanas, and a perfect Golden Russet apple; I drank a glass of extremely dry Farnum Hill cider, and then I drank another.  In the elevator, on my way home, I realized that my big ridiculous nametag was still hanging around my neck.  All I had to do was put my bags down and take off the nametag, carefully, two-handed.  Of course I did not do this.  Of course I tried to pull the frelling thing off one-handed, and of course I managed to pull both of my earrings out of my ears with the satin elastic cord on the nametag, and at the very moment I realized what I had done, I spied both earrings clattering to the hard tile floor of the lift and, literally, splitting apart.

The good news is that they did not actually shatter, and with the help of the woman riding the elevator with me, I was able to find all the pieces of the earrings and put them in the breast pocket of my jacket.  The pieces are now sitting in an empty jewelry box on my bureau, waiting for a pair of tweezers, a tube of Krazy Glue and a patient and observant brain.  The bad news, of course, is that there are no guarantees, and I may have to say goodbye to them permanently.  At best, they will be fixable but flawed—no mistaking them for the real thing anymore.

Snowball insists that this is a sign that I need to come back to Colorado to buy more earrings.  Leave it to a knitter to find the silk purse in the sow’s ear.  In the meantime, I still have my necklace, and I’m treating it with the care and solicitousness that one treats an infant that has just recovered from pneumonia.  I find myself touching it all day long, partly to reassure myself that it’s still there, but mostly because it feels good underneath my fingers.

This would be the point at which a more professional and, let’s face it, saner writer would offer you some lovely blackberry-based recipe, but since I am neither professional nor sane, I am posting what looks to be the non-bread, non-pie, non-jelly portion of this weekend’s baking and canning extravaganza.  I have not yet tried this Lemon Almond Cake, but I can already tell it’s going to be a winner.  The recipe comes from Cooking the Nouvelle Cuisine in America by Michele Urvater and David Liederman, originally published in 1979.  I found this book at Cellar Stories in Providence last weekend and snapped it up for my mom, who is a) a steadfast Michele Urvater fan and b) vacationing in Paris this week.  This is a genoise, a French sponge cake enriched with butter, further enriched with almond paste.  If this doesn’t ease the ache of jewelry mourning, I don’t know what will.  Of course, now that we can’t open a newspaper without being confronted by another depressing story about how obese we all are, one could make the case that this kind of comfort eating, eating to set a mood, eating for mood elevation, does none of us any favors.  I will take your argument into consideration.  Please pass me that 9-inch cake pan.

Lemon Almond Cake

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2.  Prepare a 9 1/2"-by 1 1/2” round cake pan by greasing it with 1 tablespoon flour around the inside.  Roll the flour around the bottom and inside edges of the cake pan.  Shake our any excess flour and set aside.
3.  In a large bowl, combine the almond paste with 1 egg yolk.  You might have to do this with your hands as the almond paste is hard to work with a fork or whisk.
4.  Add the lemon juice and rind to the almond paste.  Then whisk in the melted butter with a pinch of salt.  Set aside.
5.  Whisk the 4 eggs and the remaining yolk with the sugar in the top part of a double boiler set over simmering, not boiling, water.  Beat the eggs with a hand mixer until they have doubled in volume, and turned an ivory color.
6.  Remove from the heat.  Fold one-quarter of the beaten eggs into the almond paste batter to lighten it, then fold in the rest.
7.  Sprinkle the nuts over the batter and, using a sieve, sift the cornstarch in as well.  Very quickly fold all these ingredients together until no cornstarch shows.  Work so fast so that you do not deflate the eggs.
8.  Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a cake tester, when inserted into the center of the cake, comes out dry.  If the cake browns too quickly, cover it loosely with a piece of foil.
9.  While the cake is baking, strain the apricot preserves through a fine strainer to remove any large pieces of fruit.
10. Once baked allow the cake to cool in the pan for 15 minutes.  The unmold it and spread the strained apricot preserves around the sides of the cake.  Pat the sliced almonds onto the apricot preserves which should hold them in place.

Dear friends,

As you know well, this is not a political blog.  This is not because I don’t have strong opinions, or because I’m a wuss about sharing them, but simply because the landscape is filled with political blogs written by people who do it much, much better than I could ever hope to.  I know I am visited by people all across the political spectrum, which is very cool.  I won’t tell you for whom to vote.  I won’t even opine at length about the Sean Penn vs. Trey Parker and Matt Stone controversy (the short version is that Sean Penn took exception to comments Parker and Stone made about how anyone truly uninformed should just stay home on Election Day; Parker and Stone have suggested that Sean might just be smarting over their treatment of his puppet doppelganger in Team America: World Police).  I will follow the example of one of my favorite philosophers, who said “You are all individuals!  You are all different!  You’ve got to think for yourselves!”

Having disclaimed all over the place, can we at least agree that, whatever your opinions are of the incumbent, this is not conduct becoming to a president?:

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ‘’road map’’ for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman—the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress—mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world’s most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ‘’By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.’’

The above is excerpted from the Sunday New York Times Magazine’s cover story, “Without a Doubt,” by Ron Suskind.  The complete article can be found here.  If you have never registered with the NYT website, it is worth the registration foofaraw to read it.

Here endeth the rant.  We now return to our regularly scheduled program of food-based nonsense.

Strange to think that just this morning, young Lloyd and I were eating room service breakfast and building forts out of our pillows for maximum teevee-watching comfort in our nice room at the Westin in Providence.  It seems like mere hours ago that I said to him, “would you like to go to Providence for our anniversary?” and he agreed, sweetly.  Now we are back home, trying to ease gently back into our everyday lives.  This might not seem like such a grand task, considering that we were only out of town for two days, but it’s amazing how quickly one can acclimate oneself to wandering around the Culinary Museum at Johnson & Wales, talking shop with the workstudy students in the library and poring over baking ephemera; trooping through the nifty used bookstore Cellar Stories and eating up a good two hours in the stacks; and eating and drinking very, very well, from the split of Chateauneuf du Pape we used to kick off the weekend, to our anniversary dinner at Al Forno, which has left me lost in rapture and admiration for the past 24 hours.

I had high hopes for a good night’s frenetic writing ahead of me, but said frenetic writing will have to wait, as I am just beat, beat like a biscuit.  However, even though I am a wuss, I am not a wuss who has completely forgotten her manners.  Thanks to everyone who has been nice enough to add me to their blogrolls.  You will be on mine very shortly.  To Kitty, who responded to my plaintive candyfreak cries by sending me several packages of Valomilks and a pair of Chase’s Cherry Mashes:  you are a good, good friend.  As soon as I can figure out how to send an egg cream via the mails, you’ll be the first to know.  To A.K., the self-described Professional Slacker (even though I don’t know how slack one can be if one can bake such beautiful pies like those):  the apple butter recipes are on the way.  To Kimberly:  I have scheduled Lemon Curd Night for Wednesday, at which point your prize will be on the way.  To anyone else who has shown me kindness over the past few weeks:  hang on.  Cluefulness is on the way.

Because I know it would be unfair to vanish for the night without giving up any of the beans about Al Forno, I’ll leave you with the Number One Reason Why Al Forno is My New Favorite Restaurant:  All desserts are baked/roasted/otherwise prepared to order, so the customer is asked to place his/her dessert order at the same time s/he places the rest of the order.  I ordered a raspberry upside-down cake.  The cake was a yellow cake, enriched with creme fraiche; the raspberry topping included fresh raspberries and pecans.  That cake arrived at my table hot, the berries glistening, a little boule of creme fraiche melting over the surface.  As lovely as the fruit was, the cake was lovelier, egg and creme fraiche and butter and vanilla melting all over my tongue and palate.  I could hardly make a dent in my entree, I thought I would be too full for even espresso, but I ate every last bite of that cake, all the while thinking about how I take yellow cake for granted, how I always think of it as the boring photography on a box of Duncan Hines mix, how easily swayed I am by the promise of chocolate mayonnaise cake with vanilla buttercream, or gingerbread so hot that it makes my mouth tingle and my blood feel clean, and how, really, I should reacquaint myself with the subtle yet deep pleasure of a good basic yellow butter cake.  No buttercream, thanks.  This is a rendezvous that should remain as unfettered as possible.

Dear friends, after a late summer and early fall full of torpor and bad attitude, I have finally managed to light that fire underneath me, and I have resumed my egg research.  Eventually I will have new goodies to share with you, but for now I have this shameless recycling of my warmup exercises, written on the deck of my suite at the Colony, under the mimosa trees, in the midst of the path of dragonflies and bees the size of soybean pods, within earshot of the trolley that ran by my front door once every 15 minutes.  Despite my earlier promises, I probably won’t be back next year; I probably won’t be back for another 18 months, but I will be back, and I will be in a writing mood.  The questions I ask below will not necessarily make it into the final draft, but they are my jumping-off point.  Thanking you in advance for not laughing at them.

Started my first brioche at WCDH at 12:30 on Saturday, June 19.  Parloa recipe calls for “7 large eggs or 8 small ones” which I interpret to 14 oz.  I use the eggs from the drugstore, range of peewee to large.  I have 9, weighing out to 11 3/8 ounces.  It is a bit nervewracking, but not overly so, to figure out whether I have enough (I have water to use for backup, just in case).  I can see where the push toward absolute standardization comes from.  I understand the lure of scientific certainty, the knowledge that your egg is going to weigh as close to 2 ounces as it absolutely, positively can.  At the same time, I think that that scientific certainty is the same kind of crutch that cookbooks have become, where we place so much faith in something external that we have no faith in our own powers of observation, our ability to gauge whether we have enough of something.  We have lost patience with trial and error.  We have lost patience with learning.

Of course, it is easy for me to say this, because I have a certain relationship with food and cooking, and it is certainly not universal.  For everyone who cooks either for the pleasure of it or for the challenge of acquiring a new skill (or both), there are two or five or ten more who just want something to eat, who have fractional amounts of energy, who have invested ingredients and time and want a guaranteed return on both.  It is hard to say to them, “just pay attention to what you’re doing, and if it needs this, add this.” Even I have trouble with this from time to time:  witness the brioche I’m making now, totally without assistance of KitchenAid (I can’t find the dough hook to the spiffy 6-quart mixer).  I am using an antique recipe, and I have no real reference point for whether the dough is correct.  It’s hard to trust yourself when you don’t know what you’re doing.  This brings me back around to my original thought:  How did we get to this point?  Why do we not trust in what we’re doing?  Why have we delegated swaths of our experience to experts?  Why do we need an absolutely consistently-sized egg?

For that matter, why do we need eggs?  It sounds like an odd question, and it is, considering that I have been baking for such a long time that I do view eggs as an absolute necessity; as I told the AEB, it is impossible to imagine a pastry kitchen without eggs.  And when I say “why do we need them?” I’m not talking about their food value, or their role in history, or mythology, or folklore or apothecary.  I want to know who wants them.

I have just arrived at the point where I am starting to look at numbers.  The intense industrialization of poultry farming in the 20th century was supposedly driven by the consumer’s clamorous demand for eggs.  I love Fran Gage’s book A Sweet Quartet:  Sugar, Almonds, Eggs, and Butter, but her chapter on eggs, thoughtful and informative though it is, answers fewer questions than it asks.  “Nature’s way takes too long when there is an arms-folded, foot-tapping population demanding fresh eggs every day.  Who wants to wait for a hen to take more than fifteen days to lay a clutch of eggs, perhaps as many as fifteen, settle down on them for three weeks until they hatch, then spend several more weeks raising the chicks, and not lay any eggs in the meantime?  To an old-fashioned hen, this is the natural way to proceed, but people want an uninterrupted supply of eggs.” Exactly who is doing the foot-tapping here?  Who wants these eggs, and in what form?  My numbers are all scattershot, unpulled-together, but I am getting a basic sense of volume:  In 1920, the city of Petaluma, CA alone produced 22,250,000 dozen eggs.  That translates to 267 million eggs.  One city produced an egg for every person in the U.S., and while Petaluma was the nerve center of West Coast egg production, the “Egg Basket of the World,” it was far from the only city in the U.S., or even in the Petaluma Valley area, that was producing eggs.  In 1942 the citizens of New York City consumed over 174 million dozen eggs, or just over 2 billion.  In 2002, during a time when home baking was supposedly in a steep decline, when flour sales were soft, and when the resurgence in egg acceptability thanks to the Atkins diet was not quite cancelled out by lingering fears of dietary cholesterol, total U.S. egg production was 87 1/4 billion eggs.  Again I ask:  who is tapping their feet, demanding a constant and everready supply of eggs?  How many of these are going to large-scale institutions?  The military?  The makers of processed packaged foods?  Is this where the demand really lies?  Are we all tapping our feet impatiently, demanding an uninterrupted supply of Duncan Hines cake mix?  Or those grotesque eggs-in-a-tube that were test-marketed at Wawa about five years ago, targeted at commuters and long-drivers, who reacted to them with delight?  Is it really true that we are demanding this stuff after all, that the poultry industry is right in saying “we cram as many hens together as we can and keep them laying as long as possible and slaughter newly-hatched male White Leghorns en masse because you folks want your eggs every day?”

Tales out of Rhode Island, Part One. Dear friends, tonight we start with a puzzle.  Can anyone tell me who wrote the lyrics and music to the song below?  I know it’s an old pop standard, but for the life of me, I can’t find an author credit.  About three years ago, my mom, my mom’s cousin, Lloyd and I had the great good luck to see Blossom Dearie at Danny’s Skylight Room in midtown.  If you’ve never heard Blossom sing, take my word for it:  you want to.  The night we saw her, she sang this, after asking the audience, in a speaking voice as direct and sweet as her singing voice, “Is there anyone here tonight from Rhode Island?”

Every state has something its Rotary Club can boast of
Some product that the state produces the most of
Rhode Island is little, but oh my
It has a product anyone would buy
Copper comes from Arizona
Peaches come from Georgia
Lobsters come from Maine
The wheat fields are the sweet fields of Nebraska
And Kansas gets bonanzas from the grain
Ol’ whiskey comes from ol’ Kentucky
Ain’t the country lucky?
New Jersey gives us glue
And you come from Rhode Island
And Rhode Island is famous for you
Cotton comes from Louisiana
Gophers from Montana
And spuds from Idaho
They plow land in the cow land of Missouri
Where most beef meant for roast beef seems to grow
Grand canyons come from Colorado
Gold comes from Nevada
Divorces also do
And you come from Rhode Island
And Rhode Island is famous for you
Pencils come from Pennsylvania
Vests from Vest Virginia
Tents from Tentassee
They know mink where they grow mink in Wyomink
A camp chair in New Hampchair - That’s for me
Minnows come from Minnowsota
Coats come from Dakota But why should you be blue?
For you - you come from Rhode Island
little ol’ Rhode Island
And little ol’ Rhode Island is famous for you

Tales Out of Rhode Island, Part Two. I did promise once that I wouldn’t brag overmuch about Lloyd, but this week I cannot refrain, for he is much too good to me, much better than I deserve.  I came to bed late last night, too lazy to actually look for a pair of pajamas, so I pretty much just shed my outerwear onto the bedroom floor, snakelike, and crawled into bed in my undershirt and underpants, under a sheet, no blankets, no comforter.  (No, there are no photos forthcoming, and if there were, they would not be exciting.  Really.  If you are looking for that kind of excitement, there is probably more than one site available on the internets for your pleasure.) At 3 a.m. I realized the error of my ways.  My nose was freezing.  My shoulders and hips hurt.  My fingertips and toes were blue.  It would be a pure act of folly to believe that I could will myself into feeling warmer, but then, I’m an old fool. 

At 3:30 I couldn’t take any more, and got up to fumble around in the dark for a warmer shirt.  Shirt found, I resumed the Foolish Exercise of Will, falling asleep in a cramped and achy heap.

At 5:45 the alarm rang.  Lloyd got up to get his shower, as he does at this time every morning, but not before taking his blanket and wrapping it tightly around me.  Ahhhhh, warmth.  I felt as snug and well-placed as a tamale.  As I snuggled into my lovely warm cocoon of bedding, I thought to myself, we should do something nice this weekend. I asked Lloyd if he wanted to spend the weekend in Providence, and not only did he say yes, but he didn’t change his mind when I told him what the whole shebang would cost.  We head out on Friday night, we return on Sunday night, and in the meantime we will wander around Johnson & Wales, checking out the culinary library and generally spooking the youngsters.  We will probably pay homage to 11 years of wedded hilarity on Saturday, at this restaurant if we’re lucky, in our room eating $12 grilled cheese sandwiches if we’re not.