January 26th, 2012 Comments(0)
Look who I bumped into at the grocery store yesterday… Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the year of the dragon. Since I’m a dragon I’m expecting a roaring year though without too much fire breathing, I hope. Had a lot of that last year and didn’t like it so much.
Dragon chaps?
I would love to have one of these dragons: any idea where to get one?
Well that’s one thing, now on to another. We live in an era of distractions and interruptions so you should be used to this. Here now, let me change the channel.
The Overheard, The Overread
The ear accepts all invitations, even when it is not invited. It is impossible in a city of this density not to overhear conversations daily; it is equally impossible not to notice the writing on the walls: one is constantly incited to overhear and to overread.
Therefore I’d like to share with you today, an overheard and an overread recently culled from the streets and kiosks of Paris.
The Overheard:
Conversation between a vendor at Huguet Primeur on the rue de Meaux and a dreadlocked client whom I will refer to as “Dready.” Shall we listen in? (English translation follows.)
Vendor: Les fêtes se sont bien passées? Tu as été gâté ? Ca s’est bien passé ?
Dready : Elles se sont très bien passées, oui, oui, très bien ; elles se sont très bien passées. Impeccables.
Vendor : Mais tu as été gâté ? Oui ou non ? On t’a gâté ?
Dready : Non, non, je n’ai pas été gâté. Pas gâté du tout… non, non, parce que j’ai été un vilain garçon. Je ne l’ai pas mérite et on ne m’a pas gâté.
Vendor : Mais ta femme, alors, tu l’as gâtée ? T’as gâté ta femme ?
Dready : Oui, oui, je l’ai gâtée, bien sûr que je l’ai gâtée… quelque part. Oui quelque part je l’ai gâtée …oui, oui… Je l’ai gâtée quelque part. Quelque part…
English Version :
Vendor : Did you have a nice Holiday ? Were you spoiled ? Did it all go well ?
Dready : It went very well, yes, yes, very well. The holiday went well. Impeccable.
Vendor : But were you spoiled ? Yes or no? Did they spoil you ?
Dready : No, no, I wasn’t spoiled. Not at all spoiled. No no, because I was a bad boy. I didn’t deserve it and they didn’t spoil me.
Vendor : But what about your wife : Did you spoil her ? Did you spoil your wife ?
Dready : Yes, yes, I spoiled her, of course, I spoiled her… somewhere. Yes, somewhere I spoiled her…yes, yes…I spoiled her somewhere. Somewhere…
I don’t know about you but I find Dready’s « quelque part » or « somewhere » mighty suspicious. Too indefinite, too frequently repeated. All the same I’d like to believe Madame Dready’s « somewhere » was well taken care of – pampered, spoiled, delighted, pleasured — as it undoubtedly deserved.
I left Huguet Primeur giggling into my scarf and headed off to the cheesewife’s to pick up some parmesan. You must not let overhearing distract you from your shopping list.
And now: the Overread from Marie-Claire magazine
“La pénétration est incroyablement rapide : je pense retourner à mes activités sans perdre de temps.”
“The penetration is incredibly rapid: I can think about going back to whatever I was doing without wasting any time.”
Hmmm… Contrary to what one might think this is not an ode to the quickie, but an advertisement for a hand cream called “Vita citral.” It contains an extract of the Jericho rose otherwise knows as the Rose of the Resurrection. Maybe it’s worth trying?
Well, I will end on this floral note. Here are some pictures of some recent resurrections in my garden: mysterious hellebores.
And a confused azalea blooming in January.
January 20th, 2012 Comments(0)
As I have a penchant for invigorating unfashionable subjects in my books, it only seems natural to continue in this vein in the blog. Thankfully, my work has never been described as sexy. That is certainly a cheap word for it takes merely a Victoria’s Secret catalog to fulfill its promises. If art is sexy (which is not the same thing as being about sex, which art almost necessarily is, at some level) we’ve all gone to the dogs of consumerism and might as well dress our oeuvre in slinky lingerie. It’s hard to imagine a novel corseted into a merriwidow but stranger twists on the book have made themselves manifest; I am referring, of course, to the Kindle.
Therefore, fearing not the Odd, nor the Unsexy, nor even the Ugly, I shall make a journalistic foray into le Golden Food.
Le Golden Food? C’est quoi?
Le Golden Food is actually the name of a fast food restaurant on the Blvd de la Villette, but I use it as a metonym of sorts referring to the all-night eateries, usually Turkish or Tunisian-run, that pepper Paris. Le Golden Food comes at you fast (served in under five), cheap (all dishes under ten euros), and spicy (pili-pili pepper prevails); moreover the serving size is man-sized. Remember the “Manwhich” back in the 70s? That Sloppy Joe out of a Hunt’s can servicing lumberjacks on coffee break? Picture a Manwhich on a plate with a fried egg sitting astride it and an equally mannish portion of fries, all doused in Tabasco. Et voilà – le Golden Food! More or less.
Hitting the Parisian pavés to search for MacDoudou
Some years ago I discovered a Golden Food haven called McDoudou in the Goutte d’or, Paris’ Little Africa. This Senegalese offshoot of the Golden Arches offered heaping plates of Yassa Chicken flavoured with lime and onions, but also an assortment burgers including Le Yellow McDoudou, a kind of Big Mack with two, quick fried eggs sunny side up. It dripped a golden yellow sauce and one could only dig in with the help of a plastic fork and knife. I went in search of McDoudou Sunday but found the Goutte d’Or so tremendously changed, so bulldozered down that the streets were no longer quite recognizable. I looked high and low – down the rue Myrha and up the rue Léon — but no luck. Either I was hopelessly disoriented by the facelift or McDoudou simply no longer existed. This latter possibility affected me; though I am by no means a proponent of fast food, part of me cheered on its Davids. The grinning Goliaths with their revolting clowns and happy meals would win out, but the McDoudous fed the hungry with stick-to-the-ribs meals and offered a mint tea on occasion. At least to a passing Nazarene, like myself.
Saw these blue hats on the way…
MacBeni by Night
Inside MacBeni’s
Continuing on down the Blvd de la Chapelle I happened on MacBeni’s. In a former incarnation this Golden Food outlet was known as MacDavid and served kosher hamburgers. Today it fries them up halal. I spoke to the cook, Hamid, for just a moment.
“So what is the MacBeni specialty?”
“Les Chickens.”
“What exactly are les Chickens?”
“It’s a hamburger poulet.”
“Right, like a McChicken,” I try to pin him down.
“Chicken, meat, lots of meat, beef.”
“I see,” I said, as it dawned on me that the word chicken could signify anything at MacBeni’s where meaning is on the loose and the food is fast. I notice an item on the menu called Le Hummer but immediately lost all courage to inquire.
“Les beaux yeux, Madame, les beaux yeux,” said the chef, getting fresh all of a sudden.
“Les yeux bleus, Monsieur, les yeux bleus,” said I coolly. Then shuffled off down the Blvd de la Chapelle to search out the next Golden Food option. Two blocks further I reached Paris Fried Chicken where I was greeted by the owner and the owner’s friend.
“So you do fried chicken and curries too?” I take a look at their smorgesbord of about twenty options, including three curries (chicken, beef, vegetable) and different types of hamburgers whose photos featured in a neon lit portrait gallery. Of particular interest were Le Boursin Cheese and Le Quatro, a galloping four-steak pile up upon which two eggs ride horseback. There was also an assortment of “menus” for extra hungry Muslim lumberjacks, including “le Menu Bun’s” which consisted of any dish on the menu: steaks, kebabs, eggs, fried chicken, burgers, curries, chicken tika etc, inside a colossal bun, and served with fries. Plus a Fanta soda.
The owner replied: “We take the original Kentucky recipe, yes? (I nod in anticipation) And add some hot pepper to it – that’s what our customers expect – then we use a traditional cooking method.” I admired his euphemism for deep fry, as if he learned all this from his Gran.
By then it was four in the afternoon. There were about five seated customers, all men, all wearing a fez type cap, all leaning over half-picked plates of Golden Food.
“So is the fried chicken mildly hot or really hot?”
“Quite.”
“Are you Indian?”
“Pakistani,” corrected the owner’s friend. He was leaning on the counter near the cash register. “But it’s the same thing,” he quickly added, referring me back to England’s colonial endeavor and the eventual break up in 1947
“I’ll have a vegetable curry,” I ventured. “That’ll be take away.” I wasn’t hungry but felt I should taste what this was all about. Being a good journalist, after all, requires a solid stomach.
“Only have spinach today, Madame,” warned the owner, pointing to a deep pan of Popeye fuel — dark green spinach mush. He didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about his vegetarian offering and I suspect vegetarians didn’t often soft-shoe the premises.
“Make that a chicken curry then,” I said taking his hint.
Chicken curry from P.F.C — alas too spicy to eat.
With my purchase in an orange plastic bag, I headed out; McDoudou’s – if indeed it still existed – was now far behind me as I crossed the threshold of the nineteenth arrondissement. I lamented my inability to pinpoint the object of my original investigation, and yet I was discovering other eateries of interest. Why not continue on? Eventually I happened upon un fast with a glaring red sign: Mondial Chicken (World-Wide Chicken), a halal eatery on the rue de Meaux.
Like MacBeni’s, Mondial Chicken has a take-out window. It was through this guichet that I queried my interlocutor, the chef.
“Can I ask you why this is called Mondial Chicken?” The chef looked a bit embarrassed by my forthright question; it came without preamble, admittedly, but I didn’t expect it to cause discomfort. I wanted to get to the bottom of this “chicken business”: why chicken and not poulet, for one; and secondly, why is chicken such a ubiquitous option?
The chef was unfortunately unable to clarify. He became evasive and muttered something about serving chicken sandwiches. I noticed there were baking sheets of dried out looking pizza and that various vittles had just been plunged into the fryers – all very golden. I had to come up with my own conclusions on the chicken issue. Maybe the choice to use the English word was really more a rejection of the French word, which simply did not have the same reach. The message seemed to be: We are globalites and we eat chicken. Certainly poultry demonstrates a higher degree of flexibility than other meats in that it can be cooked in a variety of ways including the “traditional manner.” Might then its adaptability explain its success in the Golden Food arena?
“May I take a picture of your restaurant?”
My request was declined. Things were getting a bit racy all of us sudden. Did he really take me for a spy, sent on a mission by some Golden Food competitor? I bade him goodbye and looked at my watch. I had to pick my son up from school: time was running out.
My last stop was on the Blvd de la Villette where I found myself neck to neck, well almost, with the owner of the original LE GOLDEN FOOD! I got down to business.
“Please, could you explain to me why you call this restaurant Le Golden Food?” The moment of truth, within my grasp!
“Golden, that means doré,” he offered after a moment of reflection.
“Yes, yes, it does! But why doré? Does this refer to French fries, you know… to their color?” The owner knit his brows and grew pensive. He shook his head to let me know I didn’t have it right. Suddenly his face lit up and I could tell he had fished up the answer.
“Cheeseburgers,” he said.
“Cheeseburgers? You mean because of the yellow processed cheese?”
“Cheeseburgers,” he repeated. He had a crooked little smile, both bemused and surprised. I thought he might go on to elucidate the revelation but instead he lit up a cigarette and pulled out his cell phone. Like the others, he was a man of few words.
On the way back home I bumped into the “Nothing but Happiness” truck.
January 12th, 2012 Comments(0)
Insomnia. Four nights in a row of it and I can hardly see straight, my brain is scrambled and I ache all over. If you’ve been inflicted with severe sleep deprivation you know what I’m talking about. In L’Intrus French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes:
“…dans “je souffre”, un “je” rejette l’autre, tandis que dans “je jouis” un “je” excède l’autre.”
It seems that within me one “I” is rejecting another “I” because yet another I? is suffering. Clearly a battle is being waged and I think I know what Nancy is getting at but I’m too tired to mull it over properly.
Therefore I will retreat into the culinary zone and offer you an excellent recipe courtesy of my friend Vania, author of several cookbooks, for La Galette des Rois: King Cake. Don’t bother buying yours at the patisserie where they are outrageously overpriced. Follow this recipe and yours will be not only much cheaper to make but wonderfully delicious. Je te le promets!
Recipe for 2 galettes :
4 puff pastries (Picard or other brand)
For the almond cream :
250 grams of softened (but not melted) butter
250 grams of sugar
250 grams of ground almonds (poudre d’amandes)
50 grams of sifted flour
4 eggs (I used three and it came out perfectly so either way)
one vanilla bean
6 tablespoons of rum.
Work the butter with the sugar till mixed well, then add the ground almonds and mix again. Add eggs one by one. Add flour and lastly add the vanilla and rum. Spread the almond cream on a puff pastry till about 2cm from the edges and use egg yolk as a glue to attach the top puff pastry to the bottom one. Brush the rest of the egg yolk over the top of the galette and decorate it with a knife if you please. When the galette is nearly cooked, sprinkle it lightly with powdered sugar and put it under the broiler. Be careful: you need to watch closely so that it doesn’t burn; ca va vite! When the sugar melts take out the galette: it should now have a shiny, pretty surface.
Cook at about 180′ for 20 to 30min depending on your oven.
While you’re working on that, I think I’ll take a nap. If Beastie Boy can afford the luxury, why can’t I ?
January 05th, 2012 Comments(0)
The Eiffel Tower by Blaise Mariétan
To you, dear readers, all my warmest wishes for the New Year. May 2012 be a year of fresh beginnings, of actions fructified by the heart, of solidarity born of mutual trust, of inspirations, creative élan and resplendent health. And may the list go on in this vein!
The day after Christmas we drove to Normandy, to a region referred to as La Suisse Normade because, I suppose, of a very vague resemblance to Switzerland. This is not alpine country, but the landscape undulates more emphatically here than elsewhere in Normandy and above the Orne river an impressive rise of cliffs adds drama to the otherwise uneventful (cows and grass, more cows, more grass) but lovely (green, green, green!) scenery.
Looking down at the Orne River from the Route des Crêtes.
Winter berries dangling above not quite procumbent cow
We took long two to three hour walks everyday, cheered on the cows, slept heaps, read and drank a deliciously earthy terroir type cider made by the locals. A perfect respite after the madness of work and the holidays!
One of the most appreciated aspects of this week-long pastoral escape was the time it afforded me to read. I took along copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel I’ve saved till now to read – I have no idea why apart from the fact that the great classics are many and I am slowly making my way through the stacks – and am enjoying immensely. I vaguely remember reading Silas Marner as a teen-ager, upon my mother’s recommendation I believe, and finding it a rather bleak, dark story. Eliot’s humour, for she knows just when to light the comic wick, must have flown right by me back then, because it caught me completely by surprise in Middlemarch, which I expected to be a bit heavy going. It is not. Reading the novel has been a complete delight; the acuity of Eliot’s observations, the patience and insight with which she delves into her characters’ motivations strike me as exquisite and almost preternaturally perfect. How did she do it? Because there is simply too much to say about this book for a blog post, I’d like to share just a line from chapter XII in relation to the character Mary Garth that spoke to me powerfully:
Eliot writes that Mary had a “strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so.”
I’d like to ruminate on this a moment at the risk of sounding like one of the novel’s many preachers (I shall try to avoid the sanctimonious strains of Pastor Tyke). Do we – if you don’t mind my including you in the query — go around telling people, particularly our children, that they should be happy, grateful, delighted, positive etc. when they are clearly experiencing just the opposite emotion or do we do we actually manage to act towards them in a way that brings forth the feeling? Eliot, in this extraordinarily pithy sentence, seems to be pointing to a truth that we often overlook regarding the difference between acting upon judgment and feeling, and which of the two gets the work done. There is a great deal of finger pointing, reputation wrecking and calculating going on in Middlemarch as the characters vie for better social positions and establish their alliances. Mary Garth, because of her plainness we are told (one however, which “Rembrandt would have painted with pleasure.”) remains outside this dynamic, a position allowing her “reigning virtue,” her “honesty and truth-telling fairness,” to function as the novel’s moral compass. Mary Garth is a holder of keys and here is one that will get us into the Garden of Good Rapport.
To illustrate Eliot’s point let us take a banal example of how we fail to catch the key Mary tosses us. What is the most common refrain used by parents to get their finicky children to finish the food on their plate? Think of the starving children in Africa…right? Guilt, however, upsets digestion, which is why good Catholics confess and assure their absolution before communion. To suffer peptic trouble upon the ingestion of Jesus will simply not do just as grumpiness and guilt at the table turns even the healthiest food foul. What we want is for our children to appreciate their food, to feel the love we put into preparing it; the above refrain is useless to us then. So what is to be done? Perhaps, if we read into George Eliot’s wisdom, a subtext suggests we must find our own gratitude first and once back in that balm – for gratitude is just that, a balm – we can find the language or gesture to convey the feeling so that it is felt.
So here is one of my New Year’s resolutions, inspired directly from Middlemarch:
Put down the gavel and enter the Garden of Good Rapport.
The cow, bless her, judges not. She chews.
December 18th, 2011 Comments(2)
Christmas at the Place Sainte Marthe
The-job-that-pays-the-bills has made this week particularly hectic. Having little time to write, I will, therefore, refer us to the Encyclopedia of the Mistress of the Home (if you are new to this blog please refer to the earlier entry entitled On the Job of Being a Woman). The quote below is taken from the chapter 4 La Table et le Savoir Vivre.
La voici:
“L’œuf à la coque ne s’offre que dans l’intimité.”
The truth at its best is succinct, it is complexity compressed. Let us reflect now on the three-minute egg that is only offered in intimacy.
Le Savoir Vivre
Have you reflected? Very good. It is not everyday that we are given to ponder the profundities of social graces and the arts of the table. But perhaps the Encyclopedia’s injunction indirectly invites the more adventurous among us to mingle in metaphysics as well: if so, the most gifted guide for this leg of our brief journey will be Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.
Of the egg she writes:
“I take in the egg at a single glance. I immediately perceive that I cannot be seeing an egg. To see an egg never remains in the present. No sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for the last three thousand years. The very instant an egg is seen, it is the memory of an egg—the only person to see the egg is someone who has already seen it. — Upon seeing the egg, it is already too late: an egg seen is an egg lost. – To see the egg is the promise of being able to see the egg one day. – A brief glance which cannot be divided; if there is any thought; there is no thought; there is the egg.”
The Foreign Legion, Carcanet Press
It is the Encyclopedia’s mission to save us embarrassments, to preempt all possible faux pas – from the prosaic to more the obscure. Gaucheries of all persuasions. With the egg, a great deal is at stake: the egg, be it fresh or coqued has the power to disrupt the order of the table, to bring the conversation to an ontological deadlock. The three-minute egg stretched beyond the intimacy of one’s own sensory experience and plate threatens the conventions that assure us a certain safety or at least that sense of security we hold dear, particularly while dining. Indigestion is no small matter.
Still, let us picture twelve friends seated at the table and before each guest, an oeuf à la coque perched in its stand, like so many Humpty Dumpties teetering and poised to fall to pieces. I find myself itching to egg the Encyclopedia and its precautions.
From page 154: to remove yellow yoke stains, soak (book) in cold water, then apply soap (trempage dans de l’eau froide puis savonnage.).
Speaking of things yellow, several requests have been made for my cornbread recipe. I’d like to know how Emily Dickinson made hers and if she put molasses in it, but I believe mine stands on its own and no poetic surrogate is required.
Anne’s Cornbread for making in France
1 cup flour (if you don’t have proper American measuring cups use a verre à whisky)
1 cup cornflour (polenta ou semoule de mais)
A half a packet of levure
4 heaping tablespoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt (or a bit less)
Mix all dry ingredients together in big bowl then add:
1 cup of buttermilk (lait fermenté – look for Yorik in supermarket – not Hamlet’s Alas Poor Yorick but the brand Yorik)
One third cup sunflower oil or melted butter
3 eggs
Mix all together, pour into a buttered pan and cook for about 10 to 15 minutes (my oven bakes at lightening speed so I can’t be exact here) at about 200 degrees Celsius.
The key to good cornbread is the buttermilk.
At the Palais Royal: I nibbled on cornbread here, gazing at the ephebe.
December 09th, 2011 Comments(0)
As a follow up to last week’s post, I did make Emily Dickinson’s gingerbread. It was dense, thick and dark; it rose but an inch. Et pourtant… I added a whole packet of levure or rising agent, but it proved a rather helpless powder under the weight of four cups of flour and another of molasses. I have to say my loaf looked a bit like the oversized cap of a wild, black toadstool. It tasted quite as an American expects it to taste – sweet but tangy. My French husband commented “c’est quand même bizarre ton gâteau”; our good friend Mathieu agreed “c’est étrange mais c’est bon”. Mathieu, who eats at our table with the regularity of an adopted priest (seated at my right as the Encyclopedia of the Mistress of the House recommends), who complements my cooking by helping himself to seconds and – ma foi – thirds to the detriment of his waistline, polished off nearly half of Emily’s round. I helped myself to a slice and my husband finished the rest over the course of the week, carving off bits to have with coffee. Frenchmen can be very particular about food, especially our “primitive” American dishes. Pumpkin pie poses a problem the French palate cannot easily resolve: vegetables side with savory, not sweet, and if the Asian sweet-and-sour combo does have Gallic adherents, this is because a certain lightness and subtlety prevails in the Chinese method. Neither pumpkin pie nor Emily’s gingerbread rise; this is earth food and it even looks like it came from the garden. In short, I was surprised that the sharp tasting Gingerbread went down the French hatch so easily. There was no triumph in the loaf but it got eaten which is proof of something, non?
Also, I did my boughs of holly:
(To be honest I bought this one. The one I made is not photogenic for some reason…)
Keeping in the Yuletide spirit, I’d like to take you to visit Vieille France at 5 Avenue de Laumière, right near the Mairie de 19ème.
Here they make genuine Christmas cookies like back home, some coated with frosting that has a faint lemony flavor.
I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but these are delicious and every December I make my pilgrimage to purchase a small box of them. I like this shop because it has its own, slightly Alsacienne sensibility; their pastry chef make sablés which I’ve never seen anywhere else and unusual renditions of the classics – mille feuille, opéra, forêt noire etc — that do not seem new and inventive but homemade and traditional-with-a-twist. They make their own chocolates and sell fragrant teas every bit as good as Mariage Frères, as well as dried Marrakech roses in tall glass jars and prettily packaged candies that look very old-fashioned. There, I think I’ve said enough.
They sell these fab Bonnat chocolate bars – expensive but well worth the splurge.
There are numerous, delightful “Paris blogs” that explore the city’s culinary offerings and this is not one of them. What really interests me here is the artisan, or the artisan as resistant. Resistance comes in all forms, even in cakes, I promise you. Vieille France is a tiny, seven-pace shop, but what it does, it does well and like nobody else. Its business thrives in a bearish economy. I find this encouraging and take it as an example of how the small and singular can win out. David did it with a slingshot: why not with a Paris Brest?
December 02nd, 2011 Comments(0)
December has sprung on us; nature seems to have other ideas about the season. Last year at this time we had our mittens on and wool sweaters under wool coats, but at present a long sleeve shirt and light jacket suffice. This morning before leaving the flat to take my son to school I grabbed my garden shears and a large shopping bag. I had it in my mind to do a bit of hairdressing in the park. My first client was a holly tree – it had an unruly headdress of red berries and prickly leaves bespattered with grey Parisian mud from a recent rain. I lopped off the forked, berry-laden ends, minding the prickles, and tossed them into my bag: three full circles around the tree, clip, chop, clip. If the tree did not look significantly neater after my handiwork, it at least felt lighter, I am sure. Next I chanced upon a young Spruce tree suffering from overgrowth at the midriff. I gave immediate attention to the silhouette problem and snipped using a Vidal Sassoon technique taught to me by a door-to-door coiffeuse I used to know. Her name was Françoise and she was into feathering. If that Spruce had a tongue, it would thank me for picking up where the gardeners failed to facilitate, for it has now obtained that hotly desired willowy look its deciduous friends achieve merely by dropping their leaves.
By the time we reached my son’s school I had a bag full of Christmas clippings. They are now sitting in vases in the garden awaiting tomorrow’s project: Boughs of Holly.
My plan is to invoke the spirit of winter: even if it is not yet cold, the days are shortening and natural light grows scarce. I’ve had it in mind for some time to put on the Opal Apron and make Emily Dickinson’s gingerbread. Today just might be the day.
This is my version of the Opal Apron. It has Virgin Mary motifs in oval opal spheres.
Here is the recipe written by Emily’s hand (and found on the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum)
1 quart flour
½ cup butter
½ cup cream
1 tablespoon ginger
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon salt
Make up with molasses
The editors of the book in which the recipe was published include these instructions: “Cream the butter and mix with lightly whipped cream. Sift dry ingredients together and combine with other ingredients. The dough is stiff and needs to be pressed into whatever pan you choose. A round or small square pan is suitable. The recipe also fits perfectly into a cast iron muffin pan, if you happen to have one which makes oval cakes. Bake at 350°F for 20-25 minutes. Guides at the Emily Dickinson House, who in 1975 individually experimented with the quantity of molasses, have generally agreed that a ‘cup or so’ is just about right.”
What I love about this recipe is the “make up with molasses” part. Emily was said to have been an expert bread maker and like many good cooks her gift, I gather, appealed more to the senses than science. What she seems to be saying is to add enough molasses to make the batter the right consistency. But how are we to know the proper consistency if we’ve never tried the recipe? Well, that’s Emily for you. Even in the kitchen she will leave you to ponder until you enter the Garden in the Brain and your Hempen Hands –uncover the key to the Scarlet Experiment –. Emily may shed a veil but beneath it lie others, perhaps countless others, each granting us an illumination of life’s mysteries, of the territories of existence.
If you try this recipe let me know how it turned out. I think I will ignore the editor’s additions and enter into the Mysteries of Molasses as Emily advocates. It promises to get sticky but the Opal Apron is there for hand wiping, spills, spattering and dish towel hanging.
Some people tie the Strings of their Lives (see poem below) accompanied in Hello Kitty vehicles.
And lastly, a word from Emily herself as pilfered from the Daily Dickinson blog:
Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord,
Then, I am ready to go!
Just a look at the Horses —
Rapid! That will do!
Put me in on the firmest side —
So I shall never fall —
For we must ride to the Judgment —
And it’s partly, down Hill —
But never I mind the steeper —
And never I mind the Sea —
Held fast in Everlasting Race —
By my own Choice, and Thee —
Goodbye to the Life I used to live —
And the World I used to know —
And kiss the Hills, for me, just once —
Then — I am ready to go!
November 21st, 2011 Comments(2)
When my son was in kindergarten he announced to his teacher that his mother was a professor at the Eiffel Tower. Did his five year-old mind imagine me taking the glass elevator up to the summit to conduct class to the capital below? Maybe the Tour Eiffel missed its higher calling as a University of the Firmament. Better that, I say, than a sky harbour of overpriced restaurants and television antennae, but then again, I’ve never dined at the Jules Verne. Have you?
I had forgotten all about my supposed teaching stint at the Iron Lady but was reminded last weekend after a visit to La Résidence Pirandello, where my husband’s grandmother Beatrice lives. Beatrice is one hundred and one years old and has survived two genocides: the Turkish massacre of the Armenians and the concentration camps of World War II. Actually she didn’t get sent to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Flossenburg, but her husband did and she suffered the anxiety of a spouse fully aware of the horror. Beatrice has told me many of her stories including how, when her family escaped to France from Istanbul, she had sown the family’s jewels into the underside of her dresses. One of these pieces she gave me a few years back; a locket.
La Residence Pirandello is an old folks home near Gobelins. It is exceptionally clean and light; a pretty garden of hydrangeas and rhododendrons outside the glass walled dining room offers a terrace with tables for guests and residents in the warmer months. Beatrice once ran a cobblers shop and made a steady but humble living; the cost of her “residency” if I may call it that is mostly paid for by the sécurité sociale. I have to wonder if an American Beatrice would have access to equally fine accommodations. Something tells me she would not (perhaps a call from my mother last night informing me a friend of ours was denied urgent medical treatment by a doctor who saw her Medicaid would not cover it!). Recently, Beatrice had a bad bout of bronchitis, which left her hooked up to oxygen, weak and emaciated, her breathing belabored. Given her age and frailty I wondered how she was going to pull through, but my husband had no doubt she would. ”You can see,” he said, “that she’s not giving up.” Really? What I saw was a frail, suffering centenarian holding onto life by a thread. My husband was right though, and last week when we met her in the dining room, she was dressed in her purple and gold Sunday suit, sitting up at a table. She didn’t entirely recognize us though she knew we were family. My son sat next to her on the right near her good ear; she asked him about school, then, noticing his two front teeth, congratulated him on his belles dents. “Look at mine,” she said to him, opening her mouth and pointing to her gums “all gone! But not to worry. They’re growing back.”
Perhaps if you make it beyond your hundredth year, you start to expect the whole business will begin again. Anything is possible, I suppose. I’ll have to ask one of my science colleagues at the Eiffel Tower about it.
Beatrice mistakes my husband for her own son; she speaks to him in Armenian, which he doesn’t understand. “In French, in French,” he shouts into her bad ear. “Are you the boy’s grandmother,” she asks looking at me. “Sa maman,” I correct. “Where’s your father?” she asks my son. “Is he upstairs?” “But look, Great Grandma Beatrice, he’s right there!” My son points to his dad, her grandson, sitting at her left. Beatrice looks at my husband and rattles off in Armenian. And around we go… La Résidence is Beatrice’s home, but it is also her theatre where dramas and one-act plays spring forth from her memory’s repertory. Clearly we are lousy actors who haven’t learned our roles; what’s worse is we have the gall to claim that she, the metteur en scene, has made a mistake in her casting.
We suggest a round of Go Fish. My son gets a deck of cards from Beatrice’s room and the game begins! Beatrice is right there with us; she has no idea how to play and doesn’t seem to care. What’s important is that she stays in the game. The hand is going fast, mostly because my son, the buckaroo, who in his own private theatre is playing poker at the First Chance Saloon, keeps taking two turns in a row. Beatrice puts her cards down on the table revealing what we are not supposed to see. Still, she is doing better than me. Clearly I am losing, mais peu importe! There is something exciting about playing Go Fish with Beatrice in her theatre. The four of us are pulled into a circle of energy where rules are momentarily suspended, where lost teeth reappear and the Sorbonne perches in the heavens.
I think of a line by Emily Dickinson but alter it:
It might be more possible without the possibility.
A sign made by my son to dissuade men from peeing against the Eiffel Tower.
November 09th, 2011 Comments(0)
After some eight years of being a subscriber, I did not renew my subscription to The Guardian Weekly this year. I won’t go into why; suffice it to say I miss my weekly shot of news. Mostly though, I miss Nature Watch.
This column can be summed up as a meditation written by a country diarist posted in a remote corner of Shropshire or Norfolk or the North York Moors, recording the habits of birds and the seasonal changes of native plants. While the rest of the hubristic world is flying off the handle like Phaeton in the carriage, the diarists observe the elements, the flora and fauna of England’s wilds, shrouded in nature’s hush, almost outside time: they are walkers not charioteers, listeners not babblers. As far as I know The Guardian is the only newspaper to give us this aperçu of the natural world; at first glance it seems anachronistic and whimsical, but upon closer inspection, we see that this window onto the moors is subtly political and that the fancifulness operates both as a shifter of sensibilities (from news about our condition to a profound reflection on it) and as a way of approaching the concerns of conservationism without flattening them into a pat agenda.
I used to clip these missives and paste them into my notebook. Here is one on lapwings, written by Mark Cocker:
“We assume that the bird itself is filled with some of the feelings of joy that its performance inspires. I don’t believe that or, at least, I feel we can never know what it feels. Yet there is in its behaviour a kind of love, but rooted in being perfectly itself. It is our encounter with this absoluteness in the natural world that heals us but that, as a society, we have yet to value truly or find means to harness.”
Pure Lao Tseu, really.
As a family we try to get out to the forest on the weekend, usually on Sundays. We’ve been doing this since my son was about two-years-old; at first we carried him in a backpack, but he began walking alongside us sooner than we thought he would. Like me, it turns out he’s a regular mountain goat. A friend of mine who works with children and whose wise advice in matters of mothering I’ve always been attentive to, used to tell me that walking in the forest was not a child-oriented activity. She was right, it isn’t. But nor is going to mass, or to temple or to the mosque; there are some things we do with our children because they are important to us and if their entertainment value flails in a permanent recession, so be it: the transmission of values or of love and a passion is what counts. We’ve always taken our son to the forest with us because it is in nature that we are able to be most “perfectly” ourselves somehow. We walk, not because we need something to do, but because walking is meditation in motion and it brings us into the landscape the way the eye pulls a viewer into an absorbing painting; it enables a communion to take place.
Fortunately for us, Paris is surrounded by spectacular forests, once the hunting grounds of Kings. Most often we go to the Forest of Ermenonville because it is closest to home, a 45 minute drive, but my favorite is the Fontainebleau forest, particularly around Barbizon where nearly alpine landscapes of pines, heather and mossy rocks alternate with woods of beech and oak trees. I stumbled upon this site, which gives instructions on how to get there by train from Paris: http://parisweekender.com/2011/07/barbizon-the-forest-of-fontainebleau/
Enjoy!
A path in the Ermenonville Forest
I always bring a plastic bag to pick up trash people with no manners leave in the forest. I went to Montessori school. Old habits die hard.
An abbey we sometimes visit after our walk. There is a beautiful rose garden in back and in front, a good humour truck that sells homemade sorbets.
A pumpkin patch at the Château of Villandry in the Loire Valley — the countryside gets a French manicure.
November 02nd, 2011 Comments(6)
A couple of weeks ago I strolled through a neighborhood vide grenier, the French version of our garage sale, just outside the Buttes Chaumont park and happened upon what struck me as a remarkable volume: L’encyclopédie de la maîtresse de maison published in 1968, the year student riots in France disrupted bourgeois conventions and slapped them with their slogan « Ni Dieu, ni maître » (Neither God nor Master). Perhaps the young women of the time should have been shouting “Ni Dieu, ni maîtresse” instead of chiming in with the boys because despite the new and enhanced sexual freedom they were gaining au gallop the double standards remained largely in place, and whilst some tossed cobblestones from behind the barricades, others were contributing to the Encyclopedia of the Mistress of the House.
I bought the book for two euros. It is in commendable condition apart from a lipstick experiment on the front cover. Presumably the child of the book’s former mistress got a bit happy with mom’s frosted pink lipstick, and this, to the mistress’ credit as the encyclopedia, under the heading “jouets” (toys) gives the following, succinct prescription: Peu de jouets. (Few toys). We are left to assume these words were followed faithfully by the former mistress whose child, for proper lack of playthings, found merriment in mother’s make-up bag. Very well. The work of being a woman operates according to variations so multi-facetted and kaleidoscopic there are bound to be minor failings even among the most fervent followers of the Encyclopedia.
From the chapter La Table et le savoir-vivre. An elegant take on Saint Sebastianing fruit…
The book is divided into 9 chapters the last but not least of which is entitled Votre métier de femme. I’d like to reflect a moment on this rather loaded phrase which, back in 1968, probably seemed so obvious as to go unquestioned. Votre métier de femme or Your job of being a Woman. I’ve never heard the male equivalent Votre métier d’homme and probably never will. It simply does not exist. Men do jobs but they are not jobs. Women may or may not have jobs but they are always a job. It is work just to be a woman. Men search high and low, flex and wail, build and destroy to understand what it means to be a man, but women do not wallow in the interrogative folds of existential luxury. To put this in Cartesian terms: men align with “I think therefore I am”; women with “I work therefore I woman.” On the ladies’ side the grammar breaks down: we are given lists of dos and don’ts without the decency of conjugations. Under the heading Epouse or Wife, we find the following inscription:
Pour votre mari, ne jamais vous négliger (for your husband’s sake, no self negligence)
While this injunction remains open to positive interpretations of the sort that could encourage mistresses to indulge in self-embracing escapades such as spa outings and trips to the salon du thé with their coterie of lady friends, the Encyclopedia hastens to elucidate its remark:
La silhouette – comment maigrir
There is no beating around the bush. Mistress gets put on a diet before she even gets the chance to conduct a home facial as indicated step-by-step some ten pages later. Pleasure, which a woman naturally associates with her mate and their intimacy becomes precisely the obstacle to his love, ie. I love to eat therefore I am fat and my husband no longer loves to make love to me. The cliché is as aged as it is commonplace in today’s women’s magazines. This bit is followed by seven pages of brisk advice on maintaining silhouette and losing parts of the self that, through negligence, have deformed the husband-pleasing outline and preclude Pleasure with a capital “P”.
It should be noted that special thanks is given in the Encyclopedia’s preface to Marie-Claire magazine for access to its archives. Et bien, merci Marie, merci Claire.
Picture accompanying Chapter 9. Notice the prominence of the watch.
Below, the introductory paragraph of Chapter 9 “L’Organisation de votre métier de femme” rudimentarily translated by me, between trips to the washing machine and folding laundry (just exercising the métier…):
“The preparation of meals, the wash, the ironing, the upkeep of the house, the children… and the chore of dishes that returns thrice daily! The métier of mistress of the house largely suffices to fill up the life of a woman who stays at home. Is it not said, a propos of her, that the work of a mother is like that of a train line: the end seems always in view but one never sees it arrive? And what to say when a job outside the home is added to these duties? This poses nearly insurmountable problems, demands prodigious ingenuity and a rapidity of execution when the fatigue of the day weighs heavily on you! This is the moment when your loved-ones return to the house. The familial atmosphere they expect is up to you to create: your smile, a beautiful table, the intimacy of the family hearth. You’ve just finished your work for the day and another one awaits you at home. Therefore, it is of capital importance that you learn to organize your day and follow a precise and simplified schedule, economize your gestures, your fatigue, and mostly… your nerves!”
While men are terribly busy discovering what is it is to be men and should not be diverted from this business toward the endless railway of household chores, women, particularly professional women, must organize themselves better. The burden is theirs to bear; therefore, they must learn to “economize” their nerves. Clearly a more apt translation would be “spare their nerves” but I prefer economize, for what is at stake here is worth, a notion central both to economics and self-esteem. If only a woman could follow and hence control the movements of her nerves like those of her pennies she’d know just how to manage their account and no longer be plagued by end-of-the-day crankiness, nocturnal surliness and culinary vengeance, like broiling hamburger patties till hockey-puck black – a favourite of my mother’s or burning dinner rice to coal – a favourite of mine.
(Les Vacances et Les Loisirs — this is actually a long, involved chapter. Is vacation really a vacation for the Mistress of the House?)
The Encyclopedia sets the bar high. In 1968, Loréal had not yet overinvested shampoo with its “Because I’m worth it” jingle. But even if it had, few women would have given the claim credence just as few do today. Self-esteem doesn’t come in a bottle; it is earned. If we could just shuck our métier de femme, surely we’d have more time and energy to fight for the pay raises we deserve, both real and symbolic.
Despite its commanding tone and paucity of congenial grammar there is something almost touching about the Encyclopedia’s often misguided efforts to offer help; moreover, it is teeming with excellent tips from which cheeses to serve at each season to where to seat an ecclesiast at the dinner table, which I daresay, will come in handy to me, if not in the immediate future, in yonder times when I get to St. Pete’s.
(Le pique-nique en voiture…)
(Le couche-partout facile à réaliser)
(Pour que le blanc de l’oeil redevienne bleu)
(La cuisine moderne et gaie)
(TV dinner à la française)
I would love to have one of these dragons: any idea where to get one?
And a confused azalea blooming in January.
