Down to the Sea in Ships

Years ago, I was a contributing editor for the newspaper of the Seafarers International Union.  I was the Great Lakes editor, so I went to the Lakes in the spring for the annual fit out of the Lakes' fleet, and I usually went around this time of year, right before the Lakes froze and shipping pretty much stopped. There was usually a ship or two that was out just a minute too late and got stuck mid-Lake in the ice; I'm not sure that happens anymore.

There's a superstition about women on ships and some of the old-timers weren't too happy to see me, but mostly it was fine.  I interviewed a lot of seamen.  That's when I learned everyone has a story (except one man.)  I also learned there are some really good cooks - stewards - on ships.

Once, about this time of year, I met a chief steward who was famous for his fruitcake.  We always made a number of stops at different port cities, one of the paper's photographers and I, and everywhere we went, we heard about the fruitcake.  He made them a year in advance, wrapped them up and doused them with brandy every so often.  And when I got to his ship, he gave me one.  It weighed about five pounds and I carried it with me until I got back to New York, where I brought it to a Christmas party.

Everybody has a story.  (Except that one man.)

My review of BOBCAT and other Stories by Rebecca Lee
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/eziesk/2013/06/review-of-bobcat-and-other-stories-by-rebecca-lee/#more-110397

My conversation with Meg Wolitzer on writing, publishing, women in fiction and her new novel http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/eziesk/2013/04/a-conversation-with-meg-wolitzer

HOT MILK SPONGE CAKE

My essay on the recipes handed down to us, and the ones we hand down, from TheMillions http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/hot-milk-sponge-cake-on-the-stories-recipes-tell-us.html

My daughter’s birthday comes in June. Every year since the first year, I’ve made her a birthday cake — strawberry shortcake, which seemed appropriate for the summery month, her love of berries. The cake became an instant tradition, as many things with children instantly do. It’s a Hot Milk Sponge Cake, berries macerated in sugar, whipped cream. It isn’t a shortcake, which is commoner. And it isn’t better than another sponge cake recipe I have, one that’s quicker, easier, requiring fewer ingredients and less time. But I keep going back to the Hot Milk Sponge, because of the recipe.

Not the ingredients. Not taste. The paper with the handwritten recipe itself. Because it reminds me of Betty, a long ago boyfriend’s mother, the woman who first made the cake, then wrote out the recipe for me. The writing’s faded, the green lined paper it’s written on going waxy with age. I’ve typed it out against the possibility that one day I’ll open my Joy of Cooking, where I store recipes I’ve cut out of magazines or printed or that have been given to me like this one, and like an ancient Polaroid photo, it will have disappeared. And along with it, my connection to her.

Because what I’m looking for when I hunt through my recipe collection isn’t really Hot Milk Sponge Cake. It’s a connection to my personal history, a road map of where I’ve been and who I’ve known.  Recipes are connectors, the roads too small to show on maps.

And they aren’t all written down. Like The Odyssey or a Studs Terkelinterview, they can be passed along in other ways.

When my mother-in-law died, we had a small service with food afterwards. It was mostly family, a few close friends. Her friend Anita was there. They’d known each other for more than 50 years, and Anita was very upset. I extended a hand, reached out to touch her shoulder, but she didn’t want consolation.

After the service, we ate the food we’d carried there. I’d brought egg-and-onion, a dish my grandmother made. She knew it was a dish I loved, and when I was coming, she made it for me. It is how some people show love, by giving you the things they know you like to eat: that repetition. I once told someone I liked her lemon meringue pie. She made it every time she saw me after that.

I’ve updated my grandmother’s dish — I make it with olive oil, though she likely used chicken fat.  Mine is lighter, less deadly. Anita had some after the service.

“Who made this?” she said. “I haven’t tasted this taste since my mother died.”

I told her its history — the part about my grandmother, the part about the olive oil. I’ve told this story many times, I am fluent in it.

“It’s so good,” Anita said, and said again. Later, she asked me for the recipe. I sent it to her.  It comforted her in a way she couldn’t otherwise be comforted. And it connected us — me to my grandmother, Anita to her mother, the two of us to each other.

In the front of my Joy of Cooking is a recipe, in her hand, for Elizabeth’s Raspberry Buns. I make them smaller than she did, and my daughter and I renamed them Thumbkins, because you push a floured thumb into the center of each ball of dough before filling it with jam, but what I remember when I make them is Elizabeth herself, the antique samplers she collected and hung on her walls, the lunches and dinners we had together.

There is Andy’s rice salad, written on a piece of stationery so familiar to me it trips longing to be in their house whenever I see it.

There is a recipe in my own handwriting on the back of a piece of paper with notes from a biography of Margaret Mead I wrote and published years ago. There I am.

Recipes are a way of bridging metaphorical distance too: another way they are like maps. On Thanksgiving, we go to Kate’s house, where a table is set for 20 or more — some who wander in because they are — temporarily or otherwise — without family, others who always come. Everybody brings food.

Last year I made a green bean casserole, the kind my aunt always made at Thanksgiving when I was a girl out of canned soup and crispy canned onions. I made a version that used fresh everything and I brought it to Kate’s and two of the other women there came over and saidHow did you do it?!  We’ve been trying to make a good version of this for 25 years! I told them what I’d done.

There I am again.

We are cooks, my friends and I: cooking is something that binds us and grounds us. My sister takes cookbooks to bed, reads them the way other people read novels. My daughter and I like biographies, or volumes of letters about/by people who’ve made their lives in food — James Beard, Ruth Reichl, Amanda Hesser. Recipes, like maps, give you places to go, tell you how to get there.

I’ve been friends with Tessa since childhood, we’ve had many many meals together. I ate the wonderful food her mother prepared when we were girls; now I cook some of it. We’ve cooked together and separately, with and for each other. The orange marmalade she and Andy make every year, a long, painstaking process. My pasta with tomatoes and breadcrumbs. Her cinnamon rolls.

A few Saturdays ago we were speaking on the phone. We hadn’t talked in a while, we had things to catch up on, some difficult. We are at an age where, often, things are difficult — work, aging parents, questions of health. Things that made me feel cracked with sadness. And then we talked about lentil soup.

How much better it is made with tiny green lentils than the musty brown kind. How I like to make it thick and put tomatoes and vegetables in it and serve it over rice.

We were reassuring each other. Patting our way back to the beginning of adult life, when we both first started to cook — to continue the traditions of food we’d grown up with or to transcend them, begin our own. My egg and onion isn’t my grandmother’s. My green bean casserole isn’t my aunts. But they also are. Food — recipes — are what we talk about when we are telling each other: I’m here.  It’s okay. Life, despite sadness, has this in it too.

Recipes themselves appeal to me because they are small and finite: little works. You set yourself a goal, pursue and finish it, it doesn’t take very long. That’s the opposite of what I spend my time doing. The longest, most complicated recipe I ever made took me a day. A novel takes years.

But recipes connect me to people too, both people I don’t know (James Beard, Ruth Reichel, Amanda Hesser) and people I do — all the people who took the time to write out a recipe for something I loved, something they’d first prepared for me — friends, my aunt, my once-upon-a-time boyfriend’s mother. I haven’t always made the recipes. But it’s the handwriting, the road that travels both forward and back, that’s important to me.

When we were talking about lentil soup, Tessa told me Zina, her daughter, had made one with coconut and lemon grass.

“That sounds delicious,” I said.  “Will she send me the recipe?

And when my daughter calls and says she wants me to teach her to make a certain dish my heart expands.

She once asked me what the most valuable thing I had was. I wanted to say “you,” but she was too old for that answer to satisfy. She meant something tangible — silver, paintings, pearls.

I don’t have things like that, or miss them or crave them, nothing spectacular to leave her. But if I had said to her then “It’s my old Joy of Cooking, stuffed with recipes,” I don’t think she would have understood it. Now I think she will. Because inside the front cover of that book is her past and mine and my grandmother’s. Tastes she’s grown up with, things she can give her children when they come. A true inheritance.

Oh, look, she’ll say one day, thumbing through the recipes. Hot Milk Sponge Cake. I remember that.

My essay on friendship

http://www.themillions.com/2012/11/thankful-for-such-friends

MISADVENTURES IN COOKING



I'm a pretty good cook.  I kind of wing it in the kitchen - to me, that's the fun of cooking.  When I read a recipe - and I read recipes for entertainment - certain combinations of ingredients sound good to me, so I try them.  It's the way I put together colors in clothing too: I see em, I like em, I put em on.

I don't cook much from recipes.  I used to, but I don't anymore.  The key to cooking like a lot of other things is Go Forth and Conquer.  Do Not Be Afraid.

This is now.

When I first started cooking - or let me amend that: when I first started having to cook - I was about 13.  My mother was going to school one or two nights a week, and the food prep was up to me. She left things like chopped meat for hamburgers and frozen vegetables - this was pretty elementary cooking - but I liked a challenge!  One night, I took the chopped meat and the frozen vegetables and cooked them along with some seasonings including soy sauce and ketchup.  Not a match made in heaven.  My dad went out for a walk after dinner - something he never did, but it was a nice night, so I didn't think much of it.  Years later, he told me he'd gone out to get something to eat.

Things improved, although not immediately.

When you live on your own and you don't really know how to cook yet, baffling things happen.  The stuffed cabbage I bravely tried took hours.  So did everything from the "60 Minute Cook Book."  And then there was the dinner party.

Or more accurately, the dessert for the dinner party.

It was a strawberry sherbert-y thing.  I didn't have an ice cream maker (I still don't), but this recipe said you could put it in ice cube trays in the freezer and take it out every few hours and stir it up, then put it back again.

The recipe itself was a little odd - it even identified itself this way.  It called for 1/4 cup of salt.  "You'll think this is a lot of salt," the recipe said and yes, I did, I thought it was A LOT of salt, especially for sorbet.  But the salt, the recipe said, would bring out the flavor of the strawberries.  Who was I to argue, I recognized myself as the amateur, I went along, although I did check and re-check the recipe.  Yup.  Quarter cup.

So I made it, and I put it in the ice cube trays and I took it out and stirred it up every few hours.  It had a very nice texture.  I never tasted it though.  I was too tired to taste.

At least, I didn't taste it when I made it.  Or when I stirred it.  I tasted it about 5 minutes before the guests were too arrive.

A quarter cup of salt is A LOT of salt.  It was very pretty to look at - beautiful texture and color - and it was inedible.  SO SALTY!  When I went back and looked at the recipe again, it didn't say 1/4 cup.  It said 1/4 teaspoon.  Someone had obviously changed it.

For a minute I thought about serving it anyway - I'm ashamed to admit this, but it is true.  My dinner guests were in the hall.  What was I supposed to do?

But in the end, what you're told when you work on a newspaper also holds true for food you're planning to serve: When in doubt, leave it out.  Or in this case, throw it out.

Thank God for Hagen Daazs.

FAREWELL TO COOK'S MAGAZINE

Dear Cook’s Magazine,

The time has come for us to part.  I know, we’ve been together a long time and I have been loyal to you.  I never subscribed to some other cooking magazines – not that there is another like you – and rarely went to the internet for recipes.  Well, a few times, but not many.  I have renewed and renewed and renewed – even when you came up with that Country Cooking spin off that might have been put out by pre-diabetic Paula Deen so much butter did each recipe contain (I counted 14 tablespoons in one.  The dairy industry must have loved it.)  Still, my loyalty did not waver.

But, over time, doubts have crept in.  These doubts began as tiny seeds (to use a kind of organic, victory garden metaphor) that grew and grew.  What are they?

Grilling.  A disproportionately large number of your recipes – at least two entire issues per year – are devoted to grilling, which is something most people do in their backyards. 

I live in a New York City apartment smaller, I’m sure, than the Cook’s test kitchens.  My outdoor space consists of a rickety fire balcony on the fourth floor where I am not going to install a Weber.  I don’t care about grilling.  Being a non-griller presented with a grilling magazine is like going on a date to a skating rink without skates.  Or being on a baseball team but sitting out the game on the bench.  I’m sure I can come up with more sports metaphors, given time.  But the fact is I wouldn’t go to a skating rink without skates, why would I want to read a magazine devoted to grilling when I don’t have a grill?

Next, equipment.  One recipe said a food mill was good for a particular job (I could be wrong, but I believe the job was making Julia Child’s leak and potato soup) but you weren’t recommending it because few people have such an esoteric and old fashioned piece of equipment as a food mill.  Something that, even though I am not 150 years old, I happen to have.  What you apparently believe all people DO have is food processors.  Also microwaves.  And, that sign of an amateur in the kitchen, a garlic press.

 Possibly most people do have food processors and microwaves and even garlic presses.  I have a garlic press although I never used it and long ago consigned it to service as a PlayDo accessory for my daughter.  Possibly, the number of people who don’t possess food processors and microwaves and let’s not forget heavy-duty mixers with dough hooks is so miniscule, we’re not worth worrying about.  Clearly, we’re not worth translating any recipe for. 

That’s fine.  I can translate recipes myself.  I know how to melt chocolate on top of a pan of simmering water rather than in the microwave I do not have, and how to chop vegetables using that quaint, old fashioned invention the knife rather than the food processor I also do not have, and I will for a dish I’m interested in making.  But that brings me to my next and biggest problem, Cooks.  I don’t want to make any of your food.

The recipes always have too many steps.  They also always include ingredients I will never use.  I don’t want to make my sauces silky by using gelatin.  I know the cooks in Cooks-landia are very proud of having figured out how gelatin mimics the whatever-it-is in slow cooked meat sauces that comes off the bones and thickens the sauce naturally, but gelatin will never make its way into my sauce.  I’m not using liquid smoke either.  And I’m never going to use cream to emulsify a pasta sauce.

This is how you emulsify pasta sauces, Cooks, the ones that just have oil and parmesan cheese, for example.  Or the lemon sauce you tried to duplicate recently.  You make the sauce quickly in a pan (quick is its signature), you add the pasta and some of the pasta cooking water, then you turn the pasta over and over in the sauce.  Over and over.  Add a little more pasta water if it’s not the right consistency.  Turn the heat up if there’s too much liquid.  Putting cream in a non-cream sauce – in a sauce whose reason for being is that it is not a cream sauce –  makes you look lame.

The truth is, in all the years I’ve been reading Cooks I’ve made maybe four  recipes.  Two of the four were awful.  The pasta primavera – the one where you toast the pasta then cook it in vegetable broth – that was just weird.  The only recipes I’ve kept were the ones for Christmas cookies, because I used to do an annual cookie bake when my daughter was young and needed cookies sturdy enough to stand up to the decorating torture she and her friends put them through.  (I didn’t eat them.  Nobody ate them.)  And the recipe for streusel topping for apple crisp.

The recipe is genius – simple, but nobody else thought of it: you pre-bake the streusel topping before you put it on the crisp.  That way the topping doesn’t get soggy.  It’s so good, I’m happy I’m the one making it so I can eat it right out of the oven before I put it on top of the crisp, like granola.  Hats off to you for that one, Cooks.  I liked that no-knead bread recipe too, though I never made it as I’m afraid of yeast.  Which is my issue, not yours.

But what you bring to the table, well, it just isn’t enough.

For years, I’ve been waiting for you to come up with food I really want to make.  I’ve been overlooking the ingredients that make me roll my eyes; the inane tips people send in and you print; the ridiculous food tastings you do where your tasters invariably like the version of the-thing-being-tested that has chemical additives the best. 

I know it’s not just you.  I have Magazine Rage.  Magazines make me angry.  Most of them are meant for entitled rich people who have a spare $4,000 to spend on a pair of shoes.  I had to wait in the doctor’s office for a long time the other day, a magazine and a half’s worth of time and I saw that same pair of $4,000 shoes in both magazines.  “Editorial content” is just advertising.  That makes me mad.

Cooks, I didn’t think you were like that.  You don’t run ads.  You’re supposedly for everyone equally, us regular people who just like to cook.  But you have a demographic even if you won’t admit it.  Backyard owning, food processor using, microwave equipped grill enthusiasts with compromised emulsification skills. 

Of whom I am not one.

So farewell Cooks.  Thanks for the memories.  Now, I have to go start dinner.