When I was fifteen I got my heart broken for the first time. I was already an overly-emotional and fragile teenager (really, who isn’t at fifteen?) but this heartbreak had me positively melancholy. After weeks of sulking around the house, skipping school and crying at any good-natured joke my dad aimed my way, I arrived home one day to find a copy of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca sitting on my pillow. My mom had placed it there hoping it would distract me from my total devastation, and distract me it certainly did.

From the minute I picked up that lavender and pink paperback with loopy cursive scrawled across it and read “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” I was hooked.  I spent hours in my room reading, so wrapped up I forgot for the first time in my life to eat.  When I emerged from my room days later I was so gaunt and spindly that my grandmother gasped when she saw me. There is something sustaining and even filling about du Maurier’s writing, and it isn’t just because her novels are filled with food. There is a richness about her language that is decadent and thick and sinfully good.

The descriptions of food in Rebecca are both mouth watering and visceral, as the narrator moves from a “dry, unappetizing plate of ham and tongue that somebody had sent back to the cold buffet half-an-hour before as badly carved,” to thick slices of bread with butter, “cucumber and watercress sandwiches”, and “bowls of fresh raspberries and peaches.” The tea scenes at Manderly are the most elaborate and tempting, with “dripping crumpets…Tiny crisp wedges of toast, and piping hot, flaky scones. Sandwiches of unknown nature, mysteriously flavoured and quite delectable, and that very special gingerbread. Angel cake, that melted in the mouth, and his rather stodgier companion bursting with peel and raisins” (pg. 8). Last week, with Valentine’s Day approaching, I started scouring my bookshelves for the best romantic literature and stumbled across my copy of Rebecca. As I was re-reading I noticed that angel cake is mentioned at least three times in different tea scenes throughout the novel. Angel food cake is a perfect Valentine’s Day dessert. It is quick, simple and impressive, not to mention easy enough on the waistline that you’ll still fit into that little something later on.

Your egg whites should hold up like this when they're ready

I used cake flour and superfine sugar to make this cake really melt-in-your-mouth light. Cake flour is easy to find, but if you can’t find superfine sugar just put regular granulated sugar into a food processor and pulse until it’s the texture of fine sand. It’s worth the effort I promise!

Rebecca‘s Lemon Angel Food Cake

Makes 1 10-inch cake (should serve about 8 people)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups sifted superfine sugar, divided (set aside extra for strawberries and whipped cream)
• 1 1/3 cups sifted cake flour (not self-rising)
• 1 1/2 cups egg whites, at room temperature (about 11 eggs)
• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
• 3/4 teaspoon good vanilla extract
• zest of 1 and a half lemons
• 1 carton strawberries
• 16 ounces heavy whipping cream

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Slice strawberries and place in a bowl, toss in sugar and set aside in the fridge.

Sift flour and 1/2 cup of sugar together and set aside (if you have the patience to sift this mixture 3 or 4 times do it, it makes a difference). Separate eggs and add 1 1/2 cups of whites to the bowl of a mixture fitted with the whip attachment. Add cream of tartar and salt and whip on high speed until thick (1-2 minutes). While whites are whipping zest your lemons. Once the whites are foamy and thick add the lemon zest, vanilla, and remaining 1 1/2 cups of sugar and continue to whip on high until you have stiff, glossy peaks. Fold flour sugar mixture into whites gently until fully incorporated.

Scoop batter into un-greased 10-inch angel food cake pan (do not grease the pan, it will keep the batter from rising) and bake at 350 for 40-50 minutes. Remove cake from the oven and allow to cool with pan turned upside-down–this keeps the cake from sinking while it cools. Once cake is almost cool, whip your heavy cream, adding sugar and/or vanilla extract to taste. Slice cooled cake and top with freshly whipped cream and strawberries.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

A couple of years back, when I still had lots of leisure time to read, I was in a book club with two of my dearest friends. Whenever we would get together to discuss what we had just read I would cook a meal inspired by the book. After reading Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion we got together and spooned beef stew over tall butter-studded biscuits and watched Paul Newman and Henry Fonda play the Stamper men on my ancient TV and they urged me to start writing about my literature-inspired recipes. A few days later Yummy Books came to be and it is because of that that Kesey’s novel holds a particularly special place in my heart.

Kesey is best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but in my opinion Sometimes a Great Notion is his real masterpiece. The novel takes place in the fictional Oregon town of Wakonda and chronicles the lives of the Stamper family—the only non-union logging family left in the town. When the unionized loggers go on strike to demand more pay (their hours are being cut due to the invention of the chainsaw) the Stamper family decides to cross picket lines and single-handedly provide the mills with lumber.

All of the chaos outside of the Stamper household is nothing, however, compared to what is going on on the inside. Sometimes a Great Notion is a sprawling epic complete with deep-seated brotherly hatred, savage revenge plots, repressed silences and Oedipal lust. Think Steinbeck’s East of Eden pumped full of testosterone.  There is hardly a bleaker, more raw look into family dysfunction and hard-headed stubbornness. The only moments of relief from the constant stream of heartache and cold beating rain come when the Stamper family is gathered around the table.

The Stamper men wake up in the morning to “piles of steaming pancakes.” To the logging mill they take paper sacs filled with “sharp vinegar and mustard scented” deviled eggs, meaty olives and “creamy brown candy filled with roasted filberts.” At dinnertime they are “elbows and ears over a checkered table-cloth” covered with “deer liver and heart fried in onions, and gravy made from the drippings…boiled potatoes and fresh green beans and homemade bread.”

But the dish that makes the biggest impact on Leland Stamper is Viv’s baked apples, the comforting scent of which is so overpowering it has him looking to the moon and wondering, “what happened to my childhood?”

pardon my toes

 For dessert baked apples were waiting. Viv had prepared the apples by coring them and filling the holes with brown sugar and cinnamon Red Hots, then topping each apple with a slide of butter before she put them in to bake. During the meal the kitchen had been filled with the spicy smell of their cooking and all the kids had squealed delightedly when she brought the square pyrex dish from the oven. ‘Hot, now, watch it.’ The apples sizzled in thick caramel-colored syrup.

As intrigued as I was by the notion of adding Red Hots candies to my baked apples I couldn’t quite stomach it, so these apples get a cinnamon stick instead. Viv’s pad of butter gets browned within an inch of burning and mixed with maple syrup, dark brown sugar, and a little bourbon to take the edge off.

Viv Stamper’s Maple Brown Butter Baked Apples with Vanilla Custard Sauce

Makes 4 

Ingredients:

• 4 baking apples (I used Rome apples but you can also use Golden Delicious, Cortland, Ida Red, Jonathan, Macoun, Winesap, or any other apple with a sturdy skin and good tartness).
• 1 8oz stick of unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup good maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon bourbon (optional but highly recommended)
• 1/3 cup dark brown sugar
• pinch of salt
• 4 cinnamon sticks
• apple cider for basting

Directions:

In a medium saucepan brown butter until it is a very deep amber color and gives off a nutty aroma. Mix browned butter, maple syrup, bourbon and salt together and whisk until emulsified. Put in the refrigerator to cool and solidify.

Meanwhile, peel the top 1/3 of the apple. Using an apple corer or melon baller remove the apple’s lid. Pluck out the stem and replace with a cinnamon stick. Set aside. Scoop out core from apple, being careful not to dig all the way through to the other side–you want the bottom to stay intact to hold all of the ingredients in.

Once the butter mixture has set mix it up with 1/3 cup dark brown sugar and scoop it into the apple hollow. Place the lid on the apple, making sure the cinnamon stick is buried inside of the brown butter/brown sugar mixture. Place apples in a baking dish and cover them 1/3 of the way with apple cider. Bake at 350 for about 40 minutes, or until tender, basting with apple cider every 10 minutes or so.

While the apples are baking, prepare the custard sauce.

Vanilla Custard Sauce (Creme Anglaise if you’re fancy)

Makes 2 Cups

Ingredients:

• 2 cups cream or half and half
• 1.5 vanilla beans
• 5 large egg yolks
• 1/3 cup white sugar

Directions

Before you start, make an ice bath and set it aside, also have a fine mesh sieve handy. Pour cream into a medium saucepan. Split vanilla beans lengthwise, scrape the seeds from the pods and add both seeds and pods to the cream. Heat cream until just before boiling. Turn heat off and allow vanilla beans to steep while you separate your yolks. Once yolks are separated add sugar and whisk together. Temper yolks with cream, pouring the hot cream into the yolks in a slow steady stream and whisking constantly. Pour mixture back into sauce pan and cook over medium/low heat whisking constantly until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon without running (if you have a thermometer it should be at 80-82 degrees celcius at this point). Remove from heat and strain into a bowl through a fine mesh strainer. Place bowl in the ice bath and whisk mixture until cooled. Set aside in refrigerator until apples are ready.

When apples are done, transfer them into individual bowls. Pour the pan drippings onto each apple and then cover in vanilla custard sauce.

To his characters food is still exciting and overwhelming, powerful, visceral, spell-binding, rich. Food is used as a weapon, reward, healing agent and instrument of destruction. Think the peach in James and the Giant Peach, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, Mr. Twit’s food-filled beard, snozzcumbers in The BFG, and of course, the enormous chocolate cake that the Trunchbull forces poor Bruce Bogtrotter to eat in Matilda. I never heard back from that food writing job—shocking, I know—but what I did get out of answering that question was a very real and nagging hankering for a chocolate cake the size of my torso.

I am lucky enough to live right down the street from a real life chocolate factory, and one that, in my opinion, gives Willy Wonka’s some serious competition. This undying need for the richest, chocolatiest cake imaginable gave me a good excuse (and trust me, I am always looking for a good excuse) to go and visit The Mast Brothers Chocolate Factory and pick up some chocolate.

images courtesy of The Selby

If you aren’t familiar with the Mast Brothers the video below will give you some background. A little warning before you watch: you will feel devastated that you aren’t one of them.

Now, back to Bogtrotter.

I feel a kindred connection with poor Brucie, a slave to chocolate cravings so all-encompassing he will even risk the wrath of a principal who has “a lock-up cupboard in her private quarters called The Chokey” (104). An all-school assembly is held and Bruce is called up onto the stage, where the Trunchbull announces to everyone that he “sneaked in like a serpent into the kitchen and stole a slice of my private chocolate cake from my tea-tray! That tray had just been prepared for me personally by the cook! It was my morning snack! And as for the cake, it was my own private stock! That was not boy’s cake! You don’t think for one minute I’m going to eat the filth I give to you? That cake was made from real butter and real cream! And he, that robber-bandit, that safe-cracker, that highwayman standing over there with his socks around his ankles stole it and ate it!” (120).

Then, in a move wholly unexpected, the Trunchbull has her cook bring to the stage  “an enormous round chocolate cake on a china platter. The cake was fully eighteen inches in diameter and it was covered with dark-brown chocolate icing” (124).

She then tells him that he will eat the entire cake right there, and quickly, because “Greedy little thieves who like to eat cake must have cake!” (128). The whole school watches in horror, waiting for Bruce to be sick, or beg for mercy, or be hauled off to the Chokey, but to everyone’s surprise he keeps on “pushing the stuff into his mouth with the dogged perseverance of a long-distance runner who has sighted the finishing-line and knows he must keep going” until “the very last mouthful disappeared” (131).

It is a moment of victory for children and chocolate addicts alike, and one that I still get immense pleasure out of. Only the densest cake would do for Bruce so I subbed sour cream where I would usually use buttermilk, omitted baking powder, and added espresso powder to make the chocolate flavors even more intense. The chocolate frosting got sour cream too, as a nod to Trunchbull’s poor cook who “looked as though her mouth was full of lemon juice” (124).

Bruce Bogtrotter’s Chocolate cake

Makes 1 triple layer cake (I doubled this)

Ingredients:

3 cups brown sugar, packed

1 cup of soft butter

4 eggs

2 teaspoons good vanilla extract

2 2/3 cups AP flour

¾ cup cocoa powder

1 tablespoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 1/3 cup sour cream

1 1/3 cup boiling water

1 tablespoon instant espresso powder

Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting:

½ cup softened butter

6 ounces of good quality semi-sweet chocolate

5 cups confectioner’s sugar

1 cup sour cream

2 teaspoons good vanilla

Directions

In a mixing bowl, cream brown sugar and butter. Add eggs and beat on high speed until light and fluffy. Blend in vanilla. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt; add alternately with sour cream to creamed mixture. Mix on low just until combined. Add espresso powder to hot water and add to batter until blended. Pour into three greased and floured 9-in. round baking pans. Bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Cool in pans 10 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely. For frosting, in a medium saucepan, melt butter and chocolate over low heat. Cool several minutes. In a mixing bowl, combine sugar, sour cream and vanilla. Add chocolate mixture and beat until smooth.

Remember how in the last post I said that Virginia Woolf’s Beouf en Daube was one of about seven literary meal holy grails? Well I’m about to tell you about another one—Marcel Proust’s madeleines. Everyone knows about the madeleine’s from Swann’s Way, it is one of the most glaringly obvious and devastatingly powerful food scenes in all of literature. Now here is where I admit to you that the madeleines are the only reason that I ever even attempted to read Proust. That, and the fact that “Swann’s Way” was the name of our summer house growing up. I’m not entirely sure who named it this, but that was always what we always called it. It was a crumbling farmhouse from the 1800’s, with those grey-brown weathered shingles you only find in New England, a fireplace so deep and wide it could comfortably accommodate four sitting children and a huge hanging cast-iron cauldron, a stone barn covered in neon yellow and cushy green moss filled with mice, owls, stray cats, and ghosts—lots and lots of ghosts.

I spent the loveliest years of my childhood with my sisters and cousins in this house, swinging on the creaky white swing-set, running around in the crabapple orchard behind the house (throwing those crabapples with all of my might at the sassy neighbor boy), lounging under the ancient weeping willow surrounded by lavender so strong-smelling it actually hurt your tiny nostrils. In the morning there were boxes of Fruity Pebbles and Entenmann’s old-fashioned donuts soaked in thick whole milk, and at night there were sunburns and fresh fish and jugs of wine and English Beat records and sometimes, if we were lucky, Hungry-Man tv dinners and Roger’s and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

The other day during a particularly harrowing shift at work I got to thinking about myself as a kid, and how easy and uncomplicated it used to be to just love something and be good at it. I was absorbed in a memory of how absurdly far I could throw a baseball as an eight-year-old when my phone went off with an email from my cousin, Cam.  The email was sent to me, my older sister, Ande, and my cousin, Caroline. Almost as if he had been reading my mind the email said: “I just got so nostalgic remembering how we used to come home sweaty and sun-kissed from Briggs Beach to curl our legs up in front of our Swanson’s Hungry-Man dinners and MTV. When they played music videos! When we would wait for Blind Melon and Four Non- Blondes and eat mashed potatoes that were cold in the middle but delicious on the outsides. And Beavis and Butthead and sandy feet. God I love you guys.” This started an email chain of remembering that went on all day, ending with Caroline remembering “the pit in my stomach at the feeling of the summer’s end, the mildew of the house and those great falling chestnut leaves. It brought me back to the cold nights driving there with Dad and that transition from long warm busy days to the dark cold ones of the house in winter. I guess there was a reason they named the house Swann’s Way… ‘The true paradises are the paradises we have lost.’ I wish the walls could talk. They would say that those were the best years the house has ever seen.”

All of these sensory, memory-triggering experiences that my sister, cousins and I were exchanging that day are what Proust would call “involuntary memory.” In Swann’s Way it is the eating of a madeleine dipped in tea which triggers one of these full body memory experiences for Proust.

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

this is how the egg mixture should look after the sugar is added and whipped for 2 minutes

This was my first time making madeleines and I did lots of reading and testing and combining of recipes before I got a madeleine I really loved. It’s a simple little cake but one that people have very strong opinions about and attachments to (ask Proust). These madeleines are perfectly fluffy with crisp edges and they are full of warm brown butter flavor and hints of lemon.

Proust’s Madeleines

Makes about 3 dozen

Ingredients:

1½ sticks of unsalted butter (6 ounces) plus extra for greasing pan

¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

4 large eggs

pinch of fine sea salt

2/3 cups sugar

1 large lemon zested

1 teaspoon good vanilla

powdered sugar for dusting

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 350. Brown the butter in a pot over medium heat. Strain the milk solids out of the browned butter using a fine mesh strainer (a paper towel works fine too). Set aside to cool to room temperature.

Grease your madeleine pan using the extra butter and dust lightly with flour (I’m sure Pam or some other cooking spray would work fine for this step too).

Add the eggs and the salt to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment and whisk until thick and roughly doubled in volume. With the mixer still running add the sugar in a slow steady stream. Continue whisking until the mixture is thick, about 2 minutes (mixture should fall from a spatula in ribbons at this point). Gently fold lemon zest and vanilla into the egg mixture, being careful not to over mix. Now fold in the flour until just incorporated then gently fold in brown butter. Scoop into madeleine molds (about 2/3 full) and bake at 350 for about 12 minutes or until the edges are nicely browned. Invert onto a serving plate and allow to cool before dusting with powdered sugar.

Recently, on a 93 degree day, I found myself with four pounds of beautiful, fresh stewing meat and no idea whatsoever of what to do with it. The fact is, I have been wanting to recreate the Boeuf en Daube from To The Lighthouse since even before the advent of Yummybooks, but had always felt too intimidated by its fancy French name and three day marinating time—not to mention the terrifying prospect of having to re-read To the Lighthouse.

if you don't have cheesecloth a coffee filter tied with twine or an empty teabag will do the trick

I have a complicated relationship with Virginia Woolf dating back to one excruciatingly boring course I took on modernist writers while in college. Perhaps it was the oppressive fluorescent lighting and corrugated office ceilings in the lecture hall, or the professor’s monotone and uninspired rants, or the sea of NYU students raising their hands to “ask questions,” which really meant telling some pointless anecdote about their own lives—I digress. Whatever it was, Virginia and I just could not get along.

The professor loved to use the words “otherworldly” and “ethereal” when describing Woolf, and when one day a student finally asked for an example of this ethereal otherworldliness the professor mentioned as proof that there is “hardly any food at all in any of her novels.”  It was at this point that I started to doubt that the professor had ever even read any of the books he was teaching us—he was so terribly, terribly wrong! For all of my irritation and frustration with dear Virginia her food scenes were actually one of the main reasons I persevered through her novels.

In A Room of One’s Own there are “soles, sunk deep in a dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream,” and “partridges, many and various [which] came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order;” and “potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard, their sprouts foliated as rosebuds but more succulent” and “a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.” In The Waves there are Neville’s “delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitley piled with vegetables,” butter seeping through Bernard’s crumpet and “the delicious hotness & scent of pheasant & the grey dry bread crumbs; & the heaping up of soft bread sauce, and the [half] pungent, curious taste of brussel sprouts.” In Mrs. Dalloway there are the chocolate éclairs that Miss Killman, in her white gloves, so greedily eats. And in To the Lighthouse there is the boeuf en daube—the holy grail (or one of about seven) of all literary meals.

…they were having Mildred’s masterpiece—boeuf en daube. Everything depended upon things being served up the precise moment they were ready. The beef, bay-leaf, and the wine—all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question.

 An exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish and she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass to choose an especially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savory brown and yellow meats, and its bay leaves and its wine and thought, This will celebrate the occasion…

“It is a triumph,” said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked” (94, 117, 123).  

One can’t mention Virginia Woolf and food without mentioning that Woolf herself battled anorexia nearly her entire life.  Thousands of theses and multiple books have been written on the subject of Woolf’s relationship to food–whether her disease was caused by childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her brother, or whether it was, as Madeline Moore theorizes, “one of Woolf’s ascetic practices, adopted as a last-resort gesture of feminist political defiance adopted in a situation of disempowerment” (Glenny, 21-22). Whatever its cause, Woolf’s struggle allowed her to create some of the most powerfully symbolic eating scenes in all of literature. You could dissect the boeuf en daube scene in To the Lighthouse for hours–how it represents Lillie’s struggle to resist the entrapment of becoming a wife and mother, specifically a mother like her own. Or how the preparation of the meal is representative of  the microcosm that is Mrs. Ramsey’s world and how the moment of its serving is the moment of her greatest introspection (“But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table”–17). But all I really want to impart to you right now is that boeuf en daube is absolutely delicious and well worth the effort to make, even in the middle of August. It got better and better over the course of about 3 days, and if you can’t possibly imagine eating a hot stew right now I will tell you that in this house we enjoyed it cold on thick slices of sourdough and it was fantastic.

I have gone back and forth about whether or not to post a recipe for this book, especially after having put up such a light-hearted post only two weeks ago. The last thing I want to do is seem glib about Didion’s tragedies, but as a person who has experienced loss firsthand I found that Didion’s discussion of what grief does to a person’s body—specifically what it does to the appetite—in The Year of Magical Thinking to be one of the most profoundly interesting and accurate pieces of food-writing that exists. I have been thinking about that chapter a lot recently. This past month has been one of the most challenging in recent memory for a variety of reasons, and has left me seeking solace both in recipes that comfort me and in authors whose words I cherish. Joan Didion holds a special place in my heart as an author who pulled me out of a particularly deep rut and I’ve found myself turning to her writings lately and pulling every bit of wisdom I can from them.

Last May I visited California for the first time. After ten days of adventuring from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I arrived home to a rainy and unseasonably cold New York, still smelling like In-n-Out Burger and thoroughly depressed. After a particularly difficult first day back, in which I bought $60 worth of cheese from an old man at the farmers market because I felt badly for him, and cried at a wooden flute rendition of Chariots of Fire playing in a nail salon, I crawled into bed and wallowed for almost 36 hours. Just when I thought nothing could pull me out of the “am-I-still-in-love-with-New-York” pity hole I had buried myself in, I noticed Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem sitting on my bedside table. I had meant to pack it to read on my trip but had forgotten, and there it sat, still unread and giving off that wonderful new book smell. I cracked it open and read: “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country” (Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream).  For the next four hours, as the light outside of my apartment window went from yellow to orange to blue to black, I devoured every essay. By the time I got to Goodbye to All That and read the first paragraph I was crying like I hadn’t cried in years.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

When I finished I felt somehow fortified. I got out of bed and took a nighttime bike ride and smelled the early springtime smells of Brooklyn—think grass, perogies, hot garbage, deli coffee—and rather than feeling, like Didion, that I should flee back to California, I felt my love of New York renewed.

When our garlic cloves started sprouting, my sister planted them with our money tree (lotta good that's been) to grow bulbs. The shoots that grow above the soil are just as deliciously garlicky as the cloves, I used them in my soup!

The next day I went and bought every book of Didion’s I could find at the Strand and spent the rest of the week reading them. When I got to The Year of Magical Thinking I had to take a solid two weeks to get through it.

A little while after Didion’s husband dies she suddenly asks herself “Had I eaten?” (30).  This question comes with the realization that “if I thought of food…I would throw up” (30). In chapter four Didion quotes from the chapter entitled “Funerals” in Emily Post’s book of etiquette published in 1922, in which Mrs. Post talks about the way food should be presented to the grieving. Mourners should be offered “very little food: tea, coffee, bouillon, a little thin toast, a poached egg. Milk but only heated milk; Cold milk is bad for someone who is already over-chilled.” Stress is placed on the fact that food should be offered in very small portions, “for although stomachs may be empty, the palate rejects the thought of food, and digestion is never in best order.” One should present the grieving with food “without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it, and something warm to start digestion and stimulate impaired circulation is what they most need.” Didion goes on to say:

There is something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions, (“changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems) later catalogued by the Institute of Medicine….[N]othing in my body was working as it should. Mrs. Post would have understood that. She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view…In the end Emily post’s 1922 etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read. I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of a friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat (60-63).

Recently, when a deadly mixture of sleepless nights, stress and sadness had my body all out of whack I remembered this chapter. I couldn’t quite stomach the thought of congee, it seemed too heavy and dense, but I found myself craving a huge bowl of ginger scallion soup. I had no recipe but knew exactly what I wanted it to taste like, and as I stood over the steaming pot, adding things and taking them out, tasting and re-tasting and writing down each adjustment, I finally started to feel like myself again.

The Year of Magical Thinking Ginger Scallion Soup

Ingredients:

4.5 quarts water

1 quart chicken broth

2 chicken breasts—bone-in no skin

2 crushed garlic cloves

14 chopped scallions-white bulb removed, reserve two to chop for garnish

4 inch piece of ginger peeled and roughly chopped

1 lemon (slice and add both juices and rind to pot)

4 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

8 tsp white vinegar

8 tsp soy sauce

6 beaten eggs

Noodles or rice for serving

DIRECTIONS:

Add all of the ingredients besides the eggs together in a stock pot. Let them boil for 30-40 minutes (longer if you can bear it). Strain broth into a bowl and removed chicken from strainer. Pick chicken off of the bones and break into small pieces, then add back to the stock pot. Put burner on medium and take your bowl of beaten eggs. Stir constantly and add eggs in a slow stream, they will start to cook and rise up to the top. Garnish with remaining scallions and pour over rice or noodles to serve.

NOTE: I don’t like too much ginger, I think it starts to taste medicinal, but if you want your soup to taste more gingery peel and roughly chop the ginger then place it in a food-processor with 1 of the quarts of water that is going into the stock pot. Grind to make a ginger slurry and add that to the soup. You will need a fine strainer to get it all out of the broth.

I don’t care what anyone says, even if you aren’t in love Valentine’s day is fun. It’s cheesy and it’s commercial but what’s so bad about eating lots of chocolate and celebrating love?—any kind of love! Know what else is cheesy and fun? The Twilight saga. I’m a firm believer in not criticizing or ridiculing something unless I myself have formed a first-hand opinion of it, so when everyone started talking about (and making fun of) these novels and I found myself unable to intelligently add to the conversation, I went out and bought all four.

Four days later I emerged from my room—starving, dazed, and feeling a little bit like I had just been punched in the brain, heart, and gut repeatedly for 96 hours. And now that I can give an informed opinion here it is: these books are achingly romantic, atrociously written, and people…they are weird. The entire premise of the novels is that these two characters, Edward and Bella, are more attracted to each other than any two beings have ever been in the history of the universe, but they can’t physically consummate their relationship because Bella smells so delicious to Edward that there is a chance he will literally tear her apart and drink her blood if he loses control.

Explaining why he recoiled from her the first day they met, Edward tells Bella:

“To me, it was like you were some kind of demon, summoned straight from my own personal hell to ruin me. The fragrance coming off your skin…I thought it would make me deranged that first day. In that one hour, I thought of a hundred different ways to lure you from the room with me, to get you alone” (273).

All of this sex-before-marriage-leading-to-physical-destruction-and-eternal-damnation is especially poignant when you think about the fact that the author, Stephanie Myer, is a devout Mormon.

For a series that mentions food all of maybe five times, these books are wrought with hunger. My sisters and I read them together and for all of the talk of werewolves and vampires, mind-reading and glittering skin, the thing that we all had the hardest time wrapping our minds around was how good Bella possibly could have smelled. We spent more time than I care to admit theorizing about what her skin could have smelled like to torture this poor vampire so much that he had to flee to Alaska just to escape the scent. Ande decided on french fries, Gemma said warm chocolate cupcakes, and I thought probably sticky toffee pudding or hot sourdough bread. In the following (hilarious) exchange Edward tries to describe his hunger for Bella using first food, then alcoholism and narcotics addiction as examples.

“You know how everyone enjoys different flavors?” he began. “Some people love chocolate ice cream, others prefer strawberry?”

I nodded.

“Sorry about the food analogy—I couldn’t think of another way to explain.”

I smiled. He smiled ruefully back.

“You see, every person smells different, has a different essence. If you locked an alcoholic in a room full of stale beer, he’d gladly drink it. But he could resist, if he wished to, if he were a recovering alcoholic. Now lets say you placed in that room a glass of hundred-year-old-brandy, the rarest, finest cognac—and filled the room with its warm aroma—how do you think he would fare then?”

We sat silently, looking into each other’s eyes—trying to read each other’s thoughts.

He broke the silence first.

“Maybe that’s not the right comparison. Maybe it would be too easy to turn down the brandy. Perhaps I should have made our alcoholic a heroin addict instead.”

“So what you’re saying is, I’m your brand of heroin?” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.

He smiled swiftly, seeming to appreciate my effort.

“Yes, you are exactly my brand of heroin…I did my very best to stay as far from you as possible. And every day the perfume of your skin, your breath, your hair…it hit me as hard as the very first day.” (273)

Gemma is going to hate this.

Because blood is the main cause of hunger throughout this novel I got obsessed with finding blood-related recipes to post here. I couldn’t bring myself to give you a recipe for blood pudding, or something involving blood sausage, so when I remembered that it’s blood orange season I could hardly contain my excitement. There are so many wonderful and delicious ways to use blood oranges–both sweet and savory–but this blood orange panna cotta is perfect for Valentine’s Day. Not only is it easy to make, it’s scrumptious, fun to eat, and bright pink to boot!

Blood Orange Panna Cotta

Makes 4

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/2 teaspoons unflavored gelatin powder

3 tablespoons cold water

1 cup fresh blood orange juice (about 6 blood oranges if they’re small like mine were)

1 cup heavy cream (buy more than 8 oz so you can whip the rest)

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon good vanilla extract

3/4 cup buttermilk

DIRECTIONS:

Squeeze blood oranges, reserving half of one for garnish. Set aside.

In a bowl, sprinkle gelatin over cold water and set aside for about five minutes to form.

Pour blood orange juice into a saucepan and bring to a low boil until the liquid is reduced by about half—7-10 minutes. Pour the reduction into a bowl and allow it to cool.

Pour cream and sugar into a sauce pan over medium heat and bring to a simmer (not a full boil!). In the meantime, put hardened gelatin into a saucepan or microwave and heat until melted. Whisk gelatin and vanilla into simmering cream until fully incorporated and pour mixture into a metal bowl over an ice bath, stirring constantly until cool to touch. Whisk in buttermilk and blood orange juice and transfer to four ramekins (or teacups, in my case). Let set at least 2 hours but ideally more like 12-24.

When you’re ready to plate the panna cottas it helps to let them sit in a shallow dish of warm water first to help the edges pull away from the ramekin. You may have to cut around the top edges a bit and guide it out with a knife.

Whip remaining cream and add sugar to taste. Top with slices from remaining half blood orange.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! TEAM JACOB!

As an eighth-grader reading Gone with the Wind, I loved the quippy dialogue, the ridiculous characters, and the mind-bending melodrama. But mostly, mostly I loved the food—skillet-baked cornbread, “yams covered with butter,” piles of “buckwheat cakes dripping syrup,” thick slices of ham “swimming in gravy.” What had me thinking for days, though, was the scene in which Scarlett, wretched with hunger and Tara smoldering around her, goes to the field to gather withered vegetables for dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ignore the red pepper, I decided to.

 

Her search was rewarded but she was too tired even to feel pleasure at the sight of turnips and cabbages, wilted for want of water but still standing, and straggling butter beans and snap beans, yellowing but edible. She sat down in the furrows and dug into the earth with hands that shook, filling her basket slowly. There would be a good meal at Tara tonight, in spite of the lack of side meat to boil with the

vegetables. (Chapter 25)

Last week, faced with a refrigerator full of rapidly wrinkling farmers market veggies I was reminded of this scene.What did Scarlett do with those wilted turnips and cabbages, those yellowing snap beans?  The best solution I know for vegetables on their way out is a big, hearty ratatouille. Perhaps because it is often used as a solution for avoiding waste ratatouille can easily become a mushy, depressing side-dish rather than a delicious and comforting main course.

To avoid this I turned my ratatouille into a tart, giving it a crispy cornmeal crust as a nod to skillet-baked cornbread and adding feta cheese and a tart homemade tomato sauce.   Using the crust and sauce as a base the veggies in this recipe could easily be swapped out for whatever vegetables you need to use up, and the feta could be changed to any soft cheese you prefer.

Gone With the Wind Ratatouille Tart

Serves 3 very hungry girls (more like 5 if you aren’t as piggish and have a side-dish)

Adapted liberally from Ellie Krieger

Vegetables:

1 smallish ripe eggplant (you can tell an eggplant is ripe if you press your thumb to it and it leaves an indent before springing back)

1 yellow zucchini

1 green zucchini

2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions:

Before making the crust and the tomato sauce slice vegetables as thin as you can and lay them on a baking sheet. Brush with olive oil and season with salt. Roast at 350 for about 20 minutes or until they are just beginning to get tender (I didn’t pre-roast the veggies, but I would next time. They can roast while you make the crust and the sauce which makes for more evenly roasted vegetables and a quicker cooking time once the whole thing goes into the oven). Meanwhile, make the crust and the sauce:

Cornmeal crust:

2/3 cup yellow corn flour (believe it or not, no grocery stores in Brooklyn carried cornmeal! if you can find it, use it, but if not corn flour makes for a softer, more crumbly, but still delicious crust)

1/3 cup whole-grain pastry flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons canola oil

3 tablespoons water

Directions:

Mix together corn flour and whole wheat pastry flour in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse to combine. Add butter and canola oil and pulse until mixture resembles small pebbles. Add water and pulse until dough forms. Remove dough and press it into a 9″ tart or pie pan. Cover with tinfoil and weigh down with pie weights or uncooked rice and cook at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

Tomato Sauce:

1 28 oz. can of whole peeled tomatoes (San Marzano work best if you can find them)

1 medium white or yellow onion

1 stick of unsalted butter

2 cloves of garlic

2 teaspoons hot pepper or hot sauce (optional)

Directions:

Pour tomatoes into a sauce pan and using clean hands squeeze them until they resemble a fine pulp. Cut butter into big pieces  (about 4) and add them into the sauce. Slice and peel the onion and add that in along with two whole peeled garlic cloves and the hot pepper (if you’re using it). Let all the ingredients simmer until the onion halves are wilted (about 30 minutes), stirring occasionally. Remove the onion and garlic cloves from the sauce.

Assembly:

Spoon tomato sauce into the crust and cover liberally with feta cheese. Take veggies out of the oven and once they are cool enough to handle arrange them in layers on top of the cheese. Bake at 350 for another 20-30 minutes.

My friend Willa loves Jane Eyre so much she re-reads it every year. As much as I liked Jane Eyre once was certainly enough for me. My college boyfriend and I had a book club that we took very seriously (I know, it’s tough) and one sweltering summer I made him read it–something I look back on and kind of cringe.  As great as the Brontës are, their novels aren’t exactly light beach reading. In Jane Eyre, as in many Victorian novels, hunger is a major topic and usually represents some deeper yearning. Jane is searching for nourishment both physical and emotional throughout most of the novel. She is so terribly mistreated at her aunt’s house she is actually excited to be sent to a charity school, but when she gets there the misery of her aunt’s tyranny is replaced by the misery of constant gnawing hunger and the bullying of desperately hungry girls.

The scanty supply of food was distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid. From this deficiency of nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger pupils: whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the little ones out of their portion. Many a time I have shared between two claimants the precious morsel of brown bread distributed at tea-time; and after relinquishing to a third half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger.

Oftentimes the food that is given to the girls is so inedible that even the hungriest and sickest amongst them can’t stomach it. At one point the girls show up to breakfast only to find that the porridge they are being served is burnt—an offering which is apparently even worse than being offered nothing at all.

Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess. Burned porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were moved slowly. I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it, but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted. (45)

Amongst all of this misery, however, Jane does have a few moments of happiness. After Mr. Brocklehurst announces to the entire school that Jane is a liar and makes her stand on a stool for a half-an-hour, Miss Temple invites Jane and her best friend Helen over for tea, and it is here that one of the most joyful scenes in the novel transpires.

Having invited Helen and me to approach the table, and placed before each of us a cup of tea, with one delicious but thin morsel of toast, she got up, and unlocked a drawer, and taking from it a parcel wrapped up in paper, disclosed presently to our eyes a good-sized seed-cake.

“I meant to give each of you some of this to take with you,” said she; “but as there is so little toast you must have it now” and she proceeded to cut slices with a generous hand.

We feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia; and not the least delight of the entertainment was the smile of gratification with which our hostess regarded us, as we satisfied our famished appetites on delicate fare she liberally supplied (73)

Traditional Victorian seed cakes had the texture of a fruitcake and were usually prepared with seeds like coriander and caraway. Sometimes candied citrus peels and overly-sweet liquors were involved. No matter how much I tried to psych myself up to make one of these authentically Victorian cakes I kept envisioning dense, brandy-heavy fruitcake. I knew I had to think of something else for this very important food scene.

In May Willa and I traveled to California to visit friends and wander around and eat and eat and eat. One morning while we were staying in Santa Rosa, Willa’s aunt and uncle brought us home a bag full of pastries from a place called Village Bakery. Amongst the goodies were three enormous buns lined with butter and cardamom and cinnamon and studded with pearl sugar. I had never had cardamom in anything other than savory dishes and I was skeptical at first, but after one bite I was a convert. Willa and I devoured all three and then talked about them intermittently throughout the rest of the day (and for weeks to come).  I was in the grocery store last week halfheartedly searching for caraway and coriander to make a cake that I knew I wouldn’t like when I saw a jar of cardamom seeds. Smelling them I was brought right back to that sunny front porch in Santa Rosa with my very dear Jane-Eyre-loving friend, cutting in half seed bun after seed bun and sharing them with each other and I decided that a seed bun that can be shared amongst friends would do much better for this scene than a seed cake that no one wants to eat with you.

Jane Eyre Cardamom Seed Bun Recipe:

From Epicurious

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups warm water (105°F.)
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
6 tablespoons granulated sugar
two 1/4-ounce packages active dry yeast (5 tablespoons total)
3 large eggs beaten lightly
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup powdered nonfat dry milk
5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
3 tablespoons cardamom seeds, ground in a mortar with a pestle, or in an electric spice/coffee grinder
an egg wash made by beating 1 large egg with 2 tablespoons water
Pearl Sugar (optional)

Jane and Helen feasting with Miss Temple. Illustration by John Huehnergarth 1954

Directions:
In a large bowl combine water, butter, and sugar. Sprinkle yeast over mixture and let stand 5 minutes, or until foamy. Stir in eggs, salt and dry milk until combined. With a wooden spoon stir in 5 sups flour, 1 cup at a time, and stir mixture until a dough is formed.

On a floured surface, knead dough about 10 minutes, adding enough of the remaining 1 cup flour to make dough smooth and elastic. Put dough in a lightly oiled bowl, turning to coat, and let rise, covered with plastic wrap, in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Punch down dough and on floured surface with a floured rolling pin roll into a 15- by 20-inch rectangle. Spread butter over dough and sprinkle with granulated sugar, cinnamon and cardamom.

With a long side facing you, roll up dough jelly-roll fashion and cut crosswise into approximately 1 1/2-inch-thick slices with a cut side down. Working with 1 slice at a time gently twist opposite ends of slice around twice to form a figure eight. Crimp ends together. Arrange rolls, a swirled side up, on a buttered baking sheet about 2 inches apart and let rise in a warm place until increased 1 1/2 times in bulk, about 1 hour.

While rolls are rising, preheat oven to 350F.

Brush tops of rolls with egg wash and sprinkle with sugar. Bake rolls in middle of oven until tops are pale golden, about 25 minutes.

So I’ve been a little stalled lately and haven’t been posting very much. The summer was slipping away from me so quickly—and so so very hotly—that I simply couldn’t muster the strength to bake or cook in my nine-hundred-degree kitchen.

But now it’s starting to feel like fall in New York and I’m getting nostalgic for all kinds of “back to school” books from my past and wanting to bake a million varieties of appley cinnamony confections. For some reason the fall always makes me want to re-read Anne of Green Gables. Maybe it’s because of all the beautiful autumnal colors in the PBS adaptation of the novels, or the number of days I played hooky from school to watch it, but I think most likely it’s the plethora of comfort foods cooked and eaten throughout the book.

Lucy Maud Montgomery novels are so full-to-the-brim with cooking and eating scenes they could fill an entire cookbook on their own. In Jane of Lantern Hill there’s Mrs. Meade’s butter cookies, Jane’s Irish stew and Mrs. Snowbeam’s rice pudding, in Pat of Silverbush there’s iced melon balls, lemon coconut cake and pea soup, but my favorite of L.M. Montgomery’s food scenes comes from Anne of Green Gables. Oh, it’s so hard to choose between this one and the mouse in the plum cake scene! But for now we’ll focus on this one–plum cake with Marilla’s pudding sauce some other time.

Halfway through the novel, Anne invites her new “bosom” friend, Diana, over for an elegant tea party. She’s excited to feed her fruitcakes and cherry preserves but mostly she’s excited that Marilla said they could drink some of her famous (non-alcoholic) raspberry cordial.

Be sure to label bottle clearly if your sister/roommate tends to throw out anything remotely questionable in your refrigerator

“Marilla is a very generous woman. She said we could have fruit-cake and cherry preserves for tea. But it isn’t good manners to tell your company what you are going to give them to eat, so I won’t tell you what she said we could have to drink. Only it begins with an r and a c and it’s a bright red colour. I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other colour” (172).

Anne has never tasted cordial before so she has no idea when she pours Diana a generous glassful that she is actually giving her currant wine. Diana, feeling “awful sick” from all the alcohol, stumbles home to her prim and proper mother who blames Anne for Diana’s drunken state and forbids Diana to ever see Anne again.

While Marilla’s cordial in the book isn’t alcoholic the recipe given here certainly is. It’s a perfect recipe to make now before good summer raspberries disappear into winter. And since the cordial has to soak for a minimum of two weeks, by the time you do drink it you’ll be neck-deep in chunky sweaters and needing a reminder of summer.

Photo credit: Juddy Magee

Anne of Green Gables Raspberry Cordial:

Ingredients:

2 pints raspberries

2/3 cup of sugar

2 tbs triple sec

about 28 oz. good vodka

Directions:

Boil raspberries and sugar in a sauce pan until soft, smushing berries with the back of a spoon. Let berry sugar mixture cool and funnel it into a 32 oz. container. Add 2 tbs triple sec and fill remainder of the bottle with vodka. Shake and let sit for a minimum of 2 weeks.

After at least 2 weeks strain using a fine mesh sieve or a coffee filter. Be sure to squeeze berry mush thoroughly to get all of the good stuff out. Enjoy!