Jagged Little Cookies

I don’t like to complain. Given a choice, I prefer to vent, punctuate that with sobbing, and finish it off with a fine whine. But that’s just me. Shortly before Christmas my mother fell and broke both her wrists. Since then my time has been almost entirely occupied with hospital visits, doctors’ appointments and channelling my inner Martha Stewart as I give her condo a needed makeover.

My mother is an enthusiastic consumer of sweets as I think I’ve mentioned. When she emerged from her post-operative haze I asked her what cookie she’d like me to make her, even though I already knew. Sure enough, she said “those little ones where you put the jam in the middle."

Thimble cookies, these are labour intensive little gems. You make basic cookie dough into tablespoon balls, roll those in beaten egg white, then in finely chopped nuts and make small impression in each – with a thimble if you are a stickler for tradition, your thumb or the end of wooden spoon. After baking, while still warm, you deepen the indent and fill it with the jam of your choice. The ones pictured here are apricot and raspberry.

My mum’s convalescence has included these, flourless peanut butter cookie chocolate sandwiches and banana raisin muffins. The shared features are they are all sweet, portable and safely stowed in a bedside drawer.

Like Dolittle’s Push-Me-Pull-You, my mother and I are bound together and straining against each other. She craved daily visits to be sure I hadn’t been carried off by a serial killer. A glimpse was enough, after that I could, as she so succinctly put it, “sling my hook” – translation for non-Anglos and the not nautical, b----r off or set sail. Jolly good.

Once upon a time she read me books like Three Men in A Boat and Wind in the Willows and we laughed ‘til our sides hurt. She wrapped Christmas presents with the care of an artist –I remember one box made to look like a house, complete with chimney, cotton wool snow and reindeer foot prints on the roof. Last week she’d been feeling particularly bad and was eager to see me off. On our way to the elevator another patient asked her if she was better? She said, yes, now that she had seen her daughter, because I’m her aspirin (and a pill?). People change, cookies crumble, I’ll take my compliments where I can get them.


Reading as refuge
I can’t believe I’m already within one slim volume of latest of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series. They have been a perfect refuge over the last months. Not that they offer a world vision where justice is done; often the best Montalbano can do is create a stopgap against the remorseless working out of things and "crush melancholy's grape" behind clenched teeth. Perhaps strangely, I find solace in Camilleri’s complex and unflinching view from Montalbano’s veranda overlooking the sea.

Strata Various - Best in Brunch

I once joked with another holiday season baby that we should write a book called “The Yule Tide Birthday – Buy This Book AND SOMETHING ELSE”. As a kid, I hated the dual occasion present. Now I’m much more mature. (I’ll wait ‘til you finish coughing.)

When my friend Don seemed particularly bummed out at our mutual birthday season, I suggested I host him a brunch with guests and menu of his choosing. Now I’m the daughter of a woman who maintains that chocolate is a vegetable (and that she needs her five a day), but even I thought French toast followed by chocolate cake might be edging into too sweet. Plus, I worried about getting everyone served promptly . . . the answer came to me in layers.

Stratas were an ideal solution because they could be made the day before and meant we’d all eat at the same time. Stratas are a variation on a quiche and bread pudding. I used my own pain de mie (see Square Loaf in a Round Hole, April 12, 2010), because I’d found it was ideal for French toast in individual servings. The bread is toasted dry in a low oven for about half an hour, then soaked overnight in a mixture of egg-milk or cream-seasonings and possibly cheese. I did two, the French toast strata was topped with brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans; and, just in case not everyone felt up to unremitting sweet, I made an egg, sausage and cheese strata. These were accompanied by a fruit salad and a green salad. The cake, which I have now made for Marion, Naomi and Don’s birthday is a chocolate pound cake layered with a milk chocolate ganache with a hint of cinnamon, covered in a dark chocolate-espresso glaze. No complaints to date.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and reading in 2011
A recent Skeptics in the Pub podcast featured an interview with Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error. I asked for it for Christmas, because never having been wrong . . . ararararar . . . it is a fascinating study of our attitudes to being wrong, and perhaps most interestingly why we cling to ideas and beliefs when we know them absolutely to be wrong.

In 2011 I look forward to reading the rest of the Inspector Montalbano series, The Return of History by Robert Kagan, Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette, his final book in the Smoking Diaries, and many more of the many books that line my bedroom. They provide R value only in the sense they insulate me from life’s chaos.

In 2011 may you read many wonderful things, eat many wonderful things, may you recognize your wrongs, forgive and be forgiven.

Raising Pie

I walk into a cooking store in New York, a big one. I won’t tell you the name. Can’t blow my contact’s cover, we’ll call it Wm S. I casually walk over to a woman working in the baking section. I’ll call her Cupcake – what? It’s better than Muffin Top. “Do you know what I mean by a raised pie?” I ask her.

She eyes me carefully before answering. Maybe it’s the flour under my fingernails, but she decides to trust me. “Yes, yes I do.”

I try to restrain my excitement. “Do you have a raised pie mould?” I ask her in low tones.

She glares at me, indicating with her eyebrows, that I must wait for her supervisor to pass before she answers. “No, I don’t have one.” I’m crushed. If I can’t get one in New York . . . Cupcake draws me into a corner stacked with grape peelers and contact lens for potatoes. “You’re going to have to go to a real cooking store.”  Silence, Cupcake is hard nut to crack.

I won’t beg, but I might whine. “Do you know of such a store?” She just got the name out when there was a terrible bang. Someone had dropped a $500 digital mango sexer. All hell broke loose. I made my escape.

As I paid for my raised pie mould, I said to the cashier, “I knew if I couldn’t get this in New York, I couldn’t get it.” She smiled and said “If you can’t get it at ---- you can’t get it.”

The raised pie is perfect picnic food, a great way to repackage left over meat, and only moderately dangerous to prepare despite the story above. It requires hot water pastry, which needs to be worked quickly. Line your mould with pastry and fill it with your mixture of meat cut in small pieces, breadcrumbs, and seasonings; depending on the meat involved sometimes nuts are added, such as pistachio and in a traditional game pie you often see a hard boiled egg placed at the centre.

On goes the top, make a small hole and glaze it with an egg beaten with cream. Bake for 90 minutes at 350. Tent the top with foil if it is browning too much. After 90 minutes, remove the sides of the pie mould, apply the glaze to the sides and bake for another 30 minutes. Allow the pie to cool for about 3 hours. Put the sides of the mould back on. Take a cup of stock appropriate to your meat and two teaspoons of gelatin, soften the gelatin in a few tablespoons of stock in a saucepan, then add the rest of the stock and cook over a low heat until it is syrupy. Put a funnel in the hole in the top of the pie and slowly add the gelatin stock mixture. Chill the pie over night. Cut in slices and serve with chutney, pickles and a salad.

The pie in the header picture is the remainder of a ham the size of a Volkswagen. It’s my best after multiple tries. I am Madam Mowbray and this is my story.


Haunting Times
One of the first books I remember reading was a collection called Tales to Tremble By. It included Ambrose Bierce’s Middle Toe of the Right Foot, which I still recall vividly. Later on I trembled to Sardonicus by Ray Russell, W.W. Jacob’s the Monkey’s Paw, Bram Stoker’s Dracula of course, and the master M.R. James. Fear is fun when you are young.

That was then. Now I am bored by the eerie face at the window. The monster under the bed is made of dust and the horrible thing in the closet is a dress I’m too old for now. I just finished Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, a genuinely spooky tale. I ask myself, why does it work? I think it’s because, even though it is set in the early part of the last century, it puts its narrator in a very contemporary state: surrounded by people who mean him no harm, but who leave him to face the central menace alone.

We live in an era of hyper communication, but when I sit on the streetcar listening to people on their cell phones naming the stops we’ve just passed, I can't help feeling a lot of it is the contemporary equivalent of whistling past the graveyard. In 2010 the horror is in the loneliness.

Known To Be Useful

I recently came upon plastic tongs for $9.99. The packaging explained they were a tea bag squeezer. Really? $9.99? Kitchen gadgets that claim to work wonders when all they are is a superfluous substitute for a knife, or, as in this case a teaspoon pressed against the side of the pot, well they make me think of William Morris.

He said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Good sharp knives are a given. Here are five other kitchen essentials in no particular order:

• Two sets of measures – one for wet ingredients, one for dry, saves time.

• Peeler – Bonnie Stern says when you find a peeler you like, buy three because you’ll never find them again. (This is true of so many things.) My friend Naomi gave me a ceramic blade peeler years ago. I’ve gone through two more since and have another on standby.

• Wand blender, such as the Braun Multi-Quick. If you are pressed for kitchen space, this is the multi-purpose appliance to have.

• Melon baller, not just for melons anymore, nudge, nudge, wink, wink; it's useful for butter servings, when making pastry, serving ice cream, and I hate to think what else.

• Flat whisk for blending without incorporating a lot of air.


I Surrender
I’ll bet we all have books on our shelves that we know we’ll never read, but think we should own in the event that fish really is brain food or we ingest enough anti-oxidants to allow us to happily consume St. Augustine’s Confessions or NAME YOUR POISON. I have no quarrel with these books. They speak to our better aspirations even if we prefer to listen to a murder mystery.

The books I have decided to break up with are those that 1) annoy me, and 2) are too clever for me. They sit around the house with their bookmarks hanging out 30, 40, sometimes even 100 plus pages in. It’s the bibliographic equivalent of sticking out a tongue.

Of course I feel guilty. Do I in fact deserve these wagging extremities for not following them through to the final page? Doris Lessing said in her preface to my copy of The Golden Notebook that you shouldn’t force yourself to finish a book that doesn’t engage you, but you should return to it later. I have followed this advice. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho was unreadable. Unreadable on the subway and (stop the insanity) on a stationary bike, but in the silence of a cottage without television or phone it was un-put-down-able.

With Udolpho the problem was environmental. The reason I will never come to the end of Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To The End is I never came to care about his horrifically self-centred characters. They put the “so what” in solipsistic. Out you go and give me back my Tunbridge Wells bookmark. Incidentally Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections left me, unfinished, feeling the same way.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which made several Best Books of the Decade lists I give up with regret at page 414. I am not smart enough to make the connections between the nine stories that make up this tour de force and I confess I skipped the two science fiction bits.

So what am I reading? An atrocious historical novel (for the clothes), a Venetian mystery (for the food), and I’m making my third attempt at Middlemarch in the hopes that George will dance with me this time. I recently heard an interview with Zadie Smith (White Teeth, On Beauty, etc. ) in which she explained how different she found it now from when she first read it at 17. I had the same experience with The Great Gatsby. (Can you see Doris nodding?) Eleanor Wachtel responded with a quote from Middlemarch that turned out to be the epigram in the next book I read, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, hard to ignore the Gods of Literature when they manifest themselves so spookily, no?

Life and Pie

It occurs to me that we aspire to mountain tops but when we attain them—if we attain them at all, we only get to stay a short while. Life is lived in the valleys. One of the reasons I take care with food is that, while I rarely reach a summit, I can have good meals daily, which brings me to pie.

Any time is a good time for pie, but especially fall. Ode poor Keats! Victim of every writer’s dream: to write something that becomes so widely familiar it’s a cliché: thanks to him autumn is notoriously a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. We don’t get much mist in autumn in southern Ontario, except the lovely grey bloom on plums. You get plums as early as June, but my favourite are the little Italian plums that arrive about now. Every fall, usually more than once, I make Rose Levy Beranbaum’s flame tart, (see the smaller illustration).

This year I have also made plum pear jam and was so surprised and pleased with combination, I decided to try it as a pie filling. I pitted and chopped about four cups of plums, and peeled, cored and chopped three or four pears. I tossed them in a colander with a bit more than half a cup of sugar, some cinnamon and nutmeg. I left the colander over a bowl and tossed the fruit occasionally over about two hours. I transferred the juices from the fruit to a small saucepan and reduced them by half, then blended in a couple teaspoons of cornstarch. The fruit went into a nine inch pie pan lined with pastry and the reduced juice over that, put the top on and bake for 45 minutes at 350. I haven’t got a name for it yet, Plear Pie?

Summits and valleys . . .There’s a line in the Dire Straits song On Every Street that always makes me smile, “Every victory has a taste that’s bittersweet.” Happily this is not the case with Plear Pie.


Great Gossip
I have mentioned Diana Athill here before. She is someone who impresses with her fairness, candour, and humanity. The first half of her memoir Stet, an editor’s life gives an insider’s perspective on the gamble that is publishing. The second half is a collection of portraits of the some of the writers who became her friend including V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler and Brian Moore.

I confess it is the second half that beguiled me. Who could fail to be charmed by this description of Brian Moore and his first wife, Jackie, “They were both great gossips—and when I say great I mean great, because I am talking about gossip in its highest and purest form: a passionate interest, lit by humour but above malice, in human behaviour.”

Isn’t that where most great books begin?

Post from England

I came to England a lot as a child; and I have fled to England as temporary refuge as an adult. The England I visit is not the England of the film This is England or Coronation Street. The England I visit is of my past and my imagination - what would it be like to grow up with family close by? to travel roads that are tunnels of green daily, to have milk delivered in bottles, to make jam from fruit gathered from hedgerows and never be far from a castle? I have an unearned nostalgia for these things.

On my most recent visit my niece-lets (cousins once removed takes too long both to write and to say) and I went for a four mile ride. More accurately, I walked along side trying to look like a responsible adult should such a creature be required. The horse clearly thought not.

We walked up lanes shouldered by hedges jewelled with blackberries (fruit not PDA’s I hasten to add in advance of wiseacres). We climbed a hill past an abandoned orchard to views of the North and South Downs and quilts of fields of varied green. We passed a cottage where a brown lab sprang as if by magic from a large dog flap, ran to his gate tail wagging furiously but didn’t bark. We scared up a brace or two of pheasant as we passed through a quiet farm.

There are two pheasants to a brace, one male, one female, if anyone cares. Thomas Hardy has a poem, Afterwards in which he wonders if he'll be remembered as a "man who used to notice such things". I like to be a woman learns such things.The Paston Letters are a medieval collection valued by scholars for their insights into family life and manor management of the period. This trip I learned that just above a horse’s hoof is the paston joint. I have also learned how to prune roses, how to roll pastry properly and discovered slipcote, a mild sheep’s milk cheese.

I first had it in a quiche at Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s famous garden, and then bought some at a farmers’ market. I used it in a salad of rocket (aka arugula), cress and lettuce which I dressed with vinaigrette and topped with the cheese, sliced beets and walnuts, and served with thinly cut slices of my aunt’s homemade bread buttered. Madam, lunch is served. Thank you, Jeeves.

I have been to a pub where they offer a platter of three different kinds of chips (French fries) as an appetizer. I have also been to a pub, The Red Lion in Horsted Keynes where I had roasted pork belly with a cider sauce, served with a salty wafer of crackling, gently wilted spinach and a timbale of potatoes. Pudding (dessert) was a champagne jelly encasing summer berries.

The first day of my trip we had lunch in the garden to the sound of sheep bleating in the next field. My last day came quickly. Hope is an act of imagination, someone, a poet or philosopher once said. I hope to have more weeks of summer in England.


Five for the Road

The best argument I have heard for the Kindle, Kobo or any other electronic reader is that it means you can take more books with you on a trip than you would normally carry. I am more afraid of finding myself without engaging reading material than being without suitable clothing, as proven by this trip, when in a fit of uncharacteristic optimism, I packed almost nothing warm. But I had five books on board and another three waiting for me (free shipping within the UK? Why not?).

This trip I read three novels set in my other favourite country to visit, Italy. Inspector Montalbano frequently breaks the rules in pursuing the truth of his cases, but wait, this is Sicily and there are no rules, except perhaps that of the nobleman in di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, who insisted everything must change in order to remain the same. Montalbano knows he wins battles, but never the war and consoles himself with wonderful meals, especially local seafood.

Italophile mystery lovers will probably already know Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti series set in Venice and Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen, but perhaps you haven’t read Peter Elbing’s The Food Taster. Starving to death in the late medieval countryside, Ugo is a widowed peasant with a lovely daughter when he lands a new job. Tasting the delicacies prepared for his local lord is part dream come true, part potentially a fatal nightmare.

There are several givens in the mystery genre. We are often served red herrings for instance. In the mystery set in Italy, we are also served superb food.

Empress of Ice Cream

Things lodge in your brain but aren’t understood for years. Years ago, in the throes of an excruciating break up this returned to me: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.” I don’t have a lot in common with Tennyson’s Ulysses, but suddenly I understood that, along the pulses as Keats would have it.

More recently I hosted one of my Wonderful Wild Women parties. To these I invite the many WWW that I know, but who perhaps don’t know each other. In honor of summer it was an ice cream and cake party. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. It’s taken me decades to get that.

I have a theory that everyone has a defining paradox. I don’t know what mine is and it would be impertinent of me to say what yours is. So here’s an example, from someone I don’t know and can’t offend: Ben Franklin said something to the effect that you should live as if each day were your last and as if you were going to live forever.

Prayer flags, ice cream and relationships have a lot in common. Prayer flags fulfill their function, in fact become prayerful flags by unraveling. Ice cream can only be enjoyed in circumstances fatal to its iciness. Relationships, well perhaps you see where I’m going.

But you want to know about the ice cream. I made five flavors: cream cheese (yes, sounds weird), cherry with fruit fresh from the Niagara peninsula, malteser with wholesome chunks of organic maltesers, peanut butter and chocolate (if peanut butter and chocolate were people they’d be blissfully con-joined twins), and coffee. I’ve never had a store bought ice cream that did justice to coffee. Homemade ice cream isn’t difficult, as with bread, it is more a question of time than skill, and the results are infinitely better than store bought. I made three cakes: a lemon poppy seed pound cake, a buttermilk cake, both from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible, and a dense chocolate fudge cake.

I had hoped to make my party in the garden, but the weather thought otherwise and sent a monsoon. So we crowded into the living room. Conversation flowed, cake was had an eaten too, ice cream fulfilled its destiny and I felt truly joyous. So rarely and so lucky am I to be surrounded by so many caring, smart and kind women. When I first read the Wallace Stevens poem I remember tasking myself with remembering what concupiscent meant (lustful). Now I get the rest of it. It is a happy thing, if only to be had once a summer, to be an Empress of Ice Cream.


Overlooked (?) gems
When I find a writer I enjoy I make my way through their whole oeuvre. This can lead to disappointment – though it’s nice to know even great writers have some training wheels books. Sometimes a la Grey’s Elegy you discover that flower born to blush unseen.

Julian Barnes is most famous for Flaubert’s Parrot, but my favorite of his is England, England, a hilarious send up of the museum-ification of his home and native land. I would also recommend a slim volume, The Pedant in the Kitchen, about his adventures as a home chef.

Hilary Mantel is still topping the charts with her Booker winning Wolf Hall, but the book of hers that I would pack if exiled to a desert island is Beyond Black. Anyone can do tragedy. A lot of people can do comedy. A really skilful writer takes the reader the full 360 of experience. Hilary Mantel is a supremely skilled writer.

Anthony Burgess wrote many booky wooks, some would say too many, the most celebrated being Clockwork Orange. I spent two weeks at a northern Ontario fishing camp oblivious to black flies and impervious to boredom thanks to his Earthly Powers.