Sour Milk Biscuits

My parents belonged to a generation that was on the move. Along with so many others in the 1920s and 1930s, they’d left midwestern prairie homes and migrated to California, where they grew used to unsettled territories and familial disconnections. This was especially true of Dad, whose family began life in Indiana, resettled in Oklahoma, then migrated in the early 1920s to California, where my grandfather ran a small grocery store and chicken ranch. There the world of the past evaporated like morning mist in the mild Pomona air.

Dad’s family life in California would also be full of broken threads. His mother died when he was only seventeen, and shortly thereafter he dropped out of school to marry a young woman he was “crazy” about, but they separated almost immediately, and the marriage was annulled. By then the Great Depression had begun, and Dad drifted alone from one low paying job to another, driving a taxi and then picking and living on pears in Oregon. Shortly after his season with the pears, he contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a sanitarium in Southern California. During his eighteen-month confinement, he would tell us, many years later, none of his family came to visit. “Not one,” he’d say, voice rising, eyes watering, shoulders tensing toward his ears.

In 1935, cured of TB and desperate for a job, Dad took off for Death Valley Junction where he had wrangled himself  a position with the Pacific Borax Company.

Death Valley Junction

He got himself to Crucero, a dusty outpost in the Mojave some ninety miles south of the Junction, when a flash flood washed out the roads and railway tracks. It was 3:30 a.m., so Dad sat down in what passed for a railway station to get some rest. Around dawn a man in a handcar appeared, as in a dream, sent by the president of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad to transport Dad to his new employment. The dawn that day must have turned Golden Canyon the color of honey.

Golden Canyon

Dad’s job as clerk earned him only sixty dollars a month to start, but before long he was proudly writing the boss’s letters for him and taking control when the boss left town and the frontier settlement veered slightly out of whack.

One noon, he told me once—over a piece of my mother’s dense mincemeat pie—about thirty army men arrived in town and wanted to be fed. The cook threw up his hands when he saw how many there were. He went to the store and got a bottle of booze, and in an hour he was drunk. Here, Dad put down his fork and assumed the booming voice of some old time, desert rat who’s seen and done it all: “So I fired him, promoted the dishwasher to chef, waited the tables, and got them all fed.”

The Amargosa Dining Room

Then, directing his watery eyes toward something I couldn’t see: “Things like that happened all the time. It was an exciting life. You did everything.”

Dad’s one disappointment at this time stemmed from his unsuccessful attempt to work a gold mine with a Shoshone partner. The mine lay twenty miles from the Junction, hidden among the canyons, and could only be accessed, and then with difficulty, by burro. The cost of searching for elusive veins of ore eventually persuaded Dad to suspend his mining operations. But the lure of undiscovered gold stayed with him long after the railway stopped running in 1940 and the Amargosa Hotel closed down two years later for the War, long after he and my newly pregnant mother, seeing the handwriting on the  desert’s tumbled walls, fled with two-year-old me to Compton, a working-class suburb outside Los Angeles.

Our Death Valley Home

Sour Milk Biscuits

Dad never told me what he served those army men, but I like to think that it included sour milk biscuits, a pioneer bread easily assembled from staples.

2 cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 tablespoons oleo or
other shortening
⅔ cup sour milk

Preheat the oven to 475°F.

Sift dry ingredients together.
Work in oleo.
Lightly mix in the sour milk, stirring just enough to hold the
dough together.
Toss on a lightly floured board. Knead gently for a minute.
Roll ¼-inch thick. Cut with a cutter to form biscuits.
Bake 10–12 minutes.

If Julia Child had cooked Italian for a gay husband, used sugar to sweeten a sour childhood, and hosted buffets for a better world, she could have written Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen (IPPY Award for Memoir 2013)

Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen.
(Ippy Award for Memoir 2013)               

  In this food memoir, Judith Newton shares the unforgettable story of a life on the front lines of activism and in the kitchen. During a difficult childhood, food and cooking were sources of comfort and emotional sustenance.  And in the decades to come, through her marriage to a gay man, her discovery of feminism, her life in a commune, and her career as an academic, she used food to sustain personal and political relationships, mourn losses, and celebrate victories. As she earned her activist stripes in the 1960s and beyond, she also learned how food could ease tension, foster community, and build cross-racial ties.

Organized by decade and by the cookbooks that shaped the author’s life, Tasting Home takes readers on a journey through the cuisines, cultural spirit, and politics of the 1940s through the 2000s.   Seasoned with scenes of cooking and dining, it brings readers to the table, inviting them to feel how deeply food is tied to identity, love, community, and political engagement.
Read essays based on the memoir at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-newton/ “A Valentine For My Gay Ex-Husband,” February 7, 2013; “Reclaiming the Kitchen: Women’s History Month Meets the Food Justice Movement,” March 4, 2013;”How I Said Goodbye to a Difficult Mother,” May 10, 2013.

June 5, Books Inc., 1760 Fourth Street Berkeley, CA, 7:00 pm.
(510-525-7777)

Join two award-winning memoir writers as they read from and discuss their new books and talk about their personal writing journeys. They will touch on themes and messages in memoir, the sometimes-difficult decisions that must be made, and answer questions about their writing process.

Judith Newton, Professor Emerita, UC Davis, Women and Gender Studies
Author of Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen (She Writes Press)

Linda Joy Myers,  Founder and President of the National Association of Memoir Writers
Author of Don’t Call Me Mother (She Writes Press)

ROOTS : A NEW ANTHOLOGY OF FOOD WRITING, JUNE 4! (Includes material from Tasting Home.)

Roots is a love story about food—an exploration of its rich interconnectedness with culture, memory, and discovery, penned by over forty authors and personalities from the culinary blogosphere. The anthology’s deeply personal essays serve up family history, local lore, and tantalizing stories of worlds newly discovered through food, accompanied by original photography and a collection of recipes that, no matter how far flung, taste like home. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17938134-roots

Leicester Square Station

I was to meet my daughter, Hannah, in London where she was taking  dreamy courses like “The British Museum,”  “Shakespeare,” and “Contemporary Drama” at U. C. Berkeley’s campus abroad. We were to find each other outside the Tube stop at Leicester Square and, as I approached the station, I began to look around. When she left home she’d been dressed in her uniform of jeans, polo shirt, sweatshirt, and sneakers. But the young woman I saw from a distance was wearing boots, a long black skirt, and a stylish, close-fitting, suede jacket.  Hannah? I wondered.

“Hannah?” I called. She turned around–her thin golden earrings almost grazing the tops of her shoulders.

“Mom!”  We moved toward each other and entered into an extended hug.

“So good to see you, Bunny!”

“Good to see you too, Mom.”

“You look great. You’ve changed your style.”

“Yes,” she blushed a little, “it’s London. Listen, Mom, come meet my flat-mates. We can get on the Tube here and get off at Holborn and then walk. It’s close.” She guided me into the Tube stop, showed me where to buy a ticket and insert it, took my arm and drew me toward the tunnel for trains going north. She seemed to know every stop on every line, and she’d only been here two months.

“How did the dinner go?” I asked, as we swayed on the Tube.

She’d e-mailed me a month before asking about my favorite recipe for coq au vin, and I’d sent her the one from Bistro Jeanty because the cocoa in it gave the dish a nice, full flavor.  When she’d left in August, she hadn’t cared much for coq au vin or for almost anything French I’d ever made. Since childhood, to my culinary frustration, she’d been a pasta and butter or spaghetti and meat sauce sort of girl.

“The coq turned out great,” she said “but when I tried to light the cognac, it wouldn’t burn and I had to fish one of the matches out of the pot.” After dining on the coq, Hannah’s roommates had informally appointed her chief cook in the apartment, and the six of them had begun hosting regular dinner parties for their friends–tagliatella with porcini mushrooms and white wine and cream sauce, marinated salmon served on a bed of thinly sliced potatoes, untold dozens of cookies, even apple and pecan pies. Since the kitchen had no rolling pin, Hannah had been using a bottle of gin covered in plastic wrap to make the crusts. And she’d been baking the pies in shallow bowls because the kitchen also lacked proper tins. One of her roommates had begun to call her “Mama.”

After a week of dinners and plays with Hannah, my friend Mark and I traveled to Paris for a few days.  Hannah and her friend Cally had already arranged a weekend visit of their own, so Mark and I decided to meet them at their Paris hostel and take them out for a final dinner. On Saturday in the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon Mark and I walk toward the “Young and Happy Hostel” on Rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest, most narrow streets in Paris–a hive of shops and outdoor markets, with orange, green, and blue awnings, mounds of oranges and lemons, boxes of dusky grapes, mountains of peppers in red, green, and yellow.

The flower stand was a meadow of pink and lavender, and as we threaded our way through the crowd, the smells of chocolate, pastry, and cheese married each other in the air. We passed a man sitting quietly at a table, watching the shoppers go by, and there she was, quite unexpectedly, walking down the street in our direction.

“Hannah!”

“Mom!”

“Amazing, here you are on the streets of Paris!” Suddenly, Paris really did feel like the most exciting city in the world and also, somehow, like home.

“Mom, I need some boots,” she said, showing me the soles of the run-down pair she was wearing, and so we went into a nearby shop where Hannah surveyed the stock with a practiced eye. After some deliberation she picked out a pair of black, European-looking boots with a fashionably flat heel. We walked to the hostel, picked up Cally, and the then four of us turned left down a small lane. Instantly, since this was Paris after all, we found a bistro with white table cloths and rose place mats, where the smell of roasting lamb passed over us like a savory cloud. We settled at an outside table, received our menus, and I began to translate for Hannah and her friend.

“’Gigot De Pre-Sale Roti’–that’s roast leg of lamb.”

“Mom, you speak French?” She was amazed by my seeming cultural capital.

“No, Bun, I’ve cooked through Julia Child and can read a menu.”

She and Cally ordered mozzarella and tomato salad followed by steak frites. Mark wanted goat cheese salad and cassoulet. I went for the escargot and lamb.

“Want to try a snail,” I asked Hannah when they came, sizzling in their pan. The taste was a sensuous meld of garlic, parsley, shallot, European butter, and something sweet. She looked doubtful but said “Okay.” I handed her the fork and she bit off the tiniest piece she could. “Yum!” She popped the rest of the escargot into her mouth.

I looked at her and tried to take her in. She was nineteen. She had curly brown hair, long brows, and large blue eyes. She was lovely, and, somehow, she’d arrived. The girl in sweatshirts and sneakers who barely touched my beef bourguignon was now wearing fitted jackets and European boots; she was cooking coq au vin and eating escargot. I couldn’t help feeling some pleasure in these changes, but I understood “it’s London.” Her very distance from me had freed her for this transformation.

_______________________________________________________________

Bistro Jeanty’s* Coq au Vin

(Adapted with Permission from Bistro Jeanty as printed in the San Francisco Chronicle)

 Be sure to marinate the chicken overnight and use that cocoa! Although leftovers are good, I find the coq is best the day it is made. (*Bistro Jeanty is a charming French bistro in Yountville—for when you can’t get to France and don’t want to cook.)

Serves 8.
2 large yellow onions, peeled and diced
3 shallots, peeled and diced
8 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

3 sprigs parsley
2 bay leaves
5 branches thyme
1 1/2 bottles good quality Merlot or Zinfandel
2 large chickens (3 ½ or 4 pounds each) cut up
Salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
½ c. olive oil
2 T flour
½ c. cognac
2 c. chicken stock (canned is ok)
1 ½ T unsweetened cocoa powder
6 oz. sliced apple-wood-smoked bacon, diced
1 basket pearl onions, blanched and peeled
1 lb. button mushrooms, quartered
2 T. chopped parsley for garnish

1. Place onions, shallots, garlic, parsley sprigs, bay leaves, thyme and wine in a large non-reactive bowl. Add chicken and stir to mix.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 24 to 48 hours.
2. Remove chicken from the wine marinade; reserve the marinade. Dry the chicken with paper towels and season generously with salt and pepper.
3. Heat oil in large, heavy casserole over high heat.  Add chicken in batches to the pan.  Brown chicken well on all sides.  Remove pieces when browned and set aside.
4. Add flour to casserole and cook, stirring constantly for 2 minutes.
5. Return chicken to casserole, stir and add cognac.  Remove casserole from heat and carefully ignite the cognac. Let flames die out.
6. Add marinade to casserole and bring to a boil over high heat, scraping up browned bits from the bottom of the pan.  Add chicken stock, reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer until chicken is tender, 1 to 1 ½ hours.
7. Remove chicken from casserole and set aside.  Strain sauce through a sieve. Discard the solids and return sauce to the casserole.
8.  Put cocoa in small bowl; add ½ c sauce, whisk until smooth.  Add the cocoa mixture to the casserole, turn heat to high, boil until sauce is reduced to about 4 cups.
9.  When the sauce is reduced, lower heat to medium, and return chicken to casserole to heat through.
10. Meanwhile sauté bacon in large skillet. As it begins to brown, add the pearl onions and then the mushrooms. Let the mix cook about 10 minutes until lightly colored. Remove mixture from skillet with slotted spoon, leaving fat in the skillet.  Add solids to chicken. Stir to combine, sprinkle with parsley and serve.

Linda Joy Myers, Ph. D. is the Founder and President of the National Association of Memoir Writers and the author of The Power of Memoir–How to Write Your Healing Story and Don’t Call Me Mother. Linda has been a therapist in Berkeley for over thirty years, and combines her background in art, clinical work, and writing in her work. She offers unique memoir workshops and trainings in the Bay Area and nationally. Don’t Call Me Mother won the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association Gold Medal Award. For more info, visit: http://memoriesandmemoirs.com/

Judith Newton is Professor Emerita in Women and Gender Studies at U.C. Davis where she directed the Women and Gender Studies program for eight years and the Consortium for Women and Research for four. She is the author of the memoir, Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen and co-editor of five works of nonfiction on nineteenth-century British women writers, feminist criticism, women’s history, and men’s movements. Tasting Home won an Independent Publishing Award in 2013. For more information, visit: http://tasting-home.com/

Trina Drotar writes The Book Talk column for Sacramento Press in which she features primarily local writers and their new book releases and new releases coming from the many local publishers in the Sacramento area. For more information, visit: http://www.trinaldrotar.blogspot.com/

I went to Italy this April, having failed to lose the weight I gained on our October cruise. October, as you know, is followed by Thanksgiving and by Christmas, and, oh, never mind. Let’s just say I promised myself I would stick to  vegetables and fish this time around.

I found other reasons to pursue this regimen. I knew from previous vacations that Italians do wondrous things with artichokes, fava beans, and eggplant. And I wanted to test a theory. Was it my lack of access to authentic Italian fish that accounted for the disappointments I’d been having with Italian seafood recipes of every kind? I decided (because why be mean?) that I would allow myself exactly one risotto, one pasta, and one gelato during our three week stay.

It was the price of fish that threw me off my game. Eighteen to twenty-six dollars would have seemed reasonable for a tender piece of sea bass, but we’re talking Euros here my friends. We’re talking one and a half times the cost, twenty-eight to forty-one dollars. And the fish I did sample was good but not fabulous. Well, once I did have sea bass stuffed with potatoes and a view of the Arno river in Florence, and it was fabulous, but the cost!

I had also, strangely, developed a distaste for meat. Maybe I had read once too often in my Italian guidebooks that Bistecca alla Fiorentina is served al sangue which is supposed to be really, really red.  What was left but vegetables to eat?  Well, luscious squid ink ravioli stuffed with sea bass and covered with a creamy sauce of mullet roe? (I’ll get to the ravioli another time. It’s best not to think about pasta again just yet.)

I did eat my vegetables, however, and here are six you shouldn’t miss in spring and early summer. I mention spring and summer because Italians do eat what’s in season, which is one reason their vegetables are so good. Really, make, or order, one of these as your appetizer or have two of them as a meal. You won’t be sorry. (And if you’re still hungry you can get that ravioli for only 16 Euro.)

1. Asparagus with butter and Parmesan cheese.

2. Sautéed spinach. You haven’t tasted spinach until its sautéed with olive oil and garlic.

3. White beans with olive oil and thyme.

4. Fresh peas sautéed with pancetta.

5. Ribollita.  This is a thick vegetable soup made with tons of bread that my husband kept ordering. (He likes routine.)  I had to sample it, despite all the bread, because I was planning to write about Italian vegetables, and I can tell you it’s good but also different every place you go.

6.   Pumpkin Flan at La Zucca in Venice. Okay, not seasonable but mmmm.­­­­­­­­­­

What are your favorite veggies?

_____________________________________________________________

FLAN Di ZUCCA (PUMPKIN FLAN)
(adapted from Chowhound)

1 pound pumpkin, cut in pieces
Small piece of butter, salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 ounces potato flour
10 ounces mascarpone cheese
4 eggs
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons fine bread crumbs
2 tablespoons softened butter
1 teaspoon ground sage (salvia)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan

1. Cook pumpkin until tender in water to cover with a small piece of butter, salt and pepper. Drain and cool.

2. Scrape flesh away from the skin and place in a blender and blend until smooth.

3. Add the potato flour, mascarpone, eggs and spices and blend again.

4. Preheat oven to 350°F Grease a 6-cup round flan mold and sprinkle the bottom with the bread crumbs.

5. Spoon the pumpkin mixture into the mold and place in a larger pan filled half way up with hot water.

6. Cook for 1 hour and 10 minutes in a baking dish filled with water. The flan will still be  wobbly.

Pictures by permission of  CityKnown

.

Why whale and reindeer you might ask? My mother was Norwegian, and my imagined relation to Norway, like my real relation to my mother, has always been complex. After a lifetime of choosing not to see Norway, my motherland but also the land of my mother, I thought it time to encounter my heritage. But still uncertain about how I would relate to Norwegian ways, I decided that eating something indisputably Norwegian—whale and reindeer—would be an easy, and also bold, way to enter the culture.

Although I grew up in what might be called a Norwegian home, its relation to Norwegian  cuisine was much diluted. My mother had left North Dakota, and the enclave of Norwegian immigrants to which she was born, moving to Southern California at the age of twenty-six.  In Southern California, ties to the past are quick to fade, and my mother’s cooking was sporadically Norwegian at best. She served us tacos and enchiladas along with a generically Midwestern menu of meat, potatoes, and pies. But she did make Norwegian cookies and breads  at Christmas, when she also served us  lutefisk, a piece of cod preserved in lye, soaked to remove the lye, then boiled to the consistency of Jell-O and doused with butter.  Garrison Keillor described lutefisk as “a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat.” That pretty much sums up lutefisk.

Before leaving on our trip, I read a sprightly book called In Cod We Trust, a Norwegian American’s account of living in Norway for a year. The book had much to say about the prevalence of fish in Norwegian cuisine. Fish (without lye) is the most common dish in Norway and certainly the most common dish in Bergen, a city of 250,000,  that lies on the western coast of Norway right on the water.

 In Cod We Trust also taught me about Norwegian fish cookery, about the practice of boiling “all the flavor out of the fish in a pot of salted water with a dash of vinegar.” In typical Scandinavian fashion, one cookbook maintains that fish “’should have no other flavor than its own’ and warns against adding any spices or seasonings that would ‘diminish the flavor of the fish.’”  One of the author’s Norwegian acquaintances complained, “’You Americans are always asking, ‘Does it taste fishy?’ Of course it tastes fishy; it’s fish.’”  As an American who’d learned to cook by working through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I had always preferred my fish to taste of sauce, preferably one involving wine, butter, shallots, and cream.

Standing in Bergen’s open air fish market, surrounded by bright slabs of salmon, coral mountains of shrimp, and pearly mounds of translucent cod, it dawned on me, with a shock, that my mother had never served us fish. (Except for lutefisk and the occasional fish stick.) This despite the fact that her Scandinavian cookbook contains recipes for anchovy casserole, salmon with sour cream, cod fish balls, creamed codfish, fish pudding, cod casserole, salmon loaf, and escalloped and pickled herring.  And she was pure Norwegian! Had her people lost their taste for fish while living on a farm in North Dakota since the middle of the nineteenth-century?  Or since North Dakota has lakes and streams, after all, as well as a fishing industry, did her people boil fish without seasonings?  Had that put her off her native cuisine? It was my reading and not my childhood experience that prepared me for the omnipresence of Norwegian fish, though it hadn’t prepared me for so much of them.

I  had decided, nonetheless, not to order fish in Norwegian restaurants.  Norway is the most expensive country in Europe thanks to the oil and gas discovered in the 1960s (the revenue from which goes directly into Norway’s enviable social welfare program). And Norway remains relatively untouched by the current economic crisis. It stayed with the Krone and, indeed, never entered the European Union.  In a Norwegian restaurant, a (skimpy) glass of wine costs eighteen to twenty dollars and a piece of cod often runs fifty-five.  I wasn’t going to pay fifty-five dollars for boiled fish! In preparation for the trip my husband and I discussed the price of Norwegian food and decided to splurge on a restaurant that offered whale and reindeer and then to eat a lot of open-faced sandwiches, a Norwegian specialty. We also planned to microwave some frozen dinners in the spartan apartments we’d rented from young Norwegian men.

As it turned out, the microwaves in both apartments were broken or missing in action, and, at any rate, the frozen food section of our local market offered little more than pizza and fish—fish filets, fish cakes, something that looked (unpromisingly) like fish mixed with potatoes.  As it turned out, too, the sandwiches most easily available to us, consisted of fish and their fishy cousins–salmon and cucumber on a baguette, salmon mixed with something that seemed to be bits of butter and cheese, salmon on sliced, hard-boiled egg, shrimp piled so high on a baguette that you couldn’t see the baguette at all. Soon, we were eating fish twice a day.

We had fishcakes from the fish market–ground cod mixed with flour and herbs and fried into a rather dense and chewy patty. At a waterside café, we savored a creamy fish soup with a mix of salmon, mussels, and shrimp. And back at our apartment, my husband dutifully made sandwiches for dinner by layering mackerel canned in tomato sauce on a whole wheat roll. (I drew the line at mackerel in tomato sauce and made my own sandwiches out of Norwegian Jarlsberg cheese on a roll thickly spread with Norwegian butter. Norwegian butter, umm. ) I also drew the line at fish pudding, fish jerky, and rotfisk  (rotten fish) which was traditionally made by covering trout with sugar and salt and burying it for three or four months until it was, well, rotten.  Nowadays, rotfisk is more delicately referred to as “fermented trout” and is made by letting the trout sit around in its own juices for a few days.  Still, even without the rotfisk, we were “eating Norwegian” long before the whale and reindeer moment.

Our blonde, blue-eyed waitress laughs when I order reindeer. I guess Americans don’t order reindeer all that much.  Or maybe she laughs because I order reindeer right after I order whale. I tell her I am conducting an experiment. She nods and smiles and says “They’re really good.”  And yes, I know I’m not supposed to be eating whale. Norway’s insistence on whaling is one reason it never joined the EU.   But Norwegians tend to go their own way.  I eat the whale. It’s a Norwegian thing to do. The whale has been smoked and tastes like ham, but it is dark in color and has a smooth texture, the kind of texture you’d expect from a seagoing mammal. The reindeer is very tender and strangely smooth, as well. It tastes like meat but not like any meat I’ve ever eaten. I’m glad for the dark, plumy game sauce that covers it. Later, I learn that Norwegians eat very little whale or reindeer. Those dishes are for special occasions or for dinners out in tony restaurants that specialize in traditional cuisine.

It is in Oslo, in another beamed restaurant, that I eat the best meal of the trip. Stortorvets Gjaestgiveri is a homey restaurant with an expensive fine dining menu and a cheaper café one.  We debate about going in, fearful that the affordable café menu is just for the afternoon. We are near the end of our trip and we’re low on funds, but we’re also tired of  fish sandwiches so we enter and are delighted to find that the café menu is still good.  We order, and for only thirty dollars I am served a piece of tender salmon in a pool of butter sauce. The salmon melts in my mouth, tasting of salmon but not in a fishy way. The Norwegian butter sauce is sublime, and the same dish costs more than fifty dollars on the fine dining menu.  At last, I’m eating Norwegian and it feels just right.

__________________________________________________________________________

Quotations from Eric Dregni, In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream. The University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

So many books and so few slots for them to fill! I have to go with the books that most shaped my life and that have stayed with me the longest.  Four of them are from the British nineteenth and  twentieth centuries.

 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (that’s her home above).

What I still love about this book is the fantasy of Elizabeth Bennett.  Although men in the novel have far more money, mobility, and power to choose than women,  men’s sense of power and their real pomposity are basically a set up by the author, a preparation for poetic justice, a license to enjoy the spectacle of men witlessly betraying their legacy of power and demonstrating impressive capacities for turning their potential control into ineffective action or submission to the control of others.  Although Elizabeth marries at the end, and although marriage demands resignation even as it prompts rejoicing, initiates new life while confirming a flickering suspicion that the best is already over, what we take from the novel is not a sense of Elizabeth’s untimely decline, but a tonic impression of her intelligence, her wit, and her power. It is a further tribute to Austen’s skill that we believe in Elizabeth’s power and do not perceive it as fantasy.  (We need more fantasies like Elizabeth!)

Middlemarch by George Eliot

I have always loved this book for its celebration of moral passion and of the desire to make the world a better place. The celebration comes through even though much of the novel is devoted to showing how moral ardor can be led astray by egoism, failures of vision, and a web of social relations that denied women, especially, much freedom to act.  (Dorothea’s uncle reminds her that, “Young ladies don’t understand political economy.”)  In the absence of religious faith, in which Eliot no longer believed, the novel suggests that feeling for others, a toleration of their limits, a sympathetic view, much like Eliot’s own, can prompt us to acts of  generosity, caring, and social reform. Dorothea may wonder at the end if  there wasn’t something better with her life that she should have done, but Eliot affirms that even a “middle” march can have a good effect upon the world.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.

This is a novel for the times. It gives us a world in which buying and selling –orphans, lime, bones–dominates almost all relationships and in which living for profit and acquisition have come to seem natural and right.  It is a world in which  institutions act like bad parents and in which dominant values are as polluted as the Thames River, which flows though the city full of corpses and sludge, providing a living for those who make a business from robbing the dead. The very wind is full of dust and waste.  People who would appear only in the background of an Austen novel—turkey poachers or gypsies, for example,– are main characters  whose view of the world we are invited to understand.  The figures we  see as separate and isolated  at  the beginning of the novel turn out to be intimately related, a strong message that we are responsible for each other, this despite society’s widely shared assumption that pursuing our own self-interest is all we need to do. Although at the end of the novel the Voice of Society continues to drone on,  Dickens believes that unexpected flowerings of love and energy are still possible, along with good parenting, generosity, and love.

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

Ok, I know there are so many things about Lawrence I shouldn’t like. But the book had such an influence on me that I named my favorite cat after its heroine, Ursula.  The cat had golden eyes, and Ursula has a golden light.  The light is her capacity for wanting to be whole, for having passion, for being able to change, grow, and overthrow convention  despite living in a world which Lawrence thought of as dead and death giving, a victim and an instrument of industrial capitalism..

 Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

This book had a powerful influence on me and is one reason I wrote a food memoir, Tasting Home.  As a feminist, one of the things I love about it is its affirmation of the importance of women’s labor in the home. (Not that I would “save” that labor for women–it should be shared.) A takeoff on nineteenth-century Mexican romance, Like Water for Chocolate is about love and politics, the latter being represented by the Mexican Revolution and the ongoing struggle of Tita and her sister Gertrude against patriarchal culture.

Each chapter is organized around a recipe, and the process involved in making the chapter’s dish-—the grinding, the toasting, the chopping, the boiling, the frying, the cracking of eggs—is so thoroughly woven throughout the pages that cooking, an often invisible form of labor, becomes as central to the story as romance and revolution. Cooking, indeed, becomes an emblem of the domestic work that makes romance and revolution possible. It is the force that keeps women and men alive not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and politically as well.

I think cooking is like that, always there, and if it is as it should be, it not only nourishes our bodies but gives us the comfort of feeling loved, cared for, and secure. Eating what is cooked and served with good will evokes one of our first experiences of feeling at home in the world, the experience of being fed by another being. That is one reason that cooking and eating with others can heal the adult self, one reason that it can so easily make us feel connected to another person, a family, a culture, a political community.

What are your favorite five?

Please check these bloggers for their own favorites!

Edith ONuallain, In A Room of My Own

Brenda Moguez, Passionate Pursuits

Tracy Fells, The Literary Pig

Betsy Graziani Fasbinder, Art Finds a Way

 

In the summer of 1984 Max and I had purchased a three-story, late Victorian, gray, stone house on a once fashionable avenue in Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy. I loved the fat round turret and the high arched windows that made up the left side of the house, and the old-fashioned porch that wrapped its elegant curve around the right. The house stood on a leafy corner where quiet trees filled the sky.

Despite the loveliness of the porch (and despite the ghosts that seem to beckon from it—-I imagined a genteel Victorian family in wicker rockers), we never graced it with a single chair, preferring the privacy of the newly built deck in back. The latter served as meeting place and summer dining room, offering us a view of the peach and lavender perennial border I had planted and of Max’s garden on a large swath at the side of our quarter-acre lot. We often lingered on the deck past twilight when a colony of bats winged their way through the deepening blue and lavender of the sky.

“Smile,” Nigel told us. “Say cheese.” Nigel was fond of taking pictures to send home, and he captured us that summer in our most familiar ritual. The photo shows me sitting with Dick and Max at the round, white table on our deck. Pregnant and wearing striped work overalls, I have long and curly hair. I am resting my head upon my hand and am looking pleased as if paradise had come again. Dick sits to my left in sandals and a tight blue-and-red-striped tee shirt. He is leaning toward me. His honey-colored mustache droops seductively.  Max has turned his large square face and body directly to the camera. He is wearing shorts and sneakers and has a Jewish Afro and a wide, full beard. Pink flowers float above a green vase in the center of the table, and our plates are full of chicken, rice, and broccoli. It is a plain meal, with few ingredients, which means that Max had cooked it. Dick took his recipes from gourmet magazines— pork chops with wine reduction, say, and sesame green beans— while Nigel and I had both discovered Moosewood Cookbook. On the (separate) nights we cooked that summer, dinner consisted of our garden on a plate.

I never looked to Moosewood for two-star recipes. Indeed, many of its dishes squeaked by, in our rating system, with only a star above a check, meaning that they were fine for everyday meals but not for guests.  “Swiss Cheese and Mushroom Quiche” fell into this category, despite the fact that it involved a cup and a half of tangy gruyere cheese. My note in the margin read that Julia Child’s version was better. (No surprise there.) Was it the Moosewood crust, which was partly whole wheat and made with buttermilk instead of water? Was it that Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking used heavy cream and nutmeg rather than milk and mustard? That the mushrooms in Moosewood were innocent of shallots and Madeira?  Several Moosewood dishes earned only a check above a star, which translated as “not worth the effort.” We assigned “Vegetarian Chili” (with kidney beans, bulgur, celery, carrots, peppers, and tomatoes) to that category. “Don’t bother,” I wrote in the margin.  Was it the tomato juice? Did I under spice?

Going wrong with Moosewood recipes was a drag because they usually called for a ton of ingredients. It was great when the recipes worked out because they allowed you to unload a basket of summer produce (after a good deal of chopping) into a single pot. “Vegetable Stroganoff” called for onions, mushrooms, and six cups of broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, zucchini, peppers, and cherry tomatoes. “Vegetable Stew” featured potatoes, carrots, celery, eggplant, zucchini, broccoli, mushrooms and tomatoes. Both were tasty dishes in the check/star category.

But “Ode to Chang Kung” with its broccoli, mushrooms, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, bamboo, tofu and sesame seeds (plus cashews, scallions, and chopped green peppers on top) came out weird and bland. Was it the quarter cup of something called “taman?” “Never again!” Nigel wrote at the top of the recipe, and, ordinarily, Nigel never ranked his dishes.

At other times Moosewood recipes, with their cornucopia of ingredients, demanded additions that seemed mainly designed to remind us of its hippy roots. Why else would “Spinach-Rice Casserole” (which featured brown rice, spinach, onion, garlic, eggs, milk and a cup-and-a-half of cheddar cheese) also call for tamari and a quarter cup of sunflower seeds? Why did “Vegetable Stew,” an otherwise straightforward dish, demand molasses? And why, for that matter, did “Broccoli Noodle Casserole” with its decadent three cups of ricotta, one cup of cheddar, and one cup sour cream even bother to make you sprinkle wheat germ over its top?

But it didn’t matter. I cooked from Moosewood because I liked the idea of it. The book was produced by a collective, and we were a collective too. The restaurant had no “boss,” and despite Max’s alpha personality, our house had no boss either. We rotated shopping, cooking, and washing dishes, which made me feel heady, and slightly guilty, about having such domestic and culinary leisure. I was also drawn to the Moosewood philosophy of “convenience and economy” which we certainly got to practice since our ingredients came from our garden just outside the kitchen door.

Moosewood celebrated “health, lightness, purity,” a trinity that I wanted to pursue, and I liked the homemade quality of the book itself—the hand lettering, the sparkly drawings. Our favorite recipe, “Spinach–Rice Casserole,” was illustrated with a hairy unicorn encountering a large, strange bird.

Hand drawn unicorns called attention to the creativity, love, and labor that, often invisibly, go into making the sweetness of the everyday. Cooking from Moosewood, even with its imperfections, was utopian. Funny how small, utopian practices can make you feel, despite the deepest contradictions, that summer is everlasting and that life is good.

—————————————————————-

Spinach-Rice Casserole
(Adapted with permission of Mollie Katzen from Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, Ten Speed Press, 1977)

4 c. cooked brown rice (2 c. raw cooked in 3 c. water)
2 lbs raw chopped spinach
1 c. chopped onion
2 cloves minced garlic
3 T butter
4 beaten eggs
1 c. milk
1 ½ c. grated cheddar cheese
¼ c. chopped parsley
2 T tamari
½ tsp. salt
Dashes of nutmeg and cayenne pepper
¼ c. sun flower seeds
paprika

Preheat oven to 350.

 1. Cook brown rice on stove top.

2. Sauté onions and garlic with salt in butter.  When onions are soft add spinach and cook two minutes.

2. Add all other ingredients with exception of sun flower seeds an paprika.

3. Pile mixture into buttered casserole.

4. Sprinkle with sun flower seeds and paprika.

5. Bake, covered, for 35 minutes.

Mastering the Art

Berkeley, September 1964:  I placed my hands in a bowl of butter and flour with the intention of rubbing them together until they resembled flakes of oatmeal. Mother had never used anything but a fork to mix her dough, but I was following Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And Mastering the Art strictly maintained that “a necessary part of learning how to cook is to get the feel of the dough in your fingers.”

I didn’t mind getting my fingers all gummy with the dough because, in my imagination, this messy procedure completely divorced my venture into baking from my mother’s pastry practices—and from the sorrows of my relationship to her. No pie crust here! I was mixing “sweet short paste,” which called for a quarter-pound of butter and only three tablespoons of shortening—in clear opposition to my mother’s Basic Pie Crust recipe, with its cup of Crisco, half-cube of margarine, and secret pinch of baking powder.

I used my hand, as instructed, to mix cold water into the flakes and to gather the stiffening mass into a ragged ball. Then, nervously, I laid the dough on a floured board and tentatively smeared it into a series of skid marks using the heel of my hand. Mastering the Art called this the fraisage. It was meant to mix the flour and fat more evenly, but it seemed an oddly brutal treatment for a substance that, when baked, was supposed to become light and flaky. I chilled the dough for an hour and then tried to roll it into a large, pie-shaped round, thereby initiating a long and depressing struggle, during which the dough tore itself to pieces at every chance. After much patching, I coaxed a wildly uneven circle into a white enamel pan. I filled the crust with the classic apples, sugar, and cinnamon, much as Mother had done, except that I also poured a custard, made with French apple brandy, over the top. Voila! I had created a Tarte Normande Aux Pommes, not Mother’s apple pie at all. I would serve it the next day as dessert for the first meal I would ever cook from Mastering the Art.

Mastering the Art had been published three years earlier in 1961, and Julia Child’s television show, “The French Chef,” had been broadcast to a Berkeley audience in 1963. But in 1963 I had no television set and no clear idea of whether I would stay in graduate school at all, an uncertainty that seemed incompatible with mastering the art of anything. By the spring of 1964, having done well enough on my master’s oral exam, I had decided that I would go on for the English PhD as well. Why not? I thought, buoyed by my recent success. And that September, as a mark of my new commitment, I decided to cook a dinner for Paul and Sarah, two of the smartest and most serious graduate students I knew.

Paul, always jovial, shoulders curving forward because of his height, and Sarah—dark, petite, and fun—were an established couple. They had met at Harvard and were studying the Renaissance at Berkeley, where Renaissance was king. But they were kind and very witty and never made a big deal of how smart they both were. Cooking for them would be a pleasure, or so I hoped, and the dinner would signal to me, at least, that I, too, had found a path in life, a path that was different from that of my mother. Did I notice that, like her, I was implicitly coupling adulthood with the ability to cook a proper meal? No, I did not.

I had moved the summer before into an old, brown-shingled Victorian that was carved into four or five apartments, each inhabited by an English graduate student or two. My studio was the old dining room, which I had furnished rather starkly with the standard twin bed posing as a couch. The rest of my garage-sale furniture kept company with some soulful prints by Rembrandt and Fra Lippo Lippi, which I had soberly mounted on brown cork. On the other side of the bathroom a small separate kitchen looked out onto the weedy back yard. It was the apartment’s Unconscious, a room where I rebelled against Mother’s ways by leaving my unwashed dishes in the sink until green scum began to form.

Kitchen Sink 1964

It was from this mossy bank that I first eased myself into the waters of French cooking, holding onto my newly purchased Mastering the Art like a non-swimmer on an untested raft. (I did at least give my pots and pans a good wash before I began.) The menu for the evening consisted of Poulet Sauté aux Herbs de Provence (Chicken Sautéed With Herbs And Garlic, Egg Yolk and Butter Sauce); Crêpes de Pommes de Terre (Grated Potato Pancakes); Tomates á la Provençale (Tomatoes Stuffed With Bread Crumbs, Herbs, and Garlic), and the Tarte Normande Aux Pommes. Mastering the Art recommended a chilled rosé to accompany the meal.

Having made the Tarte Normande the day before, I was free to work on the Crêpes de Pommes de Terre for most of the afternoon. The first step in their preparation involved a good forty minutes of peeling and shredding, a process that added a drop or two of blood to the growing potato mound. The next step called for squeezing the grated potatoes into the corner of a dish towel to extract their juice. This step left large, brown and purple splotches on the cotton sacking, the sight of which produced a guilty thrill.

Mother, could she have seen it, would have been horrified at this stain-inducing use of a kitchen towel—and of this towel, in particular. It belonged to a set showing kittens getting engaged, entering into matrimony, and wheeling a baby kitten in a stroller. I had embroidered them myself as a young girl. I felt a little bad about the kittens. Stitching them had been one of the few occasions when I had gone along with Mother’s desire that I prepare myself for marriage and for family, and she’d been pleased. But I kept on squeezing those potatoes nonetheless.  Mastering the Art was not at all sentimental about kitchen towels, or embroidered kittens as far as I could tell. Mastering the Art was about squaring your shoulders and learning to cook it right.

I mixed the wrung-out potatoes with cream cheese, Swiss cheese, and heavy cream—-yummy additions which, unfortunately, refused to fully bond, and, as I browned them, the crepes fell apart into a series of broken shards. Aware that Mother’s meals had always maintained a respectable solidity, I set the crepes aside, hoping to reconstruct them later. I browned the chicken until it turned an uneven yellow and reread the directions for making its sauce. I had never coated a chicken with anything, much less a hollandaise, which must be finished at the last moment. Even the tomatoes, which I had already stuffed, had to be baked ten minutes before being served. So baking, chicken coating, and crepe repair would come together, or so I hoped.

To someone like me, who had never read a recipe longer than one side of a three-by-five card, each separate dish had seemed unbelievably complex, and, taken together—the peeling, shredding, squeezing, stuffing, browning, baking, sauce making, and warming—-had driven me close to the limit of my powers for doing more than one thing at a time. I threw on some dressier clothes while the chicken cooked, the tomatoes baked, and the crepes warmed, the smell of garlic, basil, and chicken filling the air. At least the dinner was smelling good. Then, “brring,” Paul and Sarah were at the door.

“Hi,” they said, handing me a bottle of wine.

“Hi, good to see you. Come in. Can I pour you some wine? I have a few things to finish up in the kitchen.”

“Can we help?”

“No, thanks. Just get comfortable.”

No one could help me now. My first dinner from Mastering the Art was a voyage to be made alone.

Back in the kitchen, I beat egg yolks into “herbal buttery pan juices,” hoping the yolks would thicken, which amazingly they did. But, wait, was the chicken underdone? Some rosy drops still lingered in the pan, so I stuck the chicken in the oven just in case. Then I jammed the crepes together using parsley to disguise the cracks, aware that I had never seen a sprig of parsley in my mother’s house. I dished out the tomatoes—-geez, they were overbrowned—but parsley covered that as well. And then came the chicken parts in their yolky jackets, hopefully now fully cooked. Their yellow coats looked like the brighter tones of a Fra Lippo Lippi against the tomatoes’ red.

I carried the plates into the main room and set them on the table, which I had moved from the kitchen where it usually stood. I invited Paul and Sarah to sit down, poured more rosé, giving myself a generous glass, and took my place. We clinked our glasses and Paul said “Cheers!” Then, Sarah lifted her fork and took a bite.

“Oh, Judy,” she said, her brown eyes gone round. “This is gourmet.”

My life as an adult had officially begun.

____________________________________________________________________________

Tarte Normande Aux Pommes
(Hot Custard Apple Tart)

(From Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Vol. 1 by Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle, Simone Beck, copyright © 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.)

For 6

An 8-inch partially baked pastry shell, on a baking sheet (see below)
1 lb crisp cooking or eating apples
1/3 c sugar
½ tsp cinnamon
1 egg
½ c sugar
¼ c sifted flour
½ c whipping cream
3 T Calvados (apple brandy)or cognac
Powdered sugar in a shaker

Preheat oven to 375.

1. Quarter, core, and peel applies. Cut in 1/8 inch lengthwise slices. Should make 3 cups.

2. Toss apple slices in a bowl with sugar and cinnamon and arrange in pastry shell.

3. Bake in upper third of preheated oven for 20 minutes or until apples start to color and are almost tender. Let cool.

4. Beat egg and sugar together until thick and pale yellow. Mixture should form a slowly dissolving ribbon when it falls back on itself.

5. Beat in flour, then cream, and finally the brandy. Pour mixture over apples almost to the top of the pastry shell.

6. Return to oven for 10 minutes or until cream begins to puff.

7. Sprinkle heavily with powdered sugar and return to oven for 15-20 minutes more. Tart is done when top has browned and a knife plunged into the custard comes out clean.

8. Put tart on rack but keep warm until ready to serve.

 Pâte Brisée Sucrée
(Sweet Short Paste)

For a 10-inch shell
2 c sifted flour
2 T sugar
¼ tsp salt
8 T. chilled butter
3 T. chilled vegetable shortening
5 to 6 T cold water

1. Place flour, salt, sugar, butter, and shortening in mixing bowl. Rub flour and fat together quickly between tips of fingers until fat is the size of oatmeal flakes. Do not overdo.

2. Add water and blend quickly with one hand slightly cupped as you gather dough into a mass.  Sprinkle up to 1 T more water by drops over any unmixed remains.

3. Press dough firmly into roughly shaped ball.  It should be pliable but not damp or sticky.

4. Place dough on lightly floured pastry board. With the heel of one hand rapidly press the pastry by two spoonful bits down on the board and away from you in a quick smear of about 6 inches.

5. With a scraper or spatula gather dough into a mass. Knead briefly into a fairly smooth round ball.

6.  Sprinkle lightly with flour and wrap in waxed paper.  Place in freezing compartment of the refrigerator for about 1 hour. Or leave it for two hours in the refrigerator.

7. Place dough on lightly floured board.  If dough is hard, beat with rolling pin to soften. Knead briefly into fairly flat circle.

8. Lightly flour the top of the dough and roll rolling pin back and forth gently to start the dough moving. Then with firm even strokes rolling away from you, start below center of dough and roll within an inch of the far edge. Lift dough and turn at a slight angle.

9. Continue rolling, lifting, and turning until dough is 1/8 thick and about 2 inches larger than your pie pan. Use dough as soon as possible so it doesn’t soften.