Bananas for Darwin

Posted on August 14, 2012 by lwbookeater

“When in the evening I descended from the mountain, a man, whom I had pleased with a trifling gift, met me, bringing with him hot roasted bananas, a pine-apple, and cocoa-nuts. After walking under a burning sun, I do not know anything more delicious than the milk of a young cocoa-nut. Pine-apples are here so abundant that the people eat them in the same wasteful manner as we might turnips.”

- Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (published in 1839 as Journal and Remarks)

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882): influential evolutionary biologist and… ardent foodie?  While studying at Cambridge, Darwin formed and presided over the Glutton Club (occasionally referred to as “The Gourmet Club”), a group that met weekly to dine on all sorts of rare delicacies: one member, whose account appears in Darwin’s son’s Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, describes meals of “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate.”  The group feasted on hawk, bittern, and an old brown owl; meetings generally ended with wild games of Blackjack and too much Port wine.

At Cambridge, Darwin also met and befriended a professor of botany named John Stevens Henslow; when Captain Robert Fitzroy sought Henslow’s recommendation for a naturalist to accompany him on the second voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, the professor suggested his young protégé. For five years, Darwin explored and collected artifacts along the coast of South America, the Galapagos islands, and the Pacific coral reefs.  He never abandoned his gustatory curiosity, however, and while aboard the Beagle, he dined on rarities like armadillo and an unidentified rodent (declared the greatest meat he’d ever tasted). Darwin read voraciously during this period, including the geologist Charles Lyell’s book, Principles of Geology, which suggested that gradual changes over long periods of time shaped the world rather than great catastrophes.  This notion greatly influenced Darwin: a few years after the Beagle voyage, he began to put forth his theory that species evolve over time.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory of evolution provided one of the most plausible alternatives to the biblical account of creation.  Darwin’s concept of natural selection was inherently random: well-adapted specimens do tend to survive in their local environment, but chance ultimately dictates the development of a species, with no particular “goal” or purpose guiding nature or civilization.  Unfortunately, his theories were adopted and bastardized by “social Darwinists” who suggested that the competition between race, class or nationality was somehow “natural” and thus justified the extermination of populations deemed less “fit” (the phrase “survival of the fittest” was not even coined by Darwin).

It has been a crazy couple of weeks.  I’m teaching a couple of writing courses and continuing work on my dissertation.  On top of that, my husband and I decided to launch blindly into a full-scale kitchen renovation.  Two weeks later, we have newly painted walls and cabinets, and plans for new countertops are in the works.  This, of course, means that our kitchen is a disaster zone: yesterday, it took me a full hour to scrub little flecks of paint off of my marble pastry board.

Brownies last week, and this week, blondies: banana walnut blondies topped with a layer of dark chocolate, to be exact.  I used Deb of Smitten Kitchen’s infinitely adaptable blondie recipe (adapted from a recipe found here) with an added half cup of banana and a handful of black walnut halves for the blondie portion, and boy are they tasty (no doubt due in part to the full stick of butter that goes into a fairly small batch of blondie mix).  A challenging rosy apple tart, this is not: as you can see, the ingredients are all tossed into and mixed up in one bowl.  Easy to make, easy to eat.

Next week: Brown Owl Baklava?

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Not Just an Ordinary Apple

Posted on June 30, 2012 by lwbookeater

“The apple tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair. He was found in the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, ‘death among the apple trees’ for ever.”

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

One of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is known for her breathtaking prose, her innovative narrative techniques, and her achievement in publishing some of the greatest and most controversial works of her time. A master of the stream-of-consciousness mode, Woolf was concerned not only with the emotional lives of her characters but also their psychological motives. Her novels tend to examine the common and uneventful; she frequently interjects a character’s perception of ordinary sounds or objects into strings of unedited thoughts and memories. Woolf was a prolific writer, but with each new work she sought to develop or challenge the last.

The Waves, with its unconventional structure and plot, has been described as a novel, a prose-poem, or, as Woolf called it, a “playpoem.” The narrative follows the thoughts and perceptions of six characters, charting their experiences from childhood through adulthood. No one point of view is privileged; instead, an array of perspectives is set against a backdrop of the sea. The novel examines the notion of individual consciousness alongside the ways in which multiple consciousnesses weave together: a seventh character, the flawed hero of the six, dies midway through the novel on an imperialist mission in colonial India, but we are never given this figure’s perspective, instead learning about him through details provided by the others. The structure of the novel also challenges the concept of uniform time: the story of the six characters’ entire lives (in roman print) is told in a single day, signaled by the rising and setting of the sun (described to the reader in italic print).

As the reader experiences the characters’ perceptions, external and familiar clues are meant to provide context. The images, usually common objects that suddenly appear strange to the perceiver – like the apple tree in the passage above – tend to recur throughout Woolf’s oeuvre (the collective body of work by an author). In a short autobiographical piece written late in her career, Woolf describes hearing of a suicide as a child by using the same apple-tree imagery she invokes in The Waves: “The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr. Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it… My body seemed paralyzed.”

Pamela J. Transue argues that the apple tree, with its silvered, dead-looking bark, serves as the objective correlative (an object that evokes emotion) for the horror of death. In both Woolf’s autobiography and in The Waves, the speaker is paralyzed and momentarily unable to pass the tree. The tree symbolizes death and mortality but the image also preserves the memory: Woolf, like Neville, the character who encounters the tree in The Waves, will use the image to recall the scene in order to come to terms with it. These “moments of being,” specific moments that are preserved and become a focal point for future memories, demonstrate the imagination’s power to create associations between the outside world and our inner consciousness.

Woolf’s novels can be difficult to work through, but, as I’ve often had to tell my students, with great challenge comes great reward.

There are three main types of tart crust: pâte brisée (“broken”), pâte sucrée (“sweet”), and pâte sablée (“sandy”). The crusts are differentiated by the method of incorporating the butter and the type of liquid used in the dough. This French apple tart uses a pâte sucrée dough, which is pressed into the tart pan and then “blind baked” (i.e. baked without the filling). To make the tart, an applesauce mixture is spread into the crust and slivers of apples – I used Braeburn – are layered on top in concentric circles to create the “rose” effect. Once the tart is baked, powdered sugar is sprinkled on the apples; the tart is then placed under the broiler in order to brown the edges of the apple-petals. When taken from the oven, an apricot (or in my case, peach rum) glaze is brushed over the apples to make the tart “shine.” The recipe I used can be found here, adapted from this.

I’m not going to lie: this tart is time consuming, and the rose-pattern requires patience and precision. But, as I’ve often had to tell myself, with great challenge comes great reward.

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Balzac and Boozy Brownies

Posted on May 29, 2012 by lwbookeater

“She would not, she said, disturb the cream on the pans full of milk from which butter was to be made.  The officer overcame this objection by undertaking to repay her amply for the wasted cream, and then tied up his horse at the door, and went inside the cottage.”

- Honoré de Balzac, The Country Doctor (1833)

French Playwright and novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was one of earliest developers of the literary style we now call Realism.  The term “realism” is difficult to define, but generally describes an artist’s attempt to render life as accurately as possible.  In the nineteenth century, an increased interest in science, the scientific method, and systematizing documentation contributed to the popularity and use of the realistic style in literature. Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are among the many writers whom are said to be indebted to Balzac’s literary experiments with realism.

Balzac is best known for La Comédie humaine (translated as “The Human Comedy,” the title was intended to invoke Dante’s Divine Comedy), a long series of novels and short stories that aimed to portray all aspects of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815: the first work of the series, Les Chouans, focuses on the French peasants who revolted against the Revolutionary government.  At Balzac’s death, 90 novels and novellas comprised the project, which included more than 2,100 characters that linked the works together by their recurrent appearance across multiple texts. Like Tolstoy and Proust, many of his works were serialized before they were published in novel form. Balzac left no territory undiscovered: while most of the works are set in Paris, the provinces also see generous representation, with long passages describing the settings being a characteristic feature of his work. Balzac’s contemporary readers were excited to read about his fictional worlds that often resembled a version of their own.  Balzac’s friends’ anecdotes about the writer’s relationship to his characters reveal that the author often had a difficult time separating his imaginary world with the real one and often referred to the lives of his fictional characters in casual conversation.  Not that these slips weren’t believable: in his stories, Balzac’s characters tend to be multifaceted and devoid of moral consciousness.  Essentially, they are realistically human.

In The Country Doctor, from which the passage above is excerpted, the story begins with a military commander named Genestas searching in the Grande Chartreuse Mountains for a doctor named Monsieur Benassis. He finds the physician practicing medicine and serving as mayor in a village called Voreppe: after an affair in Paris turned sour, the lovesick Benassis had decided to devote his life to serving a poor rural community.  As the story progresses, we learn that soon after his arrival, the doctor discovered a small colony of individuals affected by cretinism living with their families outside of the village, and decided that it was in the village’s best interests to have the “cretins” transferred to a distant asylum (now known as congenital hypothyroidism, cretinism is a thyroid condition caused by an iodine deficiency that slows or halts hormone production).  Benassis moves the other inhabitants of the community to a new location near the village and installs an irrigation system for them so that the can sustain themselves.  The soldier is moved by the doctor’s story and decides to leave his illegitimate son with him. At the novel’s end, Benassis has a stroke and dies, leaving readers with a complex moral tale of redemption and a questionable portrayal of government that seems to distrust democracy and herald the benefits of benevolent dictatorship.

Irish cream usually consists of cream and Irish whisky, often additionally flavored with coffee or mint: I used a coffee-based irish cream for this recipe.   It is usually served on its own over ice but is often mixed with more whiskey or bourbon to strengthen the alcohol content (although the liquor tends to be quite alcoholic on its own).  This week, I whipped up boozy cheesecake brownies using this recipe as my base but tripling the Irish cream called for in the cheesecake mix (due to the additional fluid, I also added an extra egg to the mix to maintain consistency).  The result?  An indulgent, moist, delicious, mudslide meets cheesecake meets brownie confection.  I’ve done my best to capture an accurate image, but I suspect that neither a picture nor a thousand words will do this dessert justice.

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Transforming the Ordinary

Posted on May 7, 2012 by lwbookeater

“The ice-cream was passed around with cake–gold and silver cake arranged on platters in alternate slices; it had been made and frozen during the afternoon back of the kitchen by two black women, under the supervision of Victor. It was pronounced a great success–excellent if it had only contained a little less vanilla or a little more sugar, if it had been frozen a degree harder, and if the salt might have been kept out of portions of it.”

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening chronicles Edna Pontellier’s struggle to understand and conform to idealized notions of femininity, sexuality, and motherhood in the American South at the turn of the century.  Edna’s discontent with her pampered life peaks during a summer vacation on Grand Isle (a small island off of the Louisiana coastline), culminating in an affair and the abandonment of her family.  Chopin’s novel was thoroughly condemned following its publication: critics denounced it as vulgar and immoral, a disappointing new work from a well-established and respected writer.  Well versed in praise for the Chopin’s descriptive language, vibrant characters, and realistic depiction of the Creole community, critics were shocked by Edna’s illicit behavior and subsequent suicide and appalled by Chopin’s failure to condemn her protagonist’s infidelity and social dissent.

I know, I know: vanilla rich chocolate chip cookies hardly qualify as haute cuisine.  It is, however, the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (i.e. the end of the fall semester) and I’ve found that nothing expresses my appreciation for the efforts of the first year writing students I work with quite like a batch of homemade cookies.  These cookies–made with four whole teaspoons of vanilla!–didn’t disappoint: between my students, officemates, and husband, I wasn’t given much of a chance to test their shelf life.  I substituted chocolate chunks for the chips called for and refrigerated the dough overnight before baking (a trick I picked up from the New York Times version of Jacques Torres’ infamous cookies), but otherwise followed the recipe exactly.

I’ve brought treats to my classes on the last day of the semester since I first began teaching five years ago: it seems like such a small, harmless gesture of my appreciation.  However, the topic of bringing baked goods to students served as a point of controversy when it came up in conversation during a weekend outing with some of my colleagues a few months ago.  The discussion had turned to the experience of women vs. men in academia: it was suggested, without much contest, that women in academia–both as students and as educators–often work twice as hard to earn the same amount of respect as their male counterparts. One of the most obvious manifestations of this double standard, we all agreed, occurs in our classrooms; every educator at the table could name at least one student in each of their courses who clearly struggled with taking direction from, and giving respect to, a smart, confident female. Students complain to, commiserate with, and confide in female instructors in ways many of our male colleagues rarely experience. The actions that perpetuate these differences in treatment, however, were up for debate: “there’s no doubt that the dynamics are different and, for many reasons, that’s not fair,” said a male colleague, gently setting his drink on the table, “but I’ve also never brought my students a plate of cupcakes.”

I have to admit, he may have a point: I’ve been known to complain about students who treat me more like their mother than their instructor, and yet I bring them fresh baked cookies, a very personal and genuine token of affection that is often construed as “maternal.” In a similar vein, concerned friends and mentors have told me that the nature (i.e. the fact that I write for a popular audience rather than an academic one) and subject matter (food and literature studies are generally considered “scholarship-lite”) of Novelbite may compromise my reputation as a serious academic.  Every time I bake and blog, these conversations enter my mind, although it has yet to stop me from doing either.  When I bake for students, it’s my small way of letting them know how much I enjoy and appreciate their contribution – as writers and as really neat people – to the class.  When I blog for Novelbite, it’s my small way of writing for and sharing my interests with an audience that extends beyond the VERY small circle of people who read my scholarly work.

At any rate, blogging and baked goods provide a tiny bit of respite from a world that keeps calling for a little less vanilla, a little more sugar, a little less salt, and….

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Cake Expectations

Posted on April 21, 2012 by lwbookeater

“`Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr Pip?’ And she looked up from her book, and said, `Yes.’ She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812 – 1870) was one of England’s most popular and prolific novelists during the Victorian period and is still widely read and appreciated by contemporary audiences.  Like Tolstoy and Joyce, many of Dickens’ most iconic works of fiction were published as serials (or “installments”) in popular magazines and journals before they were published in novel form.  Serialized tales tend to be melodramatic and usually end with a dramatic cliffhanger that was meant to prompt readers to buy the next issue.  Dickens created some of the most beloved novels and characters in English literature.  His aptitude for realistic prose meant that readers were given highly detailed depictions of characters and their settings, which Dickens often used to underscore elements of society that he found particularly unjust.

Great Expectations is the story of a precocious orphan named Pip.  At the beginning of the novel, we learn that he lives with his cruel older sister Georgiana (called “Mrs. Joe” throughout most of the novel) and her sympathetic husband, Joe Gargery.  Pip soon encounters an escaped convict named Abel Magwitch and helps him against his will. Magwitch is recaptured and Pip is recruited to visit the home of the elderly Miss Havisham, where he soon falls in love with her aloof ward, Estella.  Pip receives a “proper” education funded by an anonymous benefactor, and quickly takes on the snobbish manners of the upper class.  As he matures into adulthood, he learns that Magwitch is his benefactor, devastating the “great expectations” he has for himself.  A series of shocking revelations lead us through Pip’s fall from grace and reestablished success through hard work and (perhaps, although the novel is somewhat ambiguous about the matter) personal maturation.

In Great Expectations, food is depicted as a means of manipulation and as a source of compassion. Magwitch threatens Pip in order to secure some food.  Pip is called a piglet in front of the Christmas dinner ham; Joe is unable to protect the boy from the attack, but he offers Pip consolation in the form of more gravy.   Aside from the illustrious depictions of the food itself (remember, we have Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to thank for our nostalgic associations of certain foods with the holiday), the manner in which food is consumed by various characters is also of utmost concern.  Mr. Herbert corrects Pip’s table manners, an action that symbolizes the boy’s integration into a new social class; this scene will be recalled later when Joe visits for lunch, his coarse table manners embarrassing Pip.  Subsequently, Pip reacts to the convicts Magwitch’s eating: “he ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were uncouth, noisy and greed.”  Scenes of eating give us insight to the issues of hunger and social class that remained central to Dickens’ concerns about British society.

Of all the food references we can find across the lot of Dickens’ novels, orange flower water might seem to be an odd choice to pluck out for a Novelbite post.  Orange flower water is distilled water laced with the essence (i.e. extract or concentrate) of fresh bitter orange blossoms.  Popular for desserts in Mexico and France and for flavoring water in the Middle East, it’s rare to see it used in the United States, so when I saw a recipe for orange flower water cake here, adapted from this,  I knew I had to try it.   I know it seems like I praise every recipe I make (although Novelbite’s Facebook friends are privy to my failures), but this cake really is worth the effort of securing some orange flower water.  At first I only dusted the cake with powdered sugar and found it to be a bit dry, but later in the evening I soaked it with the recommended glaze: if you like citrus flavors, this cake is really something special.

Now I feel pressured to create a cliffhanger!  Hmm.  Well, next week’s Novelbite post will focus on… brownies!  Who can resist a brownies?  (Can you believe that there are all sorts of brownie references in classic literature?  Really!)

 

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Escapism and Ginger Scones

Posted on February 12, 2012 by lwbookeater

“Annoying girl, be joyous as of old during the five minutes of the day when you are anything to me, and for the rest of the time, so far as I am concerned, you may be as wretched as you list. Show some courage. I assure you he must be a very bad painter; only the other day I saw him looking longingly into the window of a cheap Italian restaurant, and in the end he had to crush down his aspirations with two penny scones.”

- J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird (1901)

It is in James Matthew Barrie’s The Little White Bird that we are first introduced to Peter Pan. The novel is told from the first-person perspective of Captain W—-, a wealthy, retired military officer who closely observes a lower class family in London.  From his study, he watches Mary A—- (the “annoying girl” referenced in the passage above), as she is courted by a destitute young painter.  The young couple marries and Mary A—- has a child, named David, all under the watchful eye of the cantankerous Captain W—-, who begins to anonymously assist the couple. The captain grows to love the boy, and Mary A—- eventually discovers the old man’s scheme. A significant section of the novel – including the chapters that recount the mythology of Peter Pan – chronicles the time Captain W—- and David spend in London’s Kensington Gardens. After The Little White Bird was published in serial form, the Peter chapters were extracted, written for and performed in the theater, and later published as a children’s book entitled Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The play was an immediate hit, groundbreaking in that it required the construction of an elaborate apparatus to make the players fly, and appealing in that the boy who eludes the aging process escapes to a land ambivalent to the rigid morality of Victorian-era England.

The experiment with perspective in The Little White Bird is fascinating, and for some readers, unsettling.  Unmarried and childless, Captain W—- almost obsessively watches the world outside his window. While Mary approves of his interest in her child, the captain’s remarkable fondness for the little boy – coupled with accounts of Barrie’s own keen interest in children – can be discomforting for modern audiences, a sentiment no doubt fueled by the work of biographers who’ve a made a living on building support for Barrie’s pedophilia (having done a fair amount of research on Barrie myself, I think these accusations are hogwash, productions of a society hypersensitive to perceived “irregularities” and obsessed with creating boundaries… but that’s just me). Also notable are the self-referential elements of Barrie’s novel; as the story is narrated, readers are made aware that Captain W—- is actually writing his tale down; in the book’s conclusion, he gives his manuscript to Mary.

During his lifetime, Barrie was a beloved and prolific novelist and playwright.  After marrying actress Mary Ansell in 1894, the couple often strolled through Kensington Park, and Barrie entertained the children playing there with stories of fairies and pirates.  It was at the park that Barrie would meet and befriend the Llewlyn Davies family, incorporating his experiences with the brood into his work.  Within years of meeting Barrie, Arthur and Sylvia Llewlyn Davies died of cancer, leaving their children – George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico – in the care of the author, who loved the boys as sons and was grief-stricken when George was killed during World War I and Michael drowned at Oxford. Ever dedicated to the care of children, Barrie willed any royalties from Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, England, which profited greatly from his gift until the copyright expired in 2007 and Peter Pan became part of the public domain.

I’m not sure what a “penny scone” is, but based on the attitude displayed toward the confection in the passage above, I imagine it’s a fairly unsavory little biscuit.  Well, okay, scones are not biscuits; the scone is a quick bread believed to be Scottish in origin and closely related to bannock, a skillet-cooked flatbread. In her book Biscuits and Scones, Elizabeth Alston argues that American biscuits are a variant of the English scone: unable to easily access butter and eggs in America, early British colonists substituted lard with a slightly different but still palatable result.  These ginger pecan scones are a far cry from the American biscuit, and even, I’d guess, the penny scone: wonderfully dense and moist on the inside, crispy on the outside, spiced with three kinds of ginger (crushed, grated, and crystallized), and slightly crunchy from the nuts, this recipe – found here – is a keeper.

By the way, the jury is still out on why 19th century authors dashed (e.g. Captain W—-) their character’s names.  Some believe the authors had a real person in mind and dashed the name for propriety’s sake.  Others think that the authors wanted their readers to fill in the name for themselves, thus making the narrative more personal for the reader.  Another theory suggests that the social and political attacks inherent in most literature were safer to make when unclearly directed.  If you know of other reasons, please let me know!

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Old Favorites: Alcott and Biscotti

Posted on December 21, 2011 by lwbookeater

“Beyond sat a pair of humble lovers, artlessly holding each other by the hand, a somber spinster eating peppermints out of a paper bag, and an old gentleman taking his preparatory nap behind a yellow bandanna. On her right, her only neighbor was a studious looking lad absorbed in a newspaper.”

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)

I don’t personally know any academics who study Louisa May Alcott.  I mean, I’m sure they exist, but I’ve never met one.  I’ve also never seen an Alcott novel on a standard undergraduate American literature survey syllabus: she wasn’t covered in any of the courses I took.  In the shadow of her contemporaries (e.g. Hawthorn, Melville, Poe, Twain, James), Alcott’s sensational stores and domestic novels often escape serious scholarly notice, maligned for being light on substance and overwrought with stuffy morality (though it’s certainly worth arguing that the novel works to subvert those strictures by highlighting the repression endured by women in nineteenth century).

At any rate, Alcott’s first published novel, Little Women; Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (originally published in two parts, the second called Good Wives) met immediate popular success and is now one of the bestselling books of all time.   I poured through Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys when I was in my teens; never had I until then – and not since, perhaps – identified with a literary heroine as much as I did with Jo March, the sharp-tongued, quick-tempered, second-to-oldest of the March sisters.  I gaped in horror when Amy threw Jo’s manuscript in the fire, nodded with approval when she cast off Laurie’s affections, and felt a sense of genuine triumph when the bound copy of her first novel arrived at the March family home.  My academic brain wants to pick apart the class and gender dynamics that play out in the novel (particularly the multiples scenes of humiliation and feelings of resentment experienced by the girls, the consideration of taste and value, and… I’ll stop).  My reader heart thumps nostalgically and wonders if after graduate school I’ll regain the ability to simply fall in love with a story and its characters.

Jo is said to be based on Alcott herself; Meg, Beth, and Amy are supposedly loose models of the author’s own sisters.  The March home is a literary replica of Alcott’s family home in Concord, Massachusetts.   Amos Alcott, Louisa May’s father, was a teacher, abolitionist, and member of the Transcendental Club, roles that put his young daughter in frequent contact with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.  Later in life, Louisa May advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage; she became the first woman to register to vote in Concord.   The facts of her death are of some dispute, the favorite version being that she contacted typhoid fever while serving as a nurse during the American Civil War and died from the treatment (large doses of a compound that contained mercury).  Recent biographies dispute these claims and suggest that the red-cheeked portraits taken in her last years belie the symptoms of lupus.

Little Women opens on the eve of Christmas in the March household; indeed, the season is in full swing in our own.  We would have worked our way through a century of literature if I had posted about all the treats coming out of our kitchen.  I had to share this recipe, though: while not the prettiest dessert I’ve made, it may be one of the most delicious.  I used David Lebovitz’ Chocolate Biscotti Recipe but switched out the almonds and almond extract for white-chocolate peppermint candy and peppermint extract, and drizzled the biscotti with melted peppermint chocolate rather than spreading them with Lebovitz’ ganache (I’m sure the original recipe is amazing, but I just love the combination of chocolate and peppermint around the holidays).  I wrote about biscotti more extensively in this post, but today I’ll merely echo Lebovitz’ instance that “since biscotti refers to being twice-baked in Italian, you can’t have biscotti unless they are, indeed-twice baked.”  Biscotti are meant to be crunchy and the appropriate texture requires them to be baked in a log, cut, and then re-baked to dry.

Happy holidays, Novelbite readers!  Thank you for following, commenting, and be so overwhelmingly supportive.  I look forward to toasting and posting in the new year!

 

 

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Pomegranates and Poe

Posted on November 21, 2011 by lwbookeater

“‘Sinbad went on in this manner, with his narrative — ‘I thanked the man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very much at home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the ocean; although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the world, by no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we went — so to say — either up hill or down hill all the time.’’’

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809.  After his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, Poe moved in with Francis and John Allan, the latter a successful merchant who dealt in tobacco, grain, spice, and slaves.  Poe’s writing career developed slowly: as a young man, he enrolled at the University of Virginia to study language and poetry but left after one semester.  He entered West Point as an officer’s cadet, quickly failed out, and began writing for a number of small periodicals and literary journals.  In 1827, he anonymously published a collection of poems in the Baltimore North American, the same year he self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems.

In 1835, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm: she died of tuberculosis two years after “The Raven” became an immediate success in 1845.  1850 saw the publication of  “A Thousand and Two Nights,” a satire of the popular collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales called Arabian Nights, also known as The Thousand-and-One Nights.   The original story features a jealous king who sentences his wives to death the day after their weddings.  Aware of the king’s intentions, his latest wife, Scheherazade, begins to tell the king a story on the night of their marriage, compelling him to postpone her death until the next day so that she can finish the tale. Scheherazade continues to tell her tales for 1001 nights – although some editions contain only a few hundred tales and other contain far more than the title suggests – and thus evades her own death.

In Poe’s version, the narrator has discovered a long-lost book, entitled Tellmenow Isitsoornot, that depicts the “real” story of Scheherazade.  In this version, the young wife becomes overconfident in her storytelling abilities.  On the thousand and second night, she spins a fantastic new tale featuring Sinbad, a favorite protagonist described in the original set of stories. Sinbad travels to foreign lands and encounters scores of exotic beasts; as each episode becomes more extraordinary, the king becomes less able to suspend his disbelief, and the next morning, he orders Scheherazade to death.  The irony of Poe’s story is found in the footnotes, where we learn that the wonders Sinbad encounters in his travels are all things and places that actually exist: petrified forests, plants that take their nourishment directly from the air, and women with large humps attached to their backsides (i.e. bustles) were all strange but real phenomenon that existed in Poe’s day. As Poe notes in the “old saying” that serves as the epigraph of the story, “[t]ruth is stranger than fiction.”

Pomegranates, mentioned in Poe’s story and featured in today’s recipe, were first cultivated in the Middle East, quickly spreading into China and Mediterranean (the city of Granada in southern Spain was named for them). The fruits have been depicted in art and literature for almost two thousand years and appear in nearly all of the major traditional religious doctrines. In Greek mythology, when the goddess Persephone eats forbidden pomegranate seeds, Hades sentences her to spend a portion of each year in the Underworld; Demeter, goddess of the harvest and Persephone’s mother, refuses to let anything grow in her daughter’s absence and thus, creates the seasons. Pomegranates are mentioned in the Koran as one of the gifts of Allah, and in the Jewish faith, the 613 seeds of the fruit are said to represent the 613 commandments of the Torah (although the actual amount of seeds per fruits varies between 200-1200). In Christian doctrine, some believe that Eve was tempted with a pomegranate – rather than an apple – in the Garden of Eden. The pomegranate often appears in literature as a symbol of birth, fertility, and royalty (the calyx of the pomegranate even resembles a serrated crown).  Pomegranate fruits are delicious, fun to eat, and ridiculously expensive unless you’re fortunate enough to have trees growing in your backyard (and living in the desert, many of my friends and neighbors do).

It has been almost a month since I’ve published a post, and when I finally return, I bring you this somewhat unappetizing-looking pomegranate sheet cake with lime glaze.  I followed the recipe exactly, so I’m not sure why the glaze in the recipe’s photo is so pretty and pale, while mine looks like a thick layer of Pepto-Bismol.  Please don’t let the color keep you from trying out the cake recipe, though: while the glaze completely missed the mark in both presentation and flavor, the cake itself was incredible.  My husband and I both agreed that it was maybe one of the best cakes we’ve ever tasted: fruity, moist, and not so sweet that it couldn’t be eaten for breakfast (and, believe me, we ate it for breakfast).

Posts should soon be appearing more regularly: my doctoral exams have been passed (!) and the fall semester is drawing quickly to a close.  Hopefully my baking skills – which appear to have gotten a bit rusty – will warm back up in time for the holiday season.  Until next time (if I’m lucky)…

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Thoreau vs. Pita Bread

Posted on November 2, 2011 by lwbookeater

“Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread… this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable- for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process- and I have gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Massachusetts-born author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau published his book Walden; or Life in the Woods in 1854.  A decade earlier, Thoreau spent two years living in a cabin he’d built in Walden Pond, a wooded area owned by fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson: his aim, he writes, was “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  Across the book’s eighteen chapters, Thoreau discusses nature, humanity, and divinity, advocating for a life of solitude and simplicity.   The title of “Economy,” the chapter from which the above passage is taken, is not meant to invoke the sense of the word that many of us, especially in the past three years, are familiar with.  Instead, as Thoreau tells us, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”  Seeking and embracing spiritual and intellectual growth, he argues, leaves us far richer than any monetary gains.

As shown in the passage, leaven (and all of its religious and historical symbolism) is taken to task in “Economy.” The term “leaven” refers to any one of a number of substances (e.g. yeast or baking powder) that create gas bubbles in a dough or batter, causing the final product to rise and soften. The process is based on fermentation, which biologically changes the chemistry of the dough as the yeast works to reproduce and consume carbohydrates in the flour.  Unleavened bread – the kind Thoreau advises we eat – generally consist mainly of flour, water, and salt (although Thoreau also argues that salt is not essential for man to thrive).  Unleavened flatbread holds special religious significance in Judaism and Christianity; Jewish people consume unleavened breads such as matzoh during Passover, and unleavened bread is usually used in the Western Christian rite of celebrating the Eucharist.

 The truth: pita bread is not unleavened bread, because a small amount of yeast is required to create the pocket in the pita (a process aided by steam, which puffs up the dough until it cools and then flattens, leaving a pocket in the middle).  Pita are remarkably easy and incredibly rewarding to make: essentially, you dump the ingredients in a bowl, knead, let rise, break into 8 balls and roll out, let rise again, and then toss the disks into an incredibly hot oven and watch as they “puff” into little orbs of bread.  The second truth to reveal here is that while the process is amazingly easy it took me a few tries to get it right.  After waiting two hours for the dough to ready, I threw my first batch in the oven and watched them become nothing more than dense, burnt-yet-doughy little flatbreads, a failure that I matter-of-factly blamed on the large crack that recently appeared in my old wooden rolling-pin (really, the dough was just too wet).

Four hours later, brand new pin at hand, eight little pita came out of the oven, puffed and prepared to slowly deflate.   The recipe I used can be found here.

You must make pita!  They are wonderful!  We snacked on them straight out of the oven with a fragrant homemade garlic rosemary hummus, filled them sandwich-style at dinner, and then salted, baked and ate them as chips after a late night round of Scrabble and wine.  I offer my apologies to Mr. Thoreau for choosing to include a bit of yeast in my flatbread.  His sentiments are by no means lost on me, but today it was a worthy indulgence.

More on leaven from Walden: “Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable to omit it.”

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Socrates and Spicy Shortbread

Posted on October 28, 2011 by lwbookeater

“…of course they must have a relish-salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.”

- Plato, The Republic

The classical Greek philosopher Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) did not write his own philosophical texts.  Our knowledge his life and philosophy is given to us through records made by his students and contemporaries: the most notable come from Plato (424 BC – 347 BC) and Xenophon, his pupils (this, of course, complicates the matter of knowing if we’re reading Socrates’ philosophies or his student’s idealized versions). Plato’s Republic grapples with issues of justice, injustice, the ideal city-state, the soul, and the nature of forms.  It is presented as a dialog between Socrates, Glaucon (Plato’s half-brother), Thrasymachus (a ‘Sophist’), and a host of other minor figures.  In “Book II” of the Republic, Socrates’ puts forth his conception of the ideal republic; Glaucon and Adeimantus challenge his configuration, leading to the design of the city-state discussed throughout the rest of the Republic.

In his first model of the ideal republic, Socrates begins with the premise that the State arises “out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants… and many persons are needed to supply them.”  The citizens work as farmers, carpenters, shepherds, and merchants, but the city has no need for soldiers or guardians: having met the basic needs of its people, the city embodies justice.  This conception of justice undermines Glaucon’s early claim that humans are inherently rapacious and competitive individuals.  Socrates presents justice as based in our nature, rather than “the artificial outcome of an arbitrary contract.”

Glaucon argues that because the first city lacks any luxuries, it is better fit for pigs than people.  Socrates submits to Glaucon’s claim, and formulates a “State with fever heat,” full of “dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes,” and inhabited by musicians, artists, actors and poets.  The members of this city eat meat and drink heartily, thus, they need more land to raise their cattle and doctors to address their health concerns: competition and professionalization develop. For Glaucon, this demonstrates that justice is a contract made necessary by competition: “people value [justice] not because it is a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity.”

While it may seem as though Glaucon has bested Socrates in this discussion, Socrates has set up an important basis for his theory of the tripartite soul, that is, the soul made up of three parts: the appetitive, the rational, and the spirited.  The luxurious city provides the “irrational appetite” of the soul with objects to desire; the rational part of the soul resists those objects.  The spirited part of the soul is responsible for the anger that is felt when the appetite is indulged: essentially, reason and spirit govern the appetite.  Desire for luxury allows for balance, and
 the balanced soul rejects acts of injustice (e.g. robbery, betrayal, adultery, and impiety).  Hence, justice is in our nature: it is grounded in the health and perfection of soul.

Or at least, I think that’s what the Republic is getting at: I’m no classical Greek scholar.  Furthermore, even though I’ve used the pea reference for this week’s post, peas don’t show up in many translations of Plato’s text: in many versions the “pea” is a chickpea, in some versions it’s a bean, and sometimes it doesn’t show up at all.  For my purposes, the pea is a pea, and it’s not just any pea: it’s a wasabi pea.  Okay, so there’s no way that Plato’s pea was a wasabi pea, but I have been obsessed with the idea of mixing wasabi and chocolate for a while now, and given that there aren’t too many peas in literature (at least to my knowledge), I’m opting to take liberties with the text.

Wasabi is Japanese horseradish.  The root of the wasabi plant is grated into dishes or made into a paste.  Wasabi is SPICY; when eating wasabi, most people feel a burning sensation in their nose, rather than in their mouth or the back of their throat (the kind of burn associated with chilies).  I used this chocolate shortbread cookie recipe as a base, added a heaping teaspoon of wasabi paste to the batter, dipped the baked cookies into melted bittersweet chocolate, and then dusted the flowers with crushed wasabi peas.  I’m not going to lie: these were pretty darn good, primarily because that shortbread recipe is amazing on its own.  I would definitely make the wasabi version again but amp up the wasabi by another teaspoon and find a way to work it into the chocolate dip, too.  This batch was justbarely spicy: my nose wasn’t tingling, and what fun is wasabi anything without the nose tingle?

Healthy appetite?  Check.  Healthy spirit?  *Cough*  Check.  Healthy sense of reason? Hmm…

I’m gonna go steal the last cookie.

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Shaw, Chocolate, and Hard Crack

Posted on October 18, 2011 by lwbookeater

“Rule No. 17 forbade the students to enter the kitchen, or in any way to disturb the servants in the discharge of their duties. Agatha broke it because she was fond of making toffee, of eating it, of a good fire, of doing any forbidden thing, and of the admiration with which the servants listened to her ventriloquial and musical feats. Gertrude accompanied her because she too liked toffee, and because she plumed herself on her condescension to her inferiors.”

- George Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist (1887)

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish-born playwright, literary critic, musician, novelist, essayist, journalist, orator, social advocate, and founder the London School of Economics.  He also has the unique distinction of being awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (while the committee commended his work as, “marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty,” Shaw wanted to refuse the Nobel and only accepted after bring prodded by his wife) and an Oscar, awarded for writing the screenplay for the non-musical version of Pygmalion.   He worked adamantly with the Fabian Society to advance his socialist beliefs with the aim of transforming England’s political and social system through progressive legislation and mass education.  Of his purpose and conviction, Shaw famously said, “some men see things as they are and say why… I dream things that never were and say why not.”

In the late 1880s, a young Shaw wrote a string of unsuccessful novels, including An Unsocial Socialist. The weakly plotted tale follows a wealthy gentleman who disguises himself as a laborer – assuming a set of bawdry mannerisms that he associates with the working class – in order to hide from his overly sentimental and affectionate wife. Leaving his wife, he claims, will grant him the freedom to take up the socialist cause, but the closest he comes to acting for that cause is to break down his neighbor’s park wall in order to test the question of right of way.  When not in disguise as a laborer, Sidney – the gentleman’s real name – eloquently and profoundly contests the abuses of his “natural” class (but, of course, he does this over wine and walnuts at the table of aristocrats). Sidney becomes increasingly vile: his conviction for human good amounts to endless ranting about humanity’s degeneration, and he remains unmoved even at the deathbed of his deserted wife.  The novel is often read as a satire of socialism, but I believe it more adequately serves to critique any political or “moral” agenda that lacks conviction and the effort to embrace its own objectives.

I know the literary food reference here is to toffee, but I’m going to lose my own course a bit and draft a little ode to chocolate.  I took my doctoral exams this past week, and as you can imagine, the studying process one undergoes before this sort of thing is nothing short of intensely stressful.  While my husband, family, and friends deserve a standing ovation for their efforts to motivate me, I also need to give credit to another love that prevented me from shattering into a million emotionally charged pieces: chocolate.  We’re not talking about any small amount of chocolate here.  We’re talking, “hmmm, maybe I’ll just skip breakfast and eat my way through this gigantic organic milk chocolate truffle bar… and then follow dinner with a whole box of chocolate macarons” kind of chocolate.  Work my way through a Hersey bar as I teach this class and please ignore the small mountain of wrappers on my desk kind of chocolate. Don’t judge: I swear, something about chocolate genuinely makes me feel better.  But hey, Dr. Diane Ackerman notes that Montezuma’s court drank two thousand pitchers of chocolate a day (adding a pinch of their ancestor’s ground-up bones to cure dysentery); she also reminds us that famous gastronome and food writer Jean Brillat-Savarin describes “Spanish ladies of the New World” who were so addicted to the stuff, they had it served in church.

Ackerman (whose book, A Natural History of the Senses is some kind of divine) goes on to describe a psychopharmalogical study conducted on a group of “intense, thrill-seeking women” that found that virtually ALL of the women studied turned to chocolate in the throes of their “post-thrill depression.”  She also cites George Orwell’s novel, 1984, which depicts a world where sex is forbidden, chocolate tastes like “the smoke of a rubbish fire,” and Julie and Winston consume real “dark and shiny” chocolate before their high risk love-making.  My person list of literary references to food shows that chocolate stands a fair shot at earning the “most frequently cited” title.

I can’t promise that chocolate will solve all (or any) of our social ills, but this chocolate-covered pumpkin seed toffee recipe can certainly offer a bit of personal respite: I used dark chocolate instead of semisweet and will probably up the butter by a stick the next time I make it (more butter = creamier toffee). The pumpkin seeds came from our very own freshly carved pumpkins, which promptly shriveled up like rotten, shrunken heads after two days outside in our desert heat.  I highly recommend that you invest in a candy thermometer before you make this recipe: it’s useful for making the toffee (“hard crack” stage is usually reached at 300-310 degrees Fahrenheit) and to temper the chocolate (a process described here that takes some practice to get the hang of).

I hate to be self-indulgent in light of my discussion of Shaw, but please keep your fingers crossed for me! I’m a few weeks away from being either a step closer to finishing my doctorate or a step closer to starting a pastry career (lean your hopes to the former).

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A Cosmopolitan Cookie

Posted on October 4, 2011 by lwbookeater

“This applause of the ‘rebel’ air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years’ generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a ‘fad’ in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now–the war, you know.”

- O. Henry, “A Cosmopolite in a Café”

William Sydney Porter (1862 – 1910) began writing short stories for publication while serving time in a federal penitentiary.  Born and raised in North Carolina, Porter moved to Texas after earning his pharmacy license: he believed the state’s dry climate would protect him from illness, particularly the pneumonia that had claimed his mother’s life.   In Texas, he worked as a bank teller and founded a short story magazine called The Rolling Stone.  The magazine failed in less than a year, and Porter fled to Honduras after shortages found in the accounts he managed led to an official charge of embezzlement.  He returned to the United States after receiving news of his wife’s terminal illness and was swiftly sentenced to five years in a Ohio penitentiary.  In prison, he worked as the jail pharmacist and started writing short stories to submit to popular magazines.  He developed a habit of using pseudonyms – “O. Henry” signed his most successful pieces – and routed his works to publishers through friends out of a desire to conceal his past.  However, the location of Porter’s stories is undoubtedly influenced by his own life: his settings rarely deviate away from the American South, the West, Central America (Porter coined the phrase “banana republic”), prison, and New York City.

After Porter was released from jail in 1901 (two years early on account of good behavior), he moved to New York City.  He resided in some of the city’s most infamous literary haunts – including the Chelsea, Marty, and Caledonia hotels – and would sit in restaurants and lobbies for hours, talking to people, observing their interactions, and jotting down fictional stories about them in his notebooks. These observations and informal interviews greatly inspired Porter: his stories almost always focus on the lives of everyday people and seek to magnify exceptional moments in life.  Brief in length and conversational in tone, his pieces often rely on moments of coincidence and invariably end with a surprise twist (this type of conclusion is still referred to as the “O. Henry ending,” a reflection of his success with the formula).  The year 1906 saw the publication of stories like “A Cosmopolite in a Café” in his second full collection, The Four Million, a title that refers to the population of New York City at the turn of the century.  The collection starts, “not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were 
only ‘Four Hundred’ people in New York City who were really worth 
noticing.”  But Porter, like the census taker he goes on to describe, believed that every citizen counts.  Every citizen has a story worth telling.

I decided to take a bit of Southern inspiration from O. Henry’s mint reference and throw some lime into the mix: this shortbread recipe is one rum shot short of requiring a reference to Mojitos.  Shortbread cookies (often called “biscuits”) contain no leavening agent and usually consist of one part sugar, two parts butter, and three parts flour.  The term “short” refers to an old English term for the crumbly texture you find with most shortbread.  These lime mint shortbread cookies are good in a “serve with Earl Grey on a drizzly Tuesday morning” kind of way but aren’t rich enough to satisfy your sweet tooth’s most gnawing cravings.   These cookies are light, buttery, and lime-y, with just enough mint flavoring to cut the tartness from the citrus: they might not seem extraordinary, but they truly are worthy of notice.

 

 

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A Legendary Doughnut

Posted on September 27, 2011 by lwbookeater

“There was the doughty doughnut, the tender olykoek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy- pigglely, pretty much as I have enumerated them…”

- Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820)

Few of us escaped high school without reading the tale of Ichabod Crane, the lanky, shrewd schoolmaster who becomes enamored by Katrina Van Tassel and competes for her affection with the brawny Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt.  Of course, the character we remember most is the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian soldier who rides through the night searching for the head he’d lost to a rogue cannonball during the American Revolutionary War.  After a banquet at the Van Tassel’s (described in the passage above), Ichabod mysteriously disappears, leading the townspeople to speculate that he has encountered the horseman; Katrina is left to marry Brom Bones, who is said to look “exceedingly knowing” every time Ichabod’s disappearance is mentioned.

Washington Irving’s short story has been called a gothic tale, a political allegory, a satire of religion and American history, and an authentic piece of American folklore.  Rarely, though, is the story appreciated for its gastronomic depictions and metaphors.  The food imagery in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is incredible!  Ichabod, though slimmer than the birch rod he uses to strike his pupils, has an insatiable appetite and a spirit that “rose with eating, as some men’s do with drink.”  Looking upon the Van Tassel farm, he sees, “every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce.”  Katrina is described as “plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her fathers peaches” and “tempting as a morsel.”  Ichabod’s insatiable hunger is emphasized by his desire to devour everything he encounters.

In the Spring 2003 issue of Gastronomica, Frederick Kaufman considers the connection between food and Irving far more adequately and in-depth than I have here.  Kaufman suggests that Ichabod’s desire for food is rivaled only by the “fearful pleasure” he derives from ghost stories, and that even in his early career as a journalist, Irving’s figure of the American brain is often re-imagined as the American stomach.  Kaufman writes, “by the time [Irving] wrote ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ his recurrent descriptions, invocations, and metaphors of food had come to permeate the essence of his plots and characters.”  Kaufman argues that for Irving, the only process that matters in this literary world is the active, convulsing digestive process; America itself is a “vast, engulfing power, a grand, nationalist stomach which views the entire continent—if not the world—as its manifest dinner.”

Gulp.  That’s one loaded “doughty doughnut.”

Okay, let’s face it, these aren’t really doughnuts; they’re doughnut-shaped cupcakes or something. Have you ever had a fresh, homemade fried doughnut?  They are seriously the most delicious confection you will ever eat.  Unfortunately, they are also seriously no good for the waistline, and our household is taking a few weeks off from heavy sweets to work off our “Novelbutts.”  To make these “light” doughnuts, I used this wonderful baked doughnut recipe, substituted yogurt for the buttermilk powder and ginger for the nutmeg, added a half cup of shredded (yes, shredded) pear, and poured the batter into the doughnut pan.  I drizzled a caramel icing (recipe found here) over the cakes and finished them off with coarse sea salt (if you try them, do NOT leave off the salt… I promise, it puts them over the top).

Spiced Pear Doughnuts with Sea-Salted Caramel.  Ichabod, I believe, would approve.

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Karenina and Carmelitas

Posted on August 19, 2011 by lwbookeater

“And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.”

- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)

In 2004, I was working at one of those huge box bookstores when Oprah’s Book Club chose Anna Karenina as their next reading selection.  I was the clerk who rang up over 300 copies of the book on the day the book was “released” (with a shiny new “Oprah Seal of Approval”) in bookstores nationwide.  I was also there when, a week later, dozens of sheepish readers brought the book back to the store for a refund.  I doubt many readers would dispute the quality of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy’s novel is truly a masterpiece, evident even in the English translation, which I’m told pales in comparison to the original Russian prose.  So, what, you might wonder, was the problem?

I think that the length of Anna Karenina daunted Oprah’s readers.   In an age when people read the news through twitter posts and Amazon’s best sellers are “Kindle Singles,” the long novel stands little chance of holding a contemporary reader’s attention.  However, as 19th century literature fans know, novels from this period tend to be very long (American writer and critic Henry James once referred to Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels as “loose, baggy monsters”).  This, in many cases, can be attributed to the fact that many of these works of fiction were published as serials (or “installments”) in popular magazines and journals before they were published in full form. Serializing a novel had an economic benefit for the writer: the more chapters produced, the longer the magazine published the serial, and the more money all parties earned from the publications.  The first chapters of Anna Karenina were published in the Russian Herald in 1875; the full book form wasn’t published until 1878.

Originally considered scandalous because of its treatment of illicit affairs, suicide, and various social and political issues in 19th century Russia, Tolstoy’s novel also addresses many of the timeless themes of human existence: friendship, love, hate, passion, happiness, envy, compliance, liberty, gender, and religion.  As the passage above demonstrates, Tolstoy’s use of real events and believable details – like  children taking “shots” of milk and holding raspberries over the fire – lend credibility to the fictional events of his narrative. Levin, one of the primary characters in Anna Karenina, uses the children’s actions as metaphor for human behavior:

“And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.”

We can see, then, how literary food is used not only for symbolism, but also to achieve verisimilitude, the sense that something is realistic or resembles a truth.

These cookie bars were easy to throw together and really delivered on flavor. Carmelitas are crisp, crumbly layers of oats, brown sugar, and butter bonded by a rich, chewy center made of chocolate, pecans, and dulce de leche.  Popular in Latin America, dulce de leche is a thick caramel sauce made by caramelizing the sugar in sweetened milk.  The spread is not difficult to make at home – many cooks just boil an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk for a few hours – but it’s also relatively easy to come across the pre-made variety at a well-stocked supermarket.  The recipe I used can be found here.   I halved the ingredients and still had plenty to share with a room full of cohorts at a recent back-to-school training event.

If you ever take on Anna Karenina – or any long novel for that matter – don’t be ashamed to take it slow.  Read a few pages and then leave it for a few days.  Take a year (or two!) to dip in and out of it.  You’ll be like an original reader! As for LWbookeater, it’s a new semester at the Really Big University, and her doctoral exams are on the horizon: if she survives, something a little stronger than a shot of milk may be in order!

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A Quivering Inner Life

Posted on August 16, 2011 by lwbookeater

“Ah, there she is at last! what is it, Sonia, where have you been? It’s odd that even at your father’s funeral you should be so unpunctual. Rodion Romanovitch, make room for her beside you. That’s your place, Sonia . . . take what you like. Have some of the cold entrée with jelly, that’s the best.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1886)

Russian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a former army doctor. After his mother died in 1837, he entered the Army Engineering College in St. Petersburg.  He graduated and became a military engineer but soon resigned from his position to focus on writing.  In 1849, his allegiance to the socialist agenda led to his arrest; he was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in Siberia.  Dostoevsky spent four years doing hard labor, became a soldier, and eventually left the service to marry his first wife.  Between 1964 and 1965, he lost his wife and his brother, suffered from incapacitating depression, and lost most of his fortune to gambling debts. Two years later, he published Crime and Punishment, a fictional account of protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov’s crime and redemption.

Dostoyevsky, along with George Eliot, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac, and Leo Tolstoy, is often considered to be a “realist,” a term associated with the literary style that considers a wide range of social conditions and experiences from an objective perspective.  To achieve this objectivity, writers often use the point of view of the “omniscient narrator,” revealing the motivations, thoughts and experiences of characters while providing the reader with additional plot information.  In Crime and Punishment, the material is primarily presented through the point of view of Raskolnikov, although it occasionally switches to the viewpoint of other minor characters. While Dostoyevsky uses this realist technique in his novel, he also invokes his characters’ sense of consciousness and spirituality; this, I believe, makes him one of the first published writers to use psychological realism (i.e. considering and providing details about the inner lives of characters) in his novels. The personal philosophy that guides Dostoevsky’s technique is demonstrated in a 1849 letter to his brother: “Life is in ourselves and not in the external.”

 

The first culinary task I took on this week was peach butter; while I pulled a jelly reference from Dostoyevsky’s book, I could have easily used one of his many references to liquor (a few healthy shots of golden rum found their way into this batch).  Peach butter, like apple butter, contains no dairy, but its smooth, spreadable consistency emulates the texture of milk butter.  Fruit butters require hours of cooking over very low heat to concentrate the fruit; because of the fruit density, butters require less added sweetener than traditional jam.

I used the peach rum butter to make jam pinwheels.  These little cookies are ridiculously easy to make (hey, there’s no harm in cutting an amateur pastry-maker a break every now and then): basically, you just make a pate brisee (basic pie) dough, roll it out, cut it in squares, score the squares, dollop some fruit in the middle, and fold in the left-hand outside edges (I promise, I just made that sound much more difficult than it really is).  Bake in a hot oven for ten minutes, and voila!, you’ve got little peach rum-filled cookies that taste a bit like homemade peach Pop-Tarts.

Dostoevsky’s descriptions of food in his novels often parallel the psychological and spiritual constitution of his characters.

Frankly, I think a fruity, rum-laced state of being sounds pretty wonderful.

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