If you are thinking that tonight’s observations are a touch eccentric, you have Dream Company to thank for that. Dream Company (not its real name) is based in Vermont, and this afternoon two people from the company interviewed me over the phone for a job. Dream Company has a baking school, one that teaches both professional and avocational bakers, and they are looking for someone to teach some avocational classes, assist in the professional classes, write the curriculum for new classes and tweak the curriculum for the old ones. There will also be some writing required, as well as regular meetings with Dream Company’s mail-order catalog staff, to determine which of the new products can be used successfully in class. I am on a shortlist, hoping that my lack of provable foodwriting skills and teaching experience will be compensated by the fact that I have taken just about every professional class they offer, that I live on their message board (or at least I did before I started PTMYB), and that I have been buying their flour and baking equipment on a nearly bi-weekly basis for 10 years.
I am trying, really trying, to maintain an aura of Zenlike detachment over this adventure, trying not to remember how I fell in love with Vermont and New Hampshire from the moment I watched the sun rise from my hotel room last October, looking at how beautiful it was in the daylight. I try not to think of the pleasure I took in finding a place to have a nice breakfast and a really damn fine cup of coffee, and in discovering the co-op supermarket next to my hotel, which rivals the best supermarket, the best health food store and the best gourmet market here in New York. I don’t remind myself that liquor stores in New Hampshire are open on Sunday. I try to find neither good nor bad in my quoting a salary two-thirds of my current one when they asked for a salary requirement, simply because I knew it was the only way to keep myself in the running. Most of all, I try to not think of this as anything but an option, one of many before me, just an option like the Egg Board Fellowship in Arkansas that I now know is not mine to have, or like another job here in New York, another packaging desk monkey job, only with a better salary and bonus plan, for which I interviewed in September but which may not become available until January, if it becomes available at all. These are options, not heartbreakers; no job, no fellowship, should be enough to break one’s heart, even though they may make that heart race like a hummingbird. I will not think of what it would feel like to get up and teach people to bake all day long, and to write about it, lest that little star of hope get snatched away the second I reach for it, much as Mary Fisher’s was snatched away by Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.
I will have at least 2 1/2 weeks not to think of this, as I have been told that the shortlist won’t even be whittled down until after the Christmas holidays. On the phone I said oh, that’s fine, I’ll be in Philadelphia over Christmas, so I can wait until after January 1, even though on the inside I was hollering are you kidding? Don’t you know that I have all the patience of a toddler hopped up on high-fructose corn syrup? You know that I won’t be able to close my eyes and relax for the next two weeks, right? Right? Right? I mean, fine, I’ll talk to you sometime after Christmas.
After this conversation, which rendered me unfit for anything but staring into space for the last hour and 15 minutes of my day, there was nothing for me but to come home and bake off the test fruitcakes. As cakes go, it is a labor-intensive one: Measure the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, mace). Grind cashews fine and add them to dry ingredients. Chop some more cashews and pistachios. Peel a fresh pear and add it to the dried fruit and bourbon, which smells so wonderful, like a birthday present. Beat butter and sugar together, add eggs one at a time, add flour and nuts alternately with sour cream, add lemon juice and vanilla, fold in cashews and pistachios and fruit and mix it all together and pour it into loaf pans and stick them in a 300-degree oven for an hour and 45 minutes, until you have a pair of perfect, golden, beautiful fruitcakes and a bowl for licking. Even though I felt worn out and broody when I got home, I worked happily on this cake, thinking that I could do this every night, following the rhythms I know so well, creaming butter and sugar, alternating dry and liquid, knowing that when I can smell the cake baking, it’s about 3/4 of the way done.
Dear friends, please disregard all of the above. It’s a good thing these are test cakes, because when I went to the kitchen to turn the cakes out of the tins, what should I spy with my little eye but my chopped cashews and pistachios, which never made it into the cake. They are still sitting in the Cuisinart. When I realized this, I smacked my head on the fridge in frustration. It was supposed to be a broad comic gesture, and it would have been if I had not caught my forehead on the corner of the fridge. I look like Gorbachev now. Thank you for not telling Dream Company.