It didn’t go down without a fight, but in the end, I think I kicked high altitude’s ass. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Dear friends, I am still vacationing in beautiful uptown Snowballville, Colorado, being fed and watered and generally spoiled by this kind and excellent woman and her family, to a degree that I will be a right pain in the neck once I get home, and Lloyd will come over all pale and haunted, and will take to our bed, pressing cold compresses against his forehead and wondering if there is a glass of Shut the Hell Up big enough for me.
Of course I kid, but only a little. Lloyd, you have been warned.
All cheekiness aside, I am having a delightful time at Snow’s, even though I did spend yesterday afternoon in the grip of altitude sickness. I’m not sure whether it was caused by being 5,000 feet higher than I am in New York, being an additional 2,000 feet higher than that at Estes Park this weekend, being unused to drinking even small quantities at altitude, getting sunburned (albeit happily) at the Estes Park Wool Market, or feeling the aftereffects of a madcap weekend of woolgathering, giggling, storytelling, bonding, hot-tub-soaking and cooking breakfast and dinner for 16 people. I do know that I’m glad that it waited until after said madcap weekend was over, for I would have hated to eschew all that glorious company in favor of lying on the bathroom floor, sweating, feeling my head pound and my tummy roll over, and begging my maker to just kill me now, please. Instead, I was able to do all my lying-on-the-floor-et-cetera at Snow’s, where, once the worst of it was over, Snow and G and Gram plied me with fluids, analgesics and cartoons until I felt well enough to join them for dinner, and B helped me celebrate my return to the land of the living with a Wallace & Gromit film festival. I told you I was getting spoiled rotten.
One might wonder how I could claim to kick altitude’s ass when it so clearly kicked mine. It is a fair question, dear friends, and like so many questions I find myself asking, the answer is found in baking. Simply put, I walked into a situation that could have killed my reputation as a bakerina once and for all, and I walked out smiling.
Even if you know your way around a kitchen, it is a daunting prospect to cook for a large group if you don’t do it on a regular basis. It is an even more daunting prospect to cook for a large group when you do not have the safety net of a recipe, deciding at the last minute to leave your cookbooks at home, the better to avoid having to check baggage. And we move from the realm of “daunting prospect” to “just plain barking mad prospect” to cook for a large group, without recipes, at 7,000 feet above sea level, when you have never done so before. I still remember reading The Joy of Cooking as a kid, reading the Rombauers’ directions for how to prepare certain baked goods at high altitude, and deciding I should just skirt the whole issue by staying at sea level. I went to one of my favorite sources of baking information, started reading about baking powder ratios, and popped another Excedrin.
I should mention that all of this was racing through my mind before Snow and I even got to our cabin at Estes, where I discovered that the mostly-fully-equipped kitchen did not have measuring spoons or liquid measuring cups, although we did have dry measuring cups. I had already promised Snow and Margene that our menu would consist of scones for breakfast on Saturday morning, and shepherd’s pie, green salad and strawberry-peach pie for dinner on Saturday night. Of course I would not dream of letting my dear pals down. I would have to fly by the seat of my (comfy, roomy, wide-bottomed) pants and rely on my own good senses of sight, touch and taste to produce something good. I would not dwell overmuch on the possibility of failure, of presenting leaden, rock-hard scones and pie with the appearance of parchment and the texture of Bazooka bubblegum to a crowd of people who I was meeting for the first time, and who had traveled considerable distances to get here. I had nothing to fear here, nothing at all.
Note to Snow: Yes, I know I spent the entire weekend telling you that I was worried about the pie crust, and that my hands shook as I made the scones. Yes, I know that I was not nearly as phlegmatic as I sound here. Please stop laughing before you blow my cover.
Friday afternoon, as people began to arrive and the atmosphere became merrier and merrier, I decided to start the pie dough. Because I know better than to triple a two-crust pie recipe under even the best circumstances, I decided to make three batches, one right after the other. Flour, sugar, salt, mix, mix, mix: so far, so good. Butter was cut in until the telltale “coarse cornmeal with a few bigger butter flakes” texture was achieved. Egg yolks, cold water, stir, stir, stir. In general, baking books will tell you to use a light hand with mixing liquids into pie dough, to keep it from getting too tough. In my early pie-baking days, I took this advice way too seriously, and would underhydrate and undermix my doughs, resulting in crumbly messes that would shatter when I tried to roll them out. It was the great Vogue foodwriter Jeffrey Steingarten who codified this as the Nasty Gluten Theory, and who discovered that while you don’t want excess gluten, you do need at least some gluten to hold your finished crust together. Since I learned this, I have become a bit more fearless about adding liquid to pie dough, and about kneading it a little bit, just doing whatever it takes to hold that pie together.
It is a difficult thing to remain fearless when you add water to the dough, then more water, then more water, then even more water, only to see your dough remain a crumbly, powdery, stubborn mass. I added more water. kneaded a bit, noticed that the dough had gone from crumbly and powdery to very, very, very well-hydrated—and am I imagining things, or is the dough springing back a bit, the way you want it to spring for bread dough, but is absolutely anathema to pie crust? Yikes! Wrap that sucker up in plastic, shape it into a disk and get it in the fridge right now!
Dear friends, this happened three times, with every damn batch of pie crust. It happened again later that night, as I took all the dough from the fridge, rolled out three sheets of dough for the bottom crusts and three sheets which would be cut into lattices for the top crusts. I was not a happy bakerina. I had visions of all my new friends trying to cut themselves a slice of pie, only to have the pie plate ricochet off the knife and against the kitchen wall. I could see them now, thinking to themselves, “but I thought she was supposed to be a baker or something? She’s not a baker! She’s an idiot! I know cats who can make better pie than this!” I did not get a restful night’s sleep, and I was thankful that the other four people sharing our cabin were awake by 6 a.m., so I wouldn’t have to lie in bed for another hour or two, dreaming up disaster scenarios.
If it’s Saturday morning, it must be time for scones, and for a fresh round of nerves involving baking powder. I turned on the oven, assembled my mise en place, took a deep breath and reminded myself that generations of bakers turned out bread and cake without written recipes. You have spent your entire sentient life with your hands in dough. You feel it. You know it. I started much as I did with the pie dough: flour and salt into the bowl; just enough sugar to make it a little sweet, but not too much; baking powder—now, you know how much you usually use, and you know what it looks like in the bowl, so just put in about 3/4 of that, and you should be in the right range, but cross those fingers anyway; butter, and plenty of it; enough buttermilk to moisten it all through. Need a little more buttermilk? Glug—that’s enough. I floured the counter, patted out the dough, cut it into wedges, put it on the baking sheet, banged it into the oven, and sat at the oven door, peering through the window, waiting for the scones to rise and then collapse from what was surely too much baking powder, or to remain unrisen from what was surely too little baking powder.
Dear friends, they rose, but they did not collapse. They stayed put, they took on a little light color at the top and a beautiful deep gold color on the bottoms, they worked. With a little adjustment to the amount of buttermilk, the second batch worked even better, and the last batch was the gold standard, the perfect balance of ingredients, handling and timing. I would not have to serve hockey pucks to the knitterinas. We would have scones with butter and jam (including some truly gorgeous apricot-canteloupe jam made by Miriam). We would be well-fed for the trip to Wool Market. Life would be good. It was, too.
Of course, this startling display of competency did nothing to reassure me that the pies would turn out edible. It would take more fretting, more reassurance from Snow and Kristi that the pie crust scraps did not chew like bubblegum and were tasty to boot, the actual assembly (including the mixing of fruit and sugar and thickener, which is, truthfully, the most relaxing part of putting it all together) and baking of the pies, and the assurance of all at dinner that they really, really liked the pie, to convince me that maybe, just maybe, I could bake at altitude after all.
In hindsight, three hours of altitude sickness seems like a small price to pay for such deep satisfaction.
Note: If you are wondering how I could spend a weekend in the company of so many new friends, only to drop a few thousand words on nothing but my own personal baking neuroses, I promise that it’s not because I’m a loathsome solipsist (even though I’m sure plenty of you would confirm that I am, and I would thank you for it 
. It’s just that I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of people, but I did not have the foresight to unpack my notebook and get everybody’s URLs and email addresses. I am crossing my fingers that at least one of my traveling companions was more scrupulous about getting the list of attendees than I was, so that I may shamelessly crib from their notes and give proper shoutouts to everybody without accidentally leaving anybody out. Said proper shoutouts will probably occur upon my return to New York on Wednesday night. Until then, dear friends.