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There will be words to accompany these pictures, dear friends, just as soon as I get my blogging sea legs back.  I wonder if maybe eating a bialy will help me get my strength back.  In the meantime, I’ve made a whole photodocumentary of the process. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and, uh, just try to stay awake.

It might be too late for this one, but when the next head cold comes, I will be ready for it.

Of course, I say this based on an assumption that one can plan one’s own colds.  If that were the case, I think I could have picked a better time than six days before Christmas to catch one.  Then again, when is the right time to catch a cold?  At LuthorCorp you could, and probably still can, hear the same note with carillon-like consistency:  “I canNOT afford to get sick now.  I have too much going on,” we all said, sniffling at our desks.  We would all encourage the sick one to go home, mostly out of genuine concern for his/her health, but also out of concern for Good Old Number One ("I will be so pissed if I catch your cold"), and yet, when it was our turn to get sick, there we were, croaking into our phones and going through a box of tissues every six hours.  Really, I should consider myself lucky that the viral cloud didn’t descend on me until after LuthorCorp gave me my walking papers—and yet, there’s still a stubborn noodgy part of me insisting that the time to catch cold would have been the week I was laid off, when I had the luxury of sitting at home in front of the teevee for a few days.  Now we are in Full Holiday Monty; I have more preserves to put up, a birthday cake to bake for Bunni’s birthday party (which commences fifteen short hours from now), new baby clothing to finish knitting for an expectant relative (whose daughter is due to arrive any second now—but surely that means I have time to crank out one more cotton baby kimono!), and the usual round of packing/wiping down surfaces/checking to make sure the apartment won’t catch on fire that precedes every trip to visit the parents for a few days.  This is not the time to go to bed in a pleasant antihistamine haze, only to have one’s eyes snap open at 2:30 in the morning, when the supposed 12-hour cold meds grind to a halt after only six hours, and yet, here I am, stuffed-up, quietly hyperactive in the way that one is when one is very tired but cannot sleep in a lying-down position, wondering if 5:30 a.m. is too early to whip eggs and sugar to a ribbon in the KitchenAid, and really, really hungry.

It’s my own damn fault, of course.  I stayed in the house on Thursday, and felt the better for it.  Had I stayed in yesterday, too, I might have been All Better by now.  But of course I had to run across town, picking up our train tickets at Penn Station, buying ribbons for the baby clothing in the Garment District, riding across town to Grand Central Market to pick up vanilla extract to replace the bottle I had just discovered empty in the pantry that morning (why, again, did I put an empty bottle of vanilla back in the pantry?), and then riding uptown to the Enforced Cultural Death March that is FedEx/Kinko’s, to photocopy and mail my severance paperwork back to LuthorCorp.  I have decided that the next time I wake up in the middle of the night and fear that time is passing too quickly, and that before I know it, I will be old and bent with weak and grizzled ears, I’m just going to leave the house and go directly to the first 24-hour Kinko’s I can find.  I wasn’t in Kinko’s for more than 45 minutes, but it felt for all the world like I was there for seven years.  Then again, it was probably best that I was busy, as the 21st of December is usually a tough day for me:  Not only is it the birthday of my late, still-much-missed grandfather, it is also the anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am 103, which was one of the worst days of my life, as I’d thought a good friend was on that flight.  (The relief I felt when I learned that she was not on the plane quickly gave way to dread and misery at the emerging details of both the last minutes of that flight, and of the poisonous conspiracy that engineered so much death and chaos.) Upon reflection, it’s good that I ran about like a maniac yesterday, even if I’m paying for it now.  And of course I’m leaving out the best bit:  I got to take a little rest in Bunni’s apartment, knitting baby kimonos while she baked spice cookies and generally fretted about whether everything would be ready for her party.  (It will be.) And I came home with gifts, specifically some pears that Bunni received in a fruit basket, but would not be eating, as she is not much of a pear fan.  Why, what a coincidence, I said.

Among the fabulous bits of birthday windfall I received this year was a book that really deserves a post of its own, The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham.  As I told a friend recently, Simon Hopkinson (who also deserves a post of his own) is one-third of the triumverate of British Food Writers (Male) on Whom I Have a Serious Crush, the other two being Nigel Slater and Kevin Gould.  In a perfect world, he would be all over Food Network, but considering that he has spent his adult life either cooking professionally or writing professionally about cooking, I should probably let the man have a little rest.  He is my favorite sort of writer and thinker about food:  He has near-encyclopedic knowledge of ingredients and technique, he understands how flavors work with—and against—each other, he is a genius at establishing mood and context, he is enthusiastic about what he loves, and he is noisily (but elegantly) cantankerous about that which he does not.  If ever there were a writer whose books were stamped “Made Expressly for Bakerina,” Chef Hopkinson would be that writer.  Lindsey Bareham, who co-wrote The Prawn Cocktail Years and assisted Chef Hopkinson on his superb, influential Roast Chicken and Other Stories, is no slouch herself, having written a food column for the Sunday Telegraph, among others, as well as two books I adore, A Celebration of Soup and In Praise of the Potato.  (If I’m not careful, 2008 will turn into the year I write nothing but book reports about my favorite cookbooks.)

As I mentioned before, I stayed at home on Thursday, knitting baby clothes, torturing myself with the finest reality television basic cable has to offer, and paging through The Prawn Cocktail Years, an apologia for bygone foods of bygone restaurant genres, foods that are often reduced to culinary-joke status.  Chef Hopkinson and Ms. Bareham argue that these dishes deserve better than that, and that it is not the dishes themselves, but rather poor-quality ingredients and techniques, that are at fault.  Reading through their recipes, I’m inclined to agree.  It’s easy to make steak au poivre look and sound and taste good; it’s a trickier trick to do with Scotch eggs (a staple of British sandwich shops and greasy spoons, consisting of a hard-cooked egg surrounded by a pork meatball and deep-fried), but between the text and the accompanying photo, I feel the vague stirrings of desire to have one for breakfast—or would, if only I weren’t in the thick of the Holiday Eating Season.  The recipes pay tribute to long-lost restaurant genres such as hotel dining rooms of the 1950’s, gentlemen’s clubs, Expresso Bongo-era coffee bars, “Continental” restaurants and early trattorias, all with affection.  There are recipes for Coquilles St.-Jacques and Swedish meatballs, coq au vin and chili con carne, profiteroles and oranges in caramel—and, of course, there is Pears in Red Wine, the one that made me sit up straight in my chair.

Once upon a time, in this very space, I’d written that poached pears are easy to take for granted.  They’re easy to make; in fact, they’re often the first thing a novice pastry cook learns to make.  They are often a staple of diet menus, for people who really want the tiramisu but can’t have it, or won’t have it without guilt.  For some people, they evoke unpleasant memories of school cafeteria canned pears.  This is a shame, for poached pears can be really beautiful, and really delicious, depending on the poaching medium (water, red wine, white wine, cider) and spices you use.  Gale Gand has a recipe in Butter Flour Sugar Eggs for pears poached three ways: one in white wine, one in red wine, one in a syrup laced with grenadine, resulting in the most luscious hues you’ve ever seen.  It looks beautiful, and I’m betting it tastes grand, but it will have to wait until I make the Pears in Red Wine from The Prawn Cocktail Years, which are flavored not only with red wine but also with a little creme de cassis, one of my favorite things in the world to drink, either on its own or in a kir royale.  I read this recipe while I was stuck at home on Thursday, bored out of my mind with chicken soup and toast, craving something sweet but finding nothing but ice cream, which made my head hurt just to look at it.  I drove myself to near-wildness, wishing I had pears on hand so that I could eat this dark, sweet, cold, splendiforous dessert.  When Bunni left a message on my voice mail, asking if I would be interested in taking some pears off her hands, I could have married her.

My mind is made up.  Next year, I’m going to buy pears at the market every blessed weekend.  Next year, when the head cold comes, I will be ready for it. 

Pears in Red Wine (from The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham, Michael Joseph, 2006)
serves 6 (theoretically)

When the pears are cooked, remove them with a slotted spoon and place them on their bottoms in a serving dish.  Add the creme de cassis to the poaching liquid and simmer until the whole mixture is reduced by about a third. The liquid will look syrupy at this point.  Pour the liquid over the pears and chill thoroughly.  Serve cold, with thick cream or creme fraiche, and with the wine sauce divided evenly among the servings (although if you wanted to save some of it to mix into yogurt, I wouldn’t dun you for this at all).

Edit: After I hit the publish button, I remembered that something else happened on Thursday, and that ‘mouse would never forgive me if I didn’t share the news.  My LSAT score came in on Thursday.  Despite all of my fears that I’d tanked it even worse this time around, my score was much, much better than last year’s score, which was marred by a bout of either flu or food poisoning the night before the test that kept my head in the toilet, my brain wide awake and my nerves shot.  I feel sheepish bandying around an actual score, but I will say that this year’s score puts me in the 84th percentile of test takers (as opposed to the 53rd percentile last year).  So I won’t get into a big-shot prestige law school, and I won’t be destined for some rock-star law firm, but unlike last year, this year the odds of going somewhere look much, much better.  And if they don’t...hey, I have a book to write.

Well, this morning the unemployed folk are fighting off the nasty cold virus that everyone in New York seems to be fighting.  I’ve a feeling, though, that once I get a little mushroom barley soup, and maybe a pierogi or two, in me, I will take back a little of the resistance that I lost yesterday, skipping around from Zabar’s (where I bought mason jars) to the post office (where I mailed most, but not all, of my Christmas presents [note to self:  prepare begging-of-forgiveness speech to everyone who will be getting their presents after Christmas]) to the confines of my own kitchen, where I hoisted the big copper kettle onto the hob and cranked out sixteen jars of paradise jelly (and there’s much, much more jelly to come):

Quinces in the pot.  I can’t begin to describe how good the apartment smelled while these were cooking.

Fruit in bag.

Apples and cranberries in the pot.  For this year’s jelly, I used roughly equal weights of Winesap and Pink Lady apples, with a couple of Gold Rushes thrown in.

More fruit in bags.  Turns out I had so much fruit in bags that I decided to experiment this year, and ran it all through the food mill.  It’s in the fridge now, and as soon as I feel less hit by the truck, I’m going to investigate whether I can turn it into paradise butter.

Had I been clever, I would have taken a picture of the juice in the kettle before I added the lemon juice and sugar.  The difference between the pretty-but-cloudy juice and the clear jelly is one of my favorite little phenomena of kitchen science.  The next batch will be much better documented than this, dear friends.

All clear, all set, all ready to be decanted into jars and sealed.  Which I did.  Only...In general I am a fan of a gentle set in jelly, not liquid, but not firm, either.  If you are familiar with European fruit preserves, or the jams and jellies of the Alsatian pastry chef Christine Ferber, you will have a sense of the texture I like.  Nigel Slater describes it in a sweet, funny essay, “The Setting of Jam,” in his new collection of essays, Eating for England:  “...a texture poised somewhere in that heavenly state between syrup and a lightly set jelly...that slides sexily off the mound of clotted cream and dribbles down the edge of the scone (an exquisite moment if ever there was one).” This is what I made yesterday, a gorgeous, just-set, shimmering jelly.  Alas, I am not making 30 jars of jelly for our own consumption.  These jellies are destined as gifts, and the majority of the giftees like something of a firmer set to their jellies.  I might hold back a few for ourselves and our fellow soft-jelly fans, and recook the rest.  C’est la vie.

Of course, it’s not all about the jelly here.  I’ve also taken this swell birthday present from a dear friend:

and turned it into this:

Well, of course there will be recipes.  For now, though, mushroom barley soup, and a pierogi or two, awaits.

If it’s not a universal truth, it should be:  One who finds oneself suddenly unemployed gets at least one day (although hopefully not too many more) to sit in front of the television all day long, budging only to attend to personal hygiene and receive packages from UPS.  Yesterday was mine.

I’d had better intentions, of course.  I knew that Tuesday would be a wash in terms of accomplishing anything, or of making any real plans.  My pal and cube neighbor Julie had had her job eliminated as well.  When we each learned what had happened to the other, we agreed to meet for breakfast at the Comfort Diner, because, hell, it wasn’t as if we had to be anywhere at 9 a.m.  We ate plates of food as big as our heads (waffles for Jules, scrambled eggs, biscuits, sausage gravy and grits for me), compared the details of our war stories, chatted a bit about when, where and how to register for unemployment, and then returned to her apartment to call our planner, a swell fellow who works in our plant in Pennsylvania, and who will be retiring after New Year’s Day.  (In the weeks since he’d announced his retirement date, Jules and I had been joking about how once he left, we would not only resign, we’d buy an Airstream trailer and just hang out on his front lawn.  For the life of me, I never thought we’d be out of there before he was.) From there we parted, and from there, other than 45 minutes in the pool at the Rec Center and a nice tea with Bunni much of the day was a blur of getting on buses and riding nowhere in particular.  It was exactly the day that I needed, but I knew that Wednesday would be a better day, the day on which I would make some actual plans for the future.

At least I would make some plans just as soon as I finished my coffee.  Maybe check the weather.  Oh, look, Arrested Development is on.  Oh, and there’s another one.  And another one.  And...whoops, it’s 1:30.  No more tv, nope, I need to leave the house so I don’t become one of those folks at whom all of those really depressing adverts on daytime tv are targeted.  Is that the doorbell?

It was.  UPS was here, with my boxes of stuff from the office.  I shlepped them all upstairs, started to unpack, and...well.  I’d had no plans to shed any tears over Loss of Job.  Heaven knows I’d shed plenty of tears over the course of this job, particularly over the last 18 months.  I also knew that the manner in which I was let go—quickly and with a generous severance—was the best way possible.  I have the luxury of time, to look around for the right situation, rather than accepting, in a panic, the first lousy office job that manifests itself.  I know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth—and yet, as soon as I cut the first box open, a rolling wave of pressure moved up my chest and throat, and I sat down and cried like a baby for a good five minutes, not for the loss of a job that played havoc with my health, happiness and attention span for far longer than it should have, but for the suddenness and shock of it all.  It’s one thing, of course, to say that in business, it’s all about the money, honey, and that you can work like a dog to make the company’s fortunes better while still winning friends and influencing people, but once you become too expensive to retain, all of that dog work is for naught, and really it’s not personal; it’s an entirely different thing when all this talk stops being theoretical.  I unwrapped the tissue paper that held my little bread sculptures, thought about dreams deferred and time wasted and battles fought, battles that ate up my heart and energy and light, all in the service of packaging, of a long, long train of empty cartons all ultimately destined for landfills.

The good thing about sudden violent emotional reactions—at least the ones that don’t end in blood-spilling —is that they usually leave as quickly as they arrive, and they bring a giant physical release with them.  I unpacked two of those boxes, big honking corrugate boxes full of books and shoes and little breads.  I put everything away, I got my kitchen scissors, and I slashed those boxes to ribbons and brought them down to the paper-recycling can in the front yard.  I felt like a million bucks as I did it.  (I only saved the third box because Lloyd had arrived home while I was still unpacking, and asked, nicely, if I could spare that one my wrath.  Well, sure.) I had a little chuckle to myself about how nature hates a vacuum:  as soon as Lloyd and I start moving stuff into storage, more stuff comes home with me.  I unpacked my tea strainer and my packets of tea from Sympathy for the Kettle, and felt a little better, having all of my accoutrements in one place, rather than spread out between home and office, never in the place where I want them when I want them.  I looked at my books, many of which were acquired before or during my fellowship at the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, which had never made the trip home. 

I picked up my copy of Medieval Arab Cookery: Essays and Translations by Maxime Rodinson, A.J. Arberry and Charles Perry, with a foreword by Claudia Roden.  I hadn’t looked at this book in years, which is a crime, really, because it’s such an eye-opener, and such a pleasure to read.  One of the works translated by Charles Perry is The Description of Familiar Foods (Kitab wasf al-at’ima al-mu’tada), a pair of manuscripts preserved at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.  (Perry’s translation is based on photocopies of the manuscripts held at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo.) The first manuscript is believed to date from the eighteenth, or late seventeenth, century; the second manuscript indicates a completion date in the colophon that corresponds to the end of November 1373.  The text is, by Perry’s own description, confused, subject to the prevailing circumstances of of copied cookery manuals: “lost pages, bungled rebinding of manuscripts that have fallen apart, misreadings and omissions on the part of the scribe or the person who was reading the text out to him.” I can’t imagine how challenging it must have been to assemble a coherent translation, but I’m so glad that Perry was up to the challenge, because there is some beautiful food described in these pages:  slow-cooked stews on dying fires, left to “settle” and thicken until they could be eaten with the hands, along with flatbread or rice.  There are distinctions drawn between savoury stews and sweet-and-sour stews; there is documentation of the use of ingredients now rare in Arab cookery, such as verjus, asafoetida and even cheese.  There is a condiment called kamakh rijal that I’m dying to make, basically a cheese made from yogurt and salt, fermented for 3 1/2 months.  There are beautiful, delicate, fragrant pudding recipes, and there is a veritable tutorial on fish preservation technique.

I can’t believe how many years I’d spent not reading this book, consumed instead with empty plastic boxes of one form or another.  I can’t believe how far away I stayed away from the wider world, and for how long.

The book is studded with yellow 3"x 5” notecards, marking—of course—the forms of egg cookery.  I open it to another section, one that isn’t marked off by a notecard, and find a recipe that had I had found particularly striking on the first read, for wardiyya (rose syrup pudding).  Directly above it is a recipe that I can’t believe I missed on the first read:

NUHUD AL-’ADHRA [virgin’s breasts].  One part flour, one part clarified butter, 15 of ground sugar.  Everything is mixed and made well.  Then it is made like breasts and baked in a tray [tabaq] in the bread oven.  It emerges nice.

Karen Hess was right.  Primary source material is not only the most accurate source of information on how our forebears ate and lived; it is also a lot of fun to read.  I think I’ll set some time aside, in the coming days and weeks, to read it.

Dear friends, there’s no way to say it but plainly.  This afternoon I was laid off from LuthorCorp.

I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised by this, although I did think that we’d all limp along together for one more year before our entire division was shut down.  (One other person was laid off along with me.) I was also offered a nice severance package, certainly sufficient to keep me alive for a few months while I look for other, better work.  So the news could be a lot worse.  Nevertheless, my mind is still boggled.  I feel as if I could sleep for a thousand years, or would, if my severance would cover it.

I have absolutely no idea what the future holds.  I can’t tell whether I’m horrified or delighted by this.