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Despite my best efforts, last weekend I found myself slipping into December torpor.  Even in the best of years, December is a tough, harried, wearying month, and this is certainly not the best of years (although my brother’s wedding in October did bring a lot of sweetness to it).  This has been a particularly hard year for my mother, as my grandfather died in October and my grandmother continues to be robbed of herself by Alzheimer’s.  Last Sunday I was overcome by the realization that I was a rotten daughter, that Mom would be having a particularly tough Christmas this year, and that I hadn’t spoken to her since Thanksgiving weekend, when she and my stepdad brought my cousin, visiting from L.A., into the city for a trip to the Metropolitan Museum and dinner.  I called her, got the answering machine, and left a long rambling message about how I hadn’t called in a while, I wanted to make sure she was okay, I’m sorry I’ve been so low-profile, I love you, Mom.  I didn’t hear anything from her for the rest of the day.  I went to bed worrying.  At 3 a.m. I snapped out of a cluttered and exhausting dream with the realization that the reason Mom hasn’t called is because she and my stepdad are in France, on a vacation that they have been planning, and I have known about, for six months. I felt a momentary surge of relief, followed by a bigger, longer-lasting surge of embarrassment.  I’d forgotten about the trip that was one of the only bright spots in my mother’s year.  I *am* a rotten daughter.  Fortunately, my rottenness gave Mom something to tease me about when she called tonight to say that they were home.

Even with the toughness of this particular December, I do have something else to celebrate, and while it may sound frivolous, I am still celebrating.  For the first time in two years, I will be buying the lion’s share of my Christmas presents at Coliseum Books.  Coliseum is an independent bookstore in Manhattan, 100,000 titles strong.  For 27 years it occupied the corner of 57th Street and Broadway.  Much has been made of the ugliness of this space, at least compared to the new Barnes & Noble and Borders superstores.  If Barnes & Noble is a comfortable reading room, Coliseum was a supermarket, all hard surfaces, neon in the windows, no seats except for occasional footstools purloined from the store staff who used them for reaching the high shelves, shelf stock shrinkwrapped to keep it clean in a location where dirt was easily tracked in.  And yet, I loved this space, found it the most browsable bookstore in the city, whiled away hours in there, bought so many books that my co-workers used to joke that I should just sign my paycheck over to Coliseum.  I used to go to cosmetic industry happy hours at Le Bar Bat, leave in a tipsy, ebullient mood, head to the subway, pass Coliseum and think, hmmm, no harm in just taking a peek.  The next morning I would wake up, take my little Pez dispenser of Excedrin, mutter never again, and curl up with my new books.

Of course, there were whisperings of trouble for years about Coliseum’s lease, that once the lease was up, they would never be able to renegotiate their old terms, as the space had become too valuable.  I crossed my fingers that the store’s owner and the building’s owner would be able to renegotiate; then I plugged my fingers into my ears in an attempt to stave off hearing the inevitable.  Coliseum closed on January 25, 2002, and I felt as if my heart had been torn from my chest.  The first time I walked by the building after the store had closed, I wanted to kick all the windows in.

This may seem like an extreme reaction to the closure of a shop, even a well-loved bookshop, and it was, but then, it was an extreme year.  There was, of course, That Event on That Day.  (Everyone has a 9/11 story to tell, and I am no exception, but it is another story for another day.) I was lucky in that everyone I knew or cared about who worked in or near the towers got out and got home safely.  I knew too many people who did not have that luck, and lost someone dear to them.  I remember days, weeks, of walking around the city, feeling grief everywhere, literally breathing it in, as if it were part of the ink-scented air.  While we were trying to make sense of it all, wondering if there was even sense to be had, anthrax was discovered at NBC, literally down the street from us, and suddenly everyone around me was on the phone with their spouses, arguing over whether they should try to get Cipro prescriptions for their kids.  In November 2001 my company moved from our funky little office across the street from Coliseum to our parent company’s office on 49th and Park.  We were promptly greeted by bomb threats, which forced us to evacuate the building twice a day for six weeks.  (The “bomber” was eventually discovered to be a mailroom employee of a tenant that has since vacated the building; he confessed that he had called the bomb threats in so that he could get some additional break time while he was out delivering mail to the company’s other locations.  The NYPD, the FBI and the Secret Service were not amused.) Every day seemed like a fresh assault, another day to question just what was going to happen to us now, and how much more could we absorb?  I felt that there was no quarter for goodness in the world.  I had the darkest thoughts about my fellow man that I had ever believed possible.  Walking into Coliseum in those days was like being greeted by a friend, or the kindest teacher you’d had in high school, who would listen to you rage about your dark thoughts and then say, well, maybe you’re right, but just in case you’re not, why not immerse yourself in someone else’s thoughts for a while, and see if you change your mind?  And I always did, right up until the week before Coliseum closed, when I watched people fill up baskets with books marked down 20%, while I stood in line with my lone copy of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight, thinking, is this really the last book I’m going to buy at Coliseum?

George Leibson, the owner of Coliseum, vowed to find another space.  I waited, patiently.  Finally, in January 2003, he announced that a space had been found on 42nd Street, across the street from the New York Public Library and Bryant Park.  He noted that he would do the best he could with the space, but it would still be only 2/3 of the old store space, not counting the space that would be dedicated to the cafe (his investors required that he put in a cafe to remain competitive with the chain bookstores).  More than one person, including friends of mine who should have known better, made snotty comments about how long Coliseum could last when people could just go across the street for free books.  (The pedant in me is honor-bound to point out that the NYPL’s actual lending library is two blocks to the south of the main NYPL building, the one with the lions in front.)

Coliseum reopened on June 17 of this year, and yes, I was there as fast as I could possibly walk.  I am still trying to figure out how George only got 2/3 of the space of the old store, yet managed to make it feel so much bigger.  It feels like a bigger space.  But the old shelves, the old fixtures, the old signage dots the store, which now has friendly wooden floors, the better to stand on and browse.  On that day I walked around, touching everything.  As I was browsing the new paperback fiction aisle, I felt a touch at my elbow and a voice saying, “I thought you might be here.” It was Lloyd.  (Since Coliseum is between my office and his office, we bump into each other there a lot.) I bought a Lidia Bastianich cookbook and Christopher Moore’s novel Lamb:  The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.  All around me were people like me, people who lost a piece of their hearts the day that Coliseum closed, who got that piece back when they heard the news that Coliseum would be back.  “Have people been telling you how thrilled they are that you’re back?” I asked the clerk at the register.  “You have no idea,” he said happily.

Today Julie Powell announced the official closing of the Julie/Julia Project.  For those not familiar with her or her blog, Julie Powell was a bright, frustrated administrative professional working in Lower Manhattan and living in Brooklyn (later Long Island City, Queens) when she decided to embark on an ambitious project, namely preparing each of the 536 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck.  By day she went to work; at night she came home and prepared blanquette de veau and Jambon Braise Morvandelle and a series of aspics, each more terrifying than the one that preceded it.  Each night’s cooking adventure was recorded in her blog, which attracted a large, fascinated and devoted readership.  Eventually the media (including CBS News and Amanda Hesser of the New York Times) took notice, and today Julie Powell has an agent and a book deal.  Her book is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2005.  It is a writer and cook’s dream writ large, a career born of something originally started as a lark, and in my opinion, it could not happen to a more deserving cook/writer than Julie.  Her blog is—or was—great reading.  Julie is funny, salty, opinionated, bemused by the task she set in motion, yet ultimately glad for it.

When news of Julie Powell’s book deal broke, I received a lot of helpful suggestions to try the same thing.  Hey!  You’re a writer, you know food, why don’t you pick a cookbook and cook your way through it and blog it and shop around for a publishing deal? Because the people who recommend this course of action are generally sweet and kind, I try to be diplomatic when I tell them I’ve heard better ideas.  Assuming that I had the stamina to do something like that, there is something vaguely pathetic about glomming onto a good idea and hoping lightning will strike twice.  This might be fine for network programming executives, but I don’t want to do it, at least not now.  Regardless of my opinion of savekaryn.com—I was not impressed, to put it mildly—I will give her credit for having enough moxie to be first out of the gate with the internet-panhandling idea.  I give less credit to people who tried to panhandle their way to divorces, breast implants and sportscars.

Nevertheless, a girl can fantasize, and if enough time passes where it is once again acceptable to cook one’s way across a book and keep a meticulous journal of it, I have my candidate at the ready.

The first edition of Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton was published in 1845.  A revised, updated edition was published 10 years later; it is this edition that was published in facsimile by Southover Press in 1993.  It has been acknowledged as one of the finest cookbooks in the English language, and it is easily one of the best cookbooks I own, superior, in my opinion, to the vaunted 20th century kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking.

Although it was written over 150 years ago, Modern Cookery is still so appropriate, so usable and practical that it would not be untoward to think of it as Timeless Cookery for Private Families instead.  Unlike many of the cookbooks published in the 18th and 19th centuries, Miss Acton’s cookbook was directed at small, middle-class families, rather than to the mistresses of households with a full complement of servants.  As a result, very little scaling up or down needs to be done to these recipes to make them practical for daily use today.  Most of her contemporaries included detailed directions for housekeeping, which, while interesting from a historical perspective, ultimately gives the books a dated feel.  Miss Acton preferred to focus, in her words, on the “elegance and economy” of food, and it shows.  Every page is replete with the consideration, intelligence and energy she brought to her work, and the result is a sublime collection of recipes and instruction.

I reread the soups chapter on the subway home tonight, and I was filled with the desire to make every single soup, even consomme, the time-consuming and meticulous rendering of bones into clear, concentrated meat stock.  I wanted to make milk soups, and beef tea, and mulligatawny, and the extraordinary-sounding Mademoiselle Jenny Lind’s Soup, which was given to Miss Acton by a popular Swedish writer, who in turn obtained it from the great singer’s cook.  It is made from strong veal or beef stock, eggs, cream and sago, a tapioca-like starch.  Miss Acton said that Miss Lind tended to take it before performances, as she found the sago and eggs soothing to the chest and beneficial to the voice.  (This recipe was later “appropriated” by Isabella Beeton, who changed its proportions slightly and rechristened it as “Soupe a la Cantatrice.” About 100 of Miss Acton’s recipes were similarly lifted, revised ever so slightly, and published without attribution in Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Sadly, Mrs. Beeton was neither the first nor the last writer/editor to produce a cookbook in this way.  The 18th and 19th centuries were rife with cookbook plagiarists, and it would be disingenuous to say that such dirty tricks are behind us today.)

It is a dangerous thing for me to quote Miss Acton, because the temptation is strong to quote the entire book (but I will not).  I will give, however, her recipe for something which sounds like a heavenly dish for a cold wet night, an original recipe of hers she calls “The Young Wife’s Pudding”:

Break separately into a cup four perfectly sweet eggs, and with the point of a small three-pronged fork clear them from the specks.  Throw them, as they are done, into a large basin, or a bowl, and beat them up lightly for four or five minutes, then add by degrees two ounces and a half of pounded sugar, with a very small pinch of salt, and whisk the mixture well, holding the fork rather loosely between the thumb and fingers; next, grate in the rind of a quite-fresh lemon, or substitute for it a teaspoon of lemon-brandy, or orange-flower water, which should be thrown in by degrees, and stirred briskly to the eggs.  Add a pint of cold new milk, and pour the pudding into a well buttered dish.  Slice some stale bread, something more than a quarter of an inch thick, and with a very small cake-cutter cut sufficient rounds from it to cover the top of the pudding; butter them thickly with good butter; lay them, with the dry side undermost, upon the pudding, sift sugar thickly on them, and set the dish gently into a Dutch or American oven, which should be placed at the distance of a foot or more from a moderate fire. An hour of very slow baking will be just sufficient to render the pudding firm throughout; but should the fire be fierce, or the oven placed too near it, the receipt will fail.

In a postscript, Miss Acton cautions the reader that while this is an easy and satisfactory pudding, it is easy to ruin if the cook does not watch the temperature of the oven with care.  It is a plain, grand dish, and it shows Miss Acton at her best:  her attention to detail, her no-nonsense but good-humored voice. These qualities are found in abundance throughout the book, evidence of the years she spent testing and retesting, writing and rewriting.  (According to Elizabeth Ray’s introductory notes in the 1993 edition, a review in a popular magazine of the day stated that Miss Acton had spent ten years writing Modern Cookery, and compared her sauces to those of the great French chefs Vatel and Careme.) The chapter on fish preparation, and the introductory chapter on carving techniques, should be used as primary texts in cooking schools.  Not only are they filled with meticulous direction, they are also illustrated—as is the rest of the book—with detailed, breathtakingly beautiful prints, near-perfect combinations of form and function.

It strikes me that I am doing a poor job convincing myself that it would be a bad idea to do this.  But no, I will not steal Julie Powell’s thunder.

Miss Acton wrote another book two years before her death, a smaller but still-brilliant and well-considered tome, The English Bread Book.  Maybe if I start small...no, no, no.  I will be good.  For now.

Last weekend when I was on my pie-baking adventure, I discovered that the caramel apple pie required heavy cream, and that we were out of it.  I had plans to go to my farmer’s market at Union Square to buy heavy cream from the dairy that has a stand at the market every Saturday.  The snow, and the 22-degree temperature, made me reconsider.  I went to the Greek market down the street, I picked up a quart of heavy cream, and, once again, I reflected on the state of cream in this city, this country.  And once again, I got mad.

With a few noble exceptions, the general state of heavy cream in the U.S. is terrible.  Most of the cream we can buy comes in half-pint containers and is ultra-pasteurized; that is, it is pasteurized at a higher temperature than traditional pasteurization.  This increases the shelf life of the cream.  It also gives it a weird, palate-coating taste.  It tastes cooked, or, in Karen Hess’s words, “boiled to death.” This is less of an issue if you are making caramels, or toffee, or fudge; with confectionery, you are boiling the sugar and cream and flavorings at such high temperatures that your cream is definitely going to cook.  It is more of an issue if you want to make whipped cream, or fruit fool, or custard.  Ultra-pasteurized cream is harder to whip, and again, there’s that taste, which makes itself present through any liqueur, any beautiful maple syrup, any four-fold vanilla.  Once you have tasted properly-pasteurized cream, you will be able to tell the difference.  Ultra-pasteurized cream taste like the half-and-half that comes in little tubs at diners—no surprise, since most half-and-half is sold ultra-pasteurized, too.

By U.S. law, any cream sold as heavy cream must have a minimum fat content of 36%, although the higher the fat content, the better the cream.  When I interned at a restaurant after pastry school, I had access to 40% butterfat heavy cream, which was beautiful to work with and heavenly to taste.  I tried to buy my own, but the only places that sold it were wholesalers, and even in my most high-volume, enthusiastic baking runs, I just couldn’t envision running through a case of heavy cream a week.  So I started buying heavy cream from the farmstand, where I couldn’t confirm the butterfat content but I knew the cream would be pasteurized properly.  It is very nice cream.  On my first trip to Vermont last year I discovered cream from Jersey cows, which is so superior to the cream of Holsteins that I bought pints and pints of it, and schlepped it back to New York via Amtrak, each pint wrapped tightly in newspaper to keep it cold.

The Greek market sells 40% butterfat cream.  I was delighted until I read the fine print.  It’s ultra-pasteurized.  I bought it anyway, and decided that it would make some nice caramels.

Lest you think that I am an effete crank about the whole cream issue, you are right.  But I am not alone.  Rick Stein understands me, and he does not lie when he says that British cream is the best in the world.  I am still tasting the gorgeous clotted cream I had on my first trip to Plymouth in 1989.  I have tasted the clotted cream sold in glass jars in the U.S.  It’s not bad, but it makes me long for the real thing.

Before I head off to the gym and come up with new things to complain about for this page, here are a few interstitial thoughts for your consideration:

On Snowball‘s sage advice, I have registered http://www.bakerina.com, and as of now you can use it to access this little page.  The old URL (bakerina.typepad.com) still works, though.  It’s all about choices here.

Like a fellow blogger ‘round these parts, I have spent thousands of hours at a website called Plastic, where members are invited to write discussion pieces about vital issues of the day, and then discuss them. When I started PTMYB, I put a link to it on my Plastic member page. Because my Plastic-universe name is jenmac (a combination of my first and last names), one of my buddies asked me if I am also nakedjen. Holy cow, dude, how much free time do you think I have? I mean, no, I am not also nakedjen. nakedjen and I live on opposite sides of the country, and I am not nearly as pretty naked as she is. Go visit Jen’s site; you’ll be glad you did.  (Keep in mind, though, that although the banner photo of Jen is beautiful, it is probably not safe for work, at least if you work at a company like mine.)

My most excellent brother (who, until I get permission to use his name, will be known in this space as BOB, not as in short for Robert but as in Brother of Bakerina) gave me an e gift certificate for my birthday, which I used to buy, among other things, this beautiful new book by the Canadian husband-and-wife team of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Even if it were just a collection of excellent recipes and beautiful photographs, it would be a book well worth having. But it is more: it is also a collection of essays on their travels around the world, alone and together, and the introduction contains a loving apologia for home baking, and why it is worth our while to not let this tradition die out. That said, the recipes look terrific, and I am at a loss for what to try first: the rye quick bread? the Silk Country Road naan? kouignamann, the sublime Breton yeasted butter cake? the fascinating Thai tuiles, sweet rice-flour cookies wrapped around a savory scallion filling? the Persian cardamom cookies, made with rice flour instead of wheat? I might just have to call in sick for the rest of the month.

Back in August, I went to Pittsburgh for a week to visit my college roommate, find a neighborhood to which Lloyd and I might like to move, and scout out locations for what was supposed to be my bakery, and now appears to be “the futile obsession over which I spin my wheels nightly.” From the news weasels at Plastic comes this AP story, which states that Pittsburgh is so broke that its credit rating has been reduced to junk-bond status and the mayor has asked for both a “distressed city” designation and a team of state receivers to review the city’s budget.  I went to college in Pittsburgh.  I loved this city from the first moment I laid eyes on it, I love it still, and the thought of this happening to it makes my heart hurt in a way that nothing else ever has.

At the beginning of November my pal Walt, who lives in Phoenix, spent a long weekend in New York, two days with a friend in Morningside Heights, two days with Lloyd and me.  (He has asked that I refer to him as “architectural consultant Walt Lockley,” because, uh, that’s who he is and what he does, but Walt, honey, I can only do it once, or else this post will need a whole ‘nother paragraph.) Walt is not only an architectural consultant, he is an architecture fiend. The phrase “encyclopedic knowledge” gets bandied out much too frequently, in my opinion, but Walt is one of those rare examples of the form defined. Everyone should have a Walt in his/her life. It’s not just that he has fascinating stories and informational tidbits at his fingertips; when he points out interesting facades, sconces, details, he makes you want to learn more. When he encounters something on which he hasn’t read extensively (trust me,this is rare indeed), he doesn’t think twice about going on the building tour. Going out to lunch is now filled with new observations; I look up, I peer at a ledge at this grand old building on 52nd and Lexington (Walt, what is that building? Never mind, I’ll look it up in the AIA Guide!), and wonder at who had the bright idea to put so many rococo pieces on such an Art Deco-ish building. It is because Walt went on the Grand Central Terminal tour that he learned that the famous main concourse ceiling, which was cleaned in a massive and controversial restoration project just a few years ago, has a tiny piece that was left uncleaned, so that anyone who can find it can marvel at how dark and filthy it used to be, and how deep-blue and beautiful it is now. It is because he told me this that I now look for it every night on my commute home. I check to make sure I am not cutting off the flow of traffic, I stop, I look up, and I feel better somehow for having spotted it.

One of the spots he asked to visit was Rockefeller Center. Now, as a midtown worker bee, and one who works just blocks away from Rockefeller Center at that, I viewed his request initially with trepidation. There is almost never a time when Rockefeller Center is not teeming with humanity, particularly ever since the Today show moved into the studio with the picture window. (If you are a traveler to New York City who either visited or plans to visit Rockefeller Center so that the NBC cameras will capture you waving your “Hi Mom!"/"Hi, Katie, Matt and Al!"/"Hi, Texas!” signs, welcome to New York. No, really, we are glad to see you, we know you could have spent your vacation anywhere, I will be glad to give you directions to the subway and I’ll throw in a recommendation for a nice place to have lunch. Just please, please, please remember that while you are standing 12 deep on the sidewalk, I need to get to work. If the NYCTA is up to its usual shenanigans, I am probably late for work. I recognize that you are all very cute, but I am not in a mood to appreciate your cuteness right now.) It only gets better at Christmas, when the Rock Center Christmas tree is lit, and the ice rink is open. Of course I took him there, because it was the only thing he specifically asked for on that day. I crossed my fingers, hoping silently that the throngs of people visiting the NBC Experience store, taking the virtual NBC Studios tour, would not render our visit painful and headachy.

Silly me. I needn’t have feared. Those throngs weren’t interested in the lobby of the Associated Press building, and most of the people at our ultimate destination building, the GE Building, a/k/a the RCA Building, a/k/a 30 Rock, were headed to the NBC store. Walt, on the other hand, was much more interested in checking out the wall murals, which were conceived as a paean to industry and technology as our steppingstone to a Cleaner, Brighter, Better Future. There is nothing quite like the sight of painted gods, 30 feet high, giving birth to airplanes. This is Big Art. Sadly, the one piece of Big Art we would have really liked to see was Diego Rivera’s famous mural, in which Lenin is depicted as a Really Super Guy, while John D. Rockefeller Jr. is shown sipping a martini underneath an ellipsis containing pictures of venereal disease germs. Apparently John D. was not impressed, because he ordered the whole thing painted over. You would think that anyone who allowed gods to give birth to airplanes in his lobby would have more of a sense of humor about this, but there you are.

Before we left, Walt asked if we could look at the mosaic over the Sixth Avenue entrance to the building. I still can’t believe that I worked across the street from this mosaic for over a year and I never noticed it. It is another piece of Big Art, made from over a million tiny tiles. Because it depicts Big Ideas, I feel like I should give it some big, writerly thoughts, but I can’t. It’s just too damn funny.

The mosaic in question was designed by an artist named Barry Faulkner. He was the best friend of another artist with a Rockefeller Center commission, Paul Manship. Faulkner’s vision was to depict Thought as a god, saving the proletariat from the evils of Ignorance, Poverty, Cruelty and Fear, depicted as green coppery wraiths being flung into fiery pits. Said fiery pits are on each end of the mosaic. Averting their eyes from the pits and toward the winged seraphim beckoning them are two pairs of what are meant to be average working-class men and women (it’s the overalls that give it away). The seraphim are assigned names such as “History,” “Religion,” “Drama,” “Politics,” etc. They are all watched over by two angels, department supervisors, apparently, one named “Written Words” and one named “Spoken Words.” Between them is the big boss Thought, of indeterminate gender but dressed rather like the Virgin Mary. We are not talking about subtlety here. This mural ate subtlety for breakfast. The New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell said as much when he wrote:  “I have been trying to decide where, in the wide, wide world, this acre of mosaic might make a nice spot, but for the life of me I can’t...As a work of art it is one of the most inept, graceless, empty pieces of mural decoration I have ever seen,” although he did note that at lease the tiles appeared to be cemented correctly.  (Credit for this should probably go to the Ravenna Mosaic Company of Long Island City, Queens, though.) *

The best part of this mural, at least to me, is that three of the seraphim in Spoken Word’s department are named Philosophy, Hygiene and Publicity. (A-ha! So she didn’t just make that up!)

Why, yes, there are photos. See right.

If you have a friend like Walt in your life, keep him, or her, close to you. If you don’t, find one as soon as you possibly can. You have no idea how much fun you will have until you do.

*I found this quote in a new history of Rock Center called Great Fortune:  The Epic of Rockefeller Center. It is written by Daniel Okrent, one of the best and most readable historians extant. In his hands, it is fun to read about rich old plutocrats. We are lucky to call ourselves his contemporaries. Get it at the library, or better yet, ask for it as a winter-holiday-of-your-choice gift.