Photo courtesy of the food lovers at CNN. I can't remember for what we bought them; it was probably for something baked and sweet and spicy. I don't remember their being bought. I only remember my mom pulling them out of the spice cabinet, a glass McCormick's spice jar filled with puffy white bean-shaped pods. "Look," she said, with obvious relish. "We have cardamom seeds." Although the dollar amount escapes me now, I do recall seeing a price tag, and being shocked that such an amount of money went into such a little jar. "Oh, but these last forever. You only need very, very tiny amounts." I was ten. My mom was seven months pregnant. Several weeks before, I had been in a bad car accident, an accident that by all laws of physics should have sent me hurtling through the windshield, but for reasons I don't understand, I merely hit the dashboard hard enough to be knocked unconscious. I had also received a cut on my knee, probably from the door handle, that took eight stitches to close. I was not much interested in going out to play that winter. I watched snowstorms and ice storms from the kitchen window while my mom and I turned out brownies and challah and chocolate chip cookies, which we ate with our tea, our feet up on the coffee table. I drank cup after cup of cambric tea (weak tea, heavy on the milk and sugar), and listened as my mom explained how long it would take us to get through the cardamom. "By the time we use this much [about four pods, a mere drop in the bucket as far as this jar was concerned], the baby will be walking. This much more, the baby will be in kindergarten. Maybe we'll finish the jar before the baby gets to high school!" Maybe she was pulling my leg, or maybe she was nervous about using too much of such a strong and expensive spice, but either way, the end result was the same: goggle-eyed amazement in me. Look at how much cardamom we had! Such a big thing in such a small package! Imagine, one day the baby would be big enough to go to high school! I have no memory of our using any of those cardamom pods. I know I was intimidated by them, the expensive little buggers. A little over a year later, we moved out of that house to a house closer to town, and I'm sure the cardamom did not move with us. Since that day, though, a lot has changed. The baby, whose teenage years once seemed as remote as the Northern Lights, will be 27 in May. I never buy the oversized white cardamom pods supposedly favored by Scandinavian bakers, opting instead for the smaller, harder green pods that are sold at the Indian grocery on Ditmars Boulevard. Apparently I have got over my Fear of Cardamom, because I use it as often as I can possibly get away with using any single ingredient. There are a few truisms I find repeatedly when I read about cardamom, and while I can't verify them without doing some research, I'll repeat them here anyway, with a healthy dose of caveat emptor: One is that the most common uses of cardamom are in two wildly divergent cuisines: Indian cooks use them whole, in savory dishes, while Scandinavian cooks grind them for use in cakes, cookies and sweet breads. It's a sensible observation, except when it is accompanied by much headscratching, as if it were an improbable trick for a spice to be so cherished in both cold green countries and hot lush countries. (If you pick up a good history of the spice trade, such as Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner or Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices by Andrew Dalby, the trick will not seem nearly as improbable, or tricky.) I've also read that cardamom is the third most expensive spice in the world, after saffron and vanilla. Again, I won't state this as fact without a look at commodity prices, but based on the money I have spent on saffron and vanilla, as well as cardamom, over the years, I find it a sensible observation. Although cardamom has a definite taste, peppery without being hot, it is the aroma that will hit you first when you cut open a cardamom pod. It is pungent, vaguely camphorated, but in a sweet way. The Oxford Companion to Food traces the source of this sweet pungency to cineole, a component of the essential oil that can be distilled from a cardamom seed. It smells particularly gorgeous in a pilaf, particularly when your pilaf contains basmati rice, which smells so buttery and popcorn-like when you steam it. If you include a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf and half a dozen cardamom pods in your pot of rice, you will end up with a friendly, savory gift on a cold night, made friendlier by a little knob of butter. I could eat a bowl of this, and nothing else, for dinner, but if someone offered to top it with a nice helping of butter chicken, I would not say no. I would, however, eschew the pilau for plain rice if I were making rogan josh. For rogan josh, you brown cubes of stewing lamb, on bone or boneless (normally I would insist on on-bone, but in this dish, both work well). I usually buy three pounds of lamb, so that we can have a couple of day's worth of leftovers. When the lamb has browned, I take it out of the pan and saute two sliced medium yellow onions and about an inch of grated fresh ginger. I return the lamb to the pan and stir in about a cup of yogurt and about two cups of water brought to the boil and then taken off the heat, along with salt, pepper, cayenne, coriander and cardamom to taste. You can also use the rogan josh spice mix from Penzeys, which is very good. You can also add oil or ghee to the onions if it looks like they are sticking to the pan. I really, really love this stew, and I have fed it to people who swear that they can't bear the taste of lamb. I don't know what it is about this particular spice blend that cuts the gaminess of the lamb; I only know it works. But it is as a spice for sweeties that cardamom really works its magic on me. I have a mason jar full of sugar cubes in my pantry with 1/2 cup of cracked cardamom pods layered in. I originally put it together as a topping for a rhubarb and orange tart I found in Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking, but now I use them everywhere: crushed as a topping for coffee breads and muffins, in my coffee, in my tea. If you rub one on the skin of a navel orange, you get a cardamom-and-orange-infused sugar cube, which is really great in black tea. I have made cardamom ice cream and cardamom panna cotta, which is fresh-tasting and delicious when firm, but is even better when it has just set, softly, wobbling gently on the spoon, sliding dreamily over my tongue and down my throat, leaving me smiling. I have added cardamom to banana bread, which punches up the taste of the bananas in a very nice way. And now I have even more lovely sweets to try, thanks to our Kimberly, who tipped me off to Sugar High Fridays, and this week's adventures with nutmeg, allspice and cardamom, courtesy of Food and Thoughts. There is a cardamom and apricot muffin with my name on it, and I want it for breakfast. In the end, though, there are two things that I love best of all, two things that will keep me in cardamom love forever. One is the frequently-name-dropped cardamom snaps recipe, created by Craig Claiborne, championed by Maida Heatter, and transcribed by the aforementioned lovely Kimberly. I will admit that while the recipe is nice enough as is, I've decided that these cookies demand no half-measures, and I use a full tablespoon of ground cardamom, rather than the 1/2 teaspoon the recipe calls for. The other is what would have become my signature cake had I ever opened that bakery I keep threatening to open. It is a basic butter cake, flavored with citrus peel and buttermilk, baked to a deep amber in a bundt pan and then saturated with a syrup made of citrus juice and sugar. Maida Heatter uses lemon rind and juice to flavor her buttermilk cake, while Gale Gand uses tangerines. As for me, I grate a little lemon zest into the batter, but I also throw in a tablespoon of freshly-ground cardamom (I pull the seeds from about 1/4 cup whole cardamom pods and then grind them in a spice grinder to get a tablespoon of ground cardamom; it is time-consuming and tedious, but if you have something interesting to watch on tv or someone compelling to talk to on the phone, the time goes much faster), and I use lime juice in the soaking syrup. The resulting cake is warm and wonderful, good for picnics in the summer, but even better for sleety winter weather-watching, ready to accompany your cup of tea.
...something that rhymes with bappynewyeardearfriends.
I wish I had something more fun, profound, witty or just plain neat to help carry us into 2005, but other than plans to donate to the relief fund for the survivors of last week's tsunami, my New Year's resolutions pretty much look like last year's, with special attention paid to #6. Happy 2005, sweet ones.
I have mentioned twice, in passing, that last night's posted cornbread and prosciutto stuffing recipe was created by the late Laurie Colwin, who I used to describe as "my absolute, positive favorite living writer" until that terrible Sunday in October of 1992 when, curled up with my brand-new fiance in our fourth-floor walkup studio on 15th and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia, I opened the Inquirer and read it: "Laurie Colwin, 48, Prolific Author." I felt the texture of the air change after I read that headline, rather like the way the air changes when you are suddenly slapped across the face. All of a sudden, you realize that the air you have been breathing up to that moment has been filled with something familiar and reassuring, and that something is snatched away from you and replaced with something hard and mean, and you know you will be breathing it for the rest of your life.
Before I go any further, I must clarify: Laurie Colwin and I had never met. To say that I considered her a friend feels like the height of presumption to me, simply because she had friends, plenty of them, people in whose lives she was embedded, who lost much more than I did when they lost her. I could try to claim some kind of kinship or meeting of minds based on how her writing, both her fiction and her essays for Gourmet that eventually turned into the collections Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, but the fact is, our minds never met and any feelings of kinship are strictly one-sided. Nevertheless, I can't deny that with the exception of my parents, Ms. Colwin was the single greatest influence on my adult cooking life. I bought my copy of Home Cooking the year I graduated from college and began to cook for myself, and it is safe to say that I have thought of Ms. Colwin at least once a day ever since. It is thanks to her that I started shopping at the Union Square Greenmarket the year that I moved to New York; that I began searching out meat and poultry and eggs and produce from non-intensively-farmed sources; that I bought and read The Taste of America, the book that caused a quantum shift in the way I thought about food, cooking and history; that I started buying bags of fermented black beans in Chinatown to throw into my tomato and eggplant sauce; that I started reading Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, the other two-thirds of my culinary triumverate; that I discovered what a beautiful thing English food could be as long as it was prepared with care and skill; that I learned how to make jam, and thus developed the confidence to branch into jelly from there. I once wrote an essay about her for the foodies.com e-group newsletter, in which I mentioned that my copies of Home Cooking and More Home Cooking were so worn out that they were pretty much held together by faith and little else. In addition to cooking from these books, I read and reread and reread them. I read them on the subway, to and from work and the market. I have read them in the bathtub. I have read them while in the throes of depression, and I have read them while recovering from migraines, when I felt just well enough to read but not well enough to do anything else.
My introduction to Laurie Colwin began long before she started writing for Gourmet, before I'd had even the slightest idea of what sort of hold she'd have over my own foodways. Her short story "My Mistress," part of the collection Another Marvelous Thing, was included in the 1985 Best American Short Stories collection, edited by Shannon Ravenel. "My Mistress" is a sweet sad beauty of a story, the tale of the adulterous lovers Francis Clemens and Josephine "Billy" Delille, who carry on an affair as sweet as it is futureless. Francis is a middle-aged, wealthy, socially prominent husband and father of adult children; his life is orderly, the kind of order born out of having money and applying it usefully and well. Billy is an economics professor, married to a mathematician as brilliant and socially maladroit as she is; she is messy and no-frills, living in cheerful chaos, dressed in ratty clothing and shoes held together with duct tape. They both love their spouses. Francis is a devoted father. Billy knows that one day she and her husband Grey will have a baby. They are embedded in their own lives, fiercely in love with the details of those lives, fully aware that each is baffled by the way that the other lives and would wither were they to live in such circumstances, and yet they love each other with an intensity that shakes them. I read this story in college after a steady diet of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. To say that it shook up some preconceived notions I'd had on a subject about which I knew absolutely nothing is putting it mildly. Not surprisingly, I found the most evocative and deeply-rendered moment in the story to be the one that involved food. Frank and Billy decide to go to New England for a stolen vacation. As they lie in bed together, Billy announces that she is going to fix them a snack, and returns with a plate of toasted cheese on bread. Francis observes that this is the first thing she has ever cooked for him, as her sustenance usually takes the form of tough little water biscuits and a squirt of seltzer from a siphon on her desk. Billy watches him contemplate the toasted cheese and she bursts into tears, admitting that she has no idea what sort of meal he may have wanted. They end up devouring the hot, slightly greasy, crunchy sandwiches, keeping them warm in a cold room, and in that moment, everyone -- Francis, Billy, the reader -- has exactly what they need.
Ms. Colwin was an absolute genius at conveying mood through food in her novels and stories. She wrote about admiring Barbara Pym and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers for putting food to terrific use in their books, but I think that she had a pearl-perfect talent for it, easily on a par with Washington Irving in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Her novel Happy All the Time, about two cousins, best friends from childhood, and the women they end up courting and marrying, is rich with food metaphors and signifiers. After the first night that Guido Morris and his beloved Holly Sturgis spend together, he feels overwrought by the consummation of their relationship, dazzled and panicked, and he is unnerved and infuriated by Holly's unflappability as she calmly does the Sunday crossword puzzle, sitting at table in her nightshirt, "neat as a cupcake." Misty Berkowitz spends nearly half the book putting up a prickly, elegant defense against the attentions of Guido's cousin, Vincent Cardworthy; when she realizes that she has fallen in love with Vincent and agrees to marry him, she feels "as well-placed in the universe as a fresh loaf of bread." Holly, independently wealthy and a pursuer of knowledge for knowledge's sake, is also a marvelous cook; her perfectionist and mercurial nature is tempered by the generosity of spirit that shines through her cooking. She prepares kippers, scrambled eggs and a croquembouche for Vincent and Misty's wedding breakfast, and she and Misty join together in a newly-found sense of kinship and affection and produce the meal that ends the novel: grilled striped bass that Vincent and Guido catch earlier in the day, salad, potatoes, a Lady Baltimore cake they buy in the village where they are spending the weekend. Even lines that seem like throwaways are full of meaning: in her last novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, she starts a sentence with "After they devoured a few excellent sandwiches..." and suddenly I found myself at a posh overpriced midtown deli, ordering smoked turkey and boursin cheese on an onion ficelle. Now that, I thought, is a writer.
A Big Storm Knocked It Over and More Home Cooking were her last published works, appearing in 1993, nearly a full year after her death. More Home Cooking was particularly agonizing for me to read, because I knew this would be it: no more trolling the library for her new novels, no more Gourmet columns. I could not imagine a universe in which there were no more words to be had from her, and while I have( just barely) reconciled myself to this, it always catches me around Thanksgiving and manages to land at least one good blow, not unlike the one I caught on my ear last week on the subway. Thanksgiving is usually a high point of the year for me, for the whole food-preparation ritual, for the four-day weekend, for the Thanksgiving birthday I have once every six years. At some point, though, I remember that Ms. Colwin's final column for Gourmet ran a month after her death, in which she wrote about finally tiring of the cornbread and prosciutto stuffing, and coming up with a new stuffing that was so successful that there were no leftovers, and her sadness about not being able to eat a nice plate of cold stuffing for breakfast was mitigated by the fact that she had found a new stuffing she could eat happily for years. She closes the column by saying that someday it will be her daughter's turn to host Thanksgiving, and she looked forward to see what new traditions would begin at her daughter's table. I think of this, and I miss her so terribly.
(A beautiful tribute to Ms. Colwin by her childhood friend Willard Spiegelman, printed in Gastronomica, can be found here. One of my favorite essays from Home Cooking, "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir," can be found here.)
Apologies in advance, dear friends, if the following story contains elements of name-dropping and braggery. I will try as best as I can not to be obnoxious, but it has been such a long time since I had a moment of pure, unvarnished, gleeful pleasure, the kind that kept me at absorbed and rapt attention to the speaker. That moment came yesterday afternoon at the Chesapeake Theatre at Harford Community College, the speaker was Patricia Neal, the subject was Gary Cooper. As long as I live, I will never forget the sound of That Voice, the voice almost unchanged from the one in Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Subject Was Roses: "Oh, I adored him! He was a lovely man and I adored him." That voice was accompanied by a grand sweeping of her arms, as if she were trying to take the memory of Gary Cooper and hug us all with it. I know I felt hugged by it.
It is an awfully neat story, and an awfully grand adventure; I knew it would be, but I seriously, sorely underestimated how grand it was going to be. I have been at table for two hours, trying to find an eloquent way to say that I am a lucky woman, but eloquence is failing me today, so I might as well opt for plain-spoken truth. I am a lucky woman.
Lloyd and I spent the weekend with my dad and stepmom in Maryland. Going to visit the 'rents is always a good thing; we relax, we eat well, we drink red wine out of burgundy glasses; we watch Food Network and loudly berate the on-air talent (I find myself turning into Patrick Star and bellowing "Who *are* you people?" at the likes of Michael Chiarello and the low-carb guy); we fuss over, and are fussed over by, the 92-pound American Eskimo puppy and the 15-pound black cat and the 27-pound (this is not a typo) orange cat. We did plenty of that this weekend. We also went to a special screening at the Chesapeake of The Day the Earth Stood Still on Friday night. Between myself, my dad and my Lloyd, we have probably seen this movie a total of 100 times. I never tire of it. I never tire of watching Patricia Neal, cowering in terror before the robot Gort, saving Earth by crying "Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" (My father loves this scene so much that he made me promise to physically restrain him, lest he leap up in his chair and start cheering at that moment. Trust me when I say that this was not an easy thing to do, as my dad is a big fellow.) But it has been just long enough since I've seen The Day the Earth Stood Still that I had forgotten all the other little perfect moments of that movie: the sheer creepiness of the scene where the world is shut down for half an hour; the scene where Klaatu provides the clues for Professor Barnhardt to solve the puzzle on the blackboard; the scene at the beginning that always made me cry as a little kid, where Klaatu is wounded by a panicked soldier as he tries to present a gift for the President; the scene where Patricia Neal's would-be fiance decides to turn the fugitive Klaatu in to the Pentagon and says, with braggadocio, "You'll feel different when you read about me in the papers," and she says, with wonderment, "I feel different now"; and, really, any scene where Michael Rennie has a lot of screen time. I had forgotten what a fine, fine man Michael Rennie was.
I would have been perfectly happy just watching the movie, but the college had a treat for us, namely Miss Neal, who took introductory questions from HCC professor Wayne Hepler. I was glad to hear that Michael Rennie was as suave as I'd always hoped he'd be ("I loved Michael! He was a wonderful man!"
, and I was especially tickled by Miss Neal's remembering that she continually cracked up on set ("oh, I thought it was hysterical", so much so that during the shooting of the pivotal taxi scene, Michael Rennie asked her, "Now, Patricia, do you plan on laughing like that in every scene?" If you watch that scene closely, you can see a moment where he almost loses it, where he comes close to breaking character and laughing.
The following afternoon, we went back to the Chesapeake for Professor Hepler's interview with Miss Neal. To say that she was delightful is to understate the case grossly. She was entertaining and lyrical and funny, candid about her attraction to married men ("oh, I was awful! Just awful!" and generous in her assessment of nearly everyone she worked with. She was full of affection for Gary Cooper (with whom she had had an affair for five years, and whose picture still adorns a wall in her bedroom), for Cary Grant, for Michael Rennie, for Andy Griffith (her co-star in A Face in the Crowd), even for Ronald Reagan, with whom she'd become friends while filming her first movie role, in John Loves Mary. Her voice was saturated with kindness as she remembered Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck; she practically glowed as she remembered one of her teachers in Packard, Kentucky, who fostered her love of acting. She was generous and loving about her ex-husband, Roald Dahl, calling his New Yorker short stories "fantastic" and saying that he had "done a really lovely job" of helping her recover from the three strokes she suffered in a single night when she was 39 years old and pregnant with their daughter Lucy. (Dahl's efforts at rehabilitation were a source of controversy; many people thought that his rehabilitation regime for her was brutal, but if Miss Neal has any negative feelings about them, they certainly weren't forthcoming in the interview.) About the only negative word she had in the whole interview was for George Peppard, her co-star in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Apparently she had met him on a previous job and they had got along well, but by the time they started shooting Tiffany's, Peppard had undergone a complete personality change and become, in her words, "a horrible man! Horrible!...and years later, when I heard he had died, I was glad!" Considering that Miss Neal appeared to adore just about everyone she had ever met or worked with, I can only come to the conclusion that success did indeed spoil George Peppard, and if he felt any bitterness about spending the last years of his professional life on The A-Team, well, he had it coming. 
Dear friends, I so wish that there were an extant audio or video file to which I could link, because my transcribing all of this doesn't begin to do Miss Neal justice. How I wish you could have heard about her speak of her children, of the terrifying day when her infant son Theo was struck by a taxi and was plunged into months of surgeries and close calls, and of the loss of her oldest daughter, Olivia, who contracted a fatal case of measles when she was seven. ("She was a wonderful child, a wonderful wonderful girl...But she is no more, and has not been for a very very long time." Spoken with sadness, but without tears, with resignation and with deep, deep love.) How I wish you could have heard how smoothly she was able to move from discussing the hardest moments of her life to the most frivolous and whimsical, like the ads for Maxim instant coffee she did in the 1970's ("It was a job! I wanted to work! And I loved it, it was wonderful coffee!" And I really wish I could show you the look on her face during the discussion of Gary Cooper's affair with Ingrid Bergman. "I don't know how many people knew about that," she said.
"Well, we know it now," Professor Hepler said, gesturing at the audience and smiling.
Miss Neal looked at all of us, and drawled, "Spread it arouuuuuuund." The expression on her face was priceless.
I didn't think the weekend could get any better than this. If we had left at the end of the q&a session and just returned to the 'rents' house, my weekend would have been made. But we didn't. It turns out that the HCC radio station manager, who coordinated the weekend's events, is good friends with my dad, and thus it was that Lloyd and I were invited to join the station manager and his wife and her relatives, my dad and stepmom, and Miss Neal and her assistant at dinner. At the post q&a cocktail party, she had been looking tired, and we figured she would probably send her regrets and not come to dinner, but come to dinner she did, and she got her second wind quickly. My dad was seated next to her, and several pictures were taken of the two of them staring at each other with adoration. My stepmom was seated across from her; at one point I saw Miss Neal holding both of C's hands in hers, telling her that her mother had died shortly before her 104th birthday. "I think you'll live to 103, too," said C. Miss Neal looked thoughtful. "Oh, I don't think I want to live to 103. But I think 96 would be good, don't you?" Lloyd and I sat at the far end of the table and watched, captivated but relieved that the pressure would not be on for us to be clever and charming with the famous movie star. Unfortunately, my dad had other ideas and announced to Miss Neal that his daughter and son-in-law had accompanied them. "Where are they?" she called. "Oh, the flowers are in front of you." Lloyd obligingly moved the flowers. "Oh, there you are," she said, and I thought, this is so cool! Patricia Neal is waving at Lloyd! It was at this point that I decided to screw up my courage and move down the table and -- gulp -- actually chat with Miss Neal. We spent some more time oo-ing and ahh-ing over Cary Grant and Michael Rennie, and I had the sense that if it hadn't been so late in the evening, I could have had a good two hours' worth of Gary Cooper stories from her.
"We should get a picture of you two together, for your dad," said the station manager's wife, who had been sitting to my right during dinner. I was about to demur prettily, sure that Miss Neal had had enough flashbulbs popping in her face for one day, when she turned to me. "What a good idea," she said. "Shall we hold hands?" We moved closer to each other, we moved our heads closer together, and I knew the smile I was smiling was not a pretty one; it was the kind of smile you smile when you have had more than a little wine and are anticipating a bright flash in a dark restaurant. I tried to tone the smile down a bit, make it a bit prettier and less frightening, and then I felt my hand being clasped by the woman who saved the world with "Klaatu barada nikto," the woman who handed George Peppard a check and said "you're entitled to a week's paid vacation" with a now-understandable relish, the one that Paul Newman called "the one that got away" in Hud, and I knew that smile wasn't going anywhere.