Dear friends,
I’ve said it before, but will say it again: it’s not blogbandonment, it’s just a marshalling of resources and brainpower at a time when I have little of each. It’s not that I don’t have much to say, because there is always something to contemplate and natter about, considering how interesting are the times in which we live. I’m just having trouble finding exactly how to write about it. This is a temporary state of affairs, and I promise to get through it as fast as is humanly possible.
In the meantime, since I missed shouting out to Tislet on her birthday and Pam the Beancounter on her blogday (both of which fell on October 6), I thought I would share with you one of the best things I’ve read in one of the best books I bought this year. The book in question is Windmills in My Oven: A Book of Dutch Baking by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra, published by the lovely, lovely Prospect Books in 2002. I picked it up after spending much of this weekend reading Food Politics by Marion Nestle, a brilliant book, but one filled with depressing statistics on the food industry and their manipulation of the public discourse on health and nutrition. It is excellent and necessary reading, but it is also sobering, and frequently infuriating. Thus did I find myself putting Dr. Nestle down, and picking Ms. Pagrach-Chandra up. Windmills in My Oven is packed to the rafters with excellent recipes for breads both savory and sweet; for cakes, biscuits and oliebollen. It is also packed with scrupulous research, historical and geographical contexts for the recipes included in the book, and warm, friendly, intelligent prose. The passage below is a description of a traditional Dutch birthday celebration, and I never tire of reading it. What a way to celebrate a birthday. What a way to celebrate the birthday person, and the people around them. What a way for us to tell each other that our lives matter to other people. What a way to drink what sounds like a truly amazing fruit punch. Dear friends, read this and tell me if you think—or if you don’t—that this is a good tradition to appropriate from the Dutch. Shall we have Dutch birthdays in 2005?
In Dutch, as in any other language, there are words and expressions impossible to translate accurately to convey the literal meaning and the subtle undertones. One such word is gezellig. It means cosy, snug, pleasant, convivial, cheerful, entertaining, welcoming and a lot more. And one expression is naar een verjaardag gaan. This is literally “to go to a birthday”—not a birthday party, but a birthday. A birthday party would imply that you had received an invitation to attend and you don’t really need an invitation to go to a birthday. The Dutch set great store by birthdays and it is considered a compliment if people drop in to wish you well. Birthday calendars, which often hang, inexplicably, in the lavatory, are consulted daily and busy bees will find themselves juggling the birthdays that fall on the same day. If you are the birthday girl or chap, you will have no idea of how many people will come round but in rural communities in particular, you are expected to be “at home” to visitors. They will not take kindly to your slipping out without prior warning. If, for some reason, you can’t celebrate your birthday on the actual day, it is customary to let family and friends know on which day you will be available. A birthday in Holland is gezellig.
The first such celebration I attended was at the house of my husband’s parents, and it was a bit of a culture shock. It was my mother-in-law’s birthday and the ‘phone had been ringing incessantly since breakfast, conveying the good wishes of those who were unable to come. Around 10:30 in the morning, people started to arrive. Some neighbours were first. They came in, shook my mother-in-law’s hand, congratulated her, then offered her a token of their esteem. Next, they shook my father-in-law’s hand and congratulated him on his wife’s birthday. In our turn, my brother-in-law and I were also similarly congratulated. I hadn’t been prepared for this. I was used to invited guests showing up at a pre-arranged time and crying or muttering, depending on their disposition, “Happy Birthday,” before dashing off to check on the edibles. It was to get even better. More neighbours arrived and the whole ritual was repeated. When they had finished congratulating the family, they passed to the first set of neighbours and, to my great astonishment, proceeded to congratulate them on their neighbour’s birthday, whereupon the wishes were reciprocated!
It was a busy morning. On arrival, the guests were given coffee with great dollops of sweetened whipped cream on top, and their choice of cake. They settled down to eat, drink and chat. These occasions are a primary source of local news and gossip and are used to compare and discuss ailments. (In one extreme case years later, I entered my living-room with fresh coffee to discover a few of my guests, socks and shoes strewn about them, displaying their bunions to each other as the rest watched interestedly proffering advice.) Meanwhile, the telephone was still ringing and trips had to be made to the railway station from time to time to collect various aunts. Each arrival was followed by the ritual handshaking and, depending on the relationship with the aunt in question, hugs and the traditional three kisses on the cheeks. Coffee and cakes made way for nibbles and drinks, and that typical Dutch celebration bowl. Bowl is a kind of very wet fruit salad—or very fruity punch, depending on how you look at it—which for some reason is always served with the drinks. It contains the maker’s choice of fruit, liberally moistened with mineral water, fruit juice or white wine. It is served by the cupful and you are given a spoon—whipped cream is optional. Almost everyone had a helping. Then most of the men had a glass of gin and the women had either fruit juice or advocaat.
By midday, the first guests were ready to leave. This was accompanied by more hearty handshaking. The traditional wish of “Many more happy and healthy years,” triggered the response, “May you be a witness to it for many years to come.” Formalities over, they departed. The aunts were staying all day so the atmosphere was as busy as ever. Many of them only saw each other at times like this and had a lot of catching-up to do. I joined in wholeheartedly, seeing an ideal opportunity to practise my newly-learned Dutch.
The birthday I have described is an old-fashioned country celebration. Birthdays retain their importance but ways to mark them are changing. City-dwellers, or those with busy jobs, have to cope with a preordained routine, but even the busiest seldom fail to treat their colleagues to a selection of cakes at work. Children are, as ever, the lucky ones. They usually end up with two parties, one for their friends and another for relatives and adult family friends.
Dear friends,
There is a reason for this week’s silence, not necessarily a good reason, but a reason nonetheless. Since I’m pretty sure that the only people from LuthorCorp who visit this page are my friends, fellow workerbees and desk monkeys, I’ll come right out and say it: my job, which even on its best days is not the most satisfying work in the world, lately has been reducing me to teeth-gritting, temple-pounding misery. Since teeth-gritting, temple-pounding misery is not exactly conducive to the creative process, and since I really, really don’t want to ramble on at length about the awfulness of things, I’ve been opting for non-writing pursuits this week, such as going to the gym after work, and going to Buttercup Bake Shop after the gym. 
I will have my game face back soon, I really will. I’m thinking of a Doonesbury cartoon from my childhood, in which a friend of Rick Redfern’s leaves the Washington press corps for California, and a job with then-Governor Jerry Brown. There were a few fish-out-of water strips in the series, with this guy looking in the mirror, practicing, “Oh, wow, look at the moon. Oh, wow, look at the moon.” Eventually he runs into Rick Redfern at a party. Rick asks what he’s up to, and he replies: “I’m finding my space.” “Beg pardon?” “I’m finding where my head is.” Finally Rick says, “How about running that by me in Washingtonese?” and the friend says, “I’m impacting my options.” I’m not fluent in Washingtonese, but I’m pretty sure that that’s what I’m doing now, impacting my options.
In the meantime, nothing lights the fire under my seat like a) a good piece of food news or b) a piece of rantworthy news. You can imagine, then, what a good piece of rantworthy food news does for me. Tonight we have two: From CNN (thanks, Daniel) comes this tale of an unnecessarily ostentatious cheese steak, while from the New York Times comes the unbelievable tale of where that cherry-red hue in your tuna steak comes from.
It should be a sweet, happy day here at Chez Lloyd’n’Rina, but I’m feeling a bit broody. Lloyd has earned his first paid vacation in five years, and is bound for Cleveland, just because he’s never been there before and is curious to see it. I am thrilled that he is finally taking some richly-deserved time off, but it’s going to be a long week without him.
Fortunately, I found some pleasant distraction this afternoon over at The HG-Spot, where I found the link that answers the question, “What would Jen look like as a South Park character?”
To those of you degenerates who are thinking that the correct answer is either a) Miz Crabtree; b) one of the Raisins girls; or c) Miz Cartman (fresh from the cover of Crack Whore magazine!), you should be ashamed of yourselves. The correct answer is this:
And no, you can not demand that I get my bitch-ass in the kitchen and make you a pie.
If you were at the Union Square Greenmarket last Saturday, and you decided that you might like to make some plum jam, and you headed over to the Locust Grove Farms stand only to discover that all of the damsons were gone, I hereby apologize to you for buying the last five pounds of damsons of the season. Or, rather, I don’t. It’s a patent untruth. I bought the last five pounds of damsons of the season and I’m glad.
I became an Anglophile at the tender age of three, when my parents let me watch reruns of The Avengers (even at such a young age, I knew that Mrs. Peel had the stuff, and one could do much worse than to grow up to be just like her). While I have mellowed a bit since my hardcore teenage Cool Britannia days, I still cling to the belief that there are some things the Brits have all over us on this side of the great divide. It makes perfect sense to me that there would be an organization dedicated to this magnificent fruit, and that there is a long beautiful tradition of damson use in everything from wine to cheese. My English cookbooks are filled with recipes for damson jam, damson jelly, damson butter, damson curd, damson ketchup, damson chutney, damson tart, damson cake, damson crumble. Every year I promise myself I’m going to try my hand at some of these lovelies, and every year I find myself making jam.
Like so many of my cooking adventures, I got the bright idea to try making jam from More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, who wrote beautifully about the “clean, forthright” taste of homemade plum jelly and raspberry jam, and whose forthright assessment of her math skills (I think the word she used was “decrepit") went a long way toward convincing me that maybe, just maybe, I could crack the code on jam. Ms. Colwin used Italian prune plums for her jam. I love Italian prune plums because they are the last remaining truly seasonal plum in wide distribution in New York City. For about two months in late summer and early fall, you can find these plums not just at the farmers’ markets, but at any corner greengrocer. Once the season is over, though, that’s it; no prune plums are coming from Chile. I have made jam from these plums, and while it was very nice jam, I admit that I prefer to use these plums in cakes and crumbles. I also admit that plum jam made from these plums is made much better with a slug of fine dark rum, but I know this is a controversial admission to make. 
Damsons, now, damsons need no assistance from rum. All damsons need is sugar, a little lemon juice, and themselves.
This was the advice I got when I made my first jam-making excursion to the stand where I buy all of my peaches and cherries in the summertime, all of my Concord grapes in the fall and all of my apples from October to March. Tumbled into a basket, nestled among the sugar plums and shiros and Elephant Hearts and greengages, were a mountain of small blue-black plums, labeled “very sour! perfect for jam!” These were damsons, I was informed by the farmer who grew them, and they were exactly what I was looking for. I took his word for it, since my only previous exposure to damsons were in a fancy coffee store in Pittsburgh that also sold interesting luxury foodstuffs, including a full line of Bonne Maman preserves. “Damson Plum Jam,” said the label, and I paid it no further mind, thinking it was some toffee-nosed affectation of a jam. It is embarrassing to think of how wrong-headed I have been about so many things in my life.
I had no idea how much to buy, so I settled on five pounds, figuring it to be a nice round number. It is indeed a nice round number, but it also makes for a time-consuming chore in pitting and cutting up the fruit. I have never learned to like this particular chore, the cutting up of five pounds of tiny, tiny fruit. My fingers become pruny and covered with brownish stains. My fingernails become as fragile as paper and look filthy for days, no matter how I scrub underneath them. I am not even halfway through the task before I become sick of the whole business and long to just throw everything away. But I don’t, just because I know that the resulting jam will be more than worth the effort, that the taste of this jam is a million-to-one return on the investment of time and labor I put into them. I have also learned that if I put Volume One of The Carl Stalling Project on the CD player, it will take me exactly the length of play to prep the fruit. It has now become a ritual, the exact way I want to pass the time, whistling along to “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals” and the incidental music from “The Daffy Doc” while I turn my fingernails to butter.
I flew by the seat of my pants the first time I made this jam. I was careful on all of the canning safety issues, sterilizing the jars and lids in a boiling-water canner, but as far as procedure went, I didn’t do any of the things I have since learned to do with other, more complex jams. I didn’t macerate the fruit in sugar before cooking it. I didn’t use a candy thermometer. I didn’t test for a set, i.e. I didn’t dip a cold spoon into the pot, raise it out of the steam and then pour the jam back into the pan and gauge whether it was forming a sheet. I didn’t act additional pectin, either commercial or homemade from apples or lemons, as plums have a high pectin content. I just read Ms. Colwin’s advice that this particular jam is done when it looks like jam, and then I went to work. With the stones removed, I had about 3 1/2 pounds of fruit. I added an equal amount of sugar. (Over the years, I have scaled back on the sugar, and now I use about 2 1/2 pounds of sugar for the same ratio. I think that reducing the sugar allows the flavor of the fruit to shine, but when you reduce the sugar, you can also affect the set of your preserves, and you also reduce its shelf life. The reason that preserve recipes in old cookbooks contain so much sugar is that the whole point of preserving was to put food by for the winter. If you want to keep your jams and jellies for at least a year, I would recommend using, at minimum, equal weights of cleaned fruit to sugar.)
Into the pan went the fruit and sugar, along with the juice of a lemon. On went the heat. I stood at the ready, wooden spoon in hand, and watched as the sugar began to melt and the plums began to yield and collapse in the syrupy, steamy heat. The skins began to give up their color; the dissolving fruit, which had begun to oxidize to a scary rusty brown color, suddenly turned a brilliant, just-shy-of-magenta shade of purple. The color was glorious, but the smell is even better. A damson cooking smells like a field of roses. I am not exaggerating, or trying to manipulate an image for poetry’s sake. There are few scents that affect me the way a pot of damson jam does. There is the scent of onions frying in butter or olive oil, the scent that fueled a thousand of my breakfasts at the Kiev restaurant on the Lower East Side. There is the scent of bread baking, the crust caramelizing, the yeast giving one more burst of activity. There are other, non-food-related fragrances, scents of a certain perfect eau de toilette, leather, sun-warmed skin, others that, in the interest of not giving too much information, I will keep to myself. If damson jam is not at the top of that list, it is very, very close.
If damson jam smells like heaven, it tastes even better. I have a real taste for foods that are bitingly sour in their natural states but cook into a tart smoothness: lemons, limes, crabapples, rhubarb. Damsons are not an eating-out-of-hand fruit; they need heat, sugar, a watchful eye and care. Apply all of this to them and you are rewarded with a jam that is sweet at first taste, followed by a pleasing puckery tartness, fruit acids and tannins all working their magic. “This is a winner,” my mom said the first time she tried it, and now she gets a jar every year, unless I’ve been particularly efficient and have bought more than a batch’s worth of jam, in which case she gets at least three.
Three years ago, I discovered something else to love about damsons: Assuming you don’t actually burn the syrup, it is not a dead loss if you overcook your jam, the way it would be with other fruit: instead, you will have damson butter, another very good thing. 2001 was one of those efficient years for me, where I caught the season early and bought 10 pounds of damsons at a time and turned them all into jam. One weekend, though, I overdid it, misjudged the thickness of the syrup, and cooked everything to a thick spread. The next weekend, I told Lucas, the guy at the Locust Grove stand who sells me the lion’s share of my fruit, about my adventure. He suggested that I bring some by, so that he and his fellow sellers could do some quality control. I promised I would, but three days after that, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, and I didn’t go downtown again for a month.
When I could finally bear to go downtown, I made straight for the market, the air still filled with the scent of ink, which I knew wasn’t really ink; it was the smell of collapsed buildings. I wondered if anyone would be at the market at all, but it appeared to be a normal market day. All of the regular Saturday farmers were there, and people were buying squash and sunflowers and microgreens and grapes. My nerves were still on a keenly wrought edge; I had no idea what would set me off and reduce me to tears, but I trusted that there would be comfort in routine, so I headed to the Locust Grove stand. All of the plums were gone. It was October, apple time. I held out the jar of damson butter to Lucas, apologizing for taking so long to get it to them. He acknowledged that we were living in a time where priorities would be rearranged for a while. We agreed that it was good to be back, and then I went to work, loading up on crabapples, dreaming of a winter full of crabapple jelly, paradise jelly (a mix of apple, quince and cranberry that is love in a jar), apple butter and dried apricot jam, to say nothing of a cabinet full of damson jam, pulling us through it all until the next season.
