It’s time to plan. All the periodicals, all the food sites have begun to trot out their turkey tips. We sat down today, awash in recipes we’ve used before or always wanted to use. This year we’re having Thanksgiving at the Cabin for the first time, with a borrowed table set up in front of a blazing fire, and maybe I’ll put out the good silver, my grandmother’s. Isn’t the planning almost the best thing about the holiday? Where will we get the turkey, what kind of turkey will it be? This year we’re going to Hemlock Hill Farm, in Cortlandt Manor — family-owned for over 60 years — and bringing home a broad-breasted white that has spent its short life running around, slyly if stupidly, in a big open pen. We’ll have creamed spinach, as always, and sausage and apple stuffing. Sweet potatoes. We’ll have a new item, maple syrup pie, but of course we’ll bake the old pumpkin, since Gil says we must.
Savage Girl (you won’t read it until Viking brings it out another year from now, so here’s a sneak peek) recreates a Thanksgiving repast circa 1875 Manhattan. I did research into the customs of the time. Imagine a long mahogany table with a burgundy runner down the center, in a dining room belonging to one of the wealthiest families in New York, the Delegates. They consume oyster soup and cod with egg sauce, slivered carrots and celery in crystal boats, a crisp-skinned bird (need we add free range?), lobster salad, stuffed apples, aspic, and superior biscuit, all washed down with champagne. Crystal and gold-edged china. But wait, there’s more… Stewed peaches, ginger cake, pound cake, ribbon cake, figs, walnuts in the shell. Toasts are raised.
It would all be swell if there wasn’t a mute, half-wild teenage girl upstairs, wreaking havoc by refusing to come down and have Thanksgiving with the family that so badly wants her to behave.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, Savage Girl
We were watching swans eat, but I was thinking about how we used to eat swans.
For a recipe I went to Le Menagier de Paris, a 1393 guidebook that purports to be an wise older man giving advice to a newlywed wife, emphasizing the crucial theme of womanly obedience. There are instructions for preparing dishes like frumenty (a thick wheat porridge served with venison) and lardy milk (“Take milk of cows or ewes and put to boil in the fire, and throw in bits of bacon and some saffron: and have eggs, that is both white and yolk, well-beaten and throw in all at once, without stirring, and make it all boil together, and then take it off the fire and leave it to turn”). But the coup de grace is a gilded swan that might grace the table for a wedding feast.
“Take a swan and prepare it and put it on to roast until it is all cooked, then make a paste of eggs, as clear as paper, and pour it on the said swan while turning the spit so that the paste cooks on it, and be careful that no wings or thighs be broken, and put the swan’s neck as though it were swimming in water, and to keep it in this position, you must put a skewer in its head which will rest between the two wings, passing all other, until it holds the neck firm, and another skewer below the wings, and another between the thighs, and another close to the feet and at each foot three to spread the foot: and when it is well cooked and well gilded with the paste, take out the skewers, except that in the neck, then make a terrace of whole-wheat pastry, which should be thick and strong, and which is one fist thick, made with nice fluting all around, and let it be two feet long, and a foot and a half broad, or a little more, then cook it without boiling, and have it painted green like a grassy meadow, and gild your swan with a skin of silver, except for about two fingers width around the neck, which is not gilded, and the beak and the feet, then have a flying cloak, which should be of crimson sendal on the inside, and emblazon the top of said cloak with whatever arms you wish, and around the swan have banners, the sticks two and a half feet long with banners of sendal, emblazon with whatever arms you wish, and put all in a dish the size and shape of the terrace, and present it to whomever you wish.”
Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman
Where is Auntie when I need her? My great aunt was a crafter before the shorthand existed. A home economics teacher in rural Tennessee, she taught me how to crochet as a child (I seemed constitutionally unable to learn to knit) and going to her tiny house out on the highway meant diving into closets full of fabric. She had a big field of green beans in front, a kitchen counter where we would eat buttery corn on the cob, a litter of kittens under the porch. Now that I’ve finally learned to love knitting, but lack the know-how to do much with it, I could really use her patient hands, deftly lifting the yarn and looping it back on the needle to help me out of whatever spot I’ve gotten myself in now.
After I gave a talk today at Ossining Library I began thinking about what has always made me want to write about strong women. Blandine van Couvering, Margaret Hardenbroeck, and the rest of the ladies I’ve treated in my nonfiction. Growing up with Auntie is one reason. Another is my father’s mother, also a force of nature, but in a different style. She did things her way, always. With a Polish-Jewish family only recently come to America, she ate lobster. When Joyce’s Ulysses was still banned in the U.S., she got her hands on a rare copy. She was a certifiable intellectual, a Manhattanite, with New York windows that overlooked the craggy grey outcroppings of Central Park.
They were two of my earliest heroines. What they would make of me as an adult I can’t say for sure, but I hope I’d do them proud.
Filed under Cooking, Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman
I met a couple of women at the talk I gave last night in Dobbs Ferry. They were part of a big, pleasant audience of history buffs. These ladies had read The Orphanmaster with their book group and had been inspired to recreate all the recipes and foodstuffs in the book — including fortified wine! What a great idea. They had a feast, though they told me they had a hard time finding cumin cheese.
I wonder if they ate by candlelight.
We are conserving our candles, our water and our gas. Now there is no fuel to be had anywhere, and we have one generator-full left — about eight hours — and three quarters of a tank in the car. We’re rationing. Two hours of power per day. All the estimates could be kerflooey, but they’ve been saying at least a week before the power comes back, and all bets are off re: finding gas.
Nonetheless, we have driven to the Ossining Public Library (where I will talk on The Orphanmaster next Saturday), well lit and warm, to spend the afternoon with hundreds of other aftermath-refugees, all determinedly using the beefed-up outlets here to charge their phones and computers. Within walking distance: our favorite local lunch place, with succulent, crispy-skinned Carribbean roast pork, yellow rice and red beans, coconut water. It’s nice to be out of the house.
This morning we got some sun on our faces, hiking up with Oliver to the clearing. Shattered limbs covered the trail, many of them too heavy to move. I keep having the feeling, whether watching the images of devastation on tv or passing the eerily quiet service stations (“No gas,” one sign read, “We did the best we could.”) or walking up the path through our woods and sighting over the hill to those majestic wind-overturned cedars, I didn’t know it could be so bad. I just had no idea.
And yet there are hot showers constantly on tap at the gym. So who am I to complain.
Filed under Cooking, Home, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster, Writing
The pot roast in the oven smells great, Moby Dick online sounds great, and the scarf I’m knitting is now a good seven feet. Oliver is keeping tabs on the mouse, which has crawled out from the bathroom and behind a bookcase. And the blowing outside has only increased a bit. So we’re fine for now.
I am inspired by a cider mill down the road that sells heirloom apples, some of which it grows and some it brings in. Weathered wooden crates hold one to two dozen varieties, bright green to deep red, all labeled with their place and date of origin.
Imagine biting into an apple Thomas Jefferson raised, about which he wrote from Paris: “they have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”
At Thompson Cider Mill I can find apples of the perfect flavor and shape and texture to bake into the dessert I call Apple Bombs, flaky pastry fixed in a package around a whole cored apple stuffed with butter and brown sugar, so that each dinner has their own individual, spherical apple pie.
There is an intense, hard, black apple that looks beautiful in a bowl on the table. It’s so vintage, you feel you’d have to go through a worm hole back in time (not through the apple) to find it, but here it is for you in a neat shed in 2012, ready to be collected into your shopping basket.
The Apples of New York, published before the turn of the 20th century by Spencer Ambrose Beach and now digitized, spells out nearly 400 varieties of the fruit, with lavish illustrations. It is the Audobon of apples.
Thompson Cider Mill has all new machinery to press its complex, perfumey cider. You could be drinking a combination of a dozen or more varieties, including Macoun, McIntosh, Rhode Island Greening, Northwest Greening, Jonagold, Winter Banana, Golden Russet, Idared, Winesap, Jonathan, Mutsu, Monroe, Baldwin, Fuji, Cortland, Spygold, Red Spy, Northern Spy, Pippin, Seek-No-Further, or local Golden or Red Delicious. When you take a sip, you’re drinking history.
Maybe I like the place so much because I can find my namesake fruit there.
Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
Guested at a book club today, one of two I’ve been invited to this week. Book groups are great — you get to talk about literature, and they feed you good chocolate cake.
Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud
There were about 20 members gathered in a living room overlooking the Long Island Sound. Beautiful, though my chair had its back to the view. I tried to appear scholarly, as this was a group that had actually read Anna Karenina in a month (last time I partook it was a 12 month commitment).
I find that people like The Orphanmaster a lot, but they love the idea that it’s been optioned for Hollywood.
I spoke about all the research I’d done for The Orphanmaster, how most of the details and textures of the time were as accurate as I could make them. Oh, so it was faction, one member said. Well, historical fiction, I said.
But faction is a pretty good description after all, when you’re under the spell of that chocolate cake.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster, Writing
What do you do with a quince? Or a bushel of them. I have a quantity on hand courtesy of my brother.
The romantic mythology surrounding quinces is marvelous. In ancient Greece, well wishers tossed fresh quinces into the wedding chariot of the bride and groom. It’s believed by scholars that the apple in the Garden of Eden was actually a quince. And Lear had his honeymooning Owl and Pussycat nibbling on slices of quince “which they ate with a runcible spoon.”
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.
They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Lacking a runcible spoon, I’m going to have to come up with some concoction to employ my mythical quinces. Any suggestions?
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, Poetry
There is something I’ve always loved about collecting vintage softbound cookbooks — whether put out by community organizations or companies to hawk a product — in addition to their lavish artwork and insane notions of food. That is the always hoped-for moment when an old fashioned, hand scribbled “receipt” (as they used to say) flutters out of the pages onto the kitchen countertop. Whether describing the method for putting up green tomato pickles or for baking a strawberry-Jello cake, these faded, spidery notations have always seemed to me a lifeline to the past, a past that is hurtling away from us so quickly that soon we’ll only read about the matriarchs who personalized their recipes in books. It’s hard to say which is sweeter, the notes of my own forbears, my grandmother or great aunt or mother-in-law, or the cooking wisdom of a homemaker I’ll never identify. In any case, I tuck each artifact back into its place between the pages, so I don’t have one to show off here at the moment. I can display some of the cookbooks, though…
Check out this nice piece by Michael Popek on this subject in the Huffington Post, illustrating his attempt to “keep the cycle alive.” He even had the sense to document the recipes before sticking them back in their time capsules.
Filed under Art, Cooking, Home, Jean Zimmerman
The butter being whacked first thing this morning, as per Julia Child’s intricate instructions, with an attentive audience.
After the dough is done “resting” a few more times, we undertake the following steps with military precision.
We don’t have the specialized cutter Child prescribes (it looks an awful lot like a mysterious wedding gift we saw Celeste Holm scrutinize in High Society last night) , so we might have to use an apple corer or a cheese grater. We should be done six hours from now.
In the meantime I’m going out to the garden to admire the morning glories and try to make myself weed.
Filed under Cooking, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman
Croissant dough beginning its long (five and a half) hour rise.
Dough on Grandma’s Table
It’ll spend some time in the fridge before we whack and smear butter, work it into the dough, cut the stuff into precise geometric shapes and shape it into horns. My grandmother’s table is the perfect spot to knead dough, but I don’t think she ever would have made a croissant in her life!
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman
Labor Day at the Goshen Fair in Connecticut. Perfection. Contests all around — the lawn tractor pull, the ox pull (hauling tons of concrete blocks), wood cutting (in which the judge cut down the only girl participating) where people employ special axes costing 500 dollars to dismantle 12 by 12 spruce timbers. The Percheron grand champion gelding, its face looming way over our heads. Contests in canning, with winners like this beautiful corn relish:
and this Jersey cow:
In the Jersey competition, the judge uses “dairy” as an adjective, as in, “I wish she’d be a little more dairy.” The usual 4H contests for goat, sheep and rabbit (this year’s best in show one of those mocha colored ones with the glistening eyes and lap ears). And the adult spelling bee, which we arrived too late to enter, but which challenged participants with words like “nemesis,” “analysis,” and mediocre.”
But the most amazing feats were achieved by those who had nothing to prove, like the stoic sow nursing over a dozen piglets:
or the heifer who managed to look like an art object just by standing there:
Fried belly clams, barbecue, a root beer float (Gil) and a bottomless milk shake (me) under the-end-of-summer sun, with no pressure to go up on the ferris wheel — now that’s a fair. And I came home with 288 yards of wool from a Jacob sheep, just spun that morning, from Snook Farm in Stormville, NY. As ancient as any agricultural fair, The Odyssey, which we listened to in the car, read with imposing dignity by Ian McKellan. They probably had Jacob sheep on Ithaca.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
‘We ate weeds,” said a writer who had lived through the Great Depression.
That statement has always impressed me. Are they actually digestible? How would you cook them — steamed like artichokes, boiled for hours like collards, sauteed with a little butter like spinach. No butter during the Depression, maybe margarine instead.
But today I am wondering just what weeds they were — I know people who relish purslane, but the redwood-height plants that shouldn’t be in my garden aren’t purslane. We went in and pulled out a wheelbarrow full today, after putting the state of the garden out of mind for the last month or so.
Two things prosper there. Sunflowers, and eggplant. The sunflowers are mammoth and hang their heads like old fashioned shower heads. They all face out of the garden, toward the swamp, so we see their backs exclusively. Purple and white, the eggplant grow heavy, their skins shining in the sun. Actually there’s a third, the morning glory vine, producing dozens of cerulean blossoms every day. This is the first time in my life I’ve successfully grown morning glories.
But the weeds are still the main crop.
Filed under Cooking, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman
Minestrone a la Marcella Hazan for dinner with some Cabinworld adjustments:
onions, farmer’s market carrots, no celery in the house at the moment, farmer’s market potatoes, half a home grown zucchini, farmer’s market green beans, no cabbage at the moment so instead home grown collard greens, pre-enjoyed by garden bugs, homemade chicken broth and all the tomatoes that we can find ripe in the garden (no canned tomatoes at the moment)
for the pesto: home grown basil, tall and healthy but used as a climbing stalk by morning glory vines, combined in the blender with slivered almonds (no pine nuts at the moment), Noreen’s home grown garlic, olive oil and good cheese
While we work down in the basement kitchen it is glorious end of summer above outside, the temperature perfect, a whispering breeze. We’ll have to eat outside. Again. How long can this perfection go on? Like the minestrone, perfect encompasses imperfect as the beautiful end of summer includes the bare fact of the end of summer.
Filed under Cooking, Home, Jean Zimmerman
Jean Zimmerman 