Saturday, July 28, 2012

The Holy Order of the Immaculate Muffin


I've been trying.

Since I was a kid, since before I came to fall in and out of grace, measured in 1/2 cups. I've been trying.

I came to it as a stranger; a pilgrim, as my friend Henry would say.
Though I'd never seen it myself, held it in my hand, I'd heard people talk about it. Talk about it in that way that sets folks eyelids fluttering, knees wobbling.
Like snake charmers and revivalists. Like yogis and swamis and the like.
I was looking to be charmed. Needing to be revived.
And so I made cornbread.

Rather, I tried.
God, how I tried.

At first I came at it with arrogance, with ego, with force of will - all the things that will fuck up a perfectly good cornbread.

I had thought it was simple bread and I was a complicated man. Boy, did I have that backwards.

Irony is never a good starting place.

Through my 20s I made thick, lifeless bricks of cornbread that hillbillies could use to build pyramids. I ran my ovens too hot. Inevitably I would rush the bake. Inevitably I would run my forearm into the rack; young men are measured in scars. Time after time, scar after scar, I learned nothing but only became more disappointed with each sandpapery paperweight or bludgeon masquerading as cornbread.

Boy, I was mad. Everyone had lied to me about cornbread. I was mocked in the aisles of the supermarket buy boxed mixes. I dug my heels in and continued to bow down, genuflect and lower myself to the bottom shelf, because that's where they keep the cornmeal.

Through my thirties I ruined batch after batch by adding whatever struck my fancy. My cookbooks, my armory of spells and folklore, sat uncracked, untouched, unloved - stacked above the cupboards, dogpiled. I cheated on the recipe like a touring rock musician. I played the part of plantation dandy in our sprawling Brooklyn apartment in the rural lowlands of Prospect Heights. Not surprisingly my cornbreads were often mush. Half baked and muddled. I would always check the oven too much. The oven that ran slow. The oven that was held together w/ bailing wire and twine. So it goes in your 30s, in Brooklyn. Each disappointment chipped away at me. Each soupy mess made me question my skill as a cook, my depth. Cooking is a magical thing. I came to doubt.

I doubted myself. I doubted the original, mythical cornbread that everyone had talked about. I doubted this non-existing thing that was the bar for every actual cornbread that fell short of the mark, shy of the finish. This weekly exercise in failure had brought me nothing but shame. Even the feral cats in the abandoned lot would not eat it. I walked by the cornmeal the way anonymous and guilt ridden lovers do in the long walk between trains at 14th Street.

And then I stopped. I turned my back on it. I laid into biscuits. I started working w/ high gluten flour and making bagels. I started making long batons of french bread, stubby rounds of Italian. I used no longer used my cast iron skillet, so heavy and powerful, for baking. I abandoned cornbread and viewed it as some old, brown god that the natives had placed on a pedestal. I regarded it as quaint phase of evolution.

Yeast was good for me. I understood it. It understood me. I came back to recipes and scales. I came back to quiet process, to peaceful patience. Over time my breads became better and better. I found a way to whisper to the dough, to be patient with the sponge, to let the oven be. In this way I was charmed by the tenacity of yeast that is thick in the air - unseen but prevalent. Every week I stood in my kitchen and had my own tent revival, shouting sermons and stomping my bare feet on my kitchen floor. Still, I was incomplete. The cornbread haunted me.

Last week I swung at it again.

This last weekend I made cornbread muffins for my Mom as a side for a crab cake dinner. I figured if I tried in her kitchen, the kitchen of my youth, I would have some extra luck. I was wrong. I followed the recipe closely. I was disciplined w/ the use of a timer. Still, the cornbread muffins I made were dense and coarse. They stuck to the pan, embarrassed to be debuted. My mom was kind, and the meal was good. But the cornbread muffins were awful. I was defeated.

Three days later I tried again. This time w/ grilled portobellos and a roasted pepper slaw. I let them go to long, didn't compensate on the cook time for it being muffins as opposed to full bread, and again I was presented with a small gang of cornbread cobblestones perfect for any preindustrial alley.

And then there was last night.

Last night I was pretty dragged out from a long day at work, and a long bike ride home. I couldn't think of food, much less prepare it. My wife made a really, really nice salad. We didn't have any croutons or nuts on hand so I took one of the left over muffins, that I had left in a bowl on the kitchen table as if to remind me of my failure, and crumbled it into the salad.

It was amazing. A-Maze-Ing.

In that moment it became clear to me that the thing I had been doing wrong (wrong from the start, as old E.Pound would say) was thinking the cornbread was one thing, and then blaming it for being something else. The previous failure didn't matter at that moment I was eating that salad. The failures of my youth, the failures in my Brooklyn kitchen. The failure of that dark time when I decided I would no longer try. It was clear to me that the magic lay in understanding the thing, and not forcing it. The magic was in the thing itself, as well as w/in myself, and would come to fruition when I gave it enough space to simply be what it is.

There is beauty in that which is terrible. There is hope in every failure. There are surprises only for those who are open to it. The question always is the intention. Am I cooking to impress? Am I cooking to quiet that voice that won't talk with its mouth full? Am I cooking to flex my will and strut? No. I am cooking to eat better, to be more fulfilled, more complete.

To be fed. In more ways than one.

Amen.


Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Potato Story




My mother came from the foot hills of the Appalachians, in the corner of Virginia’s New River Valley, shrouded in mountain fog, in arcane smoke full of specters and ghosts. Depression Era Virginia of my mother’s youth was just another plague or pestilence for the people of the territory. Sure, they’d been American born for two generations, a clear 60 years; but these pasty, freckled, Irish Scots had only traded fen for holler, bagpipes for fiddles, proud songs of revolt for murder ballads. They carried charms to ward of fairies and other pissed off mountain spirits. They carried scars from the Civil War. They lost an entire generation at Gettysburg, 400 miles away. Generations passed and the fables of terror were recounted in those flimsy houses built during each city’s little boom, when the Company came to town, and then became the town. The ghost story each mother told her child, the boogie man always, was the famine of 1843.

Not when what little they had was laid asunder by the Union marching home, savage w/ reckless energy. Not when raw Hell had unleashed @ King’s Mountain, when Ferguson took a bullet in the head and every man in the shadow of the Blue Ridge claimed responsibility for that aim being so true. Not when they Tutulo and Powhattan tribes agreed that these white people had no right to their sacred ground and took their revenge, not discriminating between women and children. No, it was always the famine of 1843.

It was in Ireland. The blight had taken the crops. When the crops failed the landlords came and each family was put out, one by one, until the Crown took all the ruined land. Pushed out of Ireland they came to the Virginia colonies, carrying w/ them the potato that failed them.

My mother’s grandmother, Mom Weaver, would always pause at this part of the story and point out that her family (which is to say her father’s side of the family) came from Scotland, and had not been put out. They were not vagabonds, her kit and kin.

They had come to the mountains to pull coal from the ground, each day losing a little more light. They had gone into the mines and carried out the coal for the electricity they could not afford. They had seen their savings disappear as the banks crumbled in 29. Still Mom Weaver only talked about the famine, as if it were a catch-all.

Each potato, she would say, was a kind of miracle.
“So much, you see, can go wrong”.
Mom Weaver would turn a potato over and over in her hand, scanning it like a crystal ball as she unwove her story:

“When they come to move you out, with their dogs and their guns and their writs on paper,” her hard Scottish consonants slammed like waves against a breach wall, “it’s the same as when the cold won’t break, the river don’t flow, and the crop dies before the strawberry moon. “

“But a potato, a single potato, can stretch today into tomorrow, and remind you what can come from this cold, hard ground.”

“It ain’t proud but humble. Not fancy but homely. The potato comes to us covered in dirt and sod. You can’t get at it and not take the earth home w/ you under your nails, back beneath your ears, deep in the crease of your skin. So what. Dirty hands can be trusted. Ain’t never met a banker w/ dirty hands. Can’t trust one of them.”

“Ain’t complicated. Not like an onion. Spend all day peeling an onion. Just crying and crying. Never getting to anything, each layer thinner than the first, until its nothing but tears and thin sheaf of onion you can see through. Not the potato. No sir.”

“You peel a potato one-two-three. No surprises. What you see is what you get.”

It was at this woman’s elbow that my mother learned to skin a potato, to hold the paring knife confidently, hidden strong in the crease of your palm. She would stand at the table in the kitchen on the South East corner of the house, the side closest to the willow tree, and she would peel potatoes as her grandmother had her separate the peels for later use in moonshine or sourdough starters. She would listen, trapped in the river valley, in that thin walled house, as Mom Weaver would retell the stories of warning, the horrifying recounting of the past.

My mother didn’t tell me about the famine of 49 when she taught me how to skin a potato, to prepare it, to hold the skins to the side (for luck, she said). She would only tell me that you can always count on a potato. It’s humble. It’s pragmatic. My mother smiles a certain way when she says “pragmatic”.

The potato is better than that.

It is better than Mom Weaver’s scarecrow ghost stories. It is better than my mother’s pragmatism.

It is the beginning of everything, a still point. It can become almost anything, swayed by your mood, by your impulse. Its texture is open for discussion. Its meat is a chameleon.

It is the best dinner date you will ever have. The most sublime accompaniment.

It is immediately gratifying in its ability to become. It is ever patient in its process of becoming.

I will hold a potato in my hand and consider its weight, consider its journey, trying to rub the bits of dirt off. I am struck by the great potential of the potato and realize that famine, back there in 49, that was a famine of Hope.