BLOOD ORANGE SYRUP
Makes about 2 cups
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
Zest and juice of 2 blood oranges
Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and heat over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Add the blood orange zest and juice and bring to a boil; boil gently for 10 minutes. Strain the syrup and allow it to cool completely.
In the Night Kitchen
SCALDED and MALTED MILK CAKE
In February 2010 everything went wrong. In the midst of a million other inconveniences and true emergencies, I was laid off from my job as a baker at a small restaurant and suddenly unable to find work anywhere. November to February had flashed by in a frenzy of late-night Thanksgiving and Christmas party orders—hundreds of pumpkin and pecan and apple pies, gift baskets of spicy molasses cookies, and the occasional bûche de Noël, and then, suddenly, silence.
I had clung to my job through a month of post-holiday lull, but eventually I came in to work one day to find a big red slash through my name on the schedule, the eyes of my fellow bakers filled with apology and relief that they had escaped my fate. I tried hard not to take it personally. I was, after all, the most recent hire, so it was only fair that I be cut first. I packed up my tools and folded my apron and walked out of the restaurant’s cozy warmth and into the bracing cold of February in Brooklyn.
Unable to face going home and telling my boyfriend and sister—both of whom were struggling to find work at the time—that I had been laid off, I kept walking. I was certain that in some restaurant somewhere, a baker with a bad attitude had just ripped off her apron and stormed out, vowing never to sift or knead or frost again. I would arrive just in time to save the day, and it would be as if I had never even lost my job at all.
This, of course, didn’t happen. Not even close. Every owner of every restaurant I walked into told me the same thing—that they were already overstaffed, that they also were in the post-holiday lull, that all they needed was the chocolate bread pudding that their chef always made. It was around nine at night when I finally admitted defeat and headed home. Passing by an industrial building a few blocks from my house, I noticed for the first time the smell of yeast and sugar wafting through the warehouse’s open gate. I peered in the windows and saw at least a dozen Hasidic men crouched over enormous sixty-quart mixers and leaning against baking racks, white shirts tucked in over big bellies, tightly curled payot grazing their ears. They talked and laughed and worked, fogging up the windows with steaming loaves of bread.
I considered for half a second that maybe I was hallucinating after walking around all day on an empty stomach, that maybe I was so desperate for a baking job that I had actually just willed this place into being. I marveled that all of this hustle and bustle had been happening nearly every night right under my nose, without my ever knowing it. But what really had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief was the uncanny resemblance this secret place bore to the one in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen.
My parents often read In the Night Kitchen to me before bed when I was a kid, and I was always fascinated and slightly terrified by it. After they tucked me in, I would stare at the drawings, trying to make sense of them—a scruffy, naked boy falls into a ten-foot-tall bottle of milk and gets stirred into hot cake batter by a group of swarthy chefs, then emerges from a mixing bowl drenched in a cake-batter suit that looks much like Max’s pajamas in Where the Wild Things Are.
In the Night Kitchen features a little boy named Mickey, who dreams that he falls out of bed and into the world of “the night kitchen”—a secret nighttime place where all of the pastries in the world are created while the rest of us sleep. A place like the one I passed by that night and, I’m sure, much like places Sendak himself probably passed many times as a child growing up in a Jewish section of Brooklyn. In the Night Kitchen remains, to this day, one of the most controversial children’s books ever published—it is challenged and banned every year for a variety of reasons. Some critics take offense at Mickey’s seemingly unnecessary nudity, some at the “phallic” milk bottle and the milky substance that makes the boy’s nudity seem less pure. Some even hint at a possible World War II substory, calling attention to the chefs’ “Hitler-esque” mustaches and their attempt to bake Mickey into a cake.
In 2011 I heard an interview with Sendak on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, in which he talked about a particularly memorable fan letter exchange, and it has stuck with me, tumbling around in my head whenever I feel particularly eager to create a recipe. The fan—a little boy named Jim—sent Sendak a “charming card with a little drawing on it,” so Sendak responded in kind, sending Jim a card with a drawing of a Wild Thing. To this, Sendak got a response from Jim’s mother, telling him: “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” Sendak told Gross, “That to me was one of the highest compliments I ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
The experience of loving something—particularly a book or a book’s illustration—so much that you actually want to eat it is a sentiment near and dear to my heart. It is essentially what I’m trying to express in this book. Sendak works the idea into Where the Wild Things Are when the Wild Things threaten Max with “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”
Sendak’s upbringing was not an easy one. Raised in Brooklyn by poor Jewish immigrants, he was a sickly and anxious child, aware from a young age that he was gay. His childhood in the late 1920s and early 1930s was haunted by war, death, economic collapse, and seemingly endless violence against children. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was particularly disturbing to young Maurice, and it later factored into a few of his books. His stories are full of nightmares—children are always vulnerable and threatened by danger. Adults are either suffocating his characters with their love or disappearing completely. His characters are obstinate and often downright bratty; they defy their parents’ directions and end up hurtling into danger and adventure, usually to end up—much to everyone’s relief—back in their own beds again.
Growing up, I loved Sendak’s books for this very reason. Parents fear that their children will be shaken up by something they read or see or hear, but these stories—the ones that get your brain working and your heart pumping—are the stories that make you realize the power of the written word, that make you fall in love with reading. They are the ones you remember most vividly, that comfort you when you’re fully grown, roaming the nighttime streets of your neighborhood like one of Sendak’s wandering children, peering in windows, jobless and defeated and scared for a thousand grown-up reasons.
IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN
Scalded and Malted Milk Cake
Serves 8
14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¾ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped out and pod reserved
½ cup whole milk
2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk
1½ cups cake flour
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon malted milk powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
Glaze
1½ cups confectioners’ sugar
3 tablespoons vanilla malt powder
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1½ tablespoons whole milk or heavy cream, or more if needed
⅛ teaspoon kosher salt
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Spray a Bundt pan thoroughly with nonstick cooking spray. (A 6-cup Bundt pan will yield a taller cake; a 9-cup Bundt pan will yield a shorter cake.)
Combine the butter, both sugars, and the vanilla bean seeds in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat on medium speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
While the butter is being creamed, pour the milk into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and add the vanilla bean pod. H
eat the milk over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the milk reaches 180°F. Right before it reaches this temperature, you should see bubbles forming along the pan’s edge and steam rising from the surface of the milk. Once the milk reaches 180°F, remove the pan from the heat and set it aside, leaving the vanilla bean pod in the milk to steep.
Add the eggs and yolk to the butter-sugar mixture, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl to make sure everything is combined.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the cake flour, malted milk powder, baking powder, and salt.
Remove the vanilla bean pod from the scalded milk. With the mixer on low, alternate adding the dry ingredients and the scalded milk to the butter mixture until everything is incorporated—be careful not to overmix.
Pour the batter into the greased Bundt pan and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about 45 minutes.
Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack for 45 minutes before turning it out onto the rack to cool completely.
Whisk all the glaze ingredients together in a small bowl until smooth. If the glaze is too thick to pour, add another teaspoon of milk or cream. Pour over the cake once it has cooled to room temperature.
Nancy Drew
DOUBLE CHOCOLATE WALNUT SUNDAE
I was primed to be the biggest Nancy Drew fan of all time when I received a stack of the first ten books for Christmas in fourth grade. The year before I had read Harriet the Spy eight times, and as a result refused to wear anything but wide-leg orange pants and striped thermals or eat much besides tomato and mayo sandwiches. The great-aunt who had bought the Nancy Drew books for me was in her mid-seventies and had written on the inside cover of The Secret of the Old Clock, in shaky but elegant script, that she had very fond memories of the series from her girlhood and that I was in for a great treat. I was so excited to get up to my room and crack open those books that at Christmas breakfast I barely even touched the icing-slathered Pillsbury cinnamon bun that I had been anticipating all year long.
For ten days straight I read a book every day, and each night after turning off my light and burrowing under the covers, I lay awake trying to figure out why I wasn’t more enthusiastic about them. Nancy was smart, she was brave and daring and charismatic—she was everything I should have wanted in a female protagonist—and yet somehow she seemed hollow. Instilled with a sense of duty to my great-aunt, who had gone to the bookstore and lovingly picked them out for me, though, I pushed on and finished the ten books, feeling more and more irritated and baffled with each one.
Unlike Harriet, who was very stubbornly her own person, Nancy was everygirl, imbued with talents and virtues so varied that any little girl could find her relatable. This was the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s aim for the Nancy Drew series—to teach little girls that they could be anything and everything, that they could be perfect—smart, brave, fashionable, beautiful, kind, and a darned good cook and house manager to boot. It was a noble goal, and one that girls like me, who grew up never questioning that we could be whoever and whatever we wanted, should be forever grateful for, but when I was a young reader, the idea of striving for that level of perfection only stressed me out.
Perhaps for this very reason I felt immense relief when Nancy’s chum Bess Marvin entered the picture in the fifth book, The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Unlike Nancy and George Fayne, who seem almost compulsively eager to fling themselves headlong into dark alleys with shadowy old men, Bess is anxious and cautious, with all of the appropriate reservations of an ordinary person. While much is made of Nancy’s “trim figure,” and George is described as “an attractive tomboyish girl,” Bess is introduced as “slightly plump”—a description that precedes her name in nearly every sentence for the remainder of the book.
As a young reader I always aligned myself with the tomboyish character in a book—Jo March, Scout Finch, Caddie Woodlawn—but in this case, I found myself immediately on Bess’s side, protective of her because she was the easy target, the underdog, the brunt of under-the-table knee jabs and covert eye rolls from Nancy and George. George may be a tomboy, but unlike the tomboyish characters I loved, she is mean-spirited, always drawing attention to how much Bess has eaten and how slowly she’s moving, while Nancy giggles demurely in the background.
The girls are differentiated not only by their physical appearances, but also by their relationship to food. Food is everywhere in these books, and the way that each of the girls reacts to it is telling of their personalities. Nancy loves to cook (and is, of course, fantastic at it) but cares hardly at all for the end product. Her restraint is epic. She is forever doing things like frosting warm cakes with chocolaty icing but not licking the spoon, and telling Bess and the hungry cowboys that they have to have graham crackers for dessert instead of cake. George is indifferent toward food; she often forgets to eat, and when she does it is only out of absolute necessity. She is always the one making fun of Bess for how much she eats, correcting her on the number of sandwiches she’s consumed or tormenting her by saying things like “Eating is really a very fattening hobby, dear cousin.” Bess is driven and consumed by food; she is constantly “starving” or “famished” or “hungry enough to eat a fried rock.”
When we first meet Bess, the three girls are at a diner discussing the mysterious happenings at Shadow Ranch. Nancy and George order soft drinks while Bess studies the menu and declares that the mystery has her so upset she has lost her appetite, before adding, “I’ll have a double chocolate sundae with walnuts.” At this, “Nancy and George grinned. ‘Poor girl,’ said George, ‘she’s wasting away.’ Bess looked sheepish. ‘Never mind me,’ she said.” These sundaes are Bess’s favorite food. They follow her throughout the series and are almost always eaten while Nancy and George smirk and sip their sodas.
The shame and general weirdness surrounding food in the series bothered me even as a child. I thought about the books for years afterward, wondering every time I saw them on bookshelves if I was the only kid who had reacted this way toward them. It wasn’t until I was in college and writing a research paper on eating disorders in literature that I decided to do some research on critical receptions and feminist readings of Nancy Drew.
My first shocking discovery upon delving into Nancy Drew’s complicated history was that the “author,” Carolyn Keene, was not in fact a real person at all but just a made-up name created by Edward Stratemeyer. The books were actually written by a number of ghostwriters, who were paid a flat fee for their work and required to sign away all royalties and recognition to the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I was also surprised to find out that the original books had been completely rewritten starting in 1959 in order to rid them of racially insensitive language, and also to update them so that they would appeal to a modern audience. This meant that the Nancy Drew I knew was completely different from the Nancy Drew that my great-aunt was familiar with.
The original Carolyn Keene was Mildred Benson, who wrote twenty-three of the first thirty books in the Nancy Drew series. Edward Stratemeyer hired Benson to revive the failing Ruth Fielding series and was so pleased with her work that he asked her to write a new series about a girl detective that would be like a Hardy Boys for girls, and would feature an “up-to-date, modern young lady.” It took me a long time to track down the original twenty-three Nancy Drew books, but once I did I could see why my great-aunt had loved them so much. Benson’s Nancy, while still good at almost everything, is much more likable. She knows how to handle a rifle and wrangle horses, she is confident without the cocky condescension of the later texts, and somehow her bravery feels truer and less like a compulsive death wish.
What’s most interesting about these original books compared to the rewrites, though, is how differently Bess is portrayed—and how differently the role of food figures into the narrative. In the original Secret at Shadow Ranch there is no mention of Bess’s weight. Instead, the introduction states, “Elizabeth was noted for always doing the corr
ect thing at the correct time. Though she lacked the dash and vivacity of her cousin [George], she was better looking and dressed with more care and taste.” There is no mention of double chocolate walnut sundaes, no snarky remarks about Bess’s eating habits. Rather, all of the girls seem to have healthy appetites in the original Secret at Shadow Ranch. They are equally tantalized by “the odor of hot biscuits, chicken sizzling in butter, and fragrant coffee,” washing up quickly so they can sit down to “a table which fairly groaned with plain but delicious food.”
As glad as I was to read a version of the text that wasn’t so fraught with food anxieties and shame binges, I was sad to see the double chocolate walnut sundaes go, if only because I knew how much Bess enjoyed them. I never eat a sundae without thinking of Bess, and I eat sundaes more often than I should admit (I am an independent woman and I can do whatever I want). This recipe is my ode to Bess, my favorite underdog. It has milk chocolate ice cream covered in a thick, warm chocolate sauce that tastes as close as I could get to the Brigham’s fudge sauce I was raised on, and it’s topped with candied walnuts with a healthy pinch of salt and a kick of cayenne.
NANCY DREW
Double Chocolate Walnut Sundae
Prepare the milk chocolate ice cream, candied walnuts, and chocolate fudge sauce (recipes follow). Once all of your components are ready, create your sundae by layering the ice cream and candied walnuts in an ice cream dish and topping with the hot fudge.
MILK CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM
Makes about 1 quart
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