Lower the heat to 250°F, cover the roasting pan with aluminum foil, and cook for an additional 2½ hours. Remove the foil and brush the skin with the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil. Bump up the heat to 325°F and continue to roast for 30 minutes. (This should get the skin crispy.) The roast should reach an internal temperature of 140°F.
Remove the roast from the oven and allow it to rest for 20 minutes before slicing crosswise and serving.
The Catcher in the Rye
MALTED MILK ICE CREAM
I know I’m not alone in saying that middle school, particularly eighth grade, was absolute hell. It was so bad, in fact, that even now I tend to distrust anyone who looks back fondly on the ages eleven to fourteen. It was in eighth grade, after a particularly gut-wrenching day during which I was unceremoniously dumped by all of my girlfriends, that my English teacher, Mr. Mitchell, gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
I had just eaten lunch in the nurse’s office on a trundle bed covered in white paper, and I arrived to his class blotchy-faced and glassy-eyed, looking like a crazed and frizzy Catholic schoolgirl zombie—the “Thriller” version of “Baby One More Time.” Oh, did I not mention? To add insult to injury, I was wearing a Britney Spears costume that day—it was Halloween 1999, okay? I’m sure that Mr. Mitchell, who had a daughter of his own and who had been doing battle in the trenches of middle school for at least twenty years, was familiar with this kind of scene. After class, he listened to me blubber with a kind of quiet empathy that still makes my throat swell to think about, and he pressed a copy of Salinger’s book into my hands.
The novel was exactly what I needed at the time—a testament to the fact that adolescence is agonizing, confusing, lonely. I stayed obsessed with it, and with Holden, all through high school, revisiting it for comfort whenever I was feeling particularly overwhelmed with being a teenager. I wore a maroon T-shirt on which I’d ironed on felt letters that said “I am Holden Caulfield.” As a final English project freshman year, I created a Catcher in the Rye soundtrack, which I called “Hearing Holden,” filled with torturously sad songs by the Smiths and Azure Ray. (If you’re wondering if I had more fun in high school than I did in middle school, the answer is no, I didn’t.)
The older I got, though, the less Salinger’s writing sang to me, and by college I had put my twice-yearly Catcher in the Rye reading habit to rest. The other night, I reread it for the first time in eight years, and to my surprise I found it nearly unbearable. This could be due, in part, to the simple fact that I grew up—that I’m no longer as melancholy or bitter or determined to be misunderstood as I was when The Catcher in the Rye first pulled me from despair as a thirteen-year-old. It could also be due to the fact that I’ve learned too much about J. D. Salinger’s personal life in the years since his death to read his fiction as purely fiction ever again.
When he passed away in 2010, a media frenzy broke loose, rehashing every lurid detail of the intensely private Salinger’s life and adding previously unknown biographical tidbits—none of them particularly flattering. It was during this time that I learned about his tumultuous relationships with young girls, his religious practices, his work habits, his sexual dysfunction, his paranoia. I learned, too, about his eating habits, which included a strict organic and macrobiotic diet.
According to At Home in the World, the memoir written by his famously spurned lover, Joyce Maynard, Salinger avoided cooking any of his food, if possible, believing that “cooking food robs it of all of its natural nutrients”; when he did cook it, he was very specific about his methods and his cooking oils. He shunned pasteurized dairy products, “refined foods like sugar and white flour—even whole wheat flour, honey, and maple syrup.” In Raychel Haugrud Reiff’s 2008 biography of Salinger, she revealed that for breakfast he and Maynard would eat “whole grain bread and frozen peas, and for dinner bread, steamed fiddlehead ferns, apple slices, and sometimes popcorn. If they had meat, it was barely cooked organic ground lamb.” Maynard also claims that after going out to eat pizza with his son, Salinger would make himself vomit in order to “rid his body of impure food.”
I’m not particularly interested in Salinger’s food issues, but in relation to his fiction they fascinate me, because his stories are full of eating-disordered characters. There is Franny, of Franny and Zooey, who refuses to eat while on her dinner date with Lane Coutell, not even picking at the chicken sandwich or sipping her glass of milk as her irritated date stabs at his frog legs and escargot. She is sickly and shivering, and once the waiter takes away her untouched food she falls into a faint on her way to the restroom. Once home, she argues with her mother about her refusal to eat.
In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour Glass and a little girl named Sybil discuss how they both like to chew on candle wax. Seymour then launches into a story about his invented bananafish, who “lead a very tragic life.” “They swim into a hole,” he tells her, “where there’s a lot of bananas. They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs,” he says, gorging themselves on so many bananas that they are sadly unable to get back out of the hole. After this strange, make-believe story about the dangers of overeating, Seymour goes back to his hotel room and shoots himself in the head.
Then, of course, there is Holden Caulfield, who professes to be “a very light eater”—unusual for a sixteen-year-old boy. He usually has just orange juice for breakfast, which is why he’s “so damn skinny.” He alludes to the fact that at one point he was put on a special diet “where you eat a lot of starches and crap, to gain weight and all,” but he “didn’t ever do it.” Holden then tells us his usual order when he’s out somewhere, which is one of my favorite literary meals of all: “a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk.” “It isn’t much,” he says, “but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.”
It’s a meal packed with the pasteurized dairy, refined sugars, and white flour that Salinger so feared, but the concern for health is still quietly there. Malted milk powder is a mixture of barley malt, wheat flour, and evaporated milk, and was originally sold as a health food. Malt sugars are easily digestible, so it was thought that malt powder would be easy on the stomachs of infants and the very ill. Because of its delicious, toasty, caramelized flavors, it makes a dreamy companion for ice cream, and it became a soda fountain staple for Holden Caulfield’s generation.
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
Malted Milk Ice Cream
Holden’s malted milk could simply be malt powder stirred into a glass of milk, but I like to imagine that it’s a malted milkshake. Here, the choice is yours: use this malted milk ice cream to make a shake, or just eat it on its own.
Makes about 1 quart
1½ cups whole milk
1½ cups heavy cream
2 vanilla beans, seeds scraped out and pods reserved
⅓ cup malt powder
3 large egg yolks
½ cup sugar
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup chocolate malted milk candies (such as Whoppers), crushed slightly
Prepare an ice bath by filling the sink or a very large bowl with ice cubes and cold water. Place a large metal or glass bowl over the ice bath and a fine-mesh strainer over the bowl.
In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, whisk together the milk, cream, and vanilla seeds and pods over medium heat until you see small bubbles start to form around the edge of the pot and steam rising from the surface of the liquid. Whisk in the malt powder and remove the pot from the heat.
In a large bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, and salt until pale yellow. Whisking constantly, very slowly pour in the hot milk mixture in a steady stream until it is fully incorporated.
Pour this mixture back into the pot and whisk constantly over medium-low heat until it reaches 170°F on a candy thermometer, about 10 minutes. Pour it through the strainer into the bowl set over the ice bath and whisk until it cools to room temperature.
Cover the bowl and transfer it to the refrigerator to chill for at least 8 hours.
Churn the chilled base in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions. When the ice cream has set, add the crushed malted milk candies and process in the ice cream maker until they are incorporated throughout, about 30 more seconds of spinning.
Let the ice cream set up in the freezer for about an hour before serving.
The Bell Jar
CRAB-STUFFED AVOCADOS
Sylvia Plath holds a special place in my heart, because her childhood home was directly across the street from the house I grew up in. As a child, I spent many long hours staring at the window I imagined was her bedroom. It seemed incredible to me that such a simple box of a house, with its white clapboard siding and shiny black shutters, could have contained a mind so enormous.
I didn’t know about Plath until I was in fourth grade, when my mom casually told me that a very famous writer named Sylvia Plath had grown up in the house across the street. At the time, I was up to my ears in the Redwall and Golden Compass series, filled with dreams of someday becoming a writer. I simply could not believe that a very famous female writer had grown up across the street and my mom had never thought to tell me about it.
This was, of course, pre-Google, a world in which you did not have access to every intimate detail of a person’s life at the click of a button. So that afternoon I rode my bike to the library. I asked the librarian where I could find Sylvia Plath’s books, and she looked at me in a concerned way but led me to the stacks. I spent hours on the floor of the library that day, trying to make sense of just one line of Plath’s poetry, but I left with only a vague sense of dread that I would never be happy again once I turned ten.
I spent the next decade staring out the window at the white house across the street and attempting to read Plath’s poetry, but it wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when my favorite English teacher gave me The Bell Jar, that I found Plath accessible for the first time. In this semiautobiographical novel, which Plath published under the pen name Victoria Lucas in 1963, a young woman named Esther Greenwood travels to New York City for a summer internship at Ladies’ Day magazine.
Esther ultimately has to leave New York after suffering a mental breakdown, and the novel follows her descent into mental illness as she attempts suicide on multiple occasions, is put in an asylum, and receives treatment from various doctors (including electroshock therapy and insulin injections). Plath eases the reader into Esther’s degeneration with such subtlety that it takes a moment to realize that Esther has truly and completely lost her mind. The novel is bleak, there is no denying it, but I found Esther so likable (though I’ve heard others say different) and her voice so original that I kept reading it just to root for her.
When Esther first arrives in New York, before everything begins to fall apart for her, she goes to a luncheon for Ladies’ Day. It was this passage, about Esther’s relationship with food, that made me fall for her right away—I love a girl who isn’t shy about pigging out at an elegant affair. Surrounded by young women too timid and dainty to eat, Esther begins to load up her plate, emboldened by her belief that “if you do something incorrect at a table with a certain arrogance,” and act as if you know exactly what you are doing, “nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.”
With this philosophy in her back pocket, Esther approaches the food at the luncheon fearlessly, piling caviar on thin slices of chicken before moving on to “tackle the avocado and crabmeat salad.” Avocados, Esther explains, are her favorite fruit. Every Sunday, her grandfather would bring her “an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics.” He taught her how to eat avocados by filling their hollows with a special garnet sauce he made from grape jelly and French dressing. Esther eats the avocado and crabmeat and feels “homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.”
Almost immediately after the luncheon Esther and all the other girls fall violently ill with food poisoning. In the haze of her illness, Esther envisions “avocado pear after avocado pear being stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise and photographed under brilliant lights.” She sees “the delicate, pink-mottled claw meat poking seductively through its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess.”
There is something wonderfully kitschy about a crabmeat-stuffed avocado, but I can’t imagine that what Esther ate that day would appeal to most of us now (I’m thinking lots and lots of mayonnaise). This crab salad is bright and fresh, loaded with herbs and fresh lemon juice—and no mayonnaise in sight.
THE BELL JAR
Crab-Stuffed Avocados
Makes 4 stuffed avocado halves
1 pound fresh crabmeat, picked over
Juice of 1 lemon (about ¼ cup)
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh parsley
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh dill
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 ripe avocados, halved and pitted
Toss together the crabmeat, lemon juice, olive oil, and herbs in a large glass bowl and season with salt and pepper to taste. Divide the salad evenly among the four avocado halves and serve.
Rebecca
BLOOD ORANGE MARMALADE
When I was fifteen, I was dumped by my first love, a boy nearly three years my senior, while eating a baked potato covered in neon-orange cheese sauce in the school cafeteria. Thirteen years later I still remember everything about that day—what I wore (a yellow T-shirt that said “Blondes Have More Fun”) and who I talked to, what we read in English class (Romeo and Juliet) and how, after school, I got sick in a neon-orange cheese sauce kind of way from the physical blow of how desperately sad I felt. A heady mixture of hula-hooping hormones and genuine hurt knocked me off my feet so intensely that my mom swears even now that my eyes changed color that day, in the same way that people’s hair can turn white from shock.
There was, of course, another girl—an ex-girlfriend—older and cooler and infinitely more beautiful than the bony elbows and caterpillar-thick eyebrows I saw when I looked in the mirror. For weeks I walked around in a fog, jealousy and betrayal roiling and churning in my gut like a disease, grades slipping and friends growing tired of me. One day I walked into my bedroom after school to find a book sitting on my pillow, lavender and blue with loopy pink cursive scrawled across it: Rebecca. My mom had placed it on my bed in an attempt to distract me from my despair, and upon seeing it I suddenly realized, astonished, that I hadn’t picked up a book in weeks. It was the longest I’d gone without reading since I started at age six. I was mortified at how far away I had gotten from myself, and I tore into the book as if it was the only hope I had of remembering who I had once been.
Rebecca is almost always described as a gothic romance novel. Year after year around Valentine’s Day it pops up on various Internet lists compiling the most romantic literature of all time. Next to snapshots of its various vampy, supermarket-paperback covers, there is always a blurb about the novel’s dashing and stoic Maxim de Winter, whose dark secrets and cold demeanor only serve to make him more compelling. Maybe it’s because I first read Rebecca with a broken heart, but to me this book is not at all romantic. To me, Rebecca is a story about jealousy, revenge, rage, identity, and how completely a person can be swallowed by a love that is neither equal nor returned. The narrator, a meek girl in her early twenties, goes unnamed throughout the entire novel, which I found particularly poignant and disturbing during my own heartsick identity crisis.
Daphne du Maurier always said that Rebecca was a study in jealousy, but she rarely mentioned that the inspiration for the novel stemmed from events in her own life. Just as our unnamed narrator struggles with the feeling that she will never be equal to her husband’s my
steriously deceased first wife, Rebecca, so too did du Maurier struggle with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy in her own marriage. Du Maurier’s husband, Tommy Browning, had been engaged to a woman named Jan Ricardo before he married du Maurier in 1932. Ricardo was a dark and glamorous figure, a woman who signed her elegantly written letters to Browning with an intricately curling R, much like du Maurier’s own Rebecca de Winter, whose name “stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.”
Rebecca is brimming with mouthwatering food. The breakfasts at Manderley (the de Winter estate) are awe-inspiring, particularly to our narrator, who is used to so much less. There are scrambled eggs and bacon, fish, boiled eggs, porridge, and ham. There is an entire table of condiments for the toast and scones—jam, marmalade, and honey—as well as dessert dishes and mountains of fresh fruit. The foods are simple and comforting, but the sheer amount leaves the narrator wondering, after Maxim takes only a small piece of fish from this bounty, what happens to all the food that goes untouched.
These food scenes are not just space fillers. What the characters eat—and how they order it, eat it (or don’t eat it), and think about it—speaks volumes about who they are and what their positions are. At the beginning of the novel we learn exactly what type of person Mrs. Van Hopper is when we see her eat ravioli with her “fat, bejeweled fingers… her eyes darting suspiciously from her plate to mine for fear I should have made the better choice.” We learn about the narrator’s social position via food as well, when the waiter who “had long sensed my position as inferior and subservient to [Mrs. Van Hopper’s], had placed before me a plate of ham and tongue that somebody had sent back to the cold buffet half an hour before as badly carved.”
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