Voracious

by Cara Nicoletti

  Only two chapters after Dido’s tragic death, the same honey-filled, poppy seed–studded cake makes another appearance, when the priestess leading Aeneas to the underworld throws Cerberus, the guard dog, “a sop, slumberous with honey and drugged seed / and he, frothing with hunger, three jaws spread wide, / snapped it up.” Almost immediately, the drugged cake takes hold of the dog, and he lies down in a heap, allowing Aeneas and his party entry to the underworld. One of the first ghosts Aeneas sees is Dido, and he approaches her, weeping and asking for her forgiveness. But Dido, queen of the breakup, eloquent even in her silence, “turned away, her features no more moved by his pleas as he talked on / than if she were set in stony flint or Parian marble rock.” She leaves Aeneas standing there, tears streaming down his face.

  Even amid all of this tragedy, a cake “dripping loops of oozing honey and poppies” is not easy to forget. Unlike Dido, I never wanted to cause this man whom I had loved any pain; all I wanted was a distraction from the sudden quiet expanse of my foldout kitchen table. I made dozens of different honey–poppy seed cakes during those empty weeks, hoping to glean some of Dido’s strength from them, or at the very least to get some sleep. I baked so many versions, in fact, that my copy of The Aeneid still has poppy seeds buried deep in its spine, and ten pages are now inaccessible, stuck together for eternity by honeyed fingerprints.

  THE AENEID

  Honey–Poppy Seed Cake

  This recipe, which was written on the back pages of my well-loved copy of the book, is my favorite. It has a dense crumb and a serious dose of honey, and the poppy seeds provide just enough crunch, the lemon just enough brightness, to wake you from your drowsy, full-bellied stupor.

  Makes 3 loaf cakes

  3½ cups cake flour

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature

  1½ cups sugar

  1 cup honey

  3 large eggs, at room temperature

  1 cup brewed Earl Grey tea, warm but not hot

  ¼ cup fresh lemon juice

  2 teaspoons grated fresh lemon zest

  1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

  ¼ cup poppy seeds

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line the bottom of three 9-inch loaf pans with parchment paper. Grease the parchment and the sides of the pans, dust with flour, and tap out the excess.

  In a medium bowl, whisk together the cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and set aside.

  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and honey and beat until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Turn the mixer to low and add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  Beat in the tea, lemon juice, lemon zest, and vanilla and mix until incorporated.

  Slowly add the dry ingredients, scraping down the sides of the bowl, until everything is mixed in and the batter is smooth (be careful not to overmix).

  Stir the poppy seeds into the batter with a spatula until they are spread throughout. Divide the batter evenly among the three loaf pans.

  Place the pans on a baking sheet and bake until the center of each cake springs back when you touch it gently, and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out mostly clean (this is a sticky cake, so it won’t be completely clean), 45 to 60 minutes.

  Allow the cakes to sit for 20 minutes before turning them out onto a cooling rack. Allow them to cool completely before serving.

  Mrs. Dalloway

  CHOCOLATE ÉCLAIRS

  I have a complicated relationship with Virginia Woolf that dates back to an excruciatingly boring course I took on modernist writers while in college. Perhaps it was the oppressive fluorescent lighting and corrugated office ceiling in the lecture hall, or the professor’s monotonous and uninspired rants, or the sea of students raising their hands to “ask questions,” which really meant telling some pointless anecdote about their own lives—but I digress. Whatever it was, Virginia and I just did not get along.

  The professor loved to use the words “otherworldly” and “ethereal” when describing Woolf, so much so, in fact, that the only fun part of the class was the collective eye roll that occurred whenever the words were repeated. One day, a student finally asked for an example of this ethereal otherworldliness, and the professor said, without missing a beat, “Have you ever noticed that there’s hardly any food at all in any of her novels?”

  It was at this point that I started to doubt that the professor had ever read any of the books he was teaching us—he was so terribly, terribly wrong. For all of my irritation and frustration with dear Virginia, her food scenes were actually among the main reasons I persevered through her novels. In The Waves we have Neville’s beautiful roast duck, piled with vegetables, butter seeping through Bernard’s crumpet, pheasant with bread crumbs and soft bread sauce, and Brussels sprouts with their “pungent, curious taste.” In To the Lighthouse there is the boeuf en daube—the holy grail (or one of about seven) of all literary meals—a rich and tender stew of meats scented with “olives and oil and juice.” This is one of four meals that most people mention first when I tell them that I write about literary food scenes; Miss Havisham’s bride-cake, the banana breakfast in Gravity’s Rainbow, and Bruce Bogtrotter’s chocolate cake from Matilda are the others.

  When it comes to Virginia Woolf and food, people also love to quote from A Room of One’s Own: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” This quotation is everywhere on Etsy—embroidered on pillows, painted on clean white canvases, embossed on recipe notebooks—and it points, these crafty folks seem to think, to Virginia Woolf’s love of food. However, in context, the line refers to the women at the fictitious University of Oxbridge, who do not dine well, and as a consequence are not able to think, love, or sleep well.

  Their dinner consists of transparent gravy soup, and a “homely trinity” of beef, greens, and potatoes, which Woolf describes as “the rumps of cattle in a muddy market.” This is in stark contrast to the meal served to the male students at the same school, a meal of sole spread with cream, partridges with an array of salads and sauces, succulent young potatoes, and a dessert so good that “to call it a pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.”

  The point is that Woolf’s thoughts on eating could never be captured in a single quotation. There is always more going on behind the quote, surrounding it, and after it; this is due, in part, to the fact that Woolf herself had an incredibly difficult relationship with food. For the majority of her life, Woolf battled anorexia, or something resembling it, refusing to eat for long periods of time during bouts of depression and psychosis. Woolf’s husband, Leonard, writes extensively about her “strange and slightly irrational attitude towards food” in his book Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918, referring to it as “this excruciating business of food.”

  Often, he had to sit by her side for hours at a time, coaxing her to eat just one meal, and worried that she would starve if left to her own devices. Some scholars speculate that Woolf’s disordered eating was a reaction to having possibly been molested by her brother as a child; others, such as Madeline Moore, theorize that her refusal to eat was “one of Woolf’s ascetic practices, adopted as a last-resort gesture of feminist political defiance.” Leonard Woolf himself wonders if it wasn’t simply “a (quite unnecessary) fear of becoming fat.”

  Of all the times Woolf writes about food in her diaries, one of the most telling, to me, comes from an entry dated October 7, 1918, in which she recounts her revulsion at seeing the strangers around her at a restaurant eat. She describes watching them eat as staring into “the lowest pit of human nature,” and seeing “flesh still unmolded to the shape of humanity.” She wonders “whether it is the act of eating & drinking that degrades, or whether people who lunch at restaurants are naturally degraded.”

 
Woolf’s attitude toward food is Victorian, focusing on the grotesqueness of the flesh and the marrying of moral character with eating. It’s an attitude most clearly displayed in the characterization of Mrs. Dalloway’s Miss Kilman, a history tutor and religious zealot who tries her hardest to denounce the worldly matters of the flesh, but finds that “food was all that she lived for.” At tea, her student Elizabeth Dalloway can’t help but observe Miss Kilman’s unseemly greediness toward the offerings. At one point during their tea, Miss Kilman, who has been “eating, eating with intensity,” gets upset when a child takes the pink sugared cake she had her eye on. Ever the victim, Miss Kilman sees it as an attack on her only happiness in life—her enjoyment of food.

  In an attempt to force Elizabeth, with whom she is in love, to stay with her at tea instead of leaving for her mother’s party, Miss Kilman passive-aggressively “finger[s] the last two inches of a chocolate éclair” and tells Elizabeth, “I’ve not quite finished yet.” When it becomes clear that Elizabeth is itching to go, Miss Kilman ever so slowly lifts the éclair to her mouth and swallows it down with the dregs of her tea. She is despondent after this lunch, certain that Elizabeth has turned on her, is repulsed by her—and we as readers can’t blame Elizabeth for feeling that way. By simply placing a plate of sugared cakes and chocolate éclairs in front of her, Woolf is able to speak volumes about Miss Kilman’s character and, we can infer, about her own repulsion at watching people eat.

  Psychological and textual analysis aside, I understand Miss Kilman. I can’t say in all honesty that I wouldn’t be upset if a kid took the last pink sugared cake at my tea party, and I would be lying if I told you that immediately after reading this scene in class, my friend Emily and I didn’t go straight to Pasticceria Rocco and get two big, fat chocolate éclairs.

  MRS. DALLOWAY

  Chocolate Éclairs

  Because of their fancy French name, the idea of making chocolate éclairs at home may seem intimidating at first, but actually it’s simple—a quick pâte à choux (again, don’t be scared by the French), a rich vanilla pastry cream, and some good-quality tempered chocolate, and you are in business.

  Makes 10 to 12 éclairs

  Pastry Cream

  1 cup whole milk

  1 cup heavy cream

  2 vanilla beans, seeds scraped out and pods reserved

  6 large egg yolks

  ⅔ cup sugar

  Pinch of kosher salt

  ¼ cup cornstarch

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter, cold

  Pâte à Choux

  1 cup water

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

  1 tablespoon sugar

  ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  4 large eggs, lightly beaten

  1 large egg beaten with 1½ teaspoons water, for egg wash

  Chocolate Glaze

  ½ cup semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

  ½ cup heavy cream

  Make the Pastry Cream:

  Prepare an ice bath by filling the sink or a very large bowl with ice cubes and cold water. Place a large glass or metal bowl over the ice bath and set a fine-mesh strainer over the bowl.

  Combine the milk, cream, and vanilla seeds and pods in a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Once the mixture comes to a simmer, take it off of the heat and set aside for 15 to 20 minutes to infuse.

  In a large bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, and salt until they are airy and light in color. Whisk in the cornstarch until it is smooth.

  Take ¼ cup of the milk-cream mixture and slowly drizzle it into the yolk-cornstarch mixture, whisking constantly so that the yolks don’t scramble. Repeat with the remaining hot milk and cream. Discard the vanilla bean pods and return the mixture to the saucepan.

  Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the temperature reaches 160°F. The mixture will be thick, with large bubbles rising to the surface and slowly bursting.

  Strain the pastry cream through the fine-mesh strainer into the bowl set over the ice bath. Whisk in the cold butter. Whisk the mixture until it has cooled to room temperature. Place plastic wrap over it, pressing it flush to the surface of the pastry cream so that it doesn’t form a skin, and set it in the refrigerator to chill for 2 hours.

  Make the Pâte à Choux:

  Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

  In a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat the water, butter, sugar, and salt over medium heat until the butter is melted and the water is simmering.

  Add the flour all at once and mix it with a wooden spoon until it is fully incorporated into the liquid. The mixture will be very stiff. Keep stirring it over medium heat until the batter loses its shine. The batter will get even stiffer, and feel more like a loose bread dough. This will take about 4 minutes of continuous stirring.

  Transfer the dough to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix at medium speed for 1 minute.

  After 1 minute, slowly add the 4 beaten eggs to the batter until they are fully incorporated and the batter is again glossy and smooth. When you lift the paddle out of the batter, it should fall back into the bowl in slow ribbons.

  Fill a pastry bag fitted with a 1-inch plain tip with the batter and pipe out oblong shapes (about 5 inches long and 1 inch wide) onto the lined baking sheets, spacing them at least 2 inches apart—you should get 10 to 12.

  Gently brush the tops of the éclairs with the egg wash. Then, dip a fork into the egg wash and gently drag it across the surface of the éclairs—this will help the éclairs rise evenly.

  Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 325°F and bake until golden brown all over, 25 to 30 more minutes. Turn off the oven and allow the éclairs to cool in the oven for 10 minutes before taking them out and letting them cool further on the baking sheet.

  Make the Chocolate Glaze:

  Place the chocolate in a large glass bowl and set aside. Heat the cream in a small saucepan over medium-low heat until just before boiling—steam should be rising from the surface and tiny bubbles should be forming around the edge. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and allow it to sit for 30 seconds before whisking until smooth.

  Assemble the Éclairs:

  Once the éclair shells and the pastry cream have cooled, insert a long skewer through one end of each éclair, making sure not to poke it through the other side, and move it around to make space for the pastry cream.

  Fill a pastry bag fitted with a filling tip with pastry cream and pipe it into the éclairs until they are full but not about to burst. Dip the top of each éclair in the chocolate glaze and set it on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining éclairs. Set them aside until they have cooled and set, 1 to 2 hours.

  Anna Karenina

  OYSTERS and CUCUMBER MIGNONETTE

  In my junior year of college, I took an American literature class—a huge bleacher-seated lecture with 250 sleepy, hungover kids. Looking back on these days, I recall there was almost always someone who stood out in these big auditorium classes, not necessarily as the smartest, but certainly as the coolest. In this particular class it was Ruthie, a pixie-boned girl with sallow skin and unkempt, dyed-black curls that sprung from her head like an overgrown houseplant.

  Ruthie smoked Sobranie Black Russians, one of which was always tucked behind her ear, the gold tip gleaming out of her curls. She introduced herself on the first day of our recitation by announcing in a bored voice that she was taking the course as a requirement, that her actual area of study was Russian literature with a focus on Leo Tolstoy’s moral writings. I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded so much cooler than “I’m studying English and Latin.” No matter how cold it was, Ruthie wore slouchy black tank tops to expose a tattoo on her right arm—a strikingly realistic portrait of Tolstoy, heavily shaded in deep grays and blacks. Underneath it was a quote in typewriter font that I spent the entire semester trying to make
out; it read: “Don’t steal fresh bread.”

  I had, in those days, a deep-seated dislike of Russian literature, stemming from an earlier dark period in high school in which I was assigned Crime and Punishment, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the similarly titled and equally depressing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I walked around for weeks with a gray hollowness in my gut after reading those books, and vowed I would never read any Russian literature again, but Ruthie’s tattoo haunted me. I was frantic to know what it meant. Apparently, so were other students in class, because finally, on the last day of recitation, a group of them worked up the nerve to ask. She gave the subtlest eye roll and said, “It’s complicated. It’s from Anna Karenina,” before packing up her bag and lazily sauntering out.

  When I think about Ruthie now, it’s not with fondness, but I do owe her a thank-you for lifting my self-imposed ban on Russian literature. Immediately after class that day I went and bought a copy of Anna Karenina and tore into it, intending only to find the source of Ruthie’s tattoo, but I became so engrossed that I finished it in just under two weeks. I loved the book, not only because it was beautifully written, and tragic, and epic, but also because of the heavy symbolism attached to every scene involving food and eating—perhaps the most famous of which was quoted on Ruthie’s arm.