Voracious
Page 18
The narrator is led into the dining room, where “the table was superbly set out. It was loaded with plate, and more than loaded with delicacies.” Rather than being impressed, however, the narrator is nauseated, calling the display “absolutely barbaric,” noting that “there were meats enough to have feasted the Anakim” and saying, “Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life.” There is “veal à la Menehoult” and “cauliflowers in velouté sauce” paired with glasses of “clos de Vougeot.” There is French-style rabbit, and the centerpiece is “a small calf roasted whole, and set upon its knees, with an apple in its mouth, as is the English fashion of dressing a hare.” The narrator, upon seeing the calf being carried over by three waiters, is horrified, and mistakes it for the “monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum”—The Aeneid’s “immense, misshapen, marvelous monster whose eye is out.” Something is truly not right here.
As far as food goes, though, the best of Poe is yet to come. The doctors start discussing their patients, many of whom are convinced that they are different types of food. There is the patient “who very pertinaciously maintained himself to be a Cordova cheese, and went about, with a knife in his hand, soliciting his friends to try a small slice from the middle of his leg,” as well as “the man who took himself for a bottle of champagne, and always went off with a pop and a fizz.” Lastly, there is “Jules Desoulieres, who was a very singular genius, indeed, and went mad with the idea that he was a pumpkin. He persecuted the cook to make him up into pies—a thing which the cook indignantly refused to do.” The speaker then adds that she is “by no means sure that a pumpkin pie à la Desoulieres would not have been very capital eating indeed!”
To me, this dinner party sounds like a whole lot of weird fun, but the narrator feels otherwise. He becomes progressively more uncomfortable and suspicious when his host tells him that they are no longer using the revolutionary new soothing system, but a much more rigorous and severe treatment developed by a Doctor Tarr and a Professor Fether. The host explains that they had to stop using the soothing system when the patients, having been given too much freedom, one day turned on their doctors and nurses, locking them up as mental patients and replacing them as staff for over a month. At that moment, a great ruckus erupts, and what do you know? The real doctors and nurses burst into the dining room, exposing the narrator’s hosts as the actual mental patients!
As slapstick and silly as the story is, there is genuine fear behind Poe’s tale. The nineteenth century was a time of major reform in asylums and the rights of the mentally ill. Only four years before this story was written, Dorothea Dix stood in front of the Massachusetts legislature, telling them that the sick and insane were being “confined in this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” She begged for reform, and slowly it came. That same year, Dr. John Galt opened the first publicly supported mental institution in the United States, where he aimed to treat patients with talk therapy and pharmaceutical drugs rather than simply confining and neglecting them.
At the same time, the public was uneasy over the growing number of acquittals in court cases involving violent crimes where the perpetrator was deemed mentally insane. Anger that the mentally ill were not being held accountable for their crimes was rising, as was the fear that every criminal would feign insanity in order to avoid jail time. Isn’t it a relief that we’ve gotten all of this completely under control in the last two centuries?
Ever since I read this story years ago, I’ve dreamed about combining two of those mental patients into a single pie, the Cordova cheese and the pumpkin. Cordova cheeses are generally soft goat’s or sheep’s milk cheeses, often cured in a vegetable ash rind. I imagined mixing this into a pumpkin pie to make a slightly more savory version of the Thanksgiving classic that I’ve never loved. Here it is: half pumpkin pie, half cheesecake, with a slightly salty almond-rosemary crust that is buttery and sweet but serious. Plus, now you don’t even have to stress about your pumpkin pie getting those annoying ugly cracks in the top that make you feel like a giant failure (or is that just me?). Just throw it in the fridge overnight and it’s perfectly smooth and ready to go the next day.
“THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER”
Goat Cheese Pumpkin Pie
Serves 8
Almond-Rosemary Crust
2 (5.25-ounce) packages Anna’s Almond Thins (or any similarly thin almond cookie)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon kosher salt
10 tablespoons (1¼ sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit
Goat Cheese–Pumpkin Filling
1 (15-ounce) can pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
8 ounces soft goat cheese, at room temperature
4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit
1½ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
1½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Make the Crust:
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Pulse the cookies, rosemary, and salt in a food processor until combined. With the processor running, slowly drizzle in the melted butter and run until well combined. The dough should hold together when pinched.
Press the dough firmly into a 10-inch round by 2-inch deep tart pan with a removable bottom. Place a cookie sheet on the bottom rack of the oven to catch any butter that leaks out and bake the crust for 15 minutes. When the crust is cool enough to touch but still warm enough to be pliable, fix any imperfections and set it aside to cool.
Make the Filling:
Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl and puree with a handheld blender (or use a countertop blender) until very smooth; it takes a good amount of whipping at high speed to get all the clumps out. Scoop into the cooled, baked piecrust and smooth the top. Cover and refrigerate for at least 6 hours, or preferably overnight, before serving.
In Cold Blood
CHERRY PIE
When it comes to pie I am an equal-opportunity eater—unless sour cherries are involved. Sour cherry pie wins, every time. When I was a kid I was a huge fan of the individual-size Hostess cherry pies that came in those waxy white wrappers. They were filled with thick, cherry-flavored goop and studded with pieces of… cherry? I’m not sure if they were actually cherries or some distant, factory-produced Frankenstein cousin, but they certainly did the trick for me at the time. I used to walk to Fells Market almost every day after school to get one, washing it down with a Cherry Coke on my walk home. Until I was in my late teens I thought that was what cherry pie tasted like, so when I had an actual, homemade sour cherry pie for the first time, it was an absolute revelation.
Ever since reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood a few years ago, I never eat or make a cherry pie without thinking of Nancy Clutter. Her final act as the most wholesome and blameless woman on earth is teaching her teenage neighbor, Jolene Katz, how to make the perfect cherry pie—her blue-ribbon winner with its “oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust.”
After the book was published, a writer for Best Life magazine dug up Nancy Clutter’s actual cherry pie recipe, which I was so excited about, until I found out that dear Nancy used frozen premade piecrust and frozen cherries in her version. Frozen cherries I can abide, because cherries are in season for only a short time, but a premade crust won’t do. These days, I spend a good deal of time at the Meat Hook reconstituting rendered lard into biscuits and cookies. When early summer comes around and berries start popping up in the markets, I usually focus my lard reconstituting on piecrusts so that our customers can enjoy the season properly—that is, with a freshly made piecrust that contains both butter and real lard. What is real lard? you ask. Real lard, the very best lard for baking, comes from pigs.
On Tuesdays at the shop we get our pigs delivered—us
ually between four and eight of them. No matter how many times I’ve completed the ritual of the delivery—cleaning off the tables, walking out to the truck, ducking under the weight of the pig and carrying it inside, laying it on the table, and breaking it down into its primals—I am always amazed by how quickly and smoothly and quietly it all happens.
Once the pigs are on the table, the first step in breaking them down is removing the kidney fat—or “leaf lard”—that lies in a smooth, white layer over the pig’s abdomen. It comes off without a knife in three or four clean, satisfying yanks. Once it’s off we grind it and render it and it becomes the silky, odorless lard of your baking dreams. This stuff is truly magical; it is precisely what Crisco is attempting to mimic with its vegetable shortening, but in my opinion it does an infinitely better job, in terms of both flavor and texture.
I like to think that Capote—who spent his early years living with his aunts, the Faulks, on a farm in Monroeville, Alabama, where they raised chickens and turkeys and smoked hogs in their smokehouse—would have turned up his nose at a premade piecrust. Living off the land that surrounded them, the Faulks ate well. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day there, and, according to Gerald Clarke’s biography of Capote, would include “an almost excessive display of the land’s bounty”—pork chops and collard greens, cornbread, black-eyed peas, ham and eggs, catfish, squirrel, grits and gravy, raw milk, pound cake with homemade preserves, and coffee made with chicory. His favorite aunt, Sook, combed the woods for pecans to put in her Christmas fruitcakes, and foraged for roots and herbs with which she made medicinal teas. Having spent his childhood surrounded by this kind of farm-to-table plentitude, Capote would have loved this pie.
IN COLD BLOOD
Cherry Pie
If you are a vegetarian or otherwise anti-lard, you can substitute vegetable shortening or butter (but don’t use the hydrogenated lard sold in supermarkets). And if you can find only sweet cherries instead of sour, you’ll need to increase the amount of lemon juice to 3 or 4 teaspoons.
Serves 8
Crust
2½ cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, cut into ¼-inch cubes and frozen
½ cup rendered leaf lard, cut into 6 pieces and frozen
¼ cup ice-cold water
¼ cup chilled vodka
1 large egg
1 tablespoon cream
Filling
¾ cup sugar
¼ cup cornstarch
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
2 pounds sour cherries, pitted and halved
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed
Make the Crust:
Combine 1½ cups of the flour, 2 tablespoons of the sugar, and the salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse four times. Add the frozen butter and lard and process until the dough just begins to collect and none of the flour is uncoated, 15 to 20 seconds. Add the remaining 1 cup flour and pulse five times, until pea-sized lumps appear throughout.
Transfer the mixture to a bowl and add the ice-cold water and vodka, using a rubber spatula to gently bring the dough together. It might seem stickier or tackier than you’re used to, but all of the vodka will evaporate when baked, so don’t fret!
Divide the dough into two even pieces and shape them into balls, being careful not to overhandle. Tightly wrap them in plastic and put them in the refrigerator to chill for at least 2 hours.
After 2 hours, roll out each ball of dough into a 12-inch round on a floured work surface. Stack them on a plate with a layer of greased parchment between them, put them back in the fridge, and preheat the oven to 425°F.
Make the Filling:
Whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and salt and then add the cherries, lemon juice, and vanilla. Remove the pie dough from the refrigerator and press one round into a 9-inch pie plate. Add the cherry filling, mounding it slightly in the center, and scatter the butter cubes all over the cherries.
Brush the edge of the bottom piecrust with water and gently drape the top crust over the cherries. Fold the excess dough from the bottom crust over the excess dough from the top crust and crimp them together with the tines of a fork.
Cut several vents in the top crust to allow the steam to exit.
Mix the egg and cream together, brush the egg wash all over the crust, and dust with the remaining 1 tablespoon sugar.
Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 375°F and continue baking until the crust is golden brown and the filling is bubbling, about 1 hour more. If the crust is getting brown too quickly, tent foil over it and continue to bake.
The Little Friend
PEPPERMINT STICK ICE CREAM
Having read all three of Donna Tartt’s novels, I find it impossible to pick which one I like best—they are all so different from one another. The Secret History and The Goldfinch are both set primarily on the East Coast and have the mystique of dusty intellectualism and old money. This is the kind of atmosphere that most readers came to expect after The Secret History was published, and perhaps it’s because this expectation was not met, because The Little Friend was so very different, that people were less than enthusiastic about it when it came out in 2002.
Michiko Kakutani, the notoriously harsh New York Times book critic, wrote, “At its worst [The Little Friend] feels like a Frankenstein of a book, a lumpish collection of mismatched parts,” and said that many of the book’s action scenes don’t seem plausible, but rather like “outtakes from a highly contrived action movie.” In my opinion, these observations could be applied to all of Tartt’s novels, which are epic and unwieldy—they jump forward and backward in time, and often they ask us to suspend our disbelief, if only for the sake of a truly great story.
In the case of The Little Friend, the great story is that of Harriet Dufresnes, a nine-year-old girl growing up in Mississippi, whose older brother, Robin, was found hanging from a tupelo tree in the family’s backyard when he was nine (Harriet was just a baby). The book has all of the gothic spookiness that you would expect from a Tartt novel (and then some), but it feels completely different because of its narrator. As much as I loved The Secret History and The Goldfinch, I did not love or relate to their narrators, Richard and Theo, who seem compulsively driven to make horrible decisions and throw themselves headlong into peril. Harriet is similar in her quest for adventure and danger, but somehow it feels less destructive in the body of a spirited and brave nine-year-old tomboy. Harriet is part Scout Finch, part Caddy Compson, part Harriet Welsch, and yet remains a character all her own.
Because Tartt is so private, the desire to see her in her characters is always there, and with Harriet it’s even harder to avoid. Tartt grew up in Mississippi and would have been around nine years old in the early 1970s. Like Harriet, Tartt was an avid reader, and judging by her ability to write fiction, it’s safe to assume that she had Harriet’s active imagination.
Through Harriet, we are given a glimpse of the kind of hearty Southern food that Tartt was most likely raised on—chicken croquettes and biscuits with Karo corn syrup, banana pudding, coconut cake, corn pudding, mashed potatoes, pound cake, fried chicken. Food is almost always abundant in Southern literature, but in the case of The Little Friend, it plays a particularly important role because it shines a light on the ways that grief affects Harriet’s family.
After Robin’s death, Harriet is often hungry, not only for food, but for love and attention from her nearly catatonic mother, who ignores both her physical and emotional demands. When Harriet’s health teacher asks the students to keep a journal of their daily eating habits for class, Harriet is horrified when she realizes how bad her diet is, especially on nights when her mother isn’t there to prepare dinner, and she finds herself eating meals like “Popsicles, black olives, toast and butter.” Mortified, she tears up the actu
al list and copies down “a prim series of balanced menus: chicken piccata, summer squash gratin, garden salad, apple compote” from a cookbook called A Thousand Ways to Please Your Family that her mother got as a wedding gift.
She envies her friend Hely. “No matter how hot it was,” Hely’s family “sat down and ate a real supper every night, big, hot, greasy suppers that left the kitchen sweltering: roast beef, lasagne, fried shrimp.” The only food we see Harriet’s mother eat is peppermint ice cream, which sits in striped gallon tubs in the freezer at all times, and which she seems to be forever trying to push on Harriet as a suitable meal. At one point, Harriet tells her mother point-blank, “I’m starving,” to which Harriet’s mother responds by offering her the ice cream. Harriet is incensed, and rails at her, saying: “‘I… hate… that… kind… of… ice… cream.’… How many times had she said it? ‘Mother, I hate peppermint ice cream.’ She felt desperate all of a sudden; didn’t anybody ever listen to her? ‘I can’t stand it! I’ve never liked it! Nobody’s ever liked it but you!’”
In a response as icy cold as the glass of peppermint ice cream in her hand, one that shows just how far detached she is, Harriet’s mother looks at her raging daughter and responds simply, “Hmn?”