THE LITTLE FRIEND
Peppermint Stick Ice Cream
Makes 2½ to 3 quarts
3 cups whole milk
3 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
8 large egg yolks
1½ cups sugar
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon pure peppermint extract
1½ cups crushed peppermint candies
Prepare an ice bath by filling the sink or a very large bowl with ice cubes and cold water. Set a large glass or metal bowl over it, and a fine-mesh strainer over the bowl.
In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, combine the milk, cream, and vanilla and heat over medium heat until just before boiling (you will see little bubbles form around the edge of the pan and steam rising from the surface of the liquid).
In a separate large bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, and salt until fluffy and light yellow.
Transfer some of the scalded milk-cream mixture to a 1-cup glass measuring cup. Slowly pour it into the yolks in a steady stream, whisking constantly. Continue to do this until all of the scalded milk-cream is incorporated into the egg yolks.
Pour the yolk-cream mixture back into the pot and cook over medium-low heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 170°F. Pour the mixture through the strainer into the bowl over the ice bath, whisk in the peppermint extract, and continue to whisk the base until it cools to room temperature. Cover the bowl and transfer it to the refrigerator to cool completely, at least 8 hours.
When the base is thoroughly cooled, spin it in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When the ice cream has set, add the crushed peppermint candies and allow it to spin for another minute until they are incorporated throughout. (If your ice cream maker can spin only 1 quart at a time, add ¾ cup of the candies to 1 quart of base while the ice cream is spinning, then repeat.)
“Gimpel the Fool”
CHALLAH
My grandfather grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with his mother, father, brother, and grandmother. To this day, he still talks about the challah that his grandmother used to make—big braided loaves that she kept warm on the apartment’s radiators, filling the whole house with their aroma, and the tiny individual rolls she snuck him and his brother after school. He remembers the challah so vividly that I can taste and smell it whenever he talks about it, but sadly, aside from an armload of everyday phrases and terms of endearment, he doesn’t remember how to speak Yiddish.
When I discovered Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories in college, I wished more than anything that I could read them in their original language. Saul Bellow translated “Gimpel the Fool” in 1953, introducing Singer to an American audience for the first time. As good as the translation no doubt is, I suspect that much was lost between the languages. Whenever I ask Papa or my uncle Peter to translate a Yiddish word for me, it takes them full minutes to explain—there is always a connection to another word that is reminiscent of something else entirely, which relates to the story of such-and-such—it’s beautiful to listen to. If one word takes that long to explain, though, I can only imagine what an impossible task it would be to translate an entire collection of Yiddish stories without losing any meaning along the way.
Regardless of what is lost in translation, I never tire of Singer’s writing. Food—specifically bread—is everywhere in Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories. In “Abba and His Seven Sons,” Pesha, when she baked challah for lunch, “would grasp the first loaf and carry it, hot from the oven, blowing on it all the while and tossing it from hand to hand, to show it to Abba, holding it up, front and back, till he nodded approval.” In “The Unseen” a man eats his Rosh Hashanah meal in total darkness—he “blindly dunked a slice of bread in honey, and tasted an apple, a carrot, the head of a carp, and offered a blessing for the first fruit, over a pomegranate.”
It was Gimpel the bread baker who first drew me to Singer, and Gimpel whom I thought of all day last week while I made round challahs for Rosh Hashanah. I was lucky enough to be home with my family for the holiday, and my sisters and I spent all day kneading and punching and braiding dough, loaves rising on every radiator, just like in my grandpa’s tiny childhood apartment.
“GIMPEL THE FOOL”
Challah
Challah, like most bread, can be tricky. I’ve tried a million different techniques—letting it rise in the sun, letting it rise in the oven, using honey instead of sugar, increasing the amount of eggs and decreasing the amount of yeast—and they were all good, but not perfect. The trick, as I’ve learned over and over again with raised doughs, is giving it a cold, slow rise after its first two warm rises. If you’re short on time, two warm, fast rises will do just fine, but a cold, slow rise gives the bread a whole new depth of flavor and a texture that’s somehow both airy and chewy at once, just as a good challah should be.
Makes 2 loaves
1½ tablespoons active dry yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1¾ cups warm water (110°F)
½ cup vegetable oil
5 large eggs
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon fine sea salt
8 cups bread flour
Coarse sea salt, for sprinkling
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm water. With the mixer running, whisk the oil into the yeast mixture. Add 4 of the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition, then whisk in the sugar and fine sea salt. Remove the whisk attachment and switch to the dough hook.
With the mixer running, slowly add the flour, about a cup at a time, and mix until the dough just comes together. At this point, turn out the dough onto a floured surface and knead it by hand until it is smooth and elastic, 3 to 5 minutes.
Place the dough in a greased bowl, cover it with a clean towel, and let it rise in a warm place for 1 hour. After an hour it should be about doubled in size. Punch the dough down, cover it again, and let it rise for another 30 to 45 minutes.
After the second rise, refrigerate the covered bowl of dough for 12 to 24 hours.
Line two baking sheets with parchment paper, and lightly grease the parchment. Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and divide it into two even pieces. Shape the pieces into loaves, and lay one on each lined baking sheet.
Beat the remaining egg in a small bowl and brush it onto the loaves (reserve the remaining egg wash). If you’re making round loaves (traditional for Rosh Hashanah), place them in two oven-safe bowls or round cake pans lined with greased parchment paper. Cover and let them rise in a warm place for 1 more hour.
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Brush the loaves again with the egg wash and sprinkle with the coarse sea salt. Bake until the loaves sound hollow when you tap them in the center, 40 to 60 minutes (the time will vary depending on whether you made round or straight loaves). If you have a thermometer, the internal temperature of the bread should be 190°F. Turn the finished breads out onto a cooling rack. Eat with everything for every meal.
In the Woods
CHOCOLATE-COVERED DIGESTIVE BISCUITS
On the Friday after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, I was into my fourth hour of watching the news when I suddenly felt the desperate need to bake. It wasn’t the desire to eat something sweet that drove me to it but the calm that measuring, weighing, sifting, creaming, whisking, and waiting always bring me. The sadness and anxiety that I had been feeling since that Monday seemed bottomless, and I baked until I was out of flour, trying to hit bottom so that I could start to come back up.
When you follow news coverage of a major event throughout the day, you sense a language emerging for talking about the story. In the hours before the suspect was taken into custody, news anchors uttered “manhunt” and “shootout” so many times that the words started to sound like nonsense. Others talked of “reading the tea leaves” (code, I learned, for gleaning information
by watching the movement of groups of police officers), and emphasized that Boston was a “ghost town,” under “virtual lockdown.” There was talk of a white hat and a black hat, pressure cookers and IEDs, and the words “Boston Strong” filled my news feeds.
One reporter clung to the word “digest,” saying it in one context or another almost twenty times in four hours—“we’re still digesting,” “hard to digest”—an odd word to grab onto, which is probably why it stood out for me. Funny things happen with appetites and digestion when tragedy and grief are involved. We can’t eat, or we overeat, or we crave things we’ve never craved before or things that we haven’t eaten since we were children.
That morning, when all of my butter and flour and sugar had been baked into cakes and bars, I muted the TV and hid under a blanket with my book—Tana French’s In the Woods. It was exactly what I needed at that very moment—the well-written murder mystery of my comfort-craving dreams—and I read it for hours, eating nearly an entire grapefruit cake in the meantime, until I finally felt more like myself.
As homicide detectives, Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan are engulfed by disaster and tragedy, forever grappling with ways to manage their grief. They drink too much, they sleep with the wrong people, they make each other greasy dinners, they pop handfuls of anxiety medication and stay up all night. When all else fails, Cassie eats chocolate digestive biscuits, lots of them. She buys them at the market and hides them in her desk drawer. People bring them to her as bribes and peace offerings and, in an odd twist that I’m not quite sure how to interpret, they are also the last meal of the twelve-year-old girl whose murder is at the heart of the book.
You could certainly argue that the ubiquity of chocolate biscuits in In the Woods is due to the fact that the novel is set in Ireland and that Tana French is an Irish writer. According to a Washington Post article by Monica Hesse, digestives have been part of daily life in the UK since their invention in the nineteenth century, and today an estimated fifty-two biscuits are consumed every second. As the name suggests, digestive biscuits were originally created to aid in digestion, the idea being that the coarse bran and heavy amounts of baking soda would settle the stomach and help move things along. This was of particular interest to the Victorians, who were preoccupied with their finicky insides. But, as with the graham cracker, clearly their appeal is far broader than medicinal use.
There is immense comfort in the ritual and the history that is present in every bite of a digestive. During World War II, British soldiers were given two different kinds of biscuits in their rations—two plain and two chocolate—tucked away in their rucksacks with tins of industrial-grade beans and chipped beef. I think about them, scared and young and far from home, and the comfort that these familiar little disks might have brought them in the face of tragedy and disaster and violence.
After hours of being held captive by news that was becoming increasingly repetitive (without much in the way of new information), the comfort that reading and baking had brought me began to wear thin, and I forced myself to leave the house and seek solace elsewhere. I took the train into Union Square and visited my friend Joe at work, and he made me a cocktail with burned rosemary and good gin and it tasted like Christmas and damp earth and made my chest warm. I walked to Chelsea and smelled new books in a tiny bookstore and ate chicken liver so good it immediately brought the color back to my cheeks. I walked from Herald Square to the Battery and then home across the Williamsburg Bridge, and I ate a green tomato like an apple, and it was good and musky and tart. I thought about the city that I’m in, but mostly I thought about the city that I’m from, with its bruised history and mixed-up roads and good, good people. The Shabbat sirens wailed in the neighborhoods below me and I cried a little into my tomato as a throng of Hasidic boys rushed past me to make it home before sundown, and I thought about the eighteen Boston Marathons I’d attended, feeling safe and happy and proud, and I took some time to digest it, all of it, everything.
IN THE WOODS
Chocolate-Covered Digestive Biscuits
Makes 1 dozen (3-inch) biscuits
¾ cup whole-wheat flour
¼ cup all-purpose flour
¼ cup wheat bran
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon firmly packed dark brown sugar
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, browned and chilled to solid
1 tablespoon vegetable shortening, chilled
3 tablespoons heavy cream
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Chocolate Glaze
1 cup semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 teaspoons vegetable shortening
Coarse sea salt, for sprinkling
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Combine the whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour, wheat bran, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to get everything evenly mixed. Add the chilled brown butter and vegetable shortening and pulse until the fats are evenly distributed throughout.
With the processor running, slowly add the cream and vanilla.
Turn out the dough onto a clean surface and form it into a ball. The dough will be very crumbly, but don’t worry—it will come together. Place the dough between two pieces of parchment paper and roll it to ⅛ inch thick. Cut with a 3-inch circle cutter and place the cookies on the lined baking sheet.
Bake until golden brown and firm, 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.
To make the glaze, set up a double boiler: Fill a medium saucepan with 2 inches of water and bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Place a heat-safe glass bowl over the pot and add the chocolate and shortening, whisking until smooth. Spread the melted chocolate over the cooled cookies and sprinkle with coarse salt.
Sometimes a Great Notion
BLACKBERRY-HAZELNUT COFFEE CAKE
When I met Emily in my junior year of college, I was so fed up and lonesome and exhausted with New York that I had submitted transfer applications to as many schools as I could think of and was weeks away from leaving and never looking back. Meeting Emily changed the course of my life for a million happy reasons—most importantly, she convinced me to stay in New York and, years later, to create the blog that led to this book.
Four years ago, Emily and her husband, Ante, and I started a book club. Every time we finished a book they would come over to my apartment and I would cook them a meal from the book so that we could eat while we were discussing. These book club dinners eventually turned into a literary supper club, which then turned into the blog Yummy Books, which was the starting point for this book. At our final book club meeting we discussed Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion and spooned thick stew over tall, buttery biscuits. Emily and Ante told me stories about Oregon, where they both grew up, and promised that it was just as heavenly as Kesey made it sound (and that they wouldn’t go back for at least a few more years).
Kesey is best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but in my opinion Sometimes a Great Notion is his real masterpiece. The novel takes place in the fictional Oregon town of Wakonda and chronicles the lives of the Stamper family—the only nonunion logging family left in the town. When the unionized loggers go on strike to demand more pay (their hours are being cut thanks to the invention of the chain saw), the Stamper family decides to cross the picket line and single-handedly provide the mills with lumber.
The chaos outside the Stamper household is nothing, however, compared to what is going on inside it. Sometimes a Great Notion is a sprawling epic complete with deep-seated brotherly hatred, savage revenge plots, repressed silences, and Oedipal lust. Think Steinbeck’s East of Eden pumped full of testosterone. There is hardly a bleaker, rawer look into family dysfunction and hardheaded stubbornness.
The only moments of relief from
the constant stream of heartache and cold, beating rain come when the Stamper family is gathered around the table. The men wake up in the morning to Viv Stamper’s “piles of steaming pancakes.” To the logging mill they take paper sacks filled with vinegar-and-mustard-scented deviled eggs, meaty olives, and “creamy brown candy filled with roasted filberts.”
At dinnertime they are “elbows and ears over a checkered tablecloth” covered with “deer liver and heart fried in onions, and gravy made from the drippings… boiled potatoes and fresh green beans and homemade bread.” Viv prepares baked apples so good—stuffed with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon Red Hots—that Leland Stamper, after eating one, goes outside and literally howls at the moon.
Despite having heard countless tales of how magnificent Oregon is over the years, I was still completely blown away when I visited this past summer to attend Emily and Ante’s wedding. The people in Oregon are friendly and the coffee is strong. People don’t feel the need to tell you what they’re really trying to do while telling you about their bakery job, and there is always the cleanest kiss of a breeze. I thought of Sometimes a Great Notion the whole time I was there, and of my two friends who had no idea what they would become to each other when they sat on my couch four years ago, eating biscuits and bashfully holding hands under a pillow.
Even through the haze of croissants from Ken’s Artisan Bakery and Voodoo Doughnuts and Mirror Pond Pale Ale, I couldn’t get Viv’s “filbert- and blackberry-filled coffee cake” out of my head all week, so the day after the wedding, my feet still sore from dancing (and my head still sore from champagne), I went to the farmers’ market and picked up blackberries and some good Oregon hazelnuts and we feasted on the cake until our stomachs hurt. It was a perfect end to what Leland Stamper would have called the “blessfullest” week.
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