Voracious
Page 20
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
Blackberry-Hazelnut Coffee Cake
Serves 8
Blackberry Streusel
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into pieces
1¼ cups roasted unsalted hazelnuts, chopped
1½ cups fresh blackberries
Coffee Cake
12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1½ cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1¼ cups full-fat sour cream
1¼ teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2½ cups cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Make the Streusel:
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Add the butter and, using your fingers, pinch the mixture together until it forms a crumble. Add the hazelnuts and knead everything together until big, buttery crumbs form. Toss in the blackberries and mix around to incorporate them throughout. Cover the bowl of streusel and place it in the refrigerator.
Make the Coffee Cake:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 10-inch tube pan with a removable bottom.
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes.
Lower the mixer speed and add the eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition to make sure they are well incorporated. Turn off the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Turn the mixer back on and beat in the sour cream and vanilla.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add these dry ingredients to the wet and mix just until the batter comes together.
Scrape half of the batter into the tube pan. Spoon half of the blackberry streusel on top in an even layer. Cover this layer with the rest of the batter and spoon the rest of the streusel on top.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about 1 hour.
Transfer the pan to a wire rack and cool completely. Once it is completely cooled, turn the cake out, remove the removable bottom, and place the cake streusel-side up on a cake stand or plate.
Gone Girl
BROWN BUTTER CRÊPES
I love New York in the springtime, because you really get to see how creative New Yorkers are. We can make anything into our own outdoor living space—we sunbathe on the melty tar roofs that our landlords have explicitly banned us from, stretch out and read on rusty fire escapes that haven’t been inspected since the 1970s, place seat cushions on cement stoops, and line the sidewalks with lawn chairs. We lay towels over goose poop and sidestep shards of broken glass in public parks, from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge, and we ooh and aah with jealousy about people who have actual “backyards,” which are almost always private alleyways where we pack ourselves in, shoulder to shoulder, over tiny Weber grills and think, “This is living.”
In the spring there are long, aimless bike rides and afternoons spent lying in the park, eating yolk-yellow mango slices from the man with the pushcart and sipping from enormous Styrofoam cups filled with Turkey’s Nest frozen margaritas (which, let’s admit it, are really just yellow Gatorade mixed with tequila), shifting with the position of the sun like houseplants bending and stretching toward the window.
Every year as the days get longer my attention span gets shorter, and I find myself scouring the bookstores for page-turners—pulse-pounding mysteries and thrillers filled with grizzled detectives and sassy, quick-witted heroines—the pulpier the better. In my younger years I held these cravings close to my chest, skittering furtively to those back shelves of the Strand and glancing around to make sure none of my classmates saw me thumbing through a copy of Scarpetta, but these days… not so much.
Last spring I got that familiar hankering, and with my arms still full of asparagus from the farmers’ market, I headed straight to the bookstore. Rather than ducking surreptitiously to those dimly lit back shelves, I asked a store employee for help. Without hesitation, she put her hands on my shoulders and led me straight to Gone Girl, her eyes wide and serious as she gave it to me. “You’re welcome,” she said, and walked away. The next forty-eight hours of my life completely disappeared.
Gone Girl is an easy read only in that it is absolutely impossible to put down. Beyond that, there is nothing easy about this book. Gillian Flynn creates a cast of characters as hard to like as they are to trust. They lie to each other and they lie to us, they pull us to their side only to fill us with disgust a few sentences later—it is a truly exhausting experience.
The novel begins on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. The couple, who met in New York City, had moved the year before to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, to lick their wounds, having both been laid off, and to care for his dying mother and Alzheimer’s-stricken father.
The novel opens with Nick lying in bed, listening to the sounds of his wife cooking “something impressive” in the kitchen below him—“probably a crêpe,” he imagines. He walks downstairs and finds Amy at the stove, humming the M*A*S*H theme song (you know, the “suicide is painless” song—Flynn is a master of the telling minor detail) and making him breakfast. “Amy peered at the crêpe sizzling in the pan and licked something off her wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she would smell like berries and powdered sugar.”
That evening at the bar he runs, Nick receives a call that his front door is wide open, and he goes home to find Amy missing and the house in complete disarray. As the days tick by and Amy is still missing, the investigation turns on Nick. What follows is one of the darkest accounts of a marriage gone sour that I have ever read.
Aren’t you just starving for some crêpes right now?
GONE GIRL
Brown Butter Crêpes
Serve these crêpes warm, topped with ricotta, or fruit and maple syrup, or butter, sugar, and lemon zest.
Makes 8 to 10 crêpes
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup whole milk
2 tablespoons honey
½ cup all-purpose flour
⅛ teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, browned and cooled, plus more for the pan
Beat together the eggs, milk, and honey in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. With the mixer running, add the flour, salt, and browned butter. Cover and refrigerate the batter for 1 hour.
After the batter has chilled, heat a nonstick skillet or crêpe pan over medium heat. Add a little butter (even if you’re using a nonstick pan) and ladle ¼ cup batter in the center of the pan, swirling it around to coat the whole surface evenly. Cook until the surface is set and the edges are golden brown, 1½ to 2 minutes. Flip the crêpe over gently and cook for about 30 more seconds. Repeat with the remaining batter.
The Odyssey
RED WINE–ROSEMARY BREAD
November 2012 was a strange and heavy month. First, there was that stress circus of an election that had me so on edge I was nearly catatonic by the time election night rolled around. In the hours before the results were read I was so overcome with anxiety that I ordered a four-person serving of nachos and found myself unable to eat them. Did you hear me? I said I was unable to eat nachos.
Then, there was the explosion of Thanksgiving turkey stress, which seemed to descend upon the butcher shop the very moment people shed their Halloween costumes. For three weeks the phone rang at a constant pace, the voices of people at the other end growing increasingly panicked and close to tears over brining and deep-frying, stuffing and trussing, and the impossibility of finding turkey tenderloin (which, I have
to admit, I had no idea was a thing people sold separately).
In the background of all of this was the enormous shadow cast by Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled New York with a vengeance that none of us who had weathered the dud that was Hurricane Irene the year before could have imagined. On the Sunday before the storm hit, the line at the shop spilled out the door and onto the street for hours, until all of the cases were empty. There wasn’t a cube of stew beef in sight when we turned the lights off that night, only bins of bones and two bottles of coconut-flavored vodka that had mysteriously appeared on the counter sometime in the afternoon. Everyone was jolly with the prospect of having a couple of days away from work, curling up with a good book or a few movies, cooking and drinking and eating (and eating and eating).
The next morning my coworkers and I headed back to the shop to prepare it as best we could for the possibility of flooding or loss of electricity. The wind had started to pick up, creating tiny leaf cyclones on the empty streets and in front of the boarded-up storefronts. The sky over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was lit up with that doomy, electric, hurricane gray—you know the one I mean? That light that somehow manages to be both the brightest and darkest you’ve ever seen? The one that makes you think that maybe this hurricane won’t just be a cozy, two-day vacation?
By the time I walked back to my apartment later that afternoon I was on the brink of full panic. Consumed by visions of a postapocalyptic Brooklyn, I decided to calm my nerves the best way I know how: by baking bread. I mixed and kneaded and shaped four loaves, and when I finally sat down on the couch I felt somehow calmer knowing that they were all tucked in, rising in the heat of my tiny oven.
Scrolling through storm updates on my computer, I was struck by a photograph in the New York Daily News of a man standing in front of a boarded-up bookshop that had been covered in literary quotes about storms. I couldn’t quite make out what the quotes said so I started compiling a list in my head of famous literary hurricanes. The best known are probably the storms in Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, but there are also the epic hurricanes of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital. Better still are the raging storms in Guy de Maupassant’s “The Drunkard” and Kate Chopin’s “The Storm.”
But no literary character is tossed around by more storms than poor Odysseus. Throughout The Odyssey he is constantly being rerouted and delayed by divinely inflicted hurricanes, pushed farther from home and tossed onto islands with lecherous women and hideous beasts. I found my old copy of The Odyssey, poured a huge glass of wine, and, with my bread rising in the oven, started to read.
I began to notice how often the words “bread and wine” appear together throughout the text. Homer uses the combination everywhere in The Odyssey, and it is always symbolic of being welcomed and safe and home. Bread and wine are ancient staples of comfort and hospitality; they appear in almost every root text, from the Bible to The Canterbury Tales, and they always offer relief and solace. For me, they certainly serve that purpose—they are always the first things I reach for in a crisis or offer to a friend having her own. Here, I combine the two comforts into one with delicious results.
THE ODYSSEY
Red Wine–Rosemary Bread
Eat this bread slathered with salted butter and wash it down with more wine.
Makes 1 loaf
3 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
1½ teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
½ teaspoon active dry yeast
¼ cup dry red wine, warmed slightly
1¼ cups warm water (110°F)
Sift together the flour, rosemary, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Dissolve the yeast in the warm wine, add the water to the wine, and pour all of the liquid into the dry ingredients. Mix the dough until it forms a very shaggy ball. Cover the bowl with a towel and put it in a warm place to rise for 16 to 20 hours (an oven, turned off, works great).
Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface. The part of the dough that was flush with the bowl while rising will be the top of the loaf. Shape the loaf by tucking the ragged bottom parts into the center of the loaf—it will look like a belly button. Turn the shaped loaf over, place it back in the bowl, cover it, and let it rise for 2 more hours—it should about double in size.
When you have 45 minutes left of rising time, preheat the oven to 450°F. Wait 15 minutes and then place a heavy lidded pot in the oven. Let it heat up for 30 minutes, then place the bread in the pot, cover it, and let it bake for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, uncover the pot and continue baking until the bread has a golden, crackly crust, another 15 to 20 minutes.
“The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”
RED FLANNEL HASH
Full disclosure: it was the red flannel hash that led me to Pam Houston, and not the other way around. Rebecca, one of my favorite customers at the butcher shop, frequently comes up to the counter with a basket full of eggs, beets, and potatoes and asks for a pound of thick-cut bacon. It’s pretty easy to imagine what could be done with bacon, potatoes, and eggs, but the beets always threw me. When I finally asked her what she was making, her response was one of the loveliest food names I had ever heard: “red flannel hash.” The name alone warms you right up.
It is surprising that I had never heard of red flannel hash, considering I’m a die-hard fan of all forms of breakfast hash. As a kid I went through a Libby’s canned corned beef hash phase so intense my mom feared that I would die of salt poisoning. I wanted it on everything—mashed potatoes, chicken, broccoli. I looked for corned beef hash at every restaurant we went to and ordered it stuffed inside an American cheese omelet with a side of buttered white toast. I’m not proud of any of this.
I told Rebecca that I’d never heard of red flannel hash and she said that she had learned about it from Pam Houston’s short story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had.” Even more surprising than the fact that I had never heard of red flannel hash is the fact that I had never read any Pam Houston. When Waltzing the Cat (the collection of stories that includes “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”) was first published in 1998, my older sister bought a copy of it at a Barnes & Noble because the boots on the cover looked like her Doc Martens.
Coffeehouse culture was still relatively new in 1998, and taking your notebook to a coffee shop to scribble slam poetry or curling up with your impressive, existential novel next to a soy chai was all the rage. The neighborhood Starbucks was the closest thing we had to a cozy, intimate coffee shop, and my sister used to take her copy of Waltzing the Cat there and stay for hours, drawing creeping vines and crying girls and scribbling Ani DiFranco lyrics in the book’s margins. She was in love with Drew, the barista, who had bored eyes and a safety pin stuck through his left ear, and she was forever hoping that he would ask her what she was reading. Thankfully, he never did because I think she never actually read a word of it, but she turned the book into a piece of her own artwork, a time capsule of her youth and her tireless and hungry quest for love.
The book’s narrator, thirty-three-year-old Lucy O’Rourke, is as tireless in her pursuit of love as my seventeen-year-old sister was. Despite myriad fails and countless rejections, Lucy continues to throw herself into destructive relationships, each time falling back on her best friend, Leo, for comfort. The intimacy and comfort between Lucy and Leo is clear from the very first sentence of “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”: “A perfect day in the city always starts like this: My friend Leo picks me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann’s where they make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of the Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass and read poems out loud and talk about love.”
Houston, in her minimalist prose, is able to convey volumes—not only about Lucy and Leo’s relationship but about Lucy herself—in this one sentence.
In many ways, I’m glad that I didn’t r
ead this collection of stories until recently, because I feel that it came to me at precisely the right time (books often seem to do this, don’t they?). “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” is as much a story about romantic and platonic love, love that destroys or heals or consumes, as it is about the love of a place. Much of the story is simply a love poem to San Francisco. In the last year I have lost three of my best friends to San Francisco, each one tiring of New York’s snow and grit and grind, and disappearing in a blur to build new lives far away from me. Each of these friends represents a very specific time in my ten years as a New Yorker, and watching them go feels like closing a much-loved chapter of my life here.
When Mo announced to me last spring that she would be moving to San Francisco in only a few days’ time, I had just picked up Waltzing the Cat. I cried because I would miss her, because I was happy for her, because ten years does feel like quite a long time to be in one place. That night I read “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” four times.
I found immense comfort in reading about Lucy’s budding relationship with her new surroundings, not only because it allowed me to picture more fully the new lives of my friends, but also because it reminded me of my own love affair with New York, and specifically Brooklyn, which is ongoing and ever-changing. This place destroys and rebuilds me on a daily—or sometimes even hourly—basis, and I am deeply in love with it.
“THE BEST GIRLFRIEND YOU NEVER HAD”
Red Flannel Hash