A Week on Sunday (no. 8)

Disappearing references

Disappearing references: My mother-in-law has always wished she was taller. She makes several jokes about it. There is the self-deprecating one, that she would be too vain if she had been tall. There is the one with a French saying that goes: “dans les petits pots, les meilleurs onguents” (something like the “good things come in small servings” in English) and the rapid-fire response she gives “et dans les grands, des excellents” that rhymes.

Once, when I was visiting her in 2021 and we were sitting and chatting she told me that she and her friend were called “Mutt and Jeff”. I happened to be recording her anecdotes; it was the first time I’d heard the reference. (It was a very casual conversation so forgive my unmodulated voice…)

I didn’t understand it as part of the vernacular of the period until reading this passage from Barbarian Days: “Physically, we were an unlikely pair. I was more than a foot taller. Caryn’s mother, Inge, liked to call us Mutt and Jeff.” (p 125) 

Serendipitously finding a cross-reference is a perennial source of delight. 

Quotable

Some deep relationship wisdom from Gabriel on Humans of New York: “They [your partner] pay the tax for what happened when you were a kid. That’s why it’s so important to heal childhood wounds.”

Liking

This channel on TikTok, called CultFlav, does cookbook reviews I really appreciate. They are very thorough and I learn a lot just watching them interact in the kitchen.

Cooking

This week, I made Smitten Kitchen’s Pancetta, White Bean, Swiss Chard (Kale) Pot Pies for our Thursday evening visitors, not having revisited the recipe for years. They’re cute and while they do have three steps (filling, sauce, lid) the steps are easy. And, um, I forgot how good they were…. really, really nice.

Baking

Last Sunday I made éclairs, large and small, but only the small choux pastry was properly dried out in the baking. This miniature format was nonetheless well liked, and so, all éclairs from my kitchen will be tiny. Ha! Also… jam thumbprints, with strawberry jam from last summer.

Not yet glazed…

Postcards

The warmer weather earlier this week has already melted the ice on the river… On the other side, a venerable tree in King’s Park.

Enzo and I walk past Parkview Terrace’s ongoing development. This week, the impact hammering of sheet piles being driven in has a sound that reverberates off the Waterfront condo that changes as you walk.

Friday Five

1. Feeling inspired

Writing a many-paged thesis is, for me, the first longest writing assignment I've ever had, and from the start, I've taken it on with gusto. I like writing! I told everyone and myself, and I do. I haven't been lying... but it is long and sometimes, I'd like to hasten it along, to reach that finish line. I think that's why listening to podcasts like Longform are especially helpful... they remind me how caring about the research and writing can have a worthwhile payoff. 

The latest episode featured an interview with Lisa Belkin. She answered questions about her latest book, Genealogy of a Murder which was nine years in the making. She explains how she researched how the lives of three people intersected on one day. I look forward to reading the book. But it's the idea and her research to pull it off that I especially like. To a much smaller degree, I hope to pull off something kind of similar... in my case, it's how the lives of a collection of families intersected in a small town's creation that interests me, and I hope, can be written in a way that interests others too. 

2. A short essay on recipes and cooking

On Conversations with Tyler, Seth Godin had this to say about cooking:

Lacking all humility, I am a really good cook. The reason is, I don’t follow recipes. I dance with them by understanding what the person who made the recipe had in mind. Having created recipes myself — there’re some on my blog — when someone’s making a recipe, they don’t test — unless they’re Kenji — the difference between half a teaspoon and three-quarters of a teaspoon of something. They’re not sitting there doing 4,000 variations. They just make the thing, and then they write down the way they made it, but the way they made it is not the only way to make it.

There is a project here. I cook every night because I like the short-term nature of the project. You can visualize the outcome, and if you understand the components, you can make it. It will be slightly different every time, but it will be delicious because you understand. When I find people who don’t like to cook or who say they are bad cooks, it’s simply because they’re trying to follow a recipe, and that feels like being an indentured servant.

I do not dance with recipes, ingredients, cooks or guests, but hearing an opinion about recipes so different from one's own is interesting... Maybe I can dance with opinions the way Seth dances with recipes. Dance... that's a funny word choice... I'm trying to imagine… Dancing in my mind is the romantic ballroom kind, the Maria in a shrub-walled terrace kind... take the lead, I'll follow... in fact, I like a good strong recipe telling me what to do, moving me around my linoleum-floored kitchen, flushed from the heat of the oven. Seth is older than me, but perhaps the dance he imagines is the modern kind? The tag-you're-it, improvisation-on-the-dance-floor-and-people-clapping-along-to-the-beat, kind? 

Recipes are my teachers. I am thrilled when I can compare how an ingredient, or a meal, is treated according to cooks with greater experience and better intuition. Take arborio rice. I first made risotto based on a recipe by Ricardo Larrivé. (I once tried to make it without following his recipe and ended up with flavourless goo.) With leftover risotto, you can make the somewhat laborious arancini - but I rarely do.  Perusing Rosie Daykin's Let Me Feed You led to the discovery of "Risotto Cakes" which were delicious - both an interesting twist to serving risotto and easy to do. But also, there is Ina Garten and Deb Perelman who have risotto recipes that provide a different way of cooking arborio - an oven method that promises less hassle - and, in Perelman's case, new flavours in the form of a more breakfast-y take. Just this week, I made falafel, twice. The first time based on the usual chickpea filling, the second time, using Melissa Clark's farro-lentil filling and spices, just to see which one we liked better, to feel how the ingredients came together differently. Unlike Seth Godin, I need recipe writers with me in the kitchen! I am so grateful to the kind and thoughtful ones who never make me feel like an indentured servant.

3. Rhubarb!

Something about warm weather and the end of the school year makes for delightful impromptu gatherings, ones in which the only invitation is a text like "I made rhubarb cake, wanna come over for a piece?" 

4. I'm in the yard

That's my plan for the day... print off what I need to read to help me write the next chapter and bring it outside, to read in the shade. I might pull a few weeds while I'm at it...

5. Scenery here

I know dandelions are a weed and I fully support my husband chasing them off our lawn, one inhospitable spray of Killex at a time. However, their run of city parks make them an inevitable photo subject...

Miscellany

• I’m a stay at home mom for the moment, and in this condition some things ring especially true. The beginning of Heidi Julavits The Folded Clock for one.

“Once, a day was long. It was bright and then it wasn’t, meals happened, and school happened, and sports practice, maybe, happened, and two days from this day there would be a test, or an English paper would be due, or there would be a party for which I’d been waiting, it would seem, for years. Days were ages. Love bloomed and died in a day. Rages flared and were forgotten and replaced by new rages, also forgotten. Within a day there were discernable hours, and clocks with hands that ticked out each new minute. I would think, Will this day never end? By nightfall, I’d feel like a war had been fought. I was wounded; sleep was not enough to heal me. Days would linger in my nerves, aftershocks registered on the electrical plain. Days made a physical impact. Days could hurt.”

• I bought Deb Perelman’s latest cookbook. I have re-read this paragraph from the introduction numerous times, awed by her ability to capture what cooking can mean:

“I like the way that when you make something new and awesome, the first thing you want to do is tell another friend about it so they can make it, too. I like the way following a recipe to the letter can feel like handing the reins over after a long day of having to make all the decisions, but also that pulling off a good meal when you least expected is the fastest way to feel triumphant, even if your day left you short of opportunities to. I like the way that when you sublimate your wanderlust in a dish – a cacio e pepe addiction you picked up in Rome or a Thai-ish salad with crispy shallots, lime, and fish sauce – it becomes a gateway, or an escape hatch, to so much more than dinner. I like the way that when you cook at home, you don’t actually have to compromise a thing; you get to make exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it, and then you get to invite all your favorite people over to pass the dish around. I like the way a great meal makes grouchy people ungrouchy or turns a thankless day filled with thankless stuff into a hilarious one.”

• Recently I’ve been puzzling over why some people don’t enjoy self-help subjects as much as I do. A friend helped me understand that self-knowledge can be painful. In an episode of Hidden Brain, the podcast host Shankar Vedantam, highlights and explains one experiment’s conclusion:

“Think of the deep irony (…); the folks who care the most about ethics might be most willing to turn a blind eye to unethical business practices because they know, if they found out about those practices, they would feel obliged to do something about it.” (This is 19 minutes into the podcast.)

So, say a person is raised with a strong moral code. Self-knowledge might be painful because of a preference for ambivalence.

“Clarity” writes Gretchen Rubin in Better Than Before, “requires us to acknowledge what we’re doing.”

Or, it might be painful because we cling to an identity. When the author gave up a habit she had of not owning a purse,

“being ‘the kind of woman who doesn’t own a purse’” the relinquishing “caused me a pang, even though it was such a tiny part of my identity.”

Understanding ourselves can also be painful because it forces us to confront our feelings of wanting to fit in by noticing how we are different. If a person has fragile self-esteem, this can be especially hard.

(About this, Gretchen Rubin writes, “surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve found that the more matter-of-fact I am about my habits, the more readily people accept them – and me.”)

However, avoiding self-knowledge can lead to self-deception. If I can recognize how it can be painful, I can learn to see the ways in which I deceive myself and I can be more understanding of myself and of others. In this respect, I appreciated this School of Life video.