SIGN WITH AN E

I’ve had a standing debate with the man I eventually married about the evils (he calls them wonders) of the microwave. I conceded a long time ago that they are good for heating milk for coffee (which I do every morning), and good enough for re-heating old coffee (which I do occasionally). They can also be handy for heating and re-freshing a piece of cake or bread about to go stale, to then be dressed with a few scrapings of hard, cold butter which spreads beautifully after 30 seconds or so.

But when it comes to baking bread or potatoes, forget it.

Then there was the recent feature in the New York Times on the “wonders” of microwaving; Mark BIttman waxing lyrical about things to do with brinjals/aubergines/eggplant that involves a cooking time of less than 10 minutes to produce soft and juicy morsels. I tried that recipe, and while it was interesting enough (a mildly crispy layer of curried coconut on soft vegetable flesh), I’m not sure it trumps the oven in any way, even time-wise.

Then there was the steamed pudding, which I couldn’t resist, mainly because I have a particular strength for the mouthfeel of steamed puddings. Bittman supplied a recipe for a chocolate pudding from Barbara Kafka (yes, the name is ominous), but I wasn’t in the mood for chocolate, and I had a mango that needed eating, so I turned it into a mango-ginger-Chinese lemon pudding. As per instruction, I “cooked” it on high for 4-5 minutes, then let it stand a bit, then (non-per-instructions) doused it with rum and gave it another minute before serving it up with Aylesbury vanilla fudge ice-cream (which is good, but sounds better than it is: basically vanilla with a couple of swirls).

Well, watching the thing cooking was the most fascinating part. It bubbled and seethed and threatened to explode, but then turned into a wet but solid piece of confectionary. Hot, with ice-cream, it made a fine dessert (and I believe we all had second helpings), but it wasn’t the mouthfeel I was expecting at all. It was a pudding, but not a steamed pudding like Christmas pudding with its dense, crumbly, moist (yes, Nigella) texture.

I have no idea about the chemistry, and I may very well have offended the sailor in residence (who, like me, is a disciple of the “from scratch” doctrine, which involves steaming a pudding for the eight hours that it takes to cook a mixture of eggs, butter, sugar, flour et. al. over just-boiling water), but it was – in its way – a righteous thing to do. And to eat.

I won’t be rushing to microwave my desserts from now on, but I can if I have to. Which is to say more than my ability to convince students of the necessity of being students. They fuck you up, to lighten the mood with a little Philip Larkin, they really do. And on days when you feel like Humpty Dumpty, the microwave not be so evil after all. (Chocolate cake in 5 minutes, anyone?)

It was in the wake of a trip to the country, where apples grow on trees rather than in supermarkets, that I ended up with more apples than (even) I could eat. I also had leftover prunes after recently sending a couple of devils on horseback onto the braai (aka barbecue) for crisping, so the logical conclusion was an apple and prune cake.

(It was also, some say, a logical conclusion for Marie Antoinette to suggest that peasants should eat cake rather than bread, since a nationwide flour shortage meant that baking brioche actually worked out cheaper than bread).

But back to the cake. I knew I had a recipe somewhere for exactly what I had in mind, but laziness sent me to Google instead, where I found something that apparently originates from the very same country as myself. I present the “Danish” apple and prune cake:

Danish or not, this cake is, as “Simon G” suggests, truly delicious, though I suspect the supreme moistness of the one that came out of my oven had something to do with the addition of some grated (Danish, I kid you not) marzipan into the mix.

This was mainly because I didn’t have any ground almonds – I had whole ones, which got substituted for the walnuts in the original recipe – but I did have half a roll of marzipan left over from the wedding cake, and have been waiting for the perfect moment to get it into something else. This was a perfect moment, and one which happily continues from the first piece yesterday afternoon with coffee, to late last night with whisky, to this morning after a swim, to whenever the pie dish is empty. Until then, we will eat cake, and if anyone is clever enough to drop by, we will let them eat it too.

It was in the spirit of our secular household that this Easter passed with hot question buns rather than the usual, but as far as I can tell, the only big question is why such goodness is reserved for one weekend of the year? I predict I will be shocking the purists again by whipping these babies up on any random occasion, possibly after the Christmas pudding in July. And of course mine are unique, because they contain not just any old cake mix from the local Spar, but a carefully selected mixture of raisins, sultanas (the local was out of currants) and preserved lemons all the way from China, courtesy of Glen my favourite sailorman.

Split, toast, butter, top with cheese (optional), crank up the Wham!, and you’re sailing.

Vox populi often talks about “weaknesses” when it comes to food, and suggests that we all have (at least) one; that evil thing that will break our Resolve. This language is in tune with gluttony as public enemy no.1, and also perfectly demonstrates the simple power of discourse; how a word, in this case weakness, can lace every pleasure with guilt (isn’t “indulgence” itself an evil to be avoided?).

But, as Sidney Mintz points out, ‘Gluttony is the least interesting and the most obvious of the seven deadly sins’. So, exit vox populi, enter common sense, and then surely we should describe what we like in terms of strengths. I, for instance, was born with the proverbial sweet tooth, and I can almost guarantee that it’s stronger than yours (in other words, don’t bother challenging me to the chocolate chow-down: I will be victorious). I also like deep-fried calamari tentacles. A lot. I don’t think I can eat a bucket of them, but so what? From strength to strength, I say.

More than chocolate and calamari, though, I think my strongest taste (VP translation: my “biggest weakness”) is for a particular mouthfeel. It’s not the mouthfeel of oysters, which I enjoy on occasion, but would not mind forsaking for the rest of my life. What I really love is bread. Glorious bread. The loaf I baked this weekend had the perfect mouthfeel: kind of spongy, but chewy, with a touch of crunch from a bit of polenta in the mix, and a crust that requires molars. It was righteous when it was fresh, and just as good toasted this morning.

Naturally I also have strength for a good piece of cake once in a while, and I satisfied my craving with an age-old secret family recipe (which I tweaked, of course, to add fresh ginger and walnuts, although a different brand of cocoa powder unfortunately mostly masked the exotica). But no one’s complaining (including the philosophe, who just texted me to say that he stole a piece from the consignment I sent with him to distribute at work, and that it was “very nice!”). I’m not surprised: good cakes improve after a day or two.

So I got my bread, and I had my cake and ate it too, and it was a strong weekend which I’ll look forward to replicating in some other flavour before long.

Apropos the culture of “weakness”, it really is a shame that we are, so often, made to feel so guiltful about how and what we eat. I don’t this is the result of a simplistic cause and effect as much as a complex historical process, and I’m not sure whether it’s most usefully framed as a cultural, sociological, or epistemological problem, but I was recently struck by another formulation by Mintz, who argues that there is something strongly “cultural” behind America’s relationship to food: ‘I find it difficult to imagine a French equivalent to the lonely nighttime battles waged at the refrigerator door by so many Americans’.

What a very sad image. But I guess we can’t all be Nigella Lawson in satin pyjamas dipping into chocolate pots at “midnight” while the world looks on, and pays her for it…

I’m (finally) reading a book written several years ago by Warren Belasco, an American studies professor, and also an engaging writer who I hope to meet during some conference hobnobbing later this year in New Orleans. It’s called Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry and, as the title suggests, tells the hurlyburly, but entertaining and sometimes disturbing story of the rise and fall, in the 60s and 70s, of the “counter” food culture – the hippies and the macrobiotics, the vegetarians and the communards (none of these were mutually exclusive, of course) who set out to topple the system by eating tofu and lentils, getting naked and baking their own bread from whole grains.

It’s a fascinating read, for several reasons, but mostly because of how familiar everything is, and it reminds, again, of how short (or non-existent) cultural memory is. Consider this advice, from the late 60s: ‘Think primitive. Avoid anything complex, anything you can’t pronounce, anything chemical, synthetic, or plastic’. And here are some of Michael Pollan‘s recommendations for how to eat in the twenty-first century: ‘Eat food’; ‘Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable’; ‘Get out of the supermarket’.

Now I’m not suggesting that Pollan is guilty of anything beginning with ‘p’. The point is more about how we forget the inevitable cycles of things and make everything “new”, though in truth, many of the panics and scares – even fashions, like fusion food – we go through to do with food have been visited before. Of course contexts (economic, political, whatever) change, but it is precisely an index of our complacency with media and hegemonic infrastructures that we allow ourselves to get into panics about anything. The short version of this argument must be that if we stopped to think for ourselves at all, we wouldn’t need to be told – not in the 60s, nor again this century – how to eat (and neither would we need to be subjected to Rachael Ray’s Yum-o campaign to eradicate childhood obesity).

Anyway, this isn’t all a critic’s rant: I, too, like to bake my own bread, so I especially enjoyed this bit: ‘Bread baking was … a ritualistic affirmation of membership in a subculture that viewed itself in direct opposition to the plastic death culture. Baking bread took a lot of time, but that was the point. After first tasting a homebaked loaf, [hippy cookbook writer] Ita Jones had to bake her own, even if it took a whole afternoon – indeed, precisely because it took a whole afternoon’.

There. My secret is out. Forget about fighting the system; baking bread is quite simply the best form of procrastination, and (unlike stoopid muffins), always delicious! Look at this number I just pulled out the oven, which took not just an afternoon, but a whole day:

No, I shouldn’t give the wrong idea. The truth is that it took hardly any time at all. The dough needs time, but very little of my time: on afternoon one, throw together a dough – this one is half rye, half stone-ground wholewheat (from Beaumont wine farm), pulled together with yoghurt and beer, a touch of molasses, caraway seeds and a very little bit of yeast (the yoghurt and beer help to give a soured taste when you don’t have real time to do a sourdough; for long rising times, a little yeast goes a long way). Knead it well and put it in the fridge until you have time for part two (the next day sometime), which involves taking it out the fridge and letting it warm up a little, then another little knead and finally the fun bit of shaping a loaf, rolling a baguette, or making whatever shape you like your bread in. Then heat up the oven, put it in, sit back and await the smell.

(And here’s the bonus: you can actually do OTHER stuff, like WORK, in between). So, how hard is that?? Now there’s home-baked bread in the house, and that’s just groovy, baby.