I’m packing up Santa’s sleigh and heading out for the holiday — first Xmas Eve pizza with my favorite pack of little kids, then down valley where my beloved sweetheart will be cooking a turkey at the cabin. We have half a foot of new sparkly fluffy snow, and for the first time in too many years, I’ll be waking up in a house that isn’t empty. Which is all the Christmas present I need …
Here’s hoping all of you have a wonderful holiday as well …
My new essay for Culinate was posted this morning. The Croquembouche that saved Christmas (faithful readers might remember): My inner Child — A Christmas to remember : Culinate.
My new column is up at Bookslut:
It wouldn’t be Christmas without a pile of big and fancy cookbooks just waiting to be wrapped in pretty paper and hidden under the tree. Cookbooks are one of my very favorite gifts — especially for the way they encourage people to invite one over for dinner. …
It’s now the beginning of December and I’m starting to think about Christmas boxes. For most people on my list, I recycle books I’ve read this year, and send homemade edible goodies — we’re all grownups, and we all have too much stuff, and my ideal Christmas is one where there isn’t much Stuff at the end of it.
I was watching Martha today, and her Miniature Golden Fruitcakes looked wonderful — I spent a semester in Ireland as an undergrad, and I loved English Christmas Cakes — heavy with fruit and booze with that snappy white hard frosting on them. I made a version last year, and people seemed to like them, so I’m thinking this year I’ll try this recipe I saw today.
But what else? I didn’t do a lot of canning this summer because most of our fruit crops failed … so cookies? cheese biscuits? another batch of paté?
What are you making for people for Christmas? Chime in in the comments …
I have a personal theory about Jane Austen, which is that they should immediately stop teaching her to high school students, and perhaps even college students. Jane Austen can only properly be appreciated when you’re old enough to have really messed something up, when you know that sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling that comes from a truly missed opportunity, when you understand that you can, indeed, really mess up your own life. Then Jane Austen’s books open up, and become magnificent. That she’s considered a rom-com writer makes me apoplectic.
I’ve never been that obsessed with biographical detail, but I thought this article in the Guardian was really interesting: Cause of Jane Austen’s death not universally acknowledged | Books | The Guardian.
TB from cattle. Makes a lot of sense to me — but perhaps that’s because I live surrounded by lots and lots of cattle.
Writers and typewriters: Barnes, Lively, Holroyd and Moggach | Books | The Guardian.
My favorite quote:
Michael Holroyd
I kept my typewriter after getting a laptop. My first draft was written with a pen, the second on my old friend the typwriter, and finally I used the computer. But something then went wrong. I could not find new ribbons for my old machine. So now I still keep the typewriter conspicuously on my desk and (hiding my laptop) use it to fool burglars who come looking for state-of-the-art technology.
No Country for Old Typewriters – A Well-Used One Heads to Auction – NYTimes.com.
Christie’s, which plans to auction the machine on Friday, estimated that it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. Mr. McCarthy wrote an authentication letter — typed on the Olivetti, of course — that states:
“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. … I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”
Forest Kindergarten at Waldorf School in Saratoga Springs – NYTimes.com.
Schools around the country have been planting gardens and planning ever more elaborate field trips in hopes of reconnecting children with nature. The forest kindergarten at the Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs is one of a handful in the United States that are taking that concept to another level: its 23 pupils, ages 3 ½ to 6, spend three hours each day outside regardless of the weather. This in a place where winter is marked by snowdrifts and temperatures that regularly dip below freezing.
What a fabulous idea. Frankly, it makes me want to go to Forest Kindergarten.
“The only person I ever heard call Mr. Wright Frank, was Carl Sandburg …”
Adam Gopnik’s essay on the nature of cookbooks caught my eye in this week’s New Yorker. He covers a range of topics, but the division between cookbooks which are essentially grammatical (Ratio, How to Cook Everything) and cookbooks which are encyclopedic (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) is one that is dear to my heart. What cookbooks are for, and how we use them, or don’t use them — whether we cook from them or simply read them for pleasure is one of the subjects around which I keep circling. Here’s a quote:
“However we take cookbooks— grammatically or encyclopedically, as storehouses of craft or illusions of knowledge—one can’t read them in bed for many years without feeling that there is a conspiracy between readers and writers to obscure the ultimate point. A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dressup, we always end up making. We make béarnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make béarnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies. The herbs change; the hope does not.”