Searching in Gardens, Alabama, Soufflé, NSFW Signatures, Odd Images
New Year’s Dispatch
Greetings, Pilgrims!
As I write, the third day of Christmas is becoming the fourth, and the New Year is coming on like a train. I hope you are having a lovely holiday season.
I have been thinking about and in that sense working (yes, Calvinist Santa, I’ve been a good boy!) on domestic politics, international order, technology generally and LLMs and neurosymbolic possibilities more specifically (and how will this be deployed?) and trying to think of a better institutional structure for capitalism . . . so much work. So tiresome. So premature, and is this really the season for work? I want to take a break. Policy wonks can stand down.
What to write is increasingly a problem for me, especially when dealing with subjects about which so many people have said so much, see above. Some of it is sensible, a million monkeys, etc. I don’t want to be just another monkey, much less an LLM. But coming to understand something is a difficult task. Turning that understanding into something new and well formed, writing, is another task. Is it worth it? What should I write?
Hyun Woo Kim recommended to me that – do you know Hyun Woo? Korean writer, dissident, ex-Leninist with a criminal record, devoutly Catholic, translating classical Chinese poetry into English, serious student of English literature and better with the Russians, writes like a dream. A few days ago: The Donkey (a Christmas story). Hyun Woo is a very good, may end up being major, mind. Sign up, otherwise watch this space, and thank me later. Anyway, Hyun Woo suggests I write a book of aphorisms,
And maybe he is right. It is true that I’m trying to work with juxtapositions of ideas, images, associations. A rock garden, or more grandly, a cathedral, or even the common law, the pieces only make sense in relation to other pieces. Go, not chess. Something like that. So “pieces” make sense. “ … what I like about this is how different ideas seem to be trying to spring out spontaneously.”
And this on the heels of my buddy Ali Khan somewhat unnervingly suggesting I was going crazy. A Soul No Faster Than a Camel. But in fine German style, as Nietzsche. I’m flattered, I guess, and this is the risk of chipping away at structure, cause, argument – you might be left with mere emotion, waves you cannot contain, crying on the neck of a horse, that sort of thing.
Is it a defense to say I’m more comfortable with the strange story than the aphorism, Kafka rather than Seneca? I think such stories are the core of ethnography, for whatever that might be worth. Maybe that’s my problem.
Let me offer two fragments of long term passion projects, a look back and, I hope, a look forward. Books that might get done. Structure.
Smith Lake (Alabama)
From my early childhood I remember the fog on the lake before the family woke (even though "fog" stands for that which cannot be well remembered) on what must have been summer mornings (judging from the weather and my bare feet, which would comport with the academic calendar of my mother), swirling damp above the water, usually still and bottle green, and meanwhile soaking the wood of the dock, dark and starting to rot. That was back when docks were fixed in the water on pilings, not aluminum frames floating on something like Styrofoam like they are now. Then as now the power company allowed the lake to rise to contain the spring rains or drained what was in their view their impoundment, a giant battery, to fuel the air conditioners in Birmingham or whatever, wherever. So the dock might be flooded in the spring or high and dry in August, certainly later. I caught my first fish off that dock, early on a summer evening after a rain. More strongly, however, I remember the dock as I went down to fish in those early mornings with nobody else awake yet and the water covered by a few feet of fog. I'd walk out of the house through the porch, careful not to let the screen door slam, cross the slate terrace and turn hard right at the yellow plum tree from which Mama made rarely delicious preserves, down the cracked stepped stone walkway and at the shore step onto the dock, damply soft on my bare feet except where the ten penny nails (how do I know this?) already protruded. I went fishing for the bream, mostly, that spawned and swirled among and around the pilings. Bluegills were occasional, catfish more so. Bass were plentiful to serious fisherman but almost never bit the balls I made out of store-bought white bread, or the worms I sometimes used as bait. Gar had been sighted. But what I used to see all the time were turtles and beavers and snakes. Somewhat idly I used to worry that a cottonmouth would take my bait. My paternal grandmother, "Grandmama" in my childish spelling, had told me a story about a boy who baited his hooks with baby cottonmouths, believing they were worms. And as it was impaled each one of those baby snakes bit the boy until the boy died.
When I finally returned to the lake, decades and maybe even two generations later, I could not remember the last time I had been there, or how old I was then. Perhaps it was for a funeral? I think I was too young to go to Mammy's (Grandmama's mother) or Mother Westbrook's (Grandaddy's mother) so maybe it was Vicky, my grandmother's sister? She used to live with Mammy in the little house in Jasper. Mother Westbrook lived across the street with her son Emmett. I remember Uncle Perry (Papa's brother) taking me to Alabama for some such event, long after the Lake House had been sold, telling me when I wanted to go swimming in the hotel pool that we were not there for fun. I also remember Mammy's face powdered in her casket but maybe that was a dream or just my imagination of a funeral I did not in fact attend, even though one is supposed to remember that sort of thing. I could of course ask surviving family members if (they remembered) whether or not I was there, and find out (perhaps), but having to be more or less reliably told that one really remembers, or for that matter does not actually remember, a moment that is supposed to be indelible sort of restates the problem, doesn't it?
Kitchen Existential, or The Silverheels Cookbook
I enjoy cooking, in intentionally amateurish fashion, for family, friends, and even myself, especially when I’m alone in the mountains writing. A few years ago, I started taking notes, though not really towards recipes. Perhaps these notes, too, will in due course become a book, although there is something faintly ridiculous about the idea. Why must everything be turned into text?
[You mean, why must you turn everything into text? Because that’s what writers do, idiot, but let’s not confuse your compulsions with laws of nature.]
At the end of a day preoccupied with ciphers, symbols, gestures towards abstractions at the edge of thinkable, it comes as a relief to concede, to pour a drink and make something, more specifically, to watch something emerge. This sense of emergence, of the physical yet evocative, one hopes pleasing to the senses, of this happening like this on this evening, and not something else at some other time, is what I find interesting and a comfort from the demands of the true, the atemporal. Maybe it’s all comfort food?
Contrast the ideals of perfection, control, reproducibility that inform most serious cooking, for reasons of restaurant economics and probably darker reasons, too. Since at least Escoffier, the classic French kitchen has been organized along military lines, right? Yes Chef! But, after a long day writing, I’m tired of exercising my will. To put it differently, in my culture, cooking tends to be approached like architecture, or at the high end, the performance of a Brandenburg concerto. Stressful. Most of my friends, unsurprisingly, avoid cooking, and can only make a few things, with some effort. What I am after is looser, more playful, even erotic. Yes, I am thinking about sex but more children, apropos the holidays generally and Christmastide specifically. Unto us . . . in much of life, we do what we can, and something, one hopes good, emerges. Even the illusion of control requires great effort, but we may appreciate with ease, which brings me to soufflé.
[I wrote the following, more or less, some years ago. It was one of my first efforts at this sort of personal yet public writing.]
I’m quick to admit that “soufflé” is an intimidating word. There are good reasons why – people who know what they are doing can do amazing things. But what about the rest of us?
Soufflé story: quite a few years back, I met old friend Brandon at Le Perigord, at the time perhaps the most classic French restaurant in NYC, an upper east side operation repeatedly described as a dowager. In fact, perhaps the most “classic” French place I’ve been anywhere, even though I’ve spent time in France and have lived in Belgium. The only competitor for crown of most classic French was also in NYC, the relatively recent and widely hailed Le Coucou, where Brandon and I ate, too, along with my good friend Doug.
Le Perigord was a place where nouvelle cuisine meant, well nothing much. Maybe tomorrow’s market order. I wasn’t young, then, and Brandon is a few years older. We were the youngest people in the place. A Rolls was parked in front of the door, that weekday.
When I ordered an appetizer (oysters and champagne), long before I had decided on my meal (duck?), I also ordered the soufflé for desert. Duck, whatever, but staff had to pay attention to the soufflé. It’s been years, but strawberry, I believe, though I think the house special was Grand Marnier. In due course, it was fantastic. While I’m hazy on the flavor, I remember watching it collapse as it was served, and a syrup poured over. I mean, fantastic. Chapeau.
Years later, wasting time and mildly curious, and slightly more engaged than Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, I walked through the neighborhood, and happed upon the restaurant. Le Perigord had closed, after a run of half a century, but the space hadn’t been rebadged. The old sign was there. It was sad. And now, from lockdown, I worry about NYC as a way of living . . .
Today, right now, I have too many ripe bananas, and my foody friend has left me with eggs, no doubt from hens with names. Meanwhile I already had rather more pedestrian eggs. A local legend called to ask if I needed anything from town. I said cream. He brought me some sort of sweetened cream . . . a challenge.
SO, in general and for present purposes, by soufflé I mean four things: eggs + dairy + something else + flavorings and spices, mixed and baked. It’s not complicated, even if the variations are endless, and the great ones are, well, great. But if we lower our sights a bit, I, and any of you, can do this.
The first part, egg, is the motor. It’s pretty constant. Likewise, with the second stage, dairy, sort of the transmission. Usually cream. Sometimes some butter or milk, whatever. It keeps the dish from being too “eggy.” The third stage, “something else” gives the soufflé its distinctive flavor, and its character. If it is banana, or strawberry, or broccoli, or a bit of lobster, you get a very different soufflé. And broccoli or banana is going to inform the fourth part, the choice of spices and flavorings to enhance the dish.
So that’s the strategy. What about tactics? Again, this is pretty simple. The key is to beat stuff up so it has air in it. In my mountain house, I don’t have much, but I do have a kind of fancy stick mixer, I think my kids gave it to me. -- but you could beat stuff up with any number of implements, including a fork or a whisk and some sweat equity. Just beat stuff up so it has air in it. That allows the egg to do its weird magic, both glue together and float up.
Ok, so here’s what I did the other night, and you can do if similarly situated, or differently, in accordance with your circumstances.
1) I beat 4-5 eggs.
2) I have a bunch of very ripe bananas, in fact the inspiration for this project. I beat them to a pulp, or “puree.” I throw in some of that organic sweetened half and half the local legend gave me. So, we have fruit, sugar, and dairy. And air.
3) Blend and add spices. What you are trying to get here is a mix of stuff that is yummy, but not so diffuse that the egg cannot bind it and tie into a structure that can be baked.
I added Madagascar vanilla and some cinnamon. [Other options: nutmeg, allspice, almond, lemon zest, raisins, rum – but go easy with the rum, because we want the egg to bind. Can also pour rum over finished product, if desired, or get fancy and make a rum syrup]
4) Bake at 350 (or whatever) until obviously done. It’s good but not necessary to have a soufflé bowl. Straight sides, usually fluted on the outside, I’m not entirely sure why but I assume something to do with heat distribution. The straight sides give you that cool “rise.” But maybe you don’t possess such gear – anything you can stick in an oven will do. Just make sure the vessel is big enough. You want soufflés to rise, but they also want to rise. So, you want to make sure your vessel is much bigger than the wet mix with which you start.
Actually cooking is strangely easy. Just let the damn thing rise, and when it looks like it has “set,” well, take it out.
5) Unlikely under pandemic conditions, but you might want to serve with a syrupy sauce. So, perhaps, you boil that last overripe banana with pineapple, or maybe grapefruit, and a bit of rum? Just thinking out loud.
It came out beautifully. Awesome. I had dessert first.
But a soufflé cannot be finally judged out of the oven, when the soufflé is at its best combination of air and flavor. (This, incidentally, is what made the true Krispy Kreme doughnut , hot off the line, arguably the best baked confection ever, but I digress.)
A good champagne, or any other sparkler, should be good wine not only when in the prime of life, upon opening, but the next morning, discovered as a half bottle somebody forgot. The sparkler should decompress, as it were, into decent white (could be rose) wine.
So it is with the soufflé: we should expect the divine dessert to become a satisfying breakfast. Eggs, right?
I want to do a collection of NSFW, completely inappropriate, signature blocks derived from popular music. Like this:
John Doe Regional Director & V.P. for Procurement Acme Corp. Contact Information “I've been drinkin' to remember and drinkin' to forget I got "I love you" on my mind, I got Jim Beam on my breath And loneliness has got the rest, I've got nothin' left within me It must be the whiskey.” -- Cody Jinks
I’ve got lots more, but feel encouraged to send me your suggestions. The rules: a quotation derived from popular music, not obscene, and radically unprofessional.
We will return to our regularly scheduled terribly academic programming soon. Maybe.
Have a wonderful New Year!
— David A. Westbrook