Love Apples

Same Place Next Year.

There's a unique pang in leaving the places where you're a regular.

And you don't really know how it might change without you.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Pickling Day.

I've never fully committed to pickling. There are definitely moments when I'm taken with the idea of it. I think it's that in it, I hear the sea calling, and the salt that sucks life out, and with it, oddly, preserves to give it later. What's not to stand in awe of, what's not to want to master.

Perhaps I should admit to myself that I'm afraid of pickles. Not their safety: whereas I trust very few people to give me jam, I think you'd have to work at getting pickling wrong.

Is it the unnatural crunch? Perhaps the pervasive wet that leaves me parched? And both these may well be a part of it, but I think it's the brine that holds this mystery for me. Murky magic.

Nonetheless: Pickling day. Packing the vegetables in the jar is fun. They squeak a bit as I urge them into slightly unnatural shapes. And foremost: I get to participate in ancient ritual. That alone should satisfy. Should.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

A Fool for Blackberries.

I wasn't up to more preserving just now, inspired though I was by this post at Box Elder. I went with a blackberry fool, with a crunch.

So today: my Blackberry Fool with Blackberry Meringue.

I love to think of the fool coming from the French word fouler, to crush, with a bit of a clumsy quality imbedded in the word. (I could also think of this as an over-enthusiastic performance of Eton Mess, yet that might altogether conjure something unwieldy, and so my mind doesn't brave it.) I love fool, no matter the name, too because my body staunchly refuses to tire of good softly whipped cream, and how well it loves fruit.

I also can't weary of the meringue + cream + fruit--either as a pavlova, or a vacherin--only this combination has none of the grownup challenge of real crunch, this is more like a gentle childish spoon version.

And so: I started with 500g of blackberries (50 deca, as said at markets here in Hungary), though I ended up using somewhat less than that, after a handful (the one pictured) was eaten upon coming home.

For the meringue component: 200g (1 cup) sugar and 4 egg whites placed in a clean stainless or glass bowl placed over a pan of barely simmering water for one minute or so, until the sugar crystals dissolve (so you no longer feel them between your fingers). If you omit this melting-in step, you're meringue won't be as crisp, which is frankly no great loss here, but I was in a thorough mood. Whip the egg whites with a mixer (or engage whoever's around to take turns to do it by hand) until billowy and marshmallowy, and keeps a peak when the whisk is lifted out. In a separate bowl, mash a handful or two of blackberries, and gently mix them in the beaten egg whites--let it be streaky and uneven. You then slather, somewhat evenly, the whole thing on a lined baking sheet, and bake it until dry in a cool oven (220F/110C/1/4 Gas Mark) until it's dry and feels hollow when picked up. Not much trouble here--turn it off if you've an errand to run, it will wait. Allow to cool, and then cover with a sheet of something or a tea towel, or place in a plastic bag, and bash with whatever's handy--I usually use my rolling pin--until you have mostly a sandy-pebbly rubble of purple meringue. You'll have more crumbs than you'll need, but delicious ones at that.

When ready to eat the fool, softly whip 500 ml of cold whipping cream with 2 tablespoon of sugar (a cold bowl, and cold whisk helps this, but I rarely bother). Reserve some very pretty blackberries for garnish (or don't) and in a separate bowl mash blackberries, leaving uneven bits. Gently fold the two together, with about 1/2 of the broken meringue, reserving the rest to sprinkle on the tops.

Spoon the fool into dessert or wine glasses, with reserved blackberries at the bottom, or on top, and sprinkle tops with reserved meringue.

Budapest Breakfast: Foie Gras.

I often wonder how much of an expensive treat one might choose to eat if it were always available for cheaps.

I got to know my answer for lobster and caviar, having lived in times and places where they were abundant. (The answer? LOTS.) I suspect much the same would be true for best Graves and truffles were I given the chance to find out. (Won't someone please need me to know this!?!)

In profusion here is foie gras. Last I bought it, $17 for a glorious 700g. For years, I've proven what find breakfast food it makes when I'm here, and I can. The best moment is when you forget that it's a privileged occurrence, and all you're left with is melting cool deliciousness.

The photo shows, too, how much goose fat the bread likes first. (Erm.)

I also speculate how much might I would be willing to dish out for, say, garlic mashed potatoes if priced in double digits for an ounce, but I hope never to have to find out...

[Incidentally, be it duck or goose, Hungarian foie gras is often what's labelled Produit de France once enough value-added through processing and tinning.]

Rhythm: Chopping.

I've had insomnia all my life.  Always the same kind:
-First, sleepy cosy, ready for a full night. 
-Second, sleep for two hours. 
-Third, Awake in fright and worry about something, usually someone I love, sometimes for good reason, often not.

As an adult, it's quite manageable in that, if I wear out tossing and turning, I'm able to get up, make tea, read, write, work, sort, listen.  As a child, however, all there was was all kinds of scary--only left with waiting for morning to reassure.

On summer holidays, always spent here in Budapest, most of them in some version of this place, there was jetlag, dog barks and unfamiliar creaks in the mix of reasons for missed sleep.  But the rhythm of family life fostered afternoon napping for young ones.  One would never sleep for long, but I remember those minutes as the most restful, the most stilling of my entire life.

It's that while I tried to settle and free my mind of worries, my aunt would make supper. Chop.  Chop.  She and my mum would speak and laugh in whispers.  These sounds would fill me, yet demand no response.  I could have full confidence that in the making of the meal, the rhythm of the chop, in the frequency of the whisper, resided the order of the universe.

Now that I've this flat, I no longer get to sleep in the range of these sounds.  I still witness them in passing, in waking life, but I miss how deeply they once resonated in my dreams.

(The sound of the this parsley and their roots were part of the echoes of the chopping today--for soup.)

Gift Plums.

The wife and granddaughter of the contractor who built the flat came by with this armful of plums picked from their backyard.

Gorgeous, fragrant, just a day shy of perfectly ripe.  I feel plum butter coming on.

Home & Home in a Budapest Cheese Shop.

Sometimes I'm here in Budapest, and I only feel the desire to fill myself with the tastes of childhood.  Sometimes I'm here, and I am an expat Canadian who travels lots, hungry for foods of my other homes.

This tension is all around me: I read in the Herald Trib..  I go to the British bookstore on Oktober 6 u., as though starved for reading materials in English, while I easily have 30 of my own unread books back at the flat.  But once at the store, I notice how many Hungarian authors are available in English translation--the back and forth once more.

And so with the cheese store I frequent when here.  It carries French cheeses more than anything.   I often think to myself that were I to live here, I'd want this store, and would die a little were it to close.  Only I don't live here, and I have fantastic cheese stores in Montreal--so why  come here and invent the feeling of nostalgia on principle.

Alright then, buy the Hungarian-made ashen goat--bracing, chalky, snow-white, delicious--with a wedge of a lovely moulded fig paste studded with almonds.  Another answer of somewhere in between.

(Though perhaps I am getting homesick, for, my love of paprika aside, I am feeling weary of not being able to wear white blouses around all this splatter-prone red food! This place requires great nimbleness in serving skills, or busier clothing than I have.)

Plum Tree.

It was one of trees that came with the house. If I fall in love easily in broader life, it's all the more true for trees. And so with the plum. Even as I had to admit, if only to myself, that it was a problem.

It was tall. I always thought it looked mournful, though perhaps it was that I sensed its eventual fate. The thing was its plums--plums produced in massive numbers. They would fall everywhere, below it and astonishingly far afield. But for all their collective heft, and their power to overtake us, there was never once among them a full-sized, mature, plum. Instead we had these flattened, wrinkled, ovals. Though (to me), still gorgeous in their purple waxy skins.

Much was done for it. Tree doctors consulted; books pored over. And there was much talk--some cavalier, some with wringing of hands. I knew a decision had been made, even as I didn't hear until some weeks after it was chopped down.

I gulped when news finally reached me. Okay. I know, I get it, don't tell me again: we had to. God, why am I such a baby.

I was told then too that it had already been cut into logs that would cure into fuel for our summer outdoor fires. This tradition was started when I married R. who needed a way to participate in our family evening socialising, even as he then had few words with which he could make it flow. Wine, flames and an iron became medium to his message. It soon became law: "I'm going out, but I'll meet you at the fire." "I'm finishing some work, but fire at 8.30!"

For many years now the plum wood provided hot dense heat. Every time it was mentioned that a log was from it, I tried briefly to visualise which limb or which part of the trunk it might have originated. It always felt nostalgic, even as it was stupendous, crackling, hot company.

I think this was the last fire it will give us, though we might still find some lengths of branches mixed in with the other wood.

I'm crap at goodbye.

Cup Lost.

My Budapest breakfast cup has developed a hairline crack from the lip, through to both sides.

I'm more devastated that I'm comfortable admitting. I've had it for about seven years. Mostly for hot milk, which I drink lustily while most people around me gag at the very idea--something I'm miles from understanding, not that I try.

It was perfect. Oversized but light. And looked, to me, charmingly bovine--comfy for the milk, I thought.

Of Julia & Paris, Beurre blanc & Copper.

I've always had a thing for Paris in the first half of the last century. I don't often think "I might have been happy there, then," but I think I might've.

I don't see why, in that case, I felt so unsure about reading Julia Child's My Life in France (Knopf, 2006). I bought it, but, as often, I thought I liked the idea of it better than I would like the reading. I'm blessed with a solution for these things: my mother reads so much, and so much more than I do, I get to read vicariously through her. Yet somehow on holiday, it felt right--comfy cozy--to pick it up again.

There's plenty about the book that has me impatient: It's under-edited. It leaves a lot of emotional dot dot dots where one of the things that makes me feel heavy is the holding of unsorted emotional baggage. This was especially true for me in Child's relationship with Simone Beck (was it ever ok again?). It also has little control of pace, something that's to me a near epidemic in contemporary publishing: where it starts very rich in the joys of the minute, it ends in a mad crush.

There's nonetheless much I'm taken by, starting with how much of Child's self in the cadence and feel of the prose--and what's there not to love? She knows herself well, body and soul. A woman well loved. A woman who loves intensely. Stubborn, even intransigent, but in the way I've often seen the genius mind to be, where total focus on a few realities is the only path to invention.

A few days ago I was walking and thinking about the thing I'm most grateful for in reading My Life in France: How it steeped me in this era of food when so much was new. A great deal of the memoir is about what's new to Julia, and how she brought her discoveries to the U.S. public. But then what actually stops me in my tracks is reading that this was a time where beurre blanc was merely a regional reality, one that Child was the first to formalise in print. Reading this small bit to be so makes me aware of time before our own in terms a food, and so momentous did I find this that it gave me a sense of time before time.

While thinking some of these things, I came across the storefront above, filled with all manner of copper that Child valued so well. All so new and sparkly, and full of promise somehow.

Workspace Chocolate.

There are some things one finds out about yourself when one's cleaning up. Surely this is an ignored reason for our compulsion to avoid doing it: self-knowledge often irks.

We're expecting a good friend to stay with us here in Budapest. The flat's in good shape, plus she knows us well, plus she doesn't care, but I did think my work/reading space could use some tidying.

Tidying, ever fraught.
This time round I've discovered that:

1. I'm fond of the first snap of the chocolate tablet, and the first bite. I'm apparently much less so of subsequent ones, least so of the last.

2. I could use more variety in my life. Côte d'Or not my favourite, but I've (it's now apparent) become weary of disappointment, or of shopping for better.

3. I eat A LOT of chocolate.

Tori the Addict: the Butter Fridge

1) People tend to be blind to some of your shortcomings when they're all blissed out on chocolate or duck fat.

2)There's a lot of surplus when you're lost to the crazy waves of MUST MAKE X, and so friends get to walk off with some loot. People like loot.

3)It's also popular-making that I'm willing to suspend near anything when a friend has a compelling food query. (And heartfelt apologies for those of you who've stood on the other side and heard me say in so many words: "Sorry. Gonna be late. But I'm saving lives!" when we all know I'm merely saving supper: in the middle of it all--or possibly ever--I'm not the best judge of scale. And I somehow always choose to keep basking in things said in the heat of the moment.)

But then, there's a darker side: the moments when your friends discover you're passion for food is a bit scary to them. This usually dawns after an innocent start: say, where I'm asked how I made something. The problem is mostly that I just don't know when to stop talking. As my obsessing is not scary to me, I don't have the best gauge of how far's too far, though I’m trying to guess at this better. I've now surmised that anything which includes the words "10 days" sets friends off, or, weirdly, the word "lard."

For our many years together, R. has come to know how deep this current of extremes runs in me. Though he knows that I still go to some lengths to protect him from the truth that he has made his life with someone who's very comfortable swimming way past the deep end.

Sadly one of my dams broke yesterday. It held for 4 years, since we got the tiny fridge to "complement the one downstairs," for our small Budapest flat.

We had come from market. R. was asking what should go in which fridge, the big one downstairs, or the tiny one in our flat. To everything I answered "downstairs." Only to "Butter?" did I answer "the fridge in the flat." We didn't discuss it further. We went about our morning. Suddenly, while we were walking, I see him turn his head in the way that tells me he's had a sudden thought. Uh-oh.

R.: "Tori. [Pause pause.] Do you mean...we...only got the upstairs fridge to store butter."

Tori: "Erm."

R: "But WHY???"

Tori: "Well... Butter tastes like other foods, otherwise."

R: [Bewildered, though amused, pause.]

Tori: "We keep do Champagne in there as well. But have you tasted our butter?!?!."

The Frill, the Fear, the Szendvics .

We would pass this Szendvics shop on Arany Janos u. when I was kid. At that time, it seemed like I would give the world to have my mother stop in to buy me one, stunning in its frill. Of course I wouldn't say. She mustn't have liked them herself, as she never did.

Now I pass the shopwindow and though I'm fascinated still by the look of them, they now mostly have this can't-look-away-yet-I'm-repulsed power over me. The very way in which they struck me as intricate and jewel-like now just telegraph to me that they're overwrought and garish. Perhaps taste mattered less then than fantasy--the real now wins over the fanciful.

It's one of the great puzzles of life: just when you're old enough to have the power to buy the things you used to nearly die for for the yearning of them, you no longer want them.

Tomi

Finally, Loves Apples gets a photo of actual love apples. These were Tomi's. He grows them, drives them into town, and is ready to sell at market open, 7 a.m..

We bought them as counterpoint for a multi goose-parts supper, for an all-tomato salad. Delicious though they were, they couldn't really hold their own next to the lush goose, but no matter, they weren't expected to. But I once again had that feeling that Tomi had somehow joined us at the table, with his produce there.

***

My aunt and I share this uncanny ability to fall in love quite instantly with people we've just met, merchants all the more.

There are two basic categories: those we love passionately, and those who we passionately wish we could love, just don't. In time and upon further meetings, of course, this all gets recalibrated into something more subtle, more real.

I hate how transparent I know myself to be when I'm very fond of someone new. It's not even that I mind people seeing it--rare are the true misunderstandings--it's that I can't bear how little control I have over myself: Zoom in. See nothing else. Forget that you were meant to run a quick errand. Forget that you came with a friend, who mayn't be enjoying the experience of being made to feel like they're invisible.

Just like my voice, my aunt's goes all manner of singsongy when she's gaga in this way. She's cursed with going a bit red and blotchy-faced too, while I only turn a pink shade of animation.

It was years ago that I met Tomi through her. He still makes our voice and eyes sparkle. I laugh sometimes to think what we must look like, she and I, side by side just beaming at him, as he flashes us his youthful, winsome smile. We talk shop, weather, family, and supper.

Indulgence. Lattes.

I hate to admit it, but I often have a knowing smirky smile when I notice someone eating something that I associate with the infantile. I enjoy watching it; I even feed the habit. In fact, I suspect I have whole relationships built around my desire to indulge it. Yet in the back of my mind, I've a thought that goes with the smile: I'm so glad you like it, now when are you going to grow up?

Don't tell me it's wrong. I KNOW it's wrong. Very very. Should. stop. right. now.

Milk chocolate. Candy of any kind, even toffees. Popsicles. Chocolate Milk. Ice cream. Gum. They all do it to me.

And it's not that I can never be found elbow-deep in a box of milk chocolate bonbons, especially if the box is marked Neuhaus. And for the love my friends have of them, my involvement is extensive: I even made marshmallows by hand once wanting to make the perfect hot chocolate to soothe a tired friend. Nevertheless, even in those moments, I see the adult eating the treat before me, but really I see a toddler version of them, same-clothes same-glasses same-room eating it just the same way, and I inwardly smile my obnoxious smile.

Change the milk chocolate to anything 70% +. Or thaw the ice from the cream and make it crème brulée or even the more pudding-like pot de crème, and the adult is back, and my smirk goes.

There's one place, though, where I feel the eyes of the Cheshire cat on me. And I want it known that I've no intention of growing up. Café au lait. Lattes. Or here, Tejes Kavé. While R. orders his second double espresso right now next to me, I drink my tall frothy cowy drink. Sweet as mother's milk without the addition of sugar. Go ahead, call me a kid. Here I am one.

Savoury Baking: Rétes.

One of the distinct joys of eating in Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, is the prominence of savoury baking. Salt and seeds and cheeses--they are part of daily life in bakeries here.

Most are easy-enough for me to make at home, and range from simplified to full-fledged versions of laminated doughs, made into biscuits or bars. I forget about them for whole stretches of time, and then they come back to me, as though second nature. There is a catch as with all things made of laminated dough: their powers are ephemeral. They have a few hours at most, and then they turn distinctly ordinary. So if you get them from a bakery late in the day--or worse, in a restaurant that doesn't care--you'll shake your head wondering how it is people go mad for them.

But one I've yet to attempt to make at home is rétes, better known elsewhere in the world as strudel. It's not pure fear that keeps me from it--though it ought--it's that I have far too reverential a regard for it. I don't yet feel ready, or worthy. I don't know if I ever will.

Once you've had shortcut versions of it, it's hard to imagine the sense of transport the real thing provides. But when done well, it brings you into the depths of the filling, to a purity found there, protected and kept whole by fine silken layers (for "layered" is precisely what rétes translates to) of the pastry. The pastry serves as a perfected and gentle vehicle for the filling it celebrates. It does such a job of it, you wish you could wear it. And though there are many sweet versions--sour cherry my favourite--it's the savoury ones I think the most defining. The ones I bought yesterday at a rétes shop were: dilly fresh cheese; caramelised cabbage and loads of black pepper; potato and fresh cheese.

Witnessing the making of the dough by hand is the most awe-making thing:
-The smallest mound of dough is placed at the centre of a table covered in a white linen cloth.
-The dough is pulled bit by bit by the back of the baker's hands.
-Pulling, pulling, more pulling.
-When it has been stretched to cover the whole table, the rhythm of it really flows.
-At the point where it drapes the whole cloth, threatening to touch the ground, the gentle pulling is exchanged for a rougher one that rips off the heavier "hem" of the dough.

It's often said of thin pastry that you could read a newspaper through it. This is another thing altogether--you could with confidence catch up with the stocks page.

One day...

Guerrilla Gardening: The Fig Tree

I've had a few days to think about it, but I still have no real explanation for how this happed. Strange too that whilst we all acted so in, we were also so out of, character.

But there's no question how it started. We were all sitting around the table at the restaurant. My aunt brought us another chapter to this several-year long comic saga about how people in our neighbourhood keep offering her fruit trees, most often figs, for her garden. She has long ago decided that they're the last thing we need.

We're all familiar with how these tales go. We all laugh at how this one, too, unfolds. We find it funny to think of neighbour X trying to foist another generation of baby fig on her. People do, I've seen them. My aunt is so generous with gifts from her garden, and from her kitchen, they wish to return the favour. And I know what a gift it would be… figs are to my mind a very embodiment of perfection. But this we're not meant to heed. The central conceit to this story is that they are the superfluous, and that running away from them is exactly what's good and right, and that the whole chase is hilarious.

She's a good story teller. She knows too what it's like to run away from heartfelt and generous offers--and she's seen people run away from her too when she's brandishing something plentiful that needs eating. But more than anything this is a story of controlling one's destiny and, by extension, that of one's garden.

No fig tree, however lush and sensual, is worth a challenge to this, we'd all so far thought. Yet as we're sitting there, it's not so much that a single gauntlet fell, it's a sudden, albeit silent, revolt. I've heard it said that revolutions can happen in an instant; now I've seen it.

I first notice R. looking at me. No words pass from him to me but I read his mind, and respond in English "You're not serious. She'll kill us." I add that I won't even consider this a moment longer until he's secured my cousin's assent. I'm shocked when I find out that in this flash, he's received such assurance already.

The three of us only get to talk freely much later in the day. Giggle more than talk. But we pick the spot, decide to make it an espalier, decide which nursery to check out. I make sure we all understand how seditious this is. They're gleeful in how they answer. Ok then, one for all and all for one. We're getting a fig tree and we'll plant it the next day.

The next evening I know my cousin succeeded in buying one when he comes home from work and instead of coming in, he mimes to me through the screen to go over to his place. Excitement builds. By how we act about it, you might think we were throwing my aunt a surprise party, not a putsch.

I see the tree. It's spine-tingling love at first sight--22 tiny figs already attached. R. finds us. We all agree it's the most perfect tree we've ever seen. We make sure the adults as we still call them even as we've been that too for more years than not, are occupied elsewhere. A hoe is got; a hole dug--the conspirators have accomplished their mission: once it's in the ground, she'll love it too.

The moment arrives. We call her. She looks and squints at what we're pointing too. She sees it for what it is. She declares us mad and grins and laughs, and enjoys the shift in her realm--one that comes from within.

The Cups, the Wine: the Ritual.

It never feels like there are so many of us in this house in summer. Until you set the table. And then you see it--a lot of plates, of silverware, of goblets; a lot of food; a lot of wine.

The elders are non drinkers. But when their grown children are around, they sip a glass along with us, one of a growing list of things that they follow us on--I love how open they are to the experience of us.

Wine shops are not on our usual market axis. Plus wine needs thinking through. Every year we start this afresh. We meant to remember the great finds from last year, but we don't. And so the ritual begins again.

We buy different bottles. Our criteria in choosing them are based on some distant knowledge, and led by covers to their book. Good area? Yeah, I think it is. Good year? Erm, well... I forget. Good producer? I think we bought something from them last year, only I don't recall if we loved or loathed it.

We bring them home in a plaid wheel-behind shopping trolleys. We line them up on the table in the garden. We get paper and pen. We get glasses. We sit around them. We pour, we talk, we grade on 5 (5 being strongest, just like report cards here a the time we were kids). There is no pretence at knowledge we don't have, no taking ourselves or the task overly seriously. There's only teasing one another for tastes we find facile, and defending with mock solemnity the vital importance of our pet principles. We feign shock when someone disagrees. Or sometimes we defend a choice just to not have a fan stand alone.

Once they've all been tasted, one a warm summer's night in Budapest has fallen al around us, we remind each other how we grated, we taste the ones in the lead again. A winner is declared! Glasses are raised. We all forget that we disagreed about that very bottle a few minutes ago. Now it's time to congratulate ourselves and each other. Time to acknowledge that it's the one we just knew we would end up choosing right from the first. I keep hoping that the winemakers are people who would understand what power there is in these joys.

It marks a beginning to our time together. And if by next year we forget which wine it was again, we don't forget this.

Golden Raspberries

I'm often taken with the sense that children make of the world around--what innate wisdom it holds, and yet how many structural flaws it has. As we spent summers in our home here in Budapest, I thought all things summer as being from here, of here. It was something of a crushing blow--and a simultaneous relief--to find out that these were treasures the rest of the world were in on.

Eating some things in this house, in this yard, is a Proustian falling into them that have me remember all the summers, and have me instantly feel most myself. Just now it was a handful of golden raspberries. The ground beneath my feet awakens to it, and mouths to me that it holds it all.

There are a thousand reasons why I don't live here year-round. And among the hundred practical ones would be added that whilst home is here, home is elsewhere too. (And how could I bear saying goodbye to North American eating apples?? And to good nan bread takeaway around the corner from my house?)

Nevertheless in these moments, when I'm eating here in summer when I'm eating summer here, where it feels a sin against nature to ever leave again.

Gerbeaud

It's funny that my first entry from Budapest should be of such a landmark. And yet there's something wholly landmark in the role it's had in my life, and so typical in having my first day here involve a visit. Gerbeaud is surely the patisserie I've spent most hours in, even as when I do so now, it's not without a grin of self-consciousness.

I went there as a young child. I always would always have their intense and syrupy hot chocolate. My mother would sweep in and place large orders, conversant in everything fine and best done. I found these things both inspiring and frightening in her then. I sat at one of the marble tables, sipped what seemed to take ages to cool, and watched her.

I went there without parents as an older child, when communist Budapest was so unsafe for my family, was so very safe of street crime so that my cousin and I could have the run of the city. Gerbeaud would be the end point to the day, my aunt's office, housed in a building just as perfect, so nearby. We sat, ate, and waited for her.

I went there as an adolescent to write and write in a moleskin-type notebook in fountain pen. Just, just, as I'm writing this now. I was in love with poppyseed-filled crescent cookies with harsh coffee.

I took my R. to Gerbeaud in 1990, the year we were married, and the year everything that had been called order was now called corrupt in Hungary. That year the voices there were young and excited. So were ours. Cognac--lots.

For some years that followed, however, only tourists could afford to go. Real life just drained from it. Now there's more of a mix once more, though still just a shadow of its former self. I had tea ("With milk." "[Blank stare.]" "With milk, not lemon." "Milk?")

In all the communist years calling it by its real name Gerbeaud was an act of defiance. The government, which renamed so many things changed it blandly to the name of the square it reigns over. Now calling it by its commie name, as I sometimes will if only to make my family laugh, feels strangely nostalgic.

In the communist years the women who worked behind the counters were matronly and knowledgeable; the waitresses were matronly and surly. They're still surly, just younger now. I used to complain but now find their surliness amusing, even comforting.