Love Apples

St.Nicholas Day 2008

For Northern and central Europeans, December 6th is St. Nicholas Day, and St. Nicholas Day is the chocolate holiday.

It's admittedly a kid's holiday. Ostensibly, you're meant to polish your own shoe and leave something out for him to eat. But in our house, it has perversely turned into St. Nicholas finding his own way to the fridge, the shoe cupboard (notice how he found my most fanciful outrageously colourful ones), and getting treats for adults. I just get to come downstairs and find them. This year, Neuhaus, all crème fraîche fillings. R. must have told him what I like.

Streams of Giving Thanks.

I've this thing where for holidays I don't want to use a cookbook. And so, as it was this weekend for Thanksgiving, (Thanksgiving in Canada is celebrated the second Monday in October.)

Thanksgiving is a ritualised event. A largely codified one at that. But oral history is, here too, is to me more powerful.

I love to think that the series of movements that lead to supper that come from us, with no other voice to guide but that of relationship to the day, the friends who will sit around the table, the ingredients--and relationship to memory.

Much from memory, yes: Approximate minutes per pound and internal temperature. The proportions for popovers. But the stuffing for this fine local bird was a stream of consciousness work. Perfect for the day.

Slow. Roast Garlic.

The kitchen is a roller-coaster of existential victories, and angst.

Often I feel overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility of a fine ingredient. As I hold it, I feel a definite sense of Don't. Mess. Up--.

It's a perfect [goose or char or yellow beet], don't mess it up.

And this isn't only in fits of self-loathing. I'm simply very aware that there's bit of perfection in my hands. There's a lot I can do wrong, whilst the only right I can perform is to preserve its integrity, or nudge it to make manifest its hidden beauty.

Yet at other times, I feel as though I created the perfection.

I'm not blind to the heresy of this. But I tell you, it's a ticket into heaven nonetheless.

Just now, as I write this, I'm making bread. The dough is in a process that's enormously dynamic--bubbling, transformational--and I'm metres away from it, as I will be for the rest of day. Yet with the loaf in my hands, I will feel I. made. bread.

Roast garlic shall never strike me with the same power, and really, in the end, nothing shall. Nonetheless, there's was a bit of magic here too. It is the first time it came to me that I might roast garlic in the slow cooker. Necessity was the mother of my invention: all the usual heat sources taken up with other things. And voila.

I didn't make the garlic gene, I didn't grow the garlic bulb, I didn't invent the slow cooker, surely I'm not the first to put them together. But somehow it registers as though I had. And how perfectly!

****

These were roast for a soup. But they are lovely spread on bread or such.
Heads of garlic, root-end intact, tops nipped.
Thin drizzle of olive oil.
A slow cooker.
A few hours.

The Trauma! The Hope! The Books! -- A Cookery Revolution at my House.

The process of organising books is, for me, one of the most tortured. It hasn't helped that I've historically made no small mistakes in terms of What to keep, What to give, What will fit. And then there's the tearing of the duelling values--aesthetics vs. intellectual integrity in how to display silkbound reading copies, next to dog-eared broken-spined marked-up university copies.

But this was altogether a different magnitude. This felt a revolt more than a reshuffling.

The cookbooks in my house had been stored in the kitchen, but this was always inadequate space. As a result, various places around the house--the den, the study--the bedroom started fostering piles of them. I don't know how I didn't hold cookery, otherwise at the centre of my days, to be deserving, but I thought their place was the periphery.

This meant a lot of sprinting up and down.

In the middle of a dash upstairs, at what was surely the seventh step, I had an epiphany that told me that -running was wrong -that the bookshelves needed to look more like my life, the reallife middle.

So: Deep deep breath. To elsewhere, beloved but dusty sleepy denizens. I now have food writing, alive with yeast and blotches, and in constant use on shelves with my comfy chair beside them. Oh. I see my future.

Love Apples: the Canning. The 2008 Edition.

Normally canning tomatoes goes like this:

Get up before dawn, without an alarm set, just from the excitement. A sensation not unakin to Christmas morning.

Tie hair back
Brush teeth
Wear something that likes tomato
Tiptoe downstairs
Make tea
Peer outside
Turn on Puccini
Put blanching kettles up to boil
Wash tomatoes

By the time it's Saturday morning for the rest of the world, serious progress has been made. I feel virtuous and aesthetically pleased. I feel like I've been to church.

This year, er, not exactly that.

Everything was off schedule: our house, the market, the lands. We had just gotten home from PEI, and I had placed an order for heirloom San Marzanos. When I saw them, it was love at first sight. Yet to start all of this on a Monday, one day before a Big Family Visit, and work deadlines looming, made for less than ideal conditions.

And so: Wash. Blanch. Grind. Cook. Can. All of it in fits and starts. R. did the bulk of it: early, late, in small spaces in between. It all felt disjointed; hollow; burdensome.

Ah, but then, a moment of grace-- As I was coming home from a late meeting, and several breaths before I turned the key in the front door, I was already able to detect the glorious scent of my tomatoes emanating from every brick and stone: sweet yet, now, burnished; their depth discernable. My senses trilled with them. Is it any wonder they call them love apples? It was the incense of our home. It was church after all.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Plum Plum Tart: A Continental Bridge.

R: People will find it weird that you put food on the floor.

Tori: They won't--they'll only see the plummy and gold tones, and how they love one another.

R: Er. I think that's likely to be what you see.

Tori: [Starts humming.]

***

I only decided to make a plum tart after I'd come home from market. I had bought some Mount Royals, round, dark, wet --meant for breakfast.

As soon as the tart thought occurred, I felt like 1) It HAD TO happen, 2) There was no way I'd have enough plums. (Though come on, Tori, focus, at least *weigh* them: oh well there you go: you don't even have half of what you need. Damn. Damn. Curse-rather-than-weep.) and 3) It was too late to go out again before my desperate need to serve it as part of dinner with friends.

I told myself to let it go--there's plenty of food--but I again had this sense that I needed to make it in order to declare myself home. To ground us all, really.

And if this sounds melodramatic, trust me, it was. (Have I mentioned jetlag? It was jetlag made me do it!!) I was feebly flailing hoping this would make plums spring up from the ground.

But then in the middle of my ineffectual twirls about the kitchen, I opened a cupboard in that distracted one does for lack of what else to do.

Cue floodlights, lyre strains, wing flutters: There was before me a jar of plum preserves I had just made last week, but already forgotten about. It was made with thoughts of deep winter. Instead it lit--that home serving this home--a more symbolic bleakness.

Half a jar went in. SO good. A triumph of the unreasonable.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Home.

Jetlag's a bitch. Though, then again--I do get a lot done when I wake up at 3 a.m.

I quickly get to first orders of business after sorting laundry, mail, newly-acquired books into distinct piles that mimic efficiency:

1) put up a bread
2) get coffee
3) go to market.

I hear how the rain ("The rain!") has made it a hard year for green growers. Though with how flush the markets seem, I reach this first by asking.

I'm sorry for the wet. I'm happy for the recent sun and warm. And I know that this place can start feeling like home again once I've checked in with my household gods, and those that provide for them.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Rhubarb Pink.

We only planted the rhubarb last year. I didn't grow up eating it, but I did grow up thinking I would want to. It was pink. That was all I needed to know to like it.

By this year, it became clear that it liked us too. It grew as though it knew what it was doing. Few things impress me more than a confident reach.

I couldn't return the favour. I didn't know how to trim it, but in service of good fences make good neighbours I needed to. (Or as it turns out, pull it, not trim it, as per my mother-in-law's wisdom.) In fact all I really knew was this: Stem good, leaf bad. But where exactly is the cutoff point? Plus do you cook it for long, or in a flash. How much sugar does it want? And will it turn into item no. 456 of things I like in the abstract--like-to-make, like-to-give--but don't actually like to eat. I don't need another of these in my life.

But even as I was having these thoughts, it was staring at me.

Ok! DO something! it says.

It has to be a compote. Something that would keep until after we came back. But to strawberry, or not to strawberry; that is the question.

I tend to distrust mandatory combinations. I'm not sure that oranges and dark chocolate do anything for one another: they both turn up at Christmas and people confuse this as meaning more than it does. I love prosciutto; I love melon, but although they're traditional allianced, I’m not sure it wasn't an arranged marriage that they've decided to make the best of. And I'm pretty sure it's the case here too.

M. is a friend of my mother's. He was a huge culinary influence over my early life. He has a tendency to grand pronouncements that one isn't inclined to disbelieve. And so: "peaches and strawberries need something to lift them, else you grow sick of them in minutes." I had no idea what he meant, but I knew it would end up to be true.

It hasn't of course. I can eat them by the large basketful. I would never tire of them. Strawberries are red juice goodness, peaches are a lesson in perfection. But as I had strawberries on hand that needing doing with, I declared it true for the day. Pink and gentle. Still better in the ideal, somehow, than in the execution, but I was still quite taken with it.

Locavore Interrupted

We'll be off in a few days to Europe. We're eating the kitchen bare before we go. The process of paring away the foods a person actually eats reveals some things this person ought never know about herself or her refrigerator.

We have about 3 kg of Reggiano in there: wedged, powdered, and shredded. Not that that's so staggering in itself, except that in the last few months I've more than once dashed to market to pick some up at hugely inconvenient times, while clearly we'd had some tons all the while.

And I see that we will again be throwing away most of a litre of Styrian pumpkinseed oil, even as I know that our return suitcases will have a few bottles of it again (I promise we'll use it!! Won't it be delicious with asparagus next spring? Won't it won't it??? PLUS it's good for you!!!)

Other questions are being begged: how much plain Dijon does one small family need? Ditto anchovies? Am I at all capable of opening a jar of jam again once it has already been opened, or do I believe the fridge door is the place they should go die after one use? How did I ever think goji berries were food when I knew they smelled horrible (though on the other hand, they do taste Horrible). I should just add these questions to my ever-growing hints list that lives under the header What Exactly is Wrong with Me? so I won't be as surprised next year.

Normally this before-you-leave ritual is sad for how starved it leaves you for coherent meals. This time, it's a mixed blessing. This year for the first time we'd taken a serious stab at (fork at?) urban gardening. R. built boxes, we had irrigation hoses brought in, we nabbed opinions from a structural engineer who thought we were artless in our chatting to him about how much weight our roof could bear. We got my sister to help haul bags of earth and manure up several flights of stairs (what's family for?). We went wild planting lettuces and other greens. It's turned out to be one of the best things we've ever done. Such satisfaction over what everyone who kept droning on to me about their gardens must have always known, only I wasn't listening then. Now we're eating it as bare as we can, only I'm sad to leave it. When a neophyte and wildly inadequate gardener leaves her plot, does it keep growing?