Feeling overwhelmed by time’s
fullness and breakneck speed may be brought on by a crowded calendar, concerns
of business, or any number of activities, even by reading itself. The
consumption of too many books and book reviews and political articles in
succession, particularly with a felt obligation to have something intelligent
to say about each one, culminates every now and then in a crash. The system, as
it were, goes down.
Baking
And so, tired of thinking and have
nothing to say, of days passing without inspiration, I turn to the most
spotted, dog-eared pages in my oldest cookbook. Comfort! A pan of brownies in
the oven smells delicious in the evening, and nothing brightens a grey, cold
November morning like hot oatmeal muffins dripping with butter. And now, it
being a cold, grey, wet, windy November morning as I draft this post and wait
for my oven to preheat, I’m thinking I might as well include a couple of
recipes I’ve adapted over the years from the Culinary Arts Institute
Encyclopedic Cookbook, edited by Ruth
Berolzheimer. (My mother used the 1950 edition of this cookbook, and I received
my own copy of the 1964 edition in 1966 and used it until it fell to pieces, to
be replaced by a 1967 copy.) Admonitions are my own additions, as should go
without saying, but I’m saying.
OATMEAL MUFFINS
Sift together (or mix well
together, as I do, with a wire whisk):
2 cups flour (I use Bob’s Red
Mill)
1 T baking powder
2 T sugar
½ tsp. salt
1 egg
2/3 cold cooked oatmeal (see
below)
1 cup milk
Beat the egg well, and add to
it the cold cooked oatmeal and milk, mixing ONLY until dry ingredients are
thoroughly moistened. DO NOT OVERMIX! Here you do not want an electric mixer or
food processor or even a whisk but simply a spoon or fork. Also, DO NOT USE
INSTANT OATMEAL OR “QUICK” OATS! You might as well eat a bowl of sugar! What
you want is either whole or steel-cut oats (Bob’s Red Mill has
both), and the thing to do is to cook twice the amount you want for breakfast the
day before, and to save time that morning you will put the oats and water to
soak in the top of a double boiler the night before, and to save even more
morning time bring the oats to a boil the night before, leaving them covered
for morning reheating.
Bake muffins in a HOT oven,
425 degrees, for about 25 minutes. The recipe makes a dozen muffins. OVEN
TEMPERATURE IS CRUCIAL FOR MUFFINS! Few things from an oven are more
disappointing than muffins with raw middles. You want them brown and crisp on
top, fluffy inside, and baked clear through.
CHOCOLATE BROWNIES
4 oz. melted dark baking
chocolate (NOT “baking squares”)
½ cup melted butter (use
other shortening at your own peril)
1 cup flour
(Salt and baking powder are
really not necessary.)
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
Melt chocolate and butter in
the top of a double boiler and stir until shiny and smooth. Mix dry ingredients
together with a whisk as you did with the muffin batter in the other recipe.
Add sugar gradually, beating until very light.
Add melted chocolate-butter
to sugar-egg mixture and then stir in dry ingredients. Spread in a shallow
baking pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.
My modifications to the original
cookbook brownie recipe include doubling the amounts of chocolate, shortening
(and always using butter for “shortening”), eggs and sugar and eliminating salt
and baking powder, resulting in a chewy rather than a light, cakelike brownie. The
key here, again, is making sure that the brownies are baked all the way through.
Test with a clean knife or toothpick. If it comes out gooey rather than clean,
give the brownies another 5 minutes and test again. You should have a crunchy top and a rich, dense
brownie.
I baked brownies from this
recipe on Friday night and took them to the bookshop on Saturday morning. There
were no complaints from browsers or customers.
Reading
I’ve been a re-reader all my
life and cannot comprehend people who say they never re-read. To me, that would
be like meeting a pleasant, interesting person, having a wonderful
conversation, and never wanting to see that person again. In grade school, I
read all the Walter Farley books over and over, along with The Wonderful
Flight to the Mushroom Planet, The
Borrowers, Palmer Brown’s The
Silver Nutmeg, and my mother’s old
copy of Anne of Green Gables, to
name only a select few. To be honest, I still enjoy revisiting these favorites,
but in more recent decades I’ve added to this list all of Jane Austen’s novels,
but especially Pride and Prejudice and
Persuasion; A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn and Maggie-Now, my favorite Betty Smith books; the beginning and end
(not the middle volumes, which bore me to tears) of Proust’s Remembrance of
Things Past; Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat, Thoreau’s Walden, of course; Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek; and, the most recent addition,
Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior,
which I have read four times and expect to re-read for the rest of my life.
Re-reading for me has all the
advantage of “escape,” with the added comfort of familiarity. The characters
and their worlds are old friends, and I enter once again into their lives and
adventures. Even knowing how things will come out in the end, I vicariously
re-experience all the confusions and doubts, hopes, fears, and excitement of the
people in these books. And yet, always, somehow, there are a few lines that
strike me as if I’m reading them for the first time. The time never feels
wasted or the experience repetitious.
Because I’m currently
re-reading Proust on assignment for a group discussion coming up soon, it
was Jane Austen I turned to at dark 3 a.m. one recent morning. Never feeling a
need to justify a re-reading, I did however think this time that it would be
worthwhile going through Pride and Prejudice again in preparation for a December discussion of Longbourn, which I’ll also re-read again with pleasure before
our group meets.
Here is a passage often
quoted:
Upon the whole,
therefore, she found, what has been sometimes found before, that an event to
which she had looked forward with impatient desire, did not in taking place,
bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently
necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to
have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by
again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present,
and prepare for another disappointment.
“Don’t wish your life away!”
my mother always warned me, from my earliest childhood, when I “couldn’t wait”
for time to bring around some longed-for event. How many modern self-help books
counsel readers not to believe that happiness depends on some conditional “if”
event, like falling in love or winning the lottery? The passage is perfectly
familiar, as is its sense. But in my most recent reading I was suddenly struck
by the last four words: “prepare for another disappointment.” How much dry
irony Austen packs into those four simple words, as if anything wished for will
disappoint! Is this Eliza Bennett’s skeptical wariness or the author’s own?
Much, much – I often think
far too much! – is made of the
opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Finishing the novel this time, I read the afterword by Henry
Hitchings with my own skeptical, wary eye. I nodded approvingly over everything
he had to say about Jane Austen and David Hume’s philosophical writings on
reason (once, back in graduate school, before the tsunami of writings on
Austen, I had thoughts of writing something on that subject myself but could
not bring myself to read her work with the analytic, academic rigor such a
project would demand, because one does not want to analyze love, and I love
Jane Austen), but as for what he says of the famous first sentence, I was less
than satisfied, as usual.
The novel’s opening
sentence is one of the most celebrated in English literature. It alerts us,
quite subtly, to Austen’s powers of irony. ‘It is a truth universally
acknowledged,’ she writes, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife.’ This seems straightforward, but ought to prompt two
questions: is this alleged ‘truth’ really acknowledged ‘universally’, and
‘must’ an affluent man always be ‘in want of a wife’? Austen is not endorsing
the view that all affluent men should marry; instead she gently mocks the
notion that there can be universal truths, and at the same time she mocks the
shallowness of her contemporaries.
Close reading, literary
criticism – call it what you will, it has never satisfied me and still does
not. So this time I set about trying to figure out and articulate for myself
what that sentence is doing, and it strikes me that there is both more and less
going on there than the critics would have us believe. Make no mistake: this is
one of the best, most successful first lines ever penned in a work of fiction.
There is genius in it. And yet, has it ever seemed “straightforward” to any
reader? How obtuse and thick-headed would such a reader have to be? Of
course the tone is mocking, and the
mockery is obvious! That’s why we
laugh! But are we really meant to be led by this sentence into reflections on
universal truths? Is this the direction Austen would have us go?
My questions
are rhetorical, as I’m sure is obvious, and no is the answer I would convince you is correct. My claim
is that it is self-interest in general and the character of Mrs. Bennett in
particular that Austen mocks in her opening sentence. Then, move along, move
along! We’re entering the world of a story!
As Hitchings says elsewhere,
Austen is always, first and foremost, in service to the story she is telling.
Any “feminist and revolutionary notes,” and so surely any epistemological or metaphysical considerations,
are a lesser priority. The opening sentence introduces the concerns of a
particular social group, but most pointedly it introduces one member of that
group. The mocking tone calls into question self-interest unwilling (or perhaps
unable) to recognize itself. Just as Mrs. Bennett protests that she forces
herself out into society only for the sake of her daughters, so she needs to
present those daughters as potentially answering the “need” of eligible
bachelors. Mrs. Bennett’s almost complete lack of self-awareness is paired with a very high level of
self-interest, and it is Mrs. Bennett who is introduced on the first page of the
novel, her entrance prepared by two information-rich sentences. Character and
story, story and character. How much Austen compresses into a very few words,
and how easy it is to overload those simple words with philosophical freight!
Agree or disagree? Why?
Commuting between Proust and
Austen, as I did for several mornings and evenings, I was struck anew by the
lack of description in Austen’s work (so rich in Swann’s Way!) but
also the economy of expression throughout her work. Wherever not necessary for
the explication of character or the forwarding of plot, details are omitted, as
in this passing reference to the wedding between Mr. Collins and Charlotte
Lucas:
The wedding took
place; the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door, and
everybody had as much to say or to hear on the subject as usual.
We already know what the
bride and groom respectively looked for in marriage, and in future chapters we
will see them at home, quite satisfied, so of the wedding itself nothing more
need be said.
Re-reading is a comfort and
an escape because the work and characters are familiar, but it’s important for
me to re-read books rich enough to show me something new each time through.
I began writing this post
while the oven was preheating for oatmeal muffins and finished it up with
chicken broth simmering on the stove, redolent with plenty of garlic and
celery. Homemade noodles, cut thick, were already dancing in my head as wind
and rain whipped tree branches outside our old farmhouse.
Happy baking – and happy
reading!
With Gail Dennis, Jerry’s
wife, joining the team as designer, Maple Tree Press is launching new paperback
editions of The Bird in the Waterfall
and It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes.
(These books will be available on the 13th, along with a book of
prose poetry by Jerry Dennis, A Daybreak Handbook, published by Alice Greene & Co. in Ann Arbor.)
In 2015 a third book of essays, as yet untitled, will appear in the Maple Tree
Press wonders-of-nature series. 
