Kitchens, Morning Coffee, and a Bit More

Stepping back into my Paris kitchen in our old northern Michigan farmhouse after several months far away was no big adjustment, any more than had been walking back into the one-room ghost town cabin in mid-December. Neither place is fancy or glamorous, which is probably why both feel like home. And that is how they are alike, but in other ways they are very different. 

My little kitchen in Michigan is a small galley, what one of my family members calls a “one-butt kitchen,”  which is why I began calling it a Paris kitchen in the first place. (Space is at a premium in Paris.) A second person can squeeze in, but it is difficult then for either person to move and work freely. — Well, moving and working are difficult, moving and working freely impossible. 

In the ghost town kitchen, there are steps to take across open space between stove and counter, sink and refrigerator. In my (Michigan) Paris kitchen, standing at one counter, I turn turn 180 degrees to face the sink, turn back and take a single step to the stove, and stretch an arm out to open the refrigerator. Only high shelves are a challenge. Everything else is within reach. 

In the ghost town cabin, as in Michigan, I was often up before dark or, when spring arrived, at least by first light. Both places, my morning begins with making coffee. 

This morning, for some reason, I thought of long-ago mornings in Paris, France, waking to the cooing and fluttering of pigeons, clink of spoons against china, and sounds of French conversation and singing through the open windows. That was in May, and I am now in May here, in northern Michigan. Is that what reminded me of the rue de Vaugirard and dear Hélène, the landlady who became a cherished friend? She, I remember now, made only instant coffee. (Does that seem strange?) Red wine she bought in bulk and kept a bottle filled for me on my shelf in her refrigerator. Her kitchen was somewhat larger than mine here in the farmhouse, but it was not large enough for a table, and our eating and drinking was all done in the apartment’s largest room, a combination parlor/dining room, the walls crowded with crowded bookshelves and an eclectic assortment of art work, courtyard window sill lined with herbs in pots. 

The largest kitchen I have ever had was in my graduate student apartment in Champaign, Illinois. It was an old sleeping porch on the third floor of an enormous Victorian house at the opposite end of a large city park from the downtown shopping district. Once a month, on the day I got my graduate assistant paycheck, I would get off the bus downtown and treat myself to fresh flowers from a little jewel of a florist shop (much like similar shops in Paris, France), next picking up a baguette from an Italian restaurant and bakery on my walk home, cutting through the park. My sleeping porch kitchen was enormous and filled with light. Also, and despite its generous size, because it was on the third floor and there were mature trees right outside the window, it felt like living in a treehouse.

I was alone then, without even a dog until — but that is another story. My point is that, living alone in Champaign, a single pot of French press coffee was enough to get my day started. Later in the morning, out in the world, near campus, I could stop in at a coffee house (say, the Daily Grind) or, toward the end of the long pay period when funds were running low, the basement cafeteria of the Newman Center. All that was a lifetime ago. Two dogs ago.

The ghost town coffee maker, one we bought new in early 2018, made the first pot of the morning quickly. During its operation I had time for a routine of yoga stretches but never enough time to become impatient.

Here in Michigan, in my little Paris kitchen, our equally modern but aging coffee maker takes its sweet time, even after a day-long ritual cleaning. Sometimes, not wanting to wait for the glass to fill, I pull it out ahead of time and pour a premature cup — always too strong, but the addition of hot milk makes it café au lait, thus more palatable. This morning another idea occurs to me, however, and I hunt through cupboards until I find a pair of seldom-used espresso cups and saucers.  

Yesterday I came to the last page of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, beginning at bedtime a Swedish novel recommended by a friend, Bear Town, by Fredrik Backman. I am generally careful what I choose to read before sleep, and so I saved for morning another book brought by another friend, a book of nonfiction by poet Carolyn Forché entitled What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, a story of modern-day El Salvador. That story begins with one I have heard before: the seizure of indigenous people’s lands for the cultivation of cash crops, profits reaped by the cultural thieves. In this case, the first such crops were indigo and sugar cane, as the campesinos were pushed up into the mountains. Then came the realization that the mountain slopes were perfect for coffee plantations. 

I get up and go to the freezer to look at the bag of coffee beans. The contents are claimed to be “eco-friendly,” but I see no mention of here of “fair trade,” and I remember that when my sister gave me the bag (we were visiting sister and brother-in-law on our way back to Michigan), she commented that it wasn’t what she usually buys. I remember too a piece in the latest New York Review of Books discussing slavery in the United States and quoting William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote that slavery was “not a southern, but a national institution, involving the North as well as the South,” and I recall one of my guest authors in the 2018 Thursday Evening Author series at my bookstore, Rachel May, the woman who wrote American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery, who came on her own to the same conclusion as she researched a piece of material culture. 

My original review of Rachel May’s book is here. One of the questions I note that May asked was how we, the United States, came to be where we are today, in terms of race relations. I think of that this morning because Carolyn Forché’s book seeks to answer, among other questions, how we Americans came to be where we are today in relation to Latin America, especially Central America. We cannot understand why so many refugees are streaming north to our borders without realizing what they are fleeing — and if we understand the role of our own government in creating the intolerable situations in their native countries, we cannot help feeling as responsible for their lives as we feel for the lives of our fellow United States citizens. 

When a Salvadoran man with two young daughters showed up at her door and said he had come because she was a poet, Forché had no idea that a few days later he would invite her to spend her poetry fellowship time and money by coming to spend time in his country. He said that war was coming to El Salvador and it was her chance to see something like Vietnam from the very beginning. Besides, he asked, what else did she have in mind? “Write poetry about yourself for the rest of your life?” 

What are we going to do for the rest of our days on earth? What are we going to challenge ourselves to learn, and how might what we learn change our lives? It takes courage to learn and even more courage to change. I am not unmindful of the strong coffee that accompanies my reading this morning. I’m thinking of this year’s garden, also, and wondering how it would go if I dropped seeds of corn, beans, and squash into little hills surrounded by straw mulch from last year’s gale garden — a natural thought, given my morning’s reading. 

The Siren Song of Honey

Many years ago while we were on a road trip, maybe somewhere in Kentucky, I picked up a jar of honey in a small grocery store. David looked at the price and indicated a cheaper jar. “No, I want to try the local honey,” I insisted. He has never forgotten the incident, which at the time amused him enormously, and he still teases me about local honey but now in a more supportive manner, pointing it out when he spots it along our trail. Thanks to agricultural voices like that of Wendell Berry and to local publications like Edible Grande Traverse (the Winter 2011 issue is one of their best ever), no one laughs at local honey or local produce any more. (Here's the link for EGT, by the way.)

I woke this morning from dreams of honey, dreams of rivers of heavy, thick gold, the result of having read myself to sleep last night with Australian travel writer Grace Pundyk’s The Honey Trail: In Pursuit of Liquid Gold and Vanishing Bees. Halfway through the book, I was struck by coincidence on Saturday morning, when I learned that friends from Grand Rapids who bought an old house here in the county that they are making habitable little by little (they remodeled the chicken coop first, in order to have a place to stay while working on the house) had recently attended a state-wide bee conference and will soon receive their first bees from Georgia. Z’s Bees! Can’t wait!

Pundyk’s quest for pure, unadulterated local honeys and the inside story on the complexity of today’s global honey market takes her literally around the world, from Yemen back home to Australia and from there out to New Zealand, Borneo, Russia, the U.K., Italy, Turkey, the U.S. and China. A reader has the delightful illusion of traveling along to each of these countries and to remote areas within national boundaries, but along with the personal is the factual, the story of trade and markets and tariffs, regulations and standards and all the various ways that money and honey intersect. I’m sure you wouldn’t have to be an aficionado of bees to find this book fascinating. On the other hand, once you read the story you may find yourself following swarms and looking for signs by the side of the road, and who knows what adventures you may find?

Unpacking boxes to rearrange storage in my fresh, new kitchen (still the tiny “Paris kitchen” but transformed, so that I feel I’m dreaming there, too), I unearthed the sweet jar of rose honey another friend brought back from Poland to us. “Produkt z ekologicznie czystych terenów Puszczy Bialowwieskiez,” says the label on the lid of the jar and shows a majestic bison against a background of green grass.


But I’m thinking about honey closer to home (especially that of our neighbors whose hives were ravaged by a bear in recent memory) and looking forward to seeing, when the snow has melted, stacks of white boxes in the orchards. Alas! It will be many weeks before the farm market starts back up in Northport. Perhaps, however, an expeditionary foray within the county will yield the gold I seek. We have an errand today on M-72, and I’m already humming happy backroads songs.

Gumbo Stuff

What a lot of nerve I have, blogging about gumbo when I’ve never lived in Louisiana or Texas and have not a drop (as far as I know) of Cajun or Creole blood! But gumbo is what I wanted to make for David and Michael’s combined birthday dinner the night before Phase 2 of the kitchen remodeling project was kicked into high gear. Only after making my own chicken-sausage-shrimp gumbo, very slightly modified from Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook, did I seek out other versions.

When it comes to recipes for gumbo, the variety is infinite, but two themes are always present: (1) The roux made with browned flour is essential, as are (2) celery, onion and green pepper. The rest, as far as I can see, is up for grabs.

Paul Prudhomme, in his Louisiana Kitchen cookbook, starts by coating chicken pieces in flour, salt, garlic powder and red pepper and frying the chicken, adding more flour and oil to the bits left in the pan to make his roux. He recommends high heat and constant whisking. The lower the heat, the longer the cooking time.

If you brown the flour in the oven (as I did, the night before making the gumbo), how long should it brown? Different cooks’ opinions and experience call for anywhere from 35 minutes to 2 hours. Some say to stir; others say “Don’t touch it!” But however you brown the flour, attention à la roux! “If the roux is underdone, the gumbo will have a kind of floury taste and texture, whereas if you burn the oil, it will taste like burnt oil.” The site giving this important advice looks very authentic and has recipes for catfish gumbo and crawfish gumbo, too.

Some people use tomatoes, others omit them. If you’re using sausage in your gumbo, what kind of sausage should it be? Andouille is held in high regard. Smoked sausage, in general, gets big votes. I had (organic) chorizo in the freezer but then, at the last minute, worried that its spiciness would overpower the chicken and shrimp I had set my heart on. Turned out it was not a good day for sausage shopping at our local grocery store, and I didn’t have time to go anywhere else, so summer sausage got the nod.

Then—well, I’ll give you some links to a few recipes I found online, then tell you how I made mine, which as I say started from a cookbook, one on my shelf at home. If you have a good cookbook library, see what you can find. As for online recipes, there are many, and what I’m giving here is only the tip of the iceberg. Gumbo is good eatin’ on an Up North winter evening.

Let’s start with a recipe from south Louisiana. Looks good. In another, the flour is not browned. Can it be for real? I’m dubious.

From New Jersey comes a recipe that instructs the cook to brown the flour in pot. Many recipes use this method. The ingredient list from this Texas recipe leaves out the okra, with this note: “And while the word gumbo stems from the Bantu term for okra, kingombo, I didn’t add that as well even though it’s quite common to include it for both flavor and its thickening power.” Personally, I cannot conceive of gumbo without okra. But then, I am only a damn Yankee, doin’ the best I can. Anyway, I’ll be trying variations in future, but here’s what I did this February:

Chicken, Sausage and Shrimp Gumbo

First, the night before, I browned flour in the oven in a shallow pan, "roasting" it for 45 minutes and stirring 15 and 30 minutes along. The aroma is strange. I was glad I got that smell out of the way the night before.

Late Friday afternoon, I cooked chicken pieces in a big cast iron pot with lots of water for 45 minutes to create a good, rich broth and then removed the chicken pieces to cool in a colander.

I chopped celery, chopped green pepper (excuse me, bell pepper), chopped onion and garlic and sliced green onions (scallions) and tossed these into a second big pot with olive oil and sauteed the vegetables, turning often with a spatula as they cooked.

To the sauteed vegetable mixture I added the browned flour and, a bit at a time, some of the chicken broth, stirring as it thickened.

Skinning chicken pieces, I took meat off the bones, cut it into small pieces, and added chicken pieces and sauteed vegetables with flour thickener to the broth, along with a can of diced tomatoes oregano, salt and pepper. Unfortunately I was out of bay leaves (at least, I couldn't find them in the confusion of the kitchen project, with boxes of ingredients and piles of dishes all over the house), so I added a very small amount of chopped sage (three small leaves, chopped fine), harvested from outdoors at the last minute. Summer sausage, diced large, was added at this point, also, and then everything simmered for another 45 minutes. While this was simmering and smelling better and better, I had plenty of time to shell and devein the shrimp.


About 20 minutes before dinner I added a bag of chopped okra, and, ten minutes later, the shrimp.

At the very end, I added the filé gumbo powder (which is ground thyme and powdered sassafras leaves).

I served the gumbo in big flat bowls with a pile of steaming rice on top (some people ladle the gumbo over the rice), with hot sauce on the side, an option for diners. Delicious, if I do say so myself!

Sorry I didn’t photograph the gumbo and rice in the bowls. It was beautiful, but we were very focused on digging in.

The next morning, the kitchen was half-gutted again (not the sink and new countertop side), old flooring taken up so new tile could go down. It will be a couple of days before we’ll be cooking in the kitchen again, but--lunch for the remodeling crew? Where’s that pot of gumbo?

Take a Road Trip (I’m Too Busy)

Our house is in an uproar, with boxes of dishes and boxes of cans and boxes of utensils all over the house (everywhere but in the kitchen), and we are busy, busy, busy. I spent four hours Saturday at my bookstore and had some visitors and sold a few books, but the main focus of the weekend has been and continues to be our house, as you see here.













So what I’m suggesting is that you visit a few bookstores in Washington, D.C. and some if not all of the other blogs listed in the right-hand column of this page. I just don’t have time (or energy) to write more today.

Julia’s Kitchen Was Not Magazine-Worthy, Either

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto--Food, Friendship & tha Making of a Masterpiece, ed. by Joan Reardon (Houghton Mifflin, 2010, $26)

Have you ever picked up a volume of some famous person’s letters and wished you had a correspondent like that? Even at the historical height of letter-writing, whenever that may have been, odds are that most missives were pretty pedestrian. “How are you? I am fine. Wish you were here. We saw Uncle Bertie and Aunt Evelyn on Sunday. Please send my blue sweater.” By contrast, there were the letters of Charles Lamb, full of news and wit! Oh, when first I read them, how I longed to have Charles Lamb for a correspondent, but alas! He lived and died long before I was born! I did read his published letters over and over, however.

Well, now we have letters between the ebullient and irrepressible Julia Child and Avis de Voto, letters full of news, observations (political and otherwise) and recipes. They are very logically organized, and they are also quite long, and here is a whole book full of them, ranging from 1952 to 1961. I’ll never master French cooking, but when it came to writing letters, Julia was a gal after my own heart. She begins a letter on January, 19, 1953, by writing

We both enjoyed your nice long letter immensely, and this will be but a short one from me, as I’ve got to get to work. I find I’d much rather write to you than to work, and I must not indulge myself. [This is the mark of a true letter-writer: that she writes as much, if not more, for her own pleasure as for that of her recipient. It is a more selfish pleasure than many people realize.] ...We knew Paris could not last forever, as we’ve been here just over four years. We’ve been living on borrowed time, really.

This “short” letter goes on for six printed pages in the book, so you may imagine how long the original must have looked, whether typed or handwritten.

When is the last time you received a real letter in the mail, and how long and well organized was it? When is the last time you wrote a real letter to someone? One friend and I still exchange precious handwritten letters, pages written with love and received with gratitude, but honesty compels me to admit that we write less frequently, less carefully and more sketchily than we used to do. Neither of us is complaining: seeing my friend’s handwriting on an envelope is sufficient cause for joy. We could, of course, correspond more easily and therefore more often with e-mail, which would also allow for more careful composing and editing. (In fact, let me say here and now that I value my in-depth e-mail correspondences very highly, all the more so in contrast to the brief and superficial exchanges on Facebook.) But even printed out, an e-mail is not a letter. It is almost instantaneous, and part of the pleasure of a letter is anticipation, the hope that may be disappointed one day but will rise again the next until one day it is rewarded. There at last is the envelope to be opened, the letter to be slid out and unfolded, eagerly read, refolded and put away, only to be taken out and reread half a dozen times.

Correspondence between Avis and Julia began almost accidentally after Julia had read an article of Bernard de Voto’s in which he complained about stainless steel knives, all the new rage at the time. They could not, he said, be properly sharpened. So Julia, who had never met the couple but appreciated de Voto’s writing and knew something about knives, sent the American writer a knife from Paris, and Mrs. de Voto, her husband’s secretary and proof-reader, wrote to reply with thanks. The first few letters discuss knives and knife-sharpening at great length, but right from the start the two women veered into other, related interests.

Did they handwrite or type? Did either of them write such long, interesting letters to other friends? Many friends?

But besides the letters themselves, my attention is brought back again and again to this black-and-white photograph in the front of the book:


This is Julia in her Paris kitchen! Linger, if you will, over that image for a minute. I have cooked in a couple of Paris kitchens, and they are generally tiny, which is why I refer to the tiny kitchen in our old farmhouse (a few inches over 10 square feet of floor space, I kid you not) as “my Paris kitchen,” but I am nowhere near Julia Child’s height! The top of her stove was not far above the height of her knees! Please, please notice, also, that her stove was not a huge, expensive, restaurant-quality range, the kind that architects and decorators seem to think every new American home--those worthy of being shown in magazines, at least--must have these days. Did Julia complain? Did she mope and whine over not having a dishwasher or a copper stove hood or a walk-in pantry? No, she was Julia Child, and she got busy and wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking!!!

Note to self: Stop complaining about your old farm kitchen and remember how lucky you are to have spent time in Paris and to live now in northern Michigan.


***

Update: Okay, this is uncanny. I had just finished drafting what you just finished reading when David told me he had had an epiphany about the kitchen. He’d been thinking about the kitchen, too! But he’d had an “epiphany”? My dismay burst from me: “Oh, no!” I groaned and tried to stop him from telling me about it right before bed, thinking I’d never be able to get to sleep. My visionary David, you see, has a way of mentally seeing a plan that leaves no room for changes by a second party, even if the plan is for a kitchen and the second party is the one who will be living with and in the result! We’ve talked about the kitchen before, you see, and I’ve been insisting for quite a while that we need to tear everything out, while he’s been trying to figure out how to keep and make do with the cupboards we have. (They are very old but worse, they are too high and too deep to be efficient, and they drive me crazy!) So this project, before it has even begun, has been a bone of contention.

But now, suddenly—hallelujah! His vision began with “We start by tearing everything out!” My heart soared! He really did have an epiphany! Unstoppable, he continued to describe the simple lines of the galley in his mind, just what I have been seeing all this time! “We start with a crowbar,” he said, and I reply enthusiastically, “I’m really good with a crowbar!”

It will still be a Paris kitchen in northern Michigan, no bigger than it was before, but maybe we can turn it into space more conducive to pleasurable work. At least I now have hope.

Hope? The thing with feathers? Waiting for a letter, looking forward to a more workable kitchen, the artist and the bookseller live on dreams and always have. David said last night of our dog, Sarah, “She’s the only thing standing between us and reality.” Yes, this is who we are. I wonder what Julia would think.