No less hungry

I’ve made this cake before here, but under very different circumstances. Coming out of a bad breakup, I decided to make the single most romantic cake that I could think of. The answer was obvious: Julia Child’s Reine de Saba. I liked this cake because it was a series of contradictions, as I took the whole venture of love to be. It was not too sweet, nor was it particularly heady. It was complex enough to make your palette inquisitive, but easy enough to go down smooth, happy and unquestioning. I cited some poems in that entry, and then I ate my cake, one slice at a time, for a solid week. When I photographed it, I added an extra teacup to the tableau, for fear of depressing my readers. But in actuality, it was just me. Me and the reine (“queen”). 

This time, I made her with a particular person in mind; someone who you have not yet met on the blog—my guitar teacher, Marcelo. It’s been a good year-and-a-half or more that I’ve been taking lessons with Marcelo, and, although I rarely practice, he seems to put up with me, and more than that, is and has always been a fervent supporter of the blog. Marcelo, I have learned, appreciates good food. He loves to laugh and he loves music. He might not know this, but when I was going through the saddest of times, our lessons were often a grounding element for me. After a few short months, we were sharing stories with each other, and then, before I knew it, we had become friends. 

In all this time, though, that we’ve talked and laughed and looked at photographs of the food I was making for the blog, and in which he sent me links and shared ideas, I had never baked anything for Marcelo. The timing would always be off—something I made over the weekend would be gone by Monday, for the next lesson, or we’d have a break in the schedule, or I would simply forget, or any number of other reasons why we don’t do the things that we want to do, that we, for all intensive purposes, mean to do. I was determined to change this.

Knowing a bit about Marcelo, I settled on making him the Reine de Saba (or, as Marcelo calls it now “the reina.” This cake tends to be the thing that I make when someone is close to me and I want to, in my own way, celebrate them. I brought him half the cake, so as to not overwhelm him. As I was packing it, fitting it snuggly in its parchment-lined tupperware, I wondered if I should make a single cut—one discrete slice—so that he could try it immediately. I wondered for a moment, and then I got distracted and forgot. The cake got packed and so did my instrument and away we went. 

When I arrived bearing cake, we were both happy. Marcelo immediately looked for a knife, or a fork, or any implement at all, so that he could taste it. I scoured my purse in case a previously stowed plastic utensil could be recovered. He went to the front desk and inquired. There was nothing. “How am I going to wait?” he wondered out loud. (THIS, I decided, is the kind of compliment a cook lives for.) We managed to turn back to the lesson, the reina just sitting there, on the piano in the practice room, without an eater. We played Dylan’s “Moonshiner” and talked about my difficulty with the F-chord (still, really, after 10 years). As the lesson ended, back on the hunt for a utensil, I asked Marcelo how long he was going to have to wait. When would he be home so that he could try it?! It was going to be at least two more hours, which we both decided was much too long. And then Marcelo looked at me and said something that endeared him to me even more, something that spoke to me on levels unknown and unuttered: “How can I say this…” he sighed. “I have the soul of a fat boy.” 

Sometimes Marcelo and I are very much alike.

The phrase rung in my ears for several hours, because, as I said, it spoke to something true in me (however funny). We are hungry, and that is why we bake and cook and prepare and eat and share and break bread and toast one other. Some of us are hungrier than others. Most of us are hungry in our souls, and food and love and warmth and friendship all become one. M.F.K Fisher famously expressed this sentiment in words that are so perfect they deserve to be quoted in full: 

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? […] The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it… and then warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one. […] There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.”

To talk about hunger in the soul, of insatiable hunger, or of a hunger that is metaphoric and persistent, is to brush against this fact. M.F.K. Fisher wrote in times of war. We write and think about food in a supposed era of plenty. Yet, we are no less hungry. 

I feel fuller when I share cake. 

Reine de Saba 

(Slightly altered from my previous version, with some important, quality-retaining shortcuts.)

For the cake:
2/3 cup semisweet chocolate morsels
1 tablespoon instant espresso dissolved into 2 tablespoons boiling water
1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar, plus 2 tablespoons
3 large eggs, separated
Scant 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
Pinch of kosher salt
1/3 cups sliced almonds (with or without skins), ground fine
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
3/4 cups all-purpose flour, stirred through briefly with a fork

For the icing:
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate morsels
1 1/2 tablespoons strongly brewed instant espresso
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

Notes: Julia Child's original recipe calls for blanched almonds (without their skins), as well as sifted cake flour. I have altered both of those ingredients in this recipe, and found the cake to be just as delicious as when I have stayed true to the original. I used sliced almonds with skins attached, as well as regular all-purpose flour that I did not sift. Instead, run a fork swiftly through the flour before you measure it, to simulate sifting. Another interesting adjustment to note: When I baked this, being still in the middle of a move and unable to find my measuring spoons, I approximated the teaspoon and tablespoon measurements called for here. It was, amazingly, and contrary to what we think we know about baking, totally ok. 

Set a rack in the middle of the oven, and preheat to 350 degrees. Butter and flour an 8-inch round cake pan, tapping out excess. Line the cake pan with parchment across the middle, allowing it to overlap on two "sides." Don't worry about covering the bottom completely.

Place the chocolate morsels in a small saucepan with 2 tablespoons of espresso. Fill another pan with an inch of water and bring it to a simmer. Turn off the heat, and place the smaller saucepan in the hot water. Give it one stir, and then set aside. 

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until soft and fluffy. Beat in the 3 egg yolks. 

In a medium mixing bowl, whip the egg whites: first beat them until they begin to foam, then add the cream of tartar and a pinch of kosher salt and continue beating, either by hand or with an electric mixer, until they form a soft mass. Beat in 2 tablespoons of sugar, and continue beating until soft peaks form. They should hold their shape in peaks that drop off and fold over themselves slightly when lifted with a spatula. 

Stir the chocolate. If it is not completely melted, turn the heat back on under the larger saucepan, and heat over the double boiler until the chocolate is silky and no lumps remain. 

Stir the chocolate into the butter and eggs. Then stir in the almonds, almond extract, and the flour.

With a rubber spatula or a wooden spoon, gently stir in one fourth of the beaten egg whites. The batter will lighten in color and texture. Add the remaining egg whites on top of the chocolate mixture, and fold them in swiftly but gently, until fully incorporated. 

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 25–30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted 2 inches from the edge of the pan comes out clean. The center should still be somewhat soft and just set.

Cool on a rack in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn the cake onto a plate and allow it to cool completely before icing (about 2 hours).

When the cake has completely cooled, melt the chocolate with the espresso in a small saucepan over a double boiler. Remove it from the heat. Beat in the butter, one tablespoon at a time, until completely smooth. Continue beating the mixture over a bowl of cold water until it becomes a spreadable consistency. Ice your cake. You may choose to decorate the sides of the cake with sliced almonds, or leave it as it is, as I have this time. 

So far, so good

Happy 2014. 

It’s been a good one so far, friends. You? I had a great holiday with family in New York, and now, in the new year itself—all nine days of it—I have managed to bake pfeffernüsse, drink several bloody mary’s (helloooooo, new year, new me!), and MOVE—into a lovely little house in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, with a beautiful garden, a fully equipped kitchen (with a dishwasher!, and a kitchen island!, and a white marble table that is going to be just perfect for rolling out all of the pie doughs in this book! (resolution number 1?)), and a cat named Girard who purrs like he’s twice his size and sleeps cuddled up in an achingly tight spoon, and a someone special, too. So far, so good, 2014.

With all of the changes, there have also been some adjustments. I am confronting a newly domesticated version of my former self—one who likes to bake banana bread at 10 o’clock at night and roast pumpkin and squash seeds as she simmers soup on the stove and who wakes up the whole house with the fragrance of spicy cookies being tossed around in confectioner’s sugar. (Yup, that’s me.) 

Maybe it’s because this new house is actually a house, tricked out with all of the promises of domestic bliss in every amenity and around every corner. (I have to live up to it.) Or maybe it’s me—settling out of single life and into something that, perhaps, has always made more sense: trying to live and love well, with someone who makes life that much better; sharing meals each night; and sharing our lives. It’s good. And it really is that simple. 

There’s been cooking, as I mentioned, and a lot of reading, too. As I plunge headlong into another year, I want to do even more of both of those things. 

I’ve been recently engrossed in Tamar Adler's book, which seems to have taught me more about cooking with economy and grace in its lucidly metaphoric prose than an itemized recipe probably ever has. With sentences like this—that are about so much more than cooking, but which reach toward its symbolic potential with intelligence and beauty—it’s hard not to be immediately drawn in: 

“When we cook things, we transform them. And any small acts of transformation are among the most human things we do. Whether it’s nudging dried leaves around a patch of cement, or salting a tomato, we feel, when we exert any tiny bits of our human preference in the universe, more alive.”

And, if you haven’t read it, it’s based somewhat (in structure, and a bit in tone) on M.F.K Fisher's classic work, which I loved even before cracking open the front cover. (How to Cook a Wolf is, perhaps, one of the best titles to ever grace the literary world.)

Also on my list, particularly now that I live with a pie-loving man, is the aforementioned stunner, The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, which is pleasingly organized by season, and which reads, for someone who loves pie and food and ingredients in general, like a really good novel. 

On the literary front, I’m planning to read this fictional work. The painting that the book is loosely based on stopped me in my tracks when I saw it in New York this past trip (a small, very simple painting). It’s one of the few remaining pieces by Fabritius (only about a dozen survive), whose works were nearly all lost in the Delft Thunderclap explosion (a fact that makes The Goldfinch all the more potent).

Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby has also been on my list for a while and was recently leant to me by a friend (which means I’m likely to get to it even faster than if left to my own devices). I’m looking forward to delving into her storytelling.

Lastly, I’m trying to work up the courage to read this book—the review of which, alone, left me sort of breathless. 

In terms of food, I’ll be back soon with an experiment in cooking with economy, à la Tamar Adler, that should be enough to chase away the polar vortex that a good portion of you are currently being enveloped by (a spoiler alert: this will not be for those of you who are newly sworn off of gluten, but I do think it will be somewhat healthy—in that doused in olive oil, vegetable-based, Mediterranean, sort of way). 

For now, here’s a recipe for that banana bread I mentioned, which came out of my oven late one night this week. As has been uttered by many a blogger before me, the world does not need another banana bread recipe. And yet, it’s something that we all should have in our culinary arsenals, for when nothing other than the most simple, unpretentious food item will do. (I’ve been making this one for a decade now.) It will also be there, importantly, when you have a cluster of overripe bananas melting into shadowy puddles on your counter, as bananas are wont to do. 

Simplest Banana Bread
Adapted from Martha Stewart

1 stick unsalted butter (at room temperature), plus extra for pan
1 cup sugar
2 eggs (preferably at room temperature)
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup mashed, very ripe banana (2–3)
1/2 cup sour cream (preferably at room temperature)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan with butter and line it with parchment, if desired (this makes removing the bread effortless). 

Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl with a wooden spoon, until fluffy and incorporated. Add the eggs and beat until well blended.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together lightly. Add this mixture to the butter, sugar, and eggs, and stir until just combined. Add the remaining ingredients—banana, sour cream, vanilla, and nuts—and stir until combined. 

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake at 350 degrees for approximately 1 hr 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out mostly clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes or so, and then lift the bread out of the pan with the parchment, and allow it to finish cooling on a rack. 

Serve warm or cold, with extra butter for slathering.