Nasty Women, New England Graveyards, & the Common Scold

I was still on vacation in Vermont when presidential debate #3 took place. Dan and I agreed that we had zero interest in watching it, although I occasionally checked Facebook to see what my cohorts were saying and to get a secondhand sense of what was going on. As 10:30 and the end of the allotted 90 minutes approached, my curiosity got the better of me and I live-streamed the last couple of minutes on my phone, in time to see Donald Trump lean into his microphone and to hear him speak over Hillary Clinton: "Such a nasty woman." Such a nasty woman. Much eloquent journalistic ink has been subsequently spilled over this offensive, misogynistic phrase but I knew even in the moment that it was BAD and was going to get a lot of (well-deserved) negative press.

Such a nasty woman. After hearing those words directed at the first woman presidential candidate ever nominated by a major party, the issue of the criticizing and the denigrating and the putting down of women, especially opinionated and outspoken women, was much on my mind. It was on my mind when Dan and I strolled around the South Burying Ground in Concord, Massachusetts on a misty Saturday morning before flying out of Logan Airport to return home to North Carolina. 

As we wandered about, soberly reading the inscriptions, the gravestone of Mrs. Zeruiah Miles, the wife of Mr. Charles Miles, who departed this life July ye 12th 1757 in the 30th year of her age, caught my eye. Whoever authored the inscription (Mr. Charles himself?) selected these words to sum up the essence of Goodwife Miles: she was of a pleasant temper a respectful wife and of a good conduct and behaviour in her life.

Sarah Miles, perhaps a relation, who died the year before Zeruiah, lies in the Burying Ground as well. The wife of Deacon Samuel Miles, she is remembered as a prudent and virtuous wife a kind and instructive mother and was conscientious and virtuous in her life and conversation.  Looked at from one angle, I get it, not so terrible to be remembered as kind and pleasant and good and virtuous. May we all strive to be these things, women and men alike. But the problem is that is all women are supposed to be, all we better be, good/kind/pleasant, not to mention conscientious in conversation and virtuous in pretty much everything, all the time, no matter what the situation, no matter what is happening. We were, and are, harshly judged for speaking up or speaking out. We are not praised the way men are for leadership or strength or intellectual accomplishment. The so-called feminine virtues are the ones most rewarded and reinforced. I think of the three most unforgettable Puritan female names I've seen on Vermont gravestones: SILENCE, SUBMIT, and THANKFUL.  A message to the women of the world: Be silent, submit to male authority, and be thankful for that. Amen.

As we continued our walk around Concord, I recalled something I learned in law school -- I may not have been actually taught about this, but rather might have come upon it leafing through my Black's Law Dictionary (bought as a 1L, still in my office), or during some of my feminist reading, namely, the tort of a common scold. A tort is a civil -- as opposed to a criminal -- legal wrong. An aggrieved party can take someone to civil court for such a wrong and get relief. But what, exactly, is a common scold?  

Dictionary.com lays it right on the line: in early common law, a habitually rude and brawling woman whose conduct was subject to punishment as a public nuisance. Or this: A woman who, in consequence of her boisterous, disorderly, and quarrelsome tongue, is a public nuisance to the neighborhood. Wiki weighs in thus: a troublesome and angry woman who breaks the public peace by habitually arguing and quarreling with her neighbors. The Latin name for the offense, communis rixatrix, has the telltale feminine -ix ending, signaling that the offender could only be a woman. A nasty woman.

The fact that such an offense exists at all is bad enough, but but things start to really heat up when we learn about the penalties for this offense, the ducking stool (also called a cucking stool) and the bridle or brank. Although sometimes used for men, especially dishonest tradesmen, the ducking stool was specifically categorized as a form of "women's punishment" and consisted of a wooden chair attached to a plank that was used to plunge the unlucky rixatrix in water. In short, an instrument of public humiliation and social censure:




And the scold's bridle? Nothing subtle about that baby. This humiliating device was a locked metal mask or head cage that contained a tab that fit in the mouth to inhibit talking, nothing short of a form of torture. Here's a picture. Such a nasty woman.






Finally, although many sources call the tort obsolete, let the record reflect that in 1972 (yes, nineteen hundred and seventy two), in the Garden State of New Jersey, a woman was indicted for being a common scold, "a troublesome and angry woman, who, by brawling and wrangling among her neighbors, breaks the public peace, increases discord, and becomes a nuisance to the neighborhood." State v. Palendrano, 120 N.J. Super. 336, 293 A. 2d 747 (1972). (Palendrano is a criminal case and the literature generally describes the scold as a civil wrong, but hey, this is a blog post and not a law review article, so I'm not sure why.) You can read the full opinion here -- it's not especially long, but (spoiler alert!) I am relieved to reveal that Judge McGann concluded that "being a common scold is no longer a crime." McGann found the law of communis rixatrix to be unconstitutionally vague under the 14th Amendment and also discriminatory against women in violation of that amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The judge also threw in some free speech language and a note about cruel and unusual punishment for good measure and dismissed the common scold count of the indictment. I didn't do any definitive research (remember, not a law review article) but suffice it to say I hope that was the last time a woman was indicted for being a common scold.

Such a nasty woman. There is nothing innocuous and, sadly, nothing new about those truly nasty words, which attacked Hillary Clinton on the basis of her gender alone, which at their core attack women for being women, for being themselves. But sisterhood is powerful and the fight goes on. Our voices shall not be silenced.

The Saga of Tooth #15 or, A Pity Party for One

Thursday's root canal (the need for which was discovered when the dentist took X-rays for a temporary crown preparatory to a permanent crown) morphed into Friday night's cracked and fallen-off temporary crown -- guess I got a little too aggressive with that braised rotisserie chicken and kale.  Several after-hours phone calls and texts with the admittedly extremely responsive and compassionate endodontist and on-call dentist, including a couple of texted glamour shots of the interior of my mouth (including a fleck of tomato skin on the roof thereof -- appetizing!) led to the conclusion that everything is pretty much stable  -- if you define "stable" as the ground-down, jagged, sharp, exposed remnants of what was once my tooth -- and can be dealt with Monday, when a new temporary crown (still preparatory to a permanent crown) can be fitted and popped over the whole sorry mess. I saved the broken pieces of crown snugly wrapped up in a piece of aluminum foil kind of the way children keep their baby teeth -- I'm not entirely sure why. And oh yes, be careful with food, the dentist said sympathetically, I know it's not fun, but eat mostly soft foods. 

On Saturday morning I told my husband that I was basically doing okay and that he should go forward with his plans to visit his sister and younger brother overnight. . .I'm sure he was relieved, and anyway, this was going to be a pity party for one, and two would be a crowd. I uploaded a new novella on my Nook (Richard Russo's Nate in Venice), ran a few errands, went to the Y (where I started reading Nate), had a phone conference with a recent graduate regarding the merits of a job offer, and decided to go to the 5:30 PM mass so that I could loll in bed on Sunday morning as a sort of pity-party aftermath. My lunch was the Silver Palate's broccoli puree, made by Dan the day of the root canal (and a soothing favorite of my father after his cancer diagnosis) followed by some hummus. Later, as I sat in church mentally composing a short Harris-Teeter shopping list, I remembered that HT is across the street from Vin Rouge, a pretty authentic French bistro considering we are in Durham, North Carolina, and their delightful country pâté is nothing if not soft.

For some reason you have to go to the bar at Vin Rouge to order takeout pâté, so I sat morosely on a stool surrounded by happy people drinking and noshing on their steak frites (the dentist, again, on my weekend diet, albeit sympathetically: "think of french fries as too crunchy").  It was busy and the wait was long and I kept thinking about the bottle of chilled white wine in the fridge. When I got home, ravenous, I transferred the whole thick slice of chicken-y, pork-y pâté to a favorite plate, along with the Dijon mustard and cornichons that came with it, uncorked the bottle of cirò bianco -- from Calabria, like my paternal grandparents -- poured myself a generous pour, and polished off the whole decadently delicious portion of pâté, nibbling judiciously on the cornichons with the right side of my mouth, hopefully safely removed from the tooth in question -- #15 in the dental lexicon -- the far-back upper molar on the left side of my mouth.

Once the pâté was history, I took the ripe avocado sitting on the counter, mashed it, minced some red onion, and mixed it in with the avocado along with some lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Voilà, guacamole for one, the perfect second course at my pity party. I wolfed that down too, whereupon it was time to sip just a little more cirò, see what Nate is up to, remember that we are going to see our son and daughter-in-law in less than two weeks and that our daughter and son-in-law live just around the corner from us and that we are taking them to Vin Rouge to celebrate his birthday this coming Friday night. I might even share some pâté.  Maybe my pity party is not so pitiful after all.

Lynchburg, Poplar Forest, Mr. Jefferson and Me

When the University of Virginia is your alma mater, you hear a lot about its founder, Thomas Jefferson. Not just its founder, but its architect, the man who designed the classically beautiful Rotunda and the Lawn, "the Academical Village," that graduates, including me, spend a lifetime reminiscing about, this special place where they spent their college years. Mr. J. also personally designed his famous Charlottesville home, a plantation really, the one on the back of the Jefferson nickel, the "little mountain": Monticello. So unique, such "masterpieces of human creative genius" are the Academical Village and Monticello, that they have been jointly named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not bad for a self-taught architect.

I did not set foot on the Grounds* of The University* until the day I arrived for first-year* orientation in 1974 (more common back then, to go to a college you had never seen), and although I can't remember for sure if my parents took us to Monticello during my childhood, it wasn't long after starting college that I visited there and started learning about Jefferson's innovations and inventions -- the seven-day clock in the hallway, the polygraph that allowed him to make a copy of every letter he wrote, his alcove bed, the nifty revolving bookstand. And I didn't just go there once or twice. Every time family or friends came to visit, they were eager to see Monticello as well, and I used to joke I had been there so many times I could give the tour as well as any of the guides. I do not, however, remember any mention of slavery.

[*At UVa students do not say campus or quad, they say "Grounds," because that is what Mr. Jefferson called it. And students are never referred to as freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year, because Mr. J. felt that these four years were but the beginning of a lifetime of learning. We also like to say "The University" a lot. Yeah, I know, pretty pretentious.]

I don't know when I first heard of Poplar Forest. Located near Lynchburg, Virginia, Poplar Forest was Jefferson's country home -- again, plantation really -- used in his later years as a retreat, his pied-a-terre.

The Poplar Forest (and also the Monticello) websites cover the history of Poplar Forest quite thoroughly, but in brief, Jefferson and his wife Martha inherited the plantation upon her father's death in 1773. In the early years, Jefferson manged the plantation -- it mostly grew tobacco -- from afar, but in 1781 the Jefferson family left Monticello and stayed at Poplar Forest for two months, possibly in the overseer's cabin, to avoid capture by the British.  That was thought to be Martha's only trip to the plantation, as she died later the same year. After her death, Jefferson continued in the role of absent landowner, with overseers managing the plantation, and enslaved laborers performing the work.

At some point Mr. J. decided to design a country getaway there. In 1806, during his presidency, Jefferson traveled to Poplar Forest to supervise the laying of the cornerstone for what was to become the one-story, brick, octagonal dwelling you can visit today. After he left office in 1809, although Monticello remained his primary residence, Jefferson began visiting Poplar Forest several times a year, a practice he continued until the age of 80, three years before his death in 1826. Each visit lasted between two weeks and two months, as the trip from Monticello to Poplar Forest, which takes only an hour and a half by car today, took two days by horseback and three by carriage.

As important as Poplar Forest was to Jefferson, there are reasons for its obscurity. It was sold by Jefferson's grandson Francis Eppes in 1828, only two years after Jefferson's death (Francis and his wife moved, of all places, to Tallahassee).  The house burned in 1845 (thank goodness for stone foundations and a brick exterior), was substantially remodeled, and remained in private hands until 1983, when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation bought the property and undertook the daunting -- and expensive -- task of restoration. Thus, it is only in recent years that it has finally been open to visitors, and even today the restoration is still ongoing and hardly complete.

When our nephew Chris took a job in Lynchburg and moved there with his then-fiancée-now-wife Kata, it seemed like the perfect excuse to combine a visit with them and a trip to Poplar Forest. Although Dan and I actually saw Chris and Kata in Lynchburg twice en route to other places, when they had lived in Lynchburg less than a year Chris took another job and they moved again before we had a chance to execute the plan. But the seed was planted, and I was committed to seeing Poplar Forest. My husband is as much of a history geek as I am, and it took little persuading to talk him into an overnight to Lynchburg, which is, after all, not even 2 1/2 hours from our home in Durham.

Poplar Forest ended up being the last thing we did on our 30-hour excursion. During our preparatory research, Dan noticed that the last home of Patrick Henry, Red Hill, was basically on the way to Lynchburg, and we decided to make that our first stop. A lovely, peaceful, place, especially on a sunny, hot July afternoon without many tourists in evidence. "Give me liberty or give me death!" "Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel and you may take everything else!" The guy could really turn a phrase.

In Henry's time, we learned, Red Hill encompassed about 3,000 acres. Another plantation. Our tour guide pointed out where the slave cabins once were -- as we have learned in other places, not too near the main house in order not to disturb the pastoral view, and virtually never still standing, these humble, roughly-built cabins never intended to stand the test of time. We squinted, looking into the distance. Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings. Guiltily, the midafternoon sun blazing, we did not walk up the hill to bear witness. But at least this history is no longer ignored, invisible. Red Hill's website has a section, Slavery at Red Hill.  It includes an excerpt of a letter written by Henry in 1773, where he says of the fact he is a slaveowner, owns human beings: "I will not, and cannot justify it."

The next morning, since our hotel was in downtown Lynchburg and Poplar Forest vaguely on the way back to Durham, we decided to first stop at the Lynchburg Museum, located in the old courthouse. The exhibit in the large entrance hall on the main floor is a history of Lynchburg. In a section called An Upward Struggle, I read:

State-sanctioned segregation increasingly became an issue in the 1950s. Schools were separate, parks were separate, seating in theaters was separate, and the separateness was not equal.

Near those words is a photograph of Clarence W. Seay, assured, looking ahead, a hand in the pocket of his topcoat. The caption states that he was the principal of Dunbar High School, an all-black, segregated high school, for 30 years, and that in 1970, he became the first African-American member of the Lynchburg City Council since the 1880s.

As I gazed at the photograph, I thought about how, on the way into the museum, we stopped by a statue facing the courthouse, a statue erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1890, "to commemorate the heroism of our Confederate soldiers." 1890, after Reconstruction, after the Yankees finally decamped, when blacks had the vote and even were elected to the City Council. Time to put up a statue, a statue complete with a time capsule filled with Confederate currency, photographs of local veterans, and some hair from Traveller, Robert E. Lee's horse. Time for Jim Crow. Time to wait nearly a century for the next African-American to serve on the City Council. And the Confederate Soldier still stands, on the top of Monument Terrace, in 2016.

Poplar Forest at last. Hot again. We eat our picnic lunch in pleasant solitude in the shade, looking at a grove of trees, grateful for a breeze.

The plantation was about 5,000 acres in Jefferson's day, and even with today's reduced size, is a thing of beauty, of symmetry, with the house placed in the center of a circular curtilage.

And there are still poplars on the property.

So yes, I loved the house, both back

and front.

I loved the light-filled interior (sorry, no pictures allowed), but the internet yields one of Jefferson's recliner -- a reproduction -- where he sat and contemplated the world.

Evan was a great tour guide and with only two others on our tour, we got to ask lots of questions.

But unlike my first trip to Monticello, Jefferson the slaveowner weighed deeply on my consciousness throughout our time at Poplar Forest. Again, on the tour itself, in the exhibits, on the website, in the brochure, as best as it can from the available historical evidence, this story is now being told. So we now, at last, can say their names, names inventoried and written in Mr. Jefferson's own hand: The Hubbards, Hannah and Jame and Phill and Billy. Bess's Caesar. Fanny's Rachael. Cate's Sally. Suck's Stephen. All endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Dinah. Lucinda. Armistead. John. Isaac. Briley. Prince. Melinda. Milly. Daniel. Flora. Hercules. Abby. Nace. And so many more.

            

A Luscious Plum Torte for Summer

I have two posts in mind that I hope to commit to writing this weekend, one somewhat reflective in nature, the other more cheering. Let's start with the cheering -- hence food-related  -- post. 

A few days ago my son Quentin texted me "Is there a way you can send your new york times plum cake recipe? I kind of want it for my b day."  My immediate reply:  "Nothing would make me happier!"

The plum cake Quentin was referring to is Marian Burros's Plum Torte, a recipe originally published in 1982. It was so popular that in those pre-internet days it was apparently published annually for a number of years. My mother clipped her own copy from the Times in 1984, in an article entitled Purple Plums: From Tree to Torte. (The link does not include the cute graphic in the original article, not to mention that the formatting of the recipe is a mess. The text, however, is charming.)  My photocopy of the clipping includes my mother's handwritten notation "TRY -- Looks easy." I can't remember if Mom actually ever made it (she has clipped many a recipe that never made it to table, but come to think of it, so have I), but at some point I initiated myself into the wonder of this simple and delicious torte. I know that my husband has made it a number of times as well.

A variation of Burros's plum torte also appears in Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts. Sax rechristens it "All-Time Best Summer Fruit Torte" and turns it into a peach or nectarine and blueberry cake, with Burros's 12 purple plums merely listed at the end of the recipe as a variation. Sax does, however, give Burros full credit for the original recipe, noting that it first appeared in her 1960 The Easy But Elegant Cookbook. Sax also suggests the felicitous addition of vanilla, but erroneously lists a tablespoon of baking powder rather than Burros's teaspoon.  Trust me on this; it should be a teaspoon.

This might be a good place to summarize my cook's notes:
As to ingredients, it's definitely a teaspoon of baking powder, not a tablespoon, and thumbs up to Sax's teaspoon of vanilla. Use of cinnamon and lemon juice depends on the fruit and your personal taste. As to the pan, either 8 or 9 inches is fine; ten seems big to me. Burros specifies a spring-form pan, which I think best, as you can easily remove the cake, with its lovely pattern of plums on top, to a serving plate, but a regular round cake pan (as Sax uses) also works. But honestly, if you don't have at least one spring-form pan, you really should, as there are many not-especially-pricey models out there. My Kaiser brand pans were bought years ago, were downright inexpensive, not even nonstick, and work fine. Finally, as many reviewers noted, Burros' cooking time of one hour is excessive. Sax says 45 minutes; I'd at least take a look after 30.  Here's a picture of Kaiser's "basic" spring-form pan like the ones I own.


I was also delighted to discover in my search that many food-related websites and other bloggers have sung the praises of this plain, buttery, plum-or-fruit-laden treat. A good photo of the finished product is found at Kvell in the Kitchen. Looks like The Kveller didn't use a spring-form, although she does engage in some pretty rhapsodic prose about the torte itself.

And finally, I don't want to be a total purist here; other fruits of course can be substituted as plums are not always easy to find, not to mention seasonal. As one reviewer noted: "Use any kind of nice fruit or berries, just make sure that they are firm, otherwise they can release too much juice during baking." Almond extract instead of vanilla doesn't sound like a bad idea either, nor does adding a little almond flour, but these are ideas I have not yet tried out. Last but not least: whipped cream is an optional but fine finishing touch.

So happy birthday, dearest Quentin! I only wish I could be there to make and share a plum torte with you and Mary and Dino and Bradley and Dad. Can I at least buy you a gift of a spring-form pan? 

The Tenth Anniversary of a Great Meal

As we mourn, stunned, the unbearable murders in Orlando; as we fight against the insane availability of assault weapons, without apology we must yet continue to seize life. 

Recently I was doing a bit of decluttering (although I have not yet perused The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) which included finding a number of notebooks, canvas bags, and the like loaded with endless scribbled drafts of poems and essays. In one little book I find, inter alia, the following:

In the bed 
my sunburned husband snores
21 years married
an anniversary of no
particular importance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and later on:

His head is served up
on a huge white collar
his forehead, too, is white.
His lips are serious, sealed,
His mustache narrow.
His eyes point sideways
but somehow pin us in his gaze.
He holds a small book in one hand
atop a brown Bible
one finger a bookmark.
He is seated.
He is standing up.
His robes are flowing toward us
black and white
marked with a spidery cross.

This poem (which I have edited a bit as I transcribed it here) is about El Greco's portrait of Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which I have long loved to distraction, and who actually once came to visit me in Durham at Duke's Nasher Museum of Art as part of an exhibit, which meant I was able to go to the museum obsessively to get my fill of Fray Felix (as I always call him in my head because I like the alliteration) during his stay in the Bull City. And in finding this picture below, I also just learned that Fray Felix was himself a poet who dedicated four sonnets to El Greco! How great is that?




The hell with life-changing magic; I'm not getting rid of anything I've written. Maybe one of these days I'll finish Fussy Eater, which starts, " 'Poison peas' my dad always said to me whenever they were served, knowing of my dislike for them." 

But I thought this post was supposed to be about the tenth anniversary of a great meal? Ah yes. Well, my notebook also includes some entries from a 2006 trip to Germany and Spain, including the description of a meal the four of us ate on Monday, the 3rd of July, in the Catalan city of Girona. The facilitator of the writing group I was part of at that time had recently been there herself and recommended a restaurant that she said was both excellent and reasonably priced, called Draps. (I'm delighted to report that it appears Draps is still alive and well -- "Draps: A Culinary Experience To Be Shared in Girona!" one recent diner proclaimed  -- and affordable -- "at convenient prices!")

On the way to the restaurant, I recorded, we heard nuns singing in their ancient stone convent, the music coming through the window-grill that separates them from the world, and then the clink of silverware on plates as their evening meal was served. 

I've written MEAL AT DRAPS at the top of one page. And then I describe the meal:

Water from a little blue glass bottle

2 Spanish wines -- white (slightly effervescent) and red

Cold melon and ham appetizer drink served in a tiny martini glass

3 dishes (which we shared)

Fresh thin ribbons of pasta with shrimp, duck, spinach, and mushrooms served over a bed of lettuce and radicchio

Grilled vegetables -- peppers, eggplant etc. (oh what were the et cetera?) on a tart of puff pastry, topped with strong goat cheese sprinkled with black sesame seeds, drizzled with some sort of vinaigrette

"El Pop" -- roundish pieces of octopus served on small square pieces of potato (one piece of octopus per potato) covered with red olive oil, sprinkled with paprika. Bread to soak up every last drop of the red, paprika-scented oil (must have been smoked paprika, pimenton)

2 decaf Illys (for Dino and me as I recall), a brandy for Dan, and two desserts:

El Pecat ("The Sin"): a dark chocolate pudding on a pool of creme anglaise

Crema Catalana -- a sort of Spanish Crème Brûlée topped with caramel ice cream and cinnamon sauce

Total bill: € 57, or about $80. Oh my.

As I recall, the restaurant itself was quite moderne and stylish but I cannot really recall the details -- why did I not write about that? But then I turn the page; I did!

Water glasses were curved and multicolored

Tables were square dark brown wood with fresh pale brown table runners and napkins (which were folded into long narrow rectangles)

The plates were white and in unusual shapes (I had drawn a sort of curved crescent with squared ends to demonstrate one of them). Below the crescent, I wrote: "We laughed and ate and talked about Dalí," as we had gone to the Dalí Museum in Figueres earlier that day. 



"We leave at midnight. The upstairs of the restaurant is still filled with people." 

What a memory! What a meal!

A Kosher Cake for Irit

A little context might be helpful here. This blog post is actually the ninth in a series of essays I have written about baking Kosher cakes for Irit Weissman. The Weissmans were Orthodox Jews who lived next door to us for six years before returning to Israel in 2011. Since then, Irit’s work occasionally takes her back to Durham. Out of privacy concerns, all names have been changed in this essay except Dan’s and mine.

On a Saturday afternoon last April, I check my email and see a message from Irit. In a moment, I am running through the house screaming, "Dan! Dan! Irit is coming! Irit is coming!" She will arrive only a week or so from now, on business -- has it really been three years since we last saw her -- and fortunately we will be in town. Can she stay with us Saturday night, after Shabbat? Of course. No sooner do I send her an enthusiastic reply do I start to think about food. The Kosher birthday cake tradition established when she lived next door has morphed into "any time we are lucky enough to see Irit, there must be a Kosher cake," and last visit we even upped the ante, with Irit's permission, by cooking a meal in our decidedly un-Kosher kitchen, in brand-new pots stirred with equally virgin utensils, all of which have been carefully marked meat, milk, or pareve, and optimistically stored in the basement awaiting a next visit. 

We know that when Irit comes to Durham, she stays with her Orthodox Israeli friends, the Zinns, and she had told me that I could surely bake the next cake in their kitchen. In fact, among the closing words of my last essay were, “Next time,” I said, “I think we need to have a chocolate cake!” “Next time,” said Irit, “you can make it at the Zinns!” So I email Irit telling her I would love to bake her a cake at the Zinns, and she sends me back Baruch Zinn's email. I send the Zinns an email with the subject line "Question from Friend of Irit Weissman" reading as follows:

Dear Baruch and Adira,

My husband Dan and I and our children were neighbors of Irit and Shimon and their children when they lived in Durham.  We became devoted friends, so we are very happy to be seeing Irit in a few days!

Irit will be having dinner with us on Saturday and stay the night.  We know how to make and serve a meal that Irit can eat, but I had a tradition of making Irit a cake for her birthday and on other special occasions. For this of course, I need a Kosher kitchen, and Irit thought you might be willing to let me use yours to bake a cake.

Is this possible?  I am free this Wednesday after work or any time Friday before Shabbat.

If this is possible, we can figure out the details. I would be most grateful.  Irit can tell you that I am familiar with the rules of kashrut and very respectful of them.

Kindest regards,

Maria

Baruch sends me Adira's cell phone number in reply. I call the number and a heavily-accented voice answers. I grew up with people speaking heavily-accented English, so I instantly feel right at home. Adira tells me she would be so very happy to have me come to her house to bake Irit a cake. And she sounds like she means it. My years of tracking down Kosher kitchens in which to bake these special cakes has convinced me that when you are trying to do a kindness for someone else, others are only too glad to help you. Friday is not so good, says Adira, as that is when she does her cooking for Shabbat. Of course I agree to come in the evening earlier in the week. Later, though, she calls me back -- a conflict has arisen, so please come Friday morning after all. "But what about your Shabbat preparations?" I ask. "Don't worry," she says firmly. I later learn she cooked for Shabbat earlier that week just so I could make my cake in time for Irit's visit.

So what to make? A chocolate cake, definitely, and I knew right away which one. The elegant Gâteau au chocolate: Le Doris, found in my copy of Simca's Cuisine. "Simca" is the charming nickname for Simone Beck, Julia Child's co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I found the book in a used bookshop, just happened to open it to page 107, and there it was: Le Doris, with the tantalizing English subtitle "Chocolate Cake with Almonds, Raisins, and Whiskey; Chocolate Icing." I scanned the recipe and promptly bought the book. I made a Doris for Dan's birthday several years ago when we went to the country home of friends located north of Winston-Salem where Dino and Bradley met us, so I knew how delicious it was. 

The only ingredient whose Kosher bona fides gave me any concern was the quarter-cup of Scotch. I thought I remembered from Shimon that hard liquor was generally Kosher, but my confirmatory Internet search threw me into the usual confusion of different websites and different rabbis coming to different conclusions. I decided that Adira must have some sort of whiskey that she would donate to the cause so I just assembled the other ingredients (German's sweet chocolate baking bar = Kosher!) and hoped for the best. 

On Friday morning I rang the Zinn's doorbell, ingredient box in hand. Adira answered and greeted me warmly. I was ushered into a perfectly neat and beautifully decorated foyer and living room, and taken back to the kitchen. Le Doris is admittedly is a teeny bit fussy, but Adira did not seem to mind my list of requests. An 8-inch cake pan? A little dairy pot to melt the chocolate? A food processor to pulverize the almonds?  And did she have a bit of Scotch or other whiskey that I might use for the cake (as I wasn't sure what kinds were Kosher)? "No problem!" she assured me with a wave of her hand, going to the cabinet and taking out a bottle.

I have written before about, to me, the special magic of making a Kosher cake, of entering into the world of Judaism's ancient traditions, but this baking experience was as much about my visit with Adira as it was about the cake. It became immediately apparent that she was not going to leave me to my own devices but keep me company as I baked. So as I melted and measured, pulverized and mixed, Adira and I talked, about our friendships with the Weissmans, our lives, our children, and in her case, many grandchildren. I told her my father had recently died, and although I had barely known her an hour, my eyes filled with tears. But I saw that hers did as well. She told me about her Russian immigrant grandmother, who had made heavy winter coats for the Cossacks, "like the ones they wore in Dr. Zhivago," she said, motioning with her hands to demonstrate the split skirts that enabled them to ride on horseback. 

While Le Doris is baking, I turned to the sink to wash the dishes. "No," Adira insists, "You are my guest." And she made us both cups of strong Israeli coffee and cut slices of a sort of chocolate-filled babka she had made. Not the time to bring up my low-carb diet. I ate every crumb, while she assured me it was "easy" to make. Then the cake was done -- it smelled wonderful. She told me it was fine to return the cake pan when we came to pick up Irit, after I had eased the cooled cake onto a plate at home. 

The next day, Saturday, Dan and I drive over to the Zinn's around 5 PM to get Irit. The sun is still out, which means Irit will not drive or be driven, but the plan is for Dan to take Irit's luggage back to our house in the car while she and I walk home. Which we do. We stroll back together on a lovely late-spring evening, talking about all the things we have always talked about, not hurrying, just happy to be relaxed and together.  Shabbat, the Sabbath, the day of rest!

The dairy dinner has been carefully planned and executed so as not to not violate a single convention of Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. Here is exactly how I recorded the menu in the little book I keep of favorite meals:

Saturday, May 2, 2015

A wonderful Kosher dairy reunion dinner with Irit Weissman

Hummus and Pita Chips

Costco Mixed Nuts

Salmon with Lentils (from Barefoot in Paris) Veg Broth

Sautéed Fresh Asparagus

Challah + Butter

Zanzur Carménère (2013, Chilean)

Kosher for Passover/Mevushal

Gâteau au Chocolat: Le Doris (Simca's Cuisine) 

Homemade "veg broth" had replaced the fleishig chicken broth called for in the recipe (no meat of any sort is allowed in a dairy meal); I had no Kosher colander or strainer so I gently squeezed the vegetables in my hands. The wine I had carefully selected at Southern Seasons (Baruch and Adira told me that they get their Kosher wine much more prosaically at Total Wine, the local big-box wine store), and it tasted quite good, maybe even surprisingly so after I learned the meaning of mevushal. Mevushal is the Hebrew word for cooked and is designed to deal with the fact that without this extra step in the wine-making process (um, "cooking" the wine to the boiling point) Kosher wine can be rendered non-Kosher by a non-Jew, such as yours truly, opening or pouring or even moving the wine. Or as crazyjewishconvert puts it in her blog, "You can do everything normally with a meshuval wine, with no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. That's why meshuval wine is so awesome." Apparently modern meshuval processes are pretty sophisticated (running the "must" through flash pasteurizing, whatever exactly that means) and wine-drinkers can't really tell the difference. Like I said, the carménère was good, and drunk in good company. I think we still had Irit uncork it, out of habit.

The visit was wonderful. We talked and talked and once the sun set and the Sabbath was over, looked at pictures of the children -- impossibly grown up, now -- on Irit's phone. Dan and I marveled at the fact that Avi, who we first laid eyes on as a bright-eyed one-year-old, would get his bar mitzvah next year and that the whole family hoped to come for a visit to the US sometime after that. Oh, we said, we certainly hope so! The next morning, when it was time for Dan to take Irit to the airport, I embraced her in farewell and murmured Arrivederci -- that is, of course, Italian, for until we see each other again. 

As I write this several months later, we have been to Baruch and Adira's for a memorable Shabbat dinner (it turns out that the babka was only the tip of the culinary iceberg and Baruch is a great raconteur), and Avi's 13th birthday is less than four months away. Arrivederci, dear friends. Until we see you again.

2015: A Reader's Year

In the fall of 1969, the year we moved to Vermont, when I was in the eighth grade, 12 years old, our English teacher handed out simple mimeographed forms on which we were to record the books we read outside of the class over the course of the academic year. I dutifully did so. My choices ranged from young adult lit (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Across Five Aprils, and those Kate Seredy books set in early twentieth century Hungary that I still adore and have read, reread, and read to my children: The Good Master and The Singing Tree) to more mature choices (Profiles in Courage, Rebecca, Gone with the Wind).  We did this again in ninth grade, when, although barely a teen, it appears that I fancied myself a pretty adult reader (The Good Earth; Cry, the Beloved Country; The Secret of Santa Vittoria)  I even included that bestselling novella, Love Story, on my list -- it went through the girls of my set like wildfire; I can still see Janice E. holding the book under her desk, surreptitiously reading it during class.

And then, after ninth grade was over, I just kept adding to the list, until this very day.

From tenth grade until I finished my first year of college, I kept a continuous list, and then starting in the summer of 1975, I dated the list by years. Through 2005 I handwrote the lists, and since 2006 I have typed them. (I actually typed the list in 2002, but for some unknown reason reverted to longhand in 2003 and 2004.) The lists are in plastic sleeves and collected in a looseleaf notebook imprinted with Just Manufacturing Company, Stainless Steel Sinks, on the cover (absolutely no idea where that came from). They are not in a database and cannot be searched, except by manually looking through the lists book by book. 

This lifelist of books is not 100% complete. It does not contain any books I read for school or any academic pursuit (that would have made a nice separate list), nor does it contain the books my husband and I read aloud to our children at bedtime over the course of many years (a list which I genuinely regret not keeping).  And it is missing the names of four or five books after we suffered a computer crash in 2007 and realized one of our children had wiped out our backup. I didn't care about anything we lost except my booklist, about which I was pretty distraught. I racked my brains, searched my library checkouts and book group picks, but there remained a few missing titles. The list does, however, include books I have read for my book group since I joined in 1993, as well as audiobooks I have listened to.

Today is New Years Day, and I have just updated, printed, and filed my 2015 list in the Just Manufacturing notebook.  A bird's-eye view:

Favorites:  The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (can't do it justice in a parenthetical: the subtitle is A Family's Century of Art and Loss, about a wealthy European Jewish family; a collection of Japanese netsuke miniatures that miraculously survived World War II intact and is still in the family serves as an organizing principle); The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (about the Washington crew team that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 -- great book and great audio); the opening 75 pages of Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie, where she paints a vivid picture of life in Fairbanks in the post-gold rush early years of the last century, when mail was delivered weekly by dogsled.

Books I reread: I went on a mini-Shaker rereading binge, including June Sprigg's Shaker Gifts: A Memoir of a Shaker Village; Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede, published in 1969, about a successful businesswoman who becomes a cloistered nun; a descriptive passage about a year in the monastery told through the changing seasons is as about as lyrical a passage as I have ever read; and Love Story (see above, ninth grade) -- I found a copy at the thrift shop for a quarter or 50 cents and zipped through it in about 90 minutes; at some point I want to write about the careless and shocking sexism of the book.

Biggest disappointment: I 'm not sure I have a true disappointment, maybe the final book in Updike's Rabbit series, Rabbit Remembered, which he wrote in 2000 but I somehow didn't realize existed until this year. Is it me or did this not quite live up to the four books that preceded it? 

Books I am in the process of reading: Dan and I have been reading Middlemarch aloud together since 2014. We're about halfway through. Maybe we'll finish it in 2106. In addition to Middlemarch, right now I'm listening to Jeffrey Eugenides' (of Middlesex fame) The Marriage Plot, and reading The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler for book group. 

Book I meant to read in 2015: My Brilliant Friend, an English translation of the first of four volumes of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. I received the book as a birthday gift nearly a year ago from my friend Susie, whose taste in books I trust, but it seemed dauntingly dense. Over the holidays, it was again recommended to me by my cousin's son Peter, who assured me that it is not daunting but wonderful.  Intriguingly, "Elena Ferrante" is a pen name and the author's true identity is not publicly known. A reading resolution for 2016, then.