Mickey the Milk Man

It has been pointed out to me that I am often appalled by food. For someone who writes a blog about food I have remarkably little enthusiasm for eating. I push away my plate, content more with the freedom from having to eat I have just won. Eating is often merely a distasteful means to an end. Maybe this is because I read In The Night Kitchen over and over as a child. Or perhaps I read it over and over because in some way it spoke to my tendency toward disgust. In either case the book is certainly related in some way.

There is actually a convincing case to be made for the latter possibility that I have always been prone to rejecting food. As a very small child, I am told (I don’t remember this), I went so far as to pick the bowl off of my highchair and throw it at my parents. They were the oppressors who had introduced this cruel new economy into my life: to survive you must eat. I rejected it as a theory for as long it was possible to do so. The doctor worried. My parents worried and, hoping that the problem was merely an uncontrollable enthusiasm for throwing food at them, bought a bowl with suction cups. Somehow, I managed to throw this new bowl at them too. Their idea of why I did this remained unchallenged. But today I am convinced that I did not just take pleasure in throwing things at them (though I’m sure I did). I think that I was appalled by the notion that this stuff in the bowl had to go into my mouth, and moreover that I had to make it do so. No more were the good old days of breastfeeding and bottles. I’m sure I’m getting the chronology wrong somehow, but after a rather extended period of drinking from a bottle, I chucked it into a trashcan myself, in a symbolic gesture full of melodrama. I didn’t know at the time what I had just gotten myself into. My will to self-determination was propped up by the idea that beyond the bottle lay not just dignity, but freedom. Nobody ever told me that I would have to eat.

In a way my childhood fast is the very height of heroism, and in its extremity reveals heroism’s absurdity. Here is heroism: one stands between a reality and a truth and throws a fit. I would deal with primal loss by viewing the world with skepticism and occasionally denying its vicissitudes altogether. I would not accept eating as my access to the good stuff. No, it was just some new shit.

Mickey of In The Night Kitchen has a much less problematic relationship with, um, milk.

Among other things, In the Night Kitchen is the story of Mickey's nakedness.

Mickey falls into the night kitchen under a mistaken identity: milk. Yes, that is his hand.

Mickey asserts his identity, his separateness from the night kitchen and its ingredients. He is not a part of their mad cake production. He is not milk. He is special. Or at least he certainly has no doubts that he is.

Despite his protestations the bakers still take him for milk, and for this reason chase after him.

At this point he has transformed as if by magic two foods into tools for his use: a jumpsuit from the cake he was baked in, and an airplane from unbaked dough with which to evade the bakers. The bakers in fact form no real threat. He is the master, almost effortlessly shaping all the world to his will.

Refuting that he is milk, he goes to get milk. This is the story, then, of the formation of Mickey's masculine subject-position. I daresay it's not a coincidence that the bottle of milk is an enormous phallus and the tallest building.

But to get milk and yet be separate from milk he must form a new relationship with the milk. Rather than being confused for milk, he and the milk interpenetrate. Distinction is just another word for friction. Interestingly he and the book celebrate this moment. To have rather than to be might necessitate objects circulating through you, but it's not a price. It's a kind of glory, it seems.

The milk, it is worth noting, dissolves his cake-clothing. Getting the milk demands nakedness.

Mission accomplished. Mickey relishes in his newly forged identity: he gets milk.

This is the only red text in the book.

He is restored from nakedness to the regular world and clothedness, but now a boy. His identity is from the night kitchen is not lost, but reflected: oh to ho. He shares this secret joke with himself.

Perhaps I liked the book so much because it offered a new, exciting possibility for my relationship with things that come in bottles. Maybe I threw away my bottle in hopes of becoming Mickey, the perfect boy.

Biscuits & Kidney Beans

Yesterday, in an attempt to entertain myself by imposing arbitrary lifestyle contraints, I decided not to use my computer. Yes, it's true, I composed this with pen and paper. Laugh it up at my affectation. The point is that instead of looking to the internet for proportions of flour, butter, and milk, I followed The Joy of Cooking (1972 edition) recipe for biscuits. It calls for kneading the dough "a scant 1/2 minute." (I do love this book's diction. It has so many instructions it creates its own semantic universe in which every term has precise meaning.) I had never realized kneading might be an important part of making biscuits; I thought one was supposed to handle the dough as little as possible. It turns out kneading is how they're made flaky.

I may have rolled the dough too thin. The recipe says to roll "until the dough has the desired thickness." That was a quarter of an inch in my case. They only rose to about half an inch. My brother commented that they looked English. They do look more like I imagine scones should look than they do biscuits. But they're too thin to be cut in half. So they aren't even scones really. But I like them. There's something really nice about the way they get stale. They get stiff and just a bit chewy. In this stale state they're perfectly suited to eating with hot liquids such as tea or soup. And they're the sort of thing you would put in your knapsack before setting off into the forest.

I made these to go with a pot of kidney beans seasoned with sambar powder. This came about because I couldn't find the cayenne chili powder I wanted to use. (The sambar powder consists mostly of chilis.) I'm not sure it's the greatest combination, but it was an improvement over kidney beans without the seasoning.

2 cans cooked kidney beans
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1 large onion
2 cloves garlic
3 teaspoons sambar powder
1 teaspoon dried oregano
salt to taste

Chop onion into medium pieces roughly 1/2in square. Chop garlic as finely as possible. In a medium pot on medium-low heat, fry garlic in oil. When it is just browning, add sambar powder, dried oregano, and onions. Fry onion until well softened, maybe 20 minutes, stirring and scraping bottom every minute or two with a rubber spatula. Add kidney beans and water. Simmer for ten minutes and then serve.

Corn Dodgers & Lembas

"True Grit" (1969) has corn dodgers.  The Lord of The Rings has lembas.

I could pretend to subtly treat these foods with their very different functions in their respective narratives, but the truth is I'm wrapping them both, and all of their cousins that I'm too lazy to research, into a doughy mass of sloppy exemplarity called "traveller's food."  Traveller's food is at the heart of one of high fantasy's fantasies: the long journey on foot.  (Westerns share this, but by far more often on horse.)  An adventurer, Bilbo might reminisce, does not travel bogged down with food.  No, he pops out the door with a knapsack and a cloak and is on his way.  In his knapsack he has a few bits of traveller's food--some bread and cheese perhaps (or some corn dodgers).  Traveller's food is rations but romanticized--hard tack but less disgusting while just as imperishable.  Despite its portability it is highly sustaining.

Traveller's food is one of the more extreme ways that food can compel that I have been trying to communicate.  Can one ever really make traveller's food?  No, but if you're me as a teenager, its impossibility can be easily forgotten. There was a time when I labored under the illusion that I could walk for days in the mountains with nothing but the biscuits I had baked before embarking.  The fact that I always came back before the next day was due to a personal failing and was not a reason for disillusionment.  Moreover it wasn't precisely that I went home; I simply stopped being the adventurer.  I paused the game.  No, the conflicting logics of "it was a personal failing" and "I paused the game" are not problematic.  They exemplify the necessary discontinuity of living in two.  In this manner I adventured for weeks in the wooded mountains while only doing so for an hour every day or two.  On the one hand adventuring army of one, on the other, at home on my computer.  (Not a strange combination at all, actually.)  The biscuits, obviously, did what they were supposed to.

Pastry's Conspiracy

In The Last Unicorn nothing is quite what it seems. Great monsters are puffed up from the aspirations of common animals with a bit of magical trickery, and a unicorn goes about unrecognized as anything more than a white mare. The book’s tangle of seeming and being is much like what one encounters when one tries to unravel tasting and eating.

Food may be elevated to the snobby heights of having a “palette” because at some level it is a bare necessity. As animals, to live is to eat. There’s no getting around that. But we may sculpt food and manipulate it into dreams that could otherwise not be dreamt. Eggs may, for instance, be separated and whipped into sugary clouds. This is pastry.

The whole object of pastry, it seems to me, is to create something unreal. With pastry we may believe briefly that hunger and nourishment do not exist, and that beauty and taste are everything. Defined this way pastry comes to include not all desserts, but things such as ice cream, candy, and, liminally, some forms of haute cuisine, decorative bento boxes, and even molded gelatine. It is a strain of magic in cookery. In a purely imagined history it began as delights for jaded court royalty and eventually expanding to industrially produced Hostess cakes.  The empire of pastry has wriggled its way into the fabric of many lives and has necessitated enormous quantities of sugar plantations. Unlike the Illuminati, there is no one to cackle at bringing abstractions into the world. There is no pastry sorcerer* triumphantly grinning and wringing his hands. Pastry is its own sorcerer, its own cabal and its own cult leader, and it has no more control over its destiny than those that do its bidding.

The meringue is a meagre beast, yet as beautiful and powerful as it is full of air.

* Although there are pastamancers and saucerors.

Oh my buttons!

In The Mill on the Floss, Tom explains to Maggie why he will not be running away the next day.  “It’s the pudden,” he confides, “I know what the pudden’s to be--apricot roll-up--oh my buttons!”  I’ve never heard of a roll-up before except of course those strips of candied fruit puree that kids used to (do they still?) have in paper-bag lunches called “fruit roll-ups.”  I assume this is a pastry.  It sounds very appealing, but more appealing to a not especially wealthy nineteenth-century English family who only ever has such things on special occasions than to my contemporary palate.  Apricot roll-up, ever since I read that sentence, has taken on a vibrant and uncertain life in my imagination.  I keep thinking of the words nd of why Tom is oh-my-buttonsing about it.  Incommensurate images float unresolved in my mind.  How is it rolled up?  It is made from fresh, dried, or otherwise preserved apricots?  What kind of pastry dough are they rolled up in: pate brisee, pate sablee, puff pastry, yeasted dough, or something else?  What is apricot roll-up?  At this point a google search would not answer the question I’m trying to ask.  I don’t want to know what it was historically, what George Eliot may have been referring to.  Because I don’t know what it is I have begun to imagine something.  I want to know what that something is, and in what ways it might be brought into the world.

Or maybe, considering what I did recently bake, I don’t want to make it tangible at all, and I’m content letting it draw me toward baked semblances.  After making pear-ginger tarte tatin and sweet potato pie for Christmas, I still had some pie dough leftover in the fridge.  Thinking of apricot roll-up, I rolled the remaining dough into a roughly rectangular sheet, covered it in thin pear slices, sprinkled it with brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, rolled it up and baked it at 400 F.  Well, fifteen minutes in I became paranoid that it wouldn’t become properly crisp and turned it up to 425 F.  Also I tried to pucker the ends together to keep the juices from running out too much.  The juices did run out and burned to a black caramel at the bottom of the pan, but I liked it.  It was a roll-up.  The nice thing about a culinary fantasy defined by a single word with little semantic grounding is that it can be many things.

I was also pleased because this pear roll-up was made from things that just happened to be around.  Probably derived from the frugality endorsed by environmentalism and an ego-aspiration to quiet resourcefulness, this is also one of my foremost culinary desires.

Like the sweet potato pie of last entry, I liked it because of what I thought I was making as well as because it, I thought, tasted good.  Some vagueness or polyvalence in what I imagine I’m making seems to be a necessary part of this equation.  Taste is again mediated by fantasy, but instead of the enticing photos I referred to as enthralling (as in actually placing me in their thrall) motivators to make Mrs. Hudson’s Biscuits, tarte tatin, and apple strudel, this came of a written phrase.  Why do I romanticize the textual seed of this fantasy, and hold the photographic distastefully between thumb and pinky?

1 small round pate brisee

1 large pear

4 tablespoons brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Roll out pate brisee into a rectangle roughly twice as long as it is wide.  Halve and core pear.  Slice pear thinly.  Lay pear slices parallel to the shorter edge in two rows.  Sprinkle brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg over pear slices.  Roll from short side to short side.  Pinch together the open ends of the roll.  Place roll in a baking pan with the seam facing up.  Bake at 425 F for about half an hour, or until the crust turns golden brown.