Read an Excerpt
Poor Man's Cake
Patti Smith
My mother had a way of always making things better. If my father was on strike at the factory and things looked exceptionally bleak, she would sing show tunes and let my siblings and me stay up late to watch monster movies on our little black-and-white TV. If the refrigerator was nearly empty, she would sit in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, thinking about how to brighten our situation. Then she would get up, flip through her recipe book, and somehow conjure the ingredients for Poor Man's Cake, our favorite hard-times fare.
While we waited for the cake to cool, she would tell us stories of the Great Depression. She told of how families would cross the country in search of work, and how they'd pool their meager supplies and make the same cakes and wrap them in their bandannas, to be assured of something to eat in the morning.
Sometimes she would be obliged to send us off to school with nothing but a chunk of the cake, but that was fine with us. I'd tie up my chunk, a little burned around the edges with lots of raisins, in one of my father's old blue paisley bandannas and imagine I was going west.
We always wondered why it was called Poor Man's Cake. Then after my mother passed away, my sister Linda found two coffee-stained copies of the recipe. She noticed the words NO EGGS at the top of one, solving the riddle. No eggs or milk, both expensive back then, were required. Just simple ingredients, stirred with a wooden spoon and poured into a cast-iron loaf pan.
Recently, Linda made me my own Poor Man's Cake. Breaking off a chunk, I pictured my mother in her housecoat, inevitably spattered with batter, sitting at the kitchen table pouring a cup of coffee. Linda's cake, made with our mother's recipe, brought back the happiest memories of the one who always found a way to laugh away tears and feed us when we were hungry.
Poor Man's Cake
*NO EGGS*
Ingredients:
2 cups sugar
2 cups raisins
2 cups water
1 cup margarine
Pinch of salt
2 teaspoons ground cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
Preheat the oven to 350¡F.
Grease and flour a 9 x 13-inch baking dish
Place all the ingredients, aside from the flour, in a large saucepan on top of the stove.
Bring to a boil and stir.
Set aside to cool.
When cool, add the flour, stirring it in with a wooden spoon.
Pour the mixture into a greased and floured 9 13-inch baking dish.
Bake for about 1 hour or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the middle.
Shallot Vinaigrette Insurance
Stephanie Danler
The New York City boxes came on a moving truck to the cottage in Laurel Canyon. Pomelo trees scraped the roof of the truck when it turned in, so it couldn't pull all the way into the long drive. I helped two guys from the moving company carry my stuff the rest of the way up to a shed. These boxes had been in a storage unit in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for three years, since my divorce. I felt like I had been much younger when I packed them.
The first box I opened had sweaters in it. His and mine. I remember taping up that box and thinking that we would be right back. That we were separating, dismantling our home in a cold spring, but we would be unpacking this box before the next snow came. Surveying my things in the shed, I looked at my KitchenAid stand mixer, halfheartedly protected by plastic wrap gone loose. A box of antique Bundt pans, collected at flea markets. I opened another box that had KITCHEN written on the side. It was full of Mason jars. Or what had been Mason jars. They were pulverized glass at this point. It hurt afresh to see it all again. To remember my ex-husband and me circling the tiny Williamsburg apartment, packing it all up, drinking iced coffee after iced coffee, not knowing how to speak to each other. I still loved him. He still loved me. We wept constantly, without ceremony, in front of the movers. They avoided us, whispering to each other in Polish. Surely, we would be coming right back to each other. It wasn't possible that there had been many snows since then, snowstorms when I hadn't even thought of him, or that I had moved to a place unmarked by that kind of weather.
Beyond books, most of these boxes were part of a kitchen. My marriage had revolved around food and wine. Our lives were spent in our respective restaurants where we worked the requisite twelve-hour days, and our leisure time was spent in the restaurants of our friends. I opened another box and there was my ex-husband's bourbon collection. I laughed. Rare releases of Blanton's and WhistlePig rye, even a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle I had scavenged for his birthday. The storage unit where they'd been residing was not climate controlled. Was the whiskey still drinkable? Yes, we had packed them like idiots full of denial. How much of our lives had we wasted in that way?
For the seven years of our relationship we were what Laurie Colwin calls "domestic sensualists." We never ate for subsistence, only for experience. We entertained frequently and ambitiously. We made cassoulet from scratch, including grinding the meat and stuffing the sausage casings. It took weeks. Pastas were kneaded, rolled, and cut; cheeses were tempered under mesh domes; slivers of truffles were slid under the skin of capons. We had a culinary book collection with rare cookbooks from Kitchen Arts & Letters and Bonnie Slotnick. My ex-husband brewed beer, and each season we pickled, dropping the Mason jars into boiling water. Jars of ramps, onions, and cucumbers lined up, throwing colored light. We changed glassware as we revolved our wines, moving from stemless aperitif-style glasses to slim white-wine glasses to Burgundy bowls. After dinner we often moved the dining table to the side of the room so we could dance.
This decadence occurred in accordance with the full blooming of a zeitgeist, my ex-husband and I riding a wave that surfaced after the millennium with Anthony Bourdain, April Bloomfield, and David Chang, but one that had broken in the mid-aughts and-joyfully-kept breaking. Restaurants were New York City's cutthroat sport. It seemed everyone was discovering the Jura wine region in France, or the salinity of Manzanilla sherry, or the pucker of fish sauce. That our passions were considered niche (at best) to the rest of the world didn't bother us. In the city, we spoke the same language of taste. Every discretionary penny was thrown into this search for pleasure. My discovery of the food world coincided with my marriage and became inseparable. That made it seem less like a graciously prolonged moment and more like the banquet that would always be my life.
When I left our apartment in Williamsburg-and it was my first home, really-I moved into a room in a Victorian town house in Bushwick. I had only a mattress, books, and a dining table as a desk. Two suitcases of clothes. The rest of it I locked away in the storage unit. Eight other people lived in this house. I rarely saw them or even heard them. Regardless of the weather, my room had the powdery gray light of a storybook orphanage. I wore sandals in the shower. I could play music in my room only at certain hours. It was impossible not to feel that I had left a vibrant adulthood for an ashen version of myself at twenty-two: broke, prickly with loneliness. No belongings, no footing. The kitchen in this formerly grand town house was a playground for mice and cockroaches. Only one of the roommates ever used it. He was an Indian man, a photographer in his late forties, and he made his own Indian food every evening. The scent dominated the hallways. I could smell that his ghee was rancid, and I always wanted to say something, but I was ashamed of my snobbery. One morning there was mice shit in a line across the bottom of my bed. I didn't trust my own authority on anything.
I stopped enjoying food. Wine felt flabby and desperate without the accompaniment. The act of changing out stemware (in an apartment with no dishwasher!) came to stand in for the fraudulence of my married life. I had become a bourgeois mannequin, had taken to caring about the wrong things. Alone again, I was safest when caring about nothing. Take-out containers piled up inside my room until I got nervous that the kitchen mice would find them. Tuna salad from a bodega, eaten with Triscuits; jars of cornichons; Greek yogurt; round after round of toast. Fried rice and steamed vegetables I could get from a Chinese place for less than ten dollars, which I could make last a week. It wasn't just that my financial situation had drastically changed; I knew well from married life that a vat of Marcella Hazan's minestrone could be half eaten, the other half frozen, and would be gratifying on both occasions. Cooking is nearly always the cheaper option. Yet I did not cook in that house for a year. Not even an egg. It was a form of self-recrimination. Even the thought of these once-sacred rituals made me feel empty. I had stopped believing in their power.
Depression is always a taste to me. The tongue desiccated and parched, the oversteeped and forgotten tea, the tilting-toward-decay fizziness of sour grapes. An ambient and unspecific sense of death that keeps you from your senses. I lost food and accepted it. Though I quit cooking, I still walked to the Union Square Greenmarket in all seasons. Out of habit, I still checked out Lani's Farm, Guy Jones, Keith's, and still waved to the farmers I knew. On an unremarkable winter day I bought a shallot.
A smooth, lavender teardrop of a shallot.
It was a joke among my college friends that I couldn't boil water for pasta. Maybe it was because my mother was a gifted cook who had gone to culinary school, or because we were estranged and I imagined myself nothing like her, or because I had been working in restaurants since I was fifteen years old-but I came into my twenties completely dependent on others to feed me. That changed when I moved to New York City and started serving at Union Square Cafe. But I didn't teach myself to cook because I was inspired. I did it because I fell in love. I had just started dating my future husband and we were planning a trip to Paris. We had a lengthy list of restaurants to hit, but we had rented an apartment with the idea that we would also go to the markets and cook at home. The fact that neither one of us cooked did not impede this fantasy. I assumed that my general knowledge of food would translate into a virtuoso performance in the kitchen. I assumed that by buying myself The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, reading it cover to cover, carting it over to Paris, I would, in a small but significant way, become Alice Waters vacationing in Paris with her love. The culinary results of that Paris trip were edible but not close to transcendent. I remember reading that I should skim the fat off a beef stew and not understanding the direction. Instead I stirred as hard as I could so that fat stopped collecting on the top. I kept burying it. That, to me, was skimmed.
But one of the simpler recipes I did manage to execute in Paris was a shallot vinaigrette. While the vinaigrette came out just good enough the first time (there was too much acid to oil, but I was interested exclusively in sharp flavors back then), it was still exciting: Why would anyone buy salad dressing if they could make this? In the years to come I always had a jar of it in the fridge. It went on lettuces, on rice and farro, on steamed kale, on baked potatoes and omelets, on one hundred avocados.
In addition to a finely chopped shallot, the recipe calls for vinegar and oil. Though I prefer red wine or sherry, whatever vinegar is on hand is probably fine. I've also been known to add, according to mood and availability: lemon zest, anchovies, fresh thyme, chopped soft herbs like parsley or chives, fish sauce, Aleppo pepper, crème fra”che. The key to the recipe-which isn't really a recipe as much as a gesture-is time. That means maceration. Leave the shallots and the acid alone together for an hour. The shallots will flush and plump. They will lose their rawness to the vinegar. They become their own element, not simply an accompaniment.
Shallot vinaigrette was the first thing I made in my transient Bushwick kitchen. It needed something to be spooned over. And so I made something to spoon it over. It did not feel like an achievement. It felt like eating, an urge temporarily satiated. But seeing the leftovers in a jar in the fridge begged me to make something else. I bought eggs and butter. I bought the good sourdough and the leftover ends of expensive cheeses: gouda, comtŽ, triple crèmes. Dried lentils. Cans of cannellini beans, rinsed, splashed with olive oil, just heated through. I bought a head of Little Gem lettuce and a watermelon radish. Because
I had the radish and the vinegar, why not do a quick pickle of it? It wasn't exactly a triumph over dark forces: the symphony swelling, me throwing back the heavy drapes to face the sunlight. But this is how I started over. I did not have my own plates or mugs; I had my own jar of vinaigrette.
Standing in the Laurel Canyon shed with my mangled boxes, just about as far as I could get from Brooklyn, I had so much sympathy for the idiots who packed them. That sympathy made it impossible to separate my life into organized compartments-my phases, my lovers, my sublets. I don't believe anymore that I was one person in my marriage and another when it was over, that those selves were disparate and unrepeatable. The halcyon meals of the marriage, its disappearance, and leaving New York City-it was all a wash of loss and creation. The truth is that even within that frenzy of epicurean highs, there were the seeds of our collapse. There was our penchant for drinking too much, our delirious avoidance of conflict, my fear of vulnerability, and my lust for all sorts of lives outside of matrimony. It was-much like the present moment-both paradisaical and cautionary. "The good news," a friend said to me, "is that you did it once. You know you can do it again." She meant making a home, but of course when it landed on me, it was about love. I do not live in Williamsburg or Bushwick or even Laurel Canyon anymore, but there are things from my first marriage that I've carried with me and have no idea what to do with. But I did cook again. I unpacked the kitchen boxes and started calling those things mine instead of ours. New beliefs emerged: A shallot vinaigrette in the fridge is insurance against hunger. There is nothing more elegant than eating leftovers with your hands. Time is the key element of any recipe. I am still learning how to skim the fat.
