YORKSHIRE PUDDING, REDUX

 

When I went to England for the first time, I had a list of things to try and see and do and buy and experience, quite a few of them food-related. I wanted a bowl of porridge in Scotland (related in another post), Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, treacle tart, a real afternoon tea with scones and cream and jam, and several other traditional things (all of which were accomplished and enjoyed very much).

So the first night on the road, we had dinner at our little hotel, and it was the only buffet of the trip, save for the bountiful breakfasts for which England is so famed. As I passed the gentleman who was "carving the joint," I asked for the beef. He misunderstood and carved off two hefty, steaming, juicy slices of the pork instead. I just accepted it, went right down the line, retrieved the nice muffin-pan shape of golden Yorkshire pudding, poured a bit of the rich brown gravy from the silver boat onto both, and had one of the best dining experiences of my life. It was rich and salty and BEEFY with the essence of the meat.  That sauce/gravy moat was the very embodiment of generations of Dripping, and would have been worth five hours' turning of the beef spit in the fireplace by small boys in the kitchen.

Later in the week, we stopped for lunch in the Lake District, and Yorkshire pudding was one of the features of the day in the restaurant/souvenir shop we were ushered into. I thought I'd try it one more time, and it was a bit different from the first. My plate arrived, or at least I hoped there was a plate under the weight of that huge bowl-shaped piece of browned dough holding its pint of gravy. The gravy was not so rich this time, nor did it have that tang of good meat essence nor the satisfying flavour of anything but browned flour and whatever liquid was used to make it. But it made up in quantity.

It was enormous. It covered a dinner plate, with just room on the edges for the server to get a tiny thumb-grip on either side. It looked as if a brown cake-pan had been appropriated from the kitchen, filled with brown liquid, and sent to table, its little ridges of sides barely holding in the flood. It sloshed when it was set before me, and the quandary arose: dip a spoon in that bread bowl and eat gravy soup until the ramparts could be breached, or cut right in, thus granting exit to enough brown sauce to flood the pretty tablecloth and perhaps flow back toward the kitchen. I'm a generous cook, with a lavish hand with the groceries, but I think I've served MEALS without that much gravy on the table.

Then we looked around us. Whole families were chowing down on plates of the kiddie-pool-sized servings. Twig-sized young women were tucking into the stuff with the gusto of lorry-drivers, and small children had their OWN great moats of brown in front of them. It was amazing. This was food for hearty hikers, tramping into the house in Wellies, beaming and rosy-cheeking their way through great trenchers of heavy food and gallons of steaming tea. Flour and water were the order of the day, and we were all consuming enough carbs to bankrupt Atkins several years early.

The pudding appeared to have been baked in a pieplate or cakepan, with inch-high sides which rose up and held its juicy burden, and the bottom was just about the depth of a piecrust, though springy and tender. I shared spoonfuls of the gravy all round the table; my companions scooped up spoons and bowls of it. One lady had no receptacle save her plate, so she lifted her teacup to the tablecloth and accepted a saucerful.

We all dipped and slurped and it made immediate "English dip" for the hearty sandwiches of all others at the table. I managed to down about a third of the rich eggy bready pudding, saturated as it was with the salty sauce, and passed samples to fellow travelers at other tables. When we finally lugged our stuffed selves out and back onto the bus, we left one semi-circle standing like a dough map of Stonehenge, listing toward the gravy. The stuff could have made a Biblical legend, a story passed down through whole families as they gathered on Friday nights, with children for generations asking, “Tell about the gravy which never ran out.”

When we left to go trekking through Wordsworth country, there was STILL a great moat of gravy left on that plate, with the golden pudding swelling and growing limply pale in the light of the grey afternoon.

TOUCHING THE PEN

 

 In a note just now to my friend Monique in Canada---she of the delightful and sumptuous La Table de Nana, now closed down and sorely missed, I mentioned an old custom which I think of now and then.   Letters often used to begin: I take my Pen in Hand. . .   And a lot of people DID take that for true, especially some of our town residents who had the misfortune of having never learned to read or write.   And so,  I had a few patrons who counted on me to read their letters from family and friend, as well as to WRITE them.   As I took down their words,  quite a few of them would finish the little session by a hesitant touch of my pen.   It's as if the writings were some unspoken RITES---a sacred ritual to the words, in which touching the pen, though they could not write nor read what I was putting down---that conveyed some sort of power to the words, and made them theirs.    

Even folks who came in and could only write their X on a note or document---that power of touching my trusty Parker 51 Gold-All-Over---a graduation gift which has lasted me decades---those folks trusted in the POWER of the touch, and the proof of their being there in that moment to vouchsafe their word and their agreement.    And even Wills and Deeds were treated with the dignity of their "X" if I had written in their name, and BY: racheld.   The confidence in that touch was solid, legality was confirmed, and the courthouse understood.  

I think of those long-ago folks, the ones who never learned to read or write, whose education probably stopped in third grade when they had to Quit School and help with the farming or sawmilling or road-upkeep, and my heart weeps in retrospect for what they missed and I partook of so freely and unthinkingly.   I coached several would-be drivers through the little Mississippi Highway booklet and all its rules, and once I was allowed to go to a formal required test for a friend, reading him the questions from the page about parts of engines and carburetors and flywheels and such, so he could mark A-B-C-or-D on the long answer sheet for a mechanic's certification.   They knew I couldn't coach him and certainly wouldn't cheat.

   

And the TIME---the time that they did have free---when they could have been transported into that magical world of BOOKS or even hunting magazines or the Commercial Appeal--I grieve for the wasting and missing out on all those colorful, exciting, heart-touching tales and interesting news and facts which I could pick up and set down at any moment.   I'm sure their pride in their children and all the recipients of those letters was bittersweetly great, for their own loss. 

But those dear folks, those with the concrete confidence of stone for the Power of the Touch---I wonder if there are any who still convey their faith into that simple small ritual of Touching the Pen.

A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, REMEMBERED

 

I've long-missed my friend John in Vicksburg, at MISSISSIPPI GARDEN. He faded away way too soon from the blog-world, but I look back often to see his lovely garden, and equally lovely way with words.   It's been more than fifteen years, and the memory of his sweet, lyrical, poignant prose has been a lasting wonder, and his title-page still on my side-banner.  

The first Christmas of my blog, he had posted a piece about his favorite modern Christmas story---Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory. It's also one of my own, for the times and circumstances so nearly mirrored my own raising, with Mammaw and a group of Aunts all chiming in on my welfare and manners and grooming, though they did not actually RAISE me, in the sense of every day looking-after.

And Y'all know I very rarely repeat a post, but this little book bears looking at, bears reading, for a real and stark and stunning picture of a little boy's life in the South of his day, with the devoted, fierce woman who took him in and did her absolute best for him, despite her own meager circumstances. And the almost-zany zeal with which she carries out her own odd Christmas tradition---that bespeaks a Southern woman's determination and grit and sheer strength of will to overcome and outlast and follow through.

I love Aunt Sook, as I loved and remember fondly all the odd group of Aunts of my own---the Aunt who DIPPED and traveled hundreds of miles on Greyhound to come spend summers with us, ferrying tiny Ayres and Avon samples in her vast suitcase---oddly enough, from the big city I now live in.  Then there was the one whose livelihood got her tossed in the calaboose for the activities of the scandalous houseful of young ladies she was "counseling," and the  tall slim one whose quiet, spare reserve sent her deep into the beautiful realms of paint-by-number to escape the constant humming hive and bell of the six-days-a-week dawn-to-dark little country store they owned. And always, my Mammaw.

And so, from LAWN TEA---scarcely a jot on the internet scroll, Christmas, 2008---Reflections on A Christmas Memory:

One blog featured Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” in a daily post, the stark words re-read this morning with my first coffee. I could feel those cold Christmas-morning planks of the bedroom floor, see the hard-won clumsy homemade gifts and tree decorations, smell the scents of Winter-long bacon grease and Vicks in that drafty grim house.

The faded gray tones of the accompanying picture echo those in my own scrapbooks and albums. Little Truman squints and gives a tentative smile into the sun, as the limp skirt of his spare, gaunt kinswoman hangs beside the pants of his short white boy-suit.

I know that woman---called “Aunt Sook,” though she was some distant cousin, as unwanted and unwelcome in the household as the quiet, brilliant little boy. You can see the arthritic clench of her hands which had just made thirty fruitcakes, chopping and stirring, sending them to the Roosevelts and other dignitaries, as well as neighbors and friends---she'd saved every coin and dollar she could spare for the year, hiding them in a purse beneath the floorboard under the chamberpot beneath her bed.

Those same wiry hands had chopped down a Christmas tree, wrestling it home past bayou and brush, for that beloved child, and decorated it with bits and bobs of anything pretty she could scrounge.

I know that scraggy porch, the one “turned” post standing valiantly against the sag of time, the rattly boards of the steps, the GRAY of the whole thing---the house and the porch and the prospects and the people and the time. There are plants on the porch, and contrary to my Mammaw's first porch, the one of my childhood, with the big old creaky swing, there are no coffee-cans in sight. I'd have expected at least one, holding a cutting of something-or-other, to coddle into flourishment in that ripe Alabama climate. Mammaw's Folger's and Maxwell house cans held mostly coleus---plural to her, I suppose, for if she gave you ONE, it was a colea. Just like one amaryllis was an Amarillo---I never GOT the difference til I learned to read, and seed catalogs were some of my favorites.

We have pictures of that hollow-faced woman, lithic as Lincoln at Rushmore, in our own handed-down flaps of Kodak-cardboard; the deep, wise eyes, the scrunched-back, sparse hair, the best-dress for the honor of the event, the still stare captured in its simple eloquence. She even LOOKS like my Mammaw and her sisters, though four of them, including Mammaw, were definitely not slim, spare ladies. They were bright, laughing women, whose conversation and dress and daily doings were not of the gray sort.

And so, his Christmas Memory. Very unlike mine in content, but so similar in locale, in persona, in clime and in women whose lives were of that time and place. My own memories lean more to scratchy dresses and a big noon dinner with kinfolk at Mammaw's house, with her own small tree set on the living room/bedroom dresser and her own bed behind a curtain not six feet from the dining table in the "middle room."

Men sat on the porch, came rumbling in to eat, lifted toothpicks from the tiny vase, and rocked back surfeited, into that tw0-chair-legs teeter which we knew to be the province of Uncles and Grandpas, but never young ladies; they soon vacated their places for Second Table, went outside, smoked, talked, kicked car tires and smoked some more. I think---for they were as peripheral to my ken as I to theirs.

But, like Truman, I DO remember the Women. Christmas and every day of my life.

WHAT IT WAS, WAS FUDGE!!

Reminiscing this bright-on-the-snow cold morning about days past, when we were so energetic and eager to get to the Christmas preparations.   Just about now would be the stocking-up of sugar, of chocolate chips and butterscotch and brickles, the solemn small blue jars of marshmallow creme, and a lot of butter.    It WAS FUDGE TIME!   We had a lot of folks in the local area, family and clients and just friends acquired over time, and we loved to surprise them with at least a pound every Christmas.  

I wish today was Fudge-Making Day, so it could just BE, cooling and being cut and wrapped for delivering around town to clients, so I’m “fudging” with the posts and using  this one from Christmas, sixteen years ago.  Wish I still had as much energy as I did then, when I was looking after a two-year-old three days a week.  She’s quite adept in the kitchen now, herself, and I’m sure she could show me a thing or two 

THESE ENLARGE WITH A CLICK

Here's the tableful of goodies for clients and friends---not nearly all of what we made, but it looks pretty, all arrayed like that. We swap the pretty cloths for an old red vinyl picnic sheet, and use a lot of Windex on the two glass tables, for candy-making is messy work.

Clockwise from One O'clock: Cappuccino Fudge, Plain Fudge, Chex Mix, Chocolate Chip Drop Cookies, Kahlua Fudge with Chocolate Coffee Beans, Rocky Road with the little cut marshmallows showing, more cookies, and a plate of Kahlua Brownies.

And I'm the candy-making Elf---Kahlua Fudge, with a couple of shots of Espresso Syrup and Kahlua:

Cappuccino Fudge, with a shot of Espresso syrup in the recipe:

Just plain Fudge, creamy and chocolatey---I love its color and shine:

Reese's Loaves---the bottom is the old-fashioned recipe for Peanut Butter Fudge, with extra-crunchy, left to sit in the pans til cool and firm, then a small pour of plain fudge on top.

One more look at the original, from whom all recipes spring---cutting those precise, sharp corners.

I wish you all a Christmas Season as sweet as these past

SWEET TIMES!!

MY FRIEND KARLA KAY

In this special season of THANKFULS, I'm doing a lot of remembering of Things Past---those softly-remembered moments and years and people who shaped our selves and beings along the way.   One very thankful for the past few decades has been a mist-softened memory of a childhood friend, whose life we all coveted, I think, in our youthful ways of thought.

Do we all know someone whose life we wished could live---someone with a family whose life together we envied, or who had a talent we’d like to have, or who even just had THINGS which we longed for and never obtained?    Mine was Karla Kay---she of the always-tanned perfect complexion, eyelashes out to THERE, and even longer slimslim legs which made white short-shorts into what they were meant to be. She lived in a house with hardwood floors and beautiful scatter-rugs in front of couches and a long strip of one down the hall to “the girls’ rooms” and an immense thick one beneath the real dining-room table. Our dining room was the end of the kitchen without cabinets, with a round maroon formica table and six matching vinyl chairs.     We knew each other from age four until early in this turned Century, when she passed away and was mourned most deeply by her loving family and friends.   

Karla Kay had long dark curly hair, washed with CONTI shampoo---the drift of scent from her curls was the fragrance of flowers; ours was Halo and a vinegar rinse and whatever was on the shelf at Fred’s. She always smelled of fresh-ironed cotton and the vaguest whiff of her Daddy’s cigars---he drove her and her sisters to school, and since he had a job with the CITY and could leave his office whenever he wanted, he picked them up and took them home for lunch, then was waiting after school to take them home or to the library, dentist appointments, or the drugstore for a Fountain Coke.

She had records and a big record player in the den, and a smaller one in her room; the big one was for when she “had boys over” and we danced in our socks---the closest I ever came to that was on several Saturday mornings when I’d put Johnson’s wax on all our own hardwoods, and was encouraged to call my girlfriends to come over to polish. We’d all wear a clean pair of Daddy’s old socks and dance the floors shiny to Elvis and Jerr’ Lee, and put on a Connie Francis, for long, skating strokes to smooth the boards. 

 

They went on vacations to Rock City and Destin and Mexico; they had subscriptions to Highlights For Children and National Geographic and later, Seventeen; they had girls over to spend the night, and they slept until ten or noon (once I went to a slumber party, and my Mother woke everybody up when she came to get me at eight to come home and tend to my sister, when we were supposed to go for Huddleburgers for lunch for KK's birthday). Her parents belonged to the BOMC and her mother smoked Old Golds with a little short white holder, the smoke drifting lazily up into her premature salt-and-pepper hair. They had a wonderful life.

I ran into Karla Kay and her husband in the ER one night in the Eighties, when I had to take my MIL in; she barely spoke, sitting leaning against him, as he whispered, “one of her headaches.” A couple of years later, same circumstance, same ER---his whispered, “We’ve come for her SHOT,” explaining all. I knew then that the coincidence was too far-fetched, and that she must have been there like clockwork;   Marjorie exasperatedly confided later that they made the rounds of several counties---one hospital here one night, another on another.

She wasted years of her life, her beautiful family, her own lovely existence, on a haze of nightly oblivion. And they adored her, lost her much too young, mourned her with fierce tears, and still speak of her as a saint who bore her travail with grace and honor. I remember her as a beautiful young friend whose life seemed to outshine mine. But not forever.

Anyone care to remember THEIR Karla Kay?