A Homemade Life (5 page)

I
'm not sure if many parents today belong to the cult of milk, but when I was growing up, my mother was a carton-carrying member. (Sorry.) She made me drink a glass every night with dinner. I'm not talking about a little juice tumbler, either. Picture a highball glass—tall and seemingly bottomless, the kind best reserved for a gin and tonic with lots of ice cubes and lime—and you've got the right idea.

As it also happened, I hated the taste of milk. Given this information, I'm pretty sure that the right course of action would have been to cease and desist, but my mother paid no heed.

“Milk is
good for you,
” she assured me. And every single night, that glass showed up next to my plate, filled almost to the brim. I don't know where parents get these sorts of ideas. Probably from the same school of thought that teaches them to tell their little girls that boys are mean to them because, deep down, they have a crush. If I had a nickel for every time an adult told me that, I would build a new school of thought and teach more accurate things, like that little kids are mean to other little kids because being a little kid is very hard and confusing. I am still trying to work through the fact that a boy named his dog after me in the third grade.

Milk, however, was a little easier to cope with. It didn't take me long to learn that milk tastes marginally better and less milklike
when it's icy cold, so I tried to drink it the moment we sat down, before it could warm up even a little bit. I also got good at gulping as quickly as possible, in big, open-throated glugs, so as to minimize the duration of my torture. I was also very skilled at begging for the bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup. I'd squeeze a slow, fat ribbon of syrup from the upended bottle and stir until the milk looked like melted chocolate ice cream. Then, and only then, was it pleasantly potable.

Those nightly glasses of milk didn't create much in the way of happy memories, but they did do one thing. They taught me that anything,
anything,
can be made better with chocolate. It's a lesson that has served me well. And I suppose that, in an indirect way, I owe my mother, and the cult of milk, for that.

Take banana bread, for starters. It's a lovely thing on its own, plain or with walnuts, but with a palmful of chocolate chips, as my friend Kate taught me, it's much more than that. It's no longer an after-school snack; it's a full-on dessert, preferably served with loosely whipped cream.

Even savory foods taste better with chocolate. My friend Shauna swears by cauliflower roasted with a sprinkling of cocoa powder and smoked paprika, and my husband has taken to sprinkling bittersweet chocolate into our arugula salads. (It's a lot better, I swear, than it sounds. I'll tell you more about it later.) And in some parts of Mexico, they even sauce their meats with chocolate. They combine it with chiles, nuts, and spices and turn it into
mole,
a smooth, rich sauce for poultry, beef, and pork.

You know, I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that chocolate even makes
chocolate
taste better. Take, for example, a basic chocolate cake. I've tried several recipes over the years and have finally settled on one in particular, a dark, fudgy one with yogurt for moisture, coffee for depth of flavor, and two types of chocolate. It's what I use when I want a traditional chocolate cake for birthdays, or for making into cupcakes, and it's delicious with any number of frostings or glazes. But it's pointless to deny the truth, which always leads back to chocolate. These cup
cakes don't want ganache, or whipped cream, or buttercream. All they need is a simple, strictly chocolate finish: a smooth, firm cap of bittersweet spooned over the top, the sort of thing that melts the instant it meets your tongue.

They also need a cold glass of milk, but that's a whole other matter.

CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES WITH BITTERSWEET GLAZE

t
his recipe is my standby chocolate cake formula. It makes a spectacularly moist, rich cake. I got the idea for the glaze from a local grocery store, where they used to sell chocolate cupcakes with a thin cap of chocolate instead of frosting. It was such a nice departure from the typical specimens you see these days, mounded high—almost obscenely, I think—with swirls of buttercream. Of course, much to my dismay, the market replaced “my” cupcake a couple of years ago with the usual, lots-o-frosting kind. I guess that's what people expect, but it was sad. Their cupcakes were never as good as homemade, though, so it was hard to complain for long.

If you're not the cupcake type, you can use this recipe to make a single cake instead. Follow the directions as written, but instead of a muffin tin, use an 8-or 9-inch cake pan, greased and lined with a round of parchment. (Be sure to grease the parchment, too, or else it could stick to the cake.) It will take 50 minutes to an hour to bake. The recipe also doubles easily to make a layer cake.

FOR THE CUPCAKES

1 ounce semisweet chocolate, finely chopped

½ cup hot brewed coffee

1 cup sugar

¾ cup plus 1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour

½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1 large egg

¼ cup canola oil

½ cup well-stirred plain whole-milk yogurt (not low fat or nonfat)

¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

FOR THE GLAZE

8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

 

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Line the wells of a standard-sized muffin tin with paper liners.

Put the semisweet chocolate in a medium bowl with the hot coffee.
Let stand, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth and opaque.

Meanwhile, in another medium bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer or, alternatively, a mixing bowl, if you plan to use handheld beaters, beat the egg on medium speed until it is pale yellow, about 1 minute. Add the oil, yogurt, and vanilla, beating well. Gradually pour in the melted chocolate mixture, and beat to thoroughly combine. Add the dry ingredients all at once, and beat on low speed until the batter is just combined. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the sides of the bowl and briefly stir to make sure that all the dry ingredients are absorbed.

Spoon the batter into the wells of the muffin tin, making sure that it is evenly distributed. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the cupcakes comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a wire rack, and cool for 20 minutes before—carefully: they're tender!—removing the cupcakes. Allow them to cool completely before glazing.

To make the glaze, melt the bittersweet chocolate in a metal or glass bowl set over a pan of gently simmering water. Stir frequently to prevent scorching. When the chocolate is completely smooth, it's ready. Working with one cupcake at a time, spoon a heaping teaspoonful of melted chocolate on top. Tilt and rotate the cupcake to coax the chocolate out to the edge. Alternatively, use a knife or icing spatula to spread the chocolate. The top of the cupcake should be entirely covered with a thin layer of chocolate. Spoon on more chocolate as needed.

Set the cupcakes aside at room temperature until ready to serve, at least an hour. The chocolate glaze will firm up a bit and become matte. You can, of course, serve them with the chocolate still warm and soft, but I prefer the taste and appearance of the cooled chocolate.

 

NOTE:
Stored in an airtight container at room temperature, these cupcakes are even better the second day.

 

Yield: 12 cupcakes

W
here food was concerned, my father was an equal-opportunity guy. There was little that he wouldn't try and even less that he didn't like. He loved chicken livers and scrapple, fat and gristle and escargots, and sardines straight from the can, all manner of things questionable and daunting. He even loved prunes. No one loves prunes. In the English language, there are just a handful of words that come with their own built-in laugh track, and
prune
is one of them. He didn't care. I am most definitely his daughter, because I don't either.

In recent years, marketers have tried to spiff up the public image of the prune, calling it a “dried plum” and fitting it with cheery new packaging. I like plums, especially the green type that comes out in late summer, as fragile as water balloons, but in all honesty, I like prunes better. I think of them as plums that have been improved by hardship, made finer by old age and wizening. They're the dark horse of dried fruits. Their concentrated flavor has more depth than a dried apricot, but without the shrill tang of raisins or the sticky sweetness of dates. And unlike their precursor, the fresh plum, they're available year-round, always at the ready. They may not be pretty, but they make up for it in other ways.

Straight from the bag, prunes are very good, but with a little heat and moisture, they get very,
very
good. I consider myself lucky to have
been schooled from an early age in the art of stewing them. In our house, it usually happened late at night, after Burg had changed out of his suit and into his blue polka-dotted bathrobe. He would load up a heavy saucepan with prunes, water, and thin slices of orange and lemon. Then he'd bring it to a boil, turn off the heat, snap on a lid, and let the pan sit until morning. By that point, the prunes hardly counted as dried fruits anymore; they were now soft, silky pockets of juice. When you scooped one up, it would slump wearily on the spoon, as though it had been woken up too early. Its skin would yield to the tooth with a gentle, dainty pop, and underneath, the flesh was lip-lickingly sweet, winey, and complex. The food safety people would have probably looked askance at Burg's overnight method, so I can't really advise it, but it did make ours a solidly pro-prune household.

Which is a good thing, no matter what people say.

STEWED PRUNES WITH CITRUS AND CINNAMON

i
treat my prunes very simply, as my father did. I use a method that's a little more conventional than his, but it's every bit as easy. They're delicious warm, with oatmeal or ice cream or thick Greek yogurt, although I also like them cold. That's how I eat them most days, in fact, alongside my bowl of cereal.

 

1 small orange or tangerine, preferably seedless, or ½ small orange and ½ lemon

1 pound best-quality pitted prunes

1 cinnamon stick

 

Cut the orange in half from stem to tip, and then slice it very thinly, peel and all. If it has seeds, pick them out as you go. Put the orange slices in a medium saucepan with the prunes and the cinnamon stick, and add water to just cover. Place over medium heat. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook, adjusting the heat as needed so that the liquid barely trembles, for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the prunes are tender, the orange slices are soft and glassy, and the liquid in the pan is slightly syrupy. Remove the cinnamon stick, cool slightly, and serve. Or let the prunes cool to room temperature and then store them in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to a week.

 

NOTE:
Stewed prunes improve with rest, so I try to make mine a day or so before I want to eat them.

 

Yield: about 10 servings

W
hen I was little, I thought my mother came from the most perfect family. They were all petite and attractive, four sons and three daughters, raised in a little house in Towson, Maryland, with a flagstone path that led to the front steps, a kitchen the size of an airplane galley, and three small bedrooms tucked under the eaves. I always thought of
Stuart Little
when I thought of that house. He would have been right at home there. He could have tucked his matchbox bed into a corner of the kitchen and become the official family mascot.

My mother was the third child in the brood. First came Chris, then Jerry, then my mother and, a minute or two after, her identical twin sister Tina. Eleven months later came a second set of twins, Millicent and John, and then the last, a baby boy named Jody. (My grandmother, as you might guess, was a real champ in the pregnancy department.) For his part, my father had one brother, Arnold, but we didn't see him nearly as often as we saw my mother's brothers and sisters. Arnie lives on the East Coast, and he doesn't like to fly. But my mother's siblings were spread out all over the place, and when we weren't spending holidays or summer vacations with my half-siblings, who were all a good deal older than me and likewise spread out all over the place, we spent them with my mother's family.

My aunts and uncles were fascinating and exotic. When we sent mail
to them, I got to write all sorts of strange names on the address label, like “Snowmass, Colorado,” where winter, I imagined, lasts all year long, or “Santa Rosa, California,” where my uncle Jerry once took me to a knick-knack store called Sweet Potato and bought me a pinky-sized set of bowling pins. I remember Jerry coming to visit us once in Oklahoma City, and how I couldn't sleep that night, waiting for him to arrive. I remember him flicking on the lamp beside my bed and leaning down to hug me. He was a horseman, and he wore flannel shirts all the time, mainly red and black checked ones, with blue jeans and boots. He had a boyish voice that could switch from serious to playful at the slightest instigation, one of those voices that sounds kind of crinkly, for lack of a better word, the way a person's voice sounds when he is smiling. When he spoke, his voice rustled in his throat like a bowl of potato chips does when you reach your hand in. Jerry was gay, and he lived with a man named Tom. My mother told me that they were “partners.” So far as I could tell, they were just like any other couple in the family, except that when my cousins and I were playing in their house one Christmas, we found a book full of black-and-white pictures of naked men in weird positions. I had never heard of my parents doing anything that looked like that.

When I was nine, Jerry died of AIDS. It was March of 1988, fairly early on in things, as the disease went. They didn't have any of the medications they have now. When he died, he was on his way to New York to see a doctor about an experimental treatment. He had flown to Baltimore to meet up with my grandmother, who was going to accompany him to New York, when he had to be hospitalized with Pneumocystis pneumonia. I remember sitting on the edge of my parents' bed late one night, or maybe it was early in the morning, and watching my mother pack her suitcase for the memorial service. It was held in the Catholic church where they went every Sunday as kids, and afterward, the siblings went to see the movie
Hairspray
at the Senator Theater. John Waters, the director of
Hairspray,
is from Towson, and so was Divine, the enormous transvestite who played Edna; they went to high school with my mother and aunts and uncles. As it happens, Divine died on March 7, the day after Jerry, and was buried in the local cemetery. I
always thought that was very cool, that my uncle and Divine might be putting on drag shows in the afterlife together.

After Jerry died, everything was different. It was like some seal had been broken, and whatever it was that was holding our family in place wasn't there anymore. My mother's sister Millicent was diagnosed with cancer only three weeks after Jerry's memorial service. Millicent was forty-one, with a baby who wasn't quite yet two. She'd been married only three years before, on a boat in Seattle, and I was a flower girl, along with my cousins Katie and Sarah, Tina's daughters. We wore poofy-sleeved dresses with smocking across the chest. My dad made mix tapes for the reception, and we danced to Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston. Mia, as we called her, was beautiful in her ivory lace dress, with a ripply laugh that reverberated through the room. Not long after, she got a sore throat that wouldn't go away, and the doctors said it was lung cancer. She died at home in June of 1989, asleep, in a nightgown dotted with pink flowers.

I knew that what was happening to my family was really bad, and I knew that my mother cried a lot, but I didn't know that all this early death wasn't normal. I guess whatever you grow up with seems normal. It's your life, no matter what it is. The year after Mia died, I found Gilda Radner's memoir on my mother's bookshelf. It's called
It's Always Something,
and it tells the story of her struggle with ovarian cancer. I thought it was fantastic, and I gave a book report on it for my fifth grade Language Arts class. My teacher, Mrs. Waldo, must have wrung her hands as I stood at the chalkboard and told my classmates about Gilda's meditation practice. Gilda loved to do laundry, especially towels, and when she was sick, she used to visualize her abdomen as a pink terrycloth towel. She envisioned the chemotherapy as a detergent swishing through, cleaning away all the specks of dirt (the dirt being cancer) which had embedded themselves in the little pink towel. I didn't know that eleven-year-old girls don't usually read books about ovarian cancer. In fact, until I started to write this paragraph, it didn't seem strange to me at all.

In my family, for many years, all the adults had “sad attacks.” They cried at the holiday dinner table. It was uncomfortable sometimes, but I
was also intrigued by it, by the way we live and then sometimes, all of a sudden, start to die. We did the best we could to make sense of it. I gave my book report. My cousin Katie made a panel in Jerry's name for the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. My cousin Sarah, though, did the best thing of all. She made pie.

For most of her adult life, my aunt Mia made Hoosier Pie for Thanksgiving. No one knows where the recipe came from or how she found it, but in essence, it's a pecan pie with chocolate and bourbon. It is, however, an unusually good pecan pie, with just the right ratio of nuts to soft, not-too-sweet goo. When Katie and Sarah were growing up, Mia lived nearby, so they had prime access to Hoosier Pie. In fact, Sarah told me the other day that it's the only food she remembers from holidays when she was little. She never liked the traditional pumpkin pie, and apple pie didn't excite her, but she loved Hoosier Pie.

“Thanksgiving was all about that pie,” she says, “because it meant I could have
chocolate.”
Sarah loves chocolate. I love that about her.

After Mia died, that first Thanksgiving, Sarah asked if she could make Hoosier Pie. From then on, she decided, she would make it every year in Mia's memory. Nearly two decades have passed, but she's yet to miss a year. Even the Thanksgiving when her parents had just divorced and no one wanted to cook, Hoosier Pie made the cut. With their father, Sarah and Katie ate Boston Market chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, and Mia's pie. With their mother, they ate chicken breasts from the grill, more of the same potatoes, and more pie. They also, incidentally, made a pumpkin pie, but it fell on the floor, a classic example of survival of the fittest.

Sarah is now married, and though her husband's family is more of an apple pie clan than a pecan one, she makes Mia's pie anyway.

“I don't care what other people want,” she says. “There
will
be Hoosier Pie.”

Her mother-in-law is courteous and cuts herself a slice, but Sarah always has leftovers. They're fantastic, she tells me, for breakfast the next morning. I hope to try that sometime, if I can actually get my Hoosier Pie to last past Thanksgiving dinner. This year, wherever she is, maybe Mia will pull some strings for me.

HOOSIER PIE

t
his pie is incredibly easy, which is part of why it makes such a good tradition. Sarah has made it in several kitchens over the years, and she says that it's hard to mess up. Sometimes she forgets to bring the butter for the filling to room temperature, so she melts it instead. In her first apartment, on Boylston Street in Boston, she didn't have a mixer or electric beaters, so she stirred in the sugar with a spoon. She also tells me that she's thrown a handful of dried cranberries into the filling, and they were wonderful—“to die for,” actually—with the pecans and chocolate.

Sarah uses a store-bought crust, but I like to make my own. Whatever you do, use the best bourbon you have, because its flavor will shine through. It should be the sort of thing you'd want to drink on its own. I like Woodford Reserve.

FOR THE CRUST

4 tablespoons ice water, plus more as needed

¾ teaspoon apple cider vinegar

1½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon sugar

¾ teaspoon salt

1 stick plus 1 tablespoon (4½ ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

FOR THE FILLING

4 tablespoons (2 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup sugar

3 large eggs

¾ cup light corn syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons bourbon

½ cup chocolate chips, preferably bittersweet, such as Ghirardelli 60%

1 cup pecan halves

FOR SERVING

Unsweetened whipped cream, optional

 

TO PREPARE THE CRUST

In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine the ice water and cider vinegar.

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Pulse to blend. Add the butter, and pulse until the mixture resembles a coarse meal; there should be no pieces of butter bigger than a large pea. With the motor running, slowly add the water-vinegar mixture, processing just until moist clumps form. If you pick up a handful of the dough and squeeze it in your fist, it should hold together. If the dough seems a bit dry, add more ice water by the teaspoon, pulsing to incorporate. I often find that 1 additional teaspoon is perfect.

Turn the dough out onto a wooden board or clean countertop, and gather it, massaging and pressing, until it just holds together. Shape into a ball, and press into a disk about 1½ inches thick. If the disk cracks a bit at the edges, don't worry; just pinch the cracks together as well as you can. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, and then press it a bit more, massaging away any cracks around the edges, allowing the constraint of the plastic wrap to help you form it into a smooth disk. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours. (Dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 4 days or sealed in a heavy-duty plastic bag and frozen for up to 1 month. Thaw it in the refrigerator overnight before using.) Before rolling it out, allow the dough to soften slightly at room temperature.

TO ASSEMBLE

Set an oven rack to the middle position, and preheat the oven to 375°F. Roll the dough into a circle wide enough to fit a 9-or 9½-inch pie plate. Transfer the dough gently into the pie plate, and fold and crimp the edges to form a high fluted rim. Put the prepared pie plate in the refrigerator while you make the filling.

In a medium bowl, beat the butter on medium-low speed until soft and creamy. Gradually add the sugar, beating all the while. When the sugar is fully incorporated, add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Then add the corn syrup, vanilla, and salt. Beat well. Beat in the bourbon. The batter should be pale yellow and fairly thin.

Remove the prepared pie plate from the refrigerator. Scatter the chocolate chips and nuts evenly over the base of the crust; then pour in the batter. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, checking every 5 minutes after the 30-minute mark. The filling will puff gently as it bakes. The pie is ready when the edges are firm, the top is deep brown, and the center seems set but jiggles ever so slightly. Transfer the pie to a wire rack to cool to room temperature. The filling will firm up as it cools.

Serve with whipped cream, if you like.

 

NOTE:
Wrapped in plastic wrap, Hoosier Pie will keep at room temperature for up to 3 days, if it doesn't get eaten first.

 

Yield: 8 servings