Baking with Zingerman’s

Mural at Zingerman’s Bake House, Ann Arbor.
Len took a rye bread baking class there last week.

The bake house, the classrooms, the creamery,
the candy shop, and the coffee shop are all together in
a sprawling semi-industrial complex.

It was a beautiful day, and we had a quick snack before he went into the classroom.

The small, dark rye went very well with salad and black bean “meatballs.”
As it was a German-style bread, I tried for German-style flavor (but meatless).

NOTE: How to make these black bean “meantballs” —  Combine and mash the following with a potato masher: 1 beaten egg, 1 can of drained black beans, 10 finely chopped pecans or walnuts (= 2 tablespoons), 1/3 cup Panko breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, ground caraway seeds, and herbs to taste. Form into 8-10 small patties, chill for a while to firm them up, and fry them in oil on medium heat. Serve with yogurt sauce flavored with capers and herbs.

History

This week’s class was Len’s second Zingerman’s baking school experience. The first (here) was in 2019.

Blog post and photos by mae sander. © 2019, 2022.

Claire Messud

“I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes—rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast. Her University of Michigan degree was all but ornamental, and it always seemed significant that it stood in its frame under the eaves in the attic, festooned with dust bunnies, among a dozen disavowed minor artworks, behind boxes of discarded toys. The first woman in her family to go to college, she’d cared enough to frame her diploma, only then to be embarrassed about having cared, embarrassed because she felt she hadn’t done anything with it, had squandered her opportunity. The transition from pride to shame took place sometime soon after my birth, I think: I appeared in ’67, and by 1970, her two closest friends in Manchester had divorced and moved away, reborn into the messy and not necessarily happier lives of the liberated.” (The Woman Upstairs, p. 49-50)

This passage portrays a woman of my generation with frankness and, I think, a lot of judgmental baggage. The frustration and especially the anger of this woman and many like her would have been the center of many works of literary fiction in the sixties and seventies. But here’s a novel, published in 2013, that explores how that anger and frustration is inherited by another generation!

Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs, is a highly respected and admired author, and I’ve been meaning to read one of her books for a long time. Finally, I read this one, because the summary was the most intriguing to me. I wasn’t disappointed — she’s wonderful at capturing the spirit of the age for two generations. I liked the plot and the small and varied group of characters that play a role in the narrator’s story. I liked the characterization of one successful and one unsuccessful artist. I liked the strong feelings of jealousy, hatred, love, and frustration. 

And I liked the well-observed details: food and drink, of course, but also the cups and plates and waiters and cafe environments where the narrator shares food with the other characters, or where she eats alone. Such as this continuing memory of her mother’s era:

“Do you remember the ladies’ lunches of those days? The table set first thing in the morning. Cold poached salmon and Waldorf salad, pitchers of iced tea, sweating bottles of white wine, everything served on the best china, and the ladies all still there in a blue fog of cigarette smoke when I came home from school, as though there were nothing, nothing to call them away. And the knowledge, which I had even then, that once they left the charmed circle, they were gone forever.” (p. 52)

But enough of the portrayal of the seventies, look at these descriptions from the early twentieth century, from the narrator’s (and the author’s) own generation. For example, she brings food to share with her friend who shares her art studio:

“I lingered over my choices in the shops on a Friday evening: flavored breadsticks or big Swedish crackers like enormous communion hosts, wrapped in crinkly white paper; olives, cheeses, cured meats; dolmas; burek; sweet peppers stuffed with soft curd. Tubs of ratatouille, piperade, anchoïade. Endive leaves; strips of fennel. Purple broccoli stalks. Heirloom tomatoes, which cost a fortune in early spring. And sweets: I’d bring such sweets—the famous Highland Avenue cupcakes or sesame buns soaked in honey, or salted chocolate oatmeal cookies, or loukoum, or extravagant bars of Italian chocolate from the deli down the road from my house…” (p. 170)

But in the studio, they drink endless cups of coffee from  “an Italian percolator, the heavy octagonal kind that sits upon the stove, and an array of chipped teacups from the Goodwill shop.” (p. 78) And sometimes she shares wine in these same teacups, washed over and over again as she cleans up the studio, often cleaning up both her own and her friend’s messes. 

I could focus more on the anger, the sense of betrayal and frustration, the unmet expectations, and the many other fascinatingly portrayed aspects of the narrator’s life. It’s an enjoyable book, but in a way, it’s very much a type of book — one that’s been around for a long time, more than 100 years, about the plight of women in our society. I like to see it as an update on all those books I read in the seventies. I see Messud as the heir of a long and proud tradition, as well as seeing her originality and imagination.

In a corner of my attic: feminist literature from the 1970s. There’s more than this!

Review © 2022 mae sander

Time Travel

“Darwin, Disraeli, the Indian question, Alice in Wonderland, Little Nell, Turner, Tennyson, Three Men in a Boat, crinolines, croquet, … penwipers, crocheted antimacassars, hair wreaths, Prince Albert, Flush, frock coats, sexual repression, Ruskin, Fagin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw, Gladstone, Galsworthy, Gothic Revival, Gilbert and Sullivan, lawn tennis, and parasols.” — To Say Nothing of the Dog,  p. 38.

Time travel to the nineteenth century requires some preparation, and Ned, the narrator of Connie Willis’s novel  To Say Nothing of the Dog, only receives the quoted summary of Victorian life before being transported to a long adventure in 1888. His adventures are controlled by somewhat bumbling time-travel monitors in the late twenty-first century Oxford, his native time and place. 

The book does have a plot, sort-of — centered on the bombing of Coventry Cathedral in a Nazi raid in 1940. But the narrative is mostly humor about Ned’s efforts to keep his secret: that he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a mission that he doesn’t quite understand, which involves finding a hideous Victorian flower holder called a bird stump. He collaborates with other time travelers from his own era, all avoiding the paradoxes that occur when you mess with the continuum. Or something. 

It’s fun to read Ned’s story, and to finally find out what his mission probably was, and how he and his co-travelers used bits and pieces of popular twentieth-century literature to figure out how to act and what to expect. The book was written at the end of the twentieth century, so the characters really don’t know about the twenty-first century except that there was a pandemic around 2020 — really! I wonder how the author knew that. Also, cats had gone extinct, seemingly from some disease. I guess the cat pandemic will happen in a few years from now, as the author predicts.

I especially enjoyed Ned’s bafflement at the manners of 19th century people. For example, he almost gets into TERRIBLE trouble when he notices that a Victorian cat (which he loves seeing in the flesh) is soon going to have kittens — an UNMENTIONABLE condition in front of the ladies. 

Ned is also challenged by the typical country house breakfast at the stately home where he somehow manages to be invited as a guest, as the characters who are there are part of his mission. I think the author probably read the same English Breakfast documentation that I reviewed a few years ago (blog post here). 

Ned begins by describing covered dish “which had a statuette of a flopping fish for a handle.” His colleague, Verity, also suitable disguised from her 21st century self, takes off the lid:

“Good Lord, what’s that?” I was staring at a bed of blindingly yellow rice with strips of flaked white in it. “It’s kedgeree,” she said, putting a small spoonful on her plate. “Curried rice and smoked fish.” “For breakfast?” “It’s an Indian dish. The Colonel’s fond of it.” She put the lid back on. (p. 214)

As they check out the breakfast buffet, they discuss their mission, and she helps him cope with the food: 

She moved down to the next covered dish. This lid had a large antlered deer. I wondered briefly if they represented some sort of code, but the next one down was a snarling wolf, so I doubted it. … Inside was a mass of pungent-smelling brown objects. “What’s that?” “Devilled kidneys,” she said, “braised in chutney and mustard. In Hercule Poirot mysteries, there’s always one little fact that doesn’t fit, and that’s the key to the mystery.” She picked up a charging bull by the horns. “This is cold ptarmigan.” “Aren’t there any eggs and bacon?” She shook her head. “Strictly for the lower classes.” She held out a shellacked fish on a fork. “Kipper?” I settled for porridge. (p. 215)

The Hercule Poirot mysteries, the Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse, Three Men and a Boat (which was published a year after the events at the breakfast table), and many others are constantly in the thoughts of Ned and Verity as they jump back as far as the fourteenth century, to 1940, or to 2022. In a way, reading this novel could make you a little dizzy.

Review © 2022 mae sander. 

With thanks to Elaine & Larry for the recommendation,

Ancient Birds

On our visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts last weekend, we spent most of our time in the Van Gogh in America exhibit. But after having lunch in the museum cafeteria, we walked through a few rooms of art from ancient times. I enjoyed seeing many birds and animals represented by the remarkable artists from thousands of years ago. These creatures often represented protective deities that took bird or animal form.

Walking Ibis, Egypt, 600-30 BCE.

Falcon of the God Horus, Egypt, 7th Century BCE. 

Tile from Iran, 1600s.

Vessel with Mountain Goat Spout, Turkey, 9th Century BCE.

Cup with water birds, Iran, 17th Century BCE

Sacrifices for the Dead, Egypt, 2450-2290 BCE

Protective Deity, Assyrian Culture, 900-650 BCE

Eagle-Headed Winged Guardian, Assyrian, 9th century BCE

Detail of winged guardian.

Photos © 2022 mae sander

Michigan Votes

Amazing, but yesterday's election may not be nearly as bad as we feared. These are the two big results so far in my state, Michigan. The legislature result seems not yet decided. There are also several pretty good results nation-wide, though many are pending.

Long Live Democracy

Surprisingly, no lines this morning.

 

What I must do today...

"If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention." -- Paul Krugman, November 7, 2022

Source: google search

 

Source: City of Trenton, MI 

Source: Michigan Radio

Some Experiments in Asian Cooking

Cookbooks from our collection.

Recently we — especially Len — have been experimenting with Asian recipes. This is both a lot of work and a lot of fun. He’s tried a number of new techniques and flavors. Here are a few photos of some of these dishes.

Ingredients.

A delicious tofu stir-fry flavored with tamarind paste.

Vietnamese steamed fish en papillote, with which we drank wine, of course.

The steamed fish taken out of its parchment wrapper.

 

Vegetables and rice to go with the steamed fish.

A salad of bean sprouts and cherry tomatoes.

Using our steamer for bao.

Bao buns filled with mushrooms and bok choi, with carrot pickles.

A different experiment: frozen pakora from the
Indian grocery store….

… and frozen samosas. Both were good and easy!

Blog post © 2022 mae sander

At the Detroit Institute of Arts

Van Gogh in America

Waiting in line for the fabulous Van Gogh Exhibit at
the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Huge murals of famous Van Gogh paintings are shown on the way into the exhibit.
Attendance on Saturday was at capacity, but the crowds were controlled by timed admissions.

The selection of paintings and drawings was superb.

We were thrilled by the extensive assembly of works by Van Gogh in “Van Gogh in America.” According to the organizers: 

“Van Gogh in America is the first exhibition dedicated to the introduction and early reception of Vincent van Gogh’s art in the United States. The exhibition displays 78 works by Van Gogh, illustrating the efforts made by early promoters of his art—including the artist’s family—in America”

The DIA was the first American Museum to acquire a Van Gogh painting for its collection: exactly 100 years ago. In 1922, the city of Detroit purchased a self-portrait that he had painted in 1887. By this time, Van Gogh was widely appreciated in Europe, and his works were highly valued. However, the American art establishment was very slow to appreciate his incredible genius. 

The exhibit documents how a few black-and-white newspaper articles and then the 1913 Armory Show in New York displayed some of his paintings, which didn’t find purchasers. A later exhibit, organized by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and others also featured Van Gogh paintings. Several of the works from this show by other artists such as Frank Stella and Paul Cézanne were in the DIA exhibit in addition to the Van Goghs,

The history of how the American museum-going public came to love Van Gogh and how other museums and other exhibits made his work more widely available was the main subject of the exhibit. The placards on the walls and other documentation also show how the legend of Van Gogh’s supposedly tormented life took over the public imagination, despite evidence that he was a thoughtful and painstaking draftsman and artist. This unusual approach to art history makes this exhibit different from most art exhibits I have seen, and I found it wonderful and fascinating.

Other Famous Works in the DIA Collection

We love going to the DIA, and were delighted to return after three years, as the pandemic has kept us away. Here are two works that we saw today, among those that we have enjoyed returning to over and over. The museum is less than an hour’s drive from our home, so we have frequented its galleries throughout the time we have lived here.

 

Diego Rivera’s interpretations of Detroit Industry are among his most impressive murals.

The DIA also has a remarkable collection of puppets from the early 20th century.
This is a puppet of Cleopatra by Martin T. Stevens and Olga Stevens.
Only a few puppets are displayed at any one time, so Cleopatra was new to me.

Review © 2022 mae sander.

 

Good Movie

We watched the second Enola Holmes film on Netflix. It manages to be both very funny, full of almost unbelievable chase scenes, and also suspenseful. It has very good actors, starring Millie Bobby Brown and including Helena Bonham Carter. A major plot element — protest against abuse of the women who work in a toxic match factory — is based on actual history. 

As far as I noticed, there’s not a single bite of food consumed or mentioned in the film (correct me if I’m wrong) — though I always look for food scenes. I didn’t miss them. There’s very little food in the original Sherlock Holmes either. 

Here’s the most surprising thing about it: there is a character named Mae.

Review by mae sander © 2022

What will they think of next?

 

This is not a joke. It was being sold at Costco with all the other pet food.

Mr. Micawber

 

From the project Gutenberg online David Copperfield,
a facsimile of the 1869 illustrated edition.

David Copperfield, published in 1849, is an undisputed classic. While I have read it before, I just read it again, and again found it very very long but wonderful, masterful, unimaginably great. I remembered a great deal, but found many fascinating features of the plot and the characters that I recalled only when reading. 

I reread this novel because I was curious to know it better, and also because I wanted to know how Barbara Kingsolver’s new publication, Demon Copperhead, had used Dickens’ material. The answer is, Kingsolver’s work borrowed much more than I recognized when I was reading it, because I had forgotten so many details of Dickens’ characters. I don’t feel like writing a comparison, though. I’m sure someone else will do that. In my recent write-up of her book, I mentioned some of these things.

What can I say about David Copperfield that could possibly be new, after all the years of people saying things about it? Dickens is most admired for his characters and dialog, for a type of intense pathos contrasting with very funny scenes, and for a deep look at the social problems of his era. I love the way he writes these things. The dialog is very different from modern novels, as the characters really speak at length and in a very individualized way, in some cases involving language that reveals their social class and local origin, In some cases this includes dialect words that Dickens explains parenthetically, suggesting that even his readers at the time wouldn’t have known them. Some characters have one special phrase in their speech, and repeat it often, but the individualization goes much further than that. 

Although it’s been done before, I decided to focus on just one character: Mr. Micawber, whom David Copperfield first encountered when he was a mistreated child, and continues to meet as he matures. (If you aren’t familiar with the story, it is a first-person account of Copperfield’s life from his birth through near-middle age.)  For most of the novel, Micawber is a constantly unsuccessful businessman, who finds new opportunities to fail in business or professional life, while he pawns or sells the family property to support them. He repeatedly says he is sure that something will turn up:

“I have known him come home to supper with a flood of  tears, and a declaration that nothing was now left but a jail; and go to bed making a calculation of the expense of putting bow-windows to the house, ‘in case anything turned up’, which was his favourite expression. And Mrs. Micawber was just the same.” (Chapter 11)

Micawbar’s debts, as implied here, sometimes cause him to be thrown out of his rented quarters along with his brood of children and his loyal wife who repeats the statement “I will never desert Mr. Micawber.” When the Micawbers have money, they even entertain well. On one occasion, we learn:

“We had a beautiful little dinner. Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney-end of a loin of veal, roasted; fried sausage-meat; a partridge, and a pudding. There was wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands.” (Chapter 17).

After being a very predictable character most of the way through the novel, however, Mr. Micawber does something totally unexpected and courageous: obtaining evidence to rescue David Copperfield’s dear friend and mentor Mr. Wickfield, who has been blackmailed and scammed by the throughly disgusting character Uriah Heep. (Dickens is much admired for creating this incredibly hideous and physically and morally revolting personality!)

Micawber, through all his experiences, is best known for this statement:

"‘My other piece of advice, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!’ To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and whistled the College Hornpipe." (Chapter 12)

Besides his memorable views about his pecuniary misfortunes, on several occasions Micawber shares the noted drink of punch with David Copperfield. In fact, on these occasions, he mixes the punch, using lemons, boiling water, and some rum. After mixing the punch, he often drinks several glasses of it, and considers it a kind of patriotic thing to do: he refers to "the ingredients necessary to the composition of a moderate portion of that Beverage which is peculiarly associated, in our minds, with the Roast Beef of Old England. I allude to—in short, Punch." (Chapter 57) 

The Micawber family with David Copperfield, seated around a table set for making punch.

 

Here’s how he did it on one occasion that David Copperfield describes:

"I informed Mr. Micawber that I relied upon him for a bowl of punch, and led him to the lemons. His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone in a moment. I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning rum, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr. Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity." (Chapter 28)

Dickens is an amazing writer, though a modern reader has to adjust to the length and depth of his descriptions, the long-windedness of the dialog, and the incredibly enormous number of characters that make up his work. If you consider that his novels were published in serial form — David Copperfield  appeared over two years in 20 installments — reading the novel is really like binge watching an old TV series with two seasons of 10 episodes each!

Blog post © 2022 mae sander. 

Creativity by Haruki Murakami

"Most of the time, the characters who appear in my novels naturally emerge from the flow of the story. I almost never decide in advance that I’ll present a particular type of character. As I write, a kind of axis forms that makes possible the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and fit one detail after another into place, like iron scraps attaching to a magnet. And in this way an overall picture of a person materializes. Afterward I often think that certain details resemble those of a real person, but most of the process happens automatically. I think I almost unconsciously pull information and various fragments from the cabinets in my brain and then weave them together." -- Haruki Murakami

Reading fiction is one of my favorite pastimes, and Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors, so I was fascinated to read his account of how he creates his characters. I find it hard to imagine myself into his brilliant brain or into the process he describes. In the article, titled "Where My Characters Come From: I don't choose them, they choose me," published last week in The Atlantic, he reveals a situation that's totally beyond me -- and fascinating, especially observations like this:

"When a novel is on the right track, the characters take on a life of their own, the story moves forward by itself, and the novelist ends up in a very happy situation, just writing down what he sees happening in front of him. And sometimes a character takes the novelist by the hand, leading the way to an unexpected destination."

Editions of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, which I've enjoyed reading more than once.

In his article, Murakami describes how his feelings about people contribute to his creativity with the characters in his novels, and how his process evolved over decades of writing novels. To me, this is amazing. In his early novels, for example, he wrote in the first person, and he mainly did not give names to his characters:

"Why couldn’t I give them actual names? I don’t know the answer. All I can say is that I felt embarrassed about assigning people names. I felt that somebody like me endowing others (even characters I made up) with names seemed kind of phony. Maybe in the beginning I felt embarrassed, too, by the whole act of writing novels. It was like laying my naked heart out for everyone to see."

Murakami talks in detail about some of his books and how the characters came to life while he was writing. I can't imagine ever being able to do what he does, despite the fact that he writes some of his article as advice to aspiring writers. I find it exciting to read what he says, and impossible to imagine doing it. I'm in the middle of reading Dickens' David Copperfield, which has scores of vivid characters, and I wonder if Dickens' experience in writing was anything like the process Murakami documents here.

I especially liked Murakami's final sentence:

"Whenever I begin writing a new novel, I get excited, wondering what kinds of people I’m going to meet next."

I'm looking forward to reading whatever novel this process will bring next! 

Blog post © 2022 mae sander