The Cakes my Mother Made

           My recent enthusiasm for baking has brought back memories of the cakes my mother used to make.  I’m not sure whether they would be considered pound cakes or sponge cakes.  They were just “mummy’s cakes.”  Or, to others, “Duru Aunty’s cakes.” 

In our extended family in India, for a long time, we were the only ones with an oven.  The house we lived in, provided by the company my father worked for, had a western-style stove that had an oven below, unlike the counter-top stoves at my relatives’ homes.  So my mother was the source of all the homemade cakes our family enjoyed.

            I remember squatting on the kitchen floor once, next to newspapers that were spread out under bowls of flour and other ingredients.  I was too young to help, I was told.  I could only watch.  I remember the sweet smell of vanilla as the cake came out of the oven.  I remember wanting to eat it right away, when it was hot and sweet, but having to wait.  Some of the batter had been put into small, aluminum cups in pretty shapes with scalloped edges.  The mini cakes were like madeleines.  I had to wait until they cooled before I could eat one. 

By the time I was a teenager, my mother wanted to teach me how to cook.  But, by then, I wasn’t interested.  I was willing to chop vegetables—I enjoyed it, even—and I was always willing to eat what my mother cooked.  In fact, she asked me to taste everything she made.  “Is there enough salt?” she’d ask.  When she tried to teach me how to cook, though, I’d get bored and walk away. 

This changed when I was in grad school.  I no longer had access to college cafeteria food and needed to learn how to cook.  In the process of asking my mother about the meals I grew up eating, I asked for her cake recipe.

I still laugh about that recipe.  She told me how many eggs and how much flour and how much butter, but when it came to the milk, she said, “Keep adding milk until the batter flows easily off the spoon.”  So I wrote down exactly that.  Thinking of that recipe helps me to understand why I have rarely baked before: I don’t have much practice with precise measurements and sometimes feel confined by them. Until recently, I would look at recipes with their lists of numbers and feel overwhelmed and restricted.  So I didn’t bake much. 

Cooking on the stove is different.  I can add ingredients as I taste the food, and since I often cook food I am familiar with, food I grew up eating, I know how it should taste and know how I want to alter it (usually I add more chilies in it than my mother would).  And on the stove, I can work with the quirky recipes my mother gives me (her recent instructions on gaajar in methi will be material for another blog; I will tell you though the end result was absolutely delicious).

Recently, though, perhaps in part because of the blissful Thanksgiving morning I spent making stuffing from a recipe (http://transplantedontheprairie.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-would-rather-be-here-now.html), I am drawn to the process of baking.  I don’t mind measuring precisely, working on a counter covered in cups and spoons to help me.  I take out the wonderful wooden spoon I reserve for mixing cake and muffin batter and feel pleasure as I stir the ingredients in the big, green Pyrex bowl that my partner, Marilyn, has had forever.  I follow recipes and make notes on them about what I notice.  Mixing the ingredients in the bowl makes me happy. 

My new enthusiasm for baking makes me think that we get to move on, to grow.  I still alter recipes, as I did recently when I added strawberries to blueberry lemon muffins, but I no longer feel overwhelmed as I flip through recipes with unfamiliar ingredients and lists of measurements.

One day soon, I’ll pull out the recipe for the cake my mother made, one I haven’t tried in about twenty years, and I’ll bake it again.  Maybe this time I’ll measure how much milk it takes to get the batter to flow off the spoon just right.  And maybe I’ll even tell my mum.

Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf!

I have missed writing the past few days.  I have been teaching, and preparing to teach, and thinking about teaching, and I have also been reading applications for the search committee on which I am serving.  

But today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday.  Today, I must write.  

I love Woolf’s writing: its elegance and verve and humor.  When I spent a semester in England three years ago, I went on what I considered a Virginia Woolf pilgrimage.  Included in my visits were Monk’s House (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/monks-house/) and Sissinghurst (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst-castle/).  Below, I include  photos I took there of Virginia Woolf’s and Vita Sackville-West’s desks.  May they inspire us all. 

Woolf's desk in the shed at Monk's House, Sussex

Woolf's photo on Vita Sackville-West's desk at Sissinghurst, Kent

 

Since it’s her birthday, we must hear Woolf’s own voice.  It somehow comforts me to know, that like most of us, Woolf also worried whether her writing was good enough.  And she loved being at home with her books.  She wrote this in a letter to Violet Dickinson  in early January 1905.  She was nearing her twenty-third birthday. (I am leaving her quirky punctuation intact): “I shall be rather—in fact very—glad to be home, in my own room, with my books, and I want to work like a steam engine, though editors wont take what I write.  I must show you what I have done, when it is typed, and please be very kind…and please don’t say you want to alter heaps of things or I shall give up writing altogether and take up drink or society.”

The Wind in the Grass

Earlier this week, on an unusually mild January day, I took a walk in the prairie.  When I walk alone, I often listen to music.  The rhythm encourages me to walk faster, and I enjoy the lyrics--though sometimes I become lost in my own thoughts, the music reduced to a beat in the background which my feet follow but my head ignores.  On that sunny day, I was partway through my walk when I realized that my smart phone, on which I listen to music, was still in my pocket.  I noticed my pace was slower than usual, but I decided I didn’t mind.  I wasn’t in any particular hurry (some of my favorite words in the English language) and was planning to go off the paved path and into the grass.  So I left the music off.  As I walked, I heard the rustle of the dry grass as it swished in the wind.  At one point, I stopped to listen more carefully. That was when I took the phone out of my pocket: to make a short video.  In the recording, the sound of the wind sometimes drowns out the rustling of the grass, but I am posting it anyway as a memory of that lovely walk when I listened to the music of the prairie grass. 

Peeling Oranges and Paying Attention

Last week, when I ordered fruit as a side at a restaurant, I especially enjoyed the oranges.  I love oranges, but I don’t eat them very often.  I think this is because eating oranges is not a simple process, and it certainly is not conducive to multitasking.  But last week, I was still on break from work and time felt plentiful.  So when I was at the grocery store with Marilyn, I told her that I would buy oranges so I could eat one every morning. 

Of course, I didn’t eat an orange on Tuesday, my first day back.   It was enough just to be awake and dressed and at a meeting by 9 a.m. after having stayed up really late each night over break. 

On Wednesday morning, though, I remembered the oranges. 

As I was peeling an orange, I noticed it demanded my attention.  I peel oranges by making vertical cuts down the rind and using my fingers to remove the peel.  In the process, my hands get sticky.  As I separate the segments, sometimes the pulp remains on my fingers.  When I am peeling an orange, I cannot also be working on the computer or writing in my journal.  This is not a fruit to toss in my lunch bag, not like the apple I usually take to work.  This fruit requires patience.  I have to peel it, section it, and only then can I eat it.  

Ideally, I would eat it standing in front of the kitchen window, looking at the new blue spruce tree planted in our backyard last fall and watching the birds at the feeder. 

But on Wednesday, I was in the midst of revising syllabi.  I needed to work.   So I cut the orange into bite-size pieces, put them in a bowl, and ate them with a fork.  So I multitasked after all. 

Still, for a few minutes there, I had stopped working and paid attention to this beautiful, fragrant fruit. 

That evening, as we walked in our neighborhood, I told Marilyn my thoughts about oranges and the attention they demand.  She nodded. “Every eighth grader should be required to peel an orange once a week.  That will help them to learn to focus on one task for a few minutes.”  As I imagined rows of eighth graders intent on the fruit, their fingers sticky with juice, I smiled at this woman I love.