A couple of well-meaning readers have recently inquired into the foundations of my relationship with food, or, more succinctly, the origins of this thing I call Orangette.
As the following amply demonstrates, such seemingly harmless questions
can be downright dangerous when combined with an afternoon of digging in the archives,
both online and off. What follows comes to you straight from a
tattered, sun-bleached sketchbook that holds my teenage writing—or, at
least, the snippets of it that aren’t stashed in my parents’ freezer,
which I once fervently believed was the only way to secure it for the
ages.
Dear reader, I humbly present to you the story of how it all began, the story of how one verbose teenager in the wilds of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, found her way to the kitchen, as told in her own words.* I wrote this essay-cum-prose-poem, fittingly titled “Kitchen,” ten years ago, when I was 17 and fresh from my first edible epiphany. Please, handle with care.
*With long-overdue thanks and apologies to Frank O’Hara, Armistead Maupin, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O’Connor, in whose works I’d been thoroughly pickling myself when “Kitchen” was born.
Dear reader, I humbly present to you the story of how it all began, the story of how one verbose teenager in the wilds of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, found her way to the kitchen, as told in her own words.* I wrote this essay-cum-prose-poem, fittingly titled “Kitchen,” ten years ago, when I was 17 and fresh from my first edible epiphany. Please, handle with care.
*With long-overdue thanks and apologies to Frank O’Hara, Armistead Maupin, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O’Connor, in whose works I’d been thoroughly pickling myself when “Kitchen” was born.
Kitchen
Fresh Ginger Cake with Caramelized Pears
From Gourmet, February 1996
¼ cup unsulfured molasses
¼ cup sour cream
½ stick unsalted butter, melted
¼ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp grated peeled fresh gingerroot
½ teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
2 medium firm-ripe pears
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup sugar
3 tablespoons water
1 ½ teaspoons Cognac or other brandy
3 tablespoons heavy cream
From Gourmet, February 1996
¼ cup unsulfured molasses
¼ cup sour cream
½ stick unsalted butter, melted
¼ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp grated peeled fresh gingerroot
½ teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
2 medium firm-ripe pears
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup sugar
3 tablespoons water
1 ½ teaspoons Cognac or other brandy
3 tablespoons heavy cream
Midnight, and we converge upon the kitchen: Mom for poached pears, Burg for rice pudding, and me for fresh ginger cake with caramelized pears.
Lately I’ve been really identifying with the kitchen, the way it’s
always warm in the pantry, its shelves lined with bottles or bags
labeled “Raspberry Apple Butter” or “Cranberry Beans” or “Quaker
Barley,” the way there are cookbooks laying open on the butcher-block
island, the way it smells good after dinner and in the afternoon when
the refrigerator is cold and full. It’s been this way since Christmas
with me, eagerly thumbing through the new issue of Gourmet in
search of a recipe to read about, soak in, taste without tasting. But
the recipe for fresh ginger cake with caramelized pears demands
immediate attention, tonight. So we go to the store after dinner and
come home with a backseat full of bags: gingerroot, a dozen eggs, a
bottle of molasses with a sweet-looking granny on the label, a pint of
heavy cream, a tub of sour cream, and pears (firm-ripe).
We
all think alike. Burg is at the stove with the double boiler, then
opening the pantry for rice. Mom is at the sink, peeling pears with her
new vegetable peeler, leaning over the recipe for “Pears Noir” from her California Heritage Cookbook.
I am making the cake I can’t stop thinking about. Me, I want fresh
ginger cake with caramelized pears at midnight with the rice pudding and
the poaching pears still on the stove and the kitchen warm and the cake
and caramel and pears warm and the marble tabletop cold under my
elbows.
Rice pudding is fine, but it’s
not for me. It is Burg’s once-a-week-or-so fun, later to be Tupperwared
and tucked into the fridge for occasional spooning. The poached pears
will tomorrow be coated in bittersweet chocolate and served to the
guests who will sit and laugh in the dining room with my parents. But
the cake is mine. Cake: I like it on my tongue, the word—not just the
stuff itself—but even better in my throat, my stomach. Cake. It can only mean something good.
I
never thought I would like rice pudding, anyway. Something about the
dairy and the rice; they shouldn’t be together. But I’ve changed my
mind. I wonder if it is my father’s rice pudding that’s done it—only
three tablespoons of sugar, and amazing—or maybe my uncle’s rice. My
father’s brother Arnie sends the rice from Nanuet, New York—basmati
rice, straight from India, still in the little burlap sack with the
handles and the big red block letters spelling out the name of a town I
can’t pronounce. Arnie is fun. He calls for Burg and speaks slowly
slowly and it makes me crazy if I’m in the middle of something because
it seems to take hours to get him over to Burg. The word “Hello” in and
of itself takes a good minute. But Arnie is fun. He looks like Burg and
has a dog that’s nearly as tall as he is. So I like rice pudding because
of Arnie and the rice, and after all, it is my very own father’s rice
pudding, although really, I don’t think I’m biased at all.
And
the poached pears; I like them too. Well, picture it: you’re lying in
an overfluffed bed in the upstairs bedroom of a bed-and-breakfast in
Cape Neddick, Maine, just before Christmas, and there's snow piling high
on the ground outside, but it’s warm up there, under the canopy, in the
bed. It’s eight o’clock. There’s a knock at the door. You roll out of
bed. At your feet is a silver tray with one cup, a silver coffee pot, a
cream pitcher, and a sugar bowl. You pick it up, close the door, rest
the tray on your bedside table, pour yourself a cup of blacky-brown
coffee, and you sink back into bed under the comforter and return to
your second volume of the Tales of the City series, and it’s a
good morning because on the page Mona is discovering her roots in a
whorehouse in Nevada with Mother Mucca, and gynecologist Jon Fielding is
wooing Michael again. And then, of course, there’s breakfast at nine.
First, there will be pineapple scones, still warm from the baking sheet,
and a cloth-lined tin of cinnamon muffins and apple-spice bread. Then a
poached pear, buoyed by a pool of Grand Marnier crème anglaise. Then a
warm plate with a small poached egg on a bed of puréed spinach, with
caramelized apples and a crispy little phyllo purse filled with sausage,
ricotta, and mushrooms and baked until flaky outside and melting
inside. This is breakfast on this almost-Christmas of your 18th year.
You sigh and decide to stay seated right where you are until tea at 4:30
(cranberry linzer tart; ready?).
So yes,
I like poached pears. Because I was in Maine that Christmas, and I ate
everything and then another scone an hour after breakfast because I can
never get enough, it seems. Because poached pears landed squarely in the
middle of the breakfast to go down in history, the breakfast that set
me afire, afire with the love of the food! Aaaaah-men! And
hence this midnight meeting in the kitchen, this preoccupation with cake
and caramel and fragrant winter pears.
To
the kitchen. This cake will be incredible—mark my word—and I will grate
this ginger even if the milk that runs out from under the grater makes
me feel a little queasy. It will be that good. It will be
delicious, yes. In the oven, my cake makes the kitchen smell full and
alive, and the pears bubble in the pan with sugar and butter and cream.
Midnight, and the kitchen is clicking and burbling and whirring. Soon we
all lean into the soft, brown cake cooling on the island, and we pour
pears and caramel soft and all butterflow onto the cake and melt onto
the floor with it on our forks and in our mouths even better than the
word “cake” itself on my tongue I ever dreamed it would be. Midnight,
and we melt in the kitchen and check ourselves with the candy
thermometer and declare that we’ve reached the hard-ball stage, and we
pour ourselves into bed.
Actually, that’s a lie. Today, I thought it would be nice to 
Lately,
I’ve been thinking a lot about cake. This is not an unusual condition
for me, but it happens particularly often when I’m feeling frazzled or
tired or harried, right around the same time that I start listening to
the easy listening station on the car radio and feeling genuinely
soothed by it. It’s pretty clear that you need a good night’s sleep when
“Peaceful Easy Feeling”
comes on the stereo and you almost choke up, sitting there behind the
wheel of your Honda with its missing hubcaps, singing a mournful duet
with Glenn Frey as you 
To serve, cut the cake into wedges, drizzle a bit of warm jam over the top, and dollop with whipped cream.
When
the cupcakes are cool, make the frosting. In the bowl of a food
processor, combine the powdered sugar, cocoa, and malted milk powder,
and process to mix well. Add the butter, and process to blend. Stop the
motor, and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula.
Then, with the motor running, add the water. Process briefly, until the
frosting is smooth. Frost the cupcakes in loose swirls, and serve.
Pour
1/3 of the batter into the prepared pan. Scatter about half of the
blueberries over the top. Add another 1/3 of the batter, and top with
the remaining blueberries. Top with the remaining batter. Bake the cake
for 25-30 minutes, until the cake rises, pulls away from the edges of
the pan, and springs back when pressed gently. Remove from the oven and
let cool for 15 minutes before unmolding onto a wire rack to finish
cooling completely.
