Getting ready for batch #3

Each recipe brings new adventures and ideas. This one required different stove work and yielded a very different batter.

Studying the differences before I start

Soft Molasses Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1 egg
⅓ cup butter 2 cups flour
1-3/4 teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons ginger
½ cup sour milk ½ teaspoon salt

Put butter and molasses in saucepan and cook until boiling point is reached. 

Lovely butter and molasses swirls in the pan

Remove from fire, add soda and beat vigorously.

Soda makes the molasses and butter foam like mad!

Then add milk, egg well beaten, and remaining ingredients mixed and sifted.

...add other ingredients, sifted and mixed

Bake fifteen minutes in buttered small pans, having pans two-thirds filled with mixture.

Notes on the process:
Heated milk just a tad in the microwave to take off the chill. When lemon juice was added, it curdled like mad! Be sure to use a larger pan than you think for heating molasses and butter…when you add the soda, it foams vigorously! Dark, shiny batter as the other ingredients are mixed in.

Used 3 small loaf pans greased with Crisco as before. Baking time said fifteen minutes, no oven temperature given, so used a moderate (350F) oven again. Maybe “small tin pans” meant muffin tins? This took 35 minutes to bake – crazy long!

Are these "small tin pans"?

Official Tasters say: Result is dark, rich and lovely. Quite crumbly and soft compared to the first two. Fairly moist. Many feel that this takes the “best yet” classification, though one taster is looking forward to a sweeter recipe.

Sour Milk Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1-3/4 teaspoons soda
1 cup sour milk 2 teaspoons ginger
2-1/3 cups flour ½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup melted butter

Mix soda with sour milk and add to molasses. Sift together remaining ingredients, combine mixtures, add butter, and beat vigorously. Pour into a buttered, shallow pan, and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven.

Notes on the process: This recipe calls for a tad more flour and a ½ teaspoon more ginger than the first. It uses sour milk instead of water. In Kate’s day, unpasteurized milk would sour naturally. According to The Joy of Cooking, pasteurized milk is missing the little dude that performs the souring action, so it simply spoils. Ugh. To sour a cup of milk, we let it sit out until it’s room temperature. Then we add a Tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar. I prefer lemon juice, personally.

The batter was beautiful and foamy (sorry no photos – I was lost in the moment), fragrant and dark. Again, it was baked in a moderate (350F) electric oven, but took 40 minutes in a 9”x9” greased pan.

Notes on the product: Quite gingery, not too sweet. A bit drier than the first. Crust fairly tough, but then it baked a long time.

The same Official Tasters as before say: The general assessment is that it’s noticeably less molasses- y. But very good.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Patchett has a way of taking one inside her characters. Cleanly drawn, finely tuned, they are there, whole and unapologetic with their gifts and their flaws. This is the fourth of Patchett’s books I’ve read, and with each one, I have come to love her writing style more. The unthinkable, the unbelievable, became for me possible in this work, which took me quite awhile to finish. The challenge of pausing to digest language like this, the beauty of it, is that there is always a danger of losing the thread of the story. Plot was so powerful that this was no problem. It was moving to the very last word. Read it. Share it. Pause over it.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read many middle grade books about the Lost Boys of Sudan, looking for just that book which would appeal to just the right student, one who needs a challenge to his or her thinking, a deeper set of ideas to explore. This is the first one of those I’ve read which acknowledges the intelligence of young readers, which exposes them to hard ideas without sugar coating or stepping away for reality. I’ve put it in my school library and look forward to sharing it with students.

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The first recipe, found on page 482 (see previous post for photo of page 482) is very straightforward and simple.

Hot Water Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1 teaspoon soda
½ cup boiling water 1-1/2 teaspoons ginger
2-1/4 cups flour ½ teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons melted butter

Add water to molasses. Mix and sift dry ingredients, combine mixtures, add butter, and beat vigorously. Pour into a buttered shallow pan, and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven. *Chicken fat tried out and clarified furnishes an excellent shortening, and my be used in place of butter.

Notes on the process: Baking time for me in a regular electric oven was 35 minutes, not 25 as directed. I was brought up using 350F as a moderate oven temperature. I used Crisco to grease a 9”x9” pan.

First batch baking...

*Trying out chicken fat was a measure suggested to conserve other fats, such as butter, for the War Effort, according to my research.

Notes on the product: It is most lovely, rich and dark with plenty of plenty of spice. The crust is almost crisp, with a moist, soft crumb in the center.

Official taste-testers: The Author, her Husband, her Sister, and the members of both the Author’s Primary Years Programme teaching teams. We’ve all declared it “the best so far.”

"The Best So Far"

I discovered, in my recent NaNoWriMo adventure, that even writing to a crazy deadline, I require some verisimilitude of detail. Consequently, when I began writing a scene about Kate and her housemates baking a pan of gingerbread together, I felt I needed to look at some recipes of the time in order that my details weren’t completely wrong. Even though I knew I could go back to correct, I wanted to feel it was close to the reality. Heading to the bookcase, I pulled from it a stained, slightly warped copy of The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, with its brown-trimmed yellow cover. My mother gave me a second-hand store copy in college, which I passed on to my sister when this one recently came to me from my husband’s side of the family.

Well loved

Turning to the section on gingerbread, I counted there eleven (11!) different recipes. Scanning through the ingredients lists and instructions, I patted myself on the back, agreeing with my writer self that the women could contribute different opinions and tastes to the activity and still reasonably create a delicious pan of the confection.

Looking at gingerbread made me hungry for it, and in a moment of weakness a few days later, I told myself that it was time for more needed research and I pulled out the venerable cookbook again.  This time, I lingered on the contents tucked inside which made it lumpy.

What's tucked inside

Several items rested there, and as I looked, I marveled! This is Kate’s own cookbook; many of the slips of paper are filled with her handwriting, now so familiar to me from my archaeological travels through diaries and memorabilia. Turning to the flyleaf, there it was, in fine, faded hand:

Wow, it's her cookbook!

I was stopped in my writer tracks, halted mid-thought, transported back in time to a place I recognized. For a heady moment I was there, in that kitchen I had created; this cookbook in my hands could have been lying there in that place I imagined, open to page 482, though in the story the three women baking had the semblance of recipe and proportions memorized.

The gingerbread section...

Then, of course, it came to me, a thought which has taken shape in action. Predictable? Likely. Delightful? Definitely, for me and those near to me. Hence, The Gingerbread Adventure, a la “Julie and Julia,” though on a much less grand scale. Yes, I’m baking them all. I’m putting myself in Kate’s cookbook, and her shoes, though keeping my own kitchen appliances intact. No recreations with coal-fired stove. You’ll be party to the observations and conclusions. And the recipes, of course.

Gingerbread just out of the oven

When I’m done, I can imagine that revising the gingerbread scene will have gained some verisimilitude.

Running journal and writing notebook

I seem to be a creature of tallies and routines. I set my sights on something lurking on the calendar somewhere, and I make my way toward it. Sometimes my progress is lightning-quick and life hurtles in a kind of ruthless way down the path of my choosing. I run headlong into that square on the kitchen calendar, and before I know it, I’m in the moment, catching my breath, catching up just in time to experience that something. Other times, the progress is mightily slow, millimeter by grinding millimeter, creeping along, my progress almost imperceptible. The month of November has been a major month for tallies, and looking back I’m realizing that it has been, simply, all about goals.

That first thing I mentioned, that something on the calendar toward which life flung me at top speed, was this odd little adventure called NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. The goal? Write a minimum of 50,000 words between November 1st and November 30th. Why? You ask, why do that? It seems so random, so ridiculous, that a person should attempt to write a book in a month. Would it be any good?

I wrote a book once, remember? It’s around 50 pages. I don’t know how many words that is, but nothing nearing 50,000. Took me just about twenty-six years. Here it is: homeostasis press. Hmm. Well, I didn’t expect to finish a book in thirty days. But found out all I could about the odd little adventure and realized that though this challenge is, on its surface, about quantity, what meeting the challenge might do for me would be to give me the bones of a story I’ve been trying to start for many years. And the beautiful thing is that it was true. I wrote roughly 50,167 words, depending on who’s counting, and in the process I got to know some characters, to find for myself a beginning and a middle, and a pretty reasonable ending, too. So, I wrote the first draft of a novel. Hmm.

What about counting down? You ask. Remember last January, my earnest talk of running and setting goals? I signed onto the Tall Mom on the Run 1000+ miles in 2011 challenge. I figured that if I set a goal like that, I’d have to keep moving the entire year. And the beautiful thing about it is that it worked, too. As of today, I’ve got fewer than 60 miles left.

Getting to the details

Life has intruded, as it must, because it’s life. It has complicated the reaching of these seemingly random goals, of counting up, and counting down. Injury has reared its ugly head, along with hours of energy spent at work, and on family. But these intrusions, these experiences, the usual enemies of personal goals, are also their impetus. They are part and parcel of what rockets me onward through the kitchen calendar and what propels me onward, millimeter by slow millimeter. The gift is that in each of these cases, I’ve been given much in the work I’ve done, of new beginnings, of new adventures, of power and the joy to wake another day, ready to stride toward it all again.

I don’t write these pieces to blog them, but when I realized how silent I have been here, and this one jumped out at me as something I could share about my writing, I decided to post today’s (besides, it really HAS been more than a month since I wrote. Geez).  This is fifteen minutes of writing about what stops me from writing my latest work.

I’m afraid of writing trite fiction. It’s that simple. I read and adore beautifully crafted story. I’ve read and deeply appreciated the difference for so many years I’ve lost count, though I am told that in the first grade I brought home the latest Dick and Jane reader finished at school and proceeded to read the words every direction but left to right, beginning to end, evidently to point out to my mother how ridiculous it was; “it makes as much sense this way as the right way!”

Is this my driving motivator, the thing I shy away from? I write every day at work; I carefully craft communication: emails to colleagues and families, training manuals, informational paragraphs, documentation… but fiction, which I love, frightens me. I’ve written and published a book. I’ve drafted and revised and re-drafted and formatted and fussed and stewed, driven to make every piece crystalline. But for some reason, the book, which was truth, and personal truths about situation, wrote itself. The bones were there.

This story has some bones – but I’m taking a handful of true bones and fictionalizing around them. There’s no one to offend, since those who knew her best are dead; there’s no one, really, to care how I honor (or defame) this woman with whom I have been fascinated for the past 20 years… So why am I afraid? What is it that stops me from laying out the rest of the bones?

I want her to spring real and whole and flawed from the page. I want to love or hate or be disappointed in her myself, but mostly, I want her to be that alive when someone else meets her for the first time…

The hiss and tiny, crackling breath of compost and worms working in the bin in the warm sun…

Man and dog feet on the stairs…

Snap of mushrooms as they break under the knife…

Sizzle of onions, sautéing slowly in the pan…

Jingle of dog tags outside playing as peppers roast on the grill…

Crack and papery whisper of garlic skins beneath the blade…

Beatles loud on the radio…

Crinkle of the paper bag as it gives up its treasure of blackened peppers…

As I write, I wonder if I think in textures, too. I have discovered in this exploration that each sound has a feel. I associate  with it a color, a pattern, a physical description of heft, of movement, or of life. To isolate one sense from another is a very interesting exercise, difficult in a way. It gives me joy, though, sweet and uncomplicated.

Rabari embroiderer

The woman wears layers of richly adorned clothing; her blouse is beaded and densely stitched with bands of color. Her head scarf, sequined and embroidered around the edge, covers her hair and hangs well down her body.  She squats on a cushion on the floor, bare feet set flat beneath her.

The cloth before her tells a story – the story of the Rabari people as nomads who have settled since an earthquake changed their society completely. There are camels on the cloth, and men and houses; there’s also a well depicted there, where people and animals are gathered. She points to areas of the cloth as the interpreter speaks, relating the bare bones of the tale, the saga of her people told in fabric and threads. The woman so ready to teach us is from the drought-ridden Kutch region of India, on the northwest coast, near the border of Pakistan.

She is one of two artisans who have come to the US for a one-month visit from the Kala Raksha Vidhyalaya: “The Art Preservation Institute of Higher Education.”  Kala Raksha was founded on the premise that tradition is the foundation of innovation. This is what Judy Frater, director of the school, relates to us. She answers questions, shows a slide show, and answers more questions. Suddenly one of the women with her steps forward, adjusts the cloth on her head, and speaks.  Judy laughs and tells us, “She is pleased you want to waste your time listening for so long.” It is obvious that she is ready to teach. We gather before her, eager to learn.

First she demonstrates her skill, quick neat stitches flying around the edges of the figures she sews down, turning minute edges to affix the shapes in a richly detailed fabric story. With a deft movement, ending her appliqué work at the figure’s head, she begins to add details with the same thread. Stitches which curve at the base of the throat appear; she points to her own throat, her own necklaces, then gestures back to her work. We nod understanding, and she smiles.  Suddenly, with some quick motions of the needle, the figure has fingers on one hand. She holds up a thumb, then thrusts it forward with a grin – a “thumbs-up!” The room erupts in laughter.

Abruptly she stops her work and gestures to the pile of fabrics in my lap. She nods to me to hand them over and she begins to sort through my treasures, rejecting one after the other. Finally, much to my delight, she settles on two. She folds one carefully. One end of the folded fabric is thrust into my hands and I must hold it just so while she cuts a strip from it. Then I am instructed to produce a needle and she hunts through my thread for just the right weight. I must thread the needle precisely as she directs me while she readies the fabrics together. Without a word spoken, this is where the magic of learning truly begins. She works straight; no lines drawn, no pins; she is skilled and fast; she shows us exactly what steps we have to take to produce what she has produced. We are not allowed only to observe; we must be active learners. One sharp point of an applied zigzag edge appears under her hands; she makes it look easy to fold the fabric just so, to control it in this unique way. We find, to our delight, that it is easy, if we try it her way.

This is the nature of her teaching, and of our learning; we’ve received no kit, no long and detailed list of supplies to bring. There is no handout to tell us what we can expect to learn. We must be open to the simplicity of the learning experience and leap into it fully in order to receive what it being offered. The morning races by too fast, and we reluctantly set our work aside and bow back when she puts her hands together to thank us for our attention. Suddenly a smile illuminates her face and she opens her arms for hugs all around.

As an educator myself, this experience moves me to a deeper understanding of how a lesson can be learned; it inspires me to think of new ways to reach my own students, to give them new, eye-opening, mind-broadening opportunities to find their own path to understanding.