Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
From the first fist into
the risen mass, the dough
is a-hiss. To live is
to master a liturgy
of winds — even yeast
knows this. Gas
whispers out through
a thousand pinholes as
I fold & press, fold
& press that limit-
less quilt.
*
Written for the RWP vowel prompt. Other responses may be found here.
This is my adaptation of a recipe from the classic Cooking with Wholegrains, by Vrest and Mildred Ellen Orton, originally published in 1947. A Google search only revealed one mutilated version of this on the interwebs, so I thought I’d do my part for God and country and post it myself. This serves four to six people, goes great with chile or baked beans, only takes a half hour to make, and is, as the title suggests, the best cornbread recipe of all time. As one proof of my claim: You know how regular cornbread is kind of gross to save and eat for leftovers? Not this stuff. It’s almost as good the second time around!
EARLY AMERICAN HOTBREAD
Preheat oven or toaster oven (saves electricity!) to 425° F. Grease a nine-inch-square baking pan, ideally with lard.
In a large mixing bowl, beat the bejeesus out of one large egg. Whisk in one cup milk and two tablespoons maple syrup or honey (but really, you want maple syrup. American maple syrup, not that inferior Canadian stuff).
Sift in one cup whole wheat flour, ¾ cup corn meal (either the regular stuff or masa de harina, e.g. Maseca brand, for an even earlier American flavor), and one tablespoon baking powder. Add one teaspoon salt and stir forcefully with whisk or spoon until complete and harmonious integration is achieved. Then mix in three tablespoons of oil or melted lard with as few strokes as possible. (It’s all in the wrist.)
Spoon into the waiting pan and smoosh and smooth it until it’s flat as Kansas, then bake it for twenty minutes.
It can be cut and served immediately after removal from the oven. A good, flat metal spatula does wonders for removing hot cornbread from the pan.
*
Leftovers tip: Cut a piece of cold cornbread in half, heap a spoonful of hot salsa on each half, top with a slice of cheddar or jack cheese, and heat it in the toaster oven until the cheese is all melted and bubbly.
Crescents of lemon & circles of orange orbit the earthly paradise of the plate. A freshly felled miniature tree, a replica of the inner ear fashioned from a single slice of apple — the garnish turns eating into a cautious act. We pause with our forks poised over carrot curls & strawberries exposed as if for surgery, pickle slices stacked like green coins. How many truckloads of produce bound for the city each day go into these brief displays of inconspicuous non-consumption? It seems wrong to keep count. The devil is in the details & that’s where we like him: red as a maraschino, ridiculous as a toothpick parasol. During a rare lull in the general hubbub, one can just make out the bellowing of a prep cook who’s severed the end of his pinky.
First the crust must be carefully removed from the slice of bread. The peanut butter must be mixed with wildflower honey, or vice-versa. Then the ambrosial spread is ready to be removed from the sandwich, one fingerful at a time — or if that seems too slow, by direct application of tongue to bread. Don’t worry if some of it ends up on the face or in the hair; it can be cleaned out later.
The hard work of chewing becomes easier once the tastebuds have been bribed. Cleared of spread, the bread may be cut into bite-sized pieces to facilitate consumption. The least appetizing part — the crust — is saved for last. Maybe it will be eaten and maybe it won’t.
This is the currently popular train of lunch-time events, and the wooden caboose may be pushed back and forth to help keep it in motion. The black-and-white cow stands in for a docile passenger. And as the wheels turn, the conductor spins, a big grin on his round wooden face.
Something has drilled a tiny hole
right above the base of the bell pepper.
I try to picture what it must’ve been like
to inhabit that green cathedral space as it expanded
& its single cloud grew ponderous with seeds.
Imagine the light & the sliding shadows of leaves
shaped like enormous beetles.
Imagine an orange sunset, in the absence of a horizon,
starting from random spots
that slowly spread across the vegetable sky,
deepening week by week into fire-engine red.
There is no heart like this, so roomy, so full of sugar.
If it is a bell, it’s much too good at absorbing
every kind of blow — or else
its tone is too high-pitched
to be heard by anything larger than the head of pin.
__________
Written for the prompt #2 at Read Write Poem. The other responses (mostly food poems) are here.
The mealworm tamales at Penn State’s Great Insect Fair this past Saturday were, indeed, a meal. The capsaicin hit about thirty seconds after the last bite, as a hot tamale should, and I found myself going back for seconds, and then thirds. There’s always something special about food that needs to be unwrapped, and if it contains the larvae of that most poetically named of all beetles — the tenebrionid or darkling beetle — well, that’s gravy. Of course, it helped that I’m not in the habit of examining my food too closely before popping it in my mouth.
Consuming mealworm larvae can amount to a kind of poetic justice, too, if they’ve managed to infest one’s grain supply. I’ll admit I’ve cooked up rice with flour moth larvae in it (though I’ve never served it to guests — don’t panic, y’all). It’s a way of making lemonade from lemons, and the results are usually much more nutritious than the unadulterated grain would’ve been. I’ve been told that the kinds of locusts that devastate crops are actually a culinary blessing in disguise.
They didn’t have any locusts on Saturday, but they did have two additional Mexican insect dishes at the food booth, and surprisingly, it was one of the few spots at the entire fair where I didn’t have to stand in line. My cousin Morgan graciously stepped to the side when I wanted to have a closer look at the wax moth bean dip.
This time, the insect ingredient was a little harder to ignore. But isn’t that the most succulent larva you’ve ever seen? Beekeepers, take note: when the wax moths start eating your hives, you can can simply turn the tables on them.
Then there was the guacamole. All three dishes were free, and very tasty.
It’s funny the prejudice we have against consuming terrestrial invertebrates, especially considering how much we prize certain aquatic invertebrates — shrimp, oysters, lobsters, clams, squid. But I guess that’s the point of the Great Insect Fair: to get people — especially kids — thinking about insects in a more objective light. It’s become a hugely popular annual event, packing the Ag Arena right across from Beaver Stadium, home of the Nittany Lions.
It felt a little odd to attend a free event at the Penn State University Park campus. The fair did have its share of vendors, though. My mother couldn’t attend due to a back attack, so as a consolation gift I bought her a t-shirt with a picture of a caterpillar taking a crap and the message, “FRASS HAPPENS.”
Morgan wanted to buy a pair of live Madagascar hissing cockroaches in the worst way, but her mean old parents nixed the idea. She found plenty of kid-friendly activities to console herself with, though: making a paper butterfly out of a coffee filter, for example, and fishing for crawdads with a flyswatter (see the video in yesterday’s post).
In general, any display with live invertebrates drew a crowd. The mosquito guys were great, wielding a scary handpuppet of the World’s Deadliest Insect, and pointing out the differences between male and female mosquitos in the jars in front of them, which tempted visitors to crouch down and wait for one of the swarming larvae to complete its course and graduate to the upper chamber. A stuffed crow served as a reminder of the real victims of West Nile Virus, which tends to be downplayed in the local media because, after all, it rarely kills people.
The turnout itself was the thing that impressed me the most. Who’d have thought going to the cockroach races would be a bigger draw than sitting at home and watching the Penn State-Illinois game? Next weekend, the fields across the road will once again be packed with tailgate parties, and the empty Ag Arena will echo with the roars of 100,000 football fans, but for one day, at least, insects reigned supreme.
In response to a prompt at Creek Running North.
Mushroom season came late this year. We finally got some rain toward the end of August, and now the mushrooms seem to making up for lost time.
One of our young visitors last Sunday had never seen a wild mushroom before, and was agog when I pointed out one of the common brown ones that dot the forest floor. “I love mushrooms! Can you eat these?” He was full of excited questions.
I told him that some were edible, but not these ones. I pointed out a few species I recognized, including the death cup. I described how it could dissolve the liver within 48 hours, leading to an agonizing death. “But there are a few species we eat,” I said. “Mostly giant puffballs and chicken mushrooms, and sometimes the odd chanterelle, oyster mushroom or morel.”
“Oh, you grow your own mushrooms?” The concept of wild food was taking a little time to sink in.
“No, they grow themselves,” I said. “We just pick them.”
My mother took both youngsters up to the spruce grove at the top of the hollow for a picnic lunch. Virtually the whole time, she said, they were clamoring over the wild mushrooms that lined the trails, picking them and breaking them apart to see what they looked like inside. Then on the way back down to the house, one of them spotted a log covered with orange.
“Look! What’s that?”
“Oh, wonderful! Chicken mushrooms!”
The kids were ecstatic. Their newly acquired mushroom-breaking skills suddenly had a purpose! They filled their arms with the fleshy shelf fungi and staggered back to the house.
I heard the news a short while later. We had a large gang to feed, and I had already defrosted chicken to make chicken tarragon, but I had wanted a vegetable side dish, too. It looked as if we’d be having chicken and chicken mushroom in the same meal.
I concocted a stir-fry with about a half a pound of chicken mushroom strips, a couple of sweet red peppers, and one yellow squash cut into half-moons. The sauce consisted of garlic, ginger, tamari, rice wine, oyster sauce, and five-spice powder. It was, if I may say so, delicious. My cousin Jeff — usually a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy — surprised me by taking seconds. “It tastes like chicken, but you can definitely tell the difference,” he said.
Chicken mushroom, also known as sulfur shelf (Laetiporus sulfureus) grows on rotten logs or at the base of dead trees. The other week, my mother found some growing directly out the ground, presumably on a dead root. On wetter years, we can find it as early as June. We’ve never found it twice at the same spot, so we have to keep our eyes open. Taste varies, depending on the freshness of the mushroom and probably also on genotype. But as Wildman Steve Brill puts it,
If there’s one mushroom to start with, this is it. The chicken mushroom is easy to recognize, with no poisonous look-alikes. It’s common and widespread, it has a long season, and it can be huge.
Brill also tenders some culinary advice:
To adapt it to traditional chicken recipes, include a source of protein (i.e., grains or beans) to make the dish filling, plus some olive oil or vegetable oil, because unlike chicken, this mushroom contains no fat.
Unless the mushroom is so young and tender it almost drips with juice, it’s better to cook it in moist heat (i.e. in soups, stews, or in grains) than to cook it in oil.
The only thing you have to remember is to remove the stem — that is, roughly two inches at the base of the fan. Also remove any rove beetles you might find hiding between the fans (though they are probably edible, too).
Here are a couple recipes I’ve had success with. The first is adapted from the original Moosewood Cookbook‘s recipe for spaghetti squash; the second uses actual spaghetti. Both fall under the general heading of “comfort food,” which is pretty much my specialty in the kitchen. “Comfort food” means that things get mixed together in big bowls, plopped into big casserole dishes, and baked until bubbly (ideally in a small toaster oven, to save electricity). Butter and cheese are your friends.
Chicken Mushroom and Spaghetti Squash Casserole
Bake or boil one medium spaghetti squash. While that’s going on, sauté in olive oil or butter one large onion, sliced; two to three cloves of minced garlic; one sweet pepper, cut in thin strips; and about a pound of chicken mushrooms, also cut into strips. Add a half teaspoon dried oregano and a full teaspoon basil — or more, if you have access to the fresh herbs. Add salt and pepper to taste, as they say.
When the squash is cool enough to handle, scoop out the stringy flesh and put it in a big bowl along with the sauté. Mix in a cup or more of ricotta and an equal amount of grated mozzarella. Stir it all together and plop it into a greased, three-quart casserole. Top with a shit-load of bread crumbs, and bake at 350F about 40 minutes — the last ten without the lid.
Chicken Mushroom Tetrazzini
First, unless you already have some leftover chicken gravy in the fridge: Melt at least four tablespoons of butter on medium heat. Add a third of a cup of flour, half a teaspoon salt, and a dash of black pepper, and let it bubble for half a minute. Then add a 15-oz can of low-sodium chicken broth and stir until thick. Add a cup of milk or light cream and continue stirring until it thickens again. Remove from heat.
Sauté about three cups of chicken mushroom pieces in olive oil until soft. (Or follow Brill’s advice and steam it, if you must.) Meanwhile, blanch, peel and sliver a handful of almonds.
Remove leftover whole wheat spaghetti from refrigerator (or cook fresh: roughly 6-8 ounces of dry noodles). Cut into shortish pieces.
Get out two big bowls. In one, mix the noodles with half of the sauce. In the other, mix mushrooms, slivered almonds, and a cup of fresh or frozen green peas with the other half of the sauce. Starting with the noodles, alternate layers of these two mixtures in a greased, three-quart casserole, two layers of each. Top with Parmesan (yes, you can use the cheap powdered kind — I always do) and bake as above (350, 40 minutes, whatever).
*
All this talk about wild chicken mushrooms reminds me of Wallace Steven’s fun, albeit baffling, poem, “Bantam in Pine Woods.” According to the Wikipedia, it’s now in the public domain, so here it is. Get someone to read it out loud at the supper table while you’re tying into your chicken mushroom casserole. Hilarity may or may not ensue.
Bantam in Pine-Woods
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,
Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.
Sing scrapple: buckwheat-
& cornmeal mush-stuffed
relative of head cheese,
the hog’s gray matter.
Plus every part
that couldn’t be cured
into ham or crammed
into sausage casings —
some good foot meat, perhaps,
a corkscrew piece of tail —
up to & including
the oleaginous grunt.
Always the butt of jokes
for the ignorant mass
of weiner-eaters who prefer
their pig scraps pink
& prefitted for the throat.
This is a square meal
the color of earth.
It’s what’s for supper
when you haven’t eaten
since breakfast, & want
something you can
slap in the hot
fat of a griddle & fry
until it grows a thick
brown skin. Then
serve with Grade-A
maple syrup, go hog-
wild, wallow in the gray
& gritty mush.
Whenever I drink too much, I often have a hard time sleeping. Last night, for example, I woke up around 3:30 and never did get back to sleep. And that was merely from dreaming about drinking. In real life, I can’t handle anything much stronger than wine, but in the dream, I was downing shot after shot of scotch, and actually enjoying it. Until my dream-karma caught up with me, that is, and transmigrated with me into my waking life.
Speaking of dreams, Peter emailed me this morning to describe a dream-visit to “a bricks-and-mortar Via Negativa,” located not in Plummer’s Hollow, but in the nearby city of Altoona, PA. “It was in a respectable local mall,” he wrote, “but it was kind of dark and musty — kind of mossy, actually — with large trees interspersed among the displays. There were books and DVDs, but the decor and clientele somehow suggested a beach bong shop.”
Speaking of malls, I was cheered by a story last night on NPR’s All Things Considered about the decline of shopping malls. Many of the anchor-store chains have gone bankrupt, outcompeted by the big-box stores, and the new chains — they cited the mega-bookstore Barnes and Noble — have no desire to take their places, since they already incorporate mall-like features such as coffee shops and kiddie play areas. New owners of old malls have to deal with many empty stores and a general air of decay (which does sound like a good match for Via Negativa, given my affinity for old, decrepit structures). Some malls are even being “de-malled,” they said: the roof is removed, and the storefronts migrate to the exterior wall, facing the parking lot.
Speaking of Barnes and Noble, a couple weeks ago I attended the first poetry reading at the new Barnes and Noble in Altoona. It’s part of a brand new shopping center built right into the side of the same mountain ridge I live on, at terrific environmental cost. But it’s the first real bookstore Altoona has ever had — at least in the 35 years I’ve lived in the area — so we’re not boycotting it, any more than we’re boycotting the so-called interstate built on the mountain’s flanks. At any rate, the reader was my friend Todd Davis, reading from his wonderful new book Some Heaven, whose cover reproduces one of my favorite works of Renaissance art: Dürer’s “Das Grosse Rasenstück.” Todd is perhaps one of the least affected poets I have ever known; he has a down-to-earth style of delivery that’s perfectly suited to his plain-spoken yet hard-hitting poems about landscape, love, death — all the great themes.
Speaking of the mountain’s flanks, the Davises live in a little subdivision about a half-mile to the west of the so-called interstate. If they want to see the sunrise — or the full moonrise — they have to hike up here, as they often do, to get out of our shadow. In “Moonrise Over the Little Juniata,” Todd writes,
The ridge hides most
of the moon until well into the evening, while in the valley,
where it’s still dark, we can see the silhouette of shale
and sandstone, delicate appendages of trees […]
In another poem, “Jacklighting,” Todd describes the physical geography of places like Plummer’s Hollow (though he uses the word “ravine,” rather than “hollow”):
In this part of Pennsylvania, roads run along
streambeds, or beside the narrow tributaries
the highest ridges conceal when they turn
their faces to the north or south–creases
marked the length of their long necks, ravines
as beautiful as the shadowed space at the base
of a woman’s throat.
Todd read from typed copies of his poems rather than the book itself, and used neither podium nor microphone. In his brief introductions to the poems, he often drew attention to members of the audience, making us all feel a part of the web of associations and influences undergirding his work. The bookstore lady hovered nervously, evidently preoccupied, it turned out, with the problem of how to distribute a small number of promised free drinks and pieces of cake to a larger-than-expected crowd. But the pieces of cake were enormous, and it was simply a matter of subdividing them, I think, because somehow, miraculously, everyone got a piece.
And that — as my friend Teju Cole would say — is what the kingdom of poetry is like.
I scatter a level tablespoon of dry yeast on the surface of the warm water — three-fourths of a cup, blood temperature — in the yellow mixing bowl that belonged to my mother’s father’s mother. Hard to call it an antique, since we use it almost every day. In fact, I just took it off the dish drainer: my mother used it to mix a dessert custard an hour ago. The paint is a little chipped around the rim, but otherwise it’s in fine shape. It’s a two-quart bowl, ceramic, and with a steep-sided shape that’s hard to find these days, so for reasons more practical than sentimental my mother lives in dread of someone dropping and breaking it someday.
This is called proofing the yeast: waiting for it to show signs of life. Not so different from proofreading a text, really. While I wait, I grind rosemary, measure out a quarter cup of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt, and get the flour out of the cupboard. I’ll start with a half-scoop of white flour, then make up the rest — two to three cups, I guess — with medium-ground whole wheat. I tried adding some durum wheat flour for a while, but I couldn’t tell the difference. For whole wheat pizza, I’ve found that using a heated stone and adding the sauce right away are the most important things. Otherwise you end up with something you need to cut with a steak knife.
But that’s a couple hours away yet. Right now, I’m still waiting for the yeast. I stand looking out at the back porch, where my mother hangs the birdfeeders. The black barn cat crouches over a vole burrow below the steps. A little farther downslope, a brown leaf rises on a sudden gust of wind and reattaches itself to a low-hanging branch. I stare in disbelief. It’s too cold out for butterflies. There aren’t any birds that look like that. I walk into the next room to look through another window, but now I can’t find the leaf. I go back into the kitchen and look through the back door again: the leaf, or whatever it was, is indeed gone. So is the cat.
Yesterday around noon, as I was waiting for a batch of bread to finish, I stood here and watched a small woodchuck eating the young leaves off the black raspberry canes. The woodchuck stood on its hind legs to reach the canes, which it held between its teeth like corn on the cob, delicately nibbling the inch-long leaves. They had burst from their buds two weeks ago, just before the cold returned, and have hardly grown since. This wasn’t the fat and handsome fellow I watched through my own kitchen window two weeks ago; in fact, it looked as if it might have gotten a bit too close to that other chuck. There was a long gash in the fur of its lower back, and its tail was missing. “Scarbutt,” I said to myself, thinking of Al Pacino.
With the cat gone, the birds filter back. All the sparrows are still around, including the swamp sparrow, who is proving something of a bully. He scratches like a chicken in the thick layer of sunflower seeds on the ground below the feeders, and chases anything that comes within a one-foot radius.
There’s a flash of gold at the left-hand feeder. Two of the goldfinches have nearly completed the changeover from drab olive green to their namesake summer plumage, but the mountain doesn’t seem quite ready for them yet. Over half of our daffodils and forsythia have yet to bloom, to say nothing of tulip poplars, sugar maples, oaks, and other green and gold things. I suppose the molt is triggered by length of daylight, and if turning early makes goldfinches more visible and vulnerable in a world of later springs, then perhaps selective pressures will favor late-bloomers — so to speak.
After five or six minutes, the yeast still on the surface has organized itself into ridges in a two-sided, symmetrical pattern strongly reminiscent of a brain viewed from above. Unfortunately, I don’t have my camera handy, and there’s no way I can get it from the other house before the yeast expands further and erases the pattern, so I won’t have any photographic evidence. I almost said “proof,” but that’s a term that seems distinctly out-of-place in the digital age, when proofsheets have disappeared along with the public’s confidence in photos as true depictions of reality. It’s a striking apparition, though, this brain of yeast. It’s still in my mind ten minutes later as I knead the dough — such a joy without the stickiness of the sugar (honey, molasses) required for bread! — and feel the bubbles begin to pop against my palms.