Pans and Sisters and Tarte Tatins

My sister Maya and I have lived together all but seven years of our lives.

(Which would be more impressive if you knew how old we were, but I’m not going to tell you.)

I went off to college at eighteen, took a year off, graduated, moved into a little studio apartment in downtown Portland, Oregon, worked several jobs, and then had a baby. When he (the baby) was almost a year old, Maya and I moved into what would be the first of six dwellings we would share. It was the basement apartment in the building where I lived—dark, labyrinthine, and many-roomed (there were three we never even used). It was also cheap, nestled as it was next to the apartment’s laundry room (imagine the laundry room from Rosemary’s Baby where Rosemary meets the soon-to-be-deceased neighbor and you’ve got it) and untouched since the pre-electricity days when it had been built.

The kitchen was the happiest (also, brightest) room in the place and once Maya and I moved in together, actual cooking took place in it (I was almost entirely disinterested in cooking, let alone baking until I moved in with Maya). As a housewarming gift, our dad gave us a set of cast iron pans—a ten-inch and a six-inch. They weighed about 5 tons combined and at first seemed to me more like potential weapons than kitchen utensils. My dad had gotten the pans on sale at Fred Meyer and they were the first cast iron pans that anyone in my family had ever bought. Maya was pretty excited and went through a long, involved seasoning ceremony complete with explanations of how much better it was to use cast iron because of the iron it imparted to the food and how they were naturally nonstick without any of the horrible chemicals and how they cooked more evenly and stayed hot and…

Okay, I thought, it’s just a pan.

Mais non.

These pans (the good kind—because there are always shoddy knockoffs) are so sturdy that they turn up occasionally in venues like The Antiques Roadshow. They can turn into heirlooms. And some of them have indeed doubled as weapons which gives the meals made in them the flavor of that much more history.

We don’t often use the smaller one, but the ten-inch pan gets a workout in our house. We cook almost everything in it. Twenty-five years later it’s still going strong—blackened and seasoned with age and countless sautéed rounds of tofu, vegetables, fried rice, pasta, and much more. Nothing we have cooked in this pan has defeated it. It comes clean every time and is ready for more.  I love this pan. It is easily the most consistent element of my domestic life. Well, and my sister. 

When I started baking seriously, it was inevitable that I would drift into experimenting with tarte tatins, which are best baked in pans exactly like this one. Tarte tatins start with fruit cooked with sugar and butter in the pan and arranged in a pretty pattern. The fruit is then covered with puff pastry and finished in the oven. Then you flip it over onto a plate and hope for the best. My first effort was a bit of a disaster. Unfortunately, I’d opted to try a mango tarte tatin—a big mistake for a neophyte. I’d used too much sugar or the mangoes were too ripe and I didn’t have a good feel for pastry of any kind. It stuck and burned horribly and I feared for the life of the pan. This happened a dozen years ago and I still remember the flop sweat I was covered in as I tried to scrape the burned bits off my warhorse pan without destroying it. This episode scared me off tarte tatins for a while but eventually I took the plunge again. Firmer fruit, less liquid, more caution with the sugar.

Last night I tried it again—making a cherry tomato tarte tatin with a recipe I’d modified from one I found in The New York Times years ago. The original recipe made a delicious but very sweet tart so I cut the sugar, added a little more vinegar, and played with the seasonings a bit. It looked great going into the oven but, as ever, there was that frisson of worry as I went to invert it (using two hands and a great deal of care) onto the plate.

Perfect.

The pan? Completely clean.

Success. 
(If you want the recipe, let me know.)

This Post Has Not Been Mimitized

Once, during a particularly busy lunch shift at the Italian restaurant where I waited tables, the manager (an Italian from Italy whose favorite American restaurant was Goofy’s Kitchen in Disneyland) said this to me:  “Those people on Table 42? They are mimetized!”

Okaaaaay.

This wasn’t the first time he’d said something unintelligible.  In fact, most of what he said was unintelligible, but I was—as I had been on many other occasions—forced to work out what he meant. Table 42 was my table and clearly they needed something because they were…mimetized.

I made a brief attempt at getting him to explain. “Um, mimetized? What do they need?”

“You know,” he said, getting angry at my lack of understanding something that was so obvious, “what like they look. Mi-me-tized.”

Well, that helped.

My mind went to work. “Mimetized” sounded like “mimetic,” which I knew meant copy or imitate. Like mimes. Immediately, the image of mimes popped into my head, distracting me momentarily with their stripy shirts and annoying faces. Shoving that aside (since I had been to Table 42 and they clearly were not mimes), I asked myself; what is it that mimes do? They pretend? No. They imitate? Sort of. This was getting me nowhere so I went back to mimetic. To copy…or…resemble. One thing resembling another. They looked like something. They looked like something else. They copied something else. An exact resemblance. So close a resemblance you wouldn’t know it from the original. I thought about Table 42. They were wearing colors that matched the décor of the restaurant. They resembled it so closely in fact that they were…camouflaged.

“You mean camouflaged?” I said.

“No,” the manager said, “their clothes. Mimetized.”

“The word is ‘camouflaged’ in English,” I pointed out.

“Are you sure? Because in Italian…”

But I didn’t stick around to hear the rest because by then the people at Table 42 actually did need something; coffee refills, water, or an imaginary glass box to get out of. Later, I discovered that one of the Italian words for camouflage is mimetizzare. My Italian manager had thoughtfully “translated” it into English so that I would understand. I would have gotten there sooner if I’d had a good working knowledge of Italian, but at that point I was mostly just fluent in food and curses—long, elaborate curses that involved people driving off cliffs and having their entire families suffer because they were such lousy tippers and shorter curses that mostly involved variations on the theme of male genitalia and <fill in the blank> Dio/Madonna (ie, porco Dio, Dio cane, puttana Madonna, etc.)—and my vocabulary was limited. So I had to go through the convoluted mimetic/mime/imitate route before figuring out that the piece of information I was being given wasn’t even important. For a half-second I’d been kind of proud of myself for decoding what Mr. Goofy’s Kitchen had said but then I just felt like an idiot. Who had time for this?

I’ll bet you want to know what my point is, don’t you?

My point is that if you are writing in English, your reader should not have to know Italian to understand what you are saying. To be more specific, while I’ve never believed that writers should spoon-feed their readers, nor should writers make readers work so hard that said readers get irritated and give up.

I’ve been giving this quite a bit of thought lately since I’ve been doing a great deal of editing and whenever I’m dispensing advice about writing I think carefully about what I’m saying and whether or not I’m just missing something in the text. Because maybe it’s… mimetized. And in some cases, I do catch myself and find myself seeing brilliance in, say, a metaphor that had heretofore been incomprehensible. Most of the time, however, it isn’t brilliant—it’s the result of trying too hard or sloppiness or simple attention to whatever it is that the writer is trying to say. I’ve run into this often of late—metaphors and similes that are so far out I wonder what the writer was (or wasn’t) thinking when s/he typed them out.

There is a list here of some hilarious examples of what can go wrong with metaphor/simile. But I have also seen things like: “The sea was as still as melted ice.”

So let’s think about that for a minute… Right.

Or, how about this one: “They snapped at each other like two hyenas playing backgammon.”

Note: the above example is one I just made up but it is very similar to some I have seen recently. First of all, let’s think about hyenas. What are they known for? Laughing, not snapping. Snapping is more the domain of turtles or dogs. So fight away the thing is a bit off. But more importantly…playing backgammon? Why are they playing backgammon? Why would hyenas play backgammon? Is there something I’m missing here? Some connection between hyenas and backgammon that I should know about but have completely missed? What is wrong with me? This book is too hard for me!

No…wait…

 It’s just really bad writing. Now I’m annoyed. And I’m leaving.  

Nobody loves a good metaphor more than I do. Not only that, but I enjoy odd metaphors, unusual connections. My son has helped me with that because he sees connections between things in the world that I never would have noticed. But even before my son came along, I was hopeless at those exams that tested one’s knowledge of analogies. The analogy tests were always multiple choice and I could never figure out which was the correct choice because if you stretch (and it isn’t much of a stretch) you can see how any one thing is to another thing like any third thing is to any fourth thing.

My point: I’m okay with metaphors that aren’t obvious. But as a reader I get annoyed when a writer makes me work to see a connection and then I realize that I’ve given the writer too much credit and that the writer hasn’t even taken the time to think about whether or not what s/he’s saying makes sense and is just throwing words against each other for effect.

Read it out loud. Think about it. Does it make sense? No? Then simplify. Yes? Go for it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go mimetize some cake. 

Independence

Oh dear, it's already been a week since my last post.
I've been very distracted (see: what can happen when you don't have a book contract).
After posting the first chapter of my new novel (see: While You're Here: Chapter 1) I decided to quickly put together a cookbook. The folks over at TasteBook are brilliant - and I simply couldn't resist. After entering in 25 of my most often used recipes and uploading photos I designed the dedication page and picked a cover and now I am waiting (not) patiently for it to arrive. (whereisitwhereisit.)
So there was that.
Then there was actual work - the kind I get paid for.
And then there was a mini crisis at home.
My son did something very lame. I won't go into specifics, but it caused a lot of commotion and calling of people like locksmiths and credit card companies (which included an epic conversation with the most incompetent customer service representative that wound up with me screaming, "Give me someone else! Put someone else on the phone now!") and wondering about why and how such a thing could happen. My father had one mandate for us growing up (okay, maybe more than one but this was a biggie) and that was: Don't be lame. My son had violated this cardinal rule so badly that I had to really get down into the crinkly depths of his thought processes to figure out what had gone on. This is always a difficult thing to do and at first I was just angry at him. Which I told him in no uncertain terms.
He got that part. And after I calmed down I was able to have a discussion with him (which is still going on two days later) about what he did and what it meant and how it had shaken my confidence in his ability to make good decisions.
He got that too.
But soon afterwards, he came back to me with a more sophisticated version of "How long are you going to be upset about this?" Since he became verbal, my son has known how to ask this question and although he's become used to getting more open-ended answers, he still really likes to have a schedule, a plan, a grid off which to work.
How long will you be upset?
When will you trust me again?
At what point will your confidence in me return?
It was an astonishing thing to realize--when he was much, much younger--that guilt would never work on my son, that he would never be manipulated by it. The overlay of parental guilt is an almost reflexive action, I realized. Who really wants to make a child feel bad? On the other hand, if "go ahead dance on my grave" gets the job done... But this never worked on my son. He would acknowledge the anger/frustration/annoyance/hurt or whatever it was and then he would immediately move to: how long will you hold onto this? Please let me know when you expect to be over it.
Living, loving, and raising a person like this does many things to change one's perspective on life (and any of you who have read Raising Blaze already know this story in part) but one of the most important, as I was reminded again, is that it frees one from the need to hang on to anger.
What I mean by this is that in so many situations, we find ourselves clinging to the hurt or the anger we either rightly or wrongly perceive as being caused by another person. There is some sort of weird solace in this for a minute or two but it doesn't last. Eventually the anger corrodes and you forget what it was that you were upset about in the first place and are just left with a dark sludge of wretchedness. To be asked, "When will you get over yourself and be done with this?" is like a slap in the face at first because, dammit, do you understand that I am upset because of what you did but then you think about the logic behind it.
My son likes to plan for a better, less chaotic future where I am not angry or upset and do not need to lecture him endlessly on his failings. Who can blame him? And so this time I let it go very quickly.
"I'm not angry anymore," I told him. "I'm not sure when I'll feel completely confident that you won't do something like that again but I believe you won't make that mistake again. Let's move forward."
"Okay," he said, "that works for me."
My son teaches me all the time. The lessons aren't always easy and they don't always go down smoothly but they are all valuable. It's especially true with this latest effort. Because being able to let go of anger, frustration, and even, for a minute, anxiety is to truly experience independence.
That's my independence story for this lovely July 4th.
I hope you're having a wonderful day. Thanks for reading. Oh, and I'll post Chapter 2 soon.
I made some Americookies. Here, have one.

Americookies