A nostalgia deep-dive, including a recipe for Gateau au Grand Marnier et Chocolate from 1984, memories of Christmas’ past, and a nod to that great children’s book The Polar Express.
Coming out of a bad breakup, I decided to make the single most romantic cake that I could think of. The answer was obvious: Julia Child’s Reine de Saba.
It’s the cornbread that keeps me coming back. The corn cakes, to be precise, and then, as of my latest visit, the corn muffins dotted with marionberries in the manner of this berry-oozing scone.
Here is a simple stunner of a cake. A blood-orange and Meyer-lemon-from-my-tree cake. A glistening, inverted, candied-orange-and-cornmeal to rescue you from the doldrums of winter (or work, or your laundry, or any manner of things you might like to avoid today) cake.
On Friday, the first strawberries of the season arrived in my farm box, ushering in that mystical eight-month strawberry season that I always talk about. We ate them (with gusto if not a bit of trepidation at having something so sweet and summer-like on our tongues) with poppyseed-challah french toast.
It started in the baking aisle of the grocery store. A package of Bob's Red Mill poppy seeds: An aide-memoire, a coup de foudre, a sudden shock of recollection, and then a drifting, dreaming mind, floating over the past, landing on a specific memory and than a handful of fuzzier ones.
In the country, when I was young, there was an apple tree that had been planted by a family member now long gone. It was gnarled and old and it produced very little. From my bedroom, I could see the branches outlined in the night sky. I never thought much about it. It was a part of the background, but it was still “the” apple tree. It’s presence was singular. I remember the silvery bark, crackled all over the surface of the tree trunk—this was where the light caught.
There is the even more dire imperative of needing to get this recipe into your hands before prune plums disappear from the markets. I recommend buying these plums by the bushel. I guarantee you will always find something to do with them. They bake incredibly well, making easy stove-top jam in no time, reducing quickly to an earthy-sweet compote for pork, or eating out of hand, cold and beaded with condensation from the refrigerator. They are so small and tear-drop shaped that you usually want to eat more than one in a sitting. They are a perfectly simple dessert, all on their own.
My book with Carissa Potter is available for pre-order! On sale October 11, 2022. Published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House.