What I'm Reading | May 2015

Lunch at Bottega Louie

It's hard to wrap up May in a tight sentence or two, because it brought with it a flurry of emotions. At the beginning of the month, we attended an inspiring benefit dinner supporting Alma Community Outreach, and I took home four handmade earthenware bowls from the silent auction that I've been meaning to tell you about.

The next two weeks were more of a blur. My grandfather passed away the day before my birthday, and a week later I was on a plane headed to Minneapolis for a business trip. I was able to spend time with Melissa, Sarah, and Kasey, all in the span of a week. (If you're ever in Minneapolis, check out Broder's Pasta Bar, by the way.) I got a much-needed massage. I finished reading a book and started a new cookbook. And today, Andrew and I invited my immediate family over for lunch to eat Italian beef soup and reminisce about some good memories before my grandfather's big memorial service next weekend.

Sometimes life just comes at you all at once, happy and sad, struggle and triumph, sweet and savory, yet we press on. 

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"The mantra today is the same as yesterday.
We must become different."

-from Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms by Hayan Charara

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What writing a cookbook can teach you about cooking. 

Tea culture blossoms in New York. Also, the beauty of a well-used cookbook page.

How to be a poet and a complete human being.

Imagine a world without photography.

What kind of food writer are you? 

How to make poetry edible. 

A good read in Lucky Peach.

Our stream of consciousness is actually a rhythmic pulse.

Tea in old Delhi.

Are literary journals in trouble? 

Looking forward to making turmeric cashews, summer pasta salad, and meringue with berries and cream.

The not-so-graceful middle.

"In Italy" by Derek Walcott + Almond Coffee Cake

Traveling at a young age always seems to be a good idea. I went to Europe for the first time at 15, with a good friend's family. We drove through eight countries in about as many days, and it was my first taste of a Parisian croissant, German Black Forest cake, springtime snow (also in Germany), and appropriately, the travel bug that followed me into adulthood. 

During college, I studied abroad in London for six months, traveling around Europe more while I was there, and through work have gone to places like Romania and Nepal. Travel sings to our soul. It opens our eyes, challenges us, inspires us, and offers a more expansive view of the world and its people. 

But what of the perspective of traveling later in life when you've had the chance to gain some real perspective? Perhaps you've suffered a loss or two, and instead of sightseeing, spend entire afternoons on terraces, less interested in making new memories in favor of wrestling with all the memories you brought with you. 

When I heard the New Yorker podcast on this poem, it moved me, and I think you'll find that the uncertainty and unanswered questions somehow provide comfort despite the circumstances. Also, there will be cake.

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In Italy

By Derek Walcott

I

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light
older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth
spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late
to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth
that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous,
while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells
of the hilltop towers number my errors,
because we are never where we are, but somewhere else,
even in Italy. This is the bearable truth
of old age; but count your benedictions—those fields
of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze
of the unheard Adriatic—while the day still hopes
for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes.

II

The blue windows, the lemon-colored counterpane,
the knowing that the sea is behind the avenue
with balconies and bicycles, that the gelid traffic
mixes its fumes with coffee—transient interiors,
transient bedsheets, and the transient view
of sea-salted hotels with spiky palms,
in spite of which summer is serious,
since there is inevitably a farewell to arms,
to the storm-haired beauty who will disappear.
The shifted absence of your axis, love
wobbles on your body’s pivot, to the carriage’s
shudder as it glides past the roofs and beaches
of the Ligurian coast. Things lose their balance
and totter from the small blows of memory.
You wait for revelations, for leaping dolphins,
for nightingales to loosen their knotted throats,
for the bell in the tower to absolve your sins
like the furled sails of the homecoming boats.

The New Yorker | 4/21/08

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In the first stanza, there is sunlight and hope and picnics and love, and then I find a knot in my stomach. It's easy to find yourself wrapped up in the language hat you forget there is a clear tightness, almost claustrophobia announced in the very first line with "enclosing walls" and "narrow cobbled tracks." From the first line, the walls are closing in.

We know the speaker is no longer in his youth, and has come to Italy hoping to find some kind of wisdom or clarity. Here, we find a portrait of an Italian village, but this is not just a travel poem.

In his conversation with Paul Muldoon, Major Jackson says that he admires the emotional pitch and the “the spirit of attention” in the poem, which contains lush imagery but doesn’t feel like “the equivalent of a landscape painting.”

I like this description, because here the landscape serves as a frame to pull us deeper into the interior of human experience. The speaker finds himself in a place unchanged for centuries, and church bells become a metaphor for the errors that have spanned his lifetime. Yet there is the hope of possibility and change in "torn light" on the hills, sunflowers, and the rush of sitting with unanswered questions.

In this kind of situation, there should be cake. I'm not one to spend my weekends baking elaborate layer cakes and whipping up frostings. Perhaps for a birthday or anniversary, it's important to me, yes. But I like simple cakes, too. Every day cakes. Cakes that don't have many ingredients and aren't too sweet, and simply need a dusting of powdered sugar to become dressed up. 

As far as recipes go, this pairing is a looser interpretation. The poem's lone reference to coffee fumes spurred my idea for a simple cake one might nibble on in the afternoon along with an espresso or cup of tea, hopefully overlooking the Tuscan hillsides. This particular cake would also make a nice picnic accompaniment, and seeing as we're entering the season for outdoor dining, it's a good time to think about it. 

I came to this recipe by way of Nigella Lawson, actually. My eye was on a luscious lemon cake that I ultimately deemed too fussy due to the fact that I didn't have enough almonds on hand to grind them into meal. On the heels of my disappointment, Food52 announced a simple almond cake was the one you'll make over and over again, and as it turns out, they were right.

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ALMOND COFFEE CAKE

Recipe ever so slightly adapted from Food52

Almond cake is something I've long held affection for, because it composed one of three flavors of my wedding cake. Although this version has no frosting or cream filling to speak of, it's bright with almond flavor thanks to extract, tender, and reminded me of the little crumbly cookies I used to eat from the local Italian deli that were speckled with sprinkles the color of the Italian flag. In short, this is a cake to sit with while reminiscing, which is why I felt it paired so perfectly with this poem.  

1/2 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup creme fraiche
1 1/2 cups organic cane sugar, plus 2 teaspoons for sprinkling
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups sifted spelt flour (or AP flour)
1 pinch salt
1 teaspoon almond extract
1/3 cup chopped almonds

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter a 10-inch cast-iron skillet

Combine the butter, creme fraiche, and 1 1/2 cups sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix on low speed until well combined.

Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing until well incorporated.

Add the flour, salt, and extract. Mix well, then pour into the cast iron pan.

Sprinkle the cake with the remaining sugar and scatter with the almonds.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool for 1 hour before serving.

Life & Thyme Excerpt: A Virtuous Fish

Photo by Josh Telles

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Note: This story was originally published in Issue One of Life & Thyme. To read the full feature in its entirety, purchase Issue One from the online shop or from one of their local stockists.

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The Purveyor

It’s 5:12 a.m. Behind a thick panel of plastic curtains, fish bones are ripped out under fluorescent lights and blood smears on plastic cutting boards. I’m standing in a small puddle next to Alfredo Gurrola, one of the most sought-after seafood purveyors in Los Angeles, marveling at the pink tuna bellies standing at attention on nearby table, awaiting their fate.

With scales splattered on my leather boots, I turn to Gurrola and ask how he chooses fish.

“It’s a combination of learned technique and instinct. Even though you can know why the fish should be one way, or look for clear gills, you must have the feeling. You have to love it.”

What he loves is a market that smells of salt and the faintest wisp of seaweed. Six days a week, Gurrola walks the floor at International Marine Products (IMP) in downtown Los Angeles, overseeing deliveries and meticulously inspecting orders placed by his roster of restaurant clients. Silver mackerel straight as a board is still in rigamortis. Abalone from New Zealand, the size of a grown man’s fist, suctions itself to the interior of a plastic bucket. A  five hundred pound bluefin tuna marked SG—sushi grade—with a red felt pen is unearthed from beneath a tarp.

Photo by Josh Telles

In spare moments, Gurrola calls markets on the east coast and sends texts to local chefs with the morning’s updates, like when storms prevent a box of Nantucket bay scallops from arriving on time. It’s a fast-paced, twenty four hour job. Some might buckle at the intensity, but the daily challenges have helped fuel his passion for nearly thirty years.

Growing up in Zacatecas, Mexico, fish was rarely in his mother’s kitchen, and Gurrola softens into a smile when I ask how his role developed from driving a truck for IMP—his first job in 1985—to working directly with chefs and brokers. “I saw how IMP handled the fish, how the chefs prepared it, and the freshness.”

Although his depth of knowledge was cultivated slowly, Gurrola’s confidence can be traced to one memory. Early on, Gurrola was showing an IMP customer a fish he was particularly in love with that day.

“It looked so good, so beautiful,” he recalls. “When I showed it to the chef and explained how the fish was cut, he looked at me and told my boss ‘I want to buy that fish just because I see the passion he has.’”

Gurrola turns away and opens a box of tiger prawns, pulling one up by the tail before it curls its body in protest. The rest remain covered in wood chips.

“To prevent suffocation,” he says, noticing as I lean in closer.

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The Chef

For Chef Michael Cimarusti, relationships are as important as the products. He worked with a handful of IMP reps before Gurrola took over the account for his two-Michelin star Hollywood restaurant, Providence, and the two bonded quickly.

“I trusted him immediately,” Cimarusti says. “I know he has his eye on everything that comes to us and understands the quality we’re looking for.”

Years later, Gurrola still insists he is not a salesman.

“I can’t sell fish by talking. My selling point is offering quality.” Cimarusti is quick to interject. “That’s the point! He doesn’t have to sell anything to me. I just know that when I need something, there’s nobody else to get it from.”

Chef Michael Cimarusti and Alfredo Gurrola | Photo by Josh Telles

Providence maintains strict sustainability standards and doesn’t mind paying more for wild fish. “It’s a value choice that people need to make,” Cimarusti notes. “When you’re guaranteed the fish is wild and sustainable, there are costs associated with that. Do you want to pay $10 for a piece of grilled salmon that was farm raised irresponsibly in a foreign country and not tested for its wholesomeness, or do you want to buy something wild, that’s keeping American fishermen on the water, that’s being harvested in a sustainable manner?”

This conviction, stemming in part from Cimarusti’s lifelong devotion to fishing, translates into the seasonal menu at Providence. “Whatever we do to the fish here is as important to the experience of our guests as anything else. I tell the cooks all the time, that fish didn’t come all the way from Japan or Australia to be mistreated. Somebody went and pulled that fish out of the ocean and shipped it around the world. It’s incredibly precious. Not only monetarily, but honoring the ingredients. To have it go to waste is a cardinal sin to us.”

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Want to read the full story? Find it in Issue One of Life & Thyme.