The Best American Poetry

China in A Day [by Matthew Thorburn]

Philip Larkin once remarked that he would like to visit China, but only if he could come home the same day. (I could do another week here on funny and/or curmudgeonly things he said.)

He also said in his Paris Review interview that writing a poem was, for him, a way “to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.” (As coldly scientific as that sounds, he of course also wrote some of the most beautiful and moving verbal devices in 20th century English. And he did go on at least one overnight trip abroad, to Germany, or so I’ve heard.)

Having written and now recently published a book of poems about traveling in China, Iceland and Japan, I’ve often thought of Uncle Phil (as I think of him) and these remarks of his when someone asks me what my book is about, or especially why I wrote it. But to tell you what I tell people, I first have to share another quote.

Jasper Johns said that sometimes life gets so close we can’t see it anymore. Small children and the outrageously wealthy aside, who doesn’t sometimes feel like that? Work or school – or both – plus getting there and home again, taking care of kids (if you went against Uncle Phil's advice and have some yourself), cooking and cleaning and hopefully somewhere in there sleeping… It’s hard not to get caught up in the busy-ness of everyday living and feel that life – real life, the good life, whatever cool thing your friends are doing (and posting pictures of on Facebook) and you’re not – is rushing past you in a blur.

Next thing you know, you’re one of those people who say things like, “I can’t believe it’s already Wednesday” or “Where did the summer go?”

Whereas traveling in another country can have the exact opposite effect. You notice everything – or try to. Because everything is new and different and strange (mostly in a good way). For instance, going to the bathroom in Japan can be an adventure in itself: one involving high-tech toilets and a quick change of footwear. Ordering dinner in Iceland can be too: do I feel like whale pepper steak or is tonight more of a fermented shark kind of night? Should I try the puffin? Or plokkfiskur, perhaps?

Finding yourself in another country is like putting on a new pair of glasses. Everything snaps into focus. Everything seems brighter and sharper. 

Which is, of course, like writing a poem – or like what it takes to write a poem. Traveling and writing poems are both about finding your way, in all the different senses of that phrase. And in both cases you have to pay attention.

I think it was Jordan Davis who once said that’s the biggest thing: you have to be present. Show up and pay attention. That’s the job, you poets – and you travelers. And notice how this thing connects to this other thing. How they are – or aren't – like the things you know back home. How this reminds you of that.

And now we’re making metaphors. And now the world just got a little smaller.  

I wrote poems about being in China to create verbal devices that would enable me to go back to China, if only for a day or an hour, and only in my imagination – and so that (so my hope goes) interested readers could do the same. What I wound up with on the page is a mix of memory and imagination, of course, and so not exactly the China I set foot in some years ago.

And interestingly the best part for the poet (for this one, anyway) wasn’t that finished verbal device, but the process of building it, how the words – or the search for the right ones – kept spurring me on to remember more, imagine more, to go back there again and again.

And finally it’s worth remembering too that one of Larkin’s most beautiful poems is about a journey (again, in all the senses), albeit a domestic one. Listen to him read “The Whitsun Weddings,” which picks up steam slowly but surely, like the train the poet travels in--

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

--and then ends with the most beautiful rain.

On Gastronomical Authenticity [by Raymond Sokolov]

 When I blundered into the food world around 1964, my goal was to recreate the dishes I had eaten as a student tourist in Europe in the summers of 1960 and 1962 with my own hand in my own American kitchen. With Julia Child (vol. 1) in hand, I sought to cook the unadulterated, unabbreviated, unadapted real thing.

Later, following my mentors Ellen and John Schrecker and their Sichuanese cook, I tried to do the same thing with the spicy food of her home province. The Schreckers were aiming to write recipes that would bring the “true taste” of Sichuan food within the grasp of American cooks working in American conditions.

In both cases, like hundreds and thousands of other American home cooks of that era, I was searching for authenticity. My kitchen experiments were intended to reproduce as exactly as possible the traditional recipes of Paris and Chengdu. Underlying this project, which the success of the Child book inspired publishers to back a spate of ambitious avatars for the food of Italy, Morocco and other cultures admired for their cooking, was the unexamined and rarely mentioned notion of authenticity.

Like other important abstract principles, authenticity meant many things at once. Its vagueness and broadness made it hard to define and harder to attack. Not that anyone in those days that I ever met regarded “authenticity” as a problematic idea.  If you had asked me in 1972 when I was reviewing restaurants for The New York Times, what do you look for in a restaurant? I would without hesitation have responded that I was in search of authenticity. By which I meant that I wanted a French restaurant to duplicate the food I had eaten in France, as well as the atmosphere of restaurants I had been to there. If you had pressed me further, I would have argued that the authenticity I was promoting represented a culinary purity that had evolved over the ages, a lasting tradition preserved not only in thousands of kitchens but in Bibles of cuisine by Escoffier and by Julia Child’s unavowed bourgeois model, Madame Saint-Ange.

But in that same year, 1972, I went back to France and discovered a revolution in important kitchens run by Paul Bocuse and Michel Guerard.  As the spirit of this nouvelle cuisine percolated across France and then the entire world, it became difficult to continue to believe in the unchanging value of culinary authenticity. Where once a great chef had earned his reputation as a purveyor of the foods of the past, the young Turks of the profession increasingly won praise for their innovations.

In our current era of Top Chefs straining for originality before huge audiences on television, the very notion of authenticity as a plausible value may seem quaint. But it remains a watchword for many righteous authorities in the contemporary food world, especially lovers of the food of Italy, where the craze for change that has swept through nearly every other culture has had barely any effect on local foodways. Similarly, while the most advanced sector of the foodie universe has embraced the radical inventions of the science-based wizards of modernist cuisine, Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Catalonia or Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck outside London, a faction of traditionalists continue to mock this avant-garde.

As far as one can tell, these last-ditch defenders of traditional “authentic” cookery are offended by violations of the food heritage of the world, by hysterical dabblings with dishes that evolved over centuries and shouldn’t be meddled with.

The problem with this debate—between modernists and traditionalists—is that it rests on a false idea of primordial culinary traditions under vulgar contemporary attack. Authenticity in food, like similar notions of authenticity in ethnic makeup, or national character or culture, doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny as a historical principle. Even the most worshipped dishes of Italy were invented by someone not that long ago. Although the actual names of the cooks who first brought the tomato into Italian cooking some time after it arrived from the New World in the wake of Columbus are unknown, their recipes are roughly datable. Polenta, the cornmeal mush of the Italian north, brought a Mexican plant to a region of Europe sunk in poverty, where its adoption by peasants unfamiliar with its nutritional properties led to an epidemic of pellagra. Plentiful records show when this classic vitamin b3-deficiency disease swept over a population newly dependent on corn and ignorant of the need to process the grain in an alkaline medium to make its niacin available to human digestion.

Another way to undermine one’s faith in millennial culinary authenticity is simply to look at the French cookbook tradition and to observe the difference between dishes recorded over the decades between Careme, the father of modern French haute cuisine after the revolution to Escoffier, the last codifier of tradition in the early 20^th century.

Rural and bourgeois traditions also evolved over time. Hearty stews with potatoes were offputting novelties not so long ago.

And yet, the authenticists are not just whistling Dixie.  When you cook a coq au vin following an “authentic” recipe, you will end up with pretty much the same dish someone else will produce using a basically similar set of directions. It doesn’t really matter that almost no one today will be duplicating the “original” coq au vin, which would have been based on a rooster and probably would have included its blood as a thickener. That medieval civet is not the authentic dish anyone in our gastronomic era has in mind. Our authentic coq au vin is the one we ate in France in 1960 or cooked from a recipe of that period reliably written down by someone preoccupied with preserving the true taste of a widely admired dish of that moment.

For me, anyway, culinary authenticity reflects vernacular practice in a culturally coherent region at a particular time. Getting those recipes right is not, or at least wasn’t, a delusionary mission.  Julia’s cassoulet is an authentic version of a regional bean dish of southwest France, as it was cooked in Julia’s time. Does it continue to be a regular feature of vernacular gastronomic  life in the region today? Will it be bubbling away on farmhouse stoves in 2030? This is an authentically unanswerable question.

Just relying on some woolly presumption that authentic foods sprang from the soil of Burgundy or the Dordogne when Roland was fighting off the Saracens, and will always be the only legitimate foods of France, is a mistake. An intellectually inauthentic error.

On Literature and Food [by Raymond Sokolov]

Banquet Scene Nicias Painter (circa 420 BC

In our food-besotted culture, chefs and cookbook authors get far more respect, by and large, than poets or classical musicias or scholars ever did before post-modernism had undermined the prestige of the “high” arts. Even a poet as successful as W.H. Auden found it expedient to conceal his "profession" from strangers seated next to him on planes.

 

What did he “do”? Medieval history. He had found that telling the truth about himself aroused incredulity and dialogues of unbearable tedium. But at least Auden would have been treated with wondering respect.

Now we have the bewildering phenomenon of the star chef, a fast-talking prestidigitator of improbably conjoined ingredients, famous primarily for his performances on television, rather than for the food his restaurant kitchen serves to a more limited and traditionally discriminating audience of gastronomes.

Few equivalent stars of old-fashioned literature, music and art ever existed. And even Chopin or Picasso or Dickens never penetrated the world audience to the same extent as that lout Gordon Ramsay. Well, maybe Dickens dominated his potential audience as decisively as Ramsay, but it was a smaller audience.

Perhaps it will give comfort to fogey esthetes (I am one) to consider how low the status of cooking was across the pre-video millennia, especially in literature. Before the modern era, even within the culinary profession, only a few cookbooks achieved high status. And during the heydays of Careme (1784 –  1833) and his follower Escoffier (1846 –1935), not even their most devoted acolytes would have considered their written work part of literature.

Food does inevitably appear in works of high literature from the very beginning. Those “equal feasts” on the banks of the Scamander in the Iliad are serious events, as important to the unfolding of the epic poem as is the laundry expedition to the seashore that leads Nausicaa to the shipwrecked Odysseus. But such interruptions of the main heroic fighting and manly adventure are Homer’s way of giving extra shock value to his bellicose story by contrasting it with the charm and safety of everyday life. The similes, with their celebrated outward expansion from a pinpoint in the bloody foreground to a barely related full image of peace and beauty, are the most intense examples of this approach.

But Homer treats the humblest things with respect; his barbecues are dignified, religious in fact. But in the hands of other classical writers, food, when it does get mentioned, is usually either a joke or a symbol of gross appetite and carnality.

 Perhaps the earliest food poem is a culinary parody of the opening lines of the Odyssey, in which the much-traveled (polytropon) hero (andra)  is replaced by a copious (polytrophon) and metrically equivalent banquet (deipnon).

Aristophanes frequently uses food as a tool of mockery. The plot of The Acharnians hinges on the protagonist’s passion for the eels of Lake Copais in Boeotia, off limits to Athenian epicures because of the war with Sparta. Dicaeopolis solves this problem by declaring a unilateral peace.

The most important work of gastronomy from antiquity, really the only important work of gastronomy from antiquity, is the Deipnosophistae (The Feasting Philosophers) by the Greek-Egyptian anthologist Athenaeus (fl. 200 ad). A grab-bag of mostly food-related quotations from hundreds of authors, it would be dismissible as frivolous pedantry if it did not also preserve fragments from serious writers who would be lost to us if they had not happened to mention a turnip or a stew.

The most ambitious food poem that survives from the ancient world is Moretum, a versified recipe for what may be pesto, that is included with other minor poems in the so-called Pseudo-Vergilian Appendix. Most authorities do not believe that Vergil composed the 124-hexameter account of a peasant toiling at his mortar and pestle.

The best food poem in either Greek or Latin is a tongue-in-cheek invitation to a dinner where the host will not provide any food at all, just good cheer and revelry. Catullus couches his mock invitation in the most august language, of prayer and elegiac romance:

You’ll dine well at my place, Fabullus,

In a few days, if the gods favor you,

And if you remember to bring along a fine big meal,

As well as a lovely girl and wine and salt

And lots of laughs.

If, I stress, you bring all these things, beloved friend,

You’ll dine quite well: because the wallet of your Catullus is

Full of spiders.

But in return you will receive unadulterated love,

Or whatever there is as elegant or fine:

I’ll give you a lotion,

Which Venus and Cupid gave my girlfriend,

And when you smell it, you’ll beseech the gods, Fabullus,

To make you

All nose.

So far, I’ve left out the other main literary food genre, cannibalism, the mythographic dark side of the banquet. . For example, there is the dinner at which Thyestes is served his own sons, in a  horrific profanation of the ideal feast. Such scenes are, I suppose, food literature, but far from the positive, non-satirical treatment of cooking and eating that enters literature in modern times.

Perhaps there already exists a study of the rise in respectability of gastronomy in the novel. It would inevitably show how the kitchen and its products gradually lost their trappings of Rabelaisian and Falstaffian debauchery in an arc of embourgeoisement that eventually gave us Proust’s madeleine and Virginia Woolf’s nod to gourmet cookery in To The Lighthouse, the boeuf en daube.

Neither Mrs. Woolf nor her character Mrs. Ramsay seems to know much about the actual cooking of the dish, as the British chef Rowley Leigh has shown in a clever analysis. The Ramsays’ cook Marthe does the actual cooking, which may excuse the self-satisfied if faintly idiotic warnings from Mrs. R. about the need for scientific precision in making this extremely forgiving, long-simmering classic of  Provençe. Perhaps Woolf meant to satirize Mrs. Ramsay’s pretensions as an upper middle class non-cook dining out, as it were, on the skills of her domestic employee.

Today, the equivalent person wouldn’t be cooking either. She would either order takeout or make a reservation. But we may doubt that she would be able to supply Catullan wit or an odor more divine than what emanates from a eucalyptus-spearmint aromatherapy candle ordered from the gods of the internet.

A Feast for Bards: 13 Favorite Food Poems by Stacey Harwood (from Saveur.com)

Credit: Hiroko Ishikawa

(Author's note:  A couple of months ago Saveur.com asked for my favorite food poems along with a brief introduction. This piece ran yesterday.)

Had he but world enough, and time, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin would have added a selection of gastronomical poems to his  magnum opus The Physiology of Taste to demonstrate “the inseparable alliance which has always existed between the arts of speaking well and eating well.”

Scratch a poet, find a gourmand.  “The true Muses are cooks,” writes Charles Simic. Every aspect of gastronomy, from planting to harvest to cooking to eating, has inspired poets for centuries; poets are sensualists, and these are among life's most sensual experiences.

Like much gastronomical writing, poetry about food is often about something else: memory, sex, joy, love, shame, longing, loss. The simple detail of food can concentrate the emotion in a poem, like the couple cooking for themselves alone in William Matthews' Misgivings. A food reference can quicken our most primitive emotions: Keats's stanza-long description of wine, "Tasting of Flora and the country-green, / Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!" makes longing palpable. 

Continue reading here. 

What are your favorite food poems?  I'd love to add to my collection.  -- sdh

Quote of the Week: The 99-cent Slice

On Monday morning, April 15, with taxes on people's minds -- before the bombs went off in Boston -- commuters reading the Wall Street Journal got to ponder the implications of the ninety-nine cent slice of pizza, a new development in Manhattan. You see stands advertising dollar slices on Eighth Street and Second Avenue, for instance, and the competition and inferior product are leaving some proud pizza makers feeling pretty vulnerable. So let's hear from an expert, and obligingly one steps forth, and these deathless sentences emerge:

<<<
"The 99-cent slice is a giant step towards killing the classic New York pizza experience," said John Arena, who teaches a class on pizza history and culture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "What's next, $1 lox and 10-cent bagels?"
>>>

Say, dear reader, what is the most remarkable element in this little graf? Though there's more than one candidate, my vote goes to "a class on pizza history and culture." -- DL

Much Depends on Dinner: The Menu

"It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern.  It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or thepsychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology, and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, and incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark."

                                    John Lanchester The Debt to Pleasure (1996, Henry Holt)

Much Depends on Dinner: Baking Hamentaschen with Robin Neidorf and Talia

     All human history attests
That happiness for man,—the hungry sinner!—
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
     --  Lord Byron, Don Juan. Canto xiii. Stanza 99

(Ed note:  Robin Neidorf and I were classmates in graduate school and whenever I think of her or we exchange e-mails I have to remind myself that she's not still one year out of Williams College. In grad school, even though she was studying non-fiction, she would try anything!  Like the sestina she wrote a few hours after learning the form - it was hilarious, a narrative, from the point of view of an actress who didn't want to kiss her leading man. -- sdh) 

It has been many years since I’ve had proper hamentaschen, which to me means my grandmother Lillian’s hamentaschen. This is only in part my own fault: The last time I tried to make her recipe, my aging gas oven gasped its last just as I heated it up to bake the goods. That event precipitated three months of eating sandwiches and microwave foods from a makeshift setup in the dining room and $60,000 in renovations.  Not unexpectedly (if somewhat illogically), I was a leery of trying that recipe again.

Over the next few years, I tried other recipes. I’d purchased a book of Jewish holiday crafts, stories and recipes, and naturally my daughter Talia wanted to make those recipes, rather than the one scribbled on an index card. Since part of the purpose of the book had been to engage us both with the traditions and the (now fabulous) kitchen, I could hardly say no.

But these weren’t my recipes, or my tastes. We tried the butter version – too like a shortbread. We tried the oil version – I couldn’t get the dough to stick properly. We filled with pie filling – the lazy-mom’s version… feh! We filled with chocolate chips – Talia was delighted, but the texture was all wrong. The ideal, to my mouth, was cakey rather than crispy, and filled with a savory mixture of golden raisins, prunes, apricots and… something.

Hamentaschen, for those who are not familiar with this gift to the world, are filled cookies baked for Purim, an early spring holiday celebrating Queen Esther’s courage in speaking up for her people. Bad guy Hamen (for whose triangular hat the cookies are shaped) takes the death sentence he planned to mete out to the Jews. And in commemoration of this noble victory, Jews forevermore stave off constipation with the prune-filled sweets.

There are as many versions of the cookie as there are Jewish kitchens. The matrix of options is almost mind-boggling: The cookie can be milchig (made with dairy) or parve (suitable for either meat or milk). The filling can be tangy, sweet or super-sweet. An endless array of options for tasting and testing. (As long as the oven doesn’t let you down.)

The last butter version was a disappointment. For the cookies to be shaped around the filling, the dough needs to be chilled to stiff-but-workable. I couldn’t get the ratios right, and the dough either melted in my fingers or crumbled into sweet dust.

My cousin Malcom’s wife Kara came to my rescue when I announced in a Facebook status update that only an extra stick of butter seemed to save the day. ‘They can’t be Lillian’s, then, because hers were parve and they were perfection.’

She was right. Lillian’s were perfection. Why was I looking somewhere else when I already had what I craved?

So. Grandma Lillian’s hamentaschen. Know that Grandma Lillian was a wretched cook – her baked steak was legendary for its jaw-strengthening properties. Her percolated coffee, re-perked throughout the day, could hold a teaspoon upright. Her salads featured a bright arrangement of fruit (both fresh and tinned), boiled eggs, radishes and greens of uncertain provenance. But the hamentaschen were, as Kara reminded me, perfection.

A Friday evening I prepared the dough and chilled it. On Saturday morning Kara and Malcom’s daughter Tsaudik (only a few days younger than Talia) came over to play. At  mid-day I convinced both girls (pictured above) to help me assemble, squeezing little triangles together.

The oven worked. The aroma was just as I recalled. The great-granddaughters paid little attention to the whole process, more interested in creating outfits for the cats (and trying to catch one) than creating with me. That was fine. More than fine. It was perfection.

Grandma Lillian’s Hamentaschen:
Keep in mind this makes approximately 300 cookies. I usually make half the recipe, but this is the unaltered version:

Cookie:
6 eggs (5 makes crisper)
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups oil, (Lillian used Wessen)
2 oranges--juice and zest
1/4 tsp salt
5 tsp baking powder
6-7 cups flour

-mix all until barely dry, (adding flour as you go)
-chill overnight to make it stiff and workable
-roll out on a floured surface, (not too thick, thin is better)
-add about 1/2 tsp filling and form into triangles.

Filling: Grind up packages of prunes, white raisins, dark raisins, apricots. Lillian added a small jar of apricot jam, juice and zest of one lemon.

Bake at 375 for 10-16 min.

Robin Neidorf lives, writes and cooks in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she wrote a memoir about her grandmother Lillian for her thesis. Current projects include essays on being a community volunteer and notes towards a book about preparing for an interfaith-friendly Bat Mitzvah.

(this post originally appeared on April 2, 2010)

Monday I Have Friday on My Mind: Cocktails with Nata Traub

(Ed note: After the success of Nata Traub's first post here, I convinced her to contribute a regular column that would feature drinks inspired by poems. This is the first of what we know will be a popular series.  For more of Nata's cocktail recipes check out her blog. sdh)

Monday I have Friday (Cocktails) on my mind. Truth be told, everyday I have Cocktails on my mind. Just about anything can get me going. After reading Pat Smith's Invitation to a Masquerade, it set my mind wandering. The title itself conjured up pools of Rum swirling in spices. I set out to my office (above), and began creating. A drink to Kings and wrought iron fences with Mardi Gras snapping at its heels.

The Masquerade

 

2 ½  ounces of white Rum, that has been infused with a vanilla bean for several days

1 ounce of fresh pineapple juice (if possible or if bottled, unsweetened)

½  ounce of fresh lime juice

1 T. (or more, to taste) of Wild Hibiscus  Syrup*

 

Shake all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Moisten the rim of a Martini  glass with a bit of the lime and twirl the glass edge though the Hibiscus dust**. Strain into the glass, and to gild the lily, eye dropper some dark Rum on top.

 

*Wild Hibiscus Syrup

½ c dried hibiscus flowers (flor de Jamaica, available at Caribbean or Latin markets)

3 cloves

3 allspice pods

1 small cinnamon stick

 3 thin slices of ginger

Peel from approx. half an orange w/out pith

1 ½  c demerara sugar

1 ½ c water

 

Put in a pot bring to a boil then lower flame and simmer for 15 minutes.

Shut flame and let sit until cool. Strain into a clean bottle.

Keep stored in fridge

 

**Hibiscus Dust

In the mean time, take 2 or 3 of the dried hibiscus flowers and grind them in a small food grinder (coffee grinder) This “dust” will be used on the rim of your cocktail, adding a tart burst when sipping.

-- Nata Traub

Quote of the day: Four New Potatoes by Joe Weil

("The Potato Eaters" Vincent Van Gogh, 1885)

I remember boiling 4 "new Potatoes (those are the small ones others call salt potatoes) making myself a small sauce pan of melted butter with pepper, and eating the potatoes whole and scewered on my swiss army blade as I read Williams' Selected poems. I was 18 years old, and the only one awake in the house at three in the morning. It is one of the happiest memories of my life. Maybe it was the linoleum which was torn just under my seat. I scratched an itch on my bare foot with it. Maybe it was the flourescent light. It could have been Williams' poems, too, but I know, know beyond all doubt that, without those 4 potatoes, no happiness would have been as possible.

                        -- Joe Weil

Gabriel Received the Flan and Warm Smiles [by Stacey Harwood]

Dear Howard:  one shd. Never attempt FLAN in an unfamiliar and very bad oven – so forgive me if these are full of the unforgivable holes .. .I do hope you’re feeling better – Much love - 

                                  -- Undated note from Elizabeth Bishop to Howard Moss

Have you ever made flan?  I have, many times.  Flan is a light custard dessert that makes a great finish to a heavy meal.  Flan isn’t difficult to assemble -- there aren’t many ingredients (at its most basic, there’s milk, sugar, and eggs) and the method is straightforward -- but a lot can go wrong in the baking.  If you leave it in the oven for too long or if the temperature is off its mark, the mixture can end up resembling scrambled eggs.  If you take it out of the oven too soon, you’ll have an unappealing puddle of soup.  I’m not sure of what could have caused the holes in the version Bishop delivered to Moss, her friend and editor at The New Yorker, but given her characteristic modesty, I have a feeling that Moss was quite happy with his get-well gift.

Through the magic weirdness that is Facebook, I caught this update on poet Gabriel Gudding’s page: “Gabriel received the flan and warm smiles and t-shirt from Didi just now on the porch in the marmalade light and snow.”   Now there’s a lovely line, yes?  Bishop's spirit lives on in more than her writing! The Didi Gabe refers to is poet Didi Menendez, editor of MiPoesias, Ocho, and Oranges and Sardines.  She and Gabe are neighbors.  Lucky him.

Didi was happy to pass along her recipe (below the jump), but notes that credit goes “to an aunt of a cousin I visited in 1979 in Naples Florida although the almond extract part is my version and not part of the original recipe. Also the cheese variation comes from my mother Salome and I am not sure where she picked it up -- possibly on a bus on her way to work or back from working in the factory when we were kids.”  Didi's recipe is my favorite kind - it assumes that the cook has a certain amount of comfort and experience in the kitchen.  It's the kind of recipe exchanged between friends and family who know each others' habits.   

I can't wait to try it:

-- sdh