The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
skeletal against the light blue sky
three varieties of purple in the distance
as the sun sets, and the birds exchange notes.
My dog Johnny falls asleep at my feet
on the terrace. I sip my drink and think:
just as having an even tiny portion of your portfolio
in bonds can help your long-term performance,
so even a few drops of dry vermouth
will improve your martini.
from Literary Hub
December 21, 2022
If you travel the back roads at this time of year, you might get lucky and come across a roadside stand where seasonal produce is for sale. Oftentimes these work on the honor system: there's a price list for the produce, and a can or box where you deposit your money. Some stands sell a single crop, others sell a wide variety of whatever is ripe and ready. Whenever I pass one of these places, I pull over. I'm reminded of this poem by Charles Simic:
Roadside Stand
-- by Charles Simic
In the watermelon and corn season,
The earth is a paradise, the morning
Is a ripe plum or a plump tomato
We bite into as if it were the mouth of a lover.
Despite the puzzled face of the young fellow
In scarecrow overalls reading a comic book,
It’s all there, the bell peppers, the radishes,
Local blueberries and blackberries
That will stain our lips and tongue
As if we were freezing to death in the snow.
The kid is bored, or pretends to be,
While watching the woman pick up a melon
And press its rough skin against her cheek.
What makes people happy is a mystery,
He concludes as he busies himself
Straightening crumpled bills in a cigar box.
-- sdl
Kevin Young (L) and David Lehman at Russ & Daughters Cafe (127 Orchard Street, NY NY). Photo by Stacey Lehman.
If you visit New York City and want to try the restaurant of the moment, your best chance of getting seated is at lunchtime. So we picked a slow Monday and arrived after the early rush. Even so, we had to wait ten minutes for a table at Russ & Daughters Café, one of the hot new restaurants specializing in foods of our Eastern European and German Jewish ancestors. David and I went with Kevin Young, in town from Decatur, Georgia, where he lives with his wife, the writer Kate Tuttle, and their son Mack. In between writing and editing, Kevin teaches at Emory University and curates the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. He had flown in to participate in the Poets’ House annual walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and to read from his latest collection, The Book of Hours, just out from Knopf .
I know from our visits to Decatur that Kevin is an adventurous eater. He’s also something of an afficianado of Southern food and cooking (he’s been active in the Southern Foodways Alliance). The foods of Kevin’s childhood inform some of my favorite of his poems (see “Ode to Pork” and “Ode to Gumbo”). Like the best food writing, these poems evoke memories and arouse feelings of love, grief, and intimacy without being saccharine or sounding overly sentimental.
How would Kevin feel about our food? As it turned out, and should have come as no surprise, Kevin was familiar with much of what was on the Russ & Daughters menu. We settled on cocktails--“Schmoozers” for David and Kevin, (Rye, Aquavit, sugar, Bitters and Herbsaint rinse), “Break-Fast Martini” for me (Gin, jam, lemon juice, egg white, Pernod Absinth, Bitters)--and an assortment of small plates or “Noshes.” Kevin was particularly impressed by the pickled herring trio (“exquisite”) and the latkes. I favored the “Super Heebster,” an open-faced sandwich of whitefish and baked salmon salad, wasabi-infused fish-roe, and horseradish dill cream cheese on bagel. “This I never had as a kid,” I said, helping myself to a second piece. To round out our feast we added potato latkes, pastrami-style cured salmon, pickled vegetables, and kasha varnishkas (a favorite of mine, owing to a goodly amount of caramelized onions) and new to Kevin. “An acquired taste,” said David. The prices were standard Manhattan, nicht billig.
Our conversation ricocheted between food and drink and matters of poetry and academe. What is the best bourbon for a Manhattan? (Kevin favors Dickel or Michters, with Cocchi vermouth.) How do you make a perfect Old-Fashioned (by slowly stirring the sugar and sans cherry or orange). How do you make brisket (me: slow braise, lots of onions, Kevin: smoked). At the mention of brisket Kevin recalled his Auntie’s, which held its flavor and texture even after being transported from Louisiana to Cambridge, Massachusetts and reheated.
After reminiscing about the year they worked together on The Best American Poetry 2011, David and Kevin took turns recommending heist films. Kevin touted The Heist and The Bank Job, David plugged Rififi, and the two of them waxed eloquent about Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Sterling Hayden’s parting shot at film’s end.
How do we account for the resurgence of Jewish food? Begin with nostalgia, a curiosity about our roots, and the belief that Jewish food is as worthy of attention as any other regional or ethnic food. But Talmudists could spend many an hour on the question with no prospect of resolving it. Is there as much interest in Southern food? Not in the same way, says Kevin. Unlike the eager-to-assimilate Jews, Southerners have largely held on to their traditions. They never lost the taste for regional foods like beans, greens, and field peas. There isn’t the same need to bring back foods that never fell out of favor.
By then our cocktails were long gone. Should we have another round? What we need is a “suppressor,” says Kevin, a low-alcohol drink that one sips before ordering something more potent. Instead he and David test the bartender with Old-Fashioneds. These, they agree, are nearly perfect.
I wish I could say the same for the two additional dishes we ordered. Thumbs down on the Matzo Brei, a dish which Kevin first tasted in Kansas and is David’s Passover specialty. R&D’s was a dry and flavorless disc, as if they hadn’t bothered to hydrate the matzo before cooking. The blintzes were, well, meh, though in all fairness the bar was set high by my grandmother’s, which were truly superb, light pillows of farmer cheese wrapped in delicate nearly translucent crepes. Eating Russ & Daughters’ I was reminded of what Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren said the first time he had a traditional dish prepared by someone other than his mother: “When I tasted it, that’s when I realized that my mother was dead.”
I picked Russ & Daughters Café because it has a great heritage that I knew would not be lost on Kevin. The parent store on Houston Street has been in business since immigrant days when Yiddish was still common in many households. You can imagine such a café--with its roomy booths, and soda fountain where the bar is--existing side-by-side with other now defunct establishments that emerged to serve the growing Jewish population. Russ & Daughters, store and restaurant, are reminders that delicacy and deli can go hand in hand. They can even inspire poetry:
"Three Flights Down the Stairs" by Harvey Shapiro
Three flights down the stairs,
south one block to Houston
cross the street and maybe a half-block
west to Russ & Daughters.
Take a number—why is that woman
buying all that sturgeon?—for black
Russian bread, 3 smoked fish, farmer
cheese (the bulk kind) and nova.
Retrace the route, up the stairs,
and she’s just getting out of the tub
right by the kitchen sink, pink
thighs slowly rising so you can get
the whole flavor of it, water
streaming from the red muff thick
as bread. That was Sunday.
from How Charlie Savers Died and Other Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 2001
from the archive; first posted June 14, 2014
Schmaltz Alert
One whole loaf of bread, a baguette
sliced lengthwise in half though of course
they never say baguette in Vienna, they had
other words in that slightly grimy dark bar
where I first saw it displayed in a poorly lit
glass case next to a plate of what I mistook
for burnt chocolate cookies but which turned
out to be thin, crisp slices of blood sausage.
A jar of rubbery pickled eggs, blurred
in murky liquid sat on top of the case.
But I was mesmerized by the sandwich.
What in God's name is smeared on that bread--
I almost said--that translucent goo the color
of pus?! For politeness sake I asked in my
creaky German What's that sandwich in
the window? Which probably came out
something like: "What is window-bread?"
but aided by my pointing, the guy behind
the bar received the meaning. He looked
as if I'd asked what beer was. That's a chicken
fat sandwich, he replied, as though to a dim
child. Yes, those were chopped raw
onions sprinkled on top of the schmaltz
which was spread thick like peanut butter.
Like so many things my mother cooked
that I gave her grief for and wouldn't eat:
liver, tongue, parts of the animal I couldn't
bear to recognize, let alone ingest--
suffice it to say I was utterly repulsed
by the python-like sandwich sold in sections
at that tavern in the land of my ancestors,
and with my friends at the table, I laughed
at it. Yet, eating to keep warm--what did I
know of that in my privileged existence? What
did I know of pogroms, Russian winters, forced
immigration, of the value of fat, its anti-
starvation richness, of using every bit of a bird,
my pickyeaterhippievegetariancollegeeducated
self refusing to acknowledge any such necessities,
wrinkling my nose at the stink of cabbage cooking,
squinting at Russian writing on the backs
of forebearers' multi-stamped passports slipped
into a photo album, their set, defenseless, nameless
faces peering at me hungrily. Once an uncle
at the wedding of his son, a skinny, hairy kid
who was marrying a Rubenesque beauty said,
"He always did go for those little fatties" as though
this was a delightful remark. Actually, he
used the term "little fatties," as a second try.
First, he said zaftig, but based on what he read
as incomprehension on my face, he figured
he needed to translate for the poor dumb
Jewish girl who didn't know her own language.
But, though I know little Yiddish, I was familiar
with zaftig, lobbed as a compliment among my
relatives to mean a well-padded, curvaceous cutie--
nobody's stomach rumbling here! An aunt took me
aside one afternoon when I was 20, advising,
you should eat more, dear, if you want to catch a husband.
I didn't bother to respond or keep the contempt
off my punim. Anyway, old friend, what I
wanted to say is that on the phone the other day,
when you said Schmaltz Alert! to warn me
you were about to say something affectionate,
I remembered that gross, noble sandwich
for the first time in years. I thought about how
we both come from Russian Jews who fled first
to Europe, where they perfected that sandwich
as well as an ability to simultaneously embrace
and mock the excessively sentimental, and
for no good reason I found myself in tears.
-- Amy Gerstler
from the Mississippi Review (Vol. 51, issue 3)
Three Martinis
for J.L.
Dry
Life is served up with trace amounts of youth —
the ratio of vodka to vermouth.
Dirty
You asked for it. Again. An old mistake.
Dirt never settles or grows less opaque.
Perfect
Bitter and sweet may seal their win-win deal
but the wee hours ready its repeal.
from The Cortland Review
Come lift up your glasses
and drink what you may,
I'm a man you don't meet every day.
I'm a man you don't meet every day,
every day,
I'm a man you don't meet every day!
(art by Hilary Cooper, 2020; clip from Casablanca)
La Marseillaise
Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
Contre nous, de la tyrannie,
L’étendard sanglant est levé;
L’étendard sanglant est levé.
Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes.
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.
"La Marseillaise" was written in one night, (April 24, 1792) by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Did Hitchcock vote?
from https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/new-york-citys-favorite-beauty-contest/
<<< Miss Harlem. Miss subways. Miss Brooklyn. The list of long-gone local beauty contests is filled with small-time titles and pageants.
But one mattered so much to residents, it reportedly attracted almost as many city voters as a presidential election at the time did: Miss Rheingold.
A promotional jackpot for Brooklyn’s Rheingold Brewing Company, the Miss Rheingold pageant ran from 1941 to 1964.
Every summer, grocery stores would be stocked with ballots featuring six finalists. The winner spent the following year on Rheingold billboards and in magazine ads. (Tippi Hendren, a 1953 finalist, above, didn’t snag the title.)
Miss Rheingold helped make the beer New York’s most popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Rheingold goes way back in the city; it opened in 1883 in Bushwick on the nabe’s famed “Brewers Row,” which earned its moniker because so many German-American beer companies began there.
Alas, they shut down in 1976, but the brand was revived in the 1990s. A new Miss Rheingold contest was also reinstated recently, but the contestants are all female bartenders. >>>
Renee and Huy Harwood, my parents, eager to end the Yom Kippur fast.
-- sdl
Ode to My Father’s Manhattans
Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.
Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.
My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing
(hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
An Féar Gorta
If I ever go back home again, we will drive
through the countryside just as it is getting dark.
We will gather together in the town’s only hotel,
eating, and telling jokes at each other’s expense.
My heart beats steady there, my spirit alive
to every gesture, every glance, the fire and spark
we find in those we love. Those to whom we tell
our dark secrets along with our idiotic nonsense.
Whatever route I take, I always seem to get lost.
I have a tendency to choose the wrong road
to the wrong place. I wind up confused and stranded
wondering if I’ll ever make it home.
But I want that ticket back, no matter what the cost.
At An Féar Gorta I want that rhubarb tart a la mode.
I am even willing to stand in the rain, and be reprimanded
for the sorry, soggy state in which I’ve left this poem.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
at An Féar Gorta with cousins Monica (Guthrie) Donovan and Mary Guthrie, Oct. 2013
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
An Féar Gorta is one of my favorite eating establishments in the world. Located in Ballyvaughan, in County Clare, Ireland, where I have many beloved relations, it is a place, as the poem suggests, that I look forward to visiting again.
I originally thought the term meant "the hungry man," as "fear" is “man” in Irish. But the fada (accent) confused me---instead of "fear," it's "féar," which means “grass.” So, the name translates to "The Hungry Grass," a term going back to the Famine. More information can be found here, here, and here.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
the garden at An Féar Gorta. Photo by T. Winch
Ed. note: Jack Daniel's produced a limited-batch sour-mash whiskey called "Sinatra Century" to mark the singer's 100th birthday, December 12, 2015. Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World was published by HarperCollins at the same time. An editor at The Wall Street Journal noted the coincidence and commissioned Lehman, who likes good bourbon, to review the new whiskey, which came in a gift box including a thumb drive containing the recording of a Sinatra show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966.
1. The Background
Frank Sinatra discovered Jack Daniel’s one sleepless night in the early 1940s. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since,” he later said. He famously praised “anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or Jack Daniel’s.” Frank always kept a bottle nearby, offstage, and he was buried with a flask of JD in his casket.
In her autobiography, Judith Campbell Exner —the moll who was mistress to both John F. Kennedy and the head of the Chicago mob—recalled a day spent with Sinatra. He “acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniel’s.”
By the mid-1960s, Sinatra could drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and still go on stage.
2) The Anticipation
Like any respectable Sinatra aficionado, I have imbibed my share of Tennessee’s trademark sour mash whiskey. And as the author of a new book on Sinatra, I had an extra incentive to try the latest ultra-premium Jack Daniel’s bottle sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal: a limited-edition 100-proof whiskey aged in 100 “alligator-charred” oak barrels (so called for the scaly interior surface left by the fire, the deepest of all the chars whiskey producers use to impart flavor and color to the liquor). It hit shelves in October—in plenty of time for toasts to Frank Sinatra on his 100th birthday, December 12, 2015.
The whiskey is called Sinatra Century. By serendipitous coincidence, my new book is called “Sinatra’s Century.” I wrote it, quite simply, because I have loved the singer’s voice, his musical savvy, his definitive versions of great standards ever since I heard “All the Way” and “Witchcraft” on the radio when I was eight or nine and grasped the essence of swing from Sinatra albums a few years later. Timing it to coincide with the centennial, I wrote the book in 100 parts, because Sinatra’s career exists in exquisite counterpoint with what Henry Luce called the “American century” and because the century is the perfect form for a subject with so many facets.
Jack Daniel’s already has a top-shelf whiskey with Sinatra’s name on it – 90 proof Sinatra Select, which is selling well, at twice the price of single-barrel bourbons that are just as good. So there was a part of me that wondered whether the same would be true with “Sinatra Century” – whether JD is selling a name, an event, and a future souvenir rather than a whiskey that can go head to head with A. H. Hirsch Reserve or the best of Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection.
3) The Presentation
The presentation of Sinatra Century is as lavish as it should be, priced at $379 or more per one-liter bottle. It arrives in a deep blue-indigo lacquered carrying case with an engraved brass handle on top. Pop open the case, and the bottle sits in a custom groove, like a dark liquid jewel set against black velvet. Each bottle is numbered—mine is FAS 23095, the initials standing for Francis Albert Sinatra. Also in their own made-to-size grooves are a hardbound booklet devoted to Sinatra’s relationship with Jack Daniel’s and a tie clip that doubles as a thumb drive.
That last item comes loaded with a previously unreleased album of a live Sinatra performance: thirteen songs, two monologues and a coda, all recorded at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966. Frank had just turned fifty and was teaming up with the brilliant arranger Quincy Jones backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, and what better way to return to that evening than with a rocks glass in hand?
4) The Proof
Isn’t “proof” a lovely word? It stands in one context for the potency of a potable, and in another it means verification: a geometrical proof, say, or the proof of the pudding. Both senses come into play here. Would Sinatra Century prove potent enough to provide the perfect accompaniment to belters like “Luck Be a Lady” and “Fly Me to the Moon”? At 100 proof, it had better. (The standard “Old No. 7” Jack Daniel’s bottle clocks in at a mere 80.)
As to color, I said amber, my wife said topaz. I said tongue of flame, my wife said Stradivarius. She described the taste as “warm orange afterglow.” I took another sip and said, “Cognac.” She sipped and said, “The Cognac of bourbons.” Goes well with dark chocolate. Warms the soul “in a drear-nighted December” (to quote Keats).
The whiskey is the best I’ve ever had from Jack Daniel’s.
How to drink it? Neat or with a few ice cubes. We stuck to Sinatra’s own recipe: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash”–a Sinatra haiku, when you think about it. We omitted the splash.
5. The Playlist
Sinatra Century promises not merely a whiskey but an experience. So you’re sitting in your favorite reclining armchair sipping and playing the recording of that Sands appearance of January 1966. It opens with a trusty icebreaker, “Come Fly with Me,” then turns to a ballad he’s sung since his crooner days, the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Self-consciousness spoils the verse intro. The skinny singer can scarcely keep a straight face when obliged to sing “I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo.”
He’s on safer ground with Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Perhaps the most celebrated of all Sinatra’s up-tempo finger-snappers, it brings out his swinging best. In adapting Nelson Riddle’s 1956 arrangement, Quincy Jones makes miraculous use of reeds and muted horns to compensate for the lack of a string section.
Sinatra always maintained he was at heart a saloon singer and he proves it anew in “Street of Dreams” and Matt Dennis’s great, haunting “Angel Eyes.” As you savor another swallow, the pace changes with “Fly Me to the Moon,” a highlight of the night. Sinatra reinvented Bart Howard’s 1954 song: It wasn’t a sad wistful plea, after all, but an assertive proclamation of love. It was also a nod to NASA’s great decade, the conquest of space as a seduction song. Killer arrangement. Love that flute.
The timeless “You Make Me Feel So Young” shows Sinatra at his most buoyant, and then he turns up the warmth in Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning “Shadow of Your Smile.” Sinatra is dating Mia Farrow and Mia likes the song.
Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady” comes from the musical “Guys and Dolls.” In the movie version, Sinatra played Nathan Detroit, but it was Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson who got to sing this ode to gambling that marks the show’s heroic climax. Now, to correct the injustice, Sinatra demonstrates how the song should be sung. One of Sinatra’s anthems in the 1960s, a hymn to Las Vegas, here it’s as electric as “Fly Me to the Moon,” with a tail like that of “My Kind of Town.”
Time for another round.
The audience is hushed when Frank sings “It Was a Very Good Year,” where again the reeds do the work of strings, and then the Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When,” not only a marvelous love song but also the greatest ever on the subject of déjà vu: “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.”
The nightclub act ends with a song Sinatra owns: “My Kind of Town,” the terrific tribute to Chicago that Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote for their boss to sing in “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” his last movie musical.
By now you’ve made a dent in the bottle and you’re robustly singing along.
-- from "Author David Lehman Takes On Jack Daniel's Sinatra Century," in The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2016
Summer is ending, but the impulse to pile on the fruit is almost irresistible. For Labor Day I made a Lemon Mascarpone tart with a combination of plums, blueberries, raspberries, and cherries. Right away the Italian description "tutti frutti" came to mind. It translates as "all the fruits." I didn't manage to do that, but I did my best.
A week later for my friend Elizabeth's birthday, I made Patricia Wells' Lemon Lover's Tart, because lemon is her favorite. I've made this tart over and over, but I've never made this Tutti Frutti version. I also wanted to try out my tartlet tins.
The pandemic has made all kinds of obsessions seem less weird. I'm studying French and Italian on Duolingo, talking things over with my little cat Patsy, and all summer I made fruit tarts. Oh, I also wrote a lot of poems. I call that a good summer. Thanks for sharing it with me. -- Barbara Hamby
I had a friend in college who when everything was going great would say, "It's the berries!" I knew right away what he meant. Berries are one of nature's most beautiful gifts. When we were hunter-gatherers, berries were there for the picking although now someone else picks them and they show up in little boxes at the market.
Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries--they are little party favors of the gods, Demeter's joy at Persephone's return. They can be eaten by the handfuls right off the bush, made into jams for winter, or baked into tarts. I wanted to try Tartine's pastry cream with Rose Geranium. I planted two rose geranium plants in my herb garden in the spring to use in a jam recipe, but when I saw the pastry cream recipe, I couldn't help myself. You soak four leaves in two cups of warm milk for a half hour and then make the cream. The rose geranium is a perfect compliment to the blackberries. If you don't have the rose geranium, you can use rose water.
Since I wasn't going to be taken out for dinner on my birthday this year, I decided to make my favorite Ligurian fish stew and end with this lemon mascarpone tart with blueberries, blackberries, pitted cherries, and little sprigs of mint. Happy birthday to me.
As summer's bounty is nearing its end, I'm freezing berries in anticipation of berriless days ahead. Berries are a metaphor for the small sweet things in life. In the nearly extinct Tofa language in Siberia, "to go berry picking" is a metaphor for death, which seems very beautiful to me.
I go a little crazy when peaches are in season, which in North Florida is between the middle of June and the middle of August. We're a 45 minute drive from Georgia, which is the center of the peach universe. The best of the best is the Elberta peach, which is like biting into everything the world promised you but snatched away until the moment when that golden flesh hits your tongue and the juice is running down your arms. Standing over the kitchen sink is the preferred position during the week or so that Elbertas are released by the Peach Gods into the mortal realm.
After this experience, then I start thinking about how to preserve some of the peaches for the winter. Peach jam is a must. Not only is it good with toast and jam, but if you slice some jalapenos in a jar or two then you can add it to a cheese board. I also make a white-peach saffron confiture, which is a looser French jam. White peach and lemon verbena is also a great combination.
But peaches this beautiful deserve to be put into a tart. I started with a riff on the Patricia Wells' Apricot Almond Tart, substituting peaches for the apricots. It's a divine tart not matter what fruit you use. This is a photo of the tart before it goes into the oven.
https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800
The perfection of the Elberta is expressed in all its golden glory! The Wells tart recipe is wonderful, but this year I wanted to try another one--Amanda Hesser's recipe. It is very different from Wells' recipe, but it is wonderful in its own way. The photograph at the beginning of this piece is Hesser's Fresh Peach Tart: https://food52.com/recipes/14217-peach-tart
Another peachy tart that is beautiful and delicious is this white peach tart. The White Peach is in the markets here around the beginning to the middle of August. This tart needs peach jam, and lucky for me I had some fresh jam that I'd made in July. I use the Tartine recipe, which calls for peaches, sugar, and lemon juice. It's a simple perfect recipe.
The perfume of a white peach is like a whiff of paradise, not the Old Testament one but the land of milk and honey in which everyone is illuminated by an inner light and poetry is on their tongues. This is an Italian recipe, and when I saw it, I knew I had to try it if only to be faithful to my peach-mania. https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/white-peach-tart
I'll leave you with this poem from my new book, Holoholo. Even when I'm in the middle of summer with its abundance of peaches, I am thinking of their passing from this world:
Ode to the Last Peach of Summer
How many summers are left me, fierce afternoons in July
as I bite into globes of ripe peaches, juice running
down my hands, the aching splendor of their golden flesh,
some as big as a baby’s head with its fuzz
and tender skin, but always I’m thinking of you, the last peach
of the year, sometimes in September, one year
on October fifth, and you're a little hard, my sweet nut,
or mealy, the rough fabric of your meat, its scent
a faint telegraph from August when I’m wallowing
in so many peaches I bake pies, make peach jam,
some with jalapeños, pour Bellinis, but with every bite
I get a little closer to you, and November looms
with its desperate peachless days. O pit with crevices
like the dark side of the moon. Juice exploding
on my tongue. Flesh of your flesh. O to live in a world
that has peaches, a moment or two in the riot of summer
before rain begins to fall, and in the dark woods mushrooms
sprout like gold coins in the last grass of the year.
_____
Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo: Poems (2121) Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. You can find out more about Barbara here.
The sauna of a Southern summer seems made for figs. When David Kirby and I bought our house, I discovered an old fig tree near the driveway and the vegetable garden. The woman who sold us our house told us her father had had a victory garden there during World War II. Does the fig tree date back to the forties? I wish I'd asked her.
A fig tree is a glorious creature with large leaves that look like the palms of a giant. I've planted two more trees since we moved in. We had to have a pine tree in the front yard removed, and I'm going to plant another one where the pine was. Early in the fall fig trees begin to loose their leaves, but when they start to leaf out in the spring, their bare brown stems erupt with little rosettes of green, and I know that the figs are on their way.
This summer has been miraculous. I usually make two flats (12-jars per flat) of fig jam. This year I made 36 jars, and two fig tarts.
I'm wondering about the figginess of this summer. Could the drought during May followed by torrential downpours be the reason? Probably not, because this is a pretty typical late spring into early summer. I have to compete with the birds and squirrels for the figs. This year I got all St. Francis of Assisi and addressed the critters. "Brother and sister birds, you take the high figs and I'll take the low ones. Then we'll all live as one. Brother and sister squirrels, I know you're hungry, too. Please take all you want, but please don't take a bite and then go on to the next fig. Let's share the lusciousness."
It seemed to work. Fig jam is one of mother nature's true gifts. Bread, butter, and fig jam with a cup of coffee or tea makes an ambrosial breakfast. With a strong stinky cheese it goes well with an aperitivo. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to make a crostata marmalata, the Italian breakfast tart, with fig jam.
I inherited David's mother's copper jam-making pot, and I cook up two or three batches of jam every summer. Our trees have small brown figs called Brown Turkey, that seem to me more concentrated in flavor than their larger cousins. In my mother-in-law's recipe for fig jam the only ingredients are figs, sugar, and lemons. The most complicated part of making fig jam is fig curation. The season is only a couple of weeks in July. It starts slowly and then builds up speed. On good days I pick a pound in the morning and another pound in the early evening. Every two days I have enough for a batch of jam. But figs are tender little orbs. You have to watch them or they'll turn into mush.
Since I had so many figs this year, I had plenty for tarts. My first tart was beautiful, but the crust was a disappointment. That's because I tried a crust that wasn't Patricia Wells' crust. The second one was beautiful and balanced. The recipe is from her great book At Home in Provence, which won a James Beard award when it came out in 1996. I was at the Miami Book Fair and saw her demonstrate some of the recipes. The copy I bought is falling apart because I've tried so many of the recipes. The fig tart is a variation on the apricot almond tart. The only change I made was that I substituted orange flower water for the almond extract. This photo is of the halved figs without the cream filling.
I'm hoping to find some purple figs at the market later in the summer, and try the recipe with them. Here's the recipe again: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800
Next week: It's a Peach-luscious world
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
