Stir (19 page)

Y
ou can cook for one. A fried egg and toast, a potato with cottage cheese, a single artichoke, steamed. Baking, on the other hand? I don't care how big your sweet tooth is, you can't eat all those cookies alone. You bake to share.

Baking means you have more than enough: more flour, more butter, more eggs, to make more cake than you need for just you. It means you have something to give away. Baking is an act of generosity, and thereby an act of freedom, since to be generous is to be free from the smallness of thinking only of yourself.

Illness had made me dwell unnaturally on my own body and mind. I wanted to be generous again.

 • • • 

By the end of April, I was strong enough to stand and stir as long as I needed. I'd tackled quick breads, brownies, pastas, and salads. Now, with Eitan's birthday just around the corner, it was time for something more.

Birthday baking is so much fun. I love the precake song and dance, in which I get to ask precisely what you want, and you have to tell me. You hedge a little at first: “Oh no, don't bother. You don't have to bake for me.” A beat of silence, then: “But if you
were
to,” and we're off. Cakey? Fudgy? Fruity? Boozy? Whipped cream? Buttercream? Sugar glaze? Nuts? Taste is specific. It gives me rules to work within, and there's special pleasure in that: cobbling together the best parts of recipe A and recipe B to produce exactly what you desire.

Kasey wants layers. Jonathan wants pie. Hila wants citrus and a moist crumb, a “juicy cake,” she calls it, with berries baked inside. My friend Sam wants Mexican wedding cookies, doughnut hole–looking things made from an eggless, butter-rich dough that's splashed with vanilla and specked with toasted ground pecans. You roll the cookies in powdered sugar while they're still warm, and they half explode, half melt in your mouth when you bite in. Eli's a birthday cookie man, too, oatmeal or chocolate chip, while Mary wants her cake to be
cake
, a dense, thick slab, she explains, a “cake you have to chew.” She grabs at an imaginary cake of considerable weight floating in the air before us and squeezes to show how little it gives. A white cake, she says, or maybe something yellow, flavored with vanilla and slathered with jam? Hold the frosting, but whipped cream's okay, as long as it's not too sweet. For Julia, it's chocolate. “You know the kind of cake I mean,” she says, and I do: dark chocolate, butter, heavy cream, eggs. You can keep your flour.

Now it was Eitan's turn. A couple of weeks before the date we'd scheduled to fete him, he and Julia came over for dinner. We were stuffed, flopped on the sofas, when conversation turned to cake. After the usual coaxing, Eitan's request was on the table: something strawberries and cream, preferably with custard, and a soft, white cake. That could mean only one thing, as far as I was concerned: cassata cake.
Cleveland
cassata cake, the kind I'd grown up on, made with custard instead of ricotta.

I was nervous. This was a layer cake. A celebration cake. And I was a sloppier cook than I'd ever been as I wrestled with my perception of where things were in space. I'd gotten a bit of sight back after the surgery to decompress my optic nerve, but not much. Mostly what I saw out of my left eye was blackness, with a narrow crescent of fuzzy vision in the periphery. I saw shapes and colors. I could even discern certain people and things. My ophthalmologist told me that the nerve had probably recovered as much as it could. It would certainly never be a reading eye, he said. I squinted at his chart with my right eye closed. I couldn't even see the big E.

Yet just as Dr. Tranmer had promised, while my sight did not improve, my vision did. My brain was remapping itself to understand the world with one eye. The brain is plastic, especially when you're young. People who are born with only one seeing eye or lose an eye in early childhood never notice a deficit at all in either field of vision or depth perception—because there isn't one. The brain figures out a monocular way to see it all.

At twenty-eight, I'd missed my chance for that kind of radical remapping, but I was still young enough (and lucky enough) that my brain did do a lot of the work for me. Except for when I was tired or rushing, I no longer sent mugs intended for the table crashing to the floor. The rest was up to me, to compensate for what I couldn't perceive with the way I operated.

I gathered the ingredients for Eitan's cake, read the steps, and felt the power of a recipe in a new way—how it takes you by the hand and tells you just what to do. A good recipe makes you brave. “One thing at a time,” it says; step one, step two, and from this pile of ingredients, you'll make something delicious. Eitan's cake came together this way. First the custard, which I stashed in the fridge. Next, I baked the cakes.

How would I divide the batter evenly between the two pans? In the past, I'd simply poured. Now I used a ladle, doling out equal numbers of scoops. To check my work, I stuck a toothpick into the center of each pan, then lifted the toothpicks up and compared the batter lines. Good.

While the cakes baked and cooled, I sliced the berries and macerated them in sugar until they sat in a shallow bath of their own juice. It was time to split the cakes. As I sawed them in half with a serrated bread knife, I paid attention to the angle of my hand. I couldn't trust my vision to tell me if my cut was even, but I could feel the knife in my grip and know if I was holding it flat. I assembled the cake, three layers stuffed with custard and strawberries, then set out to frost it as best I could. I kept nearly gouging the cake with my spatula, or missing it entirely, stroking the air instead with whipped cream. My solution was to draw the handle of the spatula into my body and press it against my stomach, corresponding with the height of the cake. That spot on my body became my reference point for where the cake sat in space.

And soon it was done, a fluffy white cloud leaning a bit to one side, perhaps, little peaks and swirls of whipped cream that I hadn't managed to smooth beneath a crown of strawberries. Eitan gasped when he saw it, and as I cut into the cake and pulled out a wedge striped with custard and fruit, he giggled like a kid. Jonathan and Hila were there, too, and Eli. I eased slices onto plates and passed them all around. It was perfect. Flour and butter and eggs that could have become anything, transformed. We scraped our plates clean.

When I first started hunting around for a cassata cake recipe, I found one after another that called for ricotta cheese between the cake and strawberry layers. I was baffled. It was custard in the cake that I remembered from my childhood.

With a little more digging, I found that, while most cassata cakes are indeed made with ricotta, Corbo's Bakery in Cleveland has long produced a custard and strawberry cassata cake. Their Sicilian family recipe traces back a hundred years, and no less than chef Mario Batali has called it “the best cassata I have tried in the USA.” Other bakeries and supermarkets in the Cleveland area took their cue from Corbo's and made their cassatas with custard, too.

This cake is a bit of a project in that it involves several components and takes some advance planning. To keep things manageable, I usually make the custard and the cake a day in advance and store them in the fridge. (Chilled cake is easier to split into layers, anyway.) I then macerate the berries, whip the cream, slice the cake into layers, and assemble the next morning.

Keep in mind before you begin that you'll want to chill the assembled cake for 8 hours before serving.

I used to make this recipe as a four-layer cake, but frankly it was all too much. It was hard to slice without making a mess, and the servings were impossibly large. I now assemble it as a three-layer cake and save the leftover layer in the fridge or freezer. It's nice to have around for a last-minute dessert of strawberry shortcake. Just whip some cream, slice some berries, and cut the cake into rounds with a biscuit cutter. It's great in an impromptu trifle, too. You will also end up with a little extra custard, but I assume you have a spoon and will know just what to do.

For the custard:

6 large egg yolks

½ cup (100 grams) granulated sugar

2 cups half-and-half

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

3 tablespoons cornstarch

For the cake layers:

8 large egg whites at room temperature

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

¼ cup (50 grams) plus 1¼ cups (250 grams) granulated sugar, divided

2¼ cups (271 grams) cake flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

5 large egg yolks at room temperature

½ cup cold water

½ cup vegetable oil

¼ cup lemon juice

1 teaspoon lemon zest

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

For the strawberries:

2 pounds strawberries, divided

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

For the whipped cream:

2 cups chilled heavy cream

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

Make the custard:

Whisk together all the custard ingredients in a saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-low heat, whisking constantly. Turn down the heat so that the mixture just simmers, and whisk until thick, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer the custard to a bowl, cover with plastic, and chill for at least 3 hours, or overnight.

Bake the cakes:

Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Spray the bottoms (not the sides) of two 9-inch round cake pans with cooking spray, line the bottoms with cut-out circles of parchment, and spray the paper.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Add the ¼ cup sugar, and beat on high until the peaks are stiff but not dry. Set aside.

Sift the flour, the remaining 1¼ cups sugar, the baking powder, and the salt into a medium bowl.

In a separate large bowl, use an electric hand mixer on high speed to beat together the yolks, lemon juice, water, oil, zest, and vanilla until smooth. Fold in the flour mixture with a rubber spatula until just combined.

Using a rubber spatula and a very light touch, fold about a quarter of the fluffy egg whites into the egg yolk mixture. Then fold in the remaining whites. The goal here is to incorporate the egg whites without significantly deflating them. As soon as the egg whites are no longer visible, stop folding. (A streak or two of egg white is preferable to overmixing.)

Scrape the batter into the two prepared pans and spread evenly. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the tops spring back when lightly pressed and a toothpick inserted into the centers comes out clean.

Leave the cakes to cool in their pans on a rack for at least an hour. When completely cool, run a knife around the sides to release the cakes, cover each pan with a wax-paper-lined plate, and flip. Lift the pans off of the cakes, and carefully peel back the pieces of parchment. Wrap the two cakes in plastic, and refrigerate at least 3 hours, or overnight.

Prepare the strawberries:

Thinly slice 1 pound of the strawberries lengthwise, ⅛-inch thick, and place in a medium-sized bowl. Sprinkle with the 2 tablespoons sugar, and stir. Leave the strawberries to macerate for at least 1 hour. Give them a stir once in a while. They will release their juices. Strain the berries, reserving the syrup. (Don't worry if you don't end up with much syrup. Some strawberries are juicier than others.) Meanwhile, slice the remaining 1 pound of strawberries lengthwise, ¼-inch thick, and set aside. These unmacerated berries are for the top of the cake.

Split the cakes, whip the cream, and assemble:

Remove the custard and cakes from the fridge. Using a long, serrated bread knife, carefully saw each cake into two equal layers. You'll only need three layers for this cake. Store the fourth, well wrapped, in the freezer for another day. Place each of the three remaining layers on a wax-paper-lined baking sheet or plate.

Whip the cream and sugar together until stiff.

Tear four 2- to 3-inch strips of wax paper and arrange them in a square on your cake stand or serving plate. Place one cake layer in the center of the square, with the four strips of wax paper partially sticking out on all sides. (The strips are to keep the plate clean from frosting. You'll remove them before serving, taking any smears with you.) Brush the top of the cake with half of the reserved strawberry syrup. Cover with 1 cup of the custard, then half of the sliced macerated strawberries. Top with the next layer of cake, and repeat: syrup, 1 cup of the custard, strawberries, cake.

Using an offset spatula, cover the entire cake with whipped cream. Arrange the sliced unmacerated berries in concentric circles on the top of the cake, and press them into the sides of the cake around the bottom.

Chill the cake for at least 8 hours, then bring to cool room temperature before serving.

Serves 12.

A
t the beginning of the summer, my surgeon told me he wanted to fix up my skull two whole months earlier than planned.

“Will August work for you?” he asked. I laughed out loud, wondering what on my calendar could possibly take priority over getting my head back in one piece.

He hadn't said that the early surgery date was the result of my doing particularly well, but when people asked, that was what I said. “Yes, it was supposed to be in October, but I'm doing so well that my surgeon wants to do it in August instead.” It just felt so good to say it, to feel as though this time things weren't only going according to plan, but better.

The date was set: August third. We dubbed it “Humpty Dumpty Day,” with surgeons in place of king's horses and men and my head the talking egg. My parents bought plane tickets. I told my department at school that I'd be ready to teach in the fall and knocked out two exams. I went in for 3-D scans so that the prosthetic piece could be fitted to my head. The end was in sight.

 • • • 

In June, six weeks before the surgery, Eli and I boarded a plane for Seattle. I took the window seat and leaned my helmeted head against the wall, plastic on plastic. It was actually nice, the way the thickness of the helmet kept my head propped at a gentler angle, easier on the neck. Eli was sleeping with one hand on his thigh when the tip of Mount Rainier poked up through the clouds. I put my palm on the back of his hand and slid my fingers between his.

When we touched down we went straight for provisions—Red Vines, cherries, Beecher's cheese, Copper River salmon, chicken, and lamb—then sped east into the Cascades. We were on our way to Lake Wenatchee, a couple of hours outside of Seattle, to a house that belongs to our friends Rich and Martha. They live with their daughters in the city most of the time, but spend long weekends and vacations at the lake, hiking, climbing, and skiing in the nearby mountains. That summer they would be traveling and asked if we might like to stay at the house while they were away.

We'd been out there once before, a few months after we were married when I went skiing for the first time. Eli had dressed me up in one of his orange ski jackets, a fluorescent green fleece turtleneck, and an extra pair of goggles, and signed me up for a beginners' class. I did okay. During the brief intervals I remained upright, anyway. The view from the chair lift was lovely, a nice distraction from the impending crash dismount that I managed to execute every time. It was perfect, Eli and I had joked: He'd nearly passed out after the required three-lap swim test in college, but I loved the water. If we ever had kids, between the two of us, they'd be covered for all seasons. I was a pro at après-ski, at least: hot chocolate at the lodge, then back to Rich and Martha's for apple pie.

Their house was classic Pacific Northwest, made of wood, slate, and stone. The rooms flowed one into the next, with windows that stretched up from the chattered wood floors all the way to the ceiling, framing the lake mere feet away and the mountains all around. It was an easy house to be in, minimal in a way that felt luxurious: neutral palate, exposed beams, spare furnishings.

The natural aesthetic had added power for me on this trip. As I'd grown stronger, I'd been taking off my helmet around our Cambridge apartment occasionally. Never in the kitchen, and never at my desk beneath the overstuffed bookshelves, but when the only thing above my head was ceiling—on the sofa reading with Eli, at the dinner table—I'd unbuckle the strap and give myself a break. Outside, it never left my head.

At Rich and Martha's, even inside felt like the outdoors. I'd stretch out along the window seat, take off my helmet, and feel free. A deck wrapped around the entire back of the house, and with nothing but a meteorite to come crashing down on me, I went bareheaded out there, too. It was my first time outdoors without a hockey helmet on my head in more than eight months.

This home was an open space, a safe space where I could be broken. And with Humpty Dumpty Day just around the corner, where I could begin to think about what it would mean to be whole again.

 • • • 

Down the road from the house was a trailhead at the base of a mountain called Dirty Face. We'd wake up early every morning and hike a little ways up and back.

I kicked at the uneven terrain to help me navigate the roots and rocks along the path. More than once, I stepped down into a ditch that my eye had missed. My teeth would clack together as my boot hit the ground. But I felt strong. I loved the way Eli's bare neck bobbed along in front of me, how he smelled faintly of sweat and sleep. I loved the monarch butterflies, the brush against my legs, the ponderosa pines and bigleaf maples overhead, the wild roses, mariposa lilies, tiny waterfalls, and narrow streams. Each day we'd go a bit higher, then return to the house for the day.

I liked looking in the mirror at the end of those hikes before I showered. I noticed things I hadn't seen since I'd been sick. My skin, smooth and clear, my cheeks flushed from exertion. My hair, though matted from the helmet, looked thick and full. It was strange and new how little I noticed the massive deformity alongside the other things I saw. I kept hearing what my surgeon had said, that with the prosthetic piece in place, I'd look good as new. At Rich and Martha's, I believed it.

This was a working vacation for us both. I'd photocopied articles and packed up my sticky tabs, highlighters, and a suitcase full of books to prepare for the remaining doctoral exams I planned to take before the surgery. Eli had brought his laptop and, after some climbing at nearby Icicle Creek, would check in with his office each day. We'd hike, study, work; he'd climb; and in the six or seven o'clock hour, Eli would light the grill. He was in charge of the protein and opening a bottle of wine, and I would handle the rest of the meal: bread, salad, and dessert.

Cooking there was fun. The one pop of color in the house of grays and wood tones was a deep red Viking oven. You had to wedge a tipped chair under the handle to get the oven door to shut all the way. Otherwise, it was ready for business.

On my first night there, I found Rich's bread recipe tucked between two cookbooks and got to it. The bread began as a wet dough that developed overnight and into the next afternoon with a long, slow rise. When I dumped the dough onto the counter, it clung to the bowl in strands and strings that I swept free with an oiled spatula. I cranked the oven as high as it would go. Then, after a final rise, I transferred the dough to a cast-iron pot, clapped on the lid, and baked it until the bread was swollen and brown. I was careful but no longer afraid as I shook it from the pot. It crackled as it cooled. Meanwhile, Eli finished the salmon on the grill. I tossed spicy greens with vinaigrette, sawed into the bread, and the crust shattered. We dragged slices through olive oil and salt and pressed squares of cheese into the soft crumb.

Each night after dinner, I would return to my perch on the window seat to read or write. Eli would build a fire, and we'd fall into bed a little earlier than we typically would at home. Then we'd wake up the next morning and do it all again.

At first, I studied all day long. The books on my exam lists were ones I'd selected myself and I was interested in what they had to say. Everything was as it should be—or getting close. I was doing it: studying, researching, preparing to teach. I was en route to my former life, just as I had hoped. But the pantry was stocked and the oven called, and where I really wanted to be was in the kitchen. I wanted to be making things, and while the biscuits baked and the pie dough chilled, to get some of it down in words.

Suddenly, the months I'd spent doing just that felt painfully temporary. Here I was, a few weeks out from my final surgery, the one that would close the door on the illness and injury of the past year. I was almost done at last—and wanting a little bit not to be. It was the strangest thing, this tug of longing for the days that I was still squarely in. The very days that I'd been counting down. There in that house on the water, something was happening. Something so quiet that it was barely perceptible to me. It was more of a stir than a shift, a breeze that swirls through a pile of leaves, holds them in the air for a moment, then sets them back down, the same pile, rearranged.

The evidence had been mounting. Pastas and tarts and tomatoes heavy with juice, tables full of friends, and writing about it all. This had been no time-out. All those months away from my studies and the life I had known: this had been a time-in.

So I gave myself over to it in that house by the water, cooking and writing with an urgency I hadn't felt before. “You're so happy,” Eli said one night as he cleared the plates. “I think you should pay attention to that.”

He was right. During those long months, food had called something up in me that needed calling, demanded things of me that my academic work had not. It had inspired me to make something of the everyday life around me, of my home and of my heart, to make something of myself. My kitchen wasn't the route back to the person I had been. It was the route to who I would become. Life didn't freeze when I flew off the treadmill that morning and neither did I. There was no going back, and for the first time I realized that I didn't want to.

 • • • 

A week into our stay, Megan arrived for a visit. We decided to hike Dirty Face all the way to the top, nine miles round-trip with a four-thousand-foot climb. We started early.

I felt strong, but uneasy. I told myself it was okay if I had to turn back. But as we hiked higher and higher, past the markers of every other morning's hike—the stream you had to jump across, the waterfall, the fallen tree that Eli called “our bench”—I knew we were going all the way.

The early trail snakes up along the mountain in tight, tree-lined switchbacks, then opens onto a long-abandoned logging road, wildflowers everywhere in bloom. It then narrows again into a dense forest path that carries you up along the eastern spine. The chin strap of my helmet was soaked with sweat by the time the trees began to thin.

As the trail disappeared into the flat, broken scrabble rocks of the final ascent, the view unfurled: blue water tossing off sparkling coins of sunlight, rolling green hills, mountain peaks etched into the sky. The bigness was sudden. Eli, Megan, and I wordlessly spread out from one another, each of us scrambling and crunching our way to the summit on our own. We stood for a moment and just looked. Lake Wenatchee and its tributary rivers stretched out before us. The Chiwawa Valley and the snow-capped Cascade Mountains. There was Glacier Peak, where Eli and I had gone backpacking years earlier, where he'd told me about the ring and I'd ducked into my sleeping bag, too happy to say a word. Eli grabbed me, picked me up, and swung me around. All three of us were laughing, teary, calm.

Then down, down, down we marched, back to the house. Eli and Megan jumped into the lake. I wasn't allowed to, presurgery, so I went for a shower, found the dough I'd left to proof in the fridge, and shaped it into disks for pizza on the grill. We'd picked up a giant sack of cherries at a roadside stand and I tore into it now, whisked together a batter of milk and eggs, and baked clafoutis. It was my first clafoutis, a category-defying dish that's a cross between custard, a pancake, and flan. The eggy batter puffed up, then sank back down, and the cherries slumped in their own private craters. We ate outside in bare feet, our plates on our laps, my helmet on the table beside me. “Is it crazy to look at me?” I asked Megan. I waited for her to verify that indeed it was, or worse, but instead she smiled and said, “I just see a happy Jess.” The Pacific Northwest sky was bright well into the nine o'clock hour, and I felt whole in my brokenness for the first time.