Baking without Eggs

More on structure and uncertainty

"There's a whining at the threshold, There's a scratching at the floor, To work! To work! In Heaven's name! The wolf is at the door." CPS Gilman

The price of eggs is slated to go up another 40% and to stay there for at least the next six months. I can this toss information into into the garbage bin of my mind containing all-the-proof-the-world-is-fucked things, but I can also pull G’s grandmother’s recipe box down from the high shelf in the kitchen and learn how depression era bakers made due. I prefer due here to do. Or the conflation of the two, maybe, being a satisfying lovely. This is soul work, and survival that isn’t mere: by doing, we fulfill something debted. Our ordinary, mundane, gustatory actions are high temple shit.

In fact I do both. I can’t deny that the hard things affect me hard, and I don’t suggest you ignore difficulty and the insults and the compounding grief with a merry ah-but-there-is-cake-and-life-goes-on.

No: the bin of cumulative sadnesses is real.

I am saying sadness is not the whole of reality. Spiritual work is largely finding a space in yourself in which you can hold or resolve what appears to be irreconcilable. The difficulty of spiritual life is that no one, absolutely no one, can tell you how it’s done, what you’ll find, or why it works. Thou must go there alone.

I can, however, share a few recipes.

Hope is three quarters acknowledgement, a teaspoon of debt, and two pinches of do. Give it time to ferment away from disruptions. Bake in the fires of confusion, conflict, and discipline. Eat with reverence, together or alone.

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Cookery is spiritual. This revelation isn’t mine; it is just new to me. The word recipe acknowledges receipt. Recipes are wisdom and experience handed down and revisioned every generation, every season renewing a taste for wonder and savory musing. Recipes convey both the sweet, humanizing oddities of history and the soul of that which never changes: fat, salt, acid and heat. A recipe is precious not because it’s written in gold dust or has an exchange value but precisely because it doesn’t. It’s worth is immaterial, personal, in the meaning of the thing. They are carried in battered, stained, scribbled upon books or yellowed index cards with cursive script nearly illegible to later generations and ink that has faded in time. Half the instructions are missing: they were assumed, things you simply knew from personal experience your mentor handed down to you; if you didn’t know the unmentioned, you were more or less to be pitied. There is little else to be done with you.

The index card G’s grandmother has for wacky cake is stained and soft. I feel a little bold, almost too bold, taking it from his hands and putting it on the counter next to the measuring spoons. I feel like I’m spying, presuming an intimacy with a woman I never knew. A ghost, but a ghost who was a real person; a sudden entirety of life I’ve been ignorant of and can never really, not wholly, know. But we both, she and I, love G. I presume, therefore, and begin a kind of conversation with her. This feels awfully like the thing some folks call prayer.

He is wise, I tell her, since she never knew him as a man. He is kind, I say, and tell her how many people he manages to touch every day with his laughter and a quick hand to help. He has courtesies springing out of him like spring greens, things which seem to be going out of style right quick. These make me think of him as gentlemanly, dapper, exquisite. I tell her about his work and his hobbies. I mention things only a wife or a grandmother have a right to talk about. Thank you for loving him, for raising him, I say. Then I feel a bunchy kinda muscled thing happen in my gut, a flush of white in my vision, when I realize she’s grateful to me for loving him now.

Emboldened by this sudden bond - such intimacy! such privacy! such vital things! - I tell her all about the world these days. I tell her how we’re misunderstanding hope. I tell her what I’m thinking about recently and how I feel.

I’m a little bit proud of myself: I know how to bake well enough I can decipher things she left out. I know the things which aren’t said but upon which baking depends: the order of things, combinations and what they do, that eggs provide both structure and taste, but you can make do without. Faceless, a smear of opaque density a little smaller than a person in the air, G’s grandmother gives a pert nod of approval.

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