Damnation and sweetness
sugar structure and general collapse
It is thirteen degrees below zero in Minneapolis. Our sliding glass door has frozen shut. This is one of those domestic damned if you do-s: we never quite have the money to replace the door with something that seals and therefore lowers our heating bills, but whenever the temperature drops below zero the double layer of glass creates a condensation space that freezes, melts, and refreezes, each time warping the casing a little further. It leeches the heat of the house out while haunting the cold of the world in.
A similar damnation, do or don’t, with the dog. The cold temperature means she can’t walk for long without picking up her paws and trembling; but without the long daily walks she is bored. She is prissy. Every few minutes she sighs in an exaggerated way.
We try: I make her wait until the peak of the afternoon, when the day is at it’s feeble warmest. She is so pent she gallops in place, hauling me along on the snow packed and icy walks. Within two blocks her boundless enthusiasm has bounded: she looks over her shoulder at me like I’ve hurt her on purpose. She lowers her head and she steps gingerly. I about face toward home. In the return we have switched roles: she hobbles like a wounded elder and I coax, pull, half jog and hurried sweet talk her back inside.
We’ve entered that time of the year where I must throw myself at tasks as if breaking down a wall. Any hesitation, any thinking about it, and the thing is doomed. There are some things I’ve learned over the years, stupid, psychobabble platitudes that have proved more effective than my own reason or pale motivation, so I unequivocally replace my brain with them. For example: get out of bed the moment you wake up, no lingering; when you think of doing a task, count down from three and begin; there is no such thing as perfection; it’s okay to half-ass, just get through. When it is time to practice, practice. Period. No matter how you feel about practicing. These are all versions of the same thing, I realize: it’s going to hurt either way because life is hard; don’t make it harder with your bedraggledness. I know; this philosophy can sound crude and is frequently cruel. I’m still bedraggled. Maybe your brain is stronger than mine. But this is the only way I manage to show up at all.
Another layer of hell, of damnation no matter where you turn: I am so saddened by the National Park Service removing the ‘t’ and the ‘q’ from Stonewall’s history that I react to Trump saying Ukraine started the war, and Zalensky better act fast or lose the country, with thinned and bilious anger. That anger blurs my concern for the free press, or the judiciary, the local non-profits that are scrambling to rewrite their missions to not say ‘black’ or ‘woman’ or ‘gay’ or ‘native’, or the folks who are suddenly out of a job or resigning on principle. I am propped up by an elbow and the chair more than any kind of posture. Weak little tears drool out of my eyes. I am surprised, given their weakness, how much they burn.
G nurses me with flowers. I feed him cake. I am also developing a philosophy - medicinal, scappy, hearty - of stews. Fragile as the world seems, pallid as my own actions are, I am convinced of the goodness of our marriage. We are both tired, and yet we both find resources enough to take care of one another. Life is sad, and yet his smile is everything to me.
The other day he brought me a clutch of some hybrid between a rose and a peony. He apologized for their being white, said something colorful might be better. Indeed it is boney all about, but I think they are lovely: huge headed, flouncy, bafflingly petaled and exuding a perfume so subtle you have to stick your face in it to know it’s there.
This might work: stick your face in it to know it is there. The perfume of human feeling, I mean: the strong subtlety of love.
An apple sharlotka, I decide after driving him to work. Ah yes a further fuckery: his car died so I have to drive him around. This isn’t a big deal, 45 minutes or so twice a day. If it weren’t so cold, I don’t think I’d care. I wouldn’t mind if there were a clear end date to this new arrangement. As it is, each piece of the thing is inconsequent but the whole feels just a little too much. When I got back from dropping him at work this morning, rubbing my hands to warm them, I gathered four eggs. I whip these with a cup of sugar for ten minutes straight. This causes a chemical change to the structure of both eggs and sugar. The color, the substance is a bold lemony yellow and positively aerated. There is no need for baking soda here; this lifts on it’s own churnedness. It will become the soft, sweet crystal of chiffon. Like an angel cake or a macaroon, a sharlotka will melt in the mouth but hold it’s structure on the fork. A little sweetened air, really: air miraculously stable enough to uphold baked apples. It’s a kiss in pastry form. Besides, there is something soothing to watching your KitchenAid whir for so long on a pale February morning. That yellow is holy. I line a spring form pan with apple slices, pour in the batter, and top the batter with another swirl of apple slices. Et voila.
There are two ways to look at this cake. A Charlotte Russe is an elegant, architectural wonder. It’s filled with Bavarian creme and corseted by lady fingers. Booze is typically involved, either in soaked fruit or emulsified into whipped cream. One really only serves it for special occasions. The sharlotka is the scrappy result of Soviet era scarcity tempered by an enduring urge to hospitality, a celebratory and possibly defiant repurposing of bread and apples. The two wildly different cakes are related. This has something to do with the first ever celebrity chef Marie-Antione Carême, Tsar Alexander I, and the juxtaposition of or dialogue between poverty and extravagance, reality and dream, showing off or just doing your best. Obviously, I’m going with the plain.
Marie-Antoine Carême was born poor. He was abandoned in Paris at the age of 8 because his parents couldn’t afford him. It was 1792. Think Les Misarables followed by the First Republic and Napoleon. Child Carême worked in a cheap cafe in exchange for food and a place to sleep. At 16, he apprenticed to a famous pastry chef, and shortly thereafter his sugar scape centerpieces earned him fame: he built entire cathedrals, scaled pyramids, Chinese pagodas and ancient temples out of cake. Cake! He made an edible historiography of the world’s greatest architecture entirely out of sugar, marzipan, and pastry. Some of his sugar structures were so stable court jesters could dance on them. Fact is, Carême was an architect manqué; the exigences of life made him a cook, though he dreamed of being an architect. In his own mind he was a failure. To history and his contemporaries, he was the literal best at some other thing he didn’t really care about. Such is this life.
Carême was the “chef of kings and the king of chefs”: he worked for Napoleon, the British crown, the Rothschilds and Russian czars. He formulated the famous ‘four mother sauces’ of béchamel, espagnole, velouté, and allemand. His recipes, style of table service, and technique laid the very foundation of grand French cuisine, an edifice that would rule all things delicious for two hundred years.
Some say the Carême’s Charlotte Russe was designed for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, who apparently loved apples. This early version probably refers to Charlotte a la Parisian. Later, when summoned by Tsar Alexander I to Saint Petersburg, the structurally fantastic and alcoholically tipsy cake was refashioned in in honor of Tsar Nicholas I’s wife, who before marriage was Princess Charlotte of Prussia. Carême named both cakes Charlotte. Other than that - and Carême himself - the cakes have nothing in common.
Sharlotka, the Slavic diminutive of Charlotte, (a more correct spelling, I’m told: szarlotka. And it’s Ukrainian. No: Polish. Belarusian.) spread through the Russian empire by word of mouth. Bread and apples had been staples to slavic cuisine since pre-history, but the cake and it’s hundreds of local variations seems to have some echo of Russian empire, and, later, Soviet make-do-with-littleness. It’s simple: one cup of flour, sifted into one cup of sugar that has been whipped into three or four eggs. Fruit, of course. That’s about it. Other versions don’t make a cake but use leftover brioche and create a kind of custard. It’s a tea-cake, really; suitable for picnics and totally legitimate to eat held in the hand for breakfast. It may not even be a cake, cake: there is no butter, no milk. You could call it a pie, but there is no crust. Maybe a pancake.
G laughs at my slavophilia. I read Dostoevsky for comfort. I gaze at icons with greedy atheist ecstasy. He doesn’t really believe me when I say Dostoevsky is funny. He does laugh at my own jokes, which are a little too hard and bitter for most people. He once gifted me a drawing of Saint Petersburg, a place I’ve never been to but frequently dream in. Increasingly, there are places in the world we would like to see but figure won’t be safe to visit in our lifetimes; this illustrates a flat and expansive truth not about life or the world, but about our times. It raises a question of humanity. Russia has always stood for me like an enormous and confusing question: comedy and tragedy, left and right, culture and oppression, veritable life and death. “Russian truth,” wrote Nobokov in exile, “is not a comfortable companion—not the everyday pravda but the immortal istina, which is the very soul of truth. When found, istina is the spendor of the creative imagination.”1
The first poster I had on my pre-teen bedroom wall wasn’t Boys II Men or Axl Rose but Mikhail Baryshnikov, suspended far above what you’d call ‘midair’ in sublime defiance of gravity. Maybe it was the glasnost of the late 80’s, coincident with my puberty, a human question that could tip either way. Maybe my soul is warped by the question natively.
I set the sharlotka on the hutch, next to the roses. I take comfort in the gathered whites that are not boney but sweet. I chew on a hunk of it while gazing out the frozen door, endlessly crystallized. We’re all, I think, manqué: broken; failures of our dreams. We’re all also capable of greatness concerning stuff we don’t care as much about, didn’t choose. The exigences of life, I suppose: a love not dreaming but awake. It’s all damned if you do, damned if you don’t; therefore we should.
Both Pravda and istina mean truth. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1977/02/14/mister-nabakov