Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Colin Woodard's cultural, historical, and geographic description of North America changed the way I see our country, its politics, and my neighbors. Woodard's argument is that the history of settlement in the New Word and the cultural traditions brought by those settlers prevail to this day and are more important than state boundaries or our country's rural-urban divide in describing how our political system is polarized into eleven distinct geographic units. Here is one example that persuaded me beyond any doubt: the evolution of New York City, a nation virtually unto itself.  New York was settled first by the Dutch in the 1500s (after Native Americans were dispatched, of course.) At that time Holland was the world's most liberal and open minded country in Europe. It was the one place where Jews were still free to practice -- Jews had been killed and banished from France, England, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. Puritans that had departed England because Britain ...

Sing, Unburied, Sing  is a travel log written with the intensity of a stage play. Nearly all the action and poetic-dialogue takes place during an interminable car ride from the south of Mississippi toward the Parchman penitentiary. Leonie, African American (race and pervasive southern racism are central to the story), a mother for the first time when she was 17 is driving. Her son Jojo now 13 is in the back seat caring for three-year-old Kayla who has a stomach virus. In the passenger seat is Leonie's white friend Misty. They are heading to Parchman to retrieve Michael, Leonie's boyfriend, father of her children. Michael is about to be released following three years in prison and his own parents are so angry that he is dating a white woman they have never visited him. The car is hot, sticky, and covered in Kayla's sick. Misty and Leonie are stopping to score a pickup of meth and Jojo is much too quickly reaching adulthood: caring for his baby sister in the shadow of a b...

Brioche are made from doughs enriched with eggs and butter. In France, the number of eggs and quantity of butter mixed into the dough depends in part on how much money you have at your disposal. The wealthier you are the more butter you sneak in. The recipe I used -- converted from yeast to sourdough, of course -- absorbed five eggs and two sticks of butter. Enriched is something of an understatement. 

Barracoon is a recently re-discovered manuscript. Zora Neale Hurston, one of America's greatest writers, gathered the oral history of Cudjo Lewis, America's last living slave, but the manuscript was not printed when it was first completed. Anyone that has considered the history of enslavement -- capture, chaining, bundling into cargo ships, sale, and forced labor -- is not likely to learn much that is new. Any step along the way is worse than imagination can conjure: being ripped from family and home, being locked in a fetid, lightless dungeon for months awaiting shipment, being chained below decks for weeks alongside unwashed, vomiting, defecating, crying Africans with whom you may not even share a common language, and being measured for sale to the highest bidder. And yet Barracoon  has the strength to horrify anew because Cudjo is someone we know is real. Cudjo remembers his African village, his lost mother, and his native language. Cudjo describes his forced labor....

This loaf is a hodgepodge of ingredients I wanted to use up. I mashed up three decent sized potatoes after boiling them. I added a cup of yogurt that Sue made, but didn't like enough to eat. I dumped in some cooked oatmeal. I can't tell you exactly how much of any ingredient went into the loaf. I simply let my sourdough starter, time, and a lot kneading do their work. The bread was quite tasty, but alas, heavier, with tighter crumb, than I would have hoped. To make these rye breads from the Auvergne region of France I weighed every ingredient to the gram. The recipe from Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers  (Daniel Leader, 2007) is prefaced with an explanation that making Auvergne Rye is quite difficult, but when it works, is worth the effort. I needed more water than the recipe suggested, something you could only know from experience with dough. The oven temperature of 500 degrees nearly charred the rye, but that combi...

It is a lot easier to dream up a decent farce than it is to actually write one:  The Chateau  had so much potential. In an opening scene a plastic surgeon known as The Butt God of Miami falls to his death from the top floor of a Miami Beach condo. William Katzenelenbogen, just fired from his job at the Washington Post, heads from D.C. to his father's condo to investigate because The Butt God was William's roommate in college. Dad's condo is filled with elderly, Jewish, Russian millionaires who made their money on shady, mostly illegal transactions. The old Russians say crazy things about Donald Trump (they love him), one another (they hate all their neighbors), and about America (it's an easy system to manipulate for financial gain.) The old fogies battle for control of the condo's board of directors, where kickbacks from illegal contracts are most lucrative, spy on one another, curse in Russian at their neighbors, but otherwise not much happens. Goldberg is tryi...