Eccentric Flower:199901/adventures in cooking

twenty-eight january (again)

adventures in cooking

So, cast off the shackles of yesterday!
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!
Our daughters' daughters will adore us,
And they'll sing in grateful chorus,
"Well done, Sister Suffragettes!"

It's been in the back of my head looping over and over. All afternoon. My Glynis Johns personality was the only thing that saved me from a crying jag. I don't know where these defense mechanisms originate, but I'll take them where I find them.

I tried to cook for therapy, but today everything went a little off-kilter. No disasters - my rule is, if it's edible, it's not a disaster - but not what I hoped for.

The garlic soup recipe was flawed to begin with, I think. I'd have used Julia's but it makes two quarts of soup and was not easily halved. Not enough taste to the Gourmet recipe I used - when I sampled the broth it fit the recipe's Italian name, aqua cotta. Cooked water.

Then I had to take the egg yolk-and-Parmesan mixture, which I had in a little glass bowl, and keep whisking it while I dripped in a little hot garlic broth, so that the eggs wouldn't cook instantaneously and form little ugly egg droppings. The egg-and-cheese mixture was so thick that the whisk jammed dead in it, like a saw binding in sap. To whisk it I needed one hand to hold the bowl, another to hold the whisk, and a third to pour in a stream of liquid. The results weren't pretty.

The soup was tasty enough, especially with a nice round of peasant bread from my favorite bakery and some vinho verde. But it didn't taste half as good as it smelled.

Then I tried to make a classic spongecake. This is a recipe that calls for beating the yolks, then the whites, then folding the two together with cake flour without deflating the eggs. I am a lousy folder. Plus I didn't have an eight-inch pan, only a nine-inch. I hardly ever make anything calling for an eight-inch pan. What with the deflation and the too-large pan, the cake was approximately half an inch high when it was done.

But - the happy ending is that we tried to make boiled icing (hot sugar syrup whipped into beaten egg whites) for the first time. By then there were two of us to provide the three hands needed, and we mixed a little orange extract into the syrup, and the icing was absolutely dreamy. Of course, we had about three times as much of it as we had had cake batter - a huge bowl of this fluffy icing stuff.

We toyed with rubbing it all over each other's bodies, but I decided a big bowl of egg whites and sugar was not a good dietary supplement, and I washed the rest down the sink.

The cake is really good, just dense and flat. Actually I liked the cake better than the icing. (Nonelvis thinks I'm crazy.) I don't like sugary things that don't taste enough of something other than sugar. I'm like the person in the anecdote in one of my cookbooks who liked divinity but always thought there was too much sugar in it.

And that's what I did tonight.

Oh, and I watched ten minutes of Mary Poppins. No points for guessing which ten.

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