This past Saturday, we had a party. There were people downstairs, people upstairs. Sisters playing the piano, brothers playing ping-pong. The kitchen teemed with visitors, guests who sat around the kitchen table and chatted while waiting their turn to wind around the island, assembling their dinner. Outside, in the almost spring-like weather, the men stood and sat around the oven, my father standing at the front, others coming and going. Some, who had never seen the oven in action before would watch and marvel as the raw pizzas that they had assembled slid into the oven to come out a few minutes later, the cheese brown and melted, and the entire pie sending up aromas that had the dog sniffing the ground eagerly, pausing at each twig in the hopes that it would transform into a slice of pepperoni.
Our cookie jar, a brown bear clutching a huge version of a Hershey's kiss, nearly always has chocolate chip cookies in it. I have the recipe memorized. Sugar, brown sugar, butter, eggs. Flour, baking powder, salt. If you do it right, you can make them with one half cup measure, one half teaspoon measure, one bowl and one spoon. They are the essence of simplicity. And although my father and I have a standing debate over whether or not they can be called cookies when I omit the nuts, they are always basically the same. We mix the dough and mom gets a spoonful. That step is now written into the recipe. We bake off a sheet and eat them warm from the oven, on folded squares of white paper towels. The rest, cooled and hardened, are slipped into the cookie jar to disappear gradually over the next few days.
We have had pizza parties before. This one follow the pattern. Because only three or four pizzas fit into the oven at a time, there is never a time when everyone is sitting down and eating. Mom spends the afternoon standing at the inside counter, hands covered in flour, cutting off pieces of dough, forming them, stretching them and teasing the next person into line. Making sure that everyone has a chance to eat before sending people through again for seconds. Dad stands out by his oven, hands gloved, so that they don't burn on the handle of the door or singe in the heat of the air. He holds a metal spatula in one hand, sometimes a slice of pizza finds its way to the other, left behind when it didn't quite fit on a plate, but for the most part, he waits. At the ends of the afternoon, when everyone has found their way through the line, my mother brings out her pizza. There aren't many people eating at this point. Most of the kids are playing a version of football further out in the yard, adults sit around one of the tables set out on the lawn. Mom slides into a chair, off her feet at last. She says something serious, insightful. But before things get too dull, she makes a comment about the hard lemonade she is drinking, sending everyone off into laughter.
I could sit here and type out the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I could sit here and type out the form for every pizza party we have had. They have small variations every time. Maybe we use macadamia nuts instead of walnuts, maybe we have five people over instead of twenty. But the essence doesn't change. They are still chocolate chip cookies. It is still not about the pizza, it is still about the fellowship, the joy of the gathering with those of like mind. But somehow, we take these objects and through repetition, instill in them some of the joy of a moment. Chocolate chip cookies are home and family, the oven is community and sharing. And the knowledge that we will do it again.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
450 words before midnight
I need to have 450 words written by midnight. If I write at a speed of approximately four words per minute, my goal will be accomplished, but the empty space behind my eyes, where I am used to finding thoughts, might mean that the 450 will be nothing but gibberish and that will not do. The oven, supposedly my inspiration, is sitting in the dark and the cold, I know the stars above it are easily visible in the clear sky tonight, but my desire for thoughts is not great enough to move me off of my couch.
I want to write more history, but the facts all feel dry tonight. Where are the stories? The history of the people who built the ovens and used them is what I really want to read, not the paragraphs on the development from round bowls to hive shaped mounds, to extensions from the back of the house until ovens were a metal fixture to blend neatly into the squares and rectangles of modern kitchen walls. Besides being dry, the facts here are tersely stated, mentioning no variation from the average standard.
I tuck my thumbs through the holes I have worn in my sweatshirt sleeves, turning them into comfortable gloves, to keep my fingers warm as I type here in the basement. With the gas fire turned off for the night, the air gets chilly quickly.
According to the encyclopedia, Greek bakers would build bowls of clay and heat them in the ground, then place their bread dough inside the bowl to bake. As knowledge of yeast developed, so did covered ovens, to provide the surrounding heat necessary to bake these new types of dough. The oven and bread have revolved around each other since earliest histories. In Rome, under the Emperor Trajan, a college for bakers was established. Our oven is of Roman design, a design that has persisted through time and across oceans. Metal ovens did not begin to appear until the end of the 18th century. From Trajan until then, 1500 years, ovens where you heated bricks, cleaned out the ashes and baked your bread on hot rocks were normal.
I suppose that it’s no surprise that people were eager to transition from masonry to metal, to our modern digital, self cleaning, self regulating ovens. There are many things that would be much more difficult in those wood-burning ovens. And no matter how you look at it, I have to admit that our kitchen ovens are much more time efficient than the outside oven. They always turn on, even if it has rained recently. Howling winds don’t effect them, or me, when I can stay safe inside the warm house. They are appealing in their own way, smooth polished curves, a gleaming whiteness set into the wall of the kitchen. The masonry oven, which is in reality just a carefully arranged pile of rocks, is oddly exotic next to these bits of normalcy. It is part of the romanticized past, a part of those stories that we cannot reach and therefore invent out of recorded fragments, making the past exciting, depressing, the best time in the world or the worst time in the world. ‘The grass is always greener’, is the saying. Are we always looking to another place or time for comfort? I am content to be able to sit here in comfortable laziness and speculate about the past, I know I would not want to switch times with anyone. I think there are plenty of people who feel the same way, who realize how much easier day to day tasks are in our modern world. But the simple contrast in realities is not quite disillusioning. There is always something ethereal about the past. No matter how many terrible hardships are put into words, no matter how many glorious triumphs are recorded. Perhaps, as we try so hard to articulate the abstract, even for others in our own times, you forget that you can only know what you have lived.
I want to write more history, but the facts all feel dry tonight. Where are the stories? The history of the people who built the ovens and used them is what I really want to read, not the paragraphs on the development from round bowls to hive shaped mounds, to extensions from the back of the house until ovens were a metal fixture to blend neatly into the squares and rectangles of modern kitchen walls. Besides being dry, the facts here are tersely stated, mentioning no variation from the average standard.
I tuck my thumbs through the holes I have worn in my sweatshirt sleeves, turning them into comfortable gloves, to keep my fingers warm as I type here in the basement. With the gas fire turned off for the night, the air gets chilly quickly.
According to the encyclopedia, Greek bakers would build bowls of clay and heat them in the ground, then place their bread dough inside the bowl to bake. As knowledge of yeast developed, so did covered ovens, to provide the surrounding heat necessary to bake these new types of dough. The oven and bread have revolved around each other since earliest histories. In Rome, under the Emperor Trajan, a college for bakers was established. Our oven is of Roman design, a design that has persisted through time and across oceans. Metal ovens did not begin to appear until the end of the 18th century. From Trajan until then, 1500 years, ovens where you heated bricks, cleaned out the ashes and baked your bread on hot rocks were normal.
I suppose that it’s no surprise that people were eager to transition from masonry to metal, to our modern digital, self cleaning, self regulating ovens. There are many things that would be much more difficult in those wood-burning ovens. And no matter how you look at it, I have to admit that our kitchen ovens are much more time efficient than the outside oven. They always turn on, even if it has rained recently. Howling winds don’t effect them, or me, when I can stay safe inside the warm house. They are appealing in their own way, smooth polished curves, a gleaming whiteness set into the wall of the kitchen. The masonry oven, which is in reality just a carefully arranged pile of rocks, is oddly exotic next to these bits of normalcy. It is part of the romanticized past, a part of those stories that we cannot reach and therefore invent out of recorded fragments, making the past exciting, depressing, the best time in the world or the worst time in the world. ‘The grass is always greener’, is the saying. Are we always looking to another place or time for comfort? I am content to be able to sit here in comfortable laziness and speculate about the past, I know I would not want to switch times with anyone. I think there are plenty of people who feel the same way, who realize how much easier day to day tasks are in our modern world. But the simple contrast in realities is not quite disillusioning. There is always something ethereal about the past. No matter how many terrible hardships are put into words, no matter how many glorious triumphs are recorded. Perhaps, as we try so hard to articulate the abstract, even for others in our own times, you forget that you can only know what you have lived.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Beehive
My parents moved to Taiwan a year and a half ago. With my uncle and his family moving in to take care of our house, animals, and garden, and me moving to share a small apartment with my sister for a shorter trip to school, many of the things from my bookshelves were boxed up, then crated up, then stacked with other crates in a storage shed. There is a hat rack, a rug, a basket, on top of the crates, a bike in front of them, a peddle boat for summers on the lake beside them. And inside, somewhere, is a white 3-ring binder, the sheet protectors filled with wallet-sized photos.
When my father began building his oven, he dubbed me the 'photojournalist'. I took pictures of holes in the ground, of re-bar and cement, of the nearly weightless red rock that my siblings and I use to draw on the driveway with and call 'lava rock'. Inside that notebook are pictures of things I have forgotten, steps in the construction that I was not aware enough of to remember. There are pages of blue-lined paper sitting alongside the pictures. Once, I began to write the story of the oven, describing the process one picture at a time. Pencil graphite on a few of the pages shows exactly when I halted, stuffed the notebook into a box, let the box be stacked in a crate.
'Our oven', I call it, at times. Sometimes I am more accurate and call it 'my father's oven'. Because it is my father who read the books, who learned the history and the secrets of managing this edifice that has been erected in our backyard. But his books sit on the shelves, free for the reading, so I reach for one and open it. I read.
Horizontal ovens date to the Roman era, the wood burnt on the same bricks you bake on. The massive hump of oven I saw when visiting Valley Forge, extending from the kitchen in the house George Washington slept in, was also an oven of this type, though I should apparently be calling it a beehive oven. The ovens could be small, large, for a family, for a community, for a business. And I am not as enterprising I would like to think myself, for the ovens were not used solely for bread. That they would be used for meat and perhaps the occasional dessert had occurred to me, but I read that they were used for drying and preserving fruits, for sterilizing pillows. The image of thrusting one of my mother's feather pillows into the maw of the oven flashes through my head. To these people, for centuries, from the Romans to colonial Americans, in Italy and in France, a freestanding oven was day-to-day life, a tool to be used in any way that was useful.
For me, sitting here on the green leather couch, my pillows clean of ticks, needing no sterilization, the brick oven is an oddity. A 'pizza oven', used perhaps for bread, occasionally a roast. I had thought I was branching and I find that others have been here before me, heating the oven bricks, using every last drop of heat, pulling out the ashes to use as fertilizer, making sure no resource was wasted. And each time I slide something between the blackened bricks, onto the smooth surface of the interior, there is a line of people standing behind me, who have made the same motions throughout time.
Note: The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott, (c) 1999, was used as a resource for this post.
When my father began building his oven, he dubbed me the 'photojournalist'. I took pictures of holes in the ground, of re-bar and cement, of the nearly weightless red rock that my siblings and I use to draw on the driveway with and call 'lava rock'. Inside that notebook are pictures of things I have forgotten, steps in the construction that I was not aware enough of to remember. There are pages of blue-lined paper sitting alongside the pictures. Once, I began to write the story of the oven, describing the process one picture at a time. Pencil graphite on a few of the pages shows exactly when I halted, stuffed the notebook into a box, let the box be stacked in a crate.
'Our oven', I call it, at times. Sometimes I am more accurate and call it 'my father's oven'. Because it is my father who read the books, who learned the history and the secrets of managing this edifice that has been erected in our backyard. But his books sit on the shelves, free for the reading, so I reach for one and open it. I read.
Horizontal ovens date to the Roman era, the wood burnt on the same bricks you bake on. The massive hump of oven I saw when visiting Valley Forge, extending from the kitchen in the house George Washington slept in, was also an oven of this type, though I should apparently be calling it a beehive oven. The ovens could be small, large, for a family, for a community, for a business. And I am not as enterprising I would like to think myself, for the ovens were not used solely for bread. That they would be used for meat and perhaps the occasional dessert had occurred to me, but I read that they were used for drying and preserving fruits, for sterilizing pillows. The image of thrusting one of my mother's feather pillows into the maw of the oven flashes through my head. To these people, for centuries, from the Romans to colonial Americans, in Italy and in France, a freestanding oven was day-to-day life, a tool to be used in any way that was useful.
For me, sitting here on the green leather couch, my pillows clean of ticks, needing no sterilization, the brick oven is an oddity. A 'pizza oven', used perhaps for bread, occasionally a roast. I had thought I was branching and I find that others have been here before me, heating the oven bricks, using every last drop of heat, pulling out the ashes to use as fertilizer, making sure no resource was wasted. And each time I slide something between the blackened bricks, onto the smooth surface of the interior, there is a line of people standing behind me, who have made the same motions throughout time.
Note: The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott, (c) 1999, was used as a resource for this post.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Moments
The nearly invisible smoke curls against my eyes, forcing them to squeeze shut, watering, to lessen the sting, but I force them to stay open in a half-squint, since I am pushing my head towards six-hundred degree bricks. A few centimeters closer, I sniff. The scent of smoke comes strongly. Not as painful as the sharp cut of it against my protesting eyes, the smell, sweet and ashy, turns my stomach slightly. Pulling away from the dry heat into the damp air that foretells more rain to come, I settle myself against the two level extension of smooth, white cement that serves as a counter. The rough reddish rock, which we hauled back from the desert on one of many trips, catches my attention. Thin edges line the curve of the oven door, each rock cut into a corner to fit over the unfinished cement base, mortared to another thin piece on the left and on the right. The shades shift dark, light, in-between. The corners are an odd kite shape, molded from black cement and polished down to show bits of granite and marble that were mixed in before it had a chance to set.
I glance back inside the oven. The half-sheet pan is pushed up close against the coals that are still glowing in the back of the oven, but the near edge still emerges slightly. The radiant heat manages to reach the crackers on this part of the pan, but unevenly. I rotated the pan, now the crackers nearest me look golden and inviting. I count aloud, sixty seconds, watching as the parchment paper dimples more deeply around each individual cracker, as they bubbled at the edges, then suddenly swell as the infinitesimal amount of baking powder inside reacts with the waves of heat rushing against the dough. Each bit of cheese melts and the edges of the crackers soften, then harden again as the cheese turns to a crisp lace.
Rolled to a fragile thinness and cut into undersized shapes, it only takes a few minutes before they threaten to burn and I pull them out. The gloves, heavy orange work gloves, are waterlogged from being left in the rain, but the heat of the pan is threatening to burn my fingers before I reach the door. I rush up to the picnic table, sliding the hot pan quickly down onto the wood. The glass patio door slides open as I lean my weight on the handle. Bagheera slips herself around my ankles, seizing the chance to make it into the warm house. The dog, rather than go after the cat, lays in the doorway and I step over her with care, lifting the hot pan through and managing to set it on the stovetop before my fingers begin to blister.
Each cracker is a different shape, diamonds, squares, miniature hearts, specked with dozens of poppy seeds. Lined up on the sheet, they begin to flatten and brittle as they cool. I snatch one up and set it in my mouth. I taste butter, I smell the cheese, for a moment. Then the cracker is gone.
The oven took months to build. We dug down into the ground to make the foundation secure, there were hours spent driving to and from the desert bring back loads of the rock that now covers the outside decoratively. My father built a mobile insulated screen so that he could work on in during the coldest months of the year. I learned how to make the best cracker dough in bakery classes during my three semesters in the culinary program. I learned to enjoy cooking and baking through working with my mother and father in the kitchen.
All of the knowledge that it took to build that oven, all of the care it took to mix the dough, all of the memories, all of the barely noticed details, all connect here, in this moment. And this moment, in turn, will become a memory to connect with the future.
I glance back inside the oven. The half-sheet pan is pushed up close against the coals that are still glowing in the back of the oven, but the near edge still emerges slightly. The radiant heat manages to reach the crackers on this part of the pan, but unevenly. I rotated the pan, now the crackers nearest me look golden and inviting. I count aloud, sixty seconds, watching as the parchment paper dimples more deeply around each individual cracker, as they bubbled at the edges, then suddenly swell as the infinitesimal amount of baking powder inside reacts with the waves of heat rushing against the dough. Each bit of cheese melts and the edges of the crackers soften, then harden again as the cheese turns to a crisp lace.
Rolled to a fragile thinness and cut into undersized shapes, it only takes a few minutes before they threaten to burn and I pull them out. The gloves, heavy orange work gloves, are waterlogged from being left in the rain, but the heat of the pan is threatening to burn my fingers before I reach the door. I rush up to the picnic table, sliding the hot pan quickly down onto the wood. The glass patio door slides open as I lean my weight on the handle. Bagheera slips herself around my ankles, seizing the chance to make it into the warm house. The dog, rather than go after the cat, lays in the doorway and I step over her with care, lifting the hot pan through and managing to set it on the stovetop before my fingers begin to blister.
Each cracker is a different shape, diamonds, squares, miniature hearts, specked with dozens of poppy seeds. Lined up on the sheet, they begin to flatten and brittle as they cool. I snatch one up and set it in my mouth. I taste butter, I smell the cheese, for a moment. Then the cracker is gone.
The oven took months to build. We dug down into the ground to make the foundation secure, there were hours spent driving to and from the desert bring back loads of the rock that now covers the outside decoratively. My father built a mobile insulated screen so that he could work on in during the coldest months of the year. I learned how to make the best cracker dough in bakery classes during my three semesters in the culinary program. I learned to enjoy cooking and baking through working with my mother and father in the kitchen.
All of the knowledge that it took to build that oven, all of the care it took to mix the dough, all of the memories, all of the barely noticed details, all connect here, in this moment. And this moment, in turn, will become a memory to connect with the future.
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