A Box of Stories (4): Calling Benny

          My recipe box holds only one letter. It begins, "Dear Diana. I'm so glad Louise sent me this chain letter! I finally have a way to be in touch with you. Hope all's well. We're doing ok in spite of all the ups and downs that life tosses our way." Signed, "Love and good wishes, Tinker," the letter ends with a recipe for basil pesto (in response to the send-a-recipe chain). The basil pesto has nothing to do with the story below, but that it came from Tinker makes it a meaningful recipe in my recipe box.

          In 1974 Tinker and her boyfriend, Benny, were living on a hippie commune not far from the little barn where I, my common-law husband, and our twenty-month-old son, Ela, were living. To help Dan and me patch what seemed to be a disintegrating relationship, Benny suggested a trip to Baja, California, for the five of us. Benny didn't know—no one knew; I didn't know—that the conjugal ties were fraying not from ordinary marital problems but from a storm of hallucinations and schizophrenic voices that would not diminish in a new location. I was already immersed in the in-and-out-of-reality, early stage of schizophrenia, and the hallucinations and voices would come right along with me.

          Nothing went well on the trip. As at home, I was confused by my mental whirl of directions and commands, of voices, symbols, and signs. I kept being told, in the schizophrenic hallucinatory way, that I was supposed to do this and do that—clean the camper, cook dinner, put away the dishes that fell off the shelves when we made a sudden stop. Why didn't anyone else do those things? Why did it always have to be me? I was overburdened with work, yet the voices told me again and again and again to make the beds, fix the coffee, stock the shelves. In my confusion and despair at what was happening to me, I cried and cried. Sitting across from me at the tiny table in the camper truck, Dan begged me to tell him what the matter was. "Just tell me," he said, choking on his own tears. "Why are you crying? Talk to me." But I had nothing to say. Already deeply catatonic, I could say nothing.

          Somewhere one day in some town we parked the truck on a side road. Tinker and Benny left to get something to eat. Dan, Ela, and I stayed in the camper to eat lightly on what I could find in the cupboards. Then the voices started: "Diana. Be careful. Dan is very angry. He's going to beat you, to within an inch of your life. You must get out of the camper. Leave. Quickly. Leave." It's symptomatic of how far from reality I was living that I would think seriously that Dan—Dan?!—would beat me. But I was not in my right mind. My mind had left.

          I was terrified. I would have to handle things delicately. If I said the wrong thing, if I increased Dan's anger, he would start beating me. I would have to get out of the camper. Somehow I would have to escape.

          And somehow I did. Anyone watching from the outside might have seen only that a woman stepped out of the camper and hopped into the front seat of the truck, but to me it was an escape. I was out of immediate danger, but I was terrified for my baby, in the camper with Dan, who, in my reality, was dangerously angry. I needed help, emergency help, right then, so I sat in the front seat behind the steering wheel, calling Benny, silently and powerfully, in my head. "Benny. Benny. Benny."

          Benny had been a staff of comfort to me all those troubled months that I was sinking into schizophrenia. He had been an anchor, a stabilizer. He had been the boulder I sold on in floods of confusion. He never demanded explanations—I was incapable of giving any—but he sensed my distress and calmed me. Once, he told me, "If you ever need help, all you have to do is call. I'll be right there. Just call."

          I needed Benny now, so I was calling him, as hard as I could. "Benny. Benny. Benny." And lo! Benny and Tinker came running around the corner, fast, their dinners in paper bags. Maybe they had somehow sensed trouble, or maybe Benny had sensed me calling. They arrived. Benny defused the situation with Dan, and we continued on our perilous road to Baja.

          Not surprisingly, this trip did not work as a palliative for the struggling relationship between Dan and me. Schizophrenia doesn't respond to that kind of solution. Only after several years, two hospitalizations, anti-psychotic drugs, and an intense concentration of self-healing was I free of schizophrenia. My common-law marriage with Dan became a casualty of the illness, but not our friendship, and although I had disappeared from Ela's life without explanation just before he turned two, I worked hard to rebuild our relationship when I returned from the mental institution, and our closeness did not suffer. Tinker and Benny drifted apart. She married someone else and turned Christian. I don't know what happened to Benny. I don't think that if I called him how, he would hear me, But one time in my life he did hear me, and, in my tight little schizophrenic reality, he saved my life.

Recipe from this post: Tinker's basil pesto
Next week: "Box of Stories (5): Teaching School Children about Africa"

TINKER'S BASIL PESTO

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups fresh basil leaves (or parsley)
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts
3/4 cup Sardinia, Parmesan, or Romano cheese
3/4 cup olive oil
Preparation
Grate the cheese.
To make
Pound the basil, garlic, and pine nuts in a mortar until the mixture forms a thick purée. Add the grated cheese and mix or pound till the mixture is very thick. At that point add, very slowly, stirring constantly, the olive oil. When this mixture has become the consistency of creamed butter, put a film of olive oil over the top, cover it, and place it in the refrigerator or freezer.
To serve
Use about 2 tablespoons per serving mixed with equal parts of melted butter. If you serve the pesto with pasta, mix everything together before serving.

      

A Box of Stories: (3) From My Home on Grantchester Meadows

Janet's fruit malt loaf

          While I was doing postgraduate studies at Newnham College, Cambridge University, as a Marshall Scholar, between 1966 and 1968, I lived in a house on Grantchester Meadows with four other graduate students at Newnham: Janet, An English woman doing graduate work in religious studies; Yoko, a Japanese student of anthropology; Polly, an American studying English literature; and Sue, an Australian, who was aloof (or shy) and whom I knew least. Our house was the last in a row of semi-detached houses on Grantchester Meadows, where the street ended and the path began. To take that path was to wind a pleasant, oh so English, way through the woods and the meadows to a little tea house, where one could take high tea. On the other side of the woods flowed the River Cam. Following an old Cambridge tradition, students punted down the river to Grantchester for breakfast at dawn after the all-night affairs of the post-exams May Balls, as I did with friends at Queens College after the bagpiper, following tradition, had welcomed the day from the ramparts of the college entrance and the ball had faded to an end.

          Grantchester Meadows was made famous in the Pink Floyd song of that name and, earlier, by Rupert Brooke's "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," which ends with the famous lines, "Still stands the clock at ten to three,/And is there honey still for tea?"

          Because we in the Granchester Meadows house were students on limited budgets, we usually ate dinner "in hall" (the English equivalent of the student cafeteria in American universities), but every once in a while one of us would fill our house with the good smells of a kitchen at work, most often Janet, the oldest and the official liaison between our house and Newnham College. One day she made a fruit malt loaf, heavily flavored and different from any other sweet bread I had ever eaten, so I asked her for the recipe. For years I couldn't follow the recipe because its magic ingredient is that oh so English substance Ovaltine. Some stores in the States might have carried such a product, but not in the places where I lived since those golden days of Cambridge.
          Now however, I can find Ovaltine even in stores in southern Oregon, so I have been able to make Janet's fruit malt loaf, from the recipe in my little cedar recipe box, written in my hand, on a plain white, unlined 3x5 card. On the back is the name of another friend from Cambridge, Heather Bayes. I used to play tennis with Heather, barefooted, on grass courts. Now that I have discovered her name on the back of my recipe, I wonder if I have gotten it wrong all these years. Was it Heather  who gave me this recipe, not Janet? I don't think so because my memory has always had Janet as the baker, but why would Heather's name be on the back of the card?
            Heather's or Janet's, it's a very English sweet bread and very good. I hope you'll try it.

Next week: A Box of Stories (4) "Calling Benny"

FRUIT MALT LOAF
yield: one loaf

Ingredients

2 tablespoons Ovaltine
1/2 pound self-rising flour (=3 1/3 cups)
1/2 pound dried fruit
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons Golden Syrup (another English product. Use honey.)
1 cup milk (coffee cup)
Preparation
Grease a loaf tin (loaf pan, in American English). Preheat the oven to mark #4 (350º).
To make
Combine and beat the first four ingredients. Heat the syrup and milk separately, then combine both with the flour mixtures. Turn the batter into the prepared loaf tin. Bake at  mark #4 (350º) for 1 hour.

A Box of Stories (2): September 11, 2001, in Sweden

          In September, 2001, I was in Sweden, teaching a class at the University of Göteborg and living with my good friends, Maren and Lasse. One day we made plans with a mutual friend, Sven, that he would cook dinner at our house on the evening of September 11. I was home alone in the house that afternoon, reading student papers, when Lasse burst through the door, saying, "Terrible things are happening in your country." He turned on the television. Together we watched, horrified, the images of the terrible things that were happening in my country.

          In the following days I experienced what many Americans in foreign countries were receiving at that time: an outpouring of sympathy for America's grief. Wherever I was—at the university, in the grocery store, among friends—people who knew me or who recognized my nationality through my language communicated the deepest compassion in their words and through their eyes. Swedish flags flew at half staff. At the concert of the Göteborg Symphony Orchestra on September 12, the conductor opened the program by telling us the orchestra had debated how to respond to this tragedy. "We considered canceling the concert," he said, "but then we thought that music is an appropriate and important response at such times. It seemed a more fitting tribute to those who lost their lives if we added a piece in their honor." He turned to the podium, raised his baton, and led the orchestra in playing "Elegy," by the Swedish composer Hugo Alfven. Exaltingly sad and beautiful, it sent tears down my cheeks.

          On the night of September 11, I, too, was struggling with appropriate responses. Should I cancel the dinner with Sven? And do what? Spend the evening alone, wrapped in grief and fear?

No, it seemed a more appropriate response to be surrounded by people I loved. Sven came over, his hug as sympathetic as Maren's and Lasse's. While he made dinner, Maren set the table and Lasse poured the wine. Helpless in the face of the tragedy so far from me in miles, yet so close to my heart, I was also useless to help Sven in the kitchen. All I could do was watch him prepare, with a touch of elegance and a sureness of timing, a fish stew that raises that fisherman's wife's dish to the fine-dining category. The dinner was exquisite, rich with flavorful seafood, prepared in very short time, eaten around a table with dear friends on a day when love of all expressions—music, words, touch, eyes, and food—proved the right antidote to grief and fear.




Next week: "A Box of Stories: (3) From My Home on Grantchester Meadows"

SVEN'S FISH STEW
This is a beautiful stew, quickly and easily prepared. If you aren't careful with the timing, though, it could turn into a mush. The basic rule for cooking fish is ten minutes per inch of thickness, but remember that the salmon will continue cooking as you add the other ingredients. The amounts of the ingredients are given exactly as Sven gave them to me—i.e., use as much in the way of everything as you like. Don't stint on the dill, though.

Ingredients

At my house, years later

1 salmon fillet (wild salmon, if you are a conscientious, environmentally concerned consumer)
Olive oil (only the best, double virgin, though the term puzzles me)
Garlic
Onions
Mushrooms
1 small carton whipping cream
1 small carton creme fraiche (or sour cream)
Freshwater whitefish (or cod)
Fresh dill (lots)
Tomatoes
Salt and white pepper
Fish stock or milk
Preparation
Mince or crush the garlic and slice the onions and mushrooms. Chop the dill and the tomatoes. Remove skin from fish.

To make
Briefly sauté the salmon fillet in olive oil with the crushed garlic in a large, heavy pot, like a Dutch oven. Add the onions and mushrooms and continue cooking. Add the cream and the creme fraiche (or the sour cream). Be careful not to boil the stock. Add the whitefish (or cod). Add lots of chopped fresh dill and the tomatoes. Thin with fish stock or milk, if necessary. Do not overcook.
Assemblage
Before taking the pot off the stove, decorate the dish with a circle of sliced tomatoes and, inside that circle, a circle of lemon slices from half the lemon (or the other way around). Squeeze the other half of the lemon over the entire pot of stew. Serve immediately with rice made yellow with saffron. And when your guests ask in amazement what this marvelous dish is called, tell them it's Sven's Fish Stew, from Sweden.

A Box of Stories (1): The Horrible Cake

          My recipe box is made of cedar and sized to hold 3"x5" cards. On the cover is written, in script, "recipes," and in the upper left corner, almost faded, "Yosemite National Park." This box was a gift from Ela when he was but a little, little boy and spent a vacation at Yosemite with his dad and stepfamily. Pieces of frayed blue cardboard divide the box into sections with my handwritten categories: "Desserts" (first), "Bread," "Main Dishes," "Other." Recipes are stained, blotted, blurred, torn. They are written on the backs of things: a shopping list, a grocery receipt, some unknown person's prescription (July 1971), a photocopied poem by James Whitcomb Riley, a yellow scratchpad paper from Leo. M. Philpott Co. ( Seattle, Spokane, Portland—equipment and supplies for contractors). Recipes are written on heavy brown paper; tissue-paper-thin, beige paper, on both sides, with the ink showing through; lined notebook paper; colored 3"x5" cards (yellow, dark pink, white, blue). They were emailed ("Re: Re [2]: Cassatta?"), quickly jotted down from the radio, torn from cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, and cream cheese and phyllo cartons. Some cards are just notes: "Use plump soft raisins in cooking: pour boiling water over raisins and let them stand; then drain them well. Or place raisins in a sieve and steam them over boiling water." "Separate eggs by passing the yolk from one half of the broken shell to the other until all the white has drained into the bowl. Or do it the way the French do: pour the egg into your outstretched fingers and hold onto the yolk while the white drips through your fingers."

          To open this box is to let loose not only all the odors of a kitchen in use but also the whole chronology of my cooking life: my student days, my hippy sojourn, my mountain living vegetarianism, the return to eating meat. From this box fly, on the odorous wings of recipes, memories of childhood and a flash of scenes from potlucks, dinner parties, and picnics. From it swarms a crowd of faces of family, friends, and cooks of all calibers and levels of passion. Most of all, what pours out when I open my recipe box is stories. 

          For this and the next six posts I'll tell some of the stories associated with recipes in my recipe box. The first is about a cake that, by family lore, is called the horrible cake.

          Family legend has it that my mother first made this cake when my brother, Lee, the youngest of five children and the only boy, was very little. He wasn't sure he liked it. My father said, mockingly, "Oh, it's a horrible cake," to discourage Lee from eating any (so there would be more for him, of course). From that time on, the apple cake has been known as the "horrible cake." I don't know whether Lee understood the subterfuge at the time, but certainly now he likes horrible cake as well as the rest of us.

Next week: "A Box of Stories (2): September 11, 2001, in Sweden"

DAD'S HORRIBLE CAKE (Apple cake)

serves: 12

Ingredients

My husband, Mike, with the
horrible cake, 2018

I cup cooking oil
2 cups sugar

3 eggs

2-3 apples

3 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons vanilla

Preparation

Grease 2 9" cake pans. Beat the eggs. Chop the apples. To prevent them from browning, put them in a bowl of cold water with the juice of about half a lemon. Do not preheat the oven.

To make

Mix together the oil, sugar, and beaten eggs. Add the chopped apples. Into this mixture sift the flour, salt, and baking soda. Add the vanilla. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and put it in a cold oven. Turn the temperature to 325º and bake 45 minutes, or until the cake tests done.

Easy caramel frosting

Though my mother served this cake without any frosting, and it's very good that way, the following is a delicious addition.

Ingredients

3 tablespoons butter

4 1/2 tablespoons milk

3/4 cup brown sugar, packed

1 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar

3/4 teaspoon vanilla

To make

Melt butter over medium heat. Mix in milk and brown sugar and boil vigorously 1 minute. Remove from heat and beat in half the confectioner's sugar. Let the mixture cool slightly, then beat in remaining confectioner's sugar and vanilla. Add more milk, if necessary, to achieve a spreadable consistency.