Labor Day, the last day of summer, brought weather so fine I could practically taste it on my tongue when I walked out in the morning to turn around the cafe sign. The wind was up, but it was a warm one, coaxing a smile–the kind that assaults the face when no one is watching, the corners of my mouth drawing my arms up in a delicious stretch, embracing the warm, dry air, the late summer sun.
I’ve been a news junkie lately–what with the DNC and the RNC, Gustav, and Tbilisi. I get up in the morning, make the coffee, bring a cup up to Steve and then start making cinnamon rolls. By the time I come-to, Market Place is on, the cinnamon rolls and the biscuit rolls are done and the scones are in the oven. I’m halfway through mixing muffin batter and am planning the Italian meringue buttercream I’ll make from the week’s leftover egg whites. Mid morning brings Gustav crashing into the Gulf Coast and I think a chocolate cake is in order, layered thickly with the buttercream spiked with a good dose of Venezuelan chocolate–it’s good for what ails us. All this sorrow and hope and tragedy. And recently–and closer to home–island in-fighting that always seems to plague the end of summer, as if we were all peevish at its departure, dreading the dark months to come. But, as we well know from history, we can not feed each other cake and expect our problems to disappear.
So, I spent the latter part of the afternoon catching a few tears with a dish towel, in an effort to keep them from seizing the chocolate I was tempering for lavender truffles. I hate watching my neighbors fight, stand by while misunderstandings turn to maelstroms, whirring and wailing into personal hurricanes crashing into the September-quiet shores of our own little coasts. I can’t help but think of Tita crying into her sister’s wedding cake batter in Like Water for Chocolate. What havoc that created–what with Gertrudis riding off naked with revolutionaries, and Rosaura losing her son and later becoming sterile. All because of a few tears in the wrong place.
I hope those lavender truffles don’t make people sad. Instead, I hope that they somehow communicate the complicated fabric of community life. Maybe not so literally, but somehow infusing our palates with compassion, a willingness to understand, forgive. Make the words off our tongues sweeter, lessen the bile, ease our frustrations, douse our anger with simple pleasure, fleeting joy; and a desire to seek joy, rather than unrest and conflict.
I don’t know. Maybe the onset of autumn makes me moody, more sensitive. The cream infusions for the ganache taste stronger these days. Too much coffee that I must amend with a bit more cream, which is sweet this time of year. The lavender seems cloying, so I add a bit more earthy vanilla bean, and a chocolate from Peru that is slightly more vegetal than floral. It all comes out right in the end. But it’s the getting there that seems the struggle these days. More time in the means, compensating for the imbalance in my immediate surroundings.
Is summer too sweet? Fleeting, yes. And perhaps that’s how Mother Nature makes up for the fast-fading paradise that Maine is in July and August. A goodness that, alas, is too good. And so we must complicate it. Bring it around to what we’re used to. What it’s always been. Bitter than sweet. Foiled with unrest.
And this is when recipes fail us, I suppose. The kind that we use in the kitchen, and the kind with which we govern our lives. I often boast that my ganache recipes are full-proof. Infuse the cream, chop the chocolate, strain, boil, emulsify, spread into the frame–in which, I have calculated, it will fit perfectly. But the only constant in the recipe, is that, unfailingly, each batch is different from the last. This, I have come to realize, isn’t my failing as a cook, but rather, the nature of the ingredients I choose to use. Natural things that are subject to changes in weather, stages of development at harvest time, the whim of the farmer, the roaster.
Sometimes people choose their communities as I would choose those ingredients, believing that the finest human beings (our kind of people) make fine communities. That like minds and lifestyles, accompanied by a prescribed set of rules (in the communal household I live in years ago, they called them “habits”)–a recipe, really–will guarantee utopia. But more often, and even in the planned situations, I think, communities are sprouted from the place they settle. A love of place. A fierce connection and commitment to place. And because we are people, and subject to our own storms and halcyon days; our own belligerent demons and quiet angels; this commitment manifests in vastly different ways, and so conflict and unrest are inevitable.
Not that i like it. And I find myself impatient with neighbors that I feel are being inflammatory or slanderous; unfair or bull-headed. But I am not fluent in the ways of people. And so I try to take my lesson from the lavender or the coffee. Improvise with the ingredients available. When it is too bitter, add sweetness; too floral, add earth.
