À la carte (April 28, 2024)
A recipe, a reread, a podcast, a documentary
I “didn’t have time” to write much this week, though I did find the time to bake three flourless chocolate cakes in the lead-up to my father-in-law’s 75th birthday today, which this year is falling during Passover. I’m not usually a precise or practiced baker; I usually bake, selfishly, when I want a baked good, usually at 8 pm on a weeknight. But when I heard that Jerry wanted a flourless chocolate cake for his birthday, I rose to the challenge with the single-minded focused perfectionism I usually reserve for assembling Ikea furniture. The first two cakes I made during the week let me down—the first was a traditional true flourless cake, with the ratios adjusted for a fluffier consistency. It was fine, the chocolate high-quality (I used Guittard’s semi-sweet SANTÉ chips for the first time and will now never use anything else), but just … one-note, even with raspberries on top. The second subbed almond flour and used coconut oil in lieu of butter—the result was a grainy snacking cake, one I tried to dress up with a chocolate ganache, but it just didn’t feel birthday worthy. I ended up serving Richard Sax’s Chocolate Cloud Cake, which a friend had made for my birthday this year. I would not get any points from Paul Hollywood for presentation, but this was the clear winner: light and rich, without feeling decadent. What made the difference? Orange zest. I’m usually don’t love a chocolate-orange flavor combo, but the orange is what was necessary to reawaken my palette to the pleasure of a flourless chocolate cake. Also, whipped cream!
Some Books
After finishing On Immunity: An Inoculation, which I wrote about last week, I am rereading Eula Biss’s 2020 exploration of property, labor, and capital, Having and Being Had. I was moved to reread after being in Evanston, Illinois two weeks ago—Biss uses the purchase of her first home, in a gentrifying neighborhood in Evanston, as a jumping off point to probe her discomfort with, and reluctant participation in, capitalism. Who among us is not a begrudging investor in retirement-date mutual funds?? I can’t stop chewing on Max Weber’s turn-of-the-last-century observation that capitalism wasn’t an easy sell to commoners in seventeenth-century England, who “earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the landowners who wanted them to do steady work for more wages.”1 If we can’t really choose to opt out of capitalism, what choices do we have? asks Biss. I try to imagine what it would be like to not want more than I need. Here I am, with a digital shopping cart containing a moth-printed collared bubble romper for my daughter.
I keep trying to start Maggie Nelson’s latest collection of essays and interviews, Like Love, but my daughter has recently mastered the art of pulling herself up and has crawled onto my lap and tried to eat the cover each time I open it in bed in the morning. She is less interested (thankfully) in Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz, which Ben has been flying through next to me. (There is apparently no limit to the number of Auschwitz books that pass through our home?) My daughter is still enjoying Sandra Boynton’s non-narrative Doggies: A Counting and Barking Book, which is less absurdist than much of Boynton’s oeuvre and allows my daughter to practice saying dugh, which allows me to imagine she is close to saying dog (or duck, for which she makes the same sound)
A podcast
I am way late to the
fan club, who I only just encountered through the media blitz for her latest novel, A Sicilian Inheritance. Seemingly overnight, Piazza has appeared as a guest on some of my favorite podcasts or as an interviewee by some of my favorite writers. This woman is a tour de force! I can’t believe how many projects (and children) she can simultaneously juggle. Tutto pazzo. Case in point, my podcast recommendation this week is Piazza’s eponymous companion podcast to her latest book: The Sicilian Inheritance. Piazza’s novel is inspired by a little piece of lore in her Sicilian-American family’s history: that her great-great grandmother never made it to the United States because she was murdered back in Sicily before her husband and sons could send for her. After using this alluring seed of curiosity to create a sexy and feminist fictional whodunnit, Piazza decided to get to the bottom of the actual family mystery. The Sicilian Inheritance (new episodes still dropping weekly) tracks Piazza’s efforts to get to the bottom of what happened to her great-great grandmother. This involves taking her three young children and husband to Sicily, hiring a fixer, and trying to cut through the trámite2 of Sicilian bureaucracy. Even if I weren’t Sicilian-American and even if Sicily weren’t my favorite place in the world, I think I would still love this podcast. A mother-writer becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth beyond her family’s mythology? It’s also a murder mystery? Piazza is relatable and engaging and I will confess to waiting for episodes to drop in a way that I haven’t since the world first heard of Adnan Syed.Television
I didn’t watch much TV this week, due to the aforementioned three flourless chocolate cakes, but Ben and I did start Part Two of The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst on HBO. I have been reeled right back in. Part 1 ended in 2015 with documentarian Andrew Jarecki capturing Durst seemingly confessing to multiple murders on a hot mic while in the bathroom. That season finale aired the day after the FBI apprehended Durst, thanks in part to new evidence dug up by Jarecki, which finally connected Durst to the murder of Susan Berman. The rest of Part Two will presumably cover the subsequent trial and conviction of Robert Durst shortly before his death in 2022. With Harvey Weinstein’s successful appeal and Trump’s seemingly inevitable acquittals floating around in the ether, I am stuck on the inadequacies of our legal system, on how Bad White Men can escape culpability beyond a reasonable doubt.
Having and Being Had, Eula Biss. Riverhead Books, 2020 (citing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, translated by Stephen Kalberg. Oxford University Press , 2010. First published 1905).
This is a Spanish word my husband often uses to describe the multi-step bureaucratic headache that is going to the DMV (see also, applying for a passport/waiting on a line in a foreign country so that a notary can stamp a letter so you can close your bank account) that seems to lack an sufficient equivalent in English. Google translates it as “procedure.”