Culture

In a world full of muffins, they say, be a cupcake. As an inspirational saying, it’s a good effort. But handsome is as handsome does: for solid worth, texture and deliciousness, give me the muffin every time. I remain open-minded and willing to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that however gloriously frosted, sprinkled, beflowered or bedazzled the exterior of a cupcake may be, its interior texture is always trying, in a socially anxious sort of way, to be cake. All the icing in the world can’t hide the strain. Allow me to suggest an alternative: in a world of Christmas cookies, be homemade shortbread. The last word in simplicity, shortbread is the Hermès scarf of the cookie world. It has confidence, identity, classical elegance.

Christmas dinner for American pioneers was modeled on an English Christmas, for those who could afford it. Families with enough money served turkey, plum pudding, preserved fruits, mince pies, meringues and perhaps even a fresh ham. Children in the Midwest might wake on Christmas morning to find strings of candy and raisins draped on the tree, and wafers, gingerbread or oranges hidden in their stockings. Parents would give gifts of wooden toys, dolls made from corn husks, little glass baubles and colored ribbons for the tree. But in remote places on the western frontier, Christmas often meant providing food and accommodation for travelers and strangers.

The holidays are here. If you’re like me, you may view the year’s major baking season with slight dread, not because you’re a Scrooge, but because you lack confidence, patience or skill as a baker. Recipe developer and cooking influencer Alison Roman has written a cookbook for people like us, who find the “science” of baking frustrating compared to the “art” of cooking. The cookbook, Sweet Enough, affirms this preference; in a section called “What I Hate about Baking,” Roman lists gripes: “I hate when I mess up and feel like I wasted hours of my life.” Same. But this book, written with non-bakers in mind, is for the most part flexible and forgiving, and may well become your companion this December.

It is 7:30 a.m. and already seventy degrees in Bowness-on-Windermere. A rare, early summer heatwave. My friend Ebele and I lower ourselves into a sunken outdoor hot tub in groggy disbelief. We appear to have woken up in Utopia. Llamas and alpacas frolic yards away as we sip coffees in silence. A butterfly lands on the decking. There’s no noise but for the bubbles, until a perfect breeze ruffles the fronds of the tree that’s dappling the sunlight. The grass could not be greener, skies cerulean. This is the definition of “bucolic,” I think. William Blake’s England, plus massage jets. His pastoral poems that plagued me in university start to make more sense (plenty of lambs here, too; the local “Herdies”).

The Indians, as we innocently called them in the days of my youth, put their name to it: “Indian Corn.” Somehow, “Native American” or “First Peoples Corn” just doesn’t do it, so here let us observe this now-verboten usage. Technically, Indian Corn (known as calico or dent corn too, for its coloration and dents in the kernels) is one variety of maize, first cultivated, they say, in Mexico thousands of years ago. Columbus, who called the natives “Indians” because he was looking for India, brought back seeds to Europe in the 1490s; they did not take. The Plymouth colonists in the 1620s, from whose early travails the American feast of Thanksgiving emerged, grew Indian corn courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe. It no doubt helped them survive when the English peas ran out.

Our first Thanksgiving together, my now-husband, then-medical-resident-boyfriend worked a shift during the family feast. I made it up to him with Melissa Clark’s one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving for two. The recipe went off flawlessly and made the constraints of my tiny apartment kitchen feel more like a game-show challenge than a life-or-death struggle. Clark’s 2022 cookbook Dinner in One makes the same promise about 100 different meals. The game-show, can-it-be-done? energy made the Thanksgiving method fun, but could feel tedious on a Tuesday night. Is “one-pot” a theme or a gimmick? Does this constraint serve the cook and the recipe, or is it arbitrary, artificial and unnecessarily limiting?