The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,19
liked the mist that blanketed the trees and grass and houses. It was liquid fairy dust, he told his children when they arrived, two in quick succession starting in the third year of his and Helen’s marriage. Their offspring were native north-westerners, raising their faces to the damp skies the way tulips follow the sun. Carl marveled at how the rain seemed to nourish them, watching as they sank their roots deep into the soil around them.
Helen found ways to sneak summer into the dark months of the year, canning and freezing the fruit off their trees in July and August and using it extravagantly throughout the winter—apple chutney with the Thanksgiving turkey, raspberry sauce across the top of a December pound cake, blueberries in January pancakes. And she always claimed the shorter winter days with their long stretches of cool, gray light were conducive to writing. Carl had bought her a small wooden desk, which fit as if built for the nook at the top of the stairs. Helen always said, though, that she was a sprinter when it came to writing, composing in quick snatches at the kitchen table, in bed—although after the children arrived, the snatches of time occasionally were marathon distances apart.
Wherever she wrote, whatever she did, she was his Helen, and Carl loved her as completely in the silvery light of the Northwest as he had on the beach in northern California where they had honeymooned. Helen, in turn, filled his life, and just when he would least expect it in those first years, there in his lunch he would find a Ding Dong. On those days, he left work early.
. . .
LILLIAN PUT A FINGER into the bowl. “I always think this is the most delicious stage of a cake.” She licked her finger with the enthusiasm of a child. “I’d give you some,” she teased, “but then we wouldn’t have enough for the cake.”
Lillian took eggs out of the bowl of warm water. “So, now we add the egg yolks, bit by bit, letting the air rise into them as well.” The mixer began its revolutions again as the liquid blended into the sugar-butter, the yolks turning the batter darker again, loose and glistening.
“After this,” she noted, “no snacking on the batter. With raw eggs, it’s too risky.”
THE YEARS WHEN the children were small felt like a gift to Carl. He had come from a family that regarded affection with a kind of benign intellectual amusement, and the astonishing physical love of his children filled him with gratitude. Although he and Helen had, without speaking, fallen into the traditional roles of their generation—he left the house and earned the money, she took care of the home and children—Carl found himself breaking the rules whenever possible, waking at the baby’s first noise and picking her up before Helen could rise. He sank into the warmth of his child’s fragile body against his shoulder; watched in awe that a baby, still essentially asleep, could keep a death grip on the blanket that meant the world was safe and loving, marveling at the thought that it was he and Helen who gave the feeling to the blanket, and the blanket to the child.
He didn’t even mind those early Christmas mornings when first one, then another toddler would climb into the bed that he and Helen had so recently fallen into themselves after a night of putting together wooden wagons, or bicycles, or dollhouses. He opened his arms and they piled in, trying to convince him that the streetlight outside really was the sun and that it was certainly time to open stockings, if maybe not presents, when in fact it was usually only two in the morning. Helen would groan good-naturedly and roll over, telling Carl all she wanted for Christmas was a good night’s sleep, and he would pull the children close and whisper the story of the Night Before Christmas until they would slowly, one by one, fall asleep, their bodies draped across each other like laundry in the basket. When the children got older, self-sufficient enough to go on their own midnight exploratory missions among the boxes under the tree (where, more often than not, Carl and Helen discovered them sleeping in the morning), Carl found himself missing their warm intrusions into his dreams.
“NOW IT’S TIME to add the flour.” Lillian took the lid off the container. “The way I see it,” she remarked, lifting out a scoopful and letting it fall through