Incredible that I forgot lemon bars

My daughter wants the recipe for lemon bars. There is only one recipe, of course, my own. I thought it would be the work of a moment to rummage among the 600+ posts I had to upload overnight, into Pluot, when poor old At First Glass went kaphut at the loss of the domain name. And yet lo! Search though I might, it seems I forgot to import "At First Glass turns four -- and bakes those classic lemon bars," which first swam into our ken on New Year's Day, 2012.  

Now we might think lemon bars are too ordinary to be worthy of discussion. Who has not learned to make them in a long-ago junior high school home ec. class? Who has not enjoyed them at dozens of Fourth of July picnics and PTA bake sales ever afterward? Here we are, on At First Glass's fourth anniversary, mucking about with (appropriately enough, to be sure) preschool-level treats while grander blogs are fishing ("crabbing") for their own Dungeness crabs, making green lentil soup with curried brown butter, or serving up orange-clove chocolate chip pancakes with coffee-clove syrup.

Yet I submit them, for a variety of reasons. They are simplicity itself. They are a delight to prepare, requiring the use of only one mixing bowl, which can do double duty for the preparation of both crust and filling. There is no need to fuss with softening or creaming butter, nor with greasing a baking pan. Made with fresh squeezed lemon juice, they are the most scrumptious morsels imaginable -- as with so many delicious things, it is their great buttery richness which satisfies you and prevents you from devouring the entire plateful.

And why else? Once upon a time, I made these for some evening PTA function. They lay, all anonymous and humble and ready for any hand to choose among them. People milled about in the blaringly lit, crowded gymnasium, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children. Preschoolers. I happened to be standing chatting with someone, when I saw a woman pick a lemon bar, take a bite of it, pause, and then throw it in the closest garbage can.

Witnessing that, I could only guess that this poor soul had never tasted good, properly made lemon bars before. Are they available in a box mix? Probably. Was that all she knew? Perhaps. It must have been the intense, unaccustomed flavor that put her off -- or perhaps she didn't like lemon and didn't realize until too late what these were. But how could anyone not know? Had she missed that day in Mrs. Pemberton's home ec. class? Is her name legion? All the more reason for me to do my small part today in getting the word out, to dear poor souls everywhere, about this great, commonplace, origins-lost-in-the-mists-of-culinary-prehistory cookie bar.

Lemon bars

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Have ready two 8 x 8 x 2 baking pans, ungreased.

Mix together in a large bowl:
2 and 2/3 cups flour 
1/2 cup sugar

Work in with your fingers until the mixture is moist and crumbly:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter


Divide the dough in half simply by taking it up in fistfuls and putting it alternately in the two pans. Pat the dough down and bake each pan 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven.

While the dough is baking, mix in the same mixing bowl
4 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
4 Tablespoons flour
6 Tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice 

Pour the filling over the partially baked crusts. Return to the oven and finish baking for 18 to 20 minutes, until the bars shrink away from the sides of the pan and the edges toast just a little. Let them cool before sprinkling with powdered sugar.



Postscript: do we dare mess with such beauty? Years ago, as Chicago Baking Examiner, I shoehorned this recipe into Examiner.com's random "Vodka month" theme by suggesting a vodka icing to replace the dusting of powdered sugar the bars usually receive. A plain sweet icing starts with 3 Tablespoons of hot water in a bowl, to which about 2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar is added; you beat the mixture until it reaches a good consistency for spreading or drizzling. Any liquid may be substituted for the hot water, depending on the flavors in the baked treat you plan to glaze. And so, -- vodka with lemon? Or gin .... 

Who invented the "Blue M----f----er"? You're a poltroon, too

Things have come to a pretty pass since my grandmother's day. I am talking of moral matters, but not perhaps what you think: she was surprisingly blase about the facts of life. She is the one who gave me the excellent bit of wisdom, "You know what they say -- when a couple get married, the first baby can come anytime -- after that it always takes nine months." That's a saw whose humorous decency only makes sense in a culture where people get and stay married. Who cares when babies come now, of if they do at all? Her little saying reminds me of the the Jewish proverb, I think from the Talmud, that since the parting of the Red Sea, God has done nothing else but arrange marriages. In other words, the difficulty of doing that successfully, for all mankind for all time, is as stupendous a miracle as the one by which the children of Israel walked between walls of water to freedom. Again, the proverb, the reflection, only has meaning in a culture of marriage. Try telling it to a group of children in a Sunday school class in an era of divorce, and you will get gales of laughter because God is so stupid.

The birds and the bees, Nana knew and accepted. "Why, 'a man had only to put his shoes under my bed and I got pregnant,' " she also quoted, not in reference to herself I don't think. Just another saw, a humorously decent reaction to life. It was wanton profanity that offended her. Luckily she heard little of it. She never went to the movies post-George Raft, and of course she never lived among foul-mouthed people. The one time she heard the word "s---" in public, she was speechless with outrage.

When I say therefore that things have come to a pretty pass since her day, I am thinking of how she might have reacted to a customer I faced yesterday. Or rather I am thinking, enviously, she would not have had to react at all, because she would not have faced that customer. In a more civilized era he would not have existed.

A man approached me and asked where we keep the mix needed to make the new cocktail, the Blue M ---- f----er. Just like that. He pronounced the whole word. Not "blue." The other one. He felt absolutely no compunction about speaking this word in public, to a fellow human being, still less to a woman -- ah, for the quaint days when men guarded their language around the gentle sex! -- and in a retail setting too, where we are all more or less helpless to defend ourselves in the face of the glorious Customer. I suppose I can count myself lucky that I had at least heard of this new drink a few days before. My son also works retail liquor. He told me someone had asked him the same question. Better to have known what the customer was asking about, than to have had to presume he was simply mad, or being offensive. To Nana, he would have seemed both. Small comfort.

So, as I ask in my title, "Who invented the Blue M---- f----er?" In truth, I don't care. Whoever you are, master Mixologist, you're a poltroon, too. I regret that our society has bred you while my grandmother's did not. But that's no excuse. Even in the midst of decays both major and minor, any human being can still judge very basic right from wrong, dignity from indignity. Judaism's seven Noahide laws pronounced so, and antiquity's "natural law," bequeathed to Christianity through the church fathers, also said so. You, mixologist, human being made in the image of God, you should have had the minor decency not to name your new cocktail that. All you are doing is sending people into retail stores speaking the word, and so ladling another unthinking drop of vulgarity into everyone's day and world. Even my grandmother's little proverbs about sex were clean and decently humorous.

Besides, the drink sounds ghastly. It cannot be other than a potent sugar bomb, combining as it does all the Long Island Iced Tea ingredients, namely gin, vodka, rum, and tequila, plus sweet and sour mix plus blue Curacao plus Seven Up. Our cocktail master, Charles Schumann, refuses even to make the Long Island Iced Tea for a start, because that recipe alone shows such disrespect to the distiller's art in hashing together the four spirits called for, especially gin. It follows, then, how absurd this freak offspring of the hash must be.

We choose to obey Schumann. He -- rather like the ancients, rather like Thomas Aquinas, talking of natural law -- has standards and has thought things through. In his minor sphere, he is civilized. And in this age of moral collapse, we grab onto any civilizational decency we can.

A footnote: twenty English words: Webster's says poltroon comes to us from French, Italian, and Latin words having to do with young animals (poltro, colt, pullus, chick, "see POULTRY") and means "a thorough coward, craven." That is not what I mean by poltroon. I thought the sound of it somehow conveyed, cowardice perhaps, but more importantly utter, boorish ignorance, unmanliness, and juvenility. If we turn back to another master, Dr. Johnson, we find he attests it does just so. In his Dictionary a poltro'n is "a coward," he says, "a nidget, a scoundrel; base, vile, contemptible (Hammond)." We love that "nidget" -- it seems to describe someone who is a a moral midget, but even less so, because he gets an 'n' and not an 'm.' Only why did Webster's truncate Johnson's more full definition? And who was Hammond?

While we investigate, let's try a better cocktail. A colleague of mine told me recently of a drink that a colleague of his either invented, or merely knows. It has no name and I haven't yet tried it, but it sounds intriguing. Bursting with citrus juices plus a dash of pink grapefruit bitters, we can't call it so manly a thing as the George Raft. The Pretty Pass, maybe. Proportions are guesswork, based on long study under our master.

The Pretty Pass

About an ounce (half a jigger) each of --

fresh orange juice
fresh lemon juice
fresh lime juice
Carpano Antica sweet vermouth

1 and 1/2 ounces (a jigger) bourbon
dash pink grapefruit bitters

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice, shake and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with any small subtle fruit that will pair nicely with whisky, citrus, and high-end red wine vermouth ... pear?

Image from Pinterest

The one-time, irreproducible, crazy-local gourmet recipe: or, I can do that

Make no mistake. I like food magazines. But sometimes they are annoying. For every simple recipe for something good, like say "Apricot Clafoutis" (which sounds mysterious but is essentially pancake batter baked in a pie dish and topped with fresh apricots -- Food and Wine, August 2015) they provide six more which look stupendous in color photographs but which the average cook won't reproduce because she is not inclined to rush out to that organic textile/non-GMO bison farm in upstate New York -- or outside Portland or Seattle or Nashville -- where that up-and-coming Manhattan chef spends his summers getting away from it all and thinking up new "small plates" sourced from his twenty-acre experimental locovore garden. I'm talking about, but will likely never make, recipes like Cherry and spring onion salad with Asian fish sauce, Peach, burrata, and pickled pepper salad, Red cabbage and fried Mortadella Okonomiyaki, Ajo bianco with crab and green grapes. We're getting into the July issue here.

We're also talking about a fussy complaint that the editors of Food and Wine could shoot down in a jiffy. If the magazine annoys you, they would say, 1. don't read it, 2. recognize that it's meant for entertainment, and that's why we have test kitchens, 3. recognize that novelty and creativity drive the restaurant business, 4. recognize that this level of novelty and creativity eventually drives new products down to the supermarket level, which is where you shop for foccaccia and Brie, dear (it's the famous "blue sweater scene" from The Devil Wears Prada all over again), 5. recognize that only a day's -- only an hour's experience transforms an ingredient or a technique from something you consider crazy-progressive-stuffed shirt into something you know and like, a la clafoutis; and 6. then go buy Woman's Day. Rock those hamburger casseroles.   

But you see the reason I bring up the fussy complaint at all is because I think recently, on a small scale, I cracked the code. I did what the chefs and the food writers do: assemble an unusual, irreproducible food or drink item from a handful of ingredients that I happened to buy all at once but that few other souls are going to have ready in their homes. Voila: food as literary and artistic entertainment. The up and coming chef.

Up and coming mixologist, rather. What I bought all at once, and on vacation at local shops, were just sweet, orange-fleshed "Simka" Japanese plums and a small bottle of Spice & Tea Merchant's Blood Orange pepper. What I had ready at home, as who doesn't, were rum, lemons, and sugar. The professionals who relax on the farm by tossing cherry, onion, and fish sauce salads may laugh at my clumsy dumping together of all this... stuff. But I made a new type of Rum Sour.

Simka plum and blood orange pepper rum sour

1 to 2 Simka plums, peeled and sliced in halves
good pinch Spice & Tea Merchants Blood Orange pepper
1/4 teaspoon sugar
juice of one lemon
1 jigger (3 Tbsp.) rum

Muddle one of the plums in the bottom of a rocks glass. In a cocktail shaker, combine sugar, lemon juice, rum, and pepper. Add ice and shake gently to mix. (Too much shaking anesthetizes flavor, which is why, contrary to James Bond's instructions, you do want to shake and anesthetize the flavorless but powerfully alcoholic vodka martini.) Strain into the rocks glass, garnish with a toothpick stuck with the other peeled plum halves rolled lightly in more pepper.

Incidentally the Spice & Tea Merchants' store reminded me a bit of the WineStyles store where I got my start in the wine industry. It's another franchise, each shop meant to look like a local entrepreneur's idea, each shop laid out the same way -- dark and rustic in this case -- and stocked with the same products. The franchise fee to join and get started on the path to opening your own store is $17,500. My question is, who would imagine that demand for these particular spices and teas is such that a store like this can stay in business more than a few months, anywhere, tourist mecca or not? There was small enough demand for the wine, all those years ago, and chances are if you bother buying a bottle of wine, you will use that up faster than you will use a jar of blood orange pepper. Quaint and interesting, to be sure, but next time I'm on vacation if the store is still there I'll buy something different. There must have been a thousand quaint products on the dark, rustic shelves. They've been open a year. The matter in my jar was solidified, to be fair perhaps because, according to the ingredient list, so much of the "pepper" is sugar. Still. I was the only customer in the store. I wonder when was the last time they needed to place an order for re-supply?

And -- startling thought -- could lack of demand and irreproducible, crazy-local recipes have something to do with the fact that so many of the chefs and mixologists in Food & Wine seem to bounce around so from one awesome gig to another? They are all young and happy and at one with the land, but have resumes as long as rap sheets.   

Retail rant: among the top 5 worst Christmas songs (plus a cocktail)

They used to play over the radio at a former workplace, you see, and so one became slowly irate. I am sure I could make a new list for the new workplace. And why yes, these are in order. 

1.) Etta Jones, "It's Christmas time." A maundering voice screeches and drones on, rather like a vaguely lecturing teacher, about "peekin' out the window," ting-a-ling-ling. Maundering trumpets try to make some sort of desultory melody to fill in the blank spaces. Very, very bad.

2.) Lena Horne, "Jingle Bells" -- Lena of the fierce smile, fierce eyes, hard face, harder voice. When she sings about not knowing where she is going on her sleigh ride -- "with my baby by my side, I don't really cay-uh" -- one is reminded of wintry Russian stories about the bride being thrown off the sledge to the pacing wolves. In this scenario, Lena is the fierce-eyed chucker-out, not the bride.

3.) James Brown, "Santa Claus (go straight to the ghetto"). Tough call. What he does isn't music, yet one can't ignore the screams.

4.) Brad Paisley, "Santa-looksa lot like Daddeh." Santa-wasa much too thin. And he didn't come down the chimney, so momma must have let him in. As Miss Mapp would say, such a new idea.

5.) Brenda Lee, "I'm gonna pop-pop Santa Claus (with a water pistol gun)." Squirt, squirt! Storied career or no, in my house we call this performer "the swamp child in a bottle," because that's what the voice sounds like.

I feel better. Enjoy a new cocktail, the Honeysuckle. The honey does give the drink an unusual flowery character.

• 1 jigger (1and 1/2 ounces) light rum
• the juice of a small lime (or half a large lime)
• 1 tsp. honey

Shake all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, and strain into a cocktail glass. Have two, depending on your schedule. 

Pillsbury's "Simply From Scratch" Apple Cream Cheese coffeecake (1981)

My notes were very brief. 

quite a project
baking pamphlet, picked up in a thrift store
cardamom $14 a jar

Let me give you the recipe first, so that you may begin to judge what a project it was. You are going to make three things, a cake, a filling, and a topping, so you will need three good sized bowls just for a start. (What luck that we happen to be reading Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork (2012), whose first chapter, "Pots and Pans," delves into the history of why we have so much duplicate stuff in our kitchens). You will also need two cups of peeled and chopped apples, plus two sticks of butter and an 8 ounce package of cream cheese set out beforehand, to come to room temperature.

Pillsbury's "Simply From Scratch" [that's the baking pamphlet,1981] Apple Cream Cheese coffeecake  

First, grease and lightly flour a 13 x 9 inch baking pan. Then, for the cake, combine:

3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/3 cups milk
2/3 cup butter, softened  (yes, you will work softened butter into an already thick and milk-moistened dough)
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 eggs

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

Next, make the filling. 

one 8 ounce package cream cheese, softened
2 cups chopped apples
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cardamom (this is the delicacy that costs $13.99 a jar)
1 Tablespoon flour
2 Tablespoons butter, softened 

Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, and spoon the mix over the cake batter. Use a rubber spatula to gently swirl the apples partly into the batter.

Now is a good time to preheat the oven to 375 F.

Finally, make the topping. Mix together:

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Sprinkle over the cake. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. "If desired, top with whipped cream."    

It is most scrumptious, but I must ask whether one teaspoonful out of the $14 purchase of cardamom made that much difference in the end. I am inclined to think not. The gunmetal gray powder once had a distinct lemon fragrance in the jar, a fragrance which seemed to lose itself amid the cream cheese, the apples, and the butter. Nutmeg might have been more to the point.

Besides, some time has passed since I made this cake. When I opened the jar again to smell whatever was left -- almost all of it -- the first words that came to my mind were model airplane paint. My brother used to make very nice model airplanes, painting and gluing with utmost care. I have not smelled that paint since I was maybe twelve years old. Not for nothing do we hear assurances that the sense of smell is the most evocative of all. I threw out the jar of cardamom.

Still, I'd like briefly to discuss its marvels, for apparently it has them. There is no better way to enjoy them vicariously than to quote the strong lovely prose of Sylvia Windle Humphrey, whose A Matter of Taste (1965) is our spice-and-herb bible. She says: 

Cardamom (Elettaria cardamom maton) ... a jewel of a spice, it is the second most expensive spice in the world (saffron comes first), so dear because every delicate little seed pod has to be snipped off the plant by hand with scissors. The yield is low, too, only about 250 pounds per acre. It is native to India, but most of our supply now comes from Guatemala. [Mrs. Humphrey seems to be still right about this last, even fifty years later.]

Cardamom, a clean flowery-spicy breath sweetener, is put up by nature in handy little-fingernail-sized, bleached-white capsules, each containing ten to twelve pungent black seeds, easy to fit into pocket or purse. As a member of the ginger family it has some of the properties, but not the taste, of that invaluable plant. It is sweeter than ginger, with less edge, yet has authority. Like ginger, it awakens the whole tongue, making it, in moderation, a good ingredient in a spice blend which is to be used to bring out the flavor of main dishes. Like ginger it belongs with fresh melon. Like ginger, it is good for the stomach.

Cardamom is most familiar in sweets. Fine Danish pastries and coffee cakes are frequently seasoned with cardamom, both in the dough and in the filling. In all the Scandinavian countries it has been both a favorite seasoning and flavor ever since Viking sailors first carried it home from the markets in Constantinople more than 1,500 years ago. In Norway, the Christmas season reeks of cardamom, and the Swedes consume fifty times more cardamom per capita than does the United States. 

She goes on to rhapsodize about its "clean warmth," "floral perfume," etc. I begin to think that perhaps there never was very much authentically going on in my jar of cardamom, even perhaps that I can't source the real thing because I don't know any Vikings. We will have to let our Apple Cream Cheese Coffeecake do the work of reeking-of-Christmas on its own.

A little bit of perfection -- new cocktail -- the New Job

Cocktails, like other good things, must surely have their recipes tweaked and perfected very slowly over the course of time. They must surely change, grow, and come to fulfillment depending on who liked what foundational thing, capital T, and who had what ingredients on hand to improve the Thing. Remember Mrs. Wakefield at the Toll House, who had only to cut up some chocolate bars into a plain butter cookie dough to create the immortal chocolate chip cookie; remember also King Louis XV, who is said to have invented French onion soup from only onions and a bottle of flat champagne "after a joyous night in eighteenth-century Paris" (Madeleine Kamman, The New Making of a Cook). 

When it comes to cocktails I like a sour, like my master Charles Schumann (American Bar). A sour is a large category of drinks, fundamentally lemon juice, sugar, and a spirit. We here at Pluot, by way of At First Glass, have mixed and enjoyed whisky sours, gin sours, Boston sours -- in which we learn that an egg is many things, but it is not refreshing -- and of course our longtime favorite, rum sours. When recently we availed ourselves of a stash of good Calvados, we tried and very much liked the "Arc de Triomphe," or Calvados sour. Once upon a time we even invented -- didn't we? -- something new, the Sour Blossom martini.

Today we tweak again, based on ingredients to hand, and devise a delectable cocktail very much in need of a name and a wider audience. It goes like this.

The __________ 

In a shaker, combine:

the juice of half a lemon
a dash of sugar or simple syrup (perhaps a quarter teaspoon at most -- or equal parts to the juice, if you like your drinks less tart)
half a jigger Calvados
half a jigger good bourbon, plus a tiny extra splash of  it (I used Bulleit)

Squeeze a splash of fresh orange juice into your cocktail glass -- perhaps half a teaspoon or so. Stir all the other ingredients in the shaker with a few ice cubes. (We prefer our drinks stirred, not shaken, because stirring keeps the ingredients a tad warmer and more flavorful. To shake is to anaesthetize.) Strain the lemon-and-bourbon/Calvados mix into the glass with its waiting orange juice. Garnish any way you like, provided it is simple, say a grape or a cherry, or don't garnish at all. The prettiest choice is a blushing yellow Rainier cherry, but they are only in season for a short time, and we must enjoy our new creation, The ____________,  in other months besides May.

Now what shall we call this little tweaking and approximation of perfection? It's tart, it's sweet, it has bourbon's rich fruitiness and Calvados' whiff of the apples of Normandy. For all its homey-ness, the orange juice adds a plump touch of the exotic. Though calling the drink the New Job seems downright prosaic, still we think we'll leave it at that. After all we are about six weeks into this life milestone, and are gratified to have pretty thoroughly learned the fundamentals.

Speaking of which, it's a curious thing -- and I must ask, is your workplace like mine? -- at the New Job, everyone does the same four or five tasks all day. Each task has about four or five components all of which are subject to a specific clerical error. Committing one of these errors, in other words getting one-fifth of any task wrong, nullifies the whole thing and creates cascading problems for everyone else "down the line," which is exactly the right, mass-production metaphor to use. A manager who has done the work for ten years can spot an approaching clerical error long in advance, whether I make them at my six weeks' experience, or whether a colleague makes them at his three or four years' experience. And of course the corrective is to "pay attention" to all things. Only, sometimes, that exhortation seems to backfire. It reminds me of a scene in 30 Rock when boss Jack asks earnest page Kenneth whether he can walk and talk at the same time. "I always could, but now I'm not sure," Kenneth blinks, and then carries on doing both, awkwardly. In order for any workplace ritual to become second nature, you almost have to stop paying attention, don't you? Being New, however, I think I will keep that little bit of perfect wisdom to myself.

Apples and lemons, and events of the day

This will be very unpolished; but you will forgive me I think. Although, spending part of the day driving around doing errands and listening in the car to an audiobook biography of J.S. Bach, makes one tremble at the idea of producing any writing or photos, or doing any activity whatever that is not the most refined and perfect possible. Such a travesty of a waste of the time God gives us. Did Bach ever dash anything off in a hurry, and say, "well, I've just finished a big cantata (or what have you), let this be a tad unpolished"? 

I don't know. I do suspect that the good people at Naxos, who made this Life and Works 4 CD set some years ago, have made a mistake in their attributions however. The narrator, surely, is the amber-voiced John Shrapnel, and it is someone else voicing "Bach" in letters and so on. I was so convinced of this that I felt I had to comment about it on the chat boards at the Naxos site, and only then did I do a bit of perfunctory sleuthing on the movie site IMDB. I learned that I am a little confused as to which amber-voiced English actor named John played a small role in I, Claudius, -- and which did not. Anyway I still think they've made a typo on their CD case and enclosed booklet. [Full disclosure -- they didn't make a typo, this mistake is all on me. You can make yourself look entirely ditzy, sometimes, even though you're really not. Nevertheless -- ] Somewhere in the depths of Angela Thirkell's oeuvre a character says, "My dear mother thought the most extraordinary things and she never dreamed of supporting them with a shred of proof," or something like that, and so I take her as my witness that it's all right to do that. I also like the way she sprinkles her narratives with confident and completely non-sequitir-ish, omniscient-narrator "we's." "We think that was the right thing for Tom to do," and so on. Angela Thirkell in The Duke's Daughter also gives the most perfect description of a baby's skin in all English literature: she compares it to "gossamer jelly."  

Anyway I did better research later this afternoon when it came to the matter of finding out who is the soprano who sings "Bist du bei mir" (Art thou with me) on the second CD of the Life and Works. All sopranos are wonderful as we know. But this voice had such an effortless, eerie, yet strangely metallic quality that, singing as she did after the narrator had just told us of Anna Magdalena Bach's fine soprano, I felt almost as though I were listening to a voice from the remote past. As if to Anna herself, at her harpsichord in a little room in a house in Leipzig. I felt I must know who this soprano is.

If I have researched aright, she is Ingrid Kertesi, born in Hungary. I know nothing else of her that you might not also learn in a few minutes on Wikipedia -- except I suppose that she would not be flattered to know that a musical Neanderthal like me finds her voice eerily metallic.

I've also been exploring the world of e-publishing today. You do find extraordinary things. I am not impressed with Smashword, sorry. Years ago James Michener said that when he was starting out he had no fear of getting lost in any slush pile, because he had worked in publishing and he knew exactly what kind of competition was in the slush pile with him. I don't see Smashword in any fairer light. (I once started a sort of epublishing firm of my own, and it's still there.) HarperCollins' Authonomy seems better, so I chose to upload, ahem, the Whole Thing there. Do you think the people who actually, incredibly asked me to send them "a few chapters" will withdraw the invitation if they learn I've done that? I reason that Authonomy's soup is very thick, and that the chances of simultaneous acceptances are astronomically more remote now than they were twenty or thirty years ago.

Now, re: fashion. I watched Funny Face last night, since my new computer takes in Netflix and everything. If there is a more gorgeous piece of clothing than Audrey Hepburn's first Paris gown in that movie -- the stark floor length white sheath with utterly stark, straight pink velvet cloak -- then I shall be glad to know what it is. It's curious to look at photos of Edith Head's designs, and photos of Givenchy's, and to realize that knowledgeable people consider the one to be much more sophisticated than the other; but which is which? That is a matter for more of your own research.

Finally, apples and lemons. You may call it an "Arc de Triomphe," or you may call it an Apple Brandy (or Calvados) sour. Either way, here it is. "Why does everything have to be sour?" my gentleman friend asks. "Because I like sours," I say.

Arc de Triomphe or Apple Brandy sour

In a mixing glass, stir, with four ice cubes:

the juice of half a lemon
sugar or simple syrup to taste (about half a teaspoon to start, or equal parts to the lemon juice if you like things less sour)
one jigger (1 and 1/2 ounces) apple brandy or Calvados

Stir well and strain into a cocktail glass. Enjoy with your next Audrey Hepburn movie. Or Bach.

   

Shaker lemon bread

Now my fatheads, you mustn't imagine I have abandoned you. It's just that tearing up the carpet exposes one, not only to all that wood-floor craftsmanship circa 1893, but to unexpected necessities. One mops a lot, and rearranges furniture, and goes shopping for little things that have been on a "to do" list for ages, but never taken care of actually. For example I am looking forward to getting my first "Brown Betty" teapot in a few days. And then if one has to go out and buy a new router for the old exhausted computer, why, there's a day spent hooking up machinery and telephoning the Geek Squad for assistance. What luck that a new computer arrived in the mail, a hand me down from (wait for it) the ex-husband's ex-girlfriend's young son. (Thereby hangs a tale.) If only one could get the kid's picture off the home screen. It's a Mac. They were all artsy and everything.

So I haven't abandoned you. And you may have some lemon bread.

From The Best of Shaker Cooking, 1970.

1/2 cup shortening
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)
Grated rind, and the juice, of one lemon

Preheat oven to 350 F. Beat together shortening and 1 cup of the sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Sift the dry ingredients together and add alternately with milk to the sugar mixture, beating well after each addition. Add nuts and lemon rind.

Turn batter into greased 8 and 1/2 inch bread pan. Bake 50 to 60 minutes. Blend remaining sugar and the lemon juice. Pour over bread as soon as it comes from oven. Makes 1 loaf.

New cocktail -- the Michigan Sky

It's a simple affair. Muddle a small handful of blueberries (Michigan blueberries, of course) in the bottom of a highball glass, then mix the juice of half a lemon, a dash of sugar or sugar syrup (half a teaspoon, no more), and a jigger of rum in a separate mixing glass. Stir with ice, then strain over the muddled blueberries in the first glass. Stir this up and serve, perhaps garnished with a floating fresh blueberry or two. Here at Pluot we like our cocktails very pure, with no carbonated beverages added -- unless it might be champagne -- no shaking in an ice-filled shaker to anaesthetize flavor, and certainly no ice added afterward, to melt and dilute the spirit.

We name this one after the blue of the berry and the blue of the Michigan sky. Do rum and blueberries go together? Why not, if rum is what you packed in your suitcase for your little trip? 

Cheers. I'm thinking I might redecorate my office in the style of the palace at ancient Knossos. Remember those frescoes pictured in your college art history textbooks, showing very pleased-looking griffons relaxing among tall waving lilies, blue dolphins cavorting in white tile seas, happy side-view (Egyptian style) people fishing or diving or carrying jars, and the black-haired lass with the enormous eyes called "La Parisienne"? Wouldn't that be nice to look at, to enter into every day? I don't know what put the idea of Knossos into my head; maybe it came from reading Peter Green's The Laughter of Aphrodite (1965) on the pontoon. Anyway I came home thinking this place needs furbishing up and what better start to make than with the simple fresh colors and pure lines abundant in the decor of King Minos' palace? I could even name the house Knossos. My fatheads know I like the fancy of naming where you live, even if where you live is most emphatically not some sort of estate.   

Ancient Crete was overrun and the civilization of the griffons destroyed, it seems, by the warlike Mycenaeans from mainland Greece sometime around the year 1400 BC. I wonder if the king at Knossos opened the ports to them, because he felt it his divine charge to fundamentally transform the nation? And all his court and most of the nobility agreed?

The best thing about armchair travel

This, my fatheads, is the best thing about armchair travel.You get to put gorgeous photos taken by real travelers on your blog. With permission, of course.

Below, an orange tree on the back of a motor bike in Hanoi. The source is the blog Tofu Photography. He said I could.

This leads us to recap whatever we know about citrus fruits -- since we hardly care a rap about travel -- even as we sip today's delicious cocktail. It's another rum sour. By the way, dear things! I mean, my fatheads. Let me tell you, we here at At First Glass Pluot have also discovered that James Bond was quite wrong about his martinis. They must be stirred, not shaken. At least I assume they must, if the ingredients of a martini behave anything like the ingredients of the revelatory sour I now enjoy.

The revelation came one afternoon last week. All my drink-y things, including my cocktail shaker, were in the sink, dirty. I was forced to do my best with a big mug, a spoon, and some ice, along with my lemon juice, sugar, and an improvised jigger. This happened to be the novelty Star Trek-themed shotglass that I bought for a whole dollar at a Star Trek convention a few years ago. I meant it as a goofy keepsake for my boss but he didn't take it home for fear, I think, that his wife would yell at him about it. Now he's gone, I have it. It has hash marks on the side, progressing up through fantasy alcohol-stoicism levels from Human to Vulcan, Tholian, Andorian, Romulan, and Klingon. I should have thought Borg would be last, but the theme here is obviously TOS, The Original Series, and the Borg aren't a part of Kirk's worlds. Anyway this stirred rum sour turned out to be much warmer, due to less vigorous contact with less ice, than my usual shaken variety. I can tell you as a result it was far more tasty. We recall with a start that old cocktail mixing books do speak of the danger of "bruising" one's gin. Perhaps one can bruise, or at any rate anesthetize, rum and lemon juice, too.

And now, what can we recap about citrus fruits? Let us assemble a list of bullet points, mostly derived from Harold McGee's masterful On Food and Cooking. 

• All citrus fruits are thought to derive from three parents; the citron, the mandarin orange, and the pummelo 
• All these are from southern China and northern India
• The citron is native to the Himalayas. It probably reached the Middle East by 700 BCE and the Mediterranean by 300 BCE
• There are several types of "mandarin" orange, including a Mediterranean type called tangerine from Tangier, Morocco (19th century)
•  The pummelo requires the most warmth, and is not seen much outside tropical Asia (query, does the man on the bike carry a pummelo tree?)
• Our familiar sweet eating orange may be an ancient hybrid between the mandarin and the pummelo
• Medieval crusaders brought oranges -- sour ones -- back to Europe from the East

When we venture beyond oranges into the complexities of lemons and limes, the citrus web becomes even more tangled.

• The lime (that is, the basic or Bearss lime) is a hybrid between a "true" Mexican or Key lime, and the citron. According to Waverley Root's Food,  a lime is essentially a type of lemon. Limes even turn yellow if left to ripen on the tree. For what it's worth, my well-traveled gentleman friend affirms that limes, not lemons, are the citrus of heat-plagued (or heat-blessed?) Mexico.
• The lemon is believed to be a two-step hybrid, that is, -- someone crossed a citron with a (true, Mexican) lime; and then bred the product of that with a pummelo. Possibly done in the Middle East.
• Lemons were first seen in the Mediterranean around 100 CE.
• But --  there are "many varieties of true lemon."
• The most common lemon in the U.S, the Meyer, was first produced in California in the early 20th century; it may have been a cross between "the lemon" and either an orange or a mandarin.
• The ponderosa lemon is a lemon-citron cross.

The mystery figure in all this is the lime. If the lime is "a type of lemon," but the lemon is a "two-step hybrid" one of whose grandparents was a "true" or Mexican or Key lime, then what is and whence comes that true lime? How was a "Mexican" fruit available such that lemons, with their lime grandparent, could first be seen in the Mediterranean around 100 BCE?

We leave this, for the moment, for grander souls and plant geneticists to investigate. All we can be sure of given this wealth of information is that citrus fruits, whatever their parentage, are indispensable to the joy of life. They make after-work "sours." They make sweet morning pick-me-up juices. Their tartness brightens savory cream sauces and sugary icings, they pair as well with fish and coconut as they do with tea and eggs. Their clear jewel colors of topaz, peridot, and, well, lemon-yellow make a charming artistic motif in your kitchen. Nestled among the glossy, shivering lush greenery of their own tree they look smashing on the back of a bicycle in Hanoi. Below, a few of them group themselves in jewel-toned dignity on your grandmother's hammered tin tray.

Let's close with an appropriately named cocktail for this time of year, the Spring Fever from our master Charles Schumann's American Bar. It's a feast of citrus, including the blood orange, which we haven't discussed yet. We forgot the grapefruit, too. Look closely and you will see that the Fever also is virgin. No reason you can't add a jigger of gin, or something equally nice.

Spring Fever

• 3/4 ounce (half a jigger) lemon juice
• 3/4 ounce (half a jigger) mango syrup
• 1 and 1/2 ounce (a jigger) pineapple juice
• 2 ounces (a bit less than two jiggers -- you can visualize it) blood orange juice 

Stir in a mug with a few ice cubes and strain into a collins glass ("filled with ice cubes"? We think not. Why dilute the beauty of these flavors, especially when you have improved them all with a good jigger of something, shall we say, meaningful?).

Bon Appetit's lime tart

From the June 2010 issue. The original recipe calls for the tart to be covered with perfectly arranged blackberries and blueberries, glazed with melted blackberry jam for a "pastry shop presentation." Alas, I did not get around to making this tart until a summery warm day in October, a time when seasonal berries are no longer to be had. I substituted a few grapes, mostly for show. 

And now seems as good a time as any to relay the saga of my Bon Appetit subscription, and of how I am in a bad odor with the billing department there. I was surfing about the net idly one night last April, and happened to look into Bon Appetit's website. An ad for an inexpensive subscription popped up, and I thought, why not. So I clicked yes. I also fatally clicked "bill me."

A few days later, another subscription solicitation arrived in the mail, by chance addressed to my husband. Its offer of a year's worth of issues was even cheaper. I thought, why not, I'll opt for this one instead. So I wrote out my check and mailed it off, and prepared to take in the magazine in his name.

It began to arrive fairly punctually, but so did the reminders about the subscription I had taken out in my own name. I ignored them, reasoning that surely somebody in the bowels of the billing department would figure out that the check in my name, to pay for the subscription in his name, amounted to the fact of the bill being paid. We were not getting, and never did get, two copies of every issue.

No luck. Reminders of the unpaid bill kept coming. By June I was (enjoying the magazine and) writing on the invoices, "Paid," with the April date of my check and the check number, and sending them back at the cost of a stamp mind you, not once but twice.

Now I am receiving sinister yellow envelopes in the mail, blaring "final notice," and learning that my credit is not in good standing with the magazine until this invoice is paid. Still, it keeps coming, and now I, in the guise of my husband, not only get cheery renewal reminders for a subscription which will end next summer, but similar un-looked for offers to take in Allure, Vanity Fair, and I don't know what else.

I do regret being thought a deadbeat by these nice people, but the problem seems already Dickensian enough -- or would Kafka be the better literary analogy? -- without my going to any further efforts to make all clear. Herewith, then perhaps, a peace offering: dear things, I made your lime tart.

You can too. For the entire, "white tie and tails production" as the old Joy of Cooking said about Galantine of Turkey, you will need:

• 7 eggs, 3 of which you will use whole -- for the other 4, only the yolks are required
• 1 cup plus 1/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup fresh lime juice (about 5 or 6 limes)
• 14 Tbsp butter (1 stick, at room temperature, plus 6 Tbsp., cold)
• 1 and 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 large pinch salt
• fresh fruit for the topping -- to follow the recipe exactly, use 1 (6 oz.) container fresh blueberries, 2 (6 oz.) containers fresh blackberries, and 1 Tbsp blackberry jam for a glaze

Start by making the lime curd. Set a fine mesh strainer over a medium sized bowl and set it aside. Whisk 3 large eggs, 3 egg yolks, and 1 cup sugar in a medium metal bowl to blend. Whisk in the lime juice. (I didn't have a metal bowl, so used a Corelle bowl and hoped against hope it wouldn't break while sitting in a pot of simmering water. This will be important shortly. ...It didn't.)

Set the bowl over a large pan of simmering water. Don't let the bottom of the bowl touch the water. Whisk the lime mixture constantly until the curd thickens and an instant thermometer inserted into it sideways -- be sure to bury the thermometer deep or nothing registers -- reads 175 to 180 degrees. This will take 6 to 10 minutes.

Pour the curd through the waiting mesh strainer into its new bowl. Add 6 Tbsp cold butter, and let stand one minute. Stir until blended and smooth.

Now press plastic wrap directly on the surface of the curd, covering it completely. This prevents a skin from forming on it while it cools in the refrigerator for the next four hours. (Note, in the background of the photo below, a view of the finished berry-covered lime tart in the pages of Bon Appetit. One should always have an ideal to strive for.)

Next, make the crust. In a medium sized bowl, mix 1 stick of butter, at room temperature, with 1/4 cup sugar until well blended. Add the egg yolk and beat to blend. Add 1 and 1/4 cups flour and a large pinch of salt. Mix until everything resembles large peas (this is a very rich pie dough or shortbread crust, so if you have ever made either of those you will know the hand-feel you are waiting for.) Knead the crust "just until it comes together," but not too much -- it is almost pure butter and will get greasy in a hurry.

Put the dough into a 9-inch springform pan, crumble it, and press it out and up to the sides of the pan. Cover and chill one hour.

When you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 F. Uncover the dough and bake "until golden brown, about 35 minutes."

I should say not. Thirty-five minutes is much too long for this delicate little pastry, and I don't think my oven's temperature calibration is so far off that my burned tart crust is all my fault. Perhaps "35" in the magazine was a typo for 25 or even 15. At any rate, check your crust for doneness early, and figure it will bake completely in about 20 minutes or so. I checked the dough after 15 minutes and was pleased, and then got overconfident and did not check again until the 30 minute mark, by which time disaster had occurred.

Which is why you can't see a picture of the tart's bottom. (Ha ha.) I will show you my version of the finished product, grapes and everything, because after all one soldiers on, not wanting to waste all the effort, plus the limes and the butter and the eggs.

Once your crust cools, it remains only to assemble the tart. Spoon on the lime curd, arrange some fruit on top -- some sweet fruit is needed, since the curd is very tart -- chill to firm, and you have your June-worthy party dessert. If you can remove the frame to the springform pan, and present your tart seductively nude to the world just like in the picture on page 95, then I salute you. Bon Appetit.

Lemon syrup muffins

When it appeared in the Chicago Tribune some years ago, this recipe was titled "Double lemon muffins." Like any muffin recipe, it is basically simple -- be careful not to overmix the batter, or the results will be tough -- but it does involve a little extra preparation. I have taken the unheard of liberty of using different colored fonts in the attempt to keep things visually clear. If you love lemon things, all this is well worth it.

Start by making a lemon syrup. Have ready:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/4 lemon juice
• the zest of one lemon

Combine all the syrup ingredients in a small saucepan, bring to a boil, and boil, covered, for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

For the batter, combine in a large bowl:

• 3 and 1/2 cups flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 and 1/2 cups sugar

Mix well. Then, combine in a different bowl:

• 1 cup milk
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 2 eggs
• zest of 2 lemons (I peel the zest off in strips and let it steep in the lemon juice separately while I mix the eggs and milk; when I am ready to add in the lemon juice to this mixture, I pour it through a strainer to remove the peels)

Separately, melt 2 sticks of butter.

Now, quickly combine the dry ingredients, the eggs and lemon juice mixture, and the melted butter. Preheat the oven to 375. Spoon the batter into paper-lined muffin tins. Sprinkle each muffin with a little bit of sugar -- the original recipe calls for a teaspoon of sugar atop each, but that seems far too much. A dash will do.

Bake until golden brown and rounded, about 20 minutes. Remove from pans and cool on racks. The recipe claims to make 18 muffins, but I found it made close to 30.

While they are still warm, cut 3 or 4 narrow gashes in each muffin with a knife, from top to bottom. Spoon the lemon syrup over them. They are scrumptious right at that moment and excellent the next day, when the syrup has really soaked in.

As we like to say about very good things: ooh.

Exploring the White House Cookbook: Lemon dumplings with wine sauce, 1887

When last we explored the White House Cookbook, it was to peek in at the wedding lunch of President Grover Cleveland and his very young bride, Miss Frances Folsom, and to admire the White House's taste in wines circa 1887. They served Chateau d'Yquem on that fine day in June, you know. And we vowed that we would move on and actually cook something from this once most popular of American cookbooks. Lemon Dumplings with Wine Sauce sounded interesting, though I did and do wonder if President Cleveland, with his yearning for "a Swiss cheese and a chop" instead of "the French stuff I shall find" would have considered this treat aggravatingly outre. Never mind. Let us pretend we are a civilizing influence on him, and attempt them.  

Mix together in a bowl:

• 1 pint grated breadcrumbs (a pint by volume or by weight? I opted for 2 cups)
• 1/2 "cupful" chopped suet (go ahead and use suet, if you want to be heroically authentic. And what constituted a cupful in 1887? I substituted butter, and reasoned that about half a stick looked right)
• 1/2 cup "moist" sugar (as we say in the vernacular, I'm not even going to go there. What on earth was "moist" sugar? I used sugar.)
• a little salt
• scant 1 Tbs flour
• grated rind of 1 lemon

When you have mixed all of the foregoing nicely -- noting in passing the thrifty 19th-century use of bread crumbs, the better to save white flour for more important uses like more bread -- then, add to the mix 2 eggs, well beaten, and the juice of 1 lemon.

"Stir. put into small cups well buttered, and tie them down with a cloth dipped in flour."

"Boil 45 minutes."

Now here is your challenge. Who among us anymore owns the equipment needed to boil a dozen little ramekins together, each one neatly tied down? It requires a pudding mold to be sure, but not the sort available, for instance, at Amazon.com right now, which seems to resemble nothing so much as a solitary glorified Bundt pan. What does one submerge it in? Anyway our recipe assumes we are properly supplied late Victorian householders, and it moves swiftly on to technique, and to severe admonitions. "Remember that a boiling pudding" -- which a dumpling in a way is -- "should never be touched after it is once put on the stove; a jar of the kettle destroys the lightness of the pudding. If the water boils down and more must be added, it must be done so carefully that the mold will not hit the side of the kettle, and it must not be allowed to stop boiling for an instant."

Yes ma'am. All I can do is assure Mrs. Gillette, our author, that I do know what she is talking about, sort of. Years ago I used to make Boston Brown bread, another old-fashioned steamed pudding requiring a mold and kettle, by improvising with a 1 pound coffee can, tin foil, a piece of string, and a wok with a big dome cover. The bread steamed three hours inside the lavishly buttered can, which joggled merrily in a few inches of boiling water in the wok, and it was delicious when unmolded, cut through with the string, the slices spread with more butter and served alongside Boston baked beans. All in all this made for just about the best use I ever found for a wok, since I'm sorry to say I stand unimpressed by stir-fry cooking.

Lacking all proper supplies now however, I put the lemon dumpling batter into muffin tins, set that in a jelly roll pan, and let it boil as carefully as possible on the stove top. Covered with the "flour-dipped" cloth, which got soaked in the whole process.

"Turn out onto dish and strew with fine sugar." Gladly.

Now, "serve with wine sauce," as follows:

Make a smooth paste of 1 scant tsp cornstarch and the same amount of cold water. Add:

• 1 cup boiling water
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 piece of butter the size of an egg -- (old cookbooks will sometimes simply say "an egg of butter")

Boil 10 minutes. "Remove from fire, stir in 1/2 cup brandy or wine when cool. The sauce "should be as thick as thin syrup."

For all this effort it seems only honest to point out that in 1887, lemon dumplings would have been, not dessert as we might expect, but likely a gentle, delectable accompaniment to the chicken course (number 7 or 8) of a 10- or 12-course formal dinner. Before savoring them, we Mrs. Cleveland's guests would have already eaten the oysters, soup, fish, roast, entree (glazed sweetbreads, perhaps), vegetable, and poultry. After our dumplings, we would pause briefly for the sherbet, and then go on to game, light vegetable salads, then fruits, ice creams, cakes, desserts, bonbons, and finally, always, always -- "crackers, cheese, and cafe noir." Plus all the correct wines and liqueurs.

And for all this effort, let me testify that these dumplings are delicious. If you could fit them into a no-holds-barred weekend dinner, or even use them to eke out a weeknight meal of leftovers, you might get a faint whiff of a memory of how complex and satisfying another era's meals could be.

Celebrate (again)! with a Rum Sour

It was the 21st of April, which now we may as well celebrate as the anniversary of our discovering the rum sour. Still my absolute favorite drinky. 

Now this is delicious. True, all our cocktails have been delicious, with the exception of the Bloody Mary. In my opinion, the less said of that gunky concoction the better. Meaning no offense, of course.

The Rum sour, by contrast, is very tasty. Lemon for sourness, a touch of sugar for sweetness, a slice of orange for the look and flavor of the tropics. (A stemmed cherry seems to be the correct garnish for any sour, but I had a fresh orange to hand and so used it)  Wonderful rum also gives the flavor of the tropics, but carries with it an unexpected, heady whiff of Christmas too. Our master, Charles Schumann in American Bar, tells us that sours are his favorite drinks. Why? You can almost hear him say it's because they are made -- nobly -- of these original cocktail ingredients, lemon juice, sugar, and a liquor.

What are we celebrating? Whatever you like. It's the 21st of April, the legendary date of the founding of Rome. Or maybe you got a new cell phone that actually works well. Maybe the kids cooked dinner and mowed the lawn. Bon week-end. 

Rum sour

Shake, with 4 to 5 ice cubes in a cocktail shaker:

• the juice of half a lemon
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1 jigger (1 and 1/2 ounces) rum (I used dark -- delicious)

Strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with half a slice of orange or a stemmed cherry. Admire the lawn. Celebrate.

Herbed creamed chicken and zucchini

From Richard Olney's Simple French Food. Very fast, very easy. Lacking fresh marjoram, try just about anything else -- dried tarragon worked for me.

And do heed his instructions about the fairly high heat for the zucchini. You want them to take on a nice little browning and stay firm, not just give off all their moisture and become soggy.

2-3 zucchini or yellow squash, or a mixture, sliced in julienne
1 and 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut in strips
fresh herbs to taste -- marjoram, thyme, tarragon, etc.
salt and pepper
2 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup cream

Melt the first Tbsp butter over medium-high heat in a heavy pan. Add the zucchini and cook and stir for 6 minutes, until the vegetables are barely colored and still a little crisp. Sprinkle with herbs, stir briefly, and transfer to a bowl.



Melt another Tbsp butter in the pan. Salt and pepper the chicken strips, toss them into the pan all at once and cook and stir them briefly until they are done, taking care not to overcook them and make them tough. Three minutes or so a side will do.

When ready to serve, return the squash to the pan and toss everything gently. Pour in the cream, stir, and heat through. Serve with plain rice or a pilaf.

Your wine of choice? Something fresh, dry, and bracing would be nice, I think. What about a summertime rose, an Oregon pinot gris, or the white wine that, it seems to me, no one thinks about? -- an inexpensive white Bordeaux. If you have ever encountered a bottle at your local grocery store whose label says not only Bordeaux but Entre-deux-mers -- it's a large subsection of Bordeaux known for its everyday good white wines -- you are on the right track.

So long as we are cooking from an (American-) French cookbook and (possibly) drinking a French wine,  shall we go on a little virtual field trip, while the zucchini browns and the chicken and cream warm together? I like the world of French, or at least vaguely culturally-French-themed, blogs. One leads to another. They usually include pictures of blue skies, sunflowers, bright porcelain, billowing curtains on shady patios, green seas and gold beaches, and delicious flaky or juicy or buttery food. And Paris. And there are always pictures of chic French women looking bien dans sa peau, literally comfortable in their skin, i.e., calm, confident and pleased with themselves. It's a fine phrase (it's a fine idea) but not as good as the one I'm really dying to use: I want to be able to toss off, casually, the expression that some thingummy is "un autre chaudière de poisson," a different kettle of fish. I got it from a distinctly un-cook book by an English lady, called The Pageant of Georgian England.

Anyway, we wanted to go on a virtual field trip. Here is a sampling of French blogs, each one of which leads to another. Amusez-vous.

Garance Doré -- fashion and photography
Le Petit Cabinet de Curiosités -- interiors, antiques
A boire et à manger -- food and wine and the French outdoors
Paris Daily Photo -- just what it says, written by a native Parisian in English
Chez Loulou  --  an expatriate photographs, again, Paris

... and one side trip -- try Vixen Vintage. The girl is very young, lives in Washington, has well over five thousand followers, wears vintage clothes, and refuses to get sunburned. Very impressive.

Tropical lime oat bars

One day eight or ten years ago the Chicago Tribune ran a summertime feature on refreshing lime dessert recipes. I regret to say it has taken me this long to make even one of them, today's Tropical Lime Oat Bars -- though in fairness to myself I will say that at least I always knew these sounded very interesting.

And shall we consider the lime, briefly? Did you know, for example, that the green spheroid we see in our grocery stores, called the "Persian or Tahiti or Bearss lime" (Citrus latifolia), may be a hybrid of the "true" Mexican or Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia), and a fruit called the citron? Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking tells us this. He also tells us that all citrus fruits are believed to descend from hybrids and crosses of three parent plants, the citron, the Mandarin orange, and the pummelo. This last has tended to stay in its home in tropical Asia, where conditions are as warm as it likes.

You must believe me. I had no sooner innocently armed myself with these small bits of information on the innocent Lime, than I happened to be riding in a car with a friend who visits Mexico frequently. "The things that grow there naturally," my friend marvelled as he thumbed the steering wheel. "Mangoes, bananas, guava, right in your backyard. No fertilizer. No care. Different kinds of limes ..."

"Really," I said.

And do we remember the chapter in Little Women when the youngest March sister, Amy, gets into a scrape at school over pickled limes? First she has to borrow money from her older sister Meg to buy them to begin with. Her friends have treated her so often, she knows it is past her turn.

 "Why, I owe at least a dozen pickled limes, and I can't pay them, you know, till I have money, for Marmee forbade my having anything charged at the shop."

"Tell me all about it. Are limes the fashion now? It used to be pricking bits of rubber to make balls." And Meg tried to keep her countenance, Amy looked so grave and important.

"Why, you see, the girls are always buying them, and unless you want to be thought mean, you must do it too. It's nothing but limes now, for everyone is sucking them in their desks in schooltime, and trading them off for pencils, bead rings, paper dolls, or something else, at recess. If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime. If she's mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn't offer even a suck. They treat by turns, and I've had ever so many but haven't returned them, and I ought for they are debts of honor, you know."

"How much will pay them off and restore your credit?" asked Meg, taking out her purse.

"A quarter would more than do it, and leave a few cents over for a treat for you. Don't you like limes?"

So pickled limes cost about a penny a piece in Civil War era Massachusetts, available to schoolgirls for nothing more than the family "rag money," or a quarter borrowed from big Sis. There was a time when citrus fruits were exotic little slices of the sun -- though perhaps they are always that -- their yellow and green and orange orbs purchased dear and meant only to be looked at, not squeezed or scraped for zest, and still less pickled.

As with so many foodstuffs, the story of their dispersion is the same. They originated in far away India or China, might have reached the classical world by about the year 100 A.D., and were at length brought to the west by Crusaders coming home overland from the fabulous East carrying sour oranges, by Arabs marching across Africa and out into the Mediterranean and bringing their orange and lemon trees with them, and later by the great explorers sailing home from the distant West bearing sweeter oranges, juicier lemons, and the very sour and tropics-loving lime. A quaint article by one Walter Monfried in the Milwaukee Journal, from quaint days when American newspapers reported in depth on such things (September 1 1960), says that a few full centuries into all this furore, citrus were still so rare that "the [London] leather-sellers' company contributed six silver pennies to buy one lemon for display at a banquet for King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn" -- this would have been about the year 1535, when the short-lived Anne was still queen. Note the company only contributed six silver pennies. So the one lemon cost in total more than that. By the way, the king was in the news in Milwaukee in 1960 because archaeologists were busy in England unearthing his ruined palace, Nonsuch. On the same page of the Journal was a letter to the editor about the now-forgotten Francis Gary Powers U-2 spy "incident."

C. Ann Wilson, in Food and Drink in Britain, further explains that by the middle of Henry's sixteenth century it was the Portuguese who were primarily responsible for shipping those sweet oranges (from Ceylon) to Europe. The Journal's Monfried agrees that the link was obvious enough for English people to give the fruit the very pretty name "portyngale." A hundred years after Henry's time, Samuel Pepys actually saw an orange tree -- a portyngale tree? -- in "Lord Brooke's garden" in 1666, and pilfered one of the unripe ones. Twenty years later still, lime trees had been introduced into England's colony, Jamaica, where they grew so well that lime juice by the cask (we are consulting Food and Drink in Britain again) was exported back to the mother country. We know the familiar tale of British sailors being given citrus juices, especially lime, to prevent scurvy. When the great Mrs. Beeton was compiling her Book of Household Management in England in the early 1860s, she advised that the making of orange preserves and orange wine was one of the needful tasks -- of springtime, oddly enough. So, citrus was plentiful enough by then to be useful for more than just looking at, and one put up the last of the oranges in springtime I suppose because, by then, the plentiful supplies of winter were running out, and the groves of the faraway tropics, orange or lemon or what have you, were just flowering anew.

This returns us to Little Women's era, and the saga of the pickled limes. And the Amy March Shirt of Justice. I kid you not.

Graphic by Andrew Nelson
 
This graphic comes from a great blog called Tomato Nation, which I found when I happened to google "Amy March pickled limes" hoping to find some cookery geek who might have unearthed or created a recipe for them. Instead, I found Sarah D. Bunting's short, very punchy article excoriating Amy March for simply existing, and as it happens catching us all up on the universe of Amy March hatred. Before plunging in, know that Amy's awful teacher, Mr. Davis, catches her with the limes in class and makes her throw them all out -- twenty five of them!

 One of the most satisfying moments in children's literature, in my personal opinion. I've always hated Amy March, and when that little brat has to huck all her limes out the window and gets whacked across the palm with a ruler to boot, reader, I smirk every time. Of course, it totally ruins it that she gets to storm home from school in the middle of the day and stay home forever because Marmee is a pinko who doesn't believe in capital punishment, and then she destroys Jo's shit and the whole family's all "she feels terrible, let's forgive her in five minutes" LIKE HOW ABOUT LET'S MAKE HER LIVE ON THE ROOF, AND THEN Captain Hormone Pianopants Laurie has to go and marry her, like, oh, she does sketches and will french me in a rowboat on the Continent, well la dee fucking da.

But for that brief shining moment, as the dreaded Irish children scuffle over the pickled limes, we older siblings could feel like we'd seen some justice. And now you can commemorate that moment in t-shirt form. Wear it, give it as a gift, buy two and throw 'em out the window, whatever you want. Just don't borrow Sallie's and then burn a hole in it. (…Right? That happened? To Meg, not Amy, but still.)

Sarah D. Bunting really did make a t-shirt out of the graphic, and I presume you could still go to her online shop and order one if you wish. I think, also, she wanted to say "Marmee is a pinko who hates" corporal punishment, not capital. Although given the way her 107 commenters agreed with her, maybe not. And I did ask Ms. Bunting in an email for permission to reproduce both her writing and her graphic, but she never answered me. So here they both are. La dee fucking da.

Now a long time ago, we were going to bake the Chicago Tribune's tropical lime oat bars. Here they are. If you wish to omit the coconut because you don't care for coconut (hear hear), or replace the macadamia nuts with some other nut, la dee -- I mean, I wish you joy of your free-thinkingness.

Tropical lime oat bars

1 stick (half a cup) of butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups uncooked oats, quick or old fashioned
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
1/2 cup fresh lime juice
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tsp finely grated lime zest
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1 jar (3 and 1/2 ounces) macadamia nuts, chopped

Heat oven to 350 F. Combine sugar, oats, flour, and salt in a large bowl; rub in the butter with your fingers until the dough is moist and crumbly. Reserve 1 cup of the mixture.

Press remaining oat mixture into a 13 x 9 baking dish, greased with a little butter or non-stick cooking spray. Bake 10 minutes

Combine sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, lime zest, and sour cream in a small bowl. Pour evenly over partially baked crust.

Combine the cup of reserved oat mix with coconut and macadamia nuts, and sprinkle evenly over the filling. Pat down lightly.

Bake until topping is a light golden brown, about 30 to 35 minutes. Cool completely before cutting into bars; store covered in the refrigerator. (This storing-in-the-refrigerator business makes the bars as hard as cement. Must we?)

Civello -- the nicest little white wine nobody will try

From Civello Winery, in Graton, California. In my little corner of retail, nobody will try it. What puts people off? I suspect it's the marketing. The label's tagline, "Sexier than a pinot grigio, Naughtier than a chardonnay," means exactly nothing, even less than nothing. Memo to the powers that be: please do not not tell the public, sort of, what the wine might or might not, possibly perhaps, be made of, and then try to be cute about it. What with that, and the $12 to $14 price tag, and the fact that no one knows what Civello means, you have a formula for customer frustration and increased sales -- for Robert Mondavi and Beringer.

Mind you, I wouldn't know what Civello means either, except that at leisure I can look up the website and learn that it's a brand of the Row Eleven wine company, along with Stratton-Lummis. (The first time someone knowledgeable asked me about Row Eleven, I thought she was saying "Rowy-Levin," and went home to google that. Dead end.) As a matter of fact Civello, online, is refreshingly informative. Would that they might fit half of that information on their label. For that matter once you trace Row Eleven, you find this parent company is informative, too. I like it when wine producers are honest about the business of wine. After all, you know -- after a while, Passion, Integrity, and Respect for the Land becomes self-parody; a love of pH levels and soil composition is really for the very few. Tell me instead, "we are a company and we own three brands" -- brands! and they admit it! -- and my respect for you soars.

The wine is what I would call Very Nice. Moderately sweet, moderately tart, moderately syrupy, moderately flowery and and refreshing, it is just all around what you ought to try if you are a chardonnay drinker and are in the mood for something moderately different.

Retail, call it $13. Do splurge.

And don't forget our theme for the year, which is the Baroque (and lemons, though the two themes don't always have to go together. Perhaps Civello's lemon-yellow label inspires me). I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying my new clock radio. Why in twenty-four-and-a-half years of marriage did I never think to buy myself a clock radio? Somehow I assumed that his beep-y alarm was enough for the two of us. Now I climb under the covers at a bedtime that is so grandma-ish I would be embarrassed to admit to it, and I set the radio's timer, and the (often-Baroque) strains of WFMT lull me to sleep. That is, unless the announcer announces something REALLY LOUD.

Surely there is no better Baroque to listen to, today, than Vivaldi's Spring. The temperature outside is 20 F and blustery, but we can dream.