Gabrielle Hamilton and passports

Gabrielle Hamilton and passports have little to do with one another except that during the twenty-one hour span that commenced last night at 7 and ended today around 4, I saw and spoke to Gabrielle Hamilton, she signed my copy of her new cookbook and I realized that my passport expired in June yet I need it to leave the country on Monday. You can imagine that the latter is the lame duck in the "which one doesn't fit" game.

Sigh, it is always something. However, I feel immensely grateful that I a) realized this today rather than on Monday and b) live in Washington because c) was able to make an emergency expedite appointment for Monday at 10:30am. The process is said to take 3-4 hours from start to finish, so if you don't think I'll be biting my nails in the cab out to Dulles later that afternoon, you're wrong. Immense waves of relief will rush over me as soon as I successfully check my bag and get my boarding passes.

Y'all keep your fingers crossed for me!

Last night was so much fun. Tom and I went with friends to a local restaurant, Buck's Fishing and Camping, for a dinner celebrating the release of Gabrielle Hamilton's new cookbook, Prune. (The event was organized by Politics & Prose, a tremendous independent bookstore here in DC.) It's a compilation of recipes from her restaurant, and I love that it's basically a bunch of sauce-spattered notes bound in a magenta shell. It's the kind of book from which I think I'll learn a fair amount and I am excited to jump in.

Gabrielle looked just like she does in her pictures which sounds as if it should be obvious, but you know how some people in fact do NOT resemble their photos. That is just weird. Anyway, it was a lovely evening. The bubbly was flowing, the lights were dim, people seemed truly enthused to be there. Once we'd sat, Hamilton gave a brief discussion of the book and later took a few questions.

Mrs. Student here had been thinking about how much I wanted to talk to her. I had to let her know how seriously I enjoyed her memoir (Blood, Bones & Butter), wanted to ask about a particular element of it and also thought I might throw in the fact that not two weeks ago, we ate at Prune.

Because I don't eat lamb and didn't feel interested in the rabbit leg, I'd had less solid food than perhaps advisable in the presence of freely-flowing booze (each course was paired with a matched wine). Perhaps because of that or perhaps because I was just really enjoying myself, my hand shot up -SHOT UP- when she inquired if there were any questions. My tablemates, 90% of whom I didn't know from Adam, were wildly supportive of this. I found their waving arms and cheers of "She has a question! She has a question!" very sweet if not slightly odd. Maybe they'd had a few glasses too.

Gabrielle called on me, I stood up and smiled and proceeded to let her know that my question was actually a three-parter that included two comments and one query. Nerd.alert! Swear to g, someone said, "Only in DC" which, frankly, I took as a compliment.

I told her about our visit to Prune, praised her memoir as masterfully crafted and asked if its structure -particularly around the arc of experience with her mother-in-law- was premeditated or if she'd discovered it during the writing process. "Well, as I mentioned, I have an MFA and yes, this was planned very carefully. Every word was intentional." Even more impressive really.

One of her sons is named Leone, so after thanking her, I said, "Oh, and Part 3, I have a new nephew named Leone." A collective laugh swelled when I started in on point 3, but hey, I raised my hand quicker than lightning. Today it seems possible that my knowing the name of her son may have seen vaguely stalker-like, but alas.

On our way out, I stopped by to thank her again and she was so warm and wonderful and thanked me for my question. In fact, look how she signed my book:

I floated home!

Tonight, when there was nothing more I could do about my expired passport, I started making a beef stew. It was cold today, and stew just sounded perfect. Comforting. Hearty. Midway through I decided to make potatoes to go alongside. I boiled these until al dente, sliced and fried them until golden and then topped them with rosemary, salt, pepper and a generous dollop of crème fraîche. Divine.

Cranberries and an old funnel

The hot cranberries are starting to burst. Steam building up inside each ellipsoid ultimately forces its taut magenta skin to explode, like a gum bubble that's thinned to the point of failure. As they break open, their juices coalesce with those of the lemon and apple as well as the melted sugar, all of which swirls like lava around the pot. I love the pop-pop symphony that demarcates this stage of cranberry sauce making. It means not only that the cook must take care to avoid being splattered by hot innards but also that the finished product is at hand. I am newly grateful for the pot's depth; its walls provide a bit of protection for the sensitive skin on my hands and arms, bare to the elements as I stir and stir and stir. The water bath is boiling away on the next burner, in an even deeper pot but one with a lid. You don't cover jam while it's cooking. On the contrary, you want as much water to evaporate as quickly as possible so that the mixture's sugar concentration reaches 65% or so. Then, you'll achieve set which is the line between a runny sauce and a spreadable preserve.

~~~~

Nanny never water bath processed her jars of cranberry sauce. I guess she figured that if the fruit slurry was hot enough going in to the jars -and because it contained enough sugar and acid anyway- to cause their lids to suck inward hermetically shortly after being applied, all would be well. And it was, even though no one would ever say so now. Botulism! Spoilage! People seem more worried these days, but I digress.

I remember the afternoon Nanny formally taught me to make her sauce. Her knives were always so dull and her favorite was a little paring knife. That's what she used to dice up the lemon that day, rind and all. It seemed to take more effort than it would if she were to use a larger or sharper blade, but she never complained or, to be honest, even mentioned it, and her little lemon cubes looked perfect.

In Louisiana, Mayhaw trees (recently named the official state fruit tree) are abundant and produce bunches of berries that look like red blueberries. My cousin, Eleanor, who is much older and thus has always been known to me as Nanan and more of an aunt, was a regular attendee of the Mayhaw Festival in Starks. She'd bring back gallons of freshly pressed mayhaw juice and that's what served as the base of Nanny's cranberry sauce, a recipe handed down through the generations in her family. I have to FedEx frozen juice in from out of state which can be both a challenge to find and expensive, so make do with unfiltered apple juice. You really can't much tell the difference, but I hate to admit that because the mayhaw juice looms large in my memory bank as something really special.

As the sauce cooked down, out came the box of Sure-Jell and the old canning funnel. As I later learned, cranberries have a lot of natural pectin -think about what happens if you drop a fresh one; it bounces, right? Pectin-fortified cell walls are the why.- and the Sure-Jell isn't necessary, but at that time, I just followed Nanny's lead, because why fix it if it ain't broke?

Once the pectin was incorporated and the jam sheeted rather than rained off the back of a wooden spoon, it was time to ladle the cranberry sauce carefully into the waiting mason jars. This is where the funnel became instrumental, another means of protecting us from the scalding jam and the jars from drips which just make a sticky mess of everything. Nanny would apply the lids and bands and screw them finger-tight, placing jar after sealed jar on a dish towel on the countertop.

We'd sit at her Formica table and listen to the pings of lids sealing shut, each rubber flange gripping tightly to the glass rim on which it sat. Those pings were musical gratification and the promise of things to come. An afternoon of cooking together was complete, as would be the upcoming Thanksgiving and Christmas tables on which the cranberry sauce always starred, the crown jewels in our family's stash.

~~~~

I have several canning funnels now, shiny and stainless and new. But today, when I made Nanny's cranberry sauce, I used her old aluminum funnel even though its narrow lip renders it less functional than I'd like. I had to take special care to keep the sauce from spilling over and onto my own dishtowel. In those moments of quiet concentration nostalgia slipped in, and I missed Nanny.

I wanted so badly to call her, the her from before the last years, the Nanny at the Formica table. I wanted to tell her about the boys and ask her advice. I wanted her perspective, the sort that can only be gleaned from decades of living and mothering and seeing what comes out on the other side.

"Nanny," I'd say, "I've had to take away all the boys' privileges because they just haven't been listening. They're going to have to earn each one back. Do you think that sounds reasonable? What would you do?"

I imagine her answer would be a hug over the phone, the perfect words in the perfect voice. Then I'd say, "You old fox, you always know. Are you gonna go out on the town tonight?"

And she'd laugh like she always did when I told her she was a foxy fox and probably say she was going to watch Wheel of Fortune and tuck in early.

And we'd quiet down and say how much we loved each other and that we'd talk soon.

From the inestimable Wendell Berry...

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not,

Nature is party to all our deals and decisions,

and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do."

-Wendell Berry