The Catcher in the Rye

MALTED MILK ICE CREAM

I know I’m not alone in saying that middle school, particularly eighth grade, was absolute hell. It was so bad, in fact, that even now I tend to distrust anyone who looks back fondly on the ages eleven to fourteen. It was in eighth grade, after a particularly gut-wrenching day during which I was unceremoniously dumped by all of my girlfriends, that my English teacher, Mr. Mitchell, gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

I had just eaten lunch in the nurse’s office on a trundle bed covered in white paper, and I arrived to his class blotchy-faced and glassy-eyed, looking like a crazed and frizzy Catholic schoolgirl zombie—the “Thriller” version of “Baby One More Time.” Oh, did I not mention? To add insult to injury, I was wearing a Britney Spears costume that day—it was Halloween 1999, okay? I’m sure that Mr. Mitchell, who had a daughter of his own and who had been doing battle in the trenches of middle school for at least twenty years, was familiar with this kind of scene. After class, he listened to me blubber with a kind of quiet empathy that still makes my throat swell to think about, and he pressed a copy of Salinger’s book into my hands.

The novel was exactly what I needed at the time—a testament to the fact that adolescence is agonizing, confusing, lonely. I stayed obsessed with it, and with Holden, all through high school, revisiting it for comfort whenever I was feeling particularly overwhelmed with being a teenager. I wore a maroon T-shirt on which I’d ironed on felt letters that said “I am Holden Caulfield.” As a final English project freshman year, I created a Catcher in the Rye soundtrack, which I called “Hearing Holden,” filled with torturously sad songs by the Smiths and Azure Ray. (If you’re wondering if I had more fun in high school than I did in middle school, the answer is no, I didn’t.)

The older I got, though, the less Salinger’s writing sang to me, and by college I had put my twice-yearly Catcher in the Rye reading habit to rest. The other night, I reread it for the first time in eight years, and to my surprise I found it nearly unbearable. This could be due, in part, to the simple fact that I grew up—that I’m no longer as melancholy or bitter or determined to be misunderstood as I was when The Catcher in the Rye first pulled me from despair as a thirteen-year-old. It could also be due to the fact that I’ve learned too much about J. D. Salinger’s personal life in the years since his death to read his fiction as purely fiction ever again.

When he passed away in 2010, a media frenzy broke loose, rehashing every lurid detail of the intensely private Salinger’s life and adding previously unknown biographical tidbits—none of them particularly flattering. It was during this time that I learned about his tumultuous relationships with young girls, his religious practices, his work habits, his sexual dysfunction, his paranoia. I learned, too, about his eating habits, which included a strict organic and macrobiotic diet.

According to At Home in the World, the memoir written by his famously spurned lover, Joyce Maynard, Salinger avoided cooking any of his food, if possible, believing that “cooking food robs it of all of its natural nutrients”; when he did cook it, he was very specific about his methods and his cooking oils. He shunned pasteurized dairy products, “refined foods like sugar and white flour—even whole wheat flour, honey, and maple syrup.” In Raychel Haugrud Reiff’s 2008 biography of Salinger, she revealed that for breakfast he and Maynard would eat “whole grain bread and frozen peas, and for dinner bread, steamed fiddlehead ferns, apple slices, and sometimes popcorn. If they had meat, it was barely cooked organic ground lamb.” Maynard also claims that after going out to eat pizza with his son, Salinger would make himself vomit in order to “rid his body of impure food.”

I’m not particularly interested in Salinger’s food issues, but in relation to his fiction they fascinate me, because his stories are full of eating-disordered characters. There is Franny, of Franny and Zooey, who refuses to eat while on her dinner date with Lane Coutell, not even picking at the chicken sandwich or sipping her glass of milk as her irritated date stabs at his frog legs and escargot. She is sickly and shivering, and once the waiter takes away her untouched food she falls into a faint on her way to the restroom. Once home, she argues with her mother about her refusal to eat.

In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour Glass and a little girl named Sybil discuss how they both like to chew on candle wax. Seymour then launches into a story about his invented bananafish, who “lead a very tragic life.” “They swim into a hole,” he tells her, “where there’s a lot of bananas. They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs,” he says, gorging themselves on so many bananas that they are sadly unable to get back out of the hole. After this strange, make-believe story about the dangers of overeating, Seymour goes back to his hotel room and shoots himself in the head.

Then, of course, there is Holden Caulfield, who professes to be “a very light eater”—unusual for a sixteen-year-old boy. He usually has just orange juice for breakfast, which is why he’s “so damn skinny.” He alludes to the fact that at one point he was put on a special diet “where you eat a lot of starches and crap, to gain weight and all,” but he “didn’t ever do it.” Holden then tells us his usual order when he’s out somewhere, which is one of my favorite literary meals of all: “a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk.” “It isn’t much,” he says, “but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.”

It’s a meal packed with the pasteurized dairy, refined sugars, and white flour that Salinger so feared, but the concern for health is still quietly there. Malted milk powder is a mixture of barley malt, wheat flour, and evaporated milk, and was originally sold as a health food. Malt sugars are easily digestible, so it was thought that malt powder would be easy on the stomachs of infants and the very ill. Because of its delicious, toasty, caramelized flavors, it makes a dreamy companion for ice cream, and it became a soda fountain staple for Holden Caulfield’s generation.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

Malted Milk Ice Cream

Holden’s malted milk could simply be malt powder stirred into a glass of milk, but I like to imagine that it’s a malted milkshake. Here, the choice is yours: use this malted milk ice cream to make a shake, or just eat it on its own.

Makes about 1 quart

1½ cups whole milk

1½ cups heavy cream

2 vanilla beans, seeds scraped out and pods reserved

⅓ cup malt powder

3 large egg yolks

½ cup sugar

¾ teaspoon kosher salt

½ cup chocolate malted milk candies (such as Whoppers), crushed slightly

Prepare an ice bath by filling the sink or a very large bowl with ice cubes and cold water. Place a large metal or glass bowl over the ice bath and a fine-mesh strainer over the bowl.

In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, whisk together the milk, cream, and vanilla seeds and pods over medium heat until you see small bubbles start to form around the edge of the pot and steam rising from the surface of the liquid. Whisk in the malt powder and remove the pot from the heat.

In a large bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, and salt until pale yellow. Whisking constantly, very slowly pour in the hot milk mixture in a steady stream until it is fully incorporated.

Pour this mixture back into the pot and whisk constantly over medium-low heat until it reaches 170°F on a candy thermometer, about 10 minutes. Pour it through the strainer into the bowl set over the ice bath and whisk until it cools to room temperature. Cover the bowl and transfer it to the refrigerator to chill for at least 8 hours.

Churn the chilled base in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions. When the ice cream has set, add the crushed malted milk candies and process in the ice cream maker until they are incorporated throughout, about 30 more seconds of spinning.

Let the ice cream set up in the freezer for about an hour before serving.