The following was written shortly after Trillim’s cruise to Rome where she seems to have overcome her bout of major depression. This occurred prior to losing her right hand and her two-year imprisonment in Southeast Asia. As always her life’s work has been to explore the connections between things: people, ecologies, and objects of all types large and small. This is one of my favorites because of the pictures that scholars found in an envelope tucked in her journal.
I went down, down, down to the heart of an apple seed. I searched its depths, scouring under every stairway to find its truth. I swept out the cobwebs of appearance and dug into its hard subterranean earthiness to strike some vein of richness yielding its essence. Beyond color. Beyond size. Beyond smell, touch, and sound, and at the middle of its being I found its unlimited capacity to hide, to withdraw into hidden passages, and to mask all its coordinates such that no map could be drawn. No logic yielded its ways and in the end what it disclosed of itself was naught but a meager caricature–a smudge, a line-drawing sketched from perceptions it was willing to share. I sigh at my failure.
Perhaps my approach was wrong. Perhaps to go in, to go down, I must go up. I must find all its fellows. Maybe, I’ll expand and swell and enlarge myself and discover firsthand the root of connecting patterns and in such webs see what can be netted. Perhaps as always, the best approach is to start with baking a cake.
How about this one? Sent to a friend by verdant and bright Emily Dickinson with this note and recipe:
Your sweet beneficence of bulbs I return as flowers, with a bit of the swarthy cake baked only in Domingo.
Lovingly,
Emily.
2 pounds Flour—
2 Sugar—
2 Butter—
19 Eggs—
5 pounds Raisins—
1 ½ Currants—
1 ½ Citron—
½ pint Brandy—
½ Molasses—
2 Nutmegs—
5 teaspoons—
Cloves-Mace-Cinnamon
2 teaspoons—Soda—
Beat Butter and Sugar together—
Add Eggs without beating—and beat the mixture again—
Bake 2 ½ hours, or three hours, in cake Pan Cake pans or 5 to 6 hours in Milk pan, if full—1
And what is a recipe? The blueprint of ecology. A harmony of relationships. The ideal form, which every kitchen demiurge must try to instantiate in matter (so imperfect a substance!)—An act of creation from the unorganized material floating among the carbon/nitrogen offerings budding from the earth: flours, sugars, eggs, spices, and flavors rich and varied. Endless mixtures and combinations creating worlds, nations, and countries undiscovered and lying curled snuggly in the capacious ether misting in cupboards and pantries well-stocked.
I start by taking raisins fashioned by grapes grown in the warmth of the San Joaquin Valley by a family who has grown grapes for many generations and who cherish their tended vines. These hand plucked offerings are laid out on newspapers (published in Fresno) by workers from Mexico who have come to bless their wives and children back home and make for themselves a finer life than they would have otherwise. Each fruit, graced by the sun, changes in substance as water is pulled through the fruit’s hide initiating chemical changes that draw into being flavors delicate and distinctly raisiny, signaled by a delectable dark blackening. Raisins, a gift from: grapes, sun, growers, Mexico, and a universe’s chemical underpinnings, and pulled from a box brought to me by a trucker and a grocer who have conspired under the rules of symbiosis to bring them dancing to my countertop.
I put these to soak in a brandy whose genesis was framed in a distant distillery in France from grapes of a different lineage, reared in soils whose ecology was conditioned by millions of years of separation from the raisin’s sister-soil in California, each with communities of fungi and bacteria adding and enriching what flavors will emerge from the dark underpinnings of a thousand-trillion accidents. Then, aged in oak barrels fashioned from trees grown in the Tronçais forest, whose unique climate, soil, and woodland ecology create an oak with a density just so, from which a wooden plank will be made that will author forth a firm and sturdy barrel, produced by a craftsman with the ken of five generations of barrel makers stored in his soul, a barrel that will slowly leach its own essence and nature into the brandy.
These are mixed and placed in a glass jar, made from sands carved out of sedimentary rock by ocean water, lifted and transported by wind to fall as rain down upon the pressed sandstone of Jurassic river deposits, themselves torn from ancient mountains long ago weathered to plains. Then beyond the material, scores upon scores of stories of how the glass factory was born through someone’s dreams, pain, and determination could be told.
And so from around the world, gathered from ecologies many, from materials, objects, and substances with properties wrapped thick with the stuff of deep time and cantered across many spaces, and whose myriad stories of genesis and re-genesis call and peep to one another in tangled networks, sits my jar upon the shelf with raisins soaking, creating a new flavor in the world.
And so it goes for the batter, with nutmeg from exotic islands grown among the palms of distant shores,
And the sifted flour,
And the mixed and completed dough,
The taste is subtle, a unique mix finished from staggering complexity, its creation an accident of unimaginable improbabilities and a network of earth processes and history. I picture in my mind the network of associations as if they were strung from wires connecting and fashioning the flavors. Wires running among the grapes of California, their growers, the newspapers which provided substrate for the ripening fruit, the oak of France, and on and on from the wheat farmer who grew the flour, to the sea captain who brought the cinnamon, to cows who provided milk for the butter from the grasses the bovines fed upon, to the slopes of Mauna Kea where the sugarcane was grown and harvested. The wires may vary in thickness like the strings of a guitar, with thick wires between say the citron and current where the flavor connections are strong and thin wires between the wheat made into flour and the man who delivered the gasoline for the tractor which harvested the crop. I imagine these wires stretching into the past, perhaps to the Pleistocene, which provided the material substrate for the soils of France, which add subtle shifts in the nuances of flavor gracing the cake. I wonder. Were I to pluck any string somewhere in this web of connection, how far would the vibrations propagate? Would there be any end to the music that would issue forth? The music expressed now as flavor drawn from my cake and combined with my olfactory apparatus.
Which all started with some tulip bulbs gifted by a friend and a favor returned.
