with an intimate
protective privacy both
cool and sweet-smelling
Attempting, in a recent issue of Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming, to explain his compatriots’ obsession with gathering wild mushrooms, Alexander (“Sasha”) Viazmensky tells how, during the peak of the season, Russians drive their cars right off the roads into the forests, in single-minded determination to cover as much ground as possible. This image has its downside—from the perspective of both the ecologist and the foot-borne mushroom gatherer—but from a distance it also has a certain perverse, surrealistic charm: black-beetle Soviet automobiles, like a swarm of 1948 DeSotos, their headlights glowing in the murk, weaving between the tree trunks of a forest that extends as far as the eye can see.
This image also captures something of what the landscape of western Russia is like: immense—and immensely flat. Its forests dwarf the imagination without themselves being all that impressive, for the ground is often damp, the soil poor, and the trees aspen, pine, and birch. They provide the Russian wanderer not with dramatic vistas or a sense of savage charm, but with an intimate, protective privacy — healingly cool and sweet-smelling. Boris Pasternak spoke for all native Russians when he wrote: “Included in the saintly order of pines/We become immortal for a while.”
From Outlaw Cook by John Thorne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).
If you have never read a cookbook for the writing instead of the recipes, any of John Thorne’s 4 cookbooks are a great place to start.
The recipes are also worth the time.
Over the years I have formed the theory that a good cookbook needs to have at least one good recipe.
And there are many many bad cook books out there.
Outlaw Cook has at least three recipes that I remember fondly with my stomach.
The Gingerbread Recipe, easy and served warm with ice cream so it melts into the cake is what Gingerbread is supposed to taste like.
The lemon ice cream is so easy and so refreshing you will wonder why you don’t make it every week.
The chocolate cake recipe is so simple.
Its formula is 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 -2 and bake.
1 Box of Chocolate Cake mix/
1 Box of Chocolate Pudding Mix
1 package of Chocolate Chips.
1 16ox tub of Sour Cream
2 Eggs.
Mix.
Pour into bundt pan.
Bake at 350 for a hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes.
You will never make another chocolate cake.
But you can also make a lemon version by using lemon everything and white chocolate chips.
I invented that.
All three recipes will leave you with an intimate, protective privacy — healingly cool and sweet-smelling.
No Haiku For You 