Everyone Needs a Friend, an Apron, a Chafing Dish, and a Good Book to Read
Not particularly in that order.
Saturday News Digest, V1/E27
My Apron Friend
What Do I Do With This?
What’s On the Night Table (and Notebook)
My Apron Friend Wise and practical
I don’t have many close friends, the kind that stick with you for years and years and somehow still love you. I hold the few I have very close to my heart and at the very tippy-top of the list is my friend Mary Chris. She’s hung around despite having the dubious honor of being present during the period of my crack-up crying jags. Our husbands (who love each other, too) got me to her house where she led me to her enclosed porch and coaxed me to lie down on her wicker couch. I fell asleep (thank you klonopin!) and when I awoke Mary Chris brought me a plate of cheese and crackers with a side of fruit, then sat beside me as if nothing unusual was happening at all, her quiet, commonsense voice talking about how good life is exactly the balm required.
So there’s that, plus being enthusiastically available for endless consultations on many, many important matters such as home improvements (currently helping with paint colors), our sweet annoying dogs (and children), garden design, and book recommendations. She knows where the best soft-serve ice cream stands are and believes in the necessity for little pretzel snacks in the afternoon. We parse the many joys of our time in life, its loses and sorrows that bring humor into the equation. The Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited streams up the Hudson River by her apartment and we run to her porch or windows to watch it pass: two women who, as Leonard Cohen coined, stand at the foothills of old age, excited as toddlers in shouting out merry hoots at the sound of a train whistle.
There’s more but the subject today concerns Mary Chris in the kitchen. First thing in the morning, she walks into the kitchen, pokes her head through the straps of a long chef apron, turns on really nice music I’ve never heard before, and starts thinking about breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. I guess I’ve witness this before but the last time I stayed with her it struck me how her routine sets up the day in a wonderfully thoughtful calmness. So different than my own stumbling about.
After coming home, I contemplated Mary Chris’s daily custom for a long time and decided that it all starts with the apron. The shameful fact is I never wear one which is why my entire wardrobe is polka dotted with ghostly images of past meals. I no longer see them until I’m in public and someone points them out, usually by laughing. My siblings wear aprons so it’s not a family trait. I’m planful but it’s usually about work and that, of course, inherently disregards the finer points in life. For instance, the beauty of starting one’s day in calm, mindful serenity.
I own a dandy one now, purchased from Duluth Trading Company, my clothier of choice these days. On it goes first thing in the morning over my bathrobe and my new practice begins: the fire lit under the kettle, fruit and muffin taken out for breakfast. Something of a glancing thought about lunch passes though. Dinner is a work in progress—there’s no miracles here!—but my apron provides authority to figure it out.
It all starts with the apron: Putting the apron on to progress through the day.
(P.S.: I asked Mary Chris if I could write this piece because she’s a private person and I was afraid she’d get mad at me and then wouldn’t be my friend anymore. But, as I said, she’s at the tippy top of my friend list and this is what she said, “Ha! Have at it!! I love my aprons!”)
What Do I Do With This? Second thoughts
I’m on one of my throwing things out tears which, as family members will tell you, can be quite an alarming sight. My sons still claim I threw out a baseball card worth millions, to which I say then why was it left in the bottom of an old desk sticking to the back of a Mortal Combat case which they abandoned when they moved out of the basement seven years ago? But their point is well taken. I don’t clean that much but when I do I tend to toss stuff away with zestful abandon.
Look at this chafing dish, though. A friend passed it on to me a long time ago when she was moving and it’s been sitting unused on a high shelf every since. This makes it a good candidate for the Salvation Army donation box. I took it down and lifted the lid where I found a tiny eight page brochure full of chafing dish recipes with charming misspellings throughout (i.e. been for beer; costantly for constantly).
Along with cherries jubilee and swedish meatballs, there is veal chop suey and hot curried oysters. Sausage goulash using hotdogs and Sauterne wine sounds like something one should try at least once in a lifetime.
That got me thinking of the chafing dish history which surprisingly stretches back to the Egyptians. It has been praised for fostering an intimate atmosphere because they are shallow and their recipes would feed, at most, four people. According to extensive research, the chafing dish had a major impact on men in the late 19th century. They found it to be quite useful when they were left to fend for themselves and, more often than you would think, their romantic conquests.
Every bachelor has a wife of some sort. Mine is a Chafing Dish; and I desire to sing her praises. . . .the only woman who could turn me from bachelordom, my better half, ‘Chaffinda.’ —from the preface of Cult of the Chafing Dish by Frank Schloesser (1904)
How can one not be curious to fire up a chafing dish? And aren’t you itching to make one of the tiny booklet’s recipes? I don’t think mine has ever been used: the original wick is unburnt. I could give it a good rubdown, purchase some sterno and cut up a few hot dogs for a Friday night sausage goulash.
I don’t know….what do you think? Should I keep it?
Sausage Goulash As written in "Recipes for Chafing Dish Cooking"
1 1/2 pounds beef frankfurters 2 tablespoon fat 2 medium onions, grated 1/2 cup (8 oz can) tomato sauce 1 clove garlic, mashed or pureer 4 tablespoons Sauterne wine 1 teaspoon paprika 2 tablespoons sour cream, 1 tablespoon water 1 teaspoon cornstarch 1 teaspoon salt Cut frankfurters into bite-size pieces. Heat fat in chafing pan over direct flame. Add sausage, tomato sauce, garlic, wine and paprika. Cover, and simmer for minutes. Meanwhile blend sour cream, water, cornstarch and salt until smooth and free from lumps. Add to goulash, and stir until goulash comes to boil. Serve with boiled potatoes or noodles.
What’s On the Night Table (and the Notebook)
Stacked on my night table:
Heavy, An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. I have to read this when I take a break in the afternoon because each beautiful sentence requires a moment to take in.
The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank. I pulled my copy out from the shelves after Banks died this past August. The follow up from her breakout debut, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, The Wonder Spot is funny and insightful about those awful years between 13 and 30.
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz. Babitz is a writer who’s known but not known enough. She’s the flip side of Joan Didion (who was a friend) in excavating Southern California’s 1970s mores. Her writing is mesmerizing and infuriating because it’s the not the first thing that’s said about her after first mulling over her partying and posing nude with Marcel Duchamp.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. My copy has remained on my bedside table for the last thirty years or so because, when I can’t sleep at night, I open to a random page and read one of Agee’s glorious sentences. (This is a link to the whole book to discover your own sentence.) It’s like dipping into a private creative writing class. Walker Evans took some of his most admired photographs to accompany the book and, they too, are masterpieces.
Substack on my notebook:
5SmartReads by Hitha Palepu. There’s just so many pieces you’ll want to read but mine last night was #5SmartReads—October 13, 2022 on the country’s rising spread of maternity deserts.
Wayne Christensen of Vintage Morels and his recent story, Green Lasagna Bolognese & Friends. I’m astonished to report that I made the lasagna and shared the leftovers with the family who wanted seconds but there wasn’t any.
James Tynion IV, the comic book genius behind The Empire of the Tiny Onion, who, in time for Halloween, is adding new stories to his series, True Weird.
Keep it! 😉
Right??!!!!