words, words, words

In his effort to extract his foot from his mouth, the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has given us a perfect example of the nonapology apology fashionable among politicians when they get into mouth trouble. He blamed his choice of words when he chose to slander a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke rather than rebut her opinion.  

The professional word user has blamed the tool of his trade, like a carpenter blaming his hammer. 

What he offered was not an apology, because it does not address the offense. It was not the words that were at fault. It was the idea they expressed. Words have meaning, and we select them to express ideas. The idea must exist in our heads first if the words are to follow. He carefully chose his words and they eloquently expressed his thought. There can be no confusion about that, for he said it several ways.

It’s the idea that was wrong. If there can be an acceptable apology it can only address his vulgar idea, not the words he chose to express it. 

At Last

The sugar cream pie mystery is solved.

Well, maybe not. I changed too many variables for scientific research. A scientist would change one at a time. I was impatient and changed ‘em all, but the result was perfection.

First, I used “heavy cream” instead of “whipping cream,” the difference being 36 percent butterfat versus 34 percent. Unfortunately the butterfat content does not appear on most cream containers, but those descriptions do. Except when they label it “heavy whipping cream.”

Second, I brought the cream to room temperature before making the filling. I suspect that the starting temperature was a crucial factor in the failure of the first filling to set properly. This is the one precaution I’ll always take in the future.

Third, on the theory that the filling cooks from the outside edges inward, I stirred it carefully with a wooden spoon during baking to make the temperature uniform throughout. This had the unwanted side effect of destroying the smooth and pretty finish on top.

Fourth, ovens are not perfect, and I baked this pie in a different oven that might have reached a higher baking temperature though the settings were the same. To be certain, I should test the two ovens with an oven thermometer. 

Fifth, as soon as the pie was cool enough to do so I put it in the refrigerator to set. In an hour or two I cut two pieces, and they held their shape perfectly. Tasted good, too!

So, Hungry on Tilghman, you are invited to test the next one. 

Get Over It

I was in New York City for the weekend. Early Saturday morning I walked over to the Rockefeller Center Starbucks for a coffee and a copy of the Times. Got the coffee. No Times.
     Where can I get one, I asked the barista. She didn’t know.
     Huh?
     Okay, so she doesn’t read the Times.
     I asked a uniformed security guy, classic New Yorker.

“Used to be a stand in the basement here, but they took it out. There was one over on the corner. It’s gone. There were three here. Did you try a drug store?”

By now I was so flummoxed I didn’t care whether the drug store had papers. I returned to the hotel—half a block away—and asked the desk clerk. Hotels have papers for their guests. Don’t they?

“There are some in the restaurant for browsing, but you can’t take it.”

I can’t buy a Times? In the middle of Manhattan? I thought, but did not say: Why the hell not?

“Well,” said the desk clerk, “maybe in the middle of Manhattan....”

And 51^st between Fifth and Sixth is not the middle?

Manhattan news stand in 2011, via iStockphoto.

That afternoon on a three-hour walk around the city I saw exactly one corner news stand. What happened and when did they disappear? Yesterday? Last week?

I was a newspaper man for forty-one years, and when I thought about it I knew perfectly well why there were no papers. The answer was simple. If there were a profit to be made selling them in Manhattan, people would sell them. If not, then not. News is available—often free—online. Many people don’t read newspapers, and the publishers are learning that they should be glad of that. For them, it’s a blessing.

Think about it. Transmitting information via ink on paper is a Fifteenth Century technology now hopelessly inefficient. We think paper is lightweight, but it’s not. If a Sunday Times weighs a pound, then the Sunday circulation of a million copies weighs a million pounds. Delivering them requires hundreds of big trucks, pay and benefits for hundreds of drivers not to mention the pressmen, and there’s ink, paper, dealers’ markup, et cetera. These costs can be eliminated, and not replaced, by transmitting content instantly via the Internet. Why would one do otherwise when advertising revenues are drying up, as they have been for two decades? Costs that can be eliminated must be eliminated for news companies to survive. The old business model no longer works.

I had known this would happen. I hadn’t expected to see it so dramatically and quickly.

Even More About Pie

My neighbor Steve took umbrage (see his comment) at not being introduced to sugar cream pie, and I promised to make things right when I make the pie right. He also suggested that sugar cream sounded a lot like the chess pie he knew years ago (pictured below).

He’s right about that. They are very similar, but the Hoosier version does not include eggs or corn meal. Both, judging from my Internet research, sometimes do not set firmly.

My sugar cream pie was tasty as could be—rich, sweet, and smooth—but way too soupy. We had to eat it with spoons. So my sister, a richly experienced cook, and I started researching possible causes for the failure to set. She believes it had to do with the butter fat content of the cream (ideally 40 percent) and with the temperature reached. Suggestions include using a thermometer to confirm actual oven temperature, bringing the cream to room temperature before making the filling, stirring the filling during baking to assure uniform temperature throughout. Chess pie recipes suggest turning the oven off when the pie is done and leaving it in the oven to cool. The cream pie recipes say specifically to take it out after 45 or 50 minutes. Some even suggest putting it in the refrigerator to set after baking.

Clearly I will have to practice. When I get it right, Steve, you will be the first to test it.

Chess pie picture above from http://www.cookingwithoutanet.com/2009/05/baking-class-chess-pie.html

More About Pie

I recently stumbled upon a magazine article about something called “Hoosier sugar cream pie,” and it rang a bell. I well remember loving such a pie as a child, but we didn’t call it Hoosier. It was just sugar cream pie. Some outlander probably added the “Hoosier” to distinguish it from the more famous Boston cream pie, which is not a pie at all but a cake with chocolate icing.

Anyway, this magazine article said the recipe dated to 1816, the year Indiana became a state. So I went to my source, The Hoosier Cookbook, published by Indiana University Press in 1976. There I found the same recipe with a notation that it was 160 years old. The order of listed ingredients had been changed.

Let’s see: 1976 minus 160 equals, uh, 1816.

An old friend and former colleague recently asked me for a pie crust recipe I mentioned back in August. It too came from The Hoosier Cookbook, but copyright expressly forbids reproducing or utilizing any part of the book in any form without written permission. Presumably “utilizing” does not include baking pie.

So I won’t be posting the recipe without permission. But Jon, e-mail me at f-starr@northwestern.edu. I think Indiana University Press won’t sue me if I pass it on privately to a good friend. 
Photo: whatscookingamerica.net

Still Here

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of my death are exaggerated. In fact, I haven’t even been sick if you don’t count a wonky lower back.

But yes, I have been gone too long from this place, and I hope some of you agree. Electronic indications are that a few faithful readers have persevered. Beyond the United States, most of them are in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. That’s good. I spent a lot of time in those parts as a newspaper reporter.

So, get to the point. What’s my excuse?

Well, apart from black mold after Hurricane Irene, the arrival of crisp weather and associated bird dog duties, and continuing daily bouts of wrestling with The Moon, I have no excuse.

Ah, The Moon. Yes, there’s the real culprit. I’ve mostly used available time for The Moon, not the blog, although I did capitulate to the advice of the experts and activate a Facebook page, an act that required little time. 

So here’s what I’ve been doing.

It became clear that readers of the book would need to know things Main Character could not know. To fix that I had to shift the narrative’s point of view from one limited to him to one that writers call omniscient. (Don’t you love that concept?) This meant some rewriting of earlier material.

I also had to bring some other characters into the tale to dramatize actions that Main Character can’t know about. This meant inserting whole chapters in parts of the book I thought I’d finished.   

Third circumstance: the writing has outrun my outline. For some time I’ve been making up plot structure as I go. This has worked reasonably well since I’ve always known the general arc of the story. But it requires getting down basic structure—bare bones of the action—and coming back later to flesh it out with mood, description, characters’ reactions, explanation of motives, etc.

Too much information for you? Okay, I’ll stop now. But I did promise that this blog would be partly about writing the novel, and that is more about process than content. 

The Fire Next Time

High summer here has always been hard to bear. This one was the worst in memory, long weeks of heat and humidity near one hundred. Then, quickly, came a mighty wind killing century-old trees, an earthquake that rattled homes and confidence, a hurricane that drove water through our old house’s seams, followed by a week-long deluge.

Aftermath of Hurricane Irene

Another hurricane is out there somewhere. In Texas there’s fire and drought.

The writing seemed to fetch up on the rocks too for a time. Not writers’ block, whatever that is. No, not that. Rather I reached a place where events become quite precipitous and start occurring quickly, and that posed a dilemma. Should I speed up the pace to match the events and move quickly through them, or would that simply seem impatient? Should I slow them down instead to provide more sensory perception, more detailed description so the reader can savor them? I wrote it both ways and liked neither one very much.

The hard truth of course lay somewhere in the middle, that is, I should select the telling moments and concentrate on them but be sure the details earn their keep. Otherwise kill them. Many hard choices along this path, concentrating on this, skipping over that. It feels like walking through a minefield must feel, though I’ve never walked through one. It’s a critical period, hard to concentrate when also thinking about some unnamed tropical depression in the Atlantic.

James Baldwin wrote this:

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”