Gastronomic Pleasures, Childhood Uncertainties, and a Cocktail to Use Up a Random Bottle
Plus: The new Curtis Sittenfeld is so good I'm almost annoyed
“There is no less vulgar way of expressing what a dry Martini gives me. It is as warming as a hearthfire in December, as stimulating as a good review by my favorite critic of a book I have published into a seeming void, as exciting as a thorough buss I have yearned for from a man I didn’t even suspect suspected me.”
This little paragraph by M.F.K. Fisher delights and depresses me in equal measure - delight that someone thought to put these words in this order to make such a crystalline picture of alcoholic pleasure and anticipation, depression because I know that this perfect flick of the literary wrist only comes with writing thousands and thousands of words of, for lack of a better word, dreck.
In case you haven’t guessed, greetings from the murky bog that is my Book Two manuscript! Let’s talk about brilliant books by other people instead.
Recently I read and loved…
An Alphabet for Gourmets by M.F.K. Fisher
This wonderful little book of essays is technically a re-read, though my first time with this book was over twenty years ago. I wasn’t even a teenager yet, but my well-meaning middle school librarian knew I liked to read about food and bought a copy of this for me. To say that reading it as an adult was eye-opening is a vast understatement - Fisher is equal parts intellect and sex drive when it comes to writing about eating and the rituals of the table. Her prose is crisp and witty but intensely sensual (in a way that utterly passed innocent young Sarah by), and she will have you craving fresh peas and soy-marinated steaks and pressed red caviar and, of course, the iciest of dry Martinis.
Child of all Nations (Kind aller Länder) by Irmgard Keun
As you’ll probably have suspected, 85-year-old German literary fiction is not part of my usual reading diet, but the back cover copy of Child caught my eye. There's millions of pages of fiction and nonfiction about life under Nazi rule, but not nearly as much about life after escape for refugees: the sense of loss, the alienation from a new place, the struggle to find some kind of gravity.
If I were being glib, I would say that this novel is like if Casablanca were told through the eyes of a child, if Victor Laszlo were equal parts idealist, philanderer, and grifter, with Ilsa his long-suffering helpmeet, and nobility like Rick’s nowhere to be found. The narrator, precocious ten-year-old Kully, is doing her best to make sense of a world where home is a distant memory, and daily life is a confusion of grand hotels, unpaid bills, and strained, stressed, angry adults. It’s a blackly funny book, with Kully’s good-natured naïveté pasted over the darkness of 1930s Europe.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
In the interest of full transparency: when I first heard about this book, I felt pretty damn grumpy in the way that all the brouhaha around Sally Rooney made me grumpy. As in, there have been people writing exactly these kind of books who have been dismissed and sidelined for years and years, but then an author categorized as “literary” takes it on and suddenly love stories have value? In the words of my husband’s people, bollocks to that.
But Curtis Sittenfeld has made me pack up my soapbox and go home, because this is a truly excellent book, with unbeatable characterization. Sally Milz’s anxious, self-defeating, thought patterns were painfully familiar, especially when she’s confronted with her love interest Noah Brewster, an incredibly successful aging pop star-slash-golden retriever in human form. I loved how Sally and Noah’s relationship shifted and evolved - at one stage, courtesy of 2020 and all its madness, they end up in an epistolary romance so smart and so emotionally resonant that I wanted to applaud. And when they finally see each other in person again, it’s a whole Fourth of July’s worth of fireworks. 10/10, would highly recommend you read this…and then go read Emily Henry, Kate Clayborn, Mhairi McFarlane, Marian Keyes, and all the other writers who’ve been doing this for years.
I also read and enjoyed…Impossible/The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz, The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman, The Nanny by Lana Ferguson, Her Best Kept Secret by Naima Simone, and Twice a Quinceañera by Yamile Saied Mendez
And I mixed…a Crème de Noyaux Sour.
My paternal grandparents lived in a sprawling house in the hills that had been built in the late 1950s. It had a top-of-the-line-for-the-time electric stove and oven, a wood-paneled den, and most Mad Men-esque of all, a bar closet off the living room, with tons of space for their staple bottles of gin and Lillet Blanc.
Friends, I wish I had that bar closet, if only because my liquor collection is starting to overwhelm my current setup: the old table where my grandfather mixed champagne cocktails at Christmas. (In case you were wondering, my bon vivant gene comes from him.)
But alas, London real estate prices being what they are, instead I am making an effort to use bottles I already have. It turns out crème de noyaux is an absolutely delicious substitute for amaretto, and makes a richly fruity sour that’s a velvety faded scarlet color.
(To give proper credit, this recipe is based on the Amaretto Sour from Modern Classic Cocktails by Robert Simonson.)
To make two drinks:
3 oz (90ml) Tempus Fugit crème de noyaux
1 1/2 oz (45ml) Buffalo Trace bourbon
2 oz (60ml) lemon juice
2 teaspoons 2:1 simple syrup
1 egg white
Put all the ingredients in a shaker and dry shake. Add ice, shake again, then double strain into a rocks glass packed with ice. Garnish with lemon peel, a cherry, or both on a toothpick!