Corn Feast

Steve's coming to dinner, and we will eat corn chowder, followed by corn on the cob. I could make corn pone or corn bread or hush puppies, and corn pudding for dessert, but I won't. There are plenty of other themes worthy of obsession that require less work.

I followed poet Rebecca Loudon's recipe for corn chowder, which she has posted on her blog, "Radish King."

When I read Rebecca on food, I knew her palate was the real thing, sensitive and adventurous as Colette's, and I was right: the chowder is delicious! Here's her recipe:

Veggie (not vegan) Corn Chowder

1 summer morning thunderstorm after a long dry spell, hail if possible
2 cobs of really fresh corn not frozen or etc.
1 or 2 regulation sized Yukon gold potatoes (this chowder should be more corny than it is potatoey)
1 regulation sized onion
1 cup of dry white wine
2 cups of veggie stock
1 cup of heavy cream
1 leek
2 stalks of celery
1 sprig of fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
cumin
salt
pepper


Dice the celery and the onion.
Wash the sand off your leek, dry it, then slice the white part into thin rings.
Heat a blob of butter and a blob of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot.
Sauté the veggies until they are clear.

This would be a good time to dice your potatoes to a manageable smallish size. Leave the peelings on unless you get frantic about stuff like that.

Then shuck the corn and cut the kernels off with a very sharp knife. I usually break the corn cobs in half then cut the kernels off in a bowl because they make a mess and go flying everywhere. After you cut off the kernels, scrape the cobs with the back of a knife to get out all the sweet milky corn goodness. Don’t cheat on this part. It’s what makes this chowder so yummy.

Add 1 cup of dry white wine to the veggies and let it reduce by half.
Add the veggie stock and bring the fire up until it boils.
Toss in the potatoes and corn and corny milk stuff.
Lower the fire to a simmer.

Once the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes, add the cream, a teaspoon of cumin (you just have to trust me on this), a bay leaf if you have one, and a sprig of fresh thyme if you have one of those. Salt and pepper to taste. Turn the fire to low and let the chowder simmer for at least a half hour.

Once you're ready to serve this, drizzle it with a wee bit of very good virgin olive oil and sprinkle it with chopped flat parsley for looks.

Serve with a good crusty piece of bread. I’m making baguettes today because I don’t have time for brioche.

This is good even if the sun is out.

A Swim and Picnic During a Catastrophe

Last night, when my eyes snapped open at three in the morning, I turned on the bedside light and read Willa Cather's short story, "Neighbor Rosicky." One fourth of July, during a drought, Anton Rosicky takes his two sons to the horse tank at the windmill, and the three of them go into the cool water naked. The preacher comes and asks him to join the other farmers and their families, who will be at the church to pray for rain. The preacher acts as if he's never seen a naked man before. Rosicky does not go to church. He tells his wife they should all have their supper in the orchard. They eat fried chicken, biscuits with plum jam, and drink their homemade wild-grape wine. His wife Mary tells the story of that Fourth of July: "The wind got cooler as the sun was goin' down, and it turned out pleasant, only I noticed how the leaves was curled up on the linden trees." She asks Anton about the corn. Wasn't the hot wind hard on the crop? Anton tells her there is no corn. "'All the corn in this country was cooked by three o'clock today, like you'd roasted it in an oven.'" He says they will have no crop at all. "'That's why we're havin' a picnic.'"

I closed the book, turned off the light, and fell asleep thinking of the Rosicky family, the scorched crop, the cool horse tank, the picnic in the orchard. I don't have wild-grape wine, but today I'm going to put aside a bottle of good red for hard times, that and some jam.

Spectral Sky

Twilight: August 7, 2009, Arlington, Massachusetts

Change of Style

It was time to replace the soiled rug that's been down for twenty years in a room we use every day. John and I finally agreed the rug had to go. He also wanted to get rid of the chest that served as our coffee table. I wasn't so sure. We had had the chest since 1965. John found it in a building about to be demolished in the South End of Boston, and carried it home to our small apartment on Harwich Street--the building's long gone--with the help of a friend. The chest is very heavy and may have been used for tools. We once saw a similar one underground in the subway in Boston.

Our marriage and our possession of the chest are almost contemporaneous, but I was surprised at how easily I adjusted to letting the chest go and wondered what else I could cast off.

We're thinking of replacing the chest with the Noguchi coffee table first produced in 1948. The glass-top table looks light, though it probably is as heavy as the chest. There are no sharp corners, no place to store things. The wing-shaped glass top seems to float. Maybe I'll make it a symbol of the next period of our marriage. Maybe not. I don't want us to be too light or smooth or transparent. No chance of that. Even after we had made the decision to buy a new rug, we quarreled about how really dirty it was. John ran his foot back and forth across the rug, raising the nap, making the rug darker. "See, it's not dirt," he said. "What are you talking about!" I answered. "You're sure on a short fuse," he said. I had barely raised my voice.

Sweet Corn

We always called it "sweet corn" when I was growing up.  We'd buy it at Richfield Farms in Clifton, New Jersey.  A heavy-set woman with dark hair, flushed face, and plump arms would be seated in front of a bushel basket loaded with corn.  She would rip the husk down part-way to make sure there were no worms and toss the ear of corn into a large brown paper bag.  Summer had begun.

It did today when we bought our first corn at Busa's in Lexington, the variety called "butter and sugar."  (Busa's does not grow "silver queen," a variety I find much too sweet.)  I steamed the corn for five minutes and ate it with salt and pepper--no butter.  We made a supper of corn, broccoli with olive oil; for dessert, cherries.  

I'll be eating corn for weeks, until summer is over, and always buy it from Busa's, which has been in business since 1920.  They sell their corn the day it is picked.

Here is a depiction of Chicomecoatl, the Corn Goddess of the Aztecs.  Accounts I've read say that every September the Aztecs would sacrifice a young girl to the goddess, pour her blood over the goddess's statue, and flay the girl.  The priests would wear garments made of the girl's skin.  I'm glad to buy my corn at pleasant Busa's, hear only the squeak of the husks as I shuck, watch the jiggling pot lid, and eat a peaceful meal. But should we congratulate ourselves for our civilized behavior?  We have our own forms of cruelty.

Sounds and Sweet Airs

Anthony Roth Costanzo is a great counter tenor with a gorgeous voice: honeyed, powerful, rich. On Sunday, at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, I heard him sing the role of the sorceress in Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas." Although he played the most evil character in the opera, he sang like an angel, his voice swelling, filling the theatre with sweet throbs: From the ruin of others our pleasures we borrow. The spirit of malice, he destroys Dido, the Queen of Carthage, for the pleasure of it.

Artists often give the best words and music to devils and monsters. Caliban, Shakespeare's monster, adores music, his speech itself a song: "The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not./ Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep,/ Will make me sleep again . . . " Milton's devil speaks in magnificent measures: "Farewel happy Fields/ Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail/ Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell/ Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings/ A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time./ The mind is its own place, and in it self/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." Satan's wondrous shield hangs "on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb/ Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views/ At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole."

By comparison, the devils of our own culture are one-sided, cartoonish, vampire lovers like Johnny Depp included. Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) in "Deadwood": you can have him. Tony Soprano mumbles. They don't have lines worth quoting.

Next year Costanzo will be a soloist in Handel's Messiah. Heaven.

Storm, Pig, Picnic

We drove west through rain and green monotony.

Today I fully understand the word "wallow." The pig lay in the mud, snorted up muddy water, dozed in mud. O, happy pig.

We bought tome cheese, tomatoes, bread, and blueberries at the Cooperstown Farmers Market, and had our picnic near the Lake Otsego.