By the time you read this, I will have returned from my second of two trips to Egypt. I haven’t been there since 2007. I was of course fascinated to see how (or if) things had changed since the revolution.
The changes weren’t immediately obvious. Same crowds, same pollution, same bad traffic. Worse, in fact, said taxi drivers, because traffic cops weren’t really out in force anymore.
Same hucksters plying Talaat Harb. In fact I got lured into a perfume shop because a guy started talking to me about his experience during the revolution. So adaptable, these guys! Another gambit: “Don’t go that way–it’s closed for a demonstration!”
One concrete change: no more men with giant guns slumped in guard kiosks looking bored. Their presence used to be so common that ‘ZabiT’ (officer) was one of the first words I learned in Arabic class here. In 1992, my friend Karen got a picture of herself posing with some, and captioned it straight from our textbook dialogue: ‘Ma hadha? Hadha ZabiT.’ (What is that? That is an officer.)
And graffiti. Everywhere. Gorgeous and fully formed. Some of it bursting with psychedelic color, some of it in elaborate stencil portraits of the people killed during the revolution. The sad panda of the cheese commercials is slumped on walls everywhere: don’t say no to regime change.
And then there’s simply this:
Near Al-Azhar Mosque and University
I would love to end the post on this note, but it would be dishonest. When I first arrived at the end of September, public spaces felt noticeably joyful. Now as elections are getting closer, there’s mounting anxiety. The election system is opaque and disorganized, perhaps intentionally. The Maspero incident proved everyone’s worst fears about the military council. The Salafists are saying (and doing) ridiculous things but getting all the press. Even the graffiti is being painted over, chiseled out and even covered up by campaign posters.
It will be partially resolved in late November, when elections start in Cairo and Alexandria. Meanwhile, people are looking back at their photos from the 18 days of the revolution and recounting their stories, trying to rekindle that optimism. Hanshuf ba’a. We’ll see.
I know I’m not breaking any new ground, travel-wise, here in rural England. But sometimes it’s just fun to marvel at how different a place can be just in terms of its regular day-to-day shopping.
We hiked down to Blackbushe Market, which sounds twee because it has a little -e on the end, but is really just a gargantuan parking lot with people selling socks, DVDs and cheap clothes. You can shop from secondhand, garage-sale people for free, but it’s 50p entry to mill around the new stuff.
On offer were quite a few things you wouldn’t see in the U.S. Such as:
...Postman's legs.
It’s true–the British really love their dogs. This is a photo of a small area, and it doesn’t show the vast size of the stand selling pet gear and food–a double-wide lot. And it wasn’t the only operation at the market. In the village near us, where there isn’t a real grocery store, there is a giant pet-supply shoppe.
Oh, why I am just describing it? I do have a photo. I just didn’t want the post to skew too heavily toward dog food. But maybe that’s fair.
The smell wafting off these bones was a little intense...
At Blackbushe, there was a stand selling South African food. Have never seen such a thing. The place was packed, and not, apparently, with South Africans. Spicy stuff is thin on the ground here, so perhaps that’s part of the appeal. Well, that and jerky. In the convenience store in the village near us, they sell kits for making nachos. The brand is Mexican Discovery, with the tagline “More Adventurous Tastes.” Sigh. I miss Mexico.
Elsewhere at the market was a stall selling oil paintings–new and horrible ones, like you’d see in a cheap motel. Where do they come from? And even more baffling, who buys them? It felt very Dutch golden age, when oil paintings went mainstream.
Nearby, someone else was selling “hi vis vests.” Cyclists here are big on reflect-y things. What you especially wouldn’t see in the U.S.:
Mommy's Little Helper is great at working road construction!
Also surprising at the market was the number of butchers. One was even auctioning off hunks of pork roasts, with the head butcher wearing one of those head mikes so that he looked like Britney Spears on tour, and riling up the crowd to bid higher.
On the other hand, here’s an excellent use of quotation marks:
No, officer, these aren't "counterfeit."
After the market, we hiked back to Hartley Wintney, the village near us. That village with only a convenience store. Which I know is not exactly a fair place to judge a culture, but you can buy these everywhere:
Both of these products, in fact.
It’s times like this I’m glad we get fed in a cafeteria here on the campus where we’re staying–a cafeteria where I can just point to what I want, and don’t actually have to ask for a pork faggot. Or a postman’s leg.
Like I said, I was having a little trouble grasping what Denmark was all about. But then I met up with my friend S—, who helped it seem like a real, distinct place to me.
“Tonight we’re going to have a typical Danish dinner,” she said. “It’s what everyone eats for Christmas, and of course when very important guests come!”
S— knows me well. She’d held off on shopping so that I could go to the supermarket and gawk at everything. The first thing she pointed out to me were these little crumbly things you put on top of pate for a smorrebrod.
Fat in two forms.
“Next to that,” she said, “is pork fat. Also for bread.”
And then she pointed out the pork cracklings. “But these are the bad ones. We need the fresh ones.”
The fresh ones.
And then she bought the dinner: a giant pork loin-and-rib roast, with the skin still on and sliced thin–imagine a loaf of bread that has only been sliced down for the top inch.
So, it appeared that the No. 1 way in which Denmark distinguishes itself from its neighbors is through its love of pork. Right on.
After we got a bottle of wine from the very cheerful man running wine tastings–in the supermarket, in his handsome leather butcher’s apron…
The shopping cart is full of wine glasses.
…we headed back home. Side dishes for the pork roast were red cabbage (sweetened with red-currant syrup) and potatoes. For dessert, a kind of cake that S—‘s son described as something only old ladies–and he–made.
Now, I’m going to tell you about this roast in detail, so that I don’t forget. I swear I will coerce a butcher into getting me such a roast at home, but it’s tricky, as they typically have already cut the skin off.
The key thing, S— says, is to salt the skin and fat very well, and to rub the salt down in between the fat slices.
Then you stick it in the oven on high heat, and after about 15 minutes, you start giving it the eye. You don’t want the cracklings to burn.
Your hands might be shaking with the excitement of watching the cracklings, so that you might take a kind of bad photo.
As soon as the skin properly crackles–it’s hard and a little bubbly–you cover it in foil and let the roast finish cooking.
If the crackling hasn’t behaved properly and crackled, but you had to cover it anyway because it was getting too dark, you can stick it up under the broiler at the end. This is what we did. Last-ditch effort, S— says, is to slice the fat and skin off and do it in the broiler separately, but no one really wants that.
Then you whip up a little gravy–or, as S— is wise to do, a lot of gravy, using all the juices from the roasting pan. And you boil the potatoes. And you uncover the cabbage that’s been simmering there with its currant syrup, vinegar and a pinch of sugar that you maybe stole from the coffee joint earlier in the day.
And then you slice up the roast and eat it.
Swoon.
And then, after you’ve been coerced into eating more of the crackling than is rational, because, as S— warns, it’s no good the next day, and you will be very, very sad if you try to eat it the next day and know you should’ve just eaten it the night before when it was still hot and crispy…
After all that, you somehow manage to eat a slice of the kiksekage, the old-lady cake that’s just a genius kind of ice-box cake using crispy vanilla biscuits and chocolate ganache.
Danish old ladies--and well-behaved teenage sons--rock.
And then you roll into bed. And just as S— promises, you sweat quite a bit, due to your body working hard to digest all the fat. Presto–you wake up feeling Danish. And ready for a breakfast of chocolate slabs on poppyseed bread.
Again, the hands trembling with excitement. Or just pork-detox tremors.
I spent the first couple of days in Copenhagen thinking it was just like Amsterdam:
Semi-dreary weather that fosters gezelligheid, I mean hygge…
Aw, adorable.
Loads of bikes…
The bike-traffic counter on one of the big bridges.
Snazzy design…
Even the thrift stores are hip-looking in Copenhagen.
Common-sense outlook…
The sign says to drink a glass of milk every day.
But some variations started to creep in, the more I looked around. The buildings were taller, pointier. The people weren’t taller, but they were pointier too, somehow. I walked past a shop selling leather harnesses, and it turned out they were for horses, not for bondage.
And the fast-food stands weren’t selling herring, but hot dogs with fantastically snappy skin.
My friend S--- says you must drink chocolate milk with your hot dog.
And after a day of walking around with my friend S— and her family, it finally kicked in. I was in a new place! With all kinds of new and interesting things. I’m not sure what triggered it–maybe passing the Maersk shipping line headquarters (unsurprisingly boxy), or seeing the espresso stand on the promenade, built into one of those three-wheeled utility trucks.
Or it might’ve just been when I saw the Little Mermaid statue?
She is indeed quite little.
Thanks, Copenhagen–my mental map has just expanded further north.
I have never felt quite so much like I’m living in a movie than I do here in rural England. My previous experience in the U.K. consisted of a dreadful six months on a student work visa in 1994, during which I worked in London and managed to lose money. My then-boyfriend and I went to Wales for the weekend, and I think also to Edinburgh.
So England outside of London has been created in my mind solely through PBS miniseries. You know: rock walls, grand manors, men in rubber boots walking enormous dogs on the heath.
Uh. It’s all true. So much so that I kind of keep doing double-takes. We arrived on a Monday, cruising up a tree-lined drive past a 17th-century mansion. The next day we went walking and passed not one but two men with giant dogs. And boots, natch. The day after that, I was tempted to tell people they could just stop with the accents now.
What else?
Ale tastes better here, in situ. It’s warming, and drinks like a meal.
Food is a lot better than when I lived here in 1994. There’s real coffee now, not just instant, and ingredients seem fresher. Here where Peter is doing his thing, the cafeteria serves “Bramshill estate cured venison” at lunch. That’s where we are–Bramshill estate. And I saw the deer–there are scads of them. Somehow, in the U.S., there would be a law against serving that deer to people.
The only problem with the food is that it’s still British. I mean, a good chicken-and-mushroom pie is a wonderful thing. But after a while, you crave a little spice. Spice and texture. I’ve seen “squidgy” on food packages as a point of pride, not a point of nasty.
English English is very wordy. You see a warning sign, and you just think, Eesh, I don’t want to read all that. My editing brain is in overdrive, mentally striking out all the unnecessary words, phrases, whole sentences. But then, on the plus side, that warning sign often explains why you’re not supposed to do something, which is helpful.
It’s a little unfortunate that the tube that goes from Heathrow into London is the Piccadilly line to Cockfosters. And then right near where we live there’s a house called Moorcocks. It goes on. And once you’re in that frame of mind, a place called Hazeley Bottom also makes you snicker.
Footpaths are fantastic. That’s where the real PBS miniseries feeling kicks in, when you’re striding across someone else’s property, past all their orchards, on a trail that they’re obliged to maintain and signpost. Very classy. We’ve now walked many miles, as the nearest pub is at least 30 minutes away.
The gap between London and the rest of England is vast and real. Not in a bad and scary way, like the difference between rural America and New York City. I know it’s lazy journalism to quote your cab drivers, but the first one we had was resoundingly atheist, solidly left and very well informed on all manner of current issues, and was from the not-even-a-village right here.
Which reminds me of another driver we had. “Yeah, the lottery–they say the winners are very unhappy,” he told us. “It’s because they become classless, you see. They don’t know where they belong anymore.”
I’ve spent most of my traveling life thinking I needed to get below the surface, that the obvious stuff was trumped up just for tourists. Being here makes me think I’ve been getting it very wrong. Or maybe in this case, TV has been getting it right.
We thought maybe 30 people would show up for the tour of the main galley. Whoa, were we wrong–it was more like 300 people, and the line stretched down the hall and through the pub and back to the casino.
What is so gripping about industrial food preparation? I know the output is generally bad, but all that stainless steel sure is great to look at.
Thanks to the British influence, it was a very orderly line waiting to see the galley.Orders flash up on this screen at the front. Guests in the restaurant have a choice of many apps and mains, so service can be pretty intense, I imagine.Cold apps being plated.Note the pile of bread slices with rounds cut out for little canapes.Scarily huge soup tureens.Man tending less huge soup pot.The only thing they don't bake on board, they say, is bagels. Those, it seems, they get from whoever supplies the airlines--ie, not a bagel expert.Wedgwood china, stickers still on.State-of-the-art phone.Not many kitchens have escalators.
During dinner service, they have the Parade of Chefs, where the kitchen staff march out in their white jackets and toques and file all up and down the staircases, in Broadway-like precision, while everyone, led by the Commodore Himself, claps in unison. It was a great throwback bit of showmanship, and having seen the scale of the galley and considered the size of the operation, I really appreciated the French brigade system in a way I haven’t before. And it maybe made my beef Wellington taste just a little better…
Last week’s post was all the philosophical wisdom one gains from a grand trans-Atlantic crossing. This week: the practical stuff, ie, Handy Tips for Younger Passengers, or What the Savvy Traveler (but Non-Cruiser) Needs to Know.
1) Book early. We booked in early summer for the first week in September, and at that time the cheapest fare (about $1,100 per person) applied to the three lowest room categories, which includes the rooms with balconies cut into the hull.
These balconies are supposedly not as nice as the proper-balcony rooms on higher decks, but I could sit outside and not stare at the sea and contemplate how terrifyingly far from land we were, which was a bonus in my book.
The front half of our cabin, with our balcony doors open. Bed just to the left.
2) Board late. The older-skewing demographic means there’s a big easily worried, early-arriving camp. We got to Red Hook Cruise Terminal at 3:10pm for a 4pm sailing, and didn’t have to wait in line at all. One woman even said, “You got here at the perfect time!”
Just a warning: They take your photo when you first get on the boat. You might not want to wear a see-through shirt.
3) They’re not kidding about formalwear. I just assumed everyone would half-ass this. Lordy, no! I’d also misread the materials, and thought there was only one truly formal night. Actually, no to that point too. Five out of seven nights are formal. I honestly have no idea how you really pack for that, unless you also have a coolie to tote your steamer trunks.
[Public apologies to Heather, who helped me pick my formalwear at the Salvation Army. I promised her a photo of the ridiculous red polyester with red glitter dots, but failed utterly.]
But as I said in my last post, you can opt out and eat at the buffet restaurant, which actually feels better for your health anyway, as you can eat as much salad as you want.
4) The Todd English restaurant is worth it. You can pay $35 per person extra and eat here. Do it once, at least. It’s what the main dining room is trying to be, but is automatically better because they’re only doing 40 covers a night, not 800.
I kind of scoffed before our dinner there: “Humph–Todd English! He has a restaurant at La Guardia!” But even the prosciutto-and-fig pizza tastes better on a ship than in the main terminal at LGA.
5) Be sure to go to the buffet restaurant the night it’s in Lotus, the Asian zone. Because that’s when they might have the Filipino pork belly with adobo. Hot damn, that was good. They need to let more of their Asian staff cook.
6) The library is great. The real pro cruisers were all in there in a mob the first day, snapping up the John Grisham books, I guess. The library didn’t have a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, but they did have The Pale King, which I should’ve read instead of Freedom. (Sorry, thought I got over that–I think I’m done grumbling now.)
7) Feeling seasick? Go to the pool. We bought a three-day sauna pass, and the first day we went was the “real ocean weather” day. It was a little icky sitting in the steam room, in the dark, and in fact a guy who was in there when I was went from cheerful to miserable in a matter of a minute. But floating in the pool, even though it was crashing around dramatically, was instantly relaxing–call it the aqua-gyroscopic effect, I guess.
8 ) If you’re young, introduce yourself to other youngish people. We should’ve done this more. There weren’t very many of them, but I imagine they were all feeling as out of place as we were. Or…they might’ve looked at us and thought, Why are these old people talking to us?
9) Going solo is fine. Think of all the reading you could get done! You can order room service, and the Caesar salad is pretty good. But, yeah, it is pretty solidly couples all over the ship.
Here I am enjoying my room-service cheese plate, on our poor-man's balcony. You have to stand up to see the water.
10) Don’t plan on doing anything important in the first four days off the ship. Just when your inner ear gets all groovy with being on the water, you’re dumped off on dry land. And everything seems to tilt way this waaaaay, and then way that waaaaay. Exercise and walking helps, but sitting still is difficult.
Also, the time change going east is surprisingly a drag–they set the clocks back an hour on every night but the first and the last. These shorter days, plus the world tilting, makes you feel jet-lagged even though you’re not exactly, and you can’t cop that excuse.
Being on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic gives you plenty of time to think. To keep your mind of unpleasantries like “Just how far is it to the bottom of the ocean?”, “How fast are we killing the planet?” and “Who are all these rich people?”, I guess you’re supposed to attend scarf-tying classes and all the other activities.
Instead, I slept a lot and read all the literature they gave us. Here’s what I know now. (Photos from Peter; see them all here.)
1) It’s an ocean liner, not a cruise ship. Flimsy little cruise ships are too feeble to even get anywhere if they’re in serious swells.
Handsome!
Each day at noon, the commodore came on the intercom for announcements, just like in school. Unlike in school, I could listen from the comfort of my own bed. Which I often did, and dozed off again when he handed the mike to the German announcer.
On Day 3, when the ocean was quite rough, with serious pitching such that every 10 seconds or so you felt like you were on one of those free-fall rides at the fair, the commodore came on the intercom to say cheerily, “This is real ocean weather for a real ocean liner–something to savor.” I think I will savor that phrase forever.
2) It’s a crossing, not a cruise. Actually, I knew this already from the literature, but it was surprising how many people (ie, lots) had done cruises before. Also, it’s still ridiculous to me that straight people use this as a verb so innocently. I managed not to snicker whenever someone said, “Yes, we’ve cruised quite a bit,” while patting his wife on the knee, but it was difficult.
3) I’m not old, but I’m not young. Peter went to crash the “young adults” get-together, for people 30 and under, in the G32 disco, but by the time he got there, everyone was over 60, as they were everywhere else on board. This wasn’t terrible, but also not very invigorating.
Peter and I got to be on nodding terms with the only other person in our age bracket, a solo girl of about 30, who read a lot and stared moodily out to sea. Also, apparently this guy was around, but I’m not certain we ever saw him.
4) Singalongs are fun. They’re overdue for a comeback. On Day 3, the day of real ocean weather, we happened across a mob assembled for “Groovy Choir,” even descending the two main curving staircases, like a Broadway musical. We sang a bunch of 80s songs, and “Waltzing Matilda,” while swaying with the ship. At one point, someone was doing a disco move in the glass elevator as it went up the atrium.
(Corollary wisdom: Karaoke isn’t as much fun outside of Asia. Or Peter and I need to work on our act. “King of the Road” isn’t a natural duet, really.)
5) Jonathan Franzen is overrated. I checked out Freedom from the surprisingly good ship’s library, and I’m still irritated that I wasted three perfectly good reading days on it.
6) I was tricked into going to a resort! On Day 6, it came to me: Duh–the QM2 is just an all-inclusive on the water.
Ah, rats--we never did play shuffleboard.
But the fact that it took me that long to realize why the whole dynamic felt familiar (buffet lines, activities, karaoke every night, etc.) is pretty good testament to how well the QM2 manages to preserve the lingering romance of the trans-Atlantic crossing. And even if you’re just eating a hot dog for lunch, at least you’re sitting out in the salt air and seeing nothing but horizon all around.
7) The Titanic wasn’t a disaster. On airplanes, they take care never to remind you that planes can crash. But on the QM2, you can have your portrait taken in front of a Titanic-interior backdrop. The Titanic sinking spot is marked on a map on Deck 8, and the commodore announces when you’re passing it. And, the commodore later told me, the movie Titanic actually caused a spike in demand for trans-Atlantic crossings, and motivated the building of the QM2.
8 ) Americans are over-eaters, but I owe them. I read in the Cunard literature that the buffet-style service (as opposed to formal table seating) was added, following demands from Americans. But the buffet was the only place you could eat at night without dressing up in formalwear, and I had seriously underpacked in this respect. And the buffet wasn’t a disgusting explosion of gluttony–it was actually quite tame, with only a few options each night.
Plus, if we’d had to eat sit-down fancy food every night, I think we would’ve been ill. Even with the best of intentions, dinner for 600 in one seating is going to be all wrong. Imagine a whole week of wedding food.
Our assigned table was out of the frame to the left.
Due to our preferences for comfortable shoes and green salad, we basically abandoned our assigned table-mates in the formal dining room. One night midway along, we peeked in and saw the four of them sitting there. Oops–we’d assumed everyone would go their separate ways.
So when we ran into both couples very near the end, we felt a little sheepish. We had a nice talk with one set, a just-retired couple from Long Island who were off to Paris for a week. But then we spotted the other couple in the G32 disco, and, well, you haven’t been snubbed until you’ve been snubbed by a 50somethng gay man in a navy-blue club jacket.
9) The commodore is the captain. I went most of the week thinking he was some flunkie, assigned to doing the daily announcements and glad-handing us all at a cocktail party on Day 2. But then we got invited to dine with him. Peter wasn’t quite as clueless as I was about the commodore’s rank, and had slipped him a copy of his book at the cocktail party.
The commodore was thoroughly charming, especially considering he has to spend most of his time making announcements and chatting with people at dinner every night. (His wife, I noticed, was showing a little luxury-lifestyle fatigue, as she had strawberries for dessert instead of baked Alaska.)
The other people at the commodore’s table that night were
a couple of vintage-car collectors from Australia, fresh from the show at Pebble Beach;
the Lessers, a frequent-cruising couple with Diamond status on Cunard, the man of which introduced himself as “the evil of two Lessers”; and
world-champion ballroom dancers, recently wed.
Guess which are the pro ballroom dancers.
On the cocktail party night, the commodore made a very nice speech about how we were carrying on a grand tradition of travel, there in the ballroom in our fabulous formalwear. (Well, mine was from the Salvation Army, and might’ve counted as formal only in 1974.)
And the history is certainly the thing that makes the QM2 not a soul-killing cruise that induces David Foster Wallace-style alienation and despair. Plus, the decor is all Art Deco-ish, and genuinely classy.
On a less classy ship, this bronze statue's boobs would've been all shiny from people rubbing them during photo ops, I bet.
So how about some jazz bands and phosphates and sleeve garters? There was only one man aboard who was sporting mustache wax, and that is just a tragedy. And I want to see the return of the bouillon cart I read about on one of the history panels all over the ship. This was an afternoon service for everyone bundled up in blankets on their deck chairs–loads better than tea. What the heck, throw in some con artists and flimflam men too.
Other ideas? I have a direct line to the commodore.
I haven’t written about my home cooking in many months, and probably won’t again for a while (since I won’t be home till January, but that’s another story). But as you’ll see, this doughnut thing—I need to write about it for closure.
Years ago, I wrote a couple of posts about how I learned to cook (here and here), and had always meant to write a third one about Cook’s Illustrated.
Cook’s Illustrated is the world’s most boring magazine. But damn, its plodding, exhaustive articles have taught me so much. I first subscribed in 1996, when I was in grad school. And except for a couple years in the middle when I got disgusted by how low-brow the recipes had gotten (school-lunch-style tacos), the magazine has shown up at my door every two months since.
Turns out I could’ve quit early on, because the March/April 1997 issue has been the single handiest one ever. It covered Irish soda bread, corned beef, chicken and dumplings, crepes and quick-braised lamb shoulder chops. This last thing I lived on, with endless variations, for the first few years of freelancing in New York, and the general techniques behind all of these recipes have been essential.
So retro!
Oh, and it has a killer recipe for key lime pie. I use it to this day. As you can see from the nasty stickiness all over the pages.
Mmm, sticky.
The one thing in the issue I have never cooked is the buttermilk doughnuts. Every year or so I have occasion to pick up this issue, and I always pass the doughnut article with regret. Sure, I could whip up 15 doughnuts in 45 minutes—but when would I ever have occasion to do that? I’m not shy about deep-frying, but it has to be a special occasion, and there are pretty much never special occasions before noon in my life.
But then we got this weather. Hurricane Irene, hell-bent on the eastern seaboard, and Peter and I housebound for the whole weekend. Our friend Katie had just come back from Maine with two enormous tubs of wild blueberries she’d harvested. We froze one and devoured the other almost, and there were about two handfuls of berries that needed to be eaten, stat.
And our fridge happened to be full of lard that needed to be kicked before we left. Who leaves a housesitter with a quart of lard and nothing else?
I was going to try to avoid saying this, but what the hell: It was the perfect storm of downtime, odd special occasion and ingredients just begging to be used.
As promised, the recipe was indeed easy. I made half the quantity, because it wasn’t special occasion enough to make myself violently ill by eating 10 doughnuts or so by myself, which I just might, given the opportunity. We got a yield of about eight doughnuts, which was fine by us.
They fried up beautifully and popped to the surface of the fat, just like they’re supposed to. We fried in lard, despite Cook’s Illustrated‘s warnings: Its panel decided lard’s flavor was “too meaty”—killjoys! This article was from 1997, remember, so the Cook’s Ill crew unapologetically embraced Crisco as the optimal frying medium, while sneering at lard for its unhealthiness as well.
(Let the record show that I have been on the side of lard since 1972.)
In fact, lard worked wonderfully, and the abstractly meaty flavor made these the perfect brunch doughnut, solving that timeless dilemma of sweet or savory.
I also made up a little glaze—milk and cornstarch—and drizzled it over. The problem with this glaze is that
1) I have not seen the Krispy Kreme glaze waterfall with my own eyes in years, so I couldn’t remember what viscosity I was shooting for, and
2) to get the proper crunch with the glaze, you have to give it time to harden up.
But there was no time! These doughnuts had to be rushed to our mouths instantly! My god—how could that glaze not understand?
No, we don't own a doughnut cutter. Why do you ask?
I think all we ate that day until about 9pm, when the hurricane was pretty thoroughly gone and the sun had set in churning orange clouds, was blueberry doughnuts.
2 P.M.3 P.M.
During the hurricane, our power didn’t go out, our basement didn’t flood, no trees fell down on our house. In fact, we slept right through the storm. Frankly, it was a tiny bit of a letdown—but these doughnuts made the day special.
Blueberry Buttermilk Doughnuts to Weather a Storm
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated Makes about 8 doughnuts
I used cake flour because that’s all we had, but I think this made the doughnuts actually a little too tender and cakey. If you’re not making a glaze, then add more sugar to the recipe–it’s not a very sweet doughnut.
1 3/4 cups flour (2 cups if you’re using cake flour)
Large handful wild (small) blueberries)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp fresh grated nutmeg
Zest from one lemon
1/3 cup buttermilk*
2 T butter, melted
1 egg
Lard for frying
Topping:
Confectioners sugar
Milk Or
Cinnamon
Sugar
Toss the blueberries with a couple of tablespoons of flour just to coat; set aside. Mix all the remaining dry ingredients together.
Mix egg, buttermilk and melted butter together, then pour this into the dry ingredients and mix well. You’ll end up with this very gloopy batter. You might have to add some more flour to get something you can cut into doughnut shapes.
Very heavily flour a cutting board or counter, then lay the batter/dough out. Scatter flour over the top. Gently nudge it into a round about half an inch thick. (Cook’s Ill says to use a rolling pin, but I can’t see how this wouldn’t end in tears, with all the dough stuck to it.) Use a glass with a floured rim to cut out rounds, then use something extra-small to cut out the holes.
Heat up your lard to about 375, and then carefully slide your little doughnuts into the hot fat. Flip once, after a bit less than a minute. They pop to the surface very nicely when cooked through. Fish them out and lay them on paper towels to dry.
For the glaze, combine confectioners sugar and milk till you have a reasonably thick but pourable mix. Drizzle this over the doughnuts, and wait for it to harden if you can. Or just go with cinnamon sugar–this would go nicely with the lemon zest and the blueberries.
*You know the fake buttermilk trick, right? Squeeze about a teaspoon of lemon juice in regular milk, and then let it sit for about 10 minutes, until the mixture thickens up.
