Raspberry and blackberry season are rising to a climax now - unfortunately, my parents' landscapers cut down the bearing canes behind the house a couple of years ago, and I don't quite know where to trespass safely in order to collect the wild raspberries. The Catskills are a much different place now than they were twenty years ago - a lot more sprawly development in the parts of the Catskill State Park where we used to go to get blackberries, raspberries, and, glories of the Northern woods that they are, blueberries.
Dave Jaffee and Bob Sabloff had a deer blind in the wild country north of Hunter Lake, and about three hundred acres of woodland were you could wander the blueberry patches. We picked the tiny berries into rusty tin cans, which were suspended around our necks on string loops, and we could collect *bushels*.
Jaffees, Sabloffs, Keisers, Klafters, Yekke-arzts, we would load up into the back of Bob's pickup and the back of Dave's International Harvester, and make our way up the Dahlia Road to the backcountry, with Coleman coolers full of icewater, picnic snacks, and bottles and baby food for my sister.
Now, the other five pounds of morellos are wet-processed in the freezer, and are waiting, along with a couple of bottles of Polish morello syrup and five kilos of buckwheat honey, to be turned into cherry mead.
It still uses the prototoffee, and I think I layered the cherries first and then the almonds, because that way you have the beautiful ruby-colored morello cherries on top of the cake, and the slivered almonds giving a kind of stepped-mahogony appearance to the cake.
Oh, the key difference between pineapple upside down cake and sour cherry-almond upside down cake is that instead of layering pineapple slices in the prototoffee butter/brown sugar, you layer split sour cherries and flaked almonds.
Serve soaked in the tiniest bit of kirsch and/or pflaumenliqueur.
sweet and sour cherry season is now passing, and with the last few fresh sour cherries left in the sugar bowl, I made cherry-almond upside-down cake.
Now, I've made different upside down cakes, and God Knows Alton Brown has some kind of cast-iron fetish and a predilection for bizarro wet-dry batter combinations, but his recipe for cornmeal upside down cake tastes good.
I was sitting in a trendy coffee shop, drinking free trade coffee, and I was thinking about globalization.
While we were fearing it,
that is, globalization,
it came,
whistling through our keyholes like ripe poison gas despite all of our efforts to seal our homes in good Tommy Thompson fashion, and I imagine that it finally came no matter what we did,
but came with less of fear
of the unfortunate consequences of globalization for which we were waiting,
because that fearing it so long,
which we have been doing since the false dawn of the American diminuendo during the troubled days of global stagflation in the 1970s seated the expectations of declinism and global cultural commoditism in our daily lives, altogether, I think that the anticipation of globalization, as it finally has arrived, long expected and normalized in our diminished expectation
had made it almost fair.
My wife was home, trying on bespoke subcontinental saris for which she sent through the internet, and I thought, my home has been outsourced into a clothing store, because in our spare guest room on the second floor, where I keep my spare author copies which I try to sell on ebay to the uncoming global cognoscenti of the Sub-Saharan world, like in a stall at the back of SYMS, and my wife is speaking directly to a seamstress in Bangalore, and when I asked her to parse a phone order so I could use it to write an article she had in her eyes a great disappointment, because the expensive value-added part of shopping at Barney's, that is, the careful assistance of expert fitters and selectors, was no longer in our financial reach.
There is a fitting --a dismay,
because the old certainties of our upper middle class lifestyle are being ruthlessly expropriated and airmailed to Bangalore. My wife tried on another sari, and we saw our future, locked inside of a fortress-like condominium in a reeking slum, my wife in a Burkha.
A fitting --a despair.
'Tis harder knowing it is due,
Than knowing it is here.
The trying on the utmost,
The morning it is new,
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through.
After we lit the menorah lights, we always sang _Maoz Tzur_ - "Rock of Ages" - the whole way through: six long stanzas. Took about five minutes.
Now I don't come from an Orthodox religious household, and I've never seen anybody else, including the Orthodox people I've spent time with on Hanukka, sing the whole thing.
So, why? Tonight I found out.
Larry Josephson was talking to Ismar Schorsch (president of the Jewish Theological Seminary) earlier on WNYC, and Schorch starts talking about his father Emil, who was the second Rabbi at the Hüngheim Synagoge in Hannover.
Schorsch Senior was arrested on November 9, 1938, and Schorsch's family secured his release by presenting visas for transit to England. Schorsch Junior recounted how he and his family lit the candles for the first day of Hanukka in Hannover (Wednesday, December 14, 1938), and the candles for the second day in London, after they flew from Germany to Britain. Ferociously expensive trip for the time. They sang all the stanzas of Maoz Tzur in thanks for being saved.
Here's my family's Hanukka story. My grandfather was also arrested on Kristallnacht, went to Dachau, and had his release secured by visas to England and hefty bribes to the Gauleiter. Here's the divergence - my grandmother went to England first, in April 1939, and my grandfather followed at the very end of August. On arrival in Liverpool after the beginning of the war, he was arrested and interned on the Isle of Wight as an enemy alien, and released in November 1939.
We light a Hanukka menorah that my grandfather made from scrap metal. He worked in a West End bicycle factory converted to munitions, and he made a menorah out of some scrap stainless sheet metal, because all of my grandparents' judaica had been confiscated during the emigration inventory of their belongings.
Yoon! Mazel Tov on the kid! Rachel says hi! Say hi to Joe for me!
PS I'm getting hitched in October.
N.B. Ithaca is still gorges.
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