Shana Tova


I wish you a good and sweet new year. Since it is the eve of Rosh Hashanah, only this will do:


The Eve of Rosh Hashanah


The Eve of Rosh Hashanah. At the house that’s being built
a man makes a vow: not to do anything wrong in it,
only to love.
Sins that were green last spring
dried out over the summer. Now they’re whispering.

So I washed my body and clipped my fingernails,
the last good deed a man can do for himself
while he’s still alive.

What is a man? In the daytime he untangles into words
what night turns into a heavy coil.
What do we do to one another—
a son to his father, a father to his son?

And between him and death there’s nothing
but a wall of words
like a battery of agitated lawyers.

And whoever uses people as handles or as rungs of a ladder
will soon find himself hugging a stick of wood
and holding a severed hand and wiping his tears
with a potsherd.


—Yehuda Amichai

tr. Chana Block & Stephen Mitchell

Shake n' Blake


I'm taking a break today. I'm up early so I can spend a few hours writing this morning, but the afternoon holds out the promise of two serious delights: Lunch at Shake Shack, and then a visit to the Morgan Library to see the William Blake show there.  Blake changed my life (that's a story for another time); the Morgan Library is one of my favorite places in NYC; and who doesn't love a good milkshake?

Jambon Persillé

I woke up today with a surprising and serious craving for jambon persillé, that Burgundian delicacy that resembles the head cheese I sometimes glimpse in horror at my local Polish grocery, and I'm sure they are pretty close kin. I've never made it myself, but I've watched my husband--whose superb cooking I have often likened to that of a French farm wife--make it, and it's no small undertaking. There's the making of (exceptionally gelatinous) stock, the chopping of meats and parsley and garlic, the slow cooking, the patience that a day's chilling in the refrigerator demands. It is not quite cucina povera, but a resourceful dish nonetheless, representing the combination and coaxing of ordinary ingredients (scraps, perhaps, back in the day) into something elevated, sublime. "Serve with crusty bread and a green salad" is one of those exhausted dining dicta we hear so often (with a hearty soup, with a lamb stew, etc.), but here I'll go with it: in this case too, it's all you want. And a few glasses of wine, obviously, though a very good dry cider might be nice, too.

Austerity and work will keep me from making a parsleyed ham terrine today, or next week, or the next, but I intend to do it soon--even if its season might more properly be spring than late summer. A craving is a craving, and should be satisfied when possible. When my friend Bernie learned of this particular craving, he mentioned that he'll be here in New York in October, and perhaps we could make a jambon persillé together. Yes, by all means.

But there was a time when cooking with others did not appeal to me in the least. I was less secure in my culinary competence back then, and dreaded the possibility of having anyone looking over my shoulder lest I was doing it--whatever it might be--wrong. As I've become a better cook, I've loosened up. For a time, a few years ago, I enjoyed regular Sunday night dinners with friends at their loft in lower Manhattan. These were improvised, uncomplicated affairs, normally following a few hours logged at the bar around the corner: a big pasta, a big salad, more bottles of wine than three people should rightly consume in one go. But for all their simplicity--no, surely because of their simplicity--they were invariably wonderful. One of us would saute vegetables while another made salad dressing and maybe the third cooked up some salmon to boost the dinner's protein level. And while we cooked, we drank and talked and felt perfectly relaxed, perfectly at ease. Those Sundays showed me what a joy cooking in the company of good and trusted friends can be.

And here's what I've observed: if you want to get to know someone better, spend time with her, or him, in the kitchen, cooking. Some old hearth-impulse comes out, and, warmed by it, you get closer, just like that. It never fails.

I can't wait to make jambon persillé when Bernie comes to visit, even if I mince the parsley too finely, or otherwise screw up in some small way. I've stopped worrying about stuff like that, because I know that there will be pleasure enough in time spent cooking together, making a mess, cleaning it up, talking, laughing, united in the honorable act of making something with so much history and soul. And I'm sure it will still be delicious, mistakes be damned.

Welcome to my Humble Chapeau

That, you just might know, is how Belle Carroca (played by the incomparable Lainie Kazan) greets Alan Swann (played by the inarguably heroic Peter O'Toole) in My Favorite Year, and it has always seemed to me as fine a welcome as any. I set up this thing up so long ago, I'd almost forgotten all about it. I think way back then I thought I'd come up with something incredibly interesting to say about Emily Dickinson, from whom I took the name of this thing, but I chickened out, and, anyway, so much the better to read her poems than to talk about them.

But here I am, so I should say something. First: Hi there, whoever you are. Let's start with poetry. I'll get to politics, faith, and food later.

I was very pleased with the response to an essay I recently wrote for the Poetry Foundation, called "In Search of the Auden Martini." One of the pleasures of working on the essay was that it gave me a good reason to read Auden, whom I hadn't read in ages, and to read an awful lot about Auden. If you haven't read Dorothy Farnan's Auden in Love, I highly recommend it. Farnan's prose can be a little over the top, and much of the book consists of gossip and anecdote. Maybe that's why it's such a ripping read, a perfect diversion for a rainy afternoon or sleepless night.

One of the other pleasures of working on the essay: it gave me a good reason to read an awful lot about the martini, and I wholeheartedly recommend Lowell Edmunds' bracing treatise, Martini Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail. It's smart, funny, and fiercely polemical.

Yet one more pleasure: A reason to make, and drink, plenty of martinis. All in the name of research.

More soon. Thanks for stopping by.