D'Ough!

It's my job to make croissants for family feasts. I'm not much of a baker, but I get the nod in my family because basically no one else wants to bake at all. This year we had no prospects for a big Thanksgiving dinner and no real plans for ourselves, and that was okay, because Dave has never particularly like turkey anyway. He always made the turkey, and the stuffing, and the potatoes, and the side dishes, and the gravy, and the peeled prawns with tarragon mustard sauce, and a selection of Horse Doovers, and he opened the can of cranberry sauce and shlorped it onto the plate, but he always groused about the turkey (little ground bird humor, there) and wondered why we couldn't have prime rib instead.

Anyway, this year seemed like a good opportunity to not have turkey, and we didn't have any other plans, and then it occurred to me how about I just make a batch of croissants and we eat them all? A jug of wine, a freaking mountain of butter-saturated bread and thou. As soon as it came to me I knew it had to happen. I don't even eat wheat much anymore, but I'm willing to destroy my health for homemade croissants. Mine aren't bakery-pretty, but they are spectacular. By the time you read this, I might almost be ready to sit up and take soup again.

This sort of thing is not unprecedented around here. Dave has always been a very good cook but one day I asked him what he was making and he said "All the bacon you ever really wanted." And that's what we had. It was a lot of bacon. We were not at all well afterwards.

This is the first year I've made croissants since I started watching the Great British Baking Show, though. So I've seen how puff pastry is supposed to be made, and it's a somewhat delicate and painstaking process that rewards perfectionists and painstakers, none of whom live here. I planned to make them as I always do. I always check the recipe even though I've made them almost a hundred times and there are only four ingredients. ("Oh yeah," I say, when I look them up.) The cookbook springs open to the right page, spang in the middle like the Psalms. It's an old Joy Of Cooking with grease stains and a sprung spine, and it was given to my mother-in-law Murry (yes) in 1948 with the penciled inscription "Good luck, ole pal, love, Helen." This cookbook is so old it has references to the "colored cook."

I'm good at making the dough but I get lazy when it comes to dotting the butter on it and folding it over. You're supposed to whip the butter so it's easy to Dot but I've never bothered. I just put a couple sticks of butter in my bra for a while and it's soft enough when I'm ready to go. Also, as someone who has never given milk, I think it's impressive to pull butter from my bosom.

So while I had the recipe in front of me, I re-checked it, as I had the previous 99 times, and what the hell but I've been doing it wrong all this time. I've always read "dot 1/4 of the butter on l/3 of the rolled-out dough and fold into thirds," and then swing it around east to south (I think north to east works just as well), and do it three more times. And that is what I have always done. It's hard to fit all the butter on a third of the dough after you've folded and rolled it a few times but I do my best. But it doesn't say that. It says to dot 1/4 of the butter on the whole dough layer and fold into thirds. Much easier. It says that plain as day and presumably always has. This is why it's hard to edit your own copy. Once you've read it wrong, it just stays read wrong.

Anyway my way does result in more chunks of butter that want to bust through the layers of dough and leak out, so my croissants are not only packed with butter, they're also swimming in it in the oven, resulting in sautéed butter rolls, which is even better than the professional version. The judges of the Great British Baking Show would demerit me into exile, but I don't care. And if I have a soggy bottom, 'tain't nobody's business but my own.

Just Desserts

It must have been almost thirty years ago that the family decided we could probably shake up a few traditions without pissing off the gods, and we examined the Thanksgiving dinner menu with fresh eyes. That's the kind of thing you're allowed to do when your family traditions include items from the Jell-O and marshmallow families. Dave and his sister didn't really like turkey, but the rest of us thought that was non-negotiable. Possibly even a matter of law. Punkin pie was mandatory also, but there could be a little wiggle room with other desserts. "What this dinner needs," Susan said, "is more chocolate." Or any chocolate.

I'd recently run across a promising-sounding recipe in a magazine I, as a letter carrier, was supposed to deliver, and printed off a copy of it at work at the expense of the stamp-buying public (thank you, America). I couldn't remember what it was offhand but I offered to have a look. "Does it have any chocolate in it?" Susan asked.

I located the recipe under a rumple of papers on my desk. "Let's see," I said, smoothing it out, "it's called 'Fudge-Slathered Fudge Cake.'"

"Bring it," Susan instructed.

The next day

It was one of those recipes that starts out as a pain in the ass. You preheat the oven to 350 and then you find square pans and grease them and then line them with tin foil and then grease that and flour it and knock out the excess flour, and by then your oven is preheated and you haven't even touched an ingredient. But the ingredients are tremendous. A pound of chocolate, a half pound of butter, eggs, sugar, walnuts, brandy, and two tablespoons of flour just to restore order and discipline. It's still a bit of a pain in the ass but you can feel confident it's going to be great, because chocolate butter sugar brandy. You do have to whip the egg whites and egg yellows separately and "gently fold"--god, I love that--the whites into your chocolate sludge. If there's a way to do that without losing all the loft from the egg whites, I have never found it. Then you bake your two layers, and they puff up sort of randomly, and you let them cool overnight on a rack.

The next morning your little square cake layers look all stomped to hell. They're lumpy and shrunken and flat as an old lady's tit. Or so I'm told. It's a panic situation, that first year, but hey--that's what the frosting is for. It starts out as cream and sugar. You're supposed to boil those and then reduce to low and let it bubble for ten minutes whilst "occasionally washing down sugar crystals from the side of the pan with a moistened pastry brush." Like I'm ever going to do anything with a moistened pastry brush.

The frosting is fabulous and the cakes go together beautifully, with walnuts pressed into the sides for the jazz of it. It's a hit. Anyone who ingests more than about a two-inch cube of it has to lie down on the floor for an hour, but it's a hit. And a tradition is born.

Embiggen for recipe

The next year, and all the years after that, the cakes do the exact same thing, but by then you've realized that they're only in the recipe to keep the fudge frosting layers apart, like a semi-colon holding back a pair of clauses. But the frosting doesn't set up properly. You review your ingredients, find them accurately measured, and frost the cake anyway as is. After a while someone notices it's crawling off the counter and heading for the hinterlands at a dead gallop. It's a family effort to corral the frosting with a deft posse of fingers, and even if it doesn't look like it belongs on a magazine cover, you still have to make it again the next year.

Discoveries are made over the decades. A few years in, I scribble a note in the margins: no need to grease the pans first. Duh. The tin foil slides right out. Some years the frosting works and some years it doesn't. I finally realize it's one of those heat things. It's chemistry. Chemistry was my favorite subject but when it slides into the kitchen arena, it's black magic. This frosting business is one of those candy-making deals where you have to check if your balls are hard or soft, and it's all too embarrassing. At some point I recognize that my frosting works if I let it bubble at a higher temperature for a slightly longer time. I scribble that in my margins.

I could have taken a full degree course at a culinary institute and figured this out faster than I did on my own. But I've got it working now.

Dinner is great. Dave makes a plaintive and utterly futile motion that we have prime rib instead of turkey next year. That's a tradition, too.

Clueless

Hey, I never told you all about last Thanksgiving. It was something. I can reveal that it was Dave, in the kitchen, with the candlestick holder, but I don't have a clue how exactly it went down. I will say this: you just never know what you're capable of until some big man encourages you to try something new. Encourages, yells at the top of his lungs, whatever.

The candlestick holder was a beaut. It was a little metal sculpture of some kind of shorebird with long leggedy legs and a big beakity beak. I picked it up when we were cleaning out my sister's house and claimed it for my own. "I love this," I told Dave.

"I'm not surprised," he said. "You loved it when you bought it for her in the first place, twenty years ago." Oh.

Anyway, I thought I'd put it on the table when I was setting it last Thanksgiving so my sister could join us, in a way. We had a good dozen people coming, and Dave was in charge of the turkey, the stuffing, the smashed potatoes, the carrots, the prawns in tarragon-mustard cream sauce, the pear-pecan-bleu-cheese salad, the root vegetable medley, and the cranberry sauce, while I had to set the table. I get distracted. Once I decided to put the candlestick holder on the table, I was having trouble getting the candle to stay in it. Sensing that Dave had a spare twenty seconds before his sauce burned and his potatoes boiled away and his prawns needed flipping, I handed it to him. A minute later, he made a noise of disgruntlement--not a loud noise, but the kind of noise he makes when I've forgotten to put any forks on the table. He can be fussy. I went in the kitchen to find out where I'd fallen down this time.

There he was with the candlestick holder hanging out of his hand. He'd been good and beaked. Blood was fountaining out in every direction. The bird was still in mid-stab and dangling from the back of his hand. I jumped into action. Don't praise me; anyone coming in on that scene would have planted her foot in Dave's torso and grabbed hold of the wayward heron and yanked. That's when the yelling started. This particular shorebird had suffered a fall and a nose-blunting earlier in its career, and the sharp pointy ends of its beak had curled into a fishhook shape, and required a more careful extraction from Dave's hand meat, which he accomplished himself once I'd been shooed away. Now we were left with a soiled bird and an enthusiastically bleeding wound. "Sew me up," Dave said.

The wound had exposed eighteen layers of tissue and a gaping ravine of muscle with a row of little alien teeth winking away at the bottom, which you could just make out between blood gobbets. "No! I've got butterfly bandaids. Hang on a minute." The butterfly bandaids got no purchase. It was like damming Niagara with Kleenex. The butterflies flapped wings with every arterial spurt. Dave pinched the chasm together with his fingers. "Just sew me up," he enunciated.

"No! I will not just sew you up! I do not know how to sew you up! I will take you to the emergency room."

"I can't go to the emergency room. My potatoes are boiling. You've got a needle. You've got thread. You know how to sew. Just sew me the flick up," he said, or something a lot like it. I hate that tone of voice. But I went for my needle and thread. I can't help myself. I'm a softie. I've just never been able to say no to a large irritated man with a bunch of kitchen knives.

I walked back to the kitchen with an other-worldly, Marie-Antoinette-at-the-Bastille sort of inevitability, distracting myself with details. I do know how to sew. I've never had any stitches in me and didn't have much of a plan, but I thought maybe I'd try a nice French seam, with the overlapped layers and double row of stitches such as I might use on the inseam of a sturdy pair of jeans. That should hold it. I threaded my needle, put a nice knot in my thread, gobbed it up with Neosporin and gave it a go. The needle refused to penetrate the skin. "Hang on, I'm going to need a thimble," I said out loud, or pilot holes, to myself, and went to fetch it. I came back with a thimble and a smaller needle, and managed a neat puncture on one side of the gash, but it was too close to the edge, and my seam shredded as I pulled the thread through. Shit, I'm going to need a serger to bind these edges, I thought, but decided to make a less tidy job of it and put the needle further back from the gash the second time. It was a delicate operation. Punching through required the thimble and a lot of pressure, and I had to let up as soon as it punched through so I didn't go clear through his hand. Then up through the other side from underneath, then back down, and so on, a ragged running stitch, and I cinched the gap shut by pulling on the thread, but not enough to produce gathers. Another knot to finish, and a rinse and a bandage, and we were good to go, Dave to take care of getting dinner on and me to throw up as quietly as possible. I don't know who got the forks on the table. The cream sauce seemed extra zesty.

I spend a sleepless night listening for the tiny munching of flesh-eating bacteria or the distant cellular rumble of gangrene, but by morning the wound looked pretty good, and in a few days we managed to pluck the thread out. "Of course, real surgeons do one stitch at a time and tie it off," Dave said. Oh yeah. "And they have a curved needle so you don't go all the way through the hand." That I didn't know. That would have helped. It occurs to me that duct tape would have helped, too. Dave and I both have ugly hands to begin with, and that also helped.

There are lots of lessons here. Foremost: if you want Thanksgiving dinner to go smoothly, and you think you're likely to outlive your sister, linens are always a good gift choice.