Who's Your Daddy?

Yesterday on the light rail, Enzo asked Teresa, “Is that my daddy?” pointing to a big black guy across the aisle. (Enzo’s anonymous sperm donor-dad is Chinese, and I am white.)

The guy gave Teresa a look like, who me?

Teresa said, “No, that’s not your daddy.”

“Who is my daddy?”

“Let’s ask mama Kate when she gets home.”

When I got home we conferred. I said we could tell him his daddy is a really nice man that we don’t happen to know personally but someday when Enzo’s grown up, he will know him. (Enzo’s donor is “identity-release” meaning that when Enzo turns eighteen, he can find who he his and get in touch with him.) Teresa said that’s way too complicated. Let’s just tell him some people have two mommies and some people have a daddy and a mommy and some people have two daddies. Thank god we live in a place where that is actually true. Besides, Enzo’s sperm donor isn’t really his daddy. Enzo doesn’t have a daddy. There are going to be times when he is incredibly sad about that. Guilt, guilt.

See, that’s what I like about food. It’s simple—I mean morally simple. You get hungry, you figure out what to do about it. Here’s an egg. Here’s piece of bread. Scrambled eggs with toast are good. Or you could add milk to the egg and make French toast. Or you could boil the egg and make an egg salad sandwich. And what about English muffins? It’s all wonderfully practical and (unlike child rearing) you’re unlikely to do anyone lasting harm.

But then there’s that awful book—you know the one I mean, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, about how every time you buy a porkchop at Safeway, you’re feeding an agricultural industrial complex based on corn that makes half the world die of terminal fat while the rest die of starvation. Oh, and the whole thing takes so much fossil fuel that you might as well just kill yourself right now. And I’m thinking, “But it’s only a porkchop.”

In a fit of rebellion against that book--which I haven’t even read, but it’s gotten so much media attention that I feel as if I have—I went out and bought a Twinkie. He heard the author, Michael Pollan, on the radio saying mean things about Twinkies. He called them An Edible Food-Like Substance. I hadn’t had a Twinkie in about thirty years, but I remembered them as perfect. So I bought a Twinkie, and it was awful. Twinkies are one of those childhood memories that should be left undisturbed.

So I made a plan to bake the perfect Twinkie. It’s a sponge cake, right? It says so right on the package. An extra sweet, extra salty, extra junky sponge cake. I found something in The Cake Bible that looked perfect, and here it is:

Bert Green’s Special Sponge Cake, from The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

Orange Juice 2 tablespoons

Grated lemon zest 2 teaspoons

Vanilla ½ teaspoon

Superfine sugar 1 cup + 7 tablespoons

Sifted cake flour 1 cup

Eggs 5

Egg whites 3

Cream of tartar 1 teaspoon

[The directions for this are not obvious to me, and I doubt they are too others, so I’ll put them in too, though it’s a lot of typing.]

• Preheat oven to 350. Get out one ungreased 10-inch two-piece tub pan, and preheat it for at least 5 minutes.
• In a small bowl combine the orange juice, lemon zest and vanilla.
• Remove 2 tablespoons of the sugar and reserve to sprinkle on to raw batter.
• Remove 3 more tablespoons of the sugar and whisk together with the flour.
• Rinse a large mixing bowl with hot water and wrap the sides with a hot towel. (If using a hand mixer, place the bowl in a sink partially filled with hot water.)
• Beat the yolks, gradually adding the remaining 1 cup sugar, on high speed for 5 minutes or until the mixture is very thick and ribbons when dropped from the beater. Lower the speed and gradually add the orange juice mixture. Increase the speed and beat for 30 seconds. Sift the flour mixture over the yolk mixture without mixing in and set aside.

• Beat the whites until foamy, add the cream of tartar, and continue to beat until soft peaks form when the beater is raised. Gradually beat in the 2 tablespoons of reserved sugar, beating until very stiff peaks form when the beater is raised slowly. Ad 1/3 of the whites to the yolk mixture and with a large skimmer or rubber spatula fold until incorporated. Gently fold in the remaining whites in 2 batches.

• Pour the batter into the hot pan. (It will be a little more than ½ full.) Sprinkle the top evenly with the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar. Bake 35-40 minutes or until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean when inserted in the center. Invert the pan, placing the tube opening over the neck of a soda or wine bottle to suspend it well about the counter, and cool the case completely in the pan (this takes about 1 hour).

• Loosen the sides with a long meal spatula and remove the center core of the pan from the sides. (To keep the sides attractive, press the spatula against the sides of the pan and avoid any up–and-down motion.) Dislodge the bottom and center core with a spatula or thin, sharp knife. (A wire cake tester works well around the core.) Invert onto a greased wire rack and re-invert onto a serving plate. Wrap airtight.

• Understanding: One of the secrets of this cake’s exceptional moistness and tenderness is using 1/3 cup less flour than classic sponge cask and a very high proportion of sugar (almost ½ cup more). For additional volume, Bert applies heat while beating the yolks and uses 3, sometimes ever 4, extra egg whites to compensate for structure usually provided by a higher quantity of flour. To ensure that the cake will not collapse during baking, he preheats the empty pan so that the batter starts to expand and set immediately.

Rose says that the cake is sweet enough that you don’t really need anything extra, but no creamy filling would totally defeat the purpose, so I thought quite a bit about whether to use stabilized whipped cream or vanilla butter cream. And I decided the creamy filling really needed to be inside, not on top, to recreate the Twinkie experience, so I decided to use the same batter to make cupcakes and then fill them with a pastry bag, so that the cream filling would be inside but also peep out of the top.

And then I realized I’d have to buy a pastry bag and superfine sugar and cake flour and all new clothes. And the conversion to cupcake form might not be foolproof—how to invert them? And the hopelessness of trying to recreate childhood memories dawned on me again. It might be wonderful, but it still wouldn’t be the Twinkie I remember. So I never made my homemade protest Twinkies, and it’s very sad. I have to be content with writing about thinking about it--a completely unsatisfying substitute.

*

I just had an overwrought fantasy about Enzo’s donor reading this entry and somehow figuring out that he’s our guy. Then he made the Twinkie cupcakes, following the recipe above. Or better yet he owns The Cake Bible--that’s the kind of guy he is--so he bakes it right out of the book. And then he leaves a comment on my blog with his name and phone number.

If that actually happened, I’d be completely freaked out, but in the fantasy it was perfect. We got together. He was adorable. We ate cake. Enzo loved it.

P.S. If you’re out there, I think the stabilized whipped cream would be better than the buttercream. But either one would be fine. Also don’t forget to put a little extra salt in the cake. Twinkies are pretty salty.

My Inheritance

When I was in high school I had a boyfriend whose mom hated to cook, and she did it every night, and it tasted like oppression. My boyfriend turned out to be dangerously mentally ill. I think it was the food.

I like cooking (which really means I like eating) but I can’t imagine how anyone can cook every single night. I think about food all the time, but most nights I can’t think of a thing to fix for dinner. Last night Teresa had nothing, I had a bowl of tomato slices with olive oil, salt and mozzarella cheese, Enzo had Stouffer’s Swedish meatballs and frozen red/yellow/and green bell peppers straight from the bag, crunch, crunch. You can’t fault it for nutrition (or at least it could be a lot worse), but thinking about eating as nutrition is like thinking about reading as education or sex as procreation—a grim doctrine if there ever was one.

My mom always liked cooking (which really means she liked eating). Me too. I remember her showing me how to cut cold shortening into flour for piecrust, how to beat egg whites so they’re fluffy but not dry and how to fold them gently into the pancake batter. I helped her make enchiladas, taking my place in the assembly line, stuffing the tortillas with cheese and the onion-cumin-olive mixture. She taught me how to make pesto and bread and hummus and how to roast and peel eggplant for baba ganoush. She showed me about how much salt to put in the pasta water. She let me make awful and complicated salad dressings in the blender.

My mom taught me—or I absorbed—that pretty much everything starts with sautéd onions. They’re the demi-plie, the simple fist step from which you can go anywhere. She never told me this, certainly not in those words. But you absorb patterns and do what works. So it’s a sad commentary that at this moment I have no onions in the house. Of course I also have no clean underwear.

It’s a piece of luck that my mom and I both liked to eat. And when you’re a kid you just absorb things. You don’t even know you’re learning to cook or learning each other. I picked up not just how to cook particular dishes (that you can get from a book) but how to think about food, how things go together, how things don’t have to be perfect to be good. And how to use a recipe in a strictly advisory capacity.

I don’t know if Enzo and I will have anything like that. He likes trucks, and I just don’t. He likes hacking at things in the kitchen, but I think he’s just humoring me. We both like books, but his taste is terrible.

He likes eating, though. That we have in common.