Crowned With Cream

norwich, vt

Crowned with Cream

Recently got a surprise package in the mail from my dear friend Anjee that include a darling vintage apron and a slim, illustrated book called Festive Dessert Cookery from Peter Pauper Press {1967}.

The book embodies everything about the 1960s, with its pink and orange ink illustrations and recipes with titles like Orange Delight and Rice Imperiale. What I found the most delightful were the sentiments of the author, Evelyn Loeb, who so eloquently put into words what I’ve always felt to be true:

Every good hostess knows that the dessert makes the meal, or at the very least, is the climax. And coming last as it does, it makes the most enduring impression.

If your meal is light, choose a rich and filling dessert; if it is heavy, choose a light one. And if you are not dieting and have a healthy disregard for calorie content, select a dessert crowned with whipped cream for a party effect.

I am sure I would have loved Ms. Loeb, as I love every dessert crowned with cream, like the Pavlova. Pavlova is the perfect summer dessert made up of a snappy snow-white meringue with a marshmallowy core, crowned with luscious cream and fruit. Dotted with wild summer berries like fraise de bois, huckleberries, and tiny tart blueberries, it becomes the most seasonally inspired dessert.

It is my love for the pavolva, and the juicy ripe berries and cherries of a New England summer that made it easy to say yes when I got my annual call from Robyn Sargent, of the King Arthur Baking Center in Norwich, Vermont, requesting me to dream up another baking class. I spent the early summer in my kitchen, creating lovely pavlovas and a few other festive recipes for my class on Berries, Cherries & Stone Fruits.

Today, in the tiny town of Norwich, in a room full of bakers from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Delaware, and New Jersey, we made Semolina Olive Oil Cake with Warm Sour Cherries, Buerre Noisette {Brown Butter} Pound Cake with Poached Apricots, and Pavolva, crowned with cream of course, and dressed with tiny wild blackberries and strawberries from the Killdeer Farm farm stand next door.

I love to see the look on the face of someone who claims they hate merigue when they take their first bite of ethereal pavlova. It creates, as Ms. Loeb would say, a most enduring impression.

Tradition

veszprem, hungary

I’ve always envied the food traditions of other cultures, like the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve. For years I adopted the culinary traditions of others, until I realized one very simple thing. I have my own.

Tradition is anything you’ve done more than once, and cherish. It’s the chocolate layer cake my mom bakes for each and every family birthday, or the Swedish pancakes we ate every Sunday after church among the Johnsons, Swansons and Larsons of Rockford, Illinois. One of my favorite new traditions is the welcome meal Anya, András’ mother, has waiting for us as soon as we arrive in Hungary. No matter the season or the hour of the day, it is always the same: A light broth made rich with the flavors of carrots, parsnips, potatoes and onions pulled straight from the ground; thinly sliced cucumbers marinated in their own liquid with garlic and salt; two hearty slices of her wheat-rye bread with cool slabs of butter; and bodzavirág (elderflower) syrup sodas made a'la minute with her homemade bodzavirág szirup and sparkling water from Balaton.

The meal is followed by the deepest, most relaxing sleep side-by-side in András boyhood bedroom, until Woody (as in Woody Allen), their feisty adopted stray dog, barks and wakes us. When I emerge, groggy but relaxed, Apa, (András’ dad) and I tour the backyard as I recount the location of every fruit tree, gauge their stages of ripening and how well we’d timed this visit around the season of choice.

We speak in our broken garden Magyar, our common language, and reconnect over the simple words we speak of each other’s mother tongues.

Alma. Apple.

Szilva. Plum.

Figue. Fig.

Those are easy for me.

málna.Strawberries

Szedrek. Blackberries

Cseresznyék.Cherries

Bigger challenges for my sleepy tongue, but I’ll get there.

If veggies are abundant in our community plot back in New York, this is the land of endless fruit. He shows me the tiny black raspberries that will ripen in fall, the fig tree that rebounded from our visit last May, grape vines that have doubled in size, and the new hazelnut tree that’s already producing fruit. Immediately, I start thinking about which season I’ll plan our next trip around.

For the moment, I’m quite pleased with myself. My plan worked out perfectly—we would arrive for cherry season, so that bowls of sweet and sour cherries would line our wedding table next Saturday. The cherries are everywhere—dark, firm cherries the size of walnuts, tiny black cherries with just a hint of sour, and Hungary’s famous meggyes, soft sour globes that make you pucker and smile. But Saturday is a whole week away. I’m sure the tree can spare just a few for me now.