Cream of Tartar

The three wise men followed the beckoning star to find the Christ child in the manger where there was no room for a bed.  They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and cream of tartar, for the world was raucous with uncertainty and in limited supply of valuable goods. 

Alas, one wise man was in fact a wise woman well aware of the traditional homemade sugar cookies baked in celebration of birth in Bethlehem.  Cream of tartar, a mysterious but necessary sugar cookie ingredient, was in short supply as the 500-year locusts had devoured the tartar crops in the fall, so the cream that had been salvaged from the small harvest of tartar had been dried to extend its shelf life.  

Mary nodded and gave the wise woman a Mona Lisa smile as the wise men, shepherds, and Joseph scoffed at the 1.5 ounces of white dust.  Mary’s outstretched hand easily accepted the weight of the dried cream; she watched the men struggle through the weighty transfer of heavy gold nuggets and thick sappy frankincense freshly collected from the Boswellia tree.  

The wise men made their exit in three different directions.  Behind the stable, the wise woman slung off her wise man regalia, then went and discreetly slid in between the donkey and the ox.  Her quiet grace felt only by Mary. 

***

Writing fiction is painful.  I much prefer transcribing thoughts in a rather direct line from brain to fingertips.  With fiction, the options are too great and the parameters unknown.  And I think maybe writer’s block can occur more frequently: I wanted the wise woman and Mary to bake cookies together, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them out of the stable and into a kitchen, so I left the scene unfinished and moved back into a sturdier reality.

I had two bottles of cream of tartar mid-October when I found an online class on how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing.  I sat for over two hours watching a professional decorate five Halloween cookies.  Two hours, five cookies. I found a less complicated design and thrived in the mind-numbing repetition of creating puffy pumpkins.

For the first half of my life, I thickly spread some version of buttercream frosting over Christmas sugar cookies and then loaded sprinkles over the top.  This method left the base shapes barely recognizable, aside from perhaps a red hot where Rudolph’s nose should be or gold, tooth-splitting balls outlining a snowman’s eyes and mouth. While the cookies and the decorating were basic and beautiful, the brain-freezing hit of dopamine from the sweet buttercream was divine.  The sugar cookie was a mere conveyance of the frosting. 

I grew up baking Mary’s Sugar Cookies from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook.  Twenty-some years later, that was followed by the best sugar cookie I’ve ever had—a recipe shared on a plate then on paper by my sister-in-law.  It’s the sugar cookie recipe that landed in my book. (I also plopped it onto my website with the “Menagerie of Recipes.”)

Since October I’ve made three or four batches of these cookies and practiced my royal icing technique.  Over the last two weeks, I’ve taken two more classes live where I pre-baked the cookies, pre-mixed three consistencies of icing in a half dozen colors, then commandeered the whole kitchen to spread out and decorate them as directed by the professional on the iPad screen.

When sub-cultures call, I take interest.  I want to learn; I turn to research; however, I rarely experience through absolute submersion.  I won’t buy a Harley.  I might join a ukulele meet-up some day.  But I can bake a mean sugar cookie, and now—with a bit of technology, a whole lot of powdered sugar, and some meringue powder—I can slip into artistry for a few hours. 

I keep the home renovation show “Love It or List It” recording on my DVR for an occasional pop of that dopamine that comes from seeing before, during, and after home renovations.  One night while watching it with Bill, a scene with a man spraying purple insulating foam filled our wide screen TV.  I confessed that I want to do that. I want to spray just the right amount of foam and watch it billow and grow to perfectly fill the hollows between the studs.  I will never do that; however, successfully flooding a sugar cookie comes pretty darn close.

Perfection of the flood is a challenge; sometimes I’m left with a product reminding me of the painting of melting clocks.  In my case the indication of strange malleability and movement in a normally solid object is not intentional as it was in Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.  My melting bells are a result of too much liquid in my flood icing—and/or not enough strength in my detail border icing which should act like a dam in holding the flood.  Once the flood breaks that border, there is no return.

(Photo from https://eatdelights.com/cream-of-tartar-expire/)

Back to cream of tartar, that standard mysterious ingredient in sugar cookies.  I want to know what it is and why it is.  According to allrecipes.com, cream of tartar is “a dry, powdery, acidic byproduct of fermenting grapes into wine.”  From a bit of reading, I understand it to be an ingredient that gives meringue, angel food cake, and cookies a bit of lift.  I think of it as an injection of a fluffy, white cumulus cloud that has some structure to it.

I’m running low on cream of tartar.  With a case of asymptomatic COVID in our house and no cream of tartar on the shelves of my grocery delivery service, I responded rather selfishly to a friend’s offer to pick anything up we might need from the store.  Cream of tartar, please. 

This wise woman filled a small container from her own supply and left it on my snowy front step.  It was at the bottom of a brown bag that was tucked into a plastic grocery bag and only visible after unpacking a puzzle, two cans of beer, and a bottle of wine. 

The wings of grace tapped my shoulder.

Blueberry Syrup

While Bill and I flip through lists of tv shows, Will and Liam turn to YouTube videos for entertainment.  With the prediction of six to eight inches of snow for us on Saturday, Liam woke up and bounded into the kitchen.  “I’m going to make blueberry syrup for snow cones!”  An idea from a YouTube video.

As it poured with rain outside, only the promise of a change-over to snow hung in the air.  A pan and a pint of blueberries went on the stove along with enough water for the berries to float a bit off the bottom of the pan.  “I’m going by memory; I don’t think I need to follow a recipe.”  His unrestricted confidence in the kitchen mimics Bill’s more so than mine.  For most dishes, I’d like a recipe to be my guiding light.  A tablespoon of butter went into the warming blueberries and water. 

Since Liam first saw the snow at a year old, his gut response has been the same year after year: to eat it. Off the ground or out of the air, his excitement for falling frozen water is like a puppy’s in freshly fallen snow.  Upon Liam’s direction, I searched for the strainer, found a bowl it could sit on, and put both into the sink.  We watched the blueberries shed their color in the water as the boiling bubbles grew more intense.  I think they should be called purple berries, given the color of the water.

We wondered together how long it should boil; Liam decided when to pull it off of the stove and moved the pan to a trivet next to the sink where he ladled the blueberries and liquid into the strainer.  When the ladle couldn’t pick up the last bits of blueberries, Liam lifted the pan, lightened by the ladling, and dumped the rest through the sieve.  With the back of the ladle, he pushed the blueberries in the bowl-shaped sieve to get all of the juice out.

Gently and with a little trepidation, Liam poured the mixture back into the pan and returned it to the stove.  Liam added sugar.  One and a half cups of sugar.  I bit my tongue knowing that was a bit too much, but this was his experiment, not mine.

Liam wants an ice scraper for Christmas.  Not for the car but rather for freezing sheets of ice and scraping it as it freezes so he can have snow whenever he wants.  We smelled the simmering concoction; it made me think that vanilla might be a good addition.  Liam agreed, and a teaspoon of strong Mexican vanilla joined the dance.  Liam’s nose suggested freshly squeezed lemon.  In it went.  After a few minutes, the combination thickened ever so slightly, and Liam took it off of the stove to cool.  We took turns dipping spoons in for taste testing.  It tasted more of sweetness than of blueberry.

Once we had discussed the rationale for letting the syrup cool before putting it into a glass jar, Liam disappeared for a half hour.  Then we found a bulbous squatty jar that the whole batch fit into perfectly.  Then—we waited.  Hours later, around three, the snow cloud finally arrived over our house.  The air was thick with heavy, clunky, wet snow.  It was a good start to the winter storm.  Three days before, the forecast for us was only one to three inches.  Now, the forecast had increased to a real snow of six to eight inches.  It was the weekend, and no one had to go anywhere: We were ready for that dump of snow to cover the dark, dreary, leaf-free ground.

When the table on the deck had collected about an inch of snow, Liam took a glass out with a spoon and scraped the cold, wet sheet.  Back in the house, he spooned syrup over the white mound, but it didn’t have the desired effect of thoroughly dripping and drizzling through the snow.  The heavy snow didn’t have enough air between the flakes to allow for snow cone absorption.  Once again, the taste testing proved that the syrup was more sweet than blueberry.  As the snow melted a bit, the purple syrup eventually colored the whole glob of slush. 

As Liam looked at the remaining two cups of syrup, he was decidedly disappointed.  Was it worth keeping?  Could we just pour it away down the drain?  All that effort and he was left with a subpar concoction.  We tucked it into the fridge, behind the milk. Perhaps it will resurface for a retest with the next snowfall, for there wasn’t a second chance with this snow event: It only snowed about two inches. 

All around, the anticipation and preparation gloriously outshone the main events.

Clocks

At 6:19 a.m., I have been looking at a blank page for fifteen minutes.  My mind is wandering to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family.  In particular, to their clock on the mantel.  I fact check my memory and can find no Google reference to a clock that needed daily winding in Laura’s growing up years.  However, there is a Pinterest mention of a clock that Almanzo gave to his family in 1886, and it’s now on display at their historic home, Rock Ridge Farm House, in Mansfield, Missouri.  Facts around this clock are elusive. Yet my mind clings to a clock in Little House in the Big Woods. 

When I get ready in the morning, I get caught up in all the ticking between the closet and the bathroom.  There are three clocks with faces and second hands: one by the tub, one on the wall with an outdoor temperature reading, and one on a closet shelf that’s visible from the bathroom.  Time moves in this area with three asynchronous ticks marking out each second.  According to those clocks, it may be 9:03, 9:07, or 9:09.  They keep time at their own pace—even the one that is supposed to be tuned in to gather time information off of the radio waves is in a time warp.  If the minutia of minutes is important on a given day, I take my phone into the bathroom. 

The clocks fell back the last weekend in October.  The last clock in our house to fall back was the cow cuckoo clock in the office-come-Liam’s-computer room.  It’s not often seen, only heard when the little cow pops out of the doors and moos on the hour.  That clock is mounted on the wall in a space tucked between book and LEGO shelves.  A couple of weeks ago, I recruited Bill to reach up and change it, so I didn’t need to haul out my leg extension.  Great Grandma Whittier kept a step stool in plain sight in her kitchen.  I keep my two-step step ladder in a crevice next to the dryer that can only be reached by moving the trash can which is currently locked in its spot by the tub for fall decorations.  Grandma was practical in keeping her step stool at hand; I want my kitchen void of leg extensions; however, on the days I have that thing at the ready, I’m much more productive when it comes to elevated tasks. Back to clocks, via puzzles…

In the living room, Bill has a jigsaw puzzle going on the coffee table.  He loves to watch TV and work on a puzzle.  I can’t comprehend that much division in brain power.  A few weeks ago, the table sat empty for a couple of days.  Bill was debating on a switch to the 4,000+ piece unfinished Death Star LEGO set in the basement.  The LEGO craze had fizzled in our house by the time we were old enough to feel we could make this investment.  Only about a quarter of the 58 bags of LEGOS had been opened, and only the first level had been built.  The project has sat undone on a shelf in the dining room for a couple of years.  This past summer, I rooted out space in the top shelf of a cupboard in the basement and mothballed the spacecraft.  In November, Bill brought the started structure up, together with the box of pieces.  The Death Star sprung up from the puzzle table in a few days.  The finished 20” x 20”-ish Death Star needed a galaxy in which to comfortably float.  The perfect one was atop the computer hutch in the living room.  That flat surface has always been a decorating challenge.  Our living room clock sat on top of it, and every season I changed the décor around it.  I rarely hit the mark on having a lovely, seasonally staged computer hutch.  We hung the clock on the wall next to the hutch, and now the Death Star floats majestically on that surface.  I’ll never need to decorate that space again. 

With the change out of clock for Death Star, I’ve become acutely aware of how often I looked at that clock.  Now it’s an exciting new little routine for me to glance in that direction, smile and murmur “Death Star o’clock,” then adjust my sight mere inches to the clock on the wall to find the true time.  It’s a straight shot from that clock through the living room, kitchen, and mudroom to where another analog clock is in sight on the far wall of the mudroom.  So from the main kitchen thoroughfare, I have a clock at exactly 180 from my left to my right.  I just discovered that this morning.  I try to keep those two clocks closely anchored to the time on my phone, for they are ground control to Major Malcolm.

In reality, most clocks in our house are decorative, giving only a close estimate of true time.  My phone has become the current day version of what my watch was twenty years ago: accurate, dependable, and always at hand. By far my favorite clock is the one that runs truest: the tidal clock with just one hand that marks incoming and outgoing tides.  In the summer months, I hang it in the kitchen as a ready reference.  Now, it’s by the bathtub and serves as a visual cue for reliving years of summer days at the beach. 

At high tide, the hand points straight up to where a “12” would be on a time-keeping clock.  I see a narrow Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, most of it reclaimed by water, with footsteps sinking into soft, hot, dry sand.  The boulders that we climb lay to the right as we face the ocean; their bases are submerged in the surf.  Waves move inland intensely and with purpose: to cover land, wash out sandcastles, and flood sand that has had six hours of sun. 

At low tide, when the arm swings to where the “6” would be on a standard clock, the land widens as the water retreats, yards and yards away from dunes.  The boulders are accessible for climbing and only shallow tidal pools of warm water are left at their base.  With nets and shovels and buckets in hand, kids and adults look for clams and crabs and surprise finds, like starfish or baby sand dollars.  The wet sand packs and hardens making it easier to walk along the beach.  The waves mellow and lap at the land they are moving away from. Ripples form in the hard pack sand as little streams of water work their way back to the ocean.  A meandering line of seaweed and driftwood mark the high water mark, and they work as a kind of cage to hold small treasures—shells, mermaid purses, rocks, and other surprises—in place for beachcombers to ruffle through. 

Meanwhile large empty quahog clam shells, up to six inches wide, are heavy enough to hold tight in the surf while the sand piles around them hiding their true size.  The white humps pop like polka-dots scattered on the beach, and digging them up becomes a game with a bit of suspense in how big each of them might be.  With the unearthing of each quahog shell comes a quick pop of endorphins. 

I never know where a loose thought will take me when I start putting it down on paper.  The idea for this essay came from the comedic annoyance of three timepieces in my bathroom ticking away at different times.  I’m happy that it ended at the beach. At low tide.