“Both the grunts and the slumps were transition desserts, halfway between the boiled and baked puddings but simpler to make.” (1947, E. S. Bowles & D. S. Towle, Secrets New England Cooking xi. 178)
I’ve been adrift. And I’ve been bereft.
Last week I was at my friend Anjo’s house for a meeting of the book club I organized with some friends. It was a perfect group. As I predicted, Anjo put out a lush spread that buoyed us as we erupted in laughter discussing the ridiculous (yet relatable) horniness of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and this widely discussed but, we declared, ultimately trifling New Yorker profile on marriage. After the homemade focaccia, deliciously doctored labneh, and rhubarb cordial (!) came one of my favourite springtime treats: a Victoria sponge with the first of the season Ontario strawberries and whipped cream. This wasn’t any Victoria sponge, but a meticulously tested and perfected version from the ace recipe writer Nicola Lamb. The next day (maybe even that night?) I printed out the recipe, knowing it would be this year’s version of the strawberry cake I always make for my husband’s early July birthday.
This cake fed me. Oh, did it feed me. I don’t mean the two helpings I served myself (do you know the specific joy of being at a table full of women who eat seconds of dessert?), but the feeling that simmered in me for days after.
I remembered the fullness of the crumb and the perfect amount of sweetness—nothing scant about it, you knew you were eating a dessert. But what stayed with me for days was something bigger—a feeling of having returned to something intimately familiar and comfortable. My friend went to the trouble of making this cake for us, but also because she herself gets a lot of pleasure out of cooking, as do I.
Or as I once did, in my days of big dinner parties, working my way through cookbooks, making puff pastry, and prioritizing my nourishment. Over the past year or so, it would be safe to say I lost my cooking mojo. It was undoubtedly part of the pandemic hangover. During that time I mostly despaired about having to make and serve three meals and two snacks to my then 2.5 year old babies (I didn’t do all the making or serving, but I did do all the planning, as that’s just the way things are done in our home). I had spurts of inexplicable energy, like when I cooked my way through Mina Stone’s solid Lemon Love and Olive Oil. Or the fact that I stayed committed to my two CSA subscriptions that required me to prepare, cook, and preserve many pounds of vegetables and fruit. But in the wake of that period and the increasing demands on my attention, my labour, my self, I’ve come to “give myself a break.” What that has looked like is things like outsourcing pizza night, repeating meals I could make with my eyes closed, BUYING pesto (the horror!!!!), phoning in the vegetable component of our dinners and calling it crudités, and perhaps the most horrific of all: serving breakfast for dinner (e.g., pancakes & bacon for the kids, eggs, toast, & bacon for us, with fruit, always the fruit, don’t you dare run out of fruit, Sara, but I’ve pushed my provisions far—let me tell you how much I love a no sugar added dried mango, or a questionable box of raisins lurking in the pantry as the fruit component of a lunchbox). Listen, I’m not judging you for liking or serving breakfast for dinner—you do you, forever— it’s just not my thing and a sign I’ve lost the plot on my hunger.
A couple of months ago, in the face of a mountain of deadlines, goals, ambitions, and ideals, I was overcome by that horrible impetus of late capitalism—the desire to optimize my circumstances. In terms of feeding myself and my family, optimizing meant formalizing my giving up. I even splashed out and bought a few weeks worth of fully prepared meals by a local company; all they required of me was to put them in a 375° oven for fifteen minutes. Then I went on a brief trip to Florida, which involved eating chicken fingers on “Caesar salad” at Disney World (passable, given the circumstances) and cobbling together a lunch of Greek yogurt and hummus with pretzels at the airport. (Exceptions to this bleak landscape: I need to give a shout out to Petty’s Meats in Longwood for their platonic ideal of Italian-American sandwich culture and 4 Rivers Smokehouse, who I hope are not supporters of Florida’s horrible governor). Back home the bleakness continued, in the name of efficiency and not wasting time. I was eating food, but not feeding myself.
I started thinking that I needed to bake something. Because what would baking represent? Something completely unnecessary (“unhealthy,” even!) that would demand of me my most precious resource: time.
All these thoughts coalesced last week when I read Abby Rasminsky’s recent newsletter, where she discusses the existential dread that accompanies attempts to fix herself, to optimize. This part resonated the most for me:
“And, truth be told, I am all too irritated by the very notion that I shouldn’t just let myself be who I am: someone who will always bake and enjoy the cake, who will perhaps snap too quickly at family and friends, who will laugh loudly and sing Taylor Swift or Sara Bareilles with much gusto even when her daughter turns away in shame. Perhaps I want to live into all the messiest places and call it my life.”
I know this sounds crazy, but I made some brownies last weekend and the grey cloud of hunger started to lift. I took a baby step back to me, the me that I courageously started putting back together at a late age about which I still feel shame and sadness. I like doing unnecessary things. There is a Persian word, حوصله (hoseleh), which is very hard to translate. It means patience or forbearance, but it’s more accurately something like a desirous and uncalled for effort. I have hoseleh in spades.
The words “slump cake” have been running through my mind intermittently the last few days. A slump dessert isn’t a cake at all. The modern interpretation of it is something like a cobbler cooked on the stove top rather than baked in the oven. But the idea of slump cake, a cake you make that’s easier/faster, a “dump it” cake, maybe even what the great Edna Lewis calls a busy-day cake, rang through my mind as the opposite of what I am craving.
I want to do the effortful thing that seems unnecessary and might even be ill advised. The optimized effortlessness drained me of energy. My spirit dampened. So my slump cake is getting back into the kitchen and feeding myself. The way I know to bring me home, the home I started making for myself years ago when I mustered up all my unmet needs for hoseleh, and gave it to myself. It’s a cake to ride me out of this slump.
Okay, finally ready to write the mini-essay about how deeply I related to this post. Not only to the bit about the book club, the joy of being with amazing women (who eat seconds of dessert!), the nourishing feeling of that, but also the slow deterioration of my habits over the course of the past couple of years. The cakes and slow-simmered sauces I was preparing in 2021. And ... the Hello Fresh boxes and takeout pizza we seem to live on now, thanks to a perpetual lack of time (and overabundance of stress).
The whole concept of hoseleh hit me right in the solar plexus. The thing I inherited from my mother that I think of as being her most essential self is exactly this. She always baked her own bread, made jam and pickles and even her own cheese, an absolutely unnecessary elaborate labour in a city like Toronto, where the best foods from around the world are literally at our fingertips. She didn't care. She loved the effort of it. The work was part of the pleasure. I loved this about her, and about myself, and I never had a name for it before.
Last week I got Yossi Arefi's Snacking Cakes out of the library - a stepping stone, or a compromise between the more elaborate baking I was making to get through the early pandemic, and the slump-option that I am also not craving.
"I was overcome by that horrible impetus of late capitalism—the desire to optimize my circumstances." Oh gosh, my life. Thank you for this lovely piece!