Louisiana

I was in Louisiana last week. I flew to New Orleans early on Wednesday morning and was greeted by Matt, who looked unfamiliar in his dark green uniform, and by a breeze that was much thicker and warmer than New York’s.

After nine weeks of being ferried about from base to base in the US, Matt is now in the final legs of training for deployment and is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan this week. We stayed with his parents in New Orleans for his final five days off.

The first time I visited the city was just about a year ago, when Matt and I stopped for a few days in the midst of an epic drive across the country. I was set to begin work as a reporter for a paper in Northern California in the following weeks, and, we thought, what a great excuse to witness the expansive land along the way. On that visit, we toured plantations, ate fried alligator, and zipped past fishing cabins and cypress trees in a motorboat on a swamp tour. I was filled with happy expectation, on the eve of an adventure out west.

I felt differently on this trip. Though Matt is confident and excited for his next step, I’m scared. I knew little about the Army, about deployments, or even about the intricacies of this never-ending war before I met Matt, now almost 2 years ago. Beyond the newspaper articles and TV news segments, Iraq and Afghanistan are not present in the daily lives of many here in New York City, of my friends or my family. And that unfamiliarity makes being left behind all the more lonely.

But on this trip we kept busy. We had a lot of fun. We ate beignets and snowballs, went on a tour to learn about the “haunted history” of the French Quarter, and attended a pig roast on a humid afternoon in the sun.


To begin, however, we drove south to Cajun country. We stopped for gumbo and iced tea at a diner in New Iberia. We went to Avery Island, a salt dome a few miles in from the waters of Vermilion Bay, where we toured the Tabasco factory. It was hot, a bit drizzly, and smelled of peppers, salt and vinegar. That evening we stopped in Rayne, a small town in the heart of Cajun culture known as the “Frog Capital of the World.” Fittingly, we shared a plate of frog’s legs – crisp fried and meltingly tender – at the Frog City Cafe.


That night we stayed in a small, rustic cabin at Bayou Cabins in Breaux Bridge. As the sun set, we found a table down the road at Mulates, “The Original Cajun Restaurant,” where we ate ice cream with praline liquor and listened to rollicking live music by Lee Benoit & The Bayou Stompers. We watched as a serious group of older couples danced: the two-step, the waltz, the jig. They moved with a practiced but raw elegance. Everyone was having fun.

Matt and I attempted a few moves with some help from those already on the dance floor – “This is the two-step!,” they yelled, instructing us to watch their feet. We laughed a lot.

When the band took a break, we stood on the dance floor, perused their CD collection, and chatted with some other patrons. It came out that Matt was about to deploy and, later, when the lead singer announced that news to the room, everyone clapped. People came up to Matt, one after another for the rest of the night, to wish him luck.

The next morning we woke up early to a thick morning light over the bayou. We went to the main building for coffee, and watched the owners of the cabins make fresh seafood boudin. Crawfish, shrimp and crabmeat, along with rice and spice, were stuffed into sausage casings and carefully tied. As they cooked, they spoke with lyrical accents, remnants of a culture with deep ties to France. A couple that we had met in Mulates the night before was there, too, and we talked about Cajun culture, motorcycles and dance.

After a meal of the fresh boudin, scrambled eggs and toast, we went to pay our bill and begin the drive back to New Orleans.

“It’s been taken care of,” said the proprietor, a warm red-haired woman wearing dark green. “It was taken care of by the nice couple that just left. And by us. We went halves. Good luck in Afghanistan.”

She took us out to the porch and, holding our hands in hers, she said a little prayer.

Almond Cake

I baked a cake this afternoon. A moist, densely packed almond cake from my well-worn copy of Baking with Julia. I didn't really have a reason to bake. But I wanted to try this one, which is an element of the cookbook's intense Wedding Cake recipe, because I am the designated pastry chef for a friend's wedding late this summer. And I'm nervous. So I'm practicing. Every single cake I bake, I tell myself, will make the finished product just that much better. I have over three months. That's a lot of cakes.

This one is nice. It came out of the oven golden brown and buttery. Almost too buttery, I thought as I sneaked a little sliver to eat with my late-afternoon coffee. But perhaps that will go well later on with layers of lemon curd or blueberry jam, swiss or simple vanilla buttercream. I haven't yet worked out the details. But I know that there will be no fondant. Definitely no fondant. Though lovely on its own, I have a different idea for this particular cake. I'm having friends over for dinner tomorrow and I plan to use it, cut into small disks, as the base for a fleet of individual Baked Alaskas. We'll see how that goes.*

I don't know a whole lot about the science of baking, despite the fact that I love to make and eat cakes of all kinds. I certainly don't know much about the architecture of wedding cakes. But if the testing and tweaking involved in the creation of this one offers me the opportunity to spend more afternoons like today's, procrastinating on thoughts of the real world in my warm apartment, which smelled of almonds and butter, I'm happy to learn.



*Update: They went well. A little too much cake to ice cream ratio. But what beats miniature rounds of almond sweet, topped with strawberry ice cream and a cloud of oven-brown meringue? In my mind, not much.


Dense Almond Cake
Adapted from Baking with Julia

I adapted this recipe a bit, mainly due to ingredient and equipment restraints. Instead of going to the store to buy the extra 2.5 ounces of almond paste, I just used the 7 that I had. Instead of cake flour, I used all purpose. I didn't have a working food processor, and used a hand-held mixer to beat in the eggs rather than a paddle attachment on a standing one. In retrospect, there isn't much I did do exactly according to the directions. This is most likely the reason for my only complaint: the almost too-moist texture of my end result. But either way, I imagine, it's nice. Julia's original recipe is below.

9.5 ounces, or 1 packed cup, almond paste
2.25 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 large eggs
1 cup cake flour, sifted

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Butter a baking pan -- I used a single 9" circular cake pan, while Julia's instructions are for a number of different sizes for the construction of a wedding cake -- and then place a sheet of parchment paper, cut to fit, within. Dust with flour, tap out the excess, and put aside.

Put the almond paste, butter, and sugar in a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Process for one minute, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. The mixture should be mainly smooth, with a bit of a grainy edge.

Scrape this mixture into the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the eggs and beat at medium speed until the batter is smooth. This should take about 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides, again, as needed. Turn the mixer up to high in the final 15 seconds.

Remove the bowl and fold in the flour, a little at a time, with a rubber spatula. Spread into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 1.5 to 1.75 hours, until the top is golden, the edges begin to spring away from the pan and the top is springy to the touch. For me, this took only one hour.

Transfer to a cooling rack and let sit at least 25 minutes, then invert, remove the parchment paper, and enjoy.

News

As many of you know, I’ve been writing about the sense of smell since 2005. It was then, in the crack of my skull against the windshield of a quickly-moving car, that my olfactory neurons were damaged and I lost the ability to detect the scent of brewing coffee, freshly baked bread, or a ripe bag of garbage. For a while, I lost the ability to smell anything at all.

I began this blog before that, however, when I could think of little more than the kitchen, sauté pans and paring knives. While scent was important to me as the gateway to flavor, it hardly crossed my mind that without a working nose a sip of coffee was simply hot and bitter and that a bite of chicken similar to one of cardboard. I had wanted to be a chef, and I began this blog to write about my work prepping and washing dishes in an upscale Boston restaurant. I had hoped the job would be the first step in many on my way to the professional culinary world. I wanted to chronicle the journey.

Without smell, however, my ability to perceive the world around me changed and, with that, so did my plans. I’ve written about it all along the way.

My fascination with scent began out of necessity. After the accident I suddenly realized that its absence sapped the texture from both physical experience and memory. It implied the power of what was once there. In the last four years my sense of smell, as I’ve written here, has slowly returned. While it is not completely restored—skunk sometimes smells of almond biscotti and I often can’t tell the difference between sage and thyme—I’ve watched the details painstakingly crawl back into my sensory landscape. Throughout this process, my interest in smell has grown far deeper.

And now I’m very happy to announce my current project, which I’ve been working on for quite some time but that only recently became official. I’m writing a book.

“In Search of Smell,” an olfactory memoir exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and social history of smell through the lens of my own story of loss and regain, will be published by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco. I’ll be reporting and writing for a little less than the next year. I’m very excited.

I’m not sure how this will change ‘My Madeleine.’ I plan to keep writing as I have been—about food, about smell, and about how they intersect. But perhaps now that my days are filled with research and interviews on scent, this blog will veer more towards food. Perhaps not. I just wanted to let you all know what I’m up to. And if you have any ideas or any stories to share with me, please let me know. I’m looking forward to learning so much more.

Breakfast

I like to wake up early.

I work best in the pre-dawn, my dark studio lit only by the computer screen. I love the chilly moments before the sun comes up, before I begin to hear the clank and clatter of the rest of my building starting the day. I like to type with the radio on in the background, so low as to be almost inaudible. I like to move slowly, pausing to read the paper with a mug of coffee steaming on my desk nearby.

None of this is nice, however, when I’m hungry. My mind just doesn’t work without breakfast. As Lewis Carroll said so eloquently in Through the Looking Glass: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

For me, breakfast is usually oatmeal, served with a dollop of milk and some combination of berries, apple slices or nuts. Sometimes it’s a bowl of cold cereal and yogurt. There is toast with butter and jam on occasion, oranges often, and always a piece of chocolate or two.

I made my first batch of granola this afternoon. It filled my apartment with the scent of brown sugar and cinnamon, ginger and almonds. Tomorrow morning I’ll eat it with milk and a sliced banana. Though I will admit: it’s pretty nice as a late afternoon snack.


Granola
Adapted from Orangette

I adapted this recipe from Orangette, which is a blog (and now book) that I often turn to for trusted recipes ranging from chocolate madeleines to chickpea salads. I changed some things here due to taste preference: cutting down on both sugar and the amount of nuts and seeds. I changed some things due to convenience: a lack of brown rice syrup resulted in a lovely swath of honey.

Dry Ingredients:
5 cups rolled oats
2 ½ cups slivered almonds
a heaping ½ cup light brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp salt

Wet Ingredients:
a heaping ¾ cup unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup honey (I used raw wildflower honey, which I had picked up when in Tennessee.)
2 Tbsp canola oil

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Stir and set aside. Combine wet ingredients in another, smaller bowl. Stir. Add wet ingredients to the dry ones and stir to combine.

Spread mixture out on two rimmed baking sheets, and bake for 35 – 40 minutes on two racks set on the top and bottom third of the oven. Turn around the pans and stir every 10 minutes or so. When done, the granola should be a toasty golden brown. Take the pans out of the oven and let cool. It will still be a bit soft upon its exit, but crunches up while losing heat.

Store in sealed containers, or a plastic bag, as long as you like.

Everything

Ever since Matt was called back into the Army and my days were suddenly laced with heightened levels of anxiety, I have been able to smell more.

It’s not that I’m noticing the scent of new things. There are still smells lost to me, like that of water in a stagnant pond or of certain types of flowers, which remain imperceptible now four years removed from the accident that damaged my olfactory neurons. This heightened emotional state doesn’t make a difference there.

It’s the intensity that has changed.

Last Thursday night, for example, I walked into a hair salon in the East Village just as the sun was beginning to set. The anxiety, usually swirling somewhere in the periphery of my day, had moved front and center that afternoon when Matt told me his official deployment assignment: a year in the mountains of Afghanistan. Suddenly it throbbed in the back of my throat, and I decided to get my hair cut. I could use the gossip-rag-fueled distraction, I thought.

When I entered the salon, which had red walls and glittery lights, I was immediately hit by scent. It was pungent and floral with notes of jasmine and a lingering chemical twang. It filled my head like a honeyed cloud and I inhaled and exhaled slowly as I sat to wait on a bench by the window. I could almost feel the sweet, fatty globs of conditioner, which I watched the stylist squirt onto a customer’s head over by the sink, on the roof of my mouth. The salon has never been so intense.

Is it possible to have an increased sense of smell due to a keyed-up emotional state? I’m not sure. Of course, there are physical factors known to affect the one’s ability to smell. For example, changes in the level of hormones due to pregnancy are known to cause a heightened sense of smell in women. I’m not pregnant, so that’s not it. But I’ve been stressed out. More than usual. And the body reacts to stress in many intense internal ways, including the release of such hormones as cortisol into the blood stream.

In the years since the car accident I’ve noticed a strong connection between my emotions and scent. When moving through moments of depression—whether at the tortured end of a relationship or in the months after the death of a friend—I’ve noticed that I hardly register smell at all. Scents are there, of course. But they are muted, lacking all sense of intensity. Like my mood, the olfactory environment around me becomes flat and dim.

Similarly, during times when I’ve been happiest, like in the heart-flapping beginning to a new relationship, or in the brief nothing-months of summer before beginning graduate school, I’ve found that smell is all around me, striking in its strength.

Brown University professor Rachel Herz writes about the connection between smell and emotion in her book, The Scent of Desire. The connection, she says, “is not only metaphorical but also is founded on the evolution of our brain.” The limbic system, where emotion, memory and motivation are processed, first grew from a primitive olfactory cortex, she explains. “In other words, the ability to experience and express emotion grew directly out of our brain’s ability to process smell,” Herz writes.

I’m not sure what exactly is going on in my nose right now. But for the (big, scary) writing project I am currently working on, which I’ll certainly be telling you more about later, I’m jumping headlong into research on the sense of smell, and how the science and psychology of it all relate to my own experience. I hope to soon learn more.

There are some things I do know, however. I know that on an evening in February, a week after Matt had been called back into the Army and only a few days into the resulting, panicked search for a new apartment, I stood in a parking garage on the Upper West Side. I was on assignment for a long-term story on high school kids building robots and was reporting with a notebook and pen amidst a crowd of teachers, students and electrical wiring.

Inhaling and exhaling slowly against the back-lit scent of dank concrete, I caught a whiff of cologne, a hint of sweat and the strong aroma of motor oil. Someone to my left opened the plastic lid to a cup of hot chocolate and the scent—rich, sweet—hit me from several feet away. A moment later there was the peppermint breath of an interview subject chewing gum. Someone was drinking orange juice; I could smell the pungent citrus before I saw the container in a teacher’s hand.

Everything smelled. Everything. I could hardly concentrate in the face of so many scents. What’s going on here? I remember thinking. I was exhausted but alert, jazzed on anxiety and caffeine. I was in a dark, cold parking garage, but it had been a long time since everything seemed so bright.

Empanadas

I made empanadas on the first Saturday night of April. It was Matt's and my last evening together before he reported for duty in South Carolina, the first leg of a long journey that will soon take him to either Iraq or Afghanistan.

We had been staying at his family’s home in Tennessee for the week. It was just the two of us and we had no schedule. We spent days maneuvering the Appalachian Mountains in tennis shoes and evenings watching movies on the couch. We shopped at Walmart, ate pulled pork sandwiches in empty restaurants off the highway, and tried hard to avoid the rain. I cooked a lot.

But on Saturday night – our last night – I wanted something special. As the sun went down and the vaulted ceilings of the house grew shadowy and dim, Matt packed his deep green rucksacks with uniforms and combat boots. I needed to distract myself. I wanted flour on my hands and my head in a recipe.

We had eaten empanadas almost daily while in Argentina, where we had traveled in order to escape the manic schedule of New York, the thoughts of war and the empty bags waiting to be packed. While there I loved the dish with origins in Spain: rich, spiced fillings nestled within crisp pockets of dough. We ate them with beef, with chicken and with cheese. We ate them baked, piled on metal trays and plopped on the table at cafes. We ate them fried, wandering through antique markets in Buenos Aires, the whorls of my fingers left slippery with grease.

I started cooking late on that warm Saturday night. We had spent the afternoon hiking and were moving slowly. Thoughts of the next morning, when I would drop Matt off amid a long beige line of barracks at an Army base in South Carolina, were cold in the pit of my stomach.

In the kitchen I concentrated on the movement of my knife, the temperature of the oven and the scent of butter. First I mixed the dough – a sticky, soft thing immediately sent to chill in the fridge. I sautéed onions and garlic. I watched the pink fade from a pan of crumbled beef. Olives and hardboiled eggs came later when, combined, I let it all cool on the counter.

“It smells good,” Matt called out from the living room where he was packing, surrounded by boxes of clothes and stacks of books.

I rolled the dough into small, flour-dusted circles. I filled them, pinched them, and brushed the sculpted mounds with egg wash. They came out of the oven crackly and brown. We ate them later with our fingers sitting on the couch.

These empanadas were good, though not great. I had miscalculated the ratio of dough to filling and could have used a bit more spice. That couch felt far from everywhere, especially Argentina. On our plates, butter replaced lard; bottles of Sam Adams took over for those of Malbec.

I woke up the next morning, like every morning, with my head in the crook of Matt’s arm. He smelled warm, like soap and fabric. But the now-familiar chill soon emerged from my stomach as I took a few deep breaths and remembered the day.

Before we left I took one last look at the kitchen. I emptied the dishwasher and brushed some errant crumbs of empanada dough off the counter.

That’s the end of it, I thought. No more distractions left.

Argentina

Matt and I spent the better part of March in Argentina. We arrived in Buenos Aires on a bright Tuesday morning and spent the next couple of weeks exploring.

We paused in the city for a few days on both ends of the trip. There, on streets that often reminded us of Paris, we walked. We visited cemeteries and antique shops; drank espresso and wine.

Then we headed north, driving hundreds of miles in a tiny Chevrolet Corsa, often on dirt roads snaking through the foothills of the Andes. We visited the vineyards of Cafayate and the tiny mountain towns near Salta.

There were midnight dinners, eaten outdoors against the faint chill of a late-summer breeze. There was parilla - often steak, chorizo, or morcilla cooked over a wood-fired grill. There were tamales and empanadas, jamon crudo and queso fresco. Dulce de leche came on everything.

It was a wonderful, needed escape. Now we're back in the U.S., hit with the expected though unpleasant reality of Matt's impending departure. He is packing as I write. Stacks of books and clothes litter the apartment. More soon.

Enough

On a cold morning in March of last year, Matt and I rode our bikes down the West Side of Manhattan. We pedaled from his apartment on the edge of Harlem to Penn Station, where we hopped on the Long Island Railroad. We were escaping the city for a few days, on spring break from graduate school.

I watched the sun rise over the Hudson as we passed through Riverside Park. It was early and I was hungry. We hadn’t had breakfast and my fingers, in too-thin cotton gloves, were numb. But I remember feeling content. I was on vacation and going on a trip. I was entering the final months of a master’s program that I found both challenging and fun. I had borrowed my roommate’s bike and relished the smooth sound of tire on pavement. And I rode next to Matt, whose brown hair was long enough to poke out from under his helmet and who, everyday, I grew to love a little bit more.

When Matt and I had first met, six months earlier, his hair was still short. He had it cropped close to the skull, reminiscent of his life before Journalism school: as an officer in the Army.

I knew about Matt’s past. I listened to his tales of studying as a cadet at West Point, of being stationed as an officer in Germany, of spending 2 years fighting in Iraq. But it was a foreign world to me, and difficult to imagine much beyond his words. When we met, the sand storms of Ramadi were thousands of miles away. Matt’s uniforms and combat boots were packed in boxes at his parents’ house in Tennessee. He wore jeans and T-shirts. His hair was soon long.

We rode our bikes quickly, gliding down 8th Avenue with wind at our backs. I followed as we weaved among cars and stopped at red lights. When we passed a large truck, double-parked on the west side of the street a few blocks above Times Square, Matt turned his head back towards me.

“That smells like Iraq,” he said.

I sniffed.

The scent of diesel permeated the air. It reeked of gas and metal and didn’t leave my nose for a few wind-swept blocks. For a brief moment, breathing in those thick and noxious fumes, I could imagine a world far away. One of sand and stone, heat and violence. One that smelled of fuel.

I told Matt about that moment on our bikes, late one night last week. I sat at our kitchen table while he stood nearby. We were drinking wine and talking about the war. My head felt encased in a cloud and I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. The wine tasted vague and sweet; the grape fell flat on my tongue.

A few days earlier Matt had received an envelope in the mail. It held a packet of papers: orders from the Army, written in a screaming capital-letter font. He’s been called back into service and will soon deploy to Iraq for his third tour of duty.

When he first told me we were sitting on the steps of our apartment building, one night after work. I immediately thought of that truck. Of that smell.

It was a scent that Matt knew well by the time he returned from his first tour.

“Iraq smells of diesel exhaust and human waste,” he said. “It’s like nothing else.”

Even between deployments, the scent was never far from his mind. Matt lived in Germany and would pick up whiffs here and there. But when he went back to Iraq for the second time, two years later, and he breathed in the burning oil, the gas, the waste and the sand it hit him hard. He immediately remembered things that had happened before, things that he hadn’t thought about since he last stepped foot in that country, things that happened back in 2003, when the US first surged into Iraq.

“It felt like I had never been gone,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter.

Matt told me about the mornings in Iraq. Away from the baking sun the temperature would drop. The sun would rise, pink over the horizon. He would see birds flying into the palm groves near his base. The scent was still there, but it was better in the coolness of dawn.

“It was beautiful,” he said.

I listen. I try to imagine what it’s like. But sometimes words just aren’t enough.

Beignets

A cloud of powdered sugar at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, where Matt and I spent Mardi Gras weekend.

Dinner party, February 7: Hamachi tuna, pomegranate, toasted green wheat.

Pink

On Friday morning I took the train out to Brooklyn, near where I used to live, to help my friend Ben in the kitchen. He occasionally sidelines as a chef, and we've worked together in the past. He was preparing for his most recent gig: an 80-person dinner party.

We cooked in the large, professional-style kitchen of the building where Ben holds his day job. I wasn’t there for long because I had to head off to an interview, but he remained the rest of the day, and the next.

Ben moves with confidence in the kitchen – bending over the stove, tasting sauces from steaming pots, maneuvering sharp knives as he fillets large cuts of fish, which are riddled in pink and red. I was not nearly so comfortable. It’s been a while since I last cooked under pressure, or for a group of more than 4 or 5. It’s been a while since I was last in a kitchen larger than the size of a breadbox, period. There, in the bright room that smelled of swordfish and lemons, the knife in my hand felt heavy and awkward. The pots were ungainly, and the stove, too hot.

I didn’t do a whole lot that afternoon. I pitted a crate of dates and helped to churn some ice cream. I seasoned ricotta with lemon zest, nutmeg, and salt. I poured a heavy-scented pot of garlic confit into plastic tubs to store. When I left, a couple of hours later, I took a deep breath. Everything felt unfamiliar.

I walked back to the subway on a street lined with brownstone apartments in Park Slope. I used to walk that way everyday, back when I lived in the neighborhood. The buildings are uniform in their russet-colored brick, locked together like a row of soldiers at attention. There is one block, however, where something is different. I had forgotten about it in the year and a half since I had moved. But walking by on Friday, I recalled: There is one building, toward the end of a block, which is painted a bright, screaming pink.

I stopped in front and smiled. I had forgotten about the pink.

A few years ago, on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, I strolled down this very block with a few friends, on our way home from Prospect Park.

“Why would someone paint their house that color?” a skeptical friend asked when we passed the home.

I shrugged. “Who knows,” I said.

“The people who live there must be crazy,” he concluded.

Secretly, though, I loved the house. It reminded me of summer and, perhaps, my childhood fascination with flamingos. Sometimes I even went out of my way to walk by its birthday cake-like exterior. It made me smile when I passed.

But this last Friday, heading away from the kitchen, I was surprised by the vivid pink. It didn’t seem right, bursting in color there in the leafless cold of a New York winter. It looked strange and slightly awkward. Like the way Ben’s chef knife had felt in my hand a few minutes earlier.

“I wonder who lives there,” I thought. I kept walking.

Winter

I walked through the farmers market in Union Square yesterday morning. I was on my way to work, and wanted an apple to eat on the way. I passed candles and yarn, fresh eggs and loaves of bread. I passed plastic-wrapped slices of banana bread and vacuum-packed cuts of lamb. I stopped at one of the many stalls selling apples. There were long tables covered in boxes of fruit: green, red, and yellow. The air smelled of hot cider and of smoke, wafting up from a nearby cigarette.

I took a bite of a Macintosh as I walked west towards the subway. It was tart and sweet and my fingers soon grew numb. As I walked, I realized that I could also smell something else. It was something familiar, yet unknown, something biting and faintly metallic. Perhaps it came from a trashcan, overflowing on the sidewalk. Perhaps it was the exhaust from a taxi driving by. Like many new smells for me these days—smells that are there but not, recognizable but unknown, and perpetually on the tip of my tongue—I just couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps, I thought, it is just the scent of cold.

Break

My family was in town last week and on Saturday we went to Peter Luger, a wood-paneled steak house next to the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. There were plates of hash browns, bowls of creamed spinach and pitchers of mahogany-colored steak sauce. The slabs of bacon, plopped down on our plates by an appropriately uninterested waiter, were simultaneously crisp and tender. The porterhouse steak arrived sizzling and the “shlag,” a thick pillow of whipped cream that accompanied the key lime pie, was divine.

I have been a vegetarian in the past. I shunned flesh for a few years back the heart of my awkward teenage phase, straddling the transition from junior high to high school. I don’t really remember why I decided to stop eating meat. I think it had to do with learning the source of foie gras, or perhaps it was about veal. It had to do with rebellion, too, and the knowledge that my choices at the table could say something, even if I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. It certainly stuck with some people. Members of my extended family to this day, over a decade later, still ask me with their eyebrows raised: “So, Molly, are you eating meat yet?”

I also don’t remember why I later halted the vegetarianism. But I do know that it was on a cool fall afternoon in suburban Boston, circa 1997. It had something to do my friend Ashley, McDonalds, and a chicken sandwich. Perhaps I just remembered that I like meat.

Peter Luger's Steak House is a place for people who like meat. And we ate a lot of meat that night last week. The porterhouse – a tenderloin and a strip steak separated by the thick, T-shaped bone – was served, sliced and glossy pink-in-the-middle, with a spoonful of buttery pan juices. The bacon was slathered in sauce. We took some of the leftovers home with the intention of eating them for lunch the next day.

But the next day around noon we took the bag from the fridge and opened it. I could smell the salty fat, the thick flesh, and the buttery pan juices. I closed it again. Sometimes, meat and I? We just I need a break.

Gingerbread

I am sitting in an unfamiliar apartment. There is the hiss of a radiator, the clunk of shoes on the stairs outside. Through the window next to the kitchen table, where my mug of now-cold coffee sits, I can see pigeons and a light flurry of snow. The scent of both diesel and sweet-roasted nuts; the crowded, delayed Q train and the piles of discarded Christmas trees on the sidewalk scream it out: I moved back to New York. I am still getting used to the newness of it all.

It’s been a while since I last wrote, despite my promise to do so more. Between travel and freelancing, holidays and packing, I haven’t had much time to myself.

I did bake a cake, though, on a cold December morning before Christmas. It was a gingerbread cake: Moist, spicy, and studded with hunks of Bosc pear. It smelled sweet and rich. Familiar. We ate it warm, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream while watching a movie on a Monday night. We ate it cold, for breakfast one day and for lunch the next. It was gone before I realized that I hadn’t taken a picture. But it did make rounds through the Internet, leaving many beautiful images in its wake.

Dark Gingerbread Pear Cake
From Gourmet, October 2008

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses (not robust or blackstrap)
3 large eggs
1/4 cup grated peeled ginger
1 Bosc pear

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour a 9-inch cake pan, knocking out excess.

Whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt.

Melt butter with water.

Beat together brown sugar and molasses with an electric mixer until combined. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well. Beat in flour mixture at low speed until just combined. Add butter mixture and ginger, beating just until smooth. Pour into cake pan.

Peel pear and cut into 3/4-inch pieces. Scatter over batter. Bake until a wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Cool slightly.

Scent of the City

I'm very happy to announce that I have a piece in the City Section of today's New York Times. It's about smell and it's about the city. But mainly it's about the life that each one gave to the other--and to me--as I recovered from the effects of the car accident in 2006.

Translation

I took an elevator to the 40th floor of a building in lower Manhattan on Tuesday evening of this week. When I stepped into the lobby, I saw small groups of people chatting and filling out nametags. I saw them sniffing at little brown vials of scent and recording their perception online. This is my kind of event, I thought with a smile.

I found a seat in an adjoining, window-lined room that soon filled to capacity. I was there for a lecture—A Rose by Any Other Name: the Science of Smell—hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences as part of their series “Science and the City.” For the next hour and a half I listened to Avery Gilbert, author of the recently published book What the Nose Knows, and Leslie Vosshall, head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, speak about the sense of smell.

Though interesting and casual, sometimes even verging on goofy, there were no glaringly new insights for me. I already understand the basics of olfactory science and am familiar with the references to scent in pop culture. As you know, I have been consumed by smell for the last three years. But there were a few things that grabbed me.

A sense of humor, for one. There were images of Daredevil, the blind superhero with a highly tuned sense of smell, and Andy Warhol, who valued the memories attached to each of his colognes so much that he often retired them after only a few months. “… I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn't get lost forever,” Warhol once said.

The theory of human pheromones was illustrated by a study done on strippers: tips earned from men while the pole dancers were ovulating were significantly higher than when they were not. Their tips fluctuated much more than the dancers on birth control, whose hormone levels were stable. It implies the power of our body’s chemicals, and the ability to perceive what we don't know is there.

In one moment, every member of the audience was asked to pinch his or her nose completely shut, place a jellybean on the tongue, and begin to chew. After a few seconds, everyone released their hand and exhaled. I watched as, one after another, the audience began to nod. Many smiled. While restricting the ability to smell, a jellybean is nothing but sweet and gritty. With an unclogged nose, however, flavor comes rocketing through. The sudden shot of vanilla, grape, or pineapple can be surprising.

At another point, Vosshall spoke about the different scent perceptions people have of simple, everyday items. It has to do with the olfactory receptors, which detect the odor molecules that arrive in all noses. Everyone has a different combination of receptors, she explained. Some of this difference is due to genetics, some due to wear and tear. It explains why some people love the scent of cilantro and others can’t stand it.

I remembered a professor I had in college, who taught child psychology early on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One morning during a lecture, she told my class that she loved the smell of skunk. “I would wear it as perfume if that wouldn’t be so socially unacceptable,” she said. I thought that was disgusting. I thought she was insane.

But now, over three years after I lost and regained my sense of smell, I too love the scent of skunk. To me, now, it’s sweet and nutty. It reminds me of baked goods.

“If you lose little bits,” Vosshall said on Tuesday, referring to the olfactory neurons, “things can get lost in translation.”

Nutmeg, paused in the midst of some hectic Thanksgiving kitchen work. More soon.

"Cake"

Sometimes the slow moments sneak up on me.

I had been spending my days working away, lost in reams of Word documents and stacks of library books, feeling little but the adrenaline of deadline and excitement of production. But then, suddenly, the articles were filed. The revisions were made. The endpoint never ceases to surprise me.

I woke up on Sunday morning with nothing more pressing than the newspaper, wrapped in plastic and the damp red leaves that had fallen from trees the night before. I’m really not used to free time. I baked a cake to take off the edge.

I have been transfixed by Suzanne Goin’s cookbook: Sunday Suppers at Lucques. Her “pumpkin” cake—understated and sweet, made with roasted butternut squash and a whiff of honey—transformed the house with scents of pecans and butter. It spoke to late autumn, early dusk, and lazy afternoons in the kitchen.


“Pumpkin” Cake with Pecan Streusel
Adapted from Sunday Suppers at Lucques

1 butternut squash
8 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 vanilla bean
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon dried nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/4 cups heavy cream
3 extra-large eggs
1 tablespoon honey
Pecan streusel topping (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Cut the squash in half lengthwise and place on a baking sheet, cut side up. (Don't remove the seeds yet; they give extra flavor.) Cover with foil, and roast about 1 hour, until very tender. Let cool 10 minutes, and then scoop out the seeds and discard them. Puree the warm squash through a ricer or food mill and measure out 1 1/2 cups.

Turn the oven down to 350F.

Butter and flour a 10-inch pan (I used a springform)

Place the butter in a medium saucepan. Slice the vanilla bean in two and scrape out the seeds with your knife into the pan. Add the seed pod as well, and cook over medium heat 6 to 8 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally, until the butter browns and smells nutty. Remove the pod.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a large bowl. Add the salt. Make a well in the center.

In another large bowl, whisk the reserved 1 1/2 cups squash puree, milk, 1/4 cup cream, eggs, and honey to combine. Pour the liquid into the well in the dry ingredients, and whisk until incorporated. Stir in the brown butter.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake 25 minutes, then remove the cake from the oven and sprinkle the streusel evenly over the top. Bake the cake another 45 minutes (or longer--mine was in for an hour), until the topping is crisp and cake has set. (The center of the cake will still be somewhat soft and won't pass the toothpick test.) Cool the cake on a rack for at least 15 minutes.

**Update: Originally, I had listed the quantity of heavy cream needed as 1 and 1/4 cups. The cake recipe calls for 1/4 cup, with the additional cup meant to be whipped and served along side the cake. I didn't make the whipped cream myself, and neglected to remove the measurement from the recipe when I wrote it up here. My apologies for the confusion!

Pecan Streusel Topping

1/4 cup pecans
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon dried nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 375.

Spread the pecans on a baking sheet, and toast them 8 to 10 minutes, until they darken slightly and smell nutty. When the nuts have cooled, chop them coarsely. Toss the nuts with the oil and salt.

In a food processor, pulse the butter, sugars, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg until just combined. Remove to a bowl, stir in the salted pecans, and chill until ready to use.

Tart

I’m in the middle of an overwhelming writing project. It consumes my days, and some of my nights. I spend a lot of time at my desk. I'm sitting there now. Through the window, I can see a big, gnarly oak tree. It’s leaning to the left, stretching to touch its very last branch to the roof of the house below. Over the past two weeks I’ve watched the red leaves fall, one by one, and now it’s bare.

The excitement of this past week has been surreal, especially when experienced against long hours of concentration and Word documents, watching autumn slowly melt away.

But it has been exciting. I sold some freelance work and found a yoga studio near my house. I baked Edna Lewis’ Fresh Apple Cake with Caramel Glaze, and under-seasoned a mediocre pot of cauliflower soup. My car got a flat tire. I avoided fixing it for as long as possible. And, of course, Obama is President-Elect.

I cooked dinner for my family last night. It was a calm Sunday evening to prepare for another week—a calmer week, but one still laced with hope and change. My favorite part of the meal was the Julia Child’s Alsatian Onion Tart.

Now, I took a short cut. I admit it. I used frozen puff pastry rather than the "from scratch" Julia would have wanted. But I have no regrets. The sweet onions melted against its flaky crust just right.




Alsatian Onion Tart
Adapted from Baking with Julia

1/2 pound puff pastry, chilled
4 very large onions, peeled and diced
1 cup chicken broth
3 tablespoons heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 pound bacon

-Roll out the puff pastry until very thin on a lightly floured surface. Julia recommends cutting it into a circle using the lid of a pot as a guide. I left it as a rectangle. Place it on an un-greased baking sheet, and prick dough all over with a fork. Refrigerate until needed.

-Put diced onion and chicken broth into a saucepan and cook over medium heat for around a half hour, until onions are soft. Drain, discarding liquid, and let cool. When cool, add heavy cream, season with salt and pepper, and stir.

-Cut bacon into 1/4 inch cubes. Blanch for one minute in boiling water. Drain and rinse with cold water. Pat dry with paper towels. Then, heat a medium skillet over moderately high heat, and cook the bacon pieces for a few minutes, making sure they don't get too tough. Remove from heat, and drain on paper towels again.

-Preheat oven to 350 F. Remove pastry and top with the onions, spreading all the way to the edge. Scatter bacon over top. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until golden brown. (I cooked mine for closer to 45.)

Alinea

Today I bought Alinea, the new cookbook by Grant Achatz. There are hundreds of recipes, which are based on tasting menus at his Chicago restaurant of the same name, and stunning photographs. Many of his dishes are out of my league, as I don't own a Vita-Prep blender nor do I have any calcium ascorbate lying around the house. But I couldn't help myself: There is a short section on Achatz's use of scent in cooking.

Aroma, he writes, offers two possibilities for the chef. "The opportunity to flavor a dish by way of smell, and to add a layer of complexity to a concept by triggering an emotional response to a familiar smell. These two facets of the technique became so important in our cooking that the idea of aroma itself became a creative avenue."

Achatz has fought a well-documented battle of his own in the last year. Diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2007, he underwent radiation and, as a result, temporarily lost his ability to taste. I've followed his story with great interest. My own experience of sensory loss and regain has changed the way I look at food and cooking, taste and flavor. I can only imagine what it has done for one of the country's best chefs.