Brown Bread from the Emerald Isle

Brown bread was just one of the many scrumptious baked goods that my Irish grandmother, affectionately known as "Mamo," regularly produced in her tiny kitchen in Elmhurst in Queens, New York.

Mamo emigrated from Ireland in the late 1940s and brought with her a wealth of recipes for delights such as lemon cookies, apple pie, custard tarts, Turkish delight, sultana cake, tipsy cake, spotty dog (which was a soda bread), and a yellow cake with chocolate frosting that we have never been able to reproduce and for which the recipe was never written down.

Her recipe for brown bread is as basic as it gets. I've tried several recipes from as many sources, and they all seem to simply tweak the amount of each ingredient; the results are pretty much the same.

Not the best picture of Mamo but the
only one near to hand. She was in her
mid-80s in this snapshot.

My dad, an engineer who was a lifelong fan of hearty bread and a baker of same for the past few years, could not resist fiddling with the amount of the ingredients, either. He saw fit to email me with changes to Mamo's various recipes that involved increasing the amount of buttermilk by an ounce or two or changing the brand of flour.

Every Saint Patrick's Day, I make a big round loaf of Mamo's brown bread. Slathered with butter, it makes for a filling breakfast with a big cup of coffee. It makes me think about Mamo and my other Irish relatives, too.

As a kid, I used to think Mamo was, like, a patron saint or something. She certainly was very religious (we kids said she was "holy"). When I visited her home, I slept on a fold-out cot in her bedroom, and when I awoke, I'd see her sitting up in bed, holding a well-worn, black prayer book, a cup of tea brought by my grandfather at her side. All I would hear is the sibilant whispering of her morning prayers. A painting of the Last Supper arched across the wall behind her.

Oddly, for such a pious woman, she taught me only two Irish phrases: Póg mo thóin (kiss my...erm, backside) and Go hifreann leat! (go to...uh, heck).

I'm glad I got to bake up a loaf of this bread at least once in Mamo's company. She showed me how to knead the gluey mass (today I toss it into the Kitchen Aid mixer and let the dough hook do the work) and how to slash it twice at right angles (according to Mamo, to bless it; according to my mom, who baked this same bread frequently, to make it easier to cut).

I regret, however, that I never asked Mamo to teach me to knit. Wow! What a knitter she was...Aran sweaters, boucle skirt-and-top sets, adorable cabled cardigans for children...and here I can't even cast on and can barely sew a hem.

Go raibh míle maith agat! (May you have a thousand good things!) Here's her recipe. The bread should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom after removing it from the oven. Be sure to put the bread on a cooling rack or lean it at an angle against the wall after you take it out of the oven, otherwise the bottom of the bread will get soft as it gives off moisture. Store it when cool inside a paper bag, not plastic.

Mamo's Brown Bread
(in her words)

2 cups of wheat flour
2 cups of white flour
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
About a pint of buttermilk or sour milk

To make soft dough mix with wooden spoon. Knead it a few times on board or table with flour spread on it. Bake in cooking tray in oven at 400. (Sprinkle flour on tray.) You know how to flatten it on tray and make cross to make four squares.

Yippee-Pi-Yay: Pies for Pi Day

I find mathematics fairly off-putting. My dad was an engineer who loved numbers, equations, and logic, but sadly any genes for fascination and skill with numbers bypassed me. I do, however, love pie. So I'm very pleased that 3/14 is Pi Day because it gives us a perfectly good excuse (as if you need one) to enjoy pie.

There will be no memorization of or recitations of pie in our household (though we may manage to remember the official Pi Second: 3/14/1:59:26). Instead, we'll serve up chicken pot pie for dinner this evening. As for dessert, we got a head start on that yesterday.

I figured I'd bake a pie using whatever I had in the freezer. I knew I still had summer fruits frozen there, so I had in mind a jumbleberry pie. But I hadn't realized what a dent we'd made in them: there was just a handful of freezer-burned raspberries and a scant 2 cups of blueberries. Pecan pie was a possibility, but my daughter doesn't like nuts, so that was out of the question. And there wasn't any molasses sticking around, so shoo-fly pie wasn't an option, either.

So I bravely attempted my first lemon meringue pie ever. My mom applauded the effort, noting that in 55 years of marriage she had only made one once and that she recalled the meringue peaks collapsing.

I managed to properly prebake the crust (the first time I ever prebaked a crust, I tossed in a cupful of those little ceramic pie weights to prevent the crust from bubbling up--but did not realize until too late that I should've put a layer of foil down first; the ceramic marbles got baked into the crust so that it looked as if I were making BB-pellet pie).

The lemon filling was easy to make, the meringue a bit more difficult. I was so mesmerised watching the Kitchen Aid mixer whip up the meringue topping, because for the first time ever I got to turn the mixer all the way up to the number 10 setting, so I think I whipped it for too long--the meringue had a consistency not unlike instant mashed potatoes, and I guess it was supposed to be more like whipped cream.

Slathering it on top of the wiggly filling was kind of like trying to spackle a quaking bog.

Still, it looked OK and people ate it, but after we polish it off tonight, I think it will be many a pi day before another lemon meringue shows up on the table.

Bubble Bibelots on Phinney Hill

A curious thing appeared on an outcropping from our rockery one morning in late January of this year. Here it is, photographed in its current home in a sunny window:

At first I didn't touch it, figuring it was some random part off a bicycle or something that a passerby had placed up high for its owner to find, just as people do with assorted odd mittens, children's socks, or toys--perching them on stones or fire hydrants or hanging them from branches. When I looked more closely, however, the blue bubble was obviously a blown-glass piece. I took it indoors to rescue it from its precarious position on our busy street, where it would likely be snatched and smashed on the pavement.

Then, during the next few days, I spotted more bubbles: a pink flame-shaped one, a round peach one, and a clear, red-flecked orb, all placed on rocks or concrete walls along our block.

A week later, a walk down a neighboring street led to the discovery of more than a dozen orbs in rainbow colors dotting the rockeries and walls. So when my daughter and I trekked up the hill yesterday, we thought to bring the camera with us in case we stumbled on any more of the mysterious objects. We even walked on opposite sides of the street to make sure we didn't miss any.

We weren't disappointed! Glassy gewgaws turned up at every few houses, twinkling during the rare March sunbreak we were enjoying.

We still don't know who has bedecked our neighborhood with these wonderful things, or why (though I am suspecting a local glass studio), other than just to bedazzle, charm, intrigue, and amuse people. But I am very glad they did this.

Kinglet for a Day

When a little olive-drab bird with black and white wings showed up at our feeder this winter, goggling at me with its white-ringed eyes, I scurried to the field guides to figure out what it was before it flew off to a more competitive birder's backyard, never to return.

Which, kindly, it did not do, choosing instead to become a regular in our garden. This gave me plenty of opportunities and time to figure out that it was a ruby-crowned kinglet.

The first part of this tiny bird's name comes from a field mark that one is hard pressed to spot: a small patch of red atop its head, which is (1) only present in the male and (2) only on display when it's agitated about something. The "kinglet" is a reference to both this scarlet crown and the bird's diminutive size. It could just as well be called the yellow-footed kinglet, as it's got black legs and lemony feet, but I guess those field marks would be even harder to see.

For such a little bird--barely four inches long--it warbles loudly and vigorously. It's also quite fecund: a female may lay up to a dozen eggs, a figure that marks the largest clutch-to-bird-size ratio among North American nesters. The nest that holds this cargo is a pendulous one, suspended high in a conifer.

There's the red crown!


 
Unfortunately (as in, too bad for me, but fine for the kinglets), I won't be seeing dozens of baby kinglets (what could be cuter?) this spring or summer because although kinglets winter in lowlands west of the Cascade Mountains, they migrate north into Alaska and Canada to nest or higher up in the mountains.

So for now I'll just enjoy watching this fellow's frantic antics at the suet feeder, where he flaps and hovers and clambers all over the wire cage to get at the seeds when the bushtits are not monopolizing it, looking constantly astonished at his luck thanks to those white-ringed eyes.

Feather Weather

Lots of "brrrrdies" showing up at the feeders now that the temperatures have dipped into the teens here in our usually maritime-moderated habitat. Everything from big cottony snowflakes to nasty pellets of graupel fell on us in the last 48 hours.

Very little of it stuck (just enough to require vigorous scraping of windshields in the morning and careful foot placement while going down outdoor stairs), but the accompanying cold has driven a raccoon into taking shelter beneath our tarp-covered picnic table, most likely has encouraged the #@!* rat to sneak into the engine of my Subaru again (reminder to self: bang on hood), and fortunately for us, has sent hungry, feather-fluffed birds to the feeders outside the window.

This year has seen the return of house finches--we used to have tons of these pretty birds here until a Cooper's hawk moved into the neighborhood, so I'm glad now to have both hawk and finches in the area again. This male-female pair has stopped by every day and yesterday were accompanied by two other males:

A few years ago, Bewick's wrens turned up in the neighborhood--perhaps their tendency to flit about low to the ground and through shrubs helped them evade hawks and establish a foothold in our garden. I love these little guys--they're very brave and feisty, sing prettily and loudly, and growl a loud, buzzing call that clearly says "shove off" when they see a dog, a cat, or anybody else they don't like.

This little wren asserts himself at both the suet and the sunflower seed feeder, refusing to let the brawnier finches and sparrows and the little-tough-guy chickadees push him around:

We've also had normally ground-feeding juncos perching on the suet feeder (they must have been inspired by the rest of the gang) and visits from a ruby-crowned kinglet (a new species on both my lame life list and at our feeder). Yesterday, another brand-new bird showed up--I'm pretty sure it's the "Myrtle" form of the yellow-rumped warbler (charmingly also known as the butterbutt). If so, perhaps it's a harbinger of spring on the way as migrants pick their way north for the breeding season, despite the mercury's plunge south.

I am also pleased to see that Edward Scissorbill, the neighborhood crow with the misshapen beak, has survived the winter and is once again surveying his kingdom from his utility-line perch with his mate at his side (she was too coy to stick around for this picture).

Birds of a Father

I became enamored of birds at a very young age. I do not know how this fondness began, or when I first noticed birds, but my father, who encouraged the hobbies and interests of each of his four children, happily indulged my flight of fancy. One small token of the regard he had for my pursuit was his gift of a little Royal Copenhagen robin, which he purchased while on a business trip to Denmark back in the late '60s or early 70s.

This little bird has traveled everywhere with me since, and in recent years it acquired a companion: a bigger version of itself, rescued from the shelves of a local thrift shop. The big one, of course, I consider to be the papa bird. The little one's me.

Dad wasn't a birder, but he loved that I loved birds, because it pleased him to see his children take a keen interest in a topic, research it, be enveloped by it, become impassioned about it, just as he dove into subjects that caught his attention.

And so he gave me my first field guide to birds--a book so well used that now its covers are just a folder for a sheaf of loose pages. He later replaced it with the first Audubon field guide to feature photographs (this book is still going strong). Over the years, he also gave me my first bird feeder, my first pair of binoculars, and an Audubon bird call--a squeaky little bit of wood and metal that so far hasn't summoned any birds, but has proven to be a most amusing device for stirring housecats into a frenzy of searching.

Though Dad couldn't name the species that flitted through our garden (a story recalled by my parents tells of a running disagreement over a waterfowl that paraded in front of them as they argued about whether it was a goose or a duck), he could identify other winged things with ease--namely, airplanes.

Dad was a lifelong aircraft aficionado and an aeronautical engineer by profession, and when a small craft buzzed over our Long Island garden, he would cock an ear, squint into the sky, and either rap out the name of the plane straightaway or weigh several options before deciding on one. When he moved to the northwestern USA, to an area replete with airfields, it was his particular delight to smile knowingly and not say a word when a visiting WWII B-17 rumbled over the city.

My fondness for flying things, however, stopped at birds. I've never been overly fond of air travel, though in my early twenties this sensible hesitation took the form of outright fear. This terror at leaving terra firma didn't bode well for taking a jet to Hawaii with my mom and dad. But Dad's scientific precision and sensible, logical ways--always infused with a sense of humor and a gentle, sly wit--proved to be of invaluable help.

As the jet sped down the runway and gained altitude while I maintained a death-grip on the arms of my seat, Dad didn't chide me, or seek to comfort me by sharing cheerful bromides about flying; instead, he simply murmured repetitively, with a twinkle in his eye, a pair of phrases: "Bernoulli's principle. Lift, and thrust."

This incantation, coming from a man who designed variable-sweep jet wings and wrote papers that earned him the nickname "Mr. Supersonic Propulsion Inlet," was oddly comforting--perhaps because it made me giggle, perhaps because it came from such a trusted authority. My dad simply would not allow the plane to fall down.

It was completely plausible to me that even a Boeing 747 with a takeoff weight of 975,000 pounds would respect my father's authority. There didn't seem to be anything that was beyond my father's capability.

He could not only design a jet but also sail a boat, bake bread, convert a dinghy into a sailboat, build a wooden cartop carrier for all our camping gear plus a chuck wagon to match, explain quantum physics, imitate a steam locomotive starting up, identify a metal bar scavenged on a beach as a "sacrificial anode," read books on string theory for pleasure, appreciate an exquisite turn of phrase, enjoy Beethoven and "Masterpiece Theatre" but also get startling (to us) joy from "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," fling us on his back to show us how to do the Fireman's Carry, win at Scrabble (sometimes), predict the weather, imitate Peter Lorre, drive a tractor, use a sextant, send and receive messages in Morse code, build a dollhouse for my and my sister's mouse-sized dolls as well as a playground for my pet parakeet, construct a model railroad, grill a steak to perfection, painstakingly color an Easter Egg in a plaid pattern with markers just to amuse his kids, play Candyland very graciously with his granddaughter, plot and plan square-foot gardens, write a breezy history of Ireland before taking his family on a coach tour of same, fix just about anything, and converse seriously with a harmless but completely inebriated gentleman in a park who asked him, "Excuse me, sir, but what color is indigo?"

And laugh. Dad loved to laugh, and he had a great one that went from a rumbling chuckle to gasping for breath. He loved the absurd and appreciated wordplay. Once, while complaining gruffly but with amusement about the mysterious bird that insisted on defecating daily on the mailbox, he wondered aloud if it could be identified as a "mailbox pooper." One of us kids responded, "Maybe--if it's brightly colored, unlike the female boxpooper."

A roar of appreciation from Dad, and another running joke was hatched.

Last week, we lost this excellent man, our wonderful father.

The day after his funeral, we gathered quietly for breakfast. Chancing to look out the window, we noticed a robin, puffed up against the cold, sitting on the fence. My mother remarked that her father always referred to robins as having been sent to say hello by his beloved wife Bridey, who'd been lost to him at a young age.

The robin continued to stare at us through the window, sitting quietly, peering intently at us. He watched calmly as we finished our meal, not moving until we began to tidy up.

It wasn't hard to imagine that Dad had sent this little harbinger of spring to sit in for him and tell us that he's still with us, still keeping up with everything about the life that he loved.

When Life Is Crummy, Savor the Crumbs

Crumb cake enjoys iconic status in our family.

By "crumb cake" I don't mean just any old coffeecake with a little bit of streusel topping. Oh, no. A crumb cake is actually far more crumb than cake; the cake exists merely as a platter for the heavy, sweet topping of buttery, cinnamon-flavored crumbs.

For me, growing up in New York, a crumb cake meant just one particular cake--the confectioner-sugar-dusted square of pastry nestled in a white box with the name "Entenmann's" stretching across it in bold navy blue. A cellophane window allowed you to peek in at the winterscape atop the yellow cake and long for the moment when Mom or Dad would slit the little tabs on each side to open the box.

I loved this cake so much that I requested it for my birthday cake several times. I remember candles sticking up out of the perfect square of crumbs; I remember enjoying my little rectangle cut from this square while the other kids at my party tucked into triangular pieces of normal, frosted birthday cake.

That cake had the perfect balance of crumb and cake. Though the yellow cake was subordinate to the crumbs, its texture and depth were important. It had to be moist (so moist that it was compressible, like Wonder Bread) and thick enough so that you tasted it, because without that gentle taste, the crumbs were overpowering. A stale crumb cake was unsavory; a fresh cake made at a bakery nearby that was practically all crumb (and was flat and round, billed as a Pizza Crumb) was surprisingly unappealing.

I remember we all liked the middle part of the cake best, where the crumbs stayed fresh the longest and were concentrated in a dense layer. And if you couldn't wheedle a between-meals slice from my parents, you could certainly snitch a few crumbs off the cake (and, if the cake's appearance was questioned later, claim that they had "fallen off").

When we were older, we would audaciously cut into the cake starting in the middle and working our way out to the edges. The sliced cake would take on odd shapes as people angled to get the most crumb-laden pieces; it resembled an ongoing game of tangrams.

And when the cake was all gone, there were still the crumbs to enjoy--the ones that really, truly fell off the cake without any help and rolled into the tiny alleys between the foil cake pan and the box's interior edges.

Jumping forward a few years and across a continent, I found myself in the crumb-cake-less land of the Pacific Northwest. For two long years I learned how to order lattes and what "venti" meant but lacked the appropriate crumb cake to accompany the coffee.

Then one day as I drove to work, a white billboard with a familiar blue signature appeared on the horizon. Drawing closer, I realized it announced that Entenmann's was coming soon to A Grocery Store Near Me. It was like seeing a glorious sunrise. Upon arrival at the office, I rounded a corner and bumped into a fellow East-Coaster who worked there and we simultaneously exclaimed, "Did you see? Did you see?"

It was a nice taste of home--for a while. After about a decade, though, the cakes started disappearing from local stores. The Entenmann's displays dwindled to a pathetic assortment of boxed doughnuts. A desperate plea emailed to the new company that owned the Entenmann's line yielded only a curt reply that no, the company had no intention of making the cake available in the northwest again.

*Sigh*

Ordering online was an absurd option--it would cost about $15 to buy and ship the cake from a deli in New York. The only other option was to learn to bake the darn thing myself, and that's where Cook's Illustrated came to the rescue. It published a recipe for New York Style Crumb Cake in May 2007.

I finally baked this cake about a week ago. Its baking wasn't just out of a desire to sate a sweet tooth or sweet nostalgia, though. This cake was freighted with more than just crumbs. It was baked for a dear relative facing surgery that would result in being diabetic. This cake consisted of sweetness and sweet memories.

The cake was served, with crumbs still intact (none had "fallen off" en route). We sliced the cake in time-approved manner, from the middle out. The central square went to the guest of honor.

The crumbs were pronounced delectable and "just right." The yellow cake was too dry, but this wasn't the recipe's fault--I'd baked it in a glass pan because I didn't have a metal one, and this affected the texture. We didn't mind, though. I figured the cake was just taunting us, reminding us that even though the crumbs get all the glory, the cake counts, too.

It's a sad and worrisome time for our family as life changes now and forever. But we've also shared plenty of stories, and many hugs, along with the crumb cake. That silly square of sweetness serves as a reminder in a couple of ways: Don't save the best for last. Enjoy life from the middle out, right up to the edges. And when life is crummy, savor even the littlest crumbs you can find.