Christmas at the Place Sainte Marthe
The-job-that-pays-the-bills has made this week particularly hectic. Having little time to write, I will, therefore, refer us to the Encyclopedia of the Mistress of the Home (if you are new to this blog please refer to the earlier entry entitled On the Job of Being a Woman). The quote below is taken from the chapter 4 La Table et le Savoir Vivre.
La voici:
“L’œuf à la coque ne s’offre que dans l’intimité.”
The truth at its best is succinct, it is complexity compressed. Let us reflect now on the three-minute egg that is only offered in intimacy.
Le Savoir Vivre
Have you reflected? Very good. It is not everyday that we are given to ponder the profundities of social graces and the arts of the table. But perhaps the Encyclopedia’s injunction indirectly invites the more adventurous among us to mingle in metaphysics as well: if so, the most gifted guide for this leg of our brief journey will be Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.
Of the egg she writes:
“I take in the egg at a single glance. I immediately perceive that I cannot be seeing an egg. To see an egg never remains in the present. No sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for the last three thousand years. The very instant an egg is seen, it is the memory of an egg—the only person to see the egg is someone who has already seen it. — Upon seeing the egg, it is already too late: an egg seen is an egg lost. – To see the egg is the promise of being able to see the egg one day. – A brief glance which cannot be divided; if there is any thought; there is no thought; there is the egg.”
The Foreign Legion, Carcanet Press
It is the Encyclopedia’s mission to save us embarrassments, to preempt all possible faux pas – from the prosaic to more the obscure. Gaucheries of all persuasions. With the egg, a great deal is at stake: the egg, be it fresh or coqued has the power to disrupt the order of the table, to bring the conversation to an ontological deadlock. The three-minute egg stretched beyond the intimacy of one’s own sensory experience and plate threatens the conventions that assure us a certain safety or at least that sense of security we hold dear, particularly while dining. Indigestion is no small matter.
Still, let us picture twelve friends seated at the table and before each guest, an oeuf à la coque perched in its stand, like so many Humpty Dumpties teetering and poised to fall to pieces. I find myself itching to egg the Encyclopedia and its precautions.
From page 154: to remove yellow yoke stains, soak (book) in cold water, then apply soap (trempage dans de l’eau froide puis savonnage.).
Speaking of things yellow, several requests have been made for my cornbread recipe. I’d like to know how Emily Dickinson made hers and if she put molasses in it, but I believe mine stands on its own and no poetic surrogate is required.
Anne’s Cornbread for making in France
1 cup flour (if you don’t have proper American measuring cups use a verre à whisky)
1 cup cornflour (polenta ou semoule de mais)
A half a packet of levure
4 heaping tablespoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt (or a bit less)
Mix all dry ingredients together in big bowl then add:
1 cup of buttermilk (lait fermenté – look for Yorik in supermarket – not Hamlet’s Alas Poor Yorick but the brand Yorik)
One third cup sunflower oil or melted butter
3 eggs
Mix all together, pour into a buttered pan and cook for about 10 to 15 minutes (my oven bakes at lightening speed so I can’t be exact here) at about 200 degrees Celsius.
The key to good cornbread is the buttermilk.
At the Palais Royal: I nibbled on cornbread here, gazing at the ephebe.