Mothers, Cookbooks, and Apple Pie

For years, my daughters have been asking me to teach them how to bake an apple pie. I suppose they view it as a gold standard of domesticity, the kind of task and knowledge that mothers naturally pass on to their girls and that they therefore expect to receive. Problem is, I’m not much of a cook and can hardly claim expertise in any matters domestic, partly because I lost my mom before I realized these things were valuable to learn—she knew how to bake an apple pie, though lemon meringue was her trademark—and partly, I suppose, because willfully refusing to learn how to bake pies effectively separates me from my mother and therefore, in a form of twisted logic, from her fate. I’ve felt guilty about having two daughters who want to bake, though, as if somehow I’m not stepping up to the maternal plate in the manner they want or need.

Isn’t pie baking (and knitting, and sewing, and knowing how to use a Crock Pot, and all the things I’ve taken halfhearted stabs at during the years and then promptly abandoned) just part of what mothers do?

And then this past Sunday while my husband was on a trip to New York I found myself home with the girls with a leisurely afternoon and no plans, a rarity for us three. For a reason that still escapes me, even as I sit here writing, I decided it would be a fine day to learn how to bake an apple pie.

I started by Googling “basic apple pie recipe.” The ever-trusty Cooks.com came right to the rescue, but something about referring to a laptop or iPad screen while baking felt fundamentally wrong. I decided to look in my rarely-touched stash of cookbooks for a useful alternative. My new-ish Better Homes and Gardens cookbook didn’t have a recipe for apple pie. (I know. That surprised me, too.) An older New York Times Cookbook I picked up somewhere years ago didn’t have one, either. It started to occur to me that cookbooks either a) assume that everyone with an interest in cooking already knows how to cook an apple pie; or b) an apple pie is just too basic for their readerships, who’d rather learn how to make apple-strawberry-rhubarb gluten-free latticed cobbler extravaganzas, or some such.

In the end, the recipe I found was almost exactly the one on Cooks.com and came from my mother’s old Better Homes and Garden cookbook from the early 1960s. I inherited the book when I left for college, or maybe I just took it with me without asking; I honestly don’t remember, but I’ve carried it with me from state to state, house to house, for the past 30 years. The book was a staple of my childhood, with its red-and-white checked hard looseleaf cover and silver-ring binder interior. The printed looseleaf pages have turned sepia with age, and over the years someone (my mother? me during college?) unclipped some of the baking recipes and tucked them inside the front cover without clipping them back in. But there about 2/3 of the way into the book, right where they belonged, were the recipes and instructions for double pie crusts and a simple apple pie.

The girls and I had most of the ingredients on hand – flour, salt, butter, apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar. We also had my mother’s wooden rolling pin and her big, plastic Tupperware mat with the concentric circles that tell you how wide to roll the dough for 8-, 9-, and 10-inch pies. My daughters love that mat. It looks progressive and vintage at the same time. They also like knowing the rolling pin we’re using is the one from my childhood home. Baking this pie was practically a three-generational effort, or as close to it as we could get.

With three people on the job, the pie took about 45 minutes of prep time and about 30 minutes of oven time. And the result was much better than you’d expect from three cooks who’d never tried it before, even after Eden and I got absorbed in a logo guessing game on my iPad and didn’t hear the oven timer go off for at least five minutes after the pie should have been done. Oops.

I don’t harbor any illusions that I’ll become a master baker, or magically transform into a crafty mom. I still don’t knit, and I still can’t sew. Most nights will still find me playing board games or proofreading high school papers rather than wielding a Cuisinart. But there was a certain, deep satisfaction that came from tackling that pie, from discovering it wasn’t as difficult or as mystifying as I’d imagined from a distance, and from having my mother participate in the enterprise with the two granddaughters she never met, even if it was just through her possessions. My older daughter, who took most of the pie to school to school today for a lunchtime picnic, asked if she could inherit the cookbook one day. Which will be exactly the right place for it to land.

The Thing About Fumiko

This Sunday's New York Times Style section will contain an essay I wrote about the week my 11-year-old daughter had to carry a flour-sack baby--whom she named Fumiko--to school with her every day--to learn about the responsibilities of teen parenting.
Crazy week in our house!
Here's the link to the article, titled Maternal Wisdom (5 Pounds Worth)...and a photo of the one and only Fumiko himself.
For anyone wondering, he and Hursula Zero (who appeared in The Possibility of Everything) do share a bedroom, but not a cradle.
I'm sure it says something about me that I keep writing about my children's dolls..but I'll leave that conversation for the Comments section.
Enjoy!

The Target Story

Everyone's been asking how the Target selection occurred. Well, I don't really have an answer. From my point of view, what happened was one day I got an email from my editor saying "Good news! Your book was chosen as a Target breakout book for the fall!"

I can see how some writers might get the scared deer look upon hearing this. Target? Not a retailer exactly known for its literary prominence. Sheet sets, yes. Memoirs? Not so much.

But me, I was beyond happy. “Excellent!” I wrote back.

You see, I happen to love our local Woodland Hills Target. And the one in Coralville, Iowa, too. It's my family’s premiere source of one-stop shopping. Where else can you find ballet clothes, computer paper, blow-up mattresses for sleepovers because the old one just sprang an inconvenient leak, Brita water filters that really should have been replaced a month ago, tube socks, and classic rock CDs all under the same roof?

Well, probably at Wal-Mart. But I wouldn't know. Because I'm loyal to Target.

My excitement, it lasted for about half an hour. That’s when I got the email from MoveOn.org calling for a boycott of Target. (Sheesh, I couldn’t even get to celebrate for a whole day?) Seems that Target’s corporate HQ donated $150,000 to a group supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who's known to be anti-gay. And then my gay friends started emailing me to say, "Congratulations about Target. BUT." And coming from a family with several gay members, for me, it's a pretty significant BUT.

So I hope this all gets sorted out soon. Because I really do love shopping at Target. And I'm pretty sure no one at my local Woodland Hills Target was involved in the donation. But I voted against Prop 8 here in California. And I'd vote against it again and again.

If you’re boycotting Target, please consider buying The Possibility of Everything somewhere else. If you’re a committed Target shopper, please wave at the book when you see it there. Drop one in your cart if you’d like. Most of all, please enjoy the read.

Hanging with Authors and Thinkers at the LATFOB

The LA Times Festival of Books was last weekend, and like most attendees, I imagine, I was left with two overriding impressions: first, extreme jubilation that so many people showed up this year, especially this year, in support of authors and the written word; and second, total overwhelm from having been in the presence of 400 authors and 130,000 attendees on the UCLA campus over just two days.

If you’re a participating author, your time at the festival always begins in the author’s green room, a huge room of tables and a buffet spread inside the UCLA faculty center which always feels like (no matter how old you get) the high school cafeterias of your past. The prom king and queen drift around the room, occasionally holding court, and you never feel like you’re sitting at the cool kids’ table. Unless you’re one of the cool kids and feeling secure in that knowledge, I suppose. The thing is, most of us who became authors were never the cool kids in high school, so probably nearly everyone in the room was feeling the way I was. (Except perhaps for T.C. Boyle, who walked between the tables wearing a black beret and dark sunglasses with everyone whispering, “That’s T.C.!” in his wake. I think if you actually know him you get to call him Tom. But I digress.)

On Saturday I had the great fortune to participate in an hourlong panel titled “Memoir: Keeping the Faith” with authors Dani Shapiro (Devotion); Eric Lax (Faith, Interrupted) and William Lobdell (Losing My Religion). We joked that our panel really should have been called “Keeping the Faith, Finding the Faith, Losing the Faith, and Questioning the Faith” since we were all coming at the topic from different, yet complementary, directions. Our moderater was Jack Miles, UC Professor of Religion and author of God: A Biography, who got stuck in traffic coming up from Orange County and strolled into the room at one minute to three, picked up the mike, and got us rolling, which was kind of a wonky beginning, but he was so charming and erudite that nobody seemed to mind. Each of the panelists spoke for a few minutes about their respective books, and then Jack asked a question of each of us. These panelists were terrific, all so thoughtful and considerate, and did such a good job of getting everyone thinking about faith and writing and storytelling and personal experience that I think it might have been one of the very best panels I’ve ever participated in.

During the audience Q&A section near the end, a man came up to the mike with a question for me. He said that when he hears about someone choosing to take a child to healers in Belize instead of to a psychiatrist he immediately scoffs at the idea, and he wanted to know what my suggestions I had for discussing faith with people whose beliefs are different from his own. (I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.) It was a good question, and one worthy of consideration, I think. I spoke some about how we first have to establish there is no “right” answer, no one answer, and that because faith is so individual and personal it requires people on both sides of the discussion to maintain a healthy and genuine respect for ideas other than their own. Eric Lax spoke a bit about how that requires a certain degree of humility, to suspend one’s own disbelief (or belief) long enough to consider that perhaps the other person isn’t wrong, because only then can meaningful conversation begin.

It really comes down to a discussion of arrogance, I think. In my opinion, arrogance has very bad p.r., insofar that when we hear the word we tend to bristle, reacting to it as something negative. But if you can sidestep the undertones of haughtiness and disdain that surround the word, arrogance really means steadfastly and stubbornly adhering to one’s own point of view to the exclusion of others, which can—dare I say it?—sometimes be a useful survival tool. Engaging in a respectful conversation with someone who holds a different belief system about faith does require a loosening of one’s own arrogance, I believe. To me, it’s just as arrogant to say, “There is a God because I know it to be true” as “There is no God because I haven’t seen proof that one exists.” I left the panel having reaffirmed that I have my experiences, and the belief system that have grown out of those experiences. As far as faith goes, this makes me an expert only on what I myself believe to be true--yet deeply interested in what others have to say, as well. And judging by the number of audience members who lined up to ask questions of panelists, it seems that others are, too. This is an important dialogue, especially in these difficult times. I hope it continues.