Banana Upside Down Cake

OK, tell me you don't want it: a dense, buttery cake with bananas sitting in caramel.

Well, OK, maybe you don't. If September is truly the start of the new year, you might have a resolution or two up your sleeve. I want to bone up on my French. I've lost it since we moved to the country four years ago. I don't get into too many conversations about the proper use of the subjunctive with my neighbors.

But I digress. I'm supposed to be writing about banana upside down cake. How it got mixed up with the subjunctive is. . . .

Right. Resolutions. The best thing about calling September the new year is that you don't have to make any. No French, no gym memberships. Those are all well and good. But you don't have to. You can just celebrate this thing called time. (Or not. At fifty, I can't decide which.)

I warn you, real food lovers: this cake is a also a celebration of butter. Without a doubt, it's empty calories. Probably eight servings in this thing. But butter is a real fat. Better that than some fake stuff. And yes, there's sugar involved. Even corn syrup. We'll get to that. On to the cake:

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Crabapple Jelly

Near the opening of Toni Morrison's BELOVED, Sethe is trying to come to terms with her child, dead now these several years, a baby who is still haunting her house. Her other daughter, Denver, catches her mother praying--and sees the ghostly image of the little baby with its arms around Sethe. Rather than thinking anything's odd about a ghost in the house, Denver finds it curious that her mother is praying. She asks what it was all about, and Sethe says, "I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it."

I know what she means. Time is the craziest thing. People contact me on facebook, people I haven't even thought about in 35 years--glacial epochs, or so it feels, as if I once lived on another, forgotten land mass. Then guests come to our home in the country for a week and it seems as if they stay a couple days--although the calendar says otherwise. And there are the seasons, coming and going with shocking abandon.

I've finally finished the book, the seven-step plan to get off all processed food. In, done, over. About two hours ago, in fact. But time hasn't started moving again. Instead, I've been caught in a moment that doesn't flow. It's just here, static. I keep waiting for things to lurch into gear. But they haven't. Instead, I'm looking outside at the brown leaves, the last of the bare ruined choirs that were the trees. And waiting. For? No idea.

Real food preserved is like that. Waiting. Patiently, in fact. And outside of time. I know I blog a lot about preserving things. And maybe it's because I too don't believe in time anymore. Jams and jellies cast it into the void. December can be spring. A house with busy schedules and calendars, deadlines and bills to pay, can become that timeless thing: a home.

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Red Currant Jam

When I first met Bruce, he was a canner of the first order--and surely the only person canning at any given moment in New York City! On the hottest summer days, our kitchen would be filled with steam. We even considered installing an air conditioner in the window. Never did it, but people say it's the thought that counts. Seems to me it's the air conditioner that counts. But call me a crazy Texan.

Soon, the shelves in the living room were lined with jars of jams, jellies, and pickles, serried up in front of the books. It looked as if we were running a general store for graduate students--home-canned fruit and vegetables along with volumes of Yeats and Auden.

Now that we've moved to the country, Bruce is always in canning heaven. Right now, the red currants are coming in like mad. All this rain and cool weather in the Northeast has given us a bumper crop. So yesterday, amid the rumbling thunder and while I tried to get a bunch of gooseberry bushes into a plot in the backyard, he cranked out five small jars.

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Chilled Plum Soup

Recipes are hard to predict. I don't mean the results. Maybe that, too. I mean something about predicting the recipes that'll take, that people will take to. Bruce and I develop our recipes in our own kitchen. Sure, they get sent out to testers occasionally. But mostly, we're making food we think tastes good. And taste is just a tad subjective.

What's more, no fire is as hot as public opinion. We get a book finished, take it out on the road--and then discover what people really think.

Apparently, they really like this chilled plum soup from COOKING KNOW-HOW. We've made it at several demos now. I caught one guy at Delia, the Viking cooking school in Wallingford, Connecticut, trying to lick his bowl when he thought no one was looking.

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