Cornstarch

Let me state my disdain for cornstarch. Such a statement can only be yuppie, but I will clothe it as a matter of taste.

There have been two memorable times I've used cornstarch in the past couple months. The first began with reading Muriel Spark's Cirriculum Vitae. I found myself at first intrigued then obsessed with a tangental description of a dessert wee Muriel had had with her mother at a Christmas party. Actually it wasn't really a description--just "some kind of orange mousse, served prettily in half-orange skins". This could only be the playing out of a fad for food in shells of fruit, something which brings irrational terror to my restrictive post-1960s sensibilities. Being a mousse, it was probably made with gelatin, again a capital crime. But for whatever reason the idea of orange-flavored, um, pudding (let's stay away from the word mousse), appealed strongly. I talked about making it for ages. I hadn't really worked out how. As usual, I'd just wing it. Pretty much the only way I get my jollies cooking anyway.

On Christmas I decided to make to bring to dinner at a friend's house. The timing and setting completed my fantasy. As for the actual method, I decided to go with a "pure" approach that in my mind had the advantage of enriching the orange color of the orange: it would be thickened with egg yolks. Perfect. A pudding made of orange juice, orange zest, sugar, a bit of cinnamon, and egg yolks. All I needed to do was mix it all together,and heat it slowly while whisking in paranoia. In my mind this would create something like lemon curd, but orange. It didn't. It was sweet, dully flavored orange soup. Well, okay, I thought, I won't use gelatin, but I will use cornstarch. Like Lemon-meringue pie. I mixed in more and more until it seemed almost as thick as I wanted it. It had to stay inside half an orange without spilling, after all. Everything was ready, and though I wasn't entirely pleased with the result, at least it would be presentable. Then the goop cooled. The starch became a white crust on top. Below that it had turned to a dusty texture. Apparently I had mixed in so much starch that it could not all be dissolved in water, and had precipitated in protest. Rather than going to the dinner with me, it went into the garbage. There was no use pretending it was something it wasn't--namely, edible.

(Actually, it didn't go immediately into the trash. I didn't serve it to anybody, but I left the dozen filled orange halves sitting on the counter for several days, waiting for myself to decide they were alright.)

More recently I actually made what I was modelling the orange goop on: lemon-meringue pie. My father had brought home a sizable box of Meyer lemons, and this was the best thing I could think of to do with them. It wasn't quite lemon-meringue pie. My brother is allergic to wheat, so the crust was out. I didn't want to bother making wheat-free crust, and the lazy oats-butter-sugar crust I sometimes make for pumpkin pie seemed like a disgusting pairing for lemon. So it would simply be lemon-meringue: lemon filling below meringue. My brother and I have done this many times before, usually with tangelos instead of lemons. It turned out well. Except that faint flavor and texture. It was aggravatingly hardly noticable, but unmistakable. Cornstarch. It was the thing that one didn't want to taste with lemon. It broke the fantasy of confectionary abstraction. One does not want to taste the construction of one's dessert any more than one wants to see a trash heap in the middle of the city or watch a bird's neck chopped every time one takes a bite of chicken. Food, especially dessert, is not about transparency.

I hate cornstarch.

The Appetite of Sarah Lund

Lately I've been watching "The Killing" ("Forbrydelsen"). Once you start it is difficult to stop. Sometimes, you forget to eat--not unlike its detective protagonist, Sarah Lund. She survives on whatever is at hand, unless it is offered by someone she does not want to show weakness to. When she returns, usually late at night, to her mother's house where she lives, she rummages like a teenager for whatever. Having largely starved herself most of the day, this is her ad-hoc feast. She does not intentionally starve herself; she gorges herself on the sustenance of the investigation and forgets that anyone, much less herself, has other needs. But it is not the investigative nature of her work which feeds her, per se. Her son tells her peevishly "you only care about dead people," but that's not quite it. My projections lead me to believe simply that investigating the case is certain to give her something back--something cold, like most things she wolfs down in a hurry, but abundant.

Both her and her unwanted partner, Jan Meyer, live on an edge of anxious attachment to their work. Every lead leads to another, and each promises to crack the case. Thus the investigation can never be let alone, and they can never quite rest. They must keep prodding it. At one point it is their boss pushing them, but a new boss then pushes them to be patient and keep things quiet. It becomes clear that it is not outside pressure that makes them, especially Lund, unable to stop. The case will be fine, but if she stops, she loses hold. The lid of her life would fling open. On the one hand the investigation drives her toward destruction, on the other hand it is a holding pattern. The latter is how her plain obsession is pleasurable in a "Rear Window" way: she puts herself on ice and watches the world around her aflame. She is subject; everyone else is object. Paradoxically, this makes her just as vulnerable as everyone under her detective's gaze.

This all-consuming purpose is not so much fed as kept going by a constant stream of coffee poured from vacuum-carafes into small white cups (not quite demitasses and not quite mugs), and in her partner's case, cigarettes. This is not coffee taken to jar oneself awake, but to further engorge already electrified (yet exhausted) neurons. It is drunk to make easier ongoing activity, not as a promise of activity to come. Her partner, being more ill at ease with all this, smokes. It doesn't help with the anxiety, clearly, but it gives him something to reach for. When Lund is kicked off the case, there is a turning point: She smokes one of his cigarettes. Soon she smokes another, and casually hands the half-smoked cigarette to him. Notably, they are standing behind glass side by side, looking out.

The two detectives' eating habits markedly differ. He is abject through his food; his agitation spills out with the cheese crisps, chips, and bananas he desperately gnashes. These snacks, like his cigarettes, leave a great deal of refuse: crumbs, peels, ashes. Lund does not share this habit. In fact, it annoys her. Once he calls her, and the whole time he speaks he is crunching cheese crisps noisily. "Stop it with the cheese crisps for a minute!" she snaps. He does not. When she hangs up he's tilting the dregs of the bag into his mouth. Lund, by contrast, is a creature of control. She eats, as I said, when it is convenient, and when it does not mess up her persona. What she eats is never messy, but that is not to say she eats well-manneredly. Sometimes she doesn't have to, because she eats alone. One time it's a pot of unidentified brown glop that she eats directly from the pot with a spoon, in front of her computer. Early in the show she comes home and serves herself a plate of what looks to be leftover mashed potatoes and gravy. She is clearly hungry, yet she eats it disinterestedly. It is merely something to go into her gullet, offering no psychological comfort, only calories. She looks up at her mother, which is rare, and, conciliatory, says "this is good."

What does she survive on besides her mother's leftovers snatched at odd hours? Bread and butter in the office. Her and Meyer slather untoasted slices of bread with butter, and munch them hungrily while irritably carrying on a discussion about the case, and drinking coffee. As I'm sure some of you figured, I find this appealing. This is the kind of breakfast (whenever it happens to be taken) that does not sully its consumer with the baseness of food. You can eat it without admitting that you need. You surf along like this, not acknowledging the wave moving to crash over you.