Stawberry Shortcake

During that time that I reference all too often, the winter break in Bar Harbor I spent alone, I was obsessed with strawberry shortcake. It's one among many foods that I have fetishized, fussed with, and found lacking. I always had to add something to strawberry shortcake. Nutmeg wove its way sucessively through each piece of it: the biscuits, the whipped cream, even, oddly, the sugared strawberries. I put rose water in there, one time. Vanilla in the cream, another. I may even have tried cinnamon somewhere. I did not try any sort of booze, which probably would have been the only thing worth trying.

I don’t remember exactly how many times I made strawberry shortcake, but sometimes it seems that all I did during those three weeks was eat strawberry shortcake with cheap Chardonnay and watch “Absolutely Fabulous”. I kept hoping it would be more decadent and less sickeningly rich. The strawberries deceive me into thinking that I’m eating something light and fruity, not a pile of butter and cream. Of course, that is the point of the dish–that the wet, fresh, mildly sweet berries compliment the heavy, dry biscuits and the rich cream. I kept thinking well, it’s almost perfect. Part of the trouble was that by the time I actually took a bite of the stuff, I had already eaten a few biscuits. And having had just eaten dinner, my digestion was already weighed down. The shortcake was putting me to sleep.

Decadence is by definition excessive, but one wants it to be, somehow, a needful excess. A lush does not wish to drown in pointlessness, to have everything and anything. He wants to get that particular thing, to stretch out fulfillment like taffy. To be decadent is to delay endings, which, really, is to delay time’s passage entirely. Unfortunately, strawberry shortcake leaves you sedated, gurgling, and not freed in the slightest. The worst part is, after one deadening plate, I still want more of it. And I’ll make it again. Decadence may be impossible, but I can try again and again, creating the appearance of decadence. I can try to create a tiny opening of the present, but each attempt takes me further away. Strawberry shortcake, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know, is not transcendance.

That doesn’t stop me from wishing. The only excuse I need is a new angle. This time it was an impetus thinly veiled behind the scent and flavor of strawberries. Someone told me she was eating strawberries, that the flavor was unparalleled, that nohing beats the taste of a good, fresh strawberry. I could never have what I imagined her experience to be, but I could sidle up as close as possible to that red, sylvan jouissance. I immediately bounded to the store, of course, and found that strawberries were on sale. Thrilled, I told her that I got them, that the package of strawberries was in my hand. “Smell them,” she told me. I did. “Oh yes,” I said, the air through the vents of the plastic box perfumed with promise.

Strawberries, through, unless they’re ridiculously good, are improved by sugar and stewing. These strawberries were not quite ripe enough to be best alone. This time strawberry shortcake would be foremost a vehicle for strawberries. I wanted to distill them to purer version of themselves. There would be no distractions: no nutmeg, no rosewater, no vanilla. Just sugar, biscuits, and cream. In the end, same story: nausea, second helpings, remainders of desire.

Slice some strawberries, remove their green tops, and put them in a bowl. Cover them with about a tablespoon of sugar for every two strawberries. Stir them about. Set the oven to 425 F. In another bowl mix together two cups flour, three teaspoons baking powder, and two pinches of salt. Put in a stick of cold butter. Coat it with flour and slice it into chunks, then cut it finely into the flour using a pastry cutter. Add one egg and nearly 2/3 a cup of milk. Mix with a fork until a dough is formed. Roll out the dough, dusting it with flour so it doesn't stick. Fold it once onto itself. Roll it out again to roughly 1/3 inch. Cut out small discs with a cup and put them onto a baking pan. Bake until risen and lightly browned on bottom. In yet another bowl whip some heavy cream to very soft peaks. Warm the strawberries in a small pot until all the sugar dissolves. Cut one of the biscuits in half, putting the insides up on a plate. Cover the halves with strawberries and whipped cream.

Springs Eternal

The first thing I reach for is the tea kettle, and at least half the time, no matter how I brew it or what I do with it, tea is insipid. It’s not enough. Not only does it leave me falling back asleep an hour after waking, but it fails to deliver its promise. The truth of it plunges me from the thin plane of possibility back into reality: It’s noon, and all I have is a mug of lukewarm brown liquid. I ask a lot of it. Not only is it supposed to wrest me from unconsciousness, but it also has to somehow allow me outside my life.

Therefore sometimes I escalate to coffee, and suddenly there is an arms race of morning aspirational imbibations. Coffee, though, has its problems: burning at the back of the throat, diarrhea, heartburn, sickly taste that cannot truly be scrubbed out of anything. And as much as I need coffee, it can leave me so agitated that everything becomes nearly impossible, even behaving civilly. Every time I switch to coffee I switch right back to tea the next day. (This is the kind of thing that passes for excitement for me.) It’s not really an escalation or an arms race, and coffee is not superior to or more than tea (except technically in caffeine content, which in the end is irrelevant). What I’m actually doing by switching back and forth is searching for novelty.

To this end I also mix up tea preparations. I boil it in milk with ginger, brew nicer leaves, add sugar or do not. I can fiddle all I want, in the end its futile. Novelty comes only out of the blue, and rarely because I decided to drink something different that morning. It grabs me unexpectedly on mornings when I’ve resigned myself to the same damned thing, and suddenly the same tastes different. It’s hotter, fresher, more precise.

On such lucky mornings I sometimes convince myself that the perfection of the tea (or coffee) can be chocked up to some subtlety in the way I prepared it. I try to replicate it the next day, and it comes out the same old garbage. Too this, too that, a drink to be waded through, not greedily consumed.

Faced with the pointlessness of tea and coffee, some would give it up entirely, become like monks. These people are just as afraid of intractability as I am. To opt out of the idea of stimulating beverages would take so much maintenance. Maintaining control over the desire surely means being ruled by it. Who manages it completely, anyway? Sounds just as much a longing as what I have for the supposed powers of caffeine. Besides, I could not possibly give up my crutch. This is not something that should ever be uttered at an AA meeting.