Like he did

The three of us have that hanger-onner of a virus that’s going around. The past two nights, I’ve coughed myself to sleep in the basement guest room, and as anyone who’s ever coughed herself to sleep can tell you, it’s slow going. I use the time to think about pressing issues like how much I like the taste of original Ricola, or how it could be that Alice’s feet smell so exactly like buttered popcorn, or how much I prefer haunted, unsmiling, True Detective-era Matthew McConaughey over other Matthew McConaugheys, even with the long hair that makes him a ringer for my uncle. Or, if I’m really on my game, I use the time to write in my head. Two nights ago, for instance, I found myself thought-writing about endive: about how much I hated it as a kid, about how much my dad loved it, about how he was always buying it and shoving it into salads when I wasn’t looking, about how fast he would have jumped to get himself around our dinner that night: bread, cheese, and Jennifer McLagan’s Belgian Endive Bathed in Butter.

In a couple of weeks, on December 7th, it will have been twelve years since my dad died. He’s now been gone for a third of my life. I’m glad to be able to say that, at this point, I don’t think about him a lot, and that I remember only faint outlines of what it felt like to grieve him. It feels like progress. But there must be some subterranean part of me that doesn’t forget, because every late November or early December, sometimes even on the 7th itself, he shows up. Maybe I notice the picture of him in the front hall for the first time in months, or I read a book to June and suddenly hear him thirty years back, reading it to me. Brandon blows his nose in the next room over, and because his nose has started to honk like a migrating goose, like my dad’s did, I forget for an instant who is on the other side of the wall. Or maybe I eat endive for dinner and then lie there in the dark, paging through one of the photo albums I keep in my head. My mother tells me that the same thing happens to her. We call and swap pictures.

I remember worrying as a kid, when I heard that someone I knew had died, that they might come back to haunt me, that maybe they would have something important to say and would choose me as the person to tell. From the bathroom of the house I lived in as a kid, I could look into the mirror above the sink and see behind me into the living room, and I was sure that, looking up sometime from spitting out my toothpaste, I’d see a ghost there. I consoled myself by eventually deciding that, if the dead person in question really cared about me, they’d have the courtesy, at least, to find a way to come back that wouldn’t scare the crap out of me. They’d be subtle about it. Anyway, I didn’t need to worry: nothing so Unsolved Mysteries has ever happened to me. But I still think about it sometimes, especially at this time of year. My dad has his ways.

I spent a lot of time worrying about those ways, really. He loved cheese and butter and paté and meat, everything that was bad for you in the '80s and '90s. He had a substantial gut. It was irresponsible! Of course, none of that is what did him in: as it turned out, behind his gut was a tumor the size of a half-gallon jug of milk, and kidney cancer doesn’t care what you eat. Still, it would take some years before I would think to, or dare to, bake eight endives in almost a stick of butter, and before I could appreciate butter in any way like he did.

Well! At this point in the post, I guess I should state very clearly, and unsexily, that I received Jennifer McLagan’s Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor, with Recipesfrom its publisher, as a free, unsolicited review copy. And that I loved it immediately, not only because I like bitter flavors - Brussels sprouts, Campari - but also because, as my friend Brandi puts it, Jennifer McLagan "really goes there" in everything she does. Her books celebrate some of the most basic elements of food - and in particular, the elements that no one likes to talk about, like fat and offal. Bitter is her latest, out only two months now, and the recipe for Belgian Endive Bathed in Butter was the first I dog-eared.

I conquered my aversion to endive a long time ago, but even if that weren’t the case, I think it would be hard to find this endive less than lovable. It starts with butter browning in a skillet, to which you add whole endives, turning them to coat, and then lemon juice, and then you cover the whole thing, slide it into a low oven, and two hours (two hours!) later, you open the oven triumphantly to find the endives caramelized, as soft and floppy as wet rags - tasty wet rags, reeeeally tasty wet rags - in a brothy sauce of their own juices, enriched and mellowed with butter, brightened with citrus. You could serve them next to a pork chop or a piece of roasted chicken, but we ate them on a tired, coughing Thursday night, with just bread and an aged goat cheese that I had picked up earlier in the day. And then we slept, or rather didn’t sleep for a while, and then sleep came, and then morning came, and then there were leftovers.

P.S. Because of you, Delancey has made it to the final round of the Goodreads Choice Awards. If you would, please consider casting a vote again. Thank you.


Belgian Endive Bathed in Butter
From Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor, with Recipes, by Jennifer McLagan

As McLagan explains, endive should never be cooked in water, because it’s mostly water itself; instead, what it needs is fat. I advise you to listen to her, and to have some good bread or hot rice on hand, to soak up the pan juices.

One additional note: the original recipe calls for three tablespoons of lemon juice, but I found it a little too lemony. I may well be nuts. But I would suggest starting with two tablespoons and adding more as needed.

8 Belgian endives, about 1 ¾ pounds or 800 grams
7 tablespoons (100 grams) unsalted butter, diced
Kosher or sea salt
2 to 3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Wipe the endives with a damp cloth, tear away any leaves that have gone bad, and trim the stem end, if needed.

Choose an ovenproof skillet with a lid (or, if you don’t have a lid, aluminum foil will work), one that’s just large enough to hold the endives in a single layer. Place the skillet over low heat, and add the butter. When the butter is melted, raise the heat to medium, and cook the butter, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan from time to time, until the milk solids begin to brown and the butter smells nutty. Add the endives – yes, you’re using them whole, not sliced or halved or otherwise cut up – and lower the heat. Turn them to coat with butter, and season them with salt. Cook, turning occasionally, until they are lightly colored, then pour in 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice. Cover the pan, and place it in the oven for 1 hour. Remove the pan from the oven, turn the endives carefully, and then cover it again and return it to the oven. Cook for another 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the endives are limp and very, very soft.

Before serving, taste a little of the pan juices, and if you’d like more brightness, add lemon to taste. Serve hot, with more salt at the table and freshly ground pepper.

Yield: 4 servings

I got to go back

The first time I went to the Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain was in the summer of 1995, a few months after a fire destroyed the lodge, its rooms and dining hall and library. I was sixteen, one of about a dozen high school students from across the state who’d been accepted to the summer program in poetry.  Quartz Mountain is beautiful, an isolated chain of red crags along a lake in the southwest part of the state, but my introduction wasn’t poetic: because the library was gone, our class met in a trailer, with a limping air conditioner, folding tables, and a couple of electric typewriters that we shared. But our teacher was the poet Peter Fortunato, brought in from upstate New York to spend six hours a day in that trailer with us, six days a week, for two weeks, and I would have hung out with him in a dumpster, if I had to.

Peter had wavy black hair and a goatee, and he rolled his own cigarettes, occasionally during class. (I should add, disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer, that this would of course no longer happen at OAI.) He had been an apprentice to Gary Snyder, and he introduced us to the work of Mary Oliver, James Wright, Robert Hass, poets whose voices and rhythms worked me like a tuning fork. Peter took us on walks around the foothills and the dry meadows and up to a cave where we read aloud, and I’m about 90% sure there was a smudge stick involved. At home, I was more interested in going to punk shows than communing with nature, but I remember those weeks so clearly, because it was at Quartz Mountain that I first felt taken seriously as a writer, and that I could call myself a writer, capital W, without feeling naive or sheepish. At sixteen, that was a tremendous feeling. At thirty-six, it’s still a tremendous feeling.

Peter worked on the side as a hypnotherapist, and you could hear it in his voice: both soft and firm, careful. One day, while we were discussing some poem or other on the topic of dreams, he told us that, on a couple of occasions and with much practice, he’d been able to control his dreams by getting into a very focused, hypnotic state at bedtime. We were riveted. I tried it myself a few times, never with any luck. But I still think about it sometimes, especially when I’m working on a book and find myself dreaming in words, writing in my sleep. My mother reminded me the other day that I even named my first car after Peter Fortunato, a totally mortifying fact that I should probably keep quiet but this sentence is already almost finished and well, there you go. He made an impression.

I went to Quartz Mountain again the following summer, and again in 2000 and 2002, when I was in my early twenties, to work as a counselor and an assistant to the writing faculty. By then, I wasn’t writing anymore, not outside of school assignments, and I felt detached from even the idea of writing. It had been my teenage thing, and I was done with it and glad. I don’t know why I thought to go back to Quartz Mountain, but there I was, working for and with poets George Bilgere and Ruth Schwartz. If they noticed what a cynical shit I was, they said nothing. It wouldn’t be for another couple of years, until I started this blog, that I would start to sort it out, get out of my own way, and return to writing.

I got to go back to Quartz Mountain last week, this time as a teacher myself. Each fall, OAI offers a Fall Arts Institute, a series of four-day workshops for adults, and Oklahoma public school teachers automatically receive full scholarships(!). I taught a workshop called Writing Life, on personal narrative and memoir. It was my fifth time at Quartz Mountain, but only my second visit since the rebuild was completed, a new lodge and library and, across a foot bridge, a large performing arts facility at the foot of the mountain. I wanted to go back to the amphitheater where we always gave a big reading on the last day - barefoot, as was the tradition - and to the pavilions along the lake where the dancers and photographers and actors held their classes. I was elated, and I was terrified. Nobody hears the words Oklahoma arts retreat and thinks, Carnegie Hall of the Great Plains! or, if I can maaaake it there, I can make it annnywhere!, but being asked to teach at Quartz Mountain felt bigger, more significant, than anything else I’ve achieved. Bigger than ten years of blogging, writing two books, or having a baby, even a baby who weighed nine pounds. I got to go back to the beginning.

People come to Quartz Mountain ready to work hard. As a result, the place feels electric. I asked my students to read a lot, and I asked them to write a lot. Every day, they showed up and did the work. We read Joan Didion’s "On Keeping a Notebook," some David Sedaris, a chapter from Calvin Trillin, a chapter from Roz Chast, some M. F. K. Fisher. In the off hours, we ate chicken fried steak and listened to lectures on Shakespeare and watched the relief printmaking students steamroll their panels in the parking lot, and I took a glass blowing lesson in the amphitheater. I was so charged up that, for two of the four nights, I hardly slept.

It occurs to me that, while writing this, I’ve felt electric too - this manic kind of drunken feeling that I get sometimes, if I’m very lucky, when I catch the updraft of a story and it pulls me up up up and along on its momentum. I usually come to a couple of hours later, jittery and light-headed, and find that I worked through dinner. Writing isn’t often like that; it’s usually a lot of sweating and grimacing and taking breaks to eat another package of your kid’s string cheese. But that feeling is what I’m always hoping for, every time I sit down. Peter had a term for it, a term that came back to me this weekend, when a student was describing her experience with a writing exercise. "You're riding Pegasus!" he told us, "Isn’t it amazing?"

It is.

P.S. Delancey is a nominee in the Goodreads Choice Awards! This is one of few - or maybe the only - book awards chosen by readers, not fancy judges. There are some incredible books and authors in this year's competition, and if you feel so moved, please consider casting a vote.