Letter from Boston

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Letter from Berlin is Letter from Boston just for today! Thank you for your patience as the newsletter took a backseat to my other work these past few months. More soon.

The boys and I are on the tail end of a trip to the suburbs of Boston to visit my father and stepmother. Berlin schools get a two-week fall break each year and this year’s conveniently fell right over Halloween. The last time we were here in October (but not on Halloween) was in the fall of 2019, when the world seemed weird and awful, but we really had no idea what the coming months and years held in store for us.

Bruno had his formative trauma in a CVS on that trip. I was blithely perusing the supplements aisle (probably?) and the boys were running around the carpeted (?!) floors, driving their grandparents nuts, when I realized I hadn’t heard Bruno’s slightly demented giggle for a few minutes. I walked down the aisle, turned the corner and found him standing, paralyzed with fear, in front of a Halloween witch doll the size of, well, a nearly-three year old boy. She had a green face and a warty nose and an evil expression and she scared the everloving shit out of him. For the next two years, any dark room or hallway in our apartment (or other people’s homes) was suspect. Witches dominated his fears, his worries, his nightmares. Yet he also couldn’t help but be intrigued by them.

(Some of this seems to also have a genetic component, as his father as a child was so afraid of witches that his mother wasn't allowed to say the word out loud. When he insisted on being read an entire series of books about witches, his mother had to say “hmhmhm” every time the word “witch” appeared. Can you imagine? Moms!)

Mercifully, Bruno’s fear has finally started morphing into something like a healthy respect. He’s still not a fan of having to walk through a dark room or hallway, but he’s becoming braver and on Halloween this year he found himself especially drawn to the houses with spooky music or particularly scary effects and decor. It’s been so interesting to see the birth of a foundational fear in a child and then observe its development as he lived with the fear, then learned how to get past it.

At the same time that Bruno was deep in the weeds of witch fear, we were in the first stages of the pandemic. In a way, we were grappling with similar things. Invisible threats menaced us, our dark hallways and rooms were the outside world. The difference, of course, is that Covid turned out to be far more real than any Halloween witch. Nearly three years later, we are learning to live with our fear just as Bruno did with his - with bravery and a healthy dose of respect.

A few things of note

Cook: Before we left Berlin for the fall break, I spent a few days cleaning out our freezer (the electricity needed to be cut for a few hours due to some work we’re having done in our apartment and things in the freezer sort of semi-defrosted in that time). This meant heating up Tupperwares full of mystery food (yes, I am 44 years old and still can’t bring myself to label food before it goes in the freezer), tossing peas and corn into various pots at lunch and dinner and serendipitously discovering this dead simple recipe when I needed to use up the box of frozen shrimp I bought who knows when and the green beans I meant to use in a testing recipe for Classic German Cooking, but never got around to in time. It turned out to be a godsend! Not only did it work perfectly with frozen food, get done in minutes and require zero specialty ingredients (if you, like me, consider fish sauce a staple), all of us loved it, even the boys.
NB: The recipe should be doubled if you plan to serve it as a main course for four people.

Read: I read Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait last week and I’m still chewing on it. The novel is based on the real life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, a 16th century Florentine princess who was married off to the Duke of Ferrara in a politically advantageous arrangement for her father, Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence. Less than a year after marrying, Lucrezia was dead, purportedly of a “putrid fever,” though it was always rumored that her husband killed her. O’Farrell takes these rough strands of a long-ago life and weaves them into something new, imagining Lucrezia as a steely, determined girl who must navigate the treachery of Renaissance royal families and politics under peril of death. I found it slow to start, then utterly gripping, but the end, when O’Farrell makes a narrative choice I wasn’t expecting at all, threw me for such a loop that I’m still puzzling over it a week later. If you’ve read it, can we discuss in the comments? I would love that. If you haven’t read it yet, avoid the comments so you don’t see any spoilers!

Do: On Wednesday, November 16th, I’ll be interviewing Irina Georgescu about her beautiful new baking book Tava: Easter European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond at Book Larder. “Tava means tray in Romanian, a metaphor for how a whole culinary landscape is presented to the reader…You will find Armenian pakhlava, Saxon plum pies, Swabian poppyseed crescents, Jewish fritters, and Hungarian langoși alongside plăcinte pies, alivenci corn cake, strudels and fruit dumplings. Rice or pearl barley puddings, donuts and gingerbread biscuits come with their own story, while chocolate mousses, meringues in custard sauce and coffee ice cream introduce you to the glamour of famous Romanian and Eastern European pastry shops.” The online event is free and starts at 12:00 pm PT (3:00 pm EST, 9:00 pm CET). RSVP here.

One last thing! Mark your calendars - on Thursday, December 8th at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm EST/7:00 pm CET, Molly Wizenberg and I will be doing our annual Classic German Baking bake session and we’d love for you to join! This year we’re making Bethmännchen, a classic recipe for gorgeous little almond paste nuggets embellished with peeled almonds, which originated a long time ago in Frankfurt. We always have a great time together and it’s one of the highlights of the holiday season for me! RSVP here.