almost, not quite burnt

with butter and lemon

I have been handwriting letters to my readers on the last Sunday of the month for a couple of months. This month, to be honest, I am tired, the kind of tired where you’re not really sure what to do with yourself because everything feels like an effort you’d rather not have to make. It’s been a long bunch of weeks and to be honest it takes a bit of effort just to stay standing in this country in this moment, with a strong undertow pulling the sand out from under your feet with every swell of the water. It is harder to keep your balance when you’re tired, just as it’s harder to retain the knowledge of how to stay upright, head well above water, eyes clear and refusing either to be drawn under or dazzled by the glare off of water and sand.

Yesterday I made a tart for my husband, who has a passion both for caramel and chocolate, if they’re made the way he likes them. The first time I made butterscotch pudding for him he was staggered by the fact that the first step was to put turbinado sugar into a pan and carefully melt it and let it almost, but not quite burn. Once it is the color of a glass of oloroso sherry, or maybe a Newcastle brown, you pull it from the heat and stir in butter, which foams up ferociously and spits bits of terrifyingly hot sugar-lava. Use a long spoon and stand well back.

The key to good butterscotch is that it shouldn’t be too sweet. Enough of the sugar as well as the proteins in the butter and cream should have caramelized that you taste a bit of that savory flavour that comes from the Maillard reaction, a different and more complex affair than caramelization alone. Salt brings it into focus the way it does with a grilled steak’s crust, with a roasted potato whose skin has been allowed to brown. There are reasons salted caramel tastes so good that have nothing to do with you.

Make a very short crust, leave it unsweetened, use the very best butter you can get your hands on. Think of a sablé Breton, leave the sugar out of it. Crème caramel starts the same way as butterscotch but finishes differently. Whisk the butter in like you’re making mayonnaise. If you’ve never made mayonnaise I don’t know what to tell you except that if you can, you should. Dark bittersweet chocolate crème Diplomat is leftover dark chocolate custard with a little added discipline and structure, at least if you’re me and you figure no one is judging your technique.

I struggle with getting the groceries. So much on the shelves, screaming in Technicolor about how foody it is, but so much of it isn’t food at all. Even the food that is food might as well not be: all the cheese is wrapped in thick plastic and I can’t see what it really looks like or what the texture is, let alone smell it. Maybe it’s not Edam, just modeling clay.

There are whole aisles devoted to taking decisions away: a hundred bottles of different salad dressings in mixtures into which I have no input, each assuring me that it is delicious. Several hundred foot-shelves of frozen items that hasten to reassure me that they contain exactly what I would choose to put in them were I to make them myself.

Without exception they are wrong. I’d say they were lying but in order for them to lie they’d have to know what the truth was, and what I would choose to put into a pizza or a vinaigrette or just a pan of mixed chopped vegetables and they don’t know, haven’t ever asked, and furthermore don’t care. It’s a lie of omission, not a lie of commission. They’ve omitted the part where the truth matters. This happens a lot these days, outside the grocery store as well as in it.