{"id":9,"date":"2012-12-10T14:07:50","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T19:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/toulmin.org\/?p=9"},"modified":"2012-12-10T14:35:14","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T19:35:14","slug":"how-to-face-the-holidays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/?p=9","title":{"rendered":"How to Face the Holidays"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laurie Colwin is one of my very favorite food writers.\u00a0 Her column was for me a highlight of Gourmet<\/em> magazine until her death in 1992 at the age of 48.\u00a0 Without the battered photocopy of her December 1991 column, \u2018How to Face the Holidays,\u2019 in my recipe file, I don\u2019t know how I would get through this season each year.\u00a0 The two recipes in that column have become staples without which it would not be Christmas in our house.<\/p>\n

In 2003 Jonathan Yardley wrote a moving piece<\/a> about Laurie Colwin in his \u2018Second Reading\u2019 column in The Washington Post<\/em>. \u00a0He had been a friend of this remarkable woman, and the review he writes is almost more of a remembrance of her a decade after her death.\u00a0 She was a prolific writer of short stories and novels, but my favorite works of hers are those most explicitly about food, especially Home Cooking<\/em> (1988).<\/p>\n

There are other food writers that I turn to in certain moods–Wendell Berry, Robert Farrar Capon, Sylvia Thompson, Michael Pollan–but when I\u2019m feeling overwhelmed and in need of inspiration, Laurie Colwin\u2019s work comes through for me.<\/p>\n

I have my own views about \u2018How to Make Gingerbread\u2019 (Gourmet<\/em>, December, 1987), but her 1991 \u2018Country Christmas Cake\u2019 and \u2018Spiced Beef\u2019 epitomize the season.\u00a0 She is not exaggerating when she writes, \u201cThese two delicacies have that profound, original, homemade taste that cannot be replicated, no matter what you spend.\u00a0 They make the person who made them feel ennobled.\u201d\u00a0 They take some forethought, however: the cake needs at least a month to mellow, and the beef spends twelve days soaking up its spices before you even get around to the cooking and pressing of it.\u00a0 Two weeks before you want to eat it is the time to start.\u00a0 For this Christmas, that\u2019s now.<\/p>\n

So today I will hunt down a very lean, grass-fed 5- or 6-pound piece of bottom round.\u00a0 I will find a pot that just fits it, rub it all over with a half-cup of dark brown sugar, and set it in the fridge.\u00a0 At first I will remember to turn it over and rub it with the sugary goop the way you\u2019re supposed to for the first two days.\u00a0 Then I will crush up the spices, add them to rub, and try to remember to turn and re-distribute it all every day for ten more days.\u00a0 The spice mix always requires an emergency shopping trip, because it\u2019s got things in it that I only use once a year but yet run out of regularly: one cup of coarse salt and one-third cup each of juniper berries, allspice berries, and black pepper.<\/p>\n

When the appointed time has come, I will put the meat, minus most of its spices, in a crock pot or a really slow oven with a cup of water and a tight lid, and let it cook for a long time (5 hours in the oven, or until I remember it in the crock pot).\u00a0 Next will come the tricky part: after letting it cool in its juice, I\u2019ll have to reinvent my meat-pressing technique as I seem to do every year.\u00a0 Perhaps it is so tricky because every piece of meat is a different shape.\u00a0 The idea is to wrap the meat in wax paper and press it overnight between two boards with about five pounds of weight on it, refrigerated.\u00a0 If I do it right, it will, as Laurie Colwin promises, pack down so that \u201cit can be sliced thin enough to see through.\u201d\u00a0 It will last just through New Year\u2019s, and when it is gone, we will be thinking about putting the trappings of Christmas away.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laurie Colwin is one of my very favorite food writers.\u00a0 Her column was for me a highlight of Gourmet magazine until her death in 1992 at the age of 48.\u00a0 Without the battered photocopy of her December 1991 column, \u2018How to Face the Holidays,\u2019 in my recipe file, I don\u2019t know how I would get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advent","category-food-and-cooking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/13"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toulmin.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}