Issue 22, containing: Odd Housemates, Syllabub, Letters, Commonplaces, &c.

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SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

April is a cruellish month, forgoing lilacs in this dead land and therefore being not much fun. 

I like lilacs. They ought to be bred here more substantially.

Beyond that, though, April is typically the busiest month of my year work-wise — students have final presentations, faculty-hiring gets more panic-driven, and the end of the academic fiscal year means that allocating the purchases I’ve made on the company card can no longer be ignored.

All this to say: I dislike that this issue has been abominably late, but I also don’t suppose I can promise better, at least this year. But there are always more Aprils. And some of them, by sheer statistical probability if nothing else, must bloom better.

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ODD HOUSEMATES

I have two cats. They’ve spent the last couple of years, since the younger one was adopted, being generally displeased by the fact they have to co-exist. Strangely, though, with me at home for months now — and, I admit, the multiple room reorderings — the cats have finally come to something like a truce. And with that truce, comes… behaviors.

From their various attitudes of looseness, I have to assume that these behaviors are what my cats are like when they’re not either miserably lonely or engaging in a complex guerilla war. But it’s a bit like getting two brand new pets whose quirks have to be entirely relearned.

Specifically, they’ve both gotten weird about cleaning themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t behaving poorly. They seem to be very happy and content in their ways. The elder fluffy cat has taken to contorting himself in a way that I thought was, frankly, impossible for any cat, let alone one of his size — no delicate upward leg for him, but rather *both* hind legs straight up as he curls in on himself, a black nebula rocking in the sunlight that will, sometimes, topple sideways and off the hassock he’s claimed as his private boudoir. Meanwhile the younger cat, who the shelter believed had been mistreated as a kitten and therefore ended up with a wonky neck, will find a flat patch of ground, catapult backwards from a standing position, land on her back, and wash vigorously with all four paws in the air while wiggling like a fish dropped on a boat deck.

Picture, if you will– a sunlit living room. To the left, a two-pronged mass of fur engaging in ablutions entirely too close to a cushioned edge while, to the right, a loud thumping noise erupts from the kitchen, the sure sound of a 10-pound cat flinging herself spine-ward onto linoleum.

I won’t say that it’s unheard of for a human owner to be overly aware of their pets’ cleaning rituals. But it is disconcerting for those rituals to be accompanied by dramatic sound effects.

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EXHIBIT B

Exhibit A turned aside with a delicate blush upon spying the camera aimed in his direction.

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SYLLABUB: FIT THE FOURTH (AND FIFTH)

In the continuing adventures of my syllabub experimentation, I have taught it to my sister, served it to my brother, and shared my doctored recipe with a coworker. The ever-expanding attempt to bring syllabub back to the mainstream continues apace — but I, as always, must be the brave one to continue the work of perfecting this recipe.

This is why, most recently, I have exchanged the champagne I’ve been working with up until now for something aficionados the world over refer to as… “chocolate wine”.

(More accurately, the brand name is “ChocoVine”. Is it a red wine mixed with actual chocolate milk? Yes. Do you have to shake it before serving, as we all know is definitely the best way to treat wine? Naturally. Does the bottle have what appears to be a clip-art heart outlined in milk chocolate on its label? My god, what do you take me for, of course it does.)

This stuff is great.

However, the road to perfection is oft beset by briars. Specifically:

Version 1: Chocolate wine, a tablespoon of amaretto, sugar, heavy whipping cream. A sprinkle of espresso powder to garnish. Delicious. But, crucially, missing sufficient acid to create the curdle and separation that makes syllabub so delightful.

Version 2, intended: Chocolate wine, a tablespoon of amaretto, sugar, heavy whipping cream, clementine juice. A sprinkle of espresso powder to garnish. –Had to be cancelled, due to throwing out the clementines because they looked funny and anyway, I had lemon juice in the refrigerator, no problem.

Version 2, intended: Chocolate wine, a tablespoon of amaretto, sugar, heavy whipping cream, lemon juice. A sprinkle of espresso powder to garnish. –Had to be cancelled, due to opening the bottle of lemon juice to discover that, in fact, a container of lemon juice clearly dated as expiring in 2019 will, in fact, be disgusting. In fact.

Version 2, not at all intended: I had a bowl with a little less than 200 mL of chocolate wine, a tablespoon of amaretto, and 5 tablespoons of sugar stirred up. I did not want to reproduce the previous attempt at chocolate syllabub — after all, I’m not doing this for fun. I’m doing this for science. I had to find an acid.

Keen readers of the magazine may remember a favorite household acid of mine that I have mentioned many times before. But no, I thought. Surely not. I stood at the counter and desperately scrolled through my phone, looking up lists of possible additives that would achieve the same effect. Nothing. Nothing except, over and over, the one thing that I knew could not possibly be the answer.

Finally, with heavy heart and heavier hand, I opened the cupboard door and pulled out my bottle of apple cider vinegar.

Reader: I took a capful of that vinegar, and I added it to a chocolate wine mix. Did it begin to curdle without even the addition of the cream? Yes. Did I go ahead and pour in the cream anyway, again from a great height and with certain dread? Also yes.

Because I do, sometimes, rarely, try and learn from my mistakes, I had covered most of the top of the bowl with plastic wrap. I set the mixer on high and managed to keep most of the concoction from splattering around the kitchen. I set the timer for two minutes — two minutes was not nearly enough. I let it run for another, unending length of time, waiting for the moment that it either became boozy whipped cream or, failing that, weird cottage cheese.

Neither happened. Eventually, it became just “slightly thicker” milk — fully incorporated, but with nothing like structure. I dutifully pulled out my tea cups. This mix couldn’t be spooned — it had to be poured. Grim with my failure, I added the sprinkle of espresso powder, set the tea cups in the fridge to settle, and then poured the remainder into a glass to try in the living room.

Dishes were put in the sink. The vinegar returned to its shelter. I washed my hands to rid myself of any lingering trace of folly.

I sat, cup of disaster beside me, and spent some minutes describing the evening to my siblings, who did not give me nearly the credit I deserve for my brave dedication to culinary science. But, finally, the moment could no longer be held off — it was time to test the brew.

Reader: I stand before you here today… changed.

Could I detect the vinegar? Yes, subtly. Can I guarantee that I would have been able to do so without foreknowledge of its presence? No. 

What’s more, the vinegar allowed the syllabub to separate faster than it usually does, and so a dessert that normally takes at least a couple of hours to perform its chemical magic did so in mere minutes. And a later test of the tea cups revealed that while the separation is not as structured as it is with lemon juice and champagne, it still nevertheless happens and, more importantly, doesn’t seem to taste like vinegar.

I feel as if this experiment has now taken a grand turn. What other variations can be attempted, now that the great Rubicon of reasonable ingredients has been crossed? Will I finally make the version that involves heating red wine and honey? Who fucking knows. 

But it will certainly be an adventure.

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AN ADDITIONAL NOTE REGARDING HOUSEMATES AND SOUND EFFECTS

My cats snore.

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A NOTE TO GENTLE READERS

As Christopher Lee once said, “Summer is a’coming in,” and with it the dawning hope that perhaps we might have a better season than last year’s. I intend to go camping in June, for the first time in many years, and as such I find myself seeking campfire recipes to recreate the joy of eating things half raw and half burnt to charcoal. A sampling of the list so far:

• Toast and cheese
• A meat thing, wrapped in tin foil (?)
• Hot dogs and beans
• Banana boats
• Bisquick, possibly also wrapped in tin foil (???)
• Unending s’mores

Dear readers, do you have any fondly remembered camp foods? Pass them along, before I do something ill-considered with tabasco sauce.

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LETTERS

From the Refrigerator, to the Editors, “Apple Juice”:

You ought to tell them.

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From the Editors, to the Refrigerator:

Shan’t.

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From the Refrigerator, to the Editors, “Either You or Me, Bub”:

One way or another, someone’s going to tell the readers that not even a day after the vinegar panic — not even twelve hours later — you offered your children some apple juice from a container that had been sitting idle and in-date right beside the lemon juice. Just waiting for its time to shine.

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COMMONPLACES

From T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land“:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

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From Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes:

Some say God is where we put our sorrow. God says Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

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From Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese“:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line:

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print.

Alternately, commenting on this post will get you a similar result, with much less fuss.

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-Until next week, be safe.