So, seeing as I am now confined to my kitchen and home for the time being (my kitchen is my work from home office, my partner has taken up the living room with our very strict work from home supervisor, Chester The Cat, seen below), it felt only natural to use this new (hopefully temporary) office and bake something today.
When we went to our neighborhood (Cambridge, Mass.) grocery store yesterday, as we do most Sundays, the produce section was surprisingly robust — but everything else was not. I am not a regular consumer of most dairy products, but this Sunday, I particularly could not be such a consumer — there was no dairy left to buy. Suddenly, I was consumed with the need for dairy. I needed unsalted butter. I needed eggs. I needed heavy cream. I N E E D E D these things, because, as mentioned before, if I am going to be trapped in my kitchen for two weeks, you best believe I am going to be baking. For a brief, shameful moment, I understood why everyone around me is panicking and buying too much dairy and bread products. They aren't necessarily going to make the world's largest pile of French toast in the next two weeks...but what if they decide they want to? What then?
The very helpful cashier dropped a hint that there would be more dairy on the eight AM Monday morning delivery truck, so you can bet that I showed up at 8:30 to see what remained of my dairy aisle. Luckily, the very helpful cashier was correct, and I was able to scrounge for my regular dozen eggs, along with perhaps the most expensive heavy cream and butter that I have ever purchased in my life. The butter was "cultured," which makes me think that it probably went to a prep school on the East Coast and has a family house on the Vineyard that it doesn't go to that often but still mentions occasionally in inappropriate times so everybody knows they're that kind of wealthy. (Pictured below, signet ring not included.)
I decided that I would bake a batch of cheddar scones after my working from home finished for the evening, so I pulled out one of my favorite cookbooks, the fabulous Foster's Market Favorites by Sara Foster, a beloved icon of her Durham, NC community and owner of one of my favorite places to eat when I visit my own nearby alma mater (it wasn't Duke, don't worry). You can also imagine my utter dismay when I realized that, despite the very expensive heavy cream in my reusable grocery bag, this recipe in fact called for buttermilk. However, as the internet will gladly inform you, it is very (?) easy to transform standard dairy products into buttermilk, a fact I did not know until just this evening. Two tablespoons of vinegar mixed into one cup of heavy cream ↬ basically buttermilk, more or less.
(No, we are not married, and yes, my fiancé did buy me that KitchenAid mixer for Christmas, so basically, we don't really have to get married at this point, right?)
As I often do, I decided to take advantage of the overhead speakers in my kitchen that we only recently figured out how to use after living in this apartment for three years (don't @ me, we didn't look that hard) and put on a recording of Carmen Jones, the 1954 musical film adaptation of the Oscar Hammerstein II / Georges Bizet update of Georges Bizet's iconic French opera, Carmen. In college, my best friend and I used to love to cook while listening to an old vinyl recording of the opera, trying to time the highlights of elaborate meal prep to the highlights of the opera. We called it "Cooking with Carmen," and as I am going to be cooking and baking for a few weeks here, I figured I could make it a routine, and cook with Carmen and you all. Blogging! It's like it's 2003 or something!
(If you would like to watch the actual Carmen itself, New York's Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting a production tonight, March 16th, at 7:30 PM ET. It's free! And they will be showing other operas all week as well! You should tune in! I know I will be.)
There's something incredibly frustrating about the story of Carmen. In a first year seminar during my first year of undergrad, a professor had the class argue for or against Don José, the real drip of a tenor lead, after his Act IV murder of Carmen, his ex, using music examples. (It was a class about opera, our entire course book selections were opera libretti, and because of this class, I wrote my undergrad thesis about American opera after World War II. It was that kind of a transformative undergrad class). I argued against Don José, because Carmen was VERY explicit about the risks of pursuing her affections. Her first number, the absolute bop of a habanera, "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle," which you definitely know even if you've never thought seriously about opera before in your life, features some pretty direct lines of caution. As Dorothy Dandridge's voice over, Marilyn Horne, sings aptly in Carmen Jones — "You go for me, and I'm taboo // but if you're hard to get, I go for you // and if I do, then you are through, boy // my baby, that's the end of you // So take your cue, boy, don't say I didn't tell you true // I told you truly, if I love you, that's the end of you." The original French version isn't that different in message or tone — Carmen is very direct and doesn't bury the proverbial lead. Most of the class argued that Don José didn't deserve the court's pardon, and in listening to Carmen Jones today as I baked these Foster's Market cheddar biscuits, I was reminded again and again and again why Don José sucks. Not only does he drag down the women in his life within the opera, he makes all of their musical numbers dull and lifeless. Even Micaëla / Cindy Lou, his childhood sweetheart from way back home, enters the opera with zest and vigor, only to be flattened under Don José's unbearable drabness in their first duet together. Personally, I'd prefer a sequel / revision to this opera, where Micaëla arrives on the scene, joins Carmen's gypsy band and forms a sacred smugglers' coven of smart, independent women who avoid Don José like the dreary, angry single man that he is.
(Foster's Market Cheddar Herb Biscuits Recipe, HERE)
But back to the biscuits. This recipe is super easy, and I highly recommend you give it a go should you, like me, find yourself trapped in your kitchen in the coming days and weeks. I usually choose to mix these biscuits by hand, and the results of that (pictured below) seem to function just fine, even if my cultured AF butter didn't mix as well as the regular butter I usually buy in non-quarantine times.
Another highlight of my baking life is making do with less-than-ideal tools. As mentioned earlier, this recipe calls for buttermilk, and I instead used heavy cream. It was only the intervention of a dear, dear friend that transformed my rolling pin into an actual steel rolling pin, instead of an empty wine bottle wrapped with parchment paper. I do not have a biscuit cutter, but I do have several dozen old jam jars that I use as drinking vessels. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And look, you can critique me all you'd like, but the biscuits that result from this perfectly floured make-do biscuit cutter are just are rotund as any biscuit cutter on the market.
It was around this time in my biscuit prepping routine that I heard Bizet's distinctive fate motif for the first time, as Carmen drew cards with her gypsy friends and realized that she was, in fact, going to die by Joe / José's hands. It's a pretty dramatic downward motif, and not one you particularly want to hear as you're dabbing the tops of your make-do cheddar saffron biscuits with egg wash. Maybe these would be the last biscuits I ever baked, I thought to myself. Maybe this will be the first and only edition of "Cooking With Carmen" on Indoor Voices. Maybe I should have purchased more King Arthur Flour before I left the grocery store this morning. Maybe Dorothy Dandridge deserved that Academy Award. Maybe Micaëla deserves more, too.
But the biscuits came out okay, even if Carmen still died. (See below, for the biscuits, and not the murder)
Carmen deserves better. We all deserve better. Practice social distancing, wash your hands, and watch the Metropolitan Opera FOR FREE tonight.
Foster's Market Cheddar Herb Biscuits Recipe, HERE
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