Volume 2, No. 45: Why Did I Wait So Long? + Whole Orange Cake

Greetings, book and treat people! I wore my big Icelandic sweater for the first time this season on my (snowy!) walk this morning and if you’ve been reading these chatty introductory paragraphs about the weather for a little while now, you can probably guess how happy that made me.

In this week’s Bookish Teatime video, I talk about some of the books that have come into my house recently! I’ve really enjoyed making these videos—more than I thought I would. The first one took me at least an hour to record. I kept doing takes over and over again. This last one I recorded in 15 minutes. I stopped worrying about pausing a little too long or tripping over words. It’s been fun and freeing to talk about books and tea without putting too much pressure on myself. If you want to come along for the ride, a paid subscription costs $6/month—and each one makes a big difference in my life and the work I’m able to do.

I made myself a TBR for November, and I’m having one of the best reading months of the year because of it! It included three books I’ve been meaning to read for years—and I finally sat down and read them all. These are all books by beloved authors, some of whom have written some of my all-time favorite books. Why did I wait so long? I don’t have a good answer, but the wait was worth it. These books are perfection.

The Books

Backlist #1: The President and The Frog by Carolina De Robertis (Fiction, 2021)

One of the reasons I waited so long to read this is because Cantoras is one of my all-time favorite novels. I knew there was no way I was going to love this one quite as much, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. It turns out I had nothing to worry about. I didn’t love this one as much, but that doesn’t matter. They’re nothing alike. They’re not even in the same universe, although they do touch on some similar themes.

In The President and The Frog, the former president of a small Latin American country sits down for an interview with a Norwegian reporter in his lush and beautiful garden. He’s known as the Poorest President in the World, and for championing human rights and democracy after the long years of dictatorship in his country finally ended. He lives in a humble house with his wife—no servants, a huge garden. While he was president, he rejected the trappings of power he was expected to embrace.

As he talks with the reporter, he remembers the formative experience of his life, and wonders if perhaps he should finally speak about it. Before he became president, he was a guerrilla revolutionary, eventually imprisoned by the government. This is part of what has made him famous. What he’s never told anyone is that, while in solitary confinement, he was visited by a frog, and that their conversations not only kept him alive, but formed the basis of his lifelong philosophy, and his ideas about love, work, democracy, revolution, government.

This is such a soft, beautiful book. I loved so much about it—the philosophy it explores and the ideas at the heart of it about community and activism and despair and responsibility. It reads a bit like a fable, but it feels true, grounded, physical in a way that fables often don’t. The president is a such a concrete character—he’s wry, sad, wise, imperfect. The two timelines—his conversations in prison with the frog, and his present day conversation with the reporter—illuminate so much change and struggle. Together they tell a layered story about this one mans’s life. This is absolutely a book about ideas, but Robertis uses a light touch. The president is an ideas man. So none of it ever feels contrived or heavy-handed. The themes are not subtle; the president’s life has not been subtle.

What I love most, though, in this imaginative and hopeful little book, is the way it embraces mystery. The moments that matter, the experiences that shape us, the conversations that end up changing everything about how we see the world. What we love most, and why, and where it leads us. The weird, meandering, spiraling paths our lives take. What beats the deepest in our hearts, where our tears come from, what sounds and scents lodge themselves in our skin, become a compass or a tether. We can ponder and analyze, spend months or years untangling ourselves, but there’s something mysterious at the bottom of it all. Something unknowable.

The president has a series of conversations with a frog that lead him somewhere unexpected, that lead him to the rest of his life. Where does the frog come from? Why this particular frog, with his bored, throaty, excitable voice (at least this is how I imagine it)? The president is not concerned with these questions, and neither is Robertis. Here is a thing that happened, here is what it meant, and here are the strange and beautiful reverberations of that happening, still moving through world decades and decades later.

Backlist #2: Care Of by Ivan Coyote (Nonfiction, 2021)

I have never seen Ivan Coyote perform live, but I have a strong sense that seeing one of their shows would give me the same feeling I get when I read their books: held, warm, seen, connected. It’s a specific feeling, and I can’t think of any other author offhand whose work evokes it in the same way. There’s a warmth to their writing, a physical warmth, something akin to putting on my favorite sweatshirt after a delicious hot shower on a winter morning, or wrapping my hands around my favorite mug, watching the steam from the tea rise up in smoky circles. I don’t mean to imply their writing doesn’t have any bite, or that it’s cliche or easy or simple. It’s just—present. Comfortable, solid. I get the feeling, reading their work, that I will always be welcome there. That I can make mistakes and be forgiven, cry as messily as I want, and laugh until I pee myself a little. They make so much inviting space with their words.

Coyote, who is a trans writer, musician, performer, and storyteller, gets a lot of letters. When the pandemic arrived and all of their performances were canceled, they decided to use the sudden influx of time to respond to some of the letters they’d received over the years, the special ones they’d been saving, the ones that deserved long and thoughtful responses. There are letters from trans teenagers and the parents of trans kids, from people just coming out, from queer elders. Letters about feeling alone and being seen, about making art, about health care and ruptured family relationships and queer community and living in small town Canada. All of these letter-writers pour themselves onto the page, and Coyote responds in the same way, with openness and stories and wry humor and compassion.

These stories matter, they are specific. Many of them made me cry, or think about hard and beautiful moments from my own life. Coyote is a great writer. This book is full of wisdom about rest and navigating family, about letting yourself want what you want, about friendship and activism and creativity. But the way this book—and all their books—makes make me feel is honestly most of what I want to say about it. It’s where the magic is.

I reviewed another of Coyote’s books, Rebent Sinner, last year, and I had a lot of the same feelings about it. Next up is One in Every Crowd. I’ve been savoring their backlist because I don’t want it to end.

Backlist #3: Edinburgh by Alexander Chee (Fiction, 2001)

The President and The Frog and Care Of both came out in 2021, so technically I didn’t wait that long to read them. But Chee’s masterful, astonishing debut came out in 2001. Twenty-one years ago. I cannot fathom why it has taken me so long to read it. It’s the last book of Chee’s that I’ve read. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is one of my favorite essay collections. And while I didn’t connect with The Queen of the Night in the same way, I can still objectively appreciate the heart and skill that went into it.

Edinburgh, though. I don’t know what to say about it. It snuck up on me. I knew what it was about, a little, going in. It’s about Fee, a biracial Korean American boy who grows up in Maine in the 1980s. He’s sexually abused by the choir director of a prestigious boys’ chorus he sings in. Many other boys, including his best friend, suffer the same abuse. The choir director is eventually arrested. Some of Fee’s childhood friends do not survive. It is devastating. It is so devastating, and so painful, and Chee writes about it with such care, such raw honesty. The writing is breathtaking. The sentences are effortlessly beautiful, never showy. I still can’t quite explain how Chee manages to do what he does, how he writes so beautifully about such horrific events, how he infuses so much warmth into a story about such overwhelming grief and trauma. It feels impossible, and yet here I am, holding the book in my hands, proof that it is not.

I thought I knew what this book was made of. I thought I knew what it was about. But it does not remain in one place. It shifts and shifts and shifts. It is about trauma, yes, and the devastating effects of trauma, and how trauma can sit underneath and underpin and define a life for years, simmering. It is also about ordinary life, how life goes on, keeps spinning. It’s about how time stretches and contracts and loops back around and in on itself.

It’s not surprising, that’s not the right word. It’s just so carefully and beautifully built that the structure vanishes. The book seems to hold itself up without any scaffolding. I couldn’t see inside of it, couldn’t see down to the ways Chee layered the plot and the paragraphs and the characters, to all the work that must have gone into making this specific piece of the world. I couldn’t see any of that because the experience of reading this book was like being inside of it. I don’t mean being inside of the characters and their experiences—I felt and I felt while reading this, it is vivid and heartbreaking—but that’s not what I’m getting at. I mean, it felt like the book was being made as I was reading it. I don’t know how else to describe it.

At one point, during an art class in college, Fee muses about what kind of art he wants to make, what he wants to put into the world:

I had wanted to take something inside myself, like I had once drawn a breath, and then to send it out, as I had sung. To say that you make something out of thin air: you can, if you sing. You can make an enormous number of things this way.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this. This is what the book feels like, like a song. A note that bursts out of a throat, as if out of thin air, all the the work of it not invisible, not even hidden, but contained in the ringing, in the shape of the music as it hits the air. The process entirely consumed by what the process creates. All the messy making transformed into what is made.

The Bake

Unsurprisingly, I added spices to this lovely cake, but you can leave them out if you want. It’s made with orange zest and a whole orange, and it has a wonderful, complex bitterness—not too bitter, but not too sweet. The glaze and candied orange peel on top beautifully compliment the bitterness. It’s very orangey—the perfect fall tea cake.

Whole Orange Cake

Adapted from Samantha Seneviratne via NYT Cooking

This recipe calls for one small orange. I ignored this and used the huge orange I had. My cake was quite dense—I think I ended up with 1 1/2 cups of orange puree, rather than the one cup the recipe calls for. I still enjoyed every moment of this cake, but I’d recommend using a small orange. I’m sure it was the added moisture that altered the texture of my cake.

Ingredients:

• 1 small orange (about 250 grams)

• zest from one orange (a different one)

• 1/4 cup (60 ml) whole milk

• 1 star anise pod

• 6-8 cloves

• 192 grams (1 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour

• 1 tsp baking powder

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 150 grams (3/4 cup) sugar

• 6 Tbs (85 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 2 eggs

To finish:

• 80 grams (3/4 cup) powdered sugar

• 3-4 tsp freshly squeezed orange juice

• candied orange peel

Preheat the oven to 350. Butter an 8-inch square baking pan and line it with parchment so that the ends hang over on two sides.

Cut the ends off the orange and chop it into small chunks. Discard the seeds. Put the orange chunks in a blender with the milk, star anise, and cloves. Blend until smooth. It should be the texture of thick applesauce. You should have about a cup; if you have a lot more than that, save it for something else!

In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In the bowl of an electric mixer (or a large mixing bowl) combine the sugar and orange zest and rub with your fingers until fragrant. Add the butter in cubes and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. Scape down the sides of the bowl.

Add half the flour mixture, followed by the orange puree, and then the rest of the flour, mixing just to combine after each addition. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 35-40 minutes. A tester should come out with a few moist crumbs attached. Let cool completely on a wire rack.

To make the glaze: combine the powdered sugar and orange juice, one teaspoon at a time, whisking until it reaches a consistency you like. Pour it over the cooled cake. Scatter chopped candied orange peel over the top.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Eggy Sweet Potato Gratin

I made this a while ago, for dinner with a friend, and I thought was going to be annoying and hard, but it turned out to be extremely easy. Basically, you slice a bunch of sweet potatoes, heat up some cream with herbs, grate some cheese, and tada: a delicious dinner. It’s more substantial than some gratins I’ve made, which makes it perfect for late fall!

Preheat the oven to 400. Butter a 9x13-inch baking pan and grate Parmesan cheese all over the bottom. You already know this is going to be good, right? Thinly slice a bunch of sweet potatoes (about 2.5 pounds, I used two on the larger side). The thinner the better—1/8-inch rounds are ideal. Grate a whole bunch of cheese. I used a combo of Parmesan and Gruyére, about two cups total.

In a small pot, simmer 2 cups heavy cream with the herbs of your choice, 3-5 tablespoons, chopped. I used thyme, rosemary, and sage. Add 3-4 pressed garlic cloves, a pinch of nutmeg, and a pinch of salt. Cook until the mixture has reduced about about 1/4. Whisk three eggs in a bowl and slowly pour in the cream mixture.

Layer the potatoes in the bottom of the pan, overlapping them slightly. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, then about 1/3 of the egg mixture and 1/3 of the cheese. Repeat with another layer of potatoes, egg mixture, and cheese, and again with the rest of the potatoes and the rest of the egg mixture. Cover with foil and bake for about 40 minutes. Remove the foil, cover with the remaining cheese, and bake for another 25-30 minutes until the potatoes are soft and the cheese is bubbling.

The Beat: The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel, read by the author

Everybody’s gay! I’m about a third of the way through this memoir about Hempel’s family and the secrets they were all keeping, until, eventually, they all came out: Hempel and her dad are gay, her brother is trans, and her sister is bisexual. So far I’m enjoying it a lot. When Hempel decided to write the book, she asked her family if they’d be willing to participate in the project, and she ended up conducting interviews with all of them over Zoom during the pandemic. The balance is excellent—she writes about herself, of course, but she also writes thoughtfully about her family, and it makes the book richer. It’s a book about change and growth and healing, both individually and collectively.

The Bookshelf

A Portal

I spent a while this weekend catching up on my commonplace book, which I’ve been neglecting. It was so satisfying to sift through all the quotes I’ve collected from books over the past few months, organize them, and match them to photos. I know I’ve written about my commonplace book before, but some of you are new here. If you, too, keep a commonplace book (or want to start one) come talk to me in the comments!

A Baking Quandary

Today’s question comes from Cassie, and it’s one I’ve been pondering for a few weeks because the answer is always changing.

How do you carve out time for baking? How do you make it a priority, and how do you choose what to make each week?

I love baking, but I, too, struggle to make time for it. Sometimes it feels incredibly daunting to get out the mixing bowls and let the butter soften, even though, when I actually start mixing and kneading and chopping up chocolate, I’m happy. There are two things that have helped me create space in my life for baking—maybe they’ll inspire you to make space for whatever it is you love, too!

#1: When I started this newsletter, I decided I was going to include a recipe every week, and I knew that would mean baking every week. There have been a few weeks where I’ve included an older recipe, and a few special editions without recipes, but for the most part, writing this newsletter means I’ve baked something every week for the last two and a half years. Accountability works for me. I bake every week because I “have” to, and therefore it’s become a habit, a part of the week’s rhythm that I don’t even think about anymore. I’d probably still bake without this structure, but the structure helps. This has been one of the best gifts of this work.

#2: Recently I’ve started baking more in the early morning, or during lunch. I’m always exhausted after work and I don’t want to do anything. I struggle to start projects on weekdays. It feels difficult to bake a cake at 6pm on a Wednesday night, but not to bake that same cake at 7am on Thursday morning. I’m fresher and more energized in the morning. I don’t always do this, of course, and I always tackle more complex baking projects on the weekends. But shifting how I think about my days and what’s possible within them has created what feels like extra space. I used to think mornings were not for baking—I had my pre-work routine, my walk and my breakfast and my writing. I didn’t think I could mess with it. I can mess with it, though! There are no rules except the rules I make.

How I choose what to make is another story entirely—for next week!

Now Out / Can’t Wait!

Now Out

Finally! Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead, which I reviewed way back in August, is now out! It’s brilliant. Go forth and find yourself a copy!

Can’t Wait!

Weightless by Evette Dionne (Memoir, Ecco Press, December 6th): December is a slow month for new releases, but I’m looking forward to this memoir about fatness, Blackness, and gender.

Bonus Recs: Can’t Wait So Long!

I don’t know why it takes me so long to read some books when I know I’ll love them. On the other hand, there are some books I start reading the day they’re released. Cat Sebastian is one of those authors for me. Her newest, Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots, came out yesterday, and yes, I started it last night, and yes, it’s great. (It’s only currently available as an ebook.) A different iteration of this: After reading Carl Phillip’s Double Shadow, I immediately requested two more of his books from the library and read them promptly (Wild is the Wind and Then the War).

The Boost

• A fundraising call from Pa’lante Transformative Justice came across my feed recently. It’s a youth-led restorative and transformative justice program based in my part of the world, and seems rad. You can donate here.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: 4:30 sunsets have arrived, and there is very little I love more. The Season of Light is coming, my favorite season, the deep dark of the year, the dark that makes the light, when it comes, blaze brightest.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!