I was looking today through the National Science Digital Library’s “science literacy maps,” which are a sort of graphic organizer for science concepts, showing what concepts are related to what other concepts. A valuable resource for teachers, certainly. Even more valuable, I thought, at first glance, are the lists of student misconceptions: the things students think they know about science and have trouble unlearning. But then I started wondering about the wisdom of framing that as “misconceptions” and, in fact, about the value of this idea of science “literacy” itself.
Apples and time
I spent half the weekend making apple butter. Twenty-two half-pint jars of apple butter, from a half-bushel of apples, a completely unnecessary quantity that will be foisted off on unsuspecting friends come Christmas. In the meantime it occurs to me that this is the twentieth consecutive year (!) I’ve made apple butter, and so I ought to know something about it by now. Yet what I know isn’t anything I can reduce to a recipe. Apple butter is a pure expression of the apple’s essence, an exercise in simplicity; easy to make, impossible to perfect. It has, after all, only two ingredients: apples and time, both of which can seem to have minds of their own. Here’s what I know about each.
Now be a good boy, and eat your pie.
I ran across this line today in an article I was reading: “A great deal is being written now… about provisioning our households with an eye to the nutritive value of what we buy.” Ain’t that the truth? Hang on, though: This was 1915, and “nutritive” didn’t mean what you think it means.
What’s really in the molasses?
Sometimes the things that are ostensibly the simplest turn out to pose the most interesting problems. Molasses, for example, which I’ve been using by the gallon to bake all this gingerbread. In an age when practically everything Americans use in the kitchen is constructed to industrial specifications — unless, like farmers market produce, it’s specifically branded and marketed in opposition to that sort of standardization — it’s surprising to find that a packaged, branded product has enough variation to fundamentally changed the character of baked goods, but that’s exactly what I’ve found with molasses.
Pretty good banana bread
Cook’s Illustrated finally went off the deep end this month. I’ve seen this moment coming for years, as they gradually ran through the classic American repertoire and resorted to publishing home versions of questionable restaurant fare and revisiting recipes that were already perfect. I’m a charter subscriber; I’ve been getting this magazine in the mail every other month since 1993, and every time I think about dropping it they run something that is so good that it pays for the year’s subscription. I refer to my back issues more than to any cookbook on my shelf. So I don’t say this lightly. But my old reliable has gone off the deep end. What’s finally done it? What’s inspired one of my rare full-on Internet rants and a corrective recipe?
Extreme banana bread.
Gingerbread strawberry shortcake
This is less a recipe than a suggestion, and less a suggestion than an essay on strawberry shortcake, which well-made is one of the great triumphs of American cuisine and deserves more respect than it usually gets.
The benefits of sloth to one’s fellow creatures
This Earth Day post on a New York Times blog, about why dandelions are ok and “Wimbeldonlike” lawns maintained in their sterile protection by a chemical arsenal are bad, left me nonplussed — not because I disagree; I’ve written before about my natural lawn care, my preference for wildflowers over grass and my thorough distaste for gas-powered lawn mowers. I was happy to see somebody in so mainstream a publication taking a stand, even a modest and polite one, against chemically-maintained lawns.
Turducken: The untold story
A lot of people claim to have invented turducken, or to know who did. Everybody puts its origin in Louisiana. Those crazy Cajuns! A boneless chicken inside a boneless duck inside a boneless turkey! Who else would do something like that?
Prince Albert, apparently.
Ivy’s early spring salad
Birds are nesting. Tree frogs have been peeping and croaking and chorusing for a month. Violets and buttercups are blooming. The afternoons are almost balmy. It isn’t gingerbread season anymore. It is, however, time for greens.
Brandy-orange ginger cookies: A semi-historical mashup
This recipe started as a historical reenactment and turned into an attempt to see how close I could get to my own Platonic ideal of a cookie while staying within the spirit of antebellum cuisine. After a few tries I got something I was pretty happy with, and this one you can make for your friends without having to explain that it was part of some guy’s research project.