On Mondays, my husband is at work and I’m off. So Monday is my day to do whatever I want without feeling like I have someone’s eye on me. And I always feel like I have someone’s eye on me.
A foundational example of why I always feel like someone is watching and disapproving of me: I am 18, and I’m home for summer after my first year in college. We live in an upper-middle-class cul de sac in a well-off suburb of Boston. Our house sits on an acre. It’s not a semi-rural acre that you might find in a hobby-farm area. It’s just a well-to-do neighborhood of big houses on big lots. Our house, surrounded by its lawn that won’t grow because of all the trees, sits on the half-acre closest to the street. The half-acre in the back is “woods”. Not, you know, forest, but enough trees that you can’t see the neighbor’s house, not even in winter. (My mother likes living in a house where the neighbors can’t see her.)
Today, my mother wants me to do some yard work, picking up sticks and such after a windstorm. I’m to put the sticks in garbage bags (it’s the 1970s; yard clipping bags haven’t been invented yet) and put them near the garage so that we can haul them to the dump. I say that it would be easier to empty the bags in the woods behind the house. “No”, she says. Her voice is even louder than usual. “Then I won’t be able to see you. I need to be able to look out of any window and see you”.
So I like Mondays, when I am alone. On Mondays, I am free.
Today I will vacuum, do my laundry, and make a Victoria Sponge (https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mary_berrys_perfect_34317) to please my Immediate Gratification Monkey (I call her Iggy) [https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html] who really, really enjoys the Great British Bake Off. Oh, and I will try to catch up with my emails and return my phone calls. It’s a middle-aged, middle-class woman’s day off.
I turn on the TV, which was set to TCM, despite the fact that Kevin was supposedly watching the Superbowl last night. They were showing “The Sorrow and the Pity”, which started at 6:45 AM and ends at 10:45 AM, so it’s 5 hours long. It’s a 1969 documentary: “Marcel Ophuls uses interviews as well as clips from French and German newsreels to shed light on the Nazi occupation of France”. I haven’t heard of this film before. It’s riveting. I can’t look away:
The apparent cheerful ignorance of the merchant who took out a newspaper advert in the late 1930s/early 1940s, stating that he was a Frenchman and not a Jew, disgusts me. I presume that he knows that what he did was wrong. But he’s so cavalier: “I’m a Catholic, but my name is ‘Stein’, which sounds Jewish. I just wanted everyone to know that I’m a Frenchman…. My brothers and I fought in the first war, and one of my brothers was killed…. I’m a Frenchman….”
This disgusts me, but it does not surprise me. People no longer surprise me. People are the same old story on an endless loop.
But it makes me wonder: How much of your life do you have to hide from yourself in order to live? People are icebergs: you see 10%, and the other 90% is hidden beneath the water. I always thought that 90% is hidden from other people, because someone else can never see your life—what you’ve experienced, what fears motivate you. They can only see the outer wrapping. But we hide our lives from ourselves, too, diving into the cold, black waters to bury parts of ourselves in the heavy ice. Once we’ve completed this ordeal, we convince ourselves that we can never get back there—it’s too deep, the pressure is too high, it’s deadly cold. We imprison our lives in the ice. Sometimes an epiphany breaks us free, but those are rare and we can turn away and refuse them. We rarely want to look at the things that make us free. If we did, we’d have to dive down and mine our lives back out of the ice and deal with the pain. I don’t like pain any more than anyone else. I’ve buried enough things. I’ve buried most of my life in the ice.
Anyway, I finish the vacuuming, eat lunch, put in my laundry, and make a Victoria Sponge, per Mary Berry’s recipe. I weigh all the ingredients because I have a scale. It has 4 ingredients: eggs, sugar, flour, butter.
It turns out that XL eggs (which are what I have) in the U.S. weigh just about what a medium egg does in the U.K., per my research (https://www.nigella.com/ask/egg-sizes). I blend the egg and spoon out quarter teaspoons until the weight is 250g, just to be on the safe side.
I grind the sugar in the blender to turn it into caster (superfine) sugar. I grind it a little more than I probably should because the blender isn’t the right tool. I should have broken out the food processor. The sugar touching the blender blades whirs into a vertical column that doesn’t mix with the sugar around the sides of the vessel. So I grind a little and then shake the blender to mix the sugar so that enough of it is superfine—grind and shake, grind and shake, grind and shake. Eventually it looks pretty okay.
The flour surprises me. I weigh the measuring cup and then weigh the flour that I’ve put into the measuring cup. But the ostensible 8 oz that the measuring cup holds doesn’t weigh 8 oz—it weighs something like 4.5 oz. I dump the flour into a tared bowl and switch the scale to metric. I go back for more flour. Finally I have 250g. And I realize that I’m not sure how much flour that is. Maybe about 1.5 cups? 1.75 cups? Plus, it’s not self-rising flour, which is what the recipe calls for. I’ll have to punt with adding the baking soda and salt to make it equivalent to self-rising flour. I decide to take the easy way out and just double the baking soda and salt. It will probably be too much and screw up the recipe, but I do it anyway.
I weigh the 2 sticks of butter. 252g. I decide that the butter papers weigh 1g each and that it’s close enough.
I put the eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and butter into the big red mixing bowl, which weighs 1,496g. I use the hand mixer because I imagine it will take me forever to mix with a wooden spoon, which is the recipe’s first choice. The recipe says “not to overmix”. But the butter, which I’ve cut into ~1 T bits, isn’t mixing in, although it’s room temperature. Eventually it all mixes together—”eventually” is that time when you’re doing something new, and you don’t have any idea how long it will take and what the end result will look like. It’s both an eternity and the blink of an eye in which everything seems to go wrong, and you’re still not sure if it’s right when you’re done.
It doesn’t drop off the spoon, the way the recipe says it should. In fact, it’s quite clumpy. But it’s mixed, and I’m always doing things wrong, especially when cooking. I work hard to divide the recipe in half so the two layers are identical. I’m not used to grams. A gram is both more than and less than I imagine. Spoon one smidgeon over here—no, spoon two smidgeons over there….
Eventually the same amount of batter is in both tins, give or take a gram or two. Now is the time to “gently smooth the surface of the cakes with a spatula”. Smoothing is not my strong suit. I try to bring the lessons I’ve learned from raking the shavings around the horse stalls to this task. I’ve put the batter in the middle, so I use the little metal spatula to draw the batter out to the sides, going around the tin one stroke at a time, just as I used to rake the heap of shavings into the corners of the stalls. Okay, there’s less batter in the middle and some filling the tin, almost reaching the sides. I set the tip of the spatula at the edge of the tin, handle in the middle and try to hold it horizontal as I turn the tin, trying to distribute the batter evenly while smoothing it. Eventually I call it “good enough” and give up. It’ll smooth out in the oven, right?
Into the oven they go. I set the timer for 20 minutes.
When it goes ding, there’s cake stuff to check. The cake on the left is darker, though the edges facing the front of the oven for both cakes are beginning to become light brown. The cake on the right is quite light and, though the top has set, it’s fallen in the middle. No doubt because of the extra baking powder and salt I added because I hadn’t measured the flour properly. I turn them 180° and set the timer for 5 minutes.
In 5 minutes, the cake on the left looks maybe done-ish. The cake on the right still looks quite light. Next time I’ll need to swap them as well as rotating them. But I don’t really know how to tell when they’re done. When I press them gently, as the recipe instructs, they rise into place again, but they don’t feel “springy”. I put them in for 3 more minutes.
In 3 minutes, the cake on the left is definitely, definitely done. Overcooked. Ugh. I take it out and put it onto the wire rack. The cake on the right is still possibly underdone because it was on the cooler side of the oven. I put it in for 1 more minute, hoping that it won’t be as overdone as the first one.
One minute later, the cake is definitely done. I guess. I take it out and put the timer on for 4 minutes of cooling. When it goes ding, it’s time to decant the cakes.
I run the spatula around the sides of the first cake, but it’s definitely pulled away from the edge of the tin. No need for the spatula. I grab a fresh dishtowel and put it over the cake, then put my hand on the towel. I turn the tin over and the cake drops out into my hand, showing its burnt bottom. Ugh. I put the bottom onto the wire rack where I can’t see it.
The second cake… doesn’t go as well. I somehow don’t get my dishtowel hand on it properly and it tips off my hand and lands on the counter, breaking into thirds. Of course, this was the better cake, which I had planned to use for the top.
I gather it carefully and get it onto the wire rack. At least no big pieces have fallen out. I pick up the kitchen, trying not to listen to my mother’s voice looping through my head, telling me all the things I did wrong, that the cakes are awful, that I should have known better, that the cakes are ruined. I try to remind myself that I don’t have much experience baking, that it’s the first time I tried the recipe, that I solved almost all the problems up front and now I can solve the additional problems next time, that they’ll turn out better next time, and so on.
Mom’s voice is always louder, but at least I have my own voice now.
Live Right, Now 