My girls are forever doing tea parties...whenever the mood presents itself...which happens to be often....
And all their tea partying...among other things...has put me in the mood for scones....among other things. Fall weather always puts us in the mood to find the kitchen once again with all its warmth and winter-wafting pleasures. Although I hate to admit it, I'm not one to spend inordinate amounts of time in the kitchen. In fact, I rather avoid it. I don't want to be this way...but...what can I say??? Food to me is more of an inconvenience...followed up with a gimongous mess in my nice clean kitchen...rather than anything I revel and wallow in.
However, I will say that's all changing, since I stumbled upon that Domestic Delight of the kitchen, Nigella Lawson and a curious cookbook I found of hers in the library called How to be a Domestic Goddess. This just so happened to be the book for me!
This is a book about baking, but not a baking book--not in the sense of being a manual or a comprehensive guide or a map of a land you do not inhabit. I neither want to confine you to the kitchen nor even suggest that it might be desirable.
Huh??? It's a bit awkward to have someone totally read one's mind. At this I was somewhat off-guard then she says:
But I do think that many of us have become alienated from the domestic sphere, and that it can actually make us feel better to claim back some of that space, make it comforting rather than frightening. In a way, baking stands both as a useful metaphor for the familial warmth of the kitchen we fondly imagine used to exist, and as a way of reclaiming our lost Eden. This is hardly a culinary matter, of course, but cooking, we know, has a way of cutting through things, and to things, which have nothing to do with the kitchen. This is why it matters.
Ahem. This woman is now completely speaking my language...reading my every thought and whim about my every romantic notion of kitchen-life ever conjured or conceived in my latent imaginings...yet have been so bumbling and hopelessly futile in my attempts to capture and make the reality in my life. Is there hope for me after all?
Now that I'm in a mesmerized trance, she says:
The trouble with much modern cooking is not that the food it produces isn't good, but that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure. Sometimes that's the best we can manage, but at other times we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.
So, whew, in my heady giddy-ness I tried her recipe for scones...Lily's recipe, to be exact. She begins by informing us thus:
These are the best scones I've ever eaten, which is quite how it should be since they emanate from one of those old-fashioned cooks who starts a batch the minute the doorbell rings at teatime. Yes, I know they look as if they've got cellulite--it's the cream of tartar, which is also why, despite their apparent solidity, they have that dreamy lightness.
And ya know what? She was sooooo right! And I am soooo such a sucker for scones...especially Lily's scones.
And I am now soooo hooked...line and sinker! : D