practical peace

Thanksgiving, 1999

Last night, the night before Thanksgiving, I visited every supermarket and ice cream store in town looking for rum raisin ice-cream and frozen squash. I had planned to recreate the dessert from my final prison Thanksgiving, caramelized squash tartlets in flaky pastry shells topped with the rum raisin ice cream.

The pastry alone is an hours long project. You mash together cream cheese and butter, then cut in flour and blend it to make a dough. You dump the mass of dough onto the counter-in prison this often my gray enameled steel desktop, since holiday cooking crowded the kitchen had cut me off from the Formica counter, which Jacques Pepin says is second best to marble for pastry making. You shape it into a square and roll that square with a Pepsi can to a long thin rectangle, about three times as long as it is wide. You fold the end the right and the left hand sides over the center, rotate that new square 90 degrees, and then roll again. You do this a total of four more times, refrigerating in between the sets of two.

There’s a history to this recipe. When I wanted to make the perfect pastry for fried turnovers, since we have no oven in prison, I remembered that when I came to work in the culinary arts department of the community college, the staff had the students making fried pies for God knows what reason, and the pastry they used was a cream cheese one. I remembered that it was adequate to what was being asked, that is, to hold a juicy, poky filling with out breaking through and yet to remain tender. I remembered that the dough recipe printed inside the Land-o-Lakes butter package in faint blue ink specified a proportion of butter to cream cheese of one to one. The water content of the cream cheese meant no additional water was added to the dough. But I had entirely forgotten the proportion of flour. It just happened that the first time I wanted to make this dough, it was apple season, and on the day room shelf I found a copy of Martha Stewart Living magazine with the recipe for apple pie. I translated the fat in the cream cheese into its equivalent if it were to be shortening and calculated Martha Stewart’s idea of the right ratio of fat to flour for perfect apple pie. Then, remembering that the Joy of Cooking says that things to be deep fried need a lower fat content than things to be a baked, I reduced the fat by about one- sixth. I remembered that Paula made rugelach from a cream cheese dough that got its flaky texture from repeated rolling and folding like puff pastry. The first time I tried it, I knew I was on to something. That time, since I had no spices to speak of for seasoning the apples I intended to use, I decided to flavor the dough with the cheese packet from the Kraft macaroni and cheese from the store. It contained a little powdered milk, some dried cheddar cheese, and some kind of precooked starch, which I figured would just tenderize the dough a little.

By the time I was ready to use this pastry for tartlet shells for Thanksgiving, I had mastered every step. I made it up—without the cheese sauce mix—rolled it an eight of an inch thick after its final chilling, and used the edge of the plastic spatula to cut it into squares four inches along each side. I used a plastic knife to cut to opposite corners about 3/8 of an inch from their edge, then picked up those corners and folded them criss-cross to make a pastry shell known as a vol-au-vent, twice as high on its edges as in its center with a pretty little knot at two diagonal corners. I pricked them all well with a plastic fork, and deep fried them till they were nicely browned and cooked through, as we say in the cooking biz.

For the filling, I first gathered my stash of spices. I snipped tiny holes in the corner of every package of spiced or apple cinnamon instant oatmeal that I could find, and sifted out the spices and sugar while trying to leave the pieces of the rolled oats behind. Sugar we had in abundance, but only white. For greater flavor I caramelized it, a tricky process, a sort of dance between burning and the perfection of a sweet amber liquid that reminds me of the tone of the cello. I stirred some of the thawed frozen squash into the caramelized sugar, which causes the caramel to harden into lollipop like blobs. But if you keep cooking and stirring, the caramel melts and blends with the squash.

So now I had flavor, sweetness, and the vegetable pulpy mass of the squash, but I needed a thickener that would blend it all to one whole. I thought of eggs, the usual custard agent. But we could buy tiny only Egg Beaters, which were all whites that got their body from gums. They were useless as a thickener. Instead, I cooked up a roux and treated the filling as this sort of sauce. After I brought it to a boil, I rigged up a water-bath and cooked it over simmering water until the raw taste of the starch was cooked out. A half hour later I had the filling, and the tartlets were ready to be finished off with rum raisin ice cream from the canteen.

I can only assume that the prison authorities had failed to notice the rum raisin ice cream’s active alcohol content, negligible enough that no one got smashed but transgressiv enough to contribute to a festive atmosphere.