Mrs. Gorbachev, Take Out Those Brownies

By Natalie Bradford

Writing 212: The Art of the Essay

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Once, a conversation with my dad turned to the Cold War. My dad, ever the good sport, listened to my rambling with more attention than it really merited before dropping a bomb of his own. The discussion went something like this:

“The Cold War was bananas.”

“It was.”

“Like, the two most powerful countries in the world just decided they were archenemies and then everybody had to go around knowing the world might end whenever one of them got too much into their feelings.”

“Yep.”

“Absolutely mad. And they had just fought a war against Nazis together! I feel like that should count for something.”

He thought for a moment before replying.

“We had nuclear drills when I was in school.”

“Actually?”

“Yep.”

“In Winston? But why would anybody bomb Winston?”

“It was pretty high up on the possible targets list.”

“Actually?”

I never fact-checked him on this, but he did back it up with some reasonably compelling anecdotal evidence involving the Reynolds’ cigarette factories being used to make bullets during World War II and a nuclear silo being somewhere nearby. True or not, it’s hard to reconcile the image of boring, safe, comfortable Winston-Salem with the knowledge that it might have been a prime candidate for a Soviet strike had the Cold War ever heated up. To think of my dad, walking around the same high school that his grandparents had gone to, rocking a mullet and doing the same things my brother might do today, all while knowing the city could be leveled in a moment, is strange and discomfiting. It’s odd to think of things as ordinary and mundane as our hometowns as having the potential for such calamity. Yet it happens all the time. People wreck their cars driving down roads they use every day. Burglars break into houses while people are sound asleep. And I burn myself every time I have to use an oven.

Cooking and baking—and ovens— have always elicited a very specific reaction from me. That reaction is dread. My feelings can best be described thus: It’s nighttime. A woman cooks dinner for herself in an empty home. As she sautés spinach and boils pasta, she’s playing music and singing out of tune. It seems like any other uneventful evening, but something about it is just a bit off. Something about the normalcy has you on the edge of your seat, the angles or the pacing or the suggestion of movement in the shadows has your hair raised and your heart racing. When the woman turns around to come face-to-face with a man in black wielding a wire clay cutter, a heavy wrench or, less imaginatively, a knife or gun, it’s not exactly a clutch-your-pearls moment. You felt it coming. It’s more of a culmination of the apprehension that has been building in you since the scene began.

This is how I feel about cooking. Especially when I have to take something out of the oven. Nothing triggers my fight-or-flight response quite like having to take a piece of metal out of a 375-degree box with only a cloth mitten between my hand and third-degree burns. Not to mention the fact that I’ve never been known for having particularly steady hands. (It’s one of the top reasons that I tell people I could never be a surgeon—not that they ask). I can very clearly see myself stumbling into the oven and catching myself on the hot shelf or dropping the dish and burning myself with hot brownies. Or, an alternative which is maybe even worse, I could be paralyzed by terror and burn the brownies. This horror—that of crime-show-intro-scenes and scalded flesh—is with me whenever I bake.

An early baking adventure on which I embarked was chocolate cupcakes for my brother’s tenth birthday. It was the middle of August and hot enough to melt icing. We were having a picnic at the pool as nobody wanted to spend the whole party sweating on dry land. It had been decided unanimously, by a council of just me, that the theme for the party was to be ‘funny hats.’ In keeping with this theme, I had assembled a collection of Viking helmets and purple fedoras, hats with knit beards attached and great feathered monstrosities that looked like Derby hats gone wrong to be used for photoshoots. My mom made little construction paper hats on toothpicks to decorate the drinks and snacks with. The cupcakes had been the subject of immense discussion and planning. Hours had been spent scrolling through recipe websites for how to make them tasty, and hours on top of that had been dedicated to making them cute—research compiled of all the trendiest icing colors and methods of presentation. Despite all of this prep work, each step was fraught with peril.

To begin: ingredient gathering. I’ve hated grocery stores for as long as I can remember. Grocery stores are cold, the epitome of uncomfortable. They’re too crowded and no one is paying attention to where they’re going. Pushing the cart is the worst because then I have to pay attention to where I’m going, or else plow into some old lady or knock over a shelf of Wheat Thins. They always seem to be a safe place to go without having brushed your hair or changed out of your workout clothes, until you get there and run into the last person you want to see while looking like a mess—a boss, a crush, a particularly gossipy frenemy. If you think about it, grocery stores are really just microcosms of capitalism, studies in product placement and customer suggestibility. Why else would wheat bread cost more than white? Finding what I’m looking for always seems to require walking across the store a minimum of ten times, thawing out amidst the chips just in time to pass back through the frozen section. And the ordeal doesn’t much improve from there. Once you finally get the food out of the grocery store and into your house, you have to actually make something with it.

The steps involved in creating this occasion’s catastrophic chocolate cupcakes are as follows:

Ingredients: Flour, Sugar, Baking Powder and Soda, One more egg than is in the fridge, Two begging dogs constantly underfoot, Cocoa Powder, Butter, One brother to take the cupcakes out of the oven after they’re done and to provide torture-by-bad-rap before, Milk, Salt, The memory of the delicious molten chocolate cupcakes downtown to serve as an impossible standard, and Vanilla Extract.

Step 1: Dump all of the dry ingredients into a popcorn bowl because it’s the biggest you can find. Wash it out first because there are still a few kernels stuck to it from a Pride and Prejudice marathon the night before. Pour the wet ingredients in a little bit at a time. Mix. Make a mental note to look into stand mixers. Forget where you put the fork you were using to mix. Grab another. Repeat. End up with four dirty forks.

Step 2: Remember the cute cupcake liners you saw on Pinterest while looking for recipes. Dig the boring, plain wrappers out of the back of your pantry, pout a bit, but use them anyway. Shoo your mom away when she tries to lick the spoon you are using to pour the batter into the pan.

Step 3: Stumble over a dog while you put the cupcakes in the oven at 375-degrees. Sit in a stew of anxiety and anticipation and wait for the timer to go off. Trip over another dog while you clean up. Enlist the dogs’ help in cleaning the dishes and all four dirty forks.

The final part of the food preparation process should, in a perfect world, be the best part. On this day, that was not the case. Everyone has the meal they turn to to make them feel better. I love my mom’s potato soup when I’m sick or my dad’s blueberry pancakes when I’m pretending to be sick. Few things are as cozy as a dish you grew up eating, made with love and a certain level of technical skill. These cupcakes were not that dish.

Through some horrible accident of baking-science, the cupcakes came out concave to a degree that no amount of creative icing could repair. This, in itself, wouldn’t have rendered them irredeemable. In my experience, 10-year-old boys don’t tend to care overmuch about the appearance of their food, particularly when copious amounts of sugar are involved. It was the taste test that doomed them. On a good day, my brother is my best critic. He would take a bite and leave the kitchen, taking several of whatever I had made with him. This was not a good day. He took a bite and said nothing. I took a bite and was also silent. My mom came in, took a bite, and said, “These taste like burnt tires.” She was right. The cupcakes did not make their debut during the cake-portion of the birthday party. They didn’t make it out of the kitchen until a bonfire had been lit, whereupon they became fodder for guests to toss into the flames in between s’mores. As gleeful a scene as lobbing things into a roaring fire makes for, the smell of burning cake and the sight of my misshapen desserts blackening and collapsing in on themselves was distinctly disheartening.

With time, my cupcakes have come to taste solidly of cake and turn out convex at least 90% of the time. The poof of my gougères improves with every attempt, rendering them no longer cheese disks but, truly, cheese puffs. My cakes are still lopsided, but I can now give them flavors beyond “extra vanilla extract.” Despite this, I have not overcome my trepidations regarding baking. The girl who brought homemade muffins to our AP Biology exam is and always will be, in my consideration, a superhero for undertaking such a massive, stressful project in the middle of the already massively stressful exam week, but I’ve experienced the joys of baking for school myself, on lower-pressure occasions. Showing up to school with a tray of homemade cookies is to experience popularity that class presidents and quarterbacks can only dream of. Once, when my entire Spanish class failed a quiz, we were given a chance to salvage our grades: bring in a dish from a Spanish-speaking country. This combined two of my favorite things: extra credit and cultural research. I made a Costa Rican orange pound cake, with just enough powdered sugar and fruity goodness that, after class, I was pursued across the parking lot by classmates who were after the leftovers.

Of late, I have begun to wonder if part of my aversion can be traced back to my very first baking attempt. It occurred in the periwinkle kitchen of our old house, when I decided to make my mom a cake. I must have been around six, because my brother was born but too little to be of any use. The butterfly bushes outside the kitchen window were summer-green, so it couldn’t have been a birthday cake as my mom’s birthday is right before Christmas. It might have been for Mother’s Day, or I might have been in trouble and hoping to get back in her good graces. The cake “batter” consisted of a handful of powdered sugar and half a bottle of chocolate milk, poured into a saucepan. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to play with the oven, so I figured the microwave would have to suffice to bake it. Luckily, due to a combination of impressive mom-senses and the difficulties of fitting a large saucepan into a not-that-large microwave, my plan was discovered before anything caught fire. I remember being baffled that I was in trouble for such a nice gesture. I knew that I wouldn’t be mad if someone had made me a cake. I was deeply offended that my very delicious batter was being laughed at, after I had worked so hard on it. My mom still likes to make jokes about it. It was only when she explained to me how putting certain things, like a metal saucepan and a metal fork, into the microwave could catch the house on fire that I understood my mistake.  In my horror at having almost burned the house down, an image which repeats itself in my nightmares, I may have oversimplified the lesson a bit. I walked away from the experience with the understanding that me trying to bake meant things would explode.

Although my mom still likes to kid about the near catastrophe, the threat of laughter has never been something I felt I had to avoid, despite the offense I took at my batter being laughed at. It is, after all, a family trait that we dearly love to laugh. Indeed, one of the surest ways to improve a baking experience is to lean into the humor that’s bound to be involved. I’ve embraced baking as the perfect avenue through which to exhibit flourishes of extraness. Baking like a diva is easy and painless—if a bit time consuming; just add rainbow food coloring to whatever dessert you’re making or switch out a regular birthday cake for a hundred-layer crepe cake. Whimsy—ever my weakness—abounds in many of my favorite concoctions. I can think of nothing better than spending six hours destroying the kitchen in pursuit of the best way to construct a Charlotte Royale, then forcing my dad into an impromptu tea party the moment it turns out to be anything other than a complete failure. It’s a wonderful chance to live out fantasies of The Great British Baking Show and any assortment of period dramas.

Plus, there are holidays. One of my truest loves is the holiday season. Given free reign and two hours, I’ll drape the entire house in tinsel, smother the tree in blinking lights, and throw garland over anything not flat enough to hold a snow globe. Baking is just another direction to channel my enthusiasm. Santa doesn’t get off easy at our house; there must be at least three plates of cookies by the chimney for him to sample from. Holiday parties are an excellent excuse for impractically large batches of Swedish Christmas lace cookies or Italian Christmas almond cakes and every evening eggnog requires a fresh batch of gingerbread men. Even if it won’t snow until February, it can still be a white Christmas with enough powdered sugar.

Despite the blissfully traditional image painted by these holiday preparations, there are some conventional ideas around baking that I am not at all impressed by. My reluctance to seriously improve my cooking abilities, for example, might be due to the fact that it’s expected of me to do so, in a gross, gender normative type of way. The image of a smiling housewife toting a steaming meatloaf has made it impossible for me to accept this domestic portrait, much to the chagrin of my relatives. My grandfather, in particular, in a tone oozing both old-timey Southern charm and the persuasiveness of one long accustomed to courtroom appearances, is fond of pressing this point.

“Natalie,” he has said frequently, “did you help Judy cook dinner?”

“No,” I said. “Did you?”

“You’ve got to learn how to cook! Don’t you want to be as good a cook as your grand-mommy?” Every drawn-out syllable drives me one step further from any interest in ever picking up a measuring cup again.

“No,” I said. “Will can’t cook.”

“Judy’s the best cook I know! Don’t you want to be able to cook a nice dinner for your husband after he gets home from work? For your children?”

“I’ve no intention of getting married and I don’t want kids.” This is too ludicrous to merit a response from anyone. “Dad can cook his own meals.”

“Some people,” he said, though he’s the only one I’ve ever heard say this, “think the best place for a woman is barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.”

With this line, “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen,” as a refrain drawled in the best lawyerly good-ole-boy voice my imagination can muster running through my head, I did my best to keep out of the kitchen for years. Even now I maintain a degree of impracticality in my baking—no amount of New Years’ Eve pink champagne cupcakes, delicious as they are, would make a satisfactory meal for a hungry husband. However, a pile of cupcakes is not a great dinner for me either, and I remain woefully unprepared for the feeding-yourself aspect of adulthood, due mostly to my own stubbornness. But, every time I look up a recipe for spaghetti, I hear again “the best place” and quickly switch to looking at practice LSAT questions.

Myriad fears, from minor burns to embarrassingly bad bakes to being ensnared by out-of-date expectations, make cooking a difficult minefield to navigate, even if there aren’t any nukes. Confronting anxiety in spaces that we wouldn’t expect it—like dining rooms populated by our dearest family members telling us exactly what we don’t want to hear—sometimes requires biting the metaphorical bullet, or sticking our hands in the metaphorical oven. Despite my fears, failures, and fervent abhorrence of gender norms that predated second wave feminism, I’ve kept trying to bake.

I’ve kept trying because quitting before you master something isn’t quitting at all; it’s failing. Mastery is, of course, a loose term. I would settle for being an accomplished maker of simple chocolate chip cookies, but I could never walk around with the knowledge that I’d made one bad batch of cupcakes and given up. Despite my grandfather’s less wonderful maxims, he has some which I do adhere to: Do what you’re passionate about, never settle when you know you can do better, hard work gets you farther than natural talent every time. I’ve kept trying because it’s not up to other people to define who I am. Being a traditional housewife isn’t a prerequisite to knowing the inner workings of a kitchen. I’m as capable of being an independent adult with a career and dreams whether I’m a good cook or not. I’ve kept trying because I love having something to share, like showing up to Thanksgiving dinner with more pies than there are people. I do it to help make Christmas feel like Christmas, to have somewhere to put candles for birthday wishes, or to have snacks for an adventure with friends. I do it for the stories, because “the time my brother and I stayed up until three in the morning trying to make Mother’s Day scones” makes for much better memories than “the time I showed up with grocery store scones for Mother’s Day.”

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A Word from Natalie

 Prior to taking WRI 212, I knew of three types of writing: dry academic essays, creative fiction, and personal essays. I knew the most about academic writing—and felt the most dread over personal writing. When we were given the assignment for this paper—to write a memoir—I thought it was the worst-case scenario for something I could be asked to write. I had no idea where to begin and agonized for hours trying to come up with something to write about. I had no transformative life experiences that I desperately needed to share or insightfully probing lines of inquiry that I was burning to put down in writing.

  I thought back to personal essays I had written previously, which primarily fell along the lines of “My Summer Vacation” or “My First Concert,” topics that were fine for a middle school assignment, but hardly seemed memoir worthy. Several conversations with Professor Whitehead helped me to realize that my memoir did not have to be about the time I saved an orphaned infant and a baby seal from a snowmobile accident while camping in the Yukon and subsequently developed an in-depth philosophy on life. It could just be about my troubled history with baking. Taking on a lighter topic also allowed me to adopt a less serious voice, and I attempted to incorporate some elements of humor and personal style into the essay, tones which are better suited to my writing style than heavy-handed sentimentalism.

This essay progressed through many forms. At an early stage, it was nearly four pages of complaints about grocery stores. Rounds of peer edits also helped me to realize where I was burying the lead, where I jumped incomprehensibly from one topic to another, and where my rambling crossed from entertaining to excessive. One idea that I wanted to consider was the boundary between the comfortable and the uncomfortable, and I decided to play with this in the form as well.  A conversation about the Cold War may seem like an odd beginning to an essay about baking, but wanted to prevent the reader from being able to settle immediately into the topic of the essay. The choppy segments were intended to further this goal of keeping the reader from becoming completely settled into a linear narrative. The winding form of the essay also left room for a broader array of ideas, including a bit of feminist criticism, that I didn’t always have to come to definitive conclusions about.

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From Professor Elisabeth Whitehead