When people say you need hobbies, they’re not referring to reading Yelp reviews sorted by lowest rating. But they should, because it is a hobby like none other: an authentic boost of self-esteem, because you are neither the person writing the review nor, most likely, a person who will ever leave a Yelp review.
God though, if I don’t love those people who do—their sincerity, their adoration and their outrage.
It is, of course, easy to love people in the abstract, and the internet makes that so painfully simple: here is (or is not) a picture of this person (who is or is not that person). That is also what we do offline—I can love you into abstraction this way, until you’re disembodied into a story that I’ll tell someone about some day.
Or, as Mary Oliver writes in “Dogfish,” a poem I turn to often:
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?
Recipe reviews are the necessary antagonist to Yelp restaurant reviews: the former is a home cook’s revenge against the latter, a kind of domestic Fuck You to the tyranny of a menu that states no substitutions allowed.
Because where else but in the comment sections can you find such kitchen-bound creativity? Substitutions are always allowed, even if they are not encouraged or even acknowledged in the recipe itself. And we’re not talking about substituting lime juice for lemon juice (something innocuous and common), or about people who need to substitute because of allergies. We’re talking about those who gut their house and bulldoze it to the ground, then complain about the shambles.
Ripped off!
I read Sandy’s review in a combination of Donald Trump’s voice and that of the man who did DRAMATIC READING OF A BREAK-UP LETTER, which you should listen to if you haven’t heard it or especially if you have, because its particular brand of sluggish outrage (“Dear loooo-zuhr…CHRIS”) and fevered self-righteousness is something not to be forgotten.
And honestly, I do wonder if Donald Trump is behind some of these recipe reviews. It would make a lot of sense: Trump, the ultimate troll, staying up late while watching Fox News and thinking that sinking the ratings of these reviews will naturally raise his.
I submit this review from one “Jack Gillick” for consideration as potential evidence:
LOW-POLLING LIZ CHENEY, LYIN’ TED, LOUSY BOWL OF BROTH!!!
It’s good, in other words, to make yourself laugh and, on occasion, put aside politics for a moment, only if a moment, but in whatever way you can, because we can’t fall into despair all the time, now can we?
Growing up, I begged my parents to buy me Mollie Katzen’s Honest Pretzels. Katzen is most famous for The Moosewood Cookbook, a collection of vegetarian recipes from the restaurant Moosewood in Ithaca, New York—a haven for the kind of hippie vegetarians my parents were, they of the sprouts and sad lettuce sandwich generation. (They dropped that when they became parents; there wasn’t time to pick moody lettuce, or risk food poisoning.)
Honest Pretzels, like a few of Katzen’s other cookbooks, was written for and tested by kids. The illustrations are whimsical, a word that is overused but truly applicable in this case, where a gingerbread man dons a chef’s hat and explains his dreams of gingerbread french toast; a lizard dressed for Carnival (I think?) craves a maple yogurt fruit dip; and the cover star is a cat wearing a fabulous blue coat.
The 65 recipes cover a gamut of things—the scrambled eggs how-to is particularly good—but really, the standout is “Made-In-The-Pan Chocolate Cake,” which also happens to be the first recipe I read where the word vegan was included in the headnote:
If that isn't remarkable enough, this chocolate cake just happens to be one of the best ever -- dark, moist, and tender. It is so good, in fact, that it doesn't even need any frosting. Just eat it plain, or with a little powdered sugar on top, and wash it down with a big glass of ice-cold milk. Terrific!
Note: This chocolate cake is 100 percent vegan. So, if you are a vegan, wash it down with a big glass of ice-cold soy milk instead.
(It’s sweet, reading a cookbook published in 2009.)
This cake, though not Katzen’s specific recipe, allegedly emerged during the Great Depression here in America—a time when traditional cake ingredients like butter, eggs, and milk were either too expensive, too rare, or both. Wikipedia calls it “depression cake”; a food blogger, digging into the food history annals, discovered an alternate name: “wacky cake.” If you’re looking for more wacky/depression cake recipes, or just scrolling through the Internet like I was, you can find some at Budget Bytes and the r/OldRecipes subreddit.
A good chocolate cake is one of the reasons to live. I am able to say this because I’ve had an intimate relationship with suicidal ideation; and although we parted ways a few years ago on amicable terms, I still wave around that experience as proof of my card-carrying membership in the I CAN MAKE A JOKE ABOUT SUICIDE, LIKE THAT I WAS BAD AT IT! collective.
A few weeks ago, I tried my own attempt at a substitution, using Nigella Lawson’s chocolate olive oil cake (my go-to chocolate cake recipe). There are two characters of the cake: you can go 100% almond flour—resulting in a gloriously “squidgy interior”—or a 1:1 combination of almond and all-purpose flours. “This has the built-in bonus of making it perhaps more suitable for an everyday cake,” Nigella says.
(When I make cakes for myself, I tend to favor those everyday cakes: simple cakes, cakes without adornment, no frosting or icing in sight. I want full flavor and minimal fuss, crumb coats be damned.)
I followed the 1:1 combination but used rye flour from Seylou, a mill here in D.C., in place of almond flour. The rye was a splurge; it’s not something I regularly buy, but it’s something I enjoy doing when I can, and particularly around this time of year, when small spots of joy become important balms against the bleak landscape.
Freshly-milled flour operates differently from flour produced on a mass scale: what you gain in flavor and freshness, you lose in reliability. (Whereas bags of all-purpose flour on grocery store shelves generally behave consistently from batch to batch; they’ve been made for standardization.) That’s a gross simplification; for actual deep dives into the matter, Wordloaf’s Andrew Janjigian has this thoughtful essay, and Dayna Evan’s essay in Eater is a master class.
The rye flour I used absorbed a lot more liquid—obviously, I knew that would happen, when you compare rye to almond flour, and rye in general absorbs more liquid, but I didn’t bank on exactly how much more it would.
When I pulled the cake out of the oven, I was disappointed: it hadn’t risen the way it usually does, with a graceful reach towards the top of its tin, but it was still a chocolate cake, and a good one, and I thought about that later, while I forked a slice into my mouth: that although I had lots of questions about what I had done, I would not leave my wonderings in a review; mainly because I do not want to rate the corners of my mind.
Although—as I discovered on Sunday, when I reread chapters of the Pride and Prejudice fanfiction I wrote in high school (set in a high school) (write what you know!), I do give myself 5/5 for this line I wrote, from Mrs Bennet, thanking Kitty and Lydia for their support: “You’re my bras!”
Catch me up on the last few weeks! What have your small good things been?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
She was enthralled by what the Daily Mail called “the REAL star” of Anatomy of a Scandal: Sienna Miller’s kitchen.
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
It's only a matter of time before Gidget finds her way into, or perhaps into, one of your cakes. Or one of your loaves. Or your bag while transporting said cake.
Thanks as always, and thank you for reminding me about Katzen cakes!
so i was an elite yelp reviewer in my pubescent years of adulthood l o l. i hope nobody finds them until after i perish from a natural death. in hindsight i would rate them all unnecessary for the world