Brownies

on Stuff

So it’s Saturday night, and I am on my own in Rich’s kitchen, making brownies.

I am slicing chocolate (dark, milk, white) and trying to weigh out flour on his janky scales, and figure out what the hell is going on with his extremely rental-property-in-South-London oven, and thinking about the way the world is basically going to hell and what can be done about it and how miserable I am and whether I have Covid and whether we’re heading to nuclear war, all that light stuff, when it strikes me that cooking is really fucking hard and people who do it deserve a medal.

Like, I don’t mean people like me, i.e. people for whom it is their main hobby and passion and career. It’s pretty easy, actually, when you have all the bits.

But cooking in a regular kitchen, with only the random bits of equipment people acquire over the years, and only the ingredients that came in your shop, is really fucking hard. Like: this oven is definitely not the temperature it says it is. This tin is not the size I need for this recipe. I do not have a thing for measuring teaspoons accurately, only an actual teaspoon, like for stirring tea, and while there is sugar in the cupboard, it is not the right kind of sugar.

There is, however, 350g of it. Or what this scale claims is 350g. I weigh it out into the handle-less saucepan I’m using in place of a mixing bowl (Rich, why don’t you own a mixing bowl? How can I love a person who doesn’t own a mixing bowl?). It looks like a lot, when I put it in. It looks like too much. I do not know how to tell if it is too much. The recipe comes from Daisy, who is pretty trustworthy with cooking, so maybe it’s these fucking scales that are off? I hate the scales. I hate this handle-less big saucepan.

These complaints feel pretty small, in the grand scheme of things, and yet they are my complaints. My flatmate has Covid; I would like to not get Covid, or give anyone else Covid, so I am not on a weekend away in the country. I am here, a mile away from my own home, semi-isolating and baking and wondering what impulse it is in me (in many of us?) to do these frivolous things like chocolate and complaining and writing when the world is at once a flood and on fire and at war. Partly, I think, it is to make a safe place. The internet is very big and there is a lot on it. The world is very big and there is a lot in it. This cupboard is quite small, and there is relatively speaking a lot in it, but in terms of the world: no. In terms of the world, I can find a suitable tin in here, and I do, and then I line it.

Because lining the tin is the one thing I have complete control over, I do it once and do it badly, and then I bin that paper and wash the tin up and try again so it’s really really perfect. I butter the tin; and use two overlapping rectangles of baking paper, one running left to right and one running top to bottom, so that when I lift the brownie out there will be maximum support and also minimal paper folds cutting into the edge of the brownie. Looking at the lined tin makes me feel better.

I am aware that I am kind of alluding, artfully, to the whole news situation here. Basically, I am not interested in talking about it, because…really? What am I going to add? Is an email about chocolate brownies is the place for it?

(“The wheat for much of Europe’s flour is grown in Ukraine; thus the germ of this joy is in their pain”? No.)

But I can’t not write- although I could I suppose not publish? but I have rent, like everyone else, and this is my work, this kind of writing, so?- and so it’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, to think about the function of writing; and specifically, frivolous writing. I mean journalism, and serious literary novels- maybe- and also poetry and things: I can see what they are supposed to do in times of crisis. And I see a lot of, like, consoling/encouraging the function of art type things flying around; as in, the beauty and power of making art at a time of crisis, which I get. But also, it’s not my crisis; and making beautiful powerful art in someone else’s crisis, from the safety and comfort of Rich’s kitchen that already smells like vanilla and cocoa feels like it maybe can’t really be counted in that function of art category.

So if you are a person who writes primarily about small things (e.g. the difficulties of making brownies in someone else’s kitchen) there is this curious sensation of shame and guilt and of, maybe, a lack of taste. Like, is it tactless to write about baking? When there’s a war on?

But then, when isn’t there a war on?

I thought about this a lot when Kabul fell, also, and every time something else happens in Gaza, and so many other places too- and basically whenever something really terrible happens to people who are not me, which is every single day. Every day something bad happens to someone; and when my then-boyfriend was dying I used to be so so angry about everyone outside the hospital going to pubs as if they didn’t know he was dying. Which, obviously, they did not. And then after he had died, I found myself in one of those pubs, and I wanted, like, a Victorian-style black velvet armband or something. To show that I got it, whatever it was. But I suppose the problem would be that everyone would be wearing a black velvet armband, and if everyone were wearing one we would be forced to acknowledge that terrible things happen to everyone all the time without let or cease, and that everyone (even, and especially, the worst people) has had what- for want of a better term- I will call– their Stuff. The world is full of Stuff, is what I mean, and the question is: how to write about my Stuff without seeming like I don’t care about your Stuff?

The obvious answer, I guess, is to try and forge a connection between my Stuff and your Stuff.

But like, maybe the Stuff is too different- too specifically different- to connect. A war is not like a death.

(Although, I guess, the point of war is that it’s a lot of deaths. But death is easier in a framework and a war ransacks the framework, like a pandemic.)

So anyway, I suppose, you can try to forge a connection between what’s left when you strip back the Stuff. What’s left of us without the trauma. If there’s anything there at all. And I think that there is.

I think that there almost always is something left: something good, something silly, something true. (Even if it’s very small.)

There is this tendency to assume, sort of, that people suffering are a fundamentally different kind of people: that they are purer or more noble, less frivolous and less stupid and less ordinary. When I was caring for John, people said to me a lot “I could never do what you’re doing, you are amazing”, and they meant it like a compliment? But also it wasn’t a compliment, because it meant they weren’t going to help me, and also that they didn’t want to imagine that something terrible like a 25-year-old man getting terminal cancer could just happen to ordinary people for no reason. I was not very amazing; I was just doing what needed to be done, and so is basically everyone else.

The thing about the thing about the wheat for much of Europe’s flour is grown in Ukraine; thus the germ of this joy is in their pain is that objectively, it is…kind of true. It is objectively true that we are all connected in this way, and that every thing you do and make is connected in some small way to literally hundreds and maybe thousands of people around the world. Especially with food, and that is a whole thing in itself: a whole thing of guilt and luck and joy and shame and pain and comfort.

There is this idea that we can pull them apart. That a recipe for brownies is different and separate from suffering; that the tasteful thing to do is to not acknowledge the two in the same breath. The tasteful- the correct thing- is to speak softly and tragically about war and pain and struggle; and then, another day, when everyone has kind of forgotten the war and pain and struggle, to talk about brownies.

The correct way to behave is to pretend that this has nothing to do with that; and that…is a lie. It’s a lie that lets us pretend we’re not all complicit in something; and complicit is the wrong word because what I really mean is connected because if there’s no way out of complicity, is it really complicity? And I don’t think there is a way out of it. Not even if you live in a cave and only eat your own vegetables (because, frankly, the privilege in being able to ditch the world and live in a cave…is a whole thing in itself); and so definitely not if you live in a normal rental in South London and pay taxes and try hard and go on Instagram and write blogs and sometimes make brownies when you’re sad. Even if you try. You’re in; we’re all in.

Like: the chocolate in these brownies, whatever chocolate company I bought from, almost definitely involves some kind of either slave and/or child labour somewhere along the line. Like: sugar is frequently an ethical minefield, historically and practically. Like: butter comes from dairy farms where the farmers are almost definitely struggling to keep their heads above water because that’s how farmers are especially when the subsidies are fucked and people won’t pay the real prices for milk. Like: these eggs are not the eggs I usually buy from fancy farms but are from a place where the hens are probably unhappy; but also, is anyone getting rich off hen farming? And then the wheat. Which has to come from somewhere, and maybe it’s from somewhere currently at war, but then again, I am typing this on a computer that- let’s be real- almost certainly also has child labour and slave labour and misc. other human rights abuses written right through the middle of it. There is a non-zero chance that my computer, the literal object on my lap right now, functions because some little kid in the DRC was forced, literally forced, underground. Yours too. Whatever you’re reading this on. Like, that’s a real thing. That is a thing we do not talk about because we cannot walk away from Omelas. I don’t know what to do with any of this. I know that if we stop writing every time there is a conflict- every time someone suffers- we will none of us ever write another word ever again. Never make anything ever again. Never bake anything ever again.

And then there would be nothing left for any of us; and it’s not that this is an apologia for writing about brownies while the world is burning but that the reason to fight for this ugly battered world, even now, is because there must be sweet things and careful words and time in which to make both. The reason to do anything is to make it possible to bake; to cook; to eat; to write; to do whatever. To be safe, to be warm, to be lucky. To be alive. To make this possible for everyone. Everyone.

Anyway, death happens and war happens and disease happens and Stuff happens every day, and here I am on my own in my boyfriend’s kitchen making brownies.

350g soft brown sugar, 60g flour, 80g cocoa, 1 tsp baking powder. I simply cannot stress enough to you how much this cannot be the recipe. I check Daisy’s note a whole bunch and conclude that I have gone wrong somewhere- like, it looks wrong? It looks incredibly too much sugar?- but honestly the world is so topsy turvy that I have to stick to the facts before me. Is this the scales?

In this recipe you weigh out the dry ingredients; then mix together the wet; then mix both together with a lot of chopped chocolate, and bake for 40 minutes at 160C. I have no idea if this is fan or not. I also, helpfully, have no idea if the temperature of the oven in any way correlates to the temperature I am turning it to on the dial. Fuck it, we will try it.

The wet ingredients are 4 eggs, and 200g melted butter, and 2 tsp vanilla.

I have said already about the teaspoons situation so I just sling some vanilla into the hot butter and hope for the best. Then on a whim I add some instant coffee as well, but it’s all clumped up in the tin so I just drop a chunk in and whisk til it dissolves, and a big pinch of smoked salt. It is not the kind of smoked salt I like, and the minute I even think this complaint I am mad at myself for thinking it: like, come on. Come the fuck on. Anyway, I whisk both coffee and salt into the butter until it dissolves. Then I add the eggs, and beat it up, and pour it into my saucepan of dry ingredients, and whisk it all smooth. (Basically smooth, anyway, because the sugar has made little firm lumps I can’t break up. But I can’t get upset about that at this time. I am full up.)

I chop up so much chocolate: a whole sharing bag of white buttons, most of a 150g bar of dark, half of a 150g bar of milk. I chop it into big chunky chunks, and stir it through. (Nb. I would have put nuts or something if I had had them, but I didn’t, and I think it’s better for not having them.)

Pour the batter into the tin; more of the inferior smoked salt to top. Slide into inadequate and frustrating oven. Bake 35 minutes, or until- supposedly- a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean. This never happened for me. I baked 45 minutes, and then the top was basically black and they looked so swollen and unpromising I literally couldn’t bear it. I texted Rich: I have ruined the brownies, don’t get excited.

Anyway, I had not ruined the brownies.

They were incredibly easy, and very very forgiving- I am still not sure I weighed it right- and they looked like I had fucked it completely, and I hadn’t. I let them cool completely, 100% cold, and they sunk right down to fudginess, and then I sliced them and lifted them as one sliced block into the biscuit tin. They are so, so good: sweet and dark and rich and comforting. They would travel well, I think, if you needed to post them to a person. They would keep well if we could stop eating them.

And then I ate them; and did some more actually useful things for the world; and wrote this. Which felt sort of useful, in its way.

Like, it’s always useful to have a good brownie recipe, for sure; but also it felt useful to acknowledge formally and in writing the things we all know but don’t say: that cooking ethically is hard, that writing about cooking ethically is hard, that cooking at all is far harder than we give it credit for, and that everything is connected, and everything is complicated, and even a brownie recipe needs sometimes to acknowledge that it’s all, sort of, an exercise in fiddling while Rome burns.

But, then again, violin music is very beautiful. And- sometimes- says everything I would have said in this email if I was Bach instead of me.

You wake up every day and you live.

*

(P.S. Write to your MP.)

(P.P.S. I hope I am going to get to do something practical and useful for the #CookForUkraine people soon, but until then you can give UNICEF money through here https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/cookforukraine)