fiction – samfirke.com

Words Good Enough to Eat

A couple of winters back I read Unauthorized Bread, a novella by Cory Doctorow. In that story, a set of cardamom buns makes an appearance, twice.

The description of the buns was too tantalizing. And I was on winter break with time on my hands. So I made a batch of vegan cardamom buns (from this recipe: https://myveganminimalist.com/vegan-orange-cardamom-buns/).

They were quite good! They were also a lot of work and I’m not often game for involved cooking projects so I haven’t made them again.

The most recent book I finished, Automatic Noodle, also found me reading mouthwatering descriptions of a food I’d never tried. The two books have a lot in common: near-future sci-fi set on Earth, anarchist vibes – even the titles are similar. (Side note: I liked Automatic Noodle but didn’t love it. I am realizing that “cozy” books, with their low-stakes plots and pleasant vibes, aren’t my thing.)

In this story, four sentient robots team up and open a noodle shop that serves biang biang, a certain style of Chinese hand-pulled noodle served with chili oil. I read the book in bed and kept thinking night after night, “I need to make these noodles.”

My kids and I finally did it! We were all pulling noodles and slapping them on the counter, wha-bam, and having a jolly good time. Some were thick, some were thin, some were very long. I stretched and slapped the noodles to my full extended wingspan and still they did not break.

I’m not sure we cooked them exactly right. We used this recipe but loaded into my recipe manager which doesn’t show all the pictures… looking at it now, and reading about how some biang biang is as thick as a belt, ours were too thin.

I would love to try an authentic version. That said, we were all thrilled with how they turned out and wished we’d made more.

Going farther back: the book Little House in the Big Woods enticed me to make maple syrup candy by pouring syrup on fresh snow.

It’s a testament to the authors’ evocative descriptions that each of these stories compelled me to cook.

What food from fiction have you brought to life?

Relating to natural life today

In the last month I took a family vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains and read two novels about logging: Ron Rash’s Serena and Annie Proulx’s massive Barkskins. Here are some resulting thoughts about trees, creatures, and the people who inhabit their world.

The natural world in America is nothing like what it was

We fall into the trap of thinking that climate change is unprecedented in its destruction of the natural world. But it has a clear predecessor in the deforestation of the period c. 1600-1960, documented in Barkskins, during which nearly every tree in America was cut down, every forest razed, and most wildlife extirpated. The first two sections of Barkskins start with Europeans trapping all of the beavers, minks, and martens in the northeast. Only after the furs are gone do they move onto logging.

In Serena, the logging barons clear-cut the Smokies before selling the land to the government for a national park. Serena is fiction, but this part of the story is true. In the Smokies, we hiked to Avent Cabin, a structure built around 1850. It contains a picture showing its setting around 1920, when it sat in a clearing: all of the surrounding trees had been logged. Now the cabin is again back in the woods, as the regrown trees approach a century of age.

Of course, letting the land go wild again does not recreate the complex webs of life that existed before Europeans arrived. Keystone species like the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon are extinct and megafauna like moose and bear – characters in both novels – have limited presences. The city nature areas and state parks I visit are a sad joke compared to what they held five hundred years ago. At the end of Barkskins, a character muses about “dark diversity,” the species whose absences from an ecosystem can be measured. There’s a lot of that here.

Both novels do a good job painting the picture of natural splendor that was destroyed forever. As a Michigan resident, I particularly appreciated the Breitsprechers’ trip to survey the endless, towering white pines of this state. My family has stopped at Hartwick Pines State Park on our way up north, a tiny postage stamp of old-growth forest that escaped logging. It’s the closest we can get to experiencing what was once here.

Despite being once despoiled, the trees and wildlife in the Smokies were still beautiful by modern standards. This lifted my spirits. There’s something encouraging about the fact that we’re a hundred years past the low point for trees in the Smokies and moving in the right direction. When it comes to logging, at least.