The Concerning Case of So Corny

Mark your calendars! I'll be LIVE at the Hudson Farmers' Market on Saturday, September 21. Bring your questions, your quandaries, your culinary paradoxes! I will bring ADVICE!

Dear Tamar:

In my wildest dreams, I would host a dinner in late January or early February where the menu consists of summer fruits and vegetables I’ve cooked or processed or preserved and frozen. But I worry that 7 months is too much freezer-time to ask of anything—let alone something I care about as much as I care about summer tomatoes. Speaking of too much freezer time, yesterday I made a custard-based sweet corn ice cream that was flawlessly creamy the day I churned it, but became icy and crystallized after a single night in the freezer. Would it be possible to make an ice cream base, freeze it, then thaw it later on and churn it just before serving?

-So Cold, So Corny

Dear So Cold, So Corny,

The change of the seasons always makes me think—or feel—about substances, and their ripening, withering, consumption, storage. It’s a rumination that threatens to overwhelm me until I act on it. For me, that means preserving, and also serving dinners where I can prematurely mourn ingredients, notching my guests’ memories alongside mine to avoid storing treasures in my mind alone.

This is all abstract. But it reflects my current contemplation of real questions: What to let go and what to keep? And how? And why? And how much is enough? How can I appreciate without fetishizing? My eyes flit to a scrap of Baudrillard on a nearby page: Consumption is not a passion for substances, but a passion for code.¹

In other words: For several weeks each year, I wonder from morning to night: How should I love things?

In other words: Your question, which I’ll paraphrase here: How do I keep what I love without ruining it? What form is sane for storing? When is the answer “memories,” and when can what I love be reincarnated?

I made a rudimentary graph as I thought about this.

I was thinking in culinary terms. When summer fruits and vegetables are just picked, they require no effort or manipulation. These days, most tomatoes in my house are eaten whole, like apples or grapes—or maybe put briefly in a pan with fresh garlic and olive oil. Our corn only kisses a pot of water. The more time has passed since their picking, the more effort fruits and vegetables demand, along a fairly direct slope, until, when I pull frozen tomatoes from my deep freeze in January, I’ll peel and chop and simmer them for a long time with lots of fat, invoking the sweet heat of summer through the sleight of hand called cooking. Same for corn—which I also freeze, off the cob, after a two-minute blanch in boiling water—which I’ll add to risotto, cornbread, chowder, all winter—and spicy chilies, which sit on my refrigerator shelf in their vinegar brine, sometimes for years. The chilies left after a year or two get thoroughly blended—lots of effort by the blender!—into my secret-ingredient hot sauce. (The secret ingredient is time.)

The graph basically makes sense: the longer something has been stored, the more work it requires to make it “good as new,” if not anything like new. Along the same literal lines: I rarely preserve foods (canned or frozen) in any form but whole. There are few frozen soups or frozen bases in my life. If an ingredient will not survive, in close to its original form, for several months of icy hibernation, I eschew it until it grows again next year.

Your question about being able to produce perfect, corny ice cream midwinter made me question my direct slope. If you invest effort and manipulation now, can you make something that, in months, tastes effortless and unmanipulated? Is there an amount of preparation you can do to make an attempt at reincarnation unrecognizable as such?

Dairy has a way of separating when frozen—which is why many ice creams contain stabilizers. I suspect that your custard base might fall prey—that in your wildest dreams, you ask (wildly, understandably) too much. My mother, who’s the ice cream maker in my family, insists on serving strawberry ice cream midwinter, using her own, ice-cream centric strawberry strategy: She blends summer strawberries into a chopped, sweetened, fruit-and-sugar slurry, and freezes that. She adds it to a fresh ice cream base midwinter, and we all Ooh and Ah, in what I can’t tell if is an affirmation or contradiction of my pseudo-mathematical formula.

The farmers at Holmquest Farms, from whom I’ve bought the sweetest sungolds and corn all summer, insist that corn must be canned—cut off the cob raw into jars, then processed under pressure. Then, they insist, what you eat from the jar in winter is indistinguishable from you eat off the cob. Their method seems harder than my freezer one, but if I had my heart set on midwinter ice cream, I’d try it, putting in just enough work to keep the corn itself in its best possible state, then popping a jar open and chilling my ice cream canister in a bank of February snow.

Dear cook, there’s no stable answer to what you should save, and how. My mother is older than I am. She has put in more effort, over a lifetime, so far. Her freezer is eternally full of all kinds of soup and stews and rice and bases and who knows what else? I suppose what matters is making some effort, and then reflecting on what felt rewarding, and what was drama, or performance, or a passion for the code. Corny? Yes, absolutely. But so, then, is Heraclitus’ aphorism that “the only constant in life is change.”

1. This translation is Anne Carson’s.