...as Apple Pie

I'm rather disappointed Norman Rockwell didn't do any pictures of Apple Pies- or rather, none that my extensive research has been able to uncover. He was all over the Thanksgiving Turkey like a rash (see below) but sadly a bit reticent on the subject of apple pie. Seems like an opportunity missed, in my opinion, but there you go. The reason being, despite the risk of being called Meryl Streep again by Iain, this is another recipe-based post, and it’d have been nice to illustrate it thusly.

It’s getting to what I believe to be the most American-flavoured time of year. Forget 4th of July, it is the end of Autumn, Halloween and Thanksgiving, which has the true flavour of the USA running through it. It’s pumpkins and pilgrims, colonial times and cranberry sauce. It’s the time of year when the American climate starts to resemble the British one, and if we look at a part of the States which looks a bit like England- New England, say, or upstate New York- at a time of year when the temperature is starting to chill and the fog rolls in somewhat Britishly, it’s easier to feel the actual cultural differences in your bones.  Wooden churches with white picket fences, and so on. Oceanic coastline. Let Washington Irving take us there:

Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

-The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819)

For non-British readers, by the way, it was rare, when I was growing up, to make your Halloween lantern out of a pumpkin. You were posh if you could afford a pumpkin in the North-East in those days. We used what is variously called swede or rutabaga- we call it a turnip (we call what everyone else calls turnips white turnips. Don’t let’s get into that just now though.) There is nothing quite as soul-destroying as trying vainly to hollow out a turnip with a teaspoon. It has to be a teaspoon because it’s got a sharp edge. A knife is downright hazardous. You can’t carve them worth a damn, either. But I will say two things in defence of the Turnip Lantern: Firstly, you didn’t have to be able to carve them well to make them look scary. This purple and yellow monstrosity, with its craggy surface and hairy, tentacular roots, looks like the severed head of a scarecrow’s decomposing corpse.  You can have jolly, happy pumpkin lanterns, but turnip lanterns are posessed of an inherent malevolence which no amount of jollying-up could ever remedy. They are naturally as scary as all hell.

Secondly, after an hour or so of illumination the candle flame starts to scorch the inside of the turnip skull. This happens with pumpkins, but rarely. Pumpkins are generally larger and juicier than turnips so don’t scorch as easily. As the underside of the cranial lid turns black, the bitter-sweet smell of burning turnip bestows upon you a gift greater than rubies: that is, that whenever you smell burning turnip- whenever a piece falls on a hot gas-ring or a pan of soup starts to catch on the bottom of the pot- you are instantly transported back to the Halloweens of your childhood, when the pinnacle of life’s desire was a bottle of fake blood and some luminous plastic fangs which would wear through at the hinge after an evening’s serious vamping.

So we have this time of year upon us, when our fictional ideas of Old America start to coincide somewhat with the reality outside our windows as harvest season comes around and old traditions are celebrated. Along with the season comes that dish which is as American, we are told, as motherhood (a value peculiar to the Americans, presumably because everybody else on the planet hatches from eggs.) Apple pie.

I’m not giving you a recipe for the stuff because that would be a waste of everyone’s time. It’s pastry, with  apples inside. Go knock yourselves out. But a couple of tips which might not come amiss. One good idea is to sprinkle a tablespoon of semolina on the pastry before you put the apples in. This soaks up excess liquid which means the base doesn’t become soggy, and you can’t tell it’s there. Secondly, don’t cut even-sized pieces of apple. Cut some chunky and some very small. The small pieces will combine with the brown sugar and spices to create a kind of apple sauce, while the larger pieces retain a certain amount of texture. Also, what’s better than plain egg wash for making the top brown nicely, is egg wash with a heavy dredging of Demerara sugar. There you go, rocket science.

But while we’re on the subject of Halloween, witchcraft and the American-ness of the same, let me give you what is much closer to being a spell than a recipe: Double chocolate cookies. In Europe, when you put something in the oven, it comes out the same shape. We’ve got biscuit cutters. Sometimes they are in humorous shapes. However, American baked goods- no matter how respectably shaped- appear to be the work of the devil. You have no control over them. You put blind faith in the recipe, dark forces take over, and at the end there are cookies. You put ball-shaped blobs of dough in the oven, they puff up, and then flatten as they cool. That’s THREE different shapes.

The reason, incidentally, that I attribute these cookies to the forces of darkness rather than light is that all the pictures of Jesus I’ve seen show him as quite a slim bloke- one might almost say skinny. If these cookies were kicking around heaven in any number, I’m fairly sure there wouldn’t be as many paintings of Jesus with his shirt off. Also, after taking them into work I have seen people’s eyes glaze over as if possessed. I’m fairly sure blood may have been spilled were there to be a fight over the last one. I took it myself just to save my friends from clawing each other to death. Also, I’m fairly sure Satan got round to inventing these some time after he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, because I feel sure that if he’d had them at his disposal at the time he would have used them straight away instead of all that stuff about the Kingdoms of the World. I don’t know; that’s just what I’d do if I had to tempt somebody who I thought would be able to resist most things. Perhaps that’s just me.

Hershey’s Double Chocolate Cookies

1 1/4 cups butter 
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
2 cups flour
3/4 cups cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups chocolate chips (I coarsely chopped a 200g bar of Bournville instead- worked VERY well indeed)

One and a half quantities made 50 cookies. Not small ones, either.

Heat oven to 350°F (180°C).  Cream butter and sugar until lightly and fluffy.  Add eggs and vanilla; beat well.  Add flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt.  gradually blend until creamy.  Stir in chips.  Drop by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake 8 to 9 minutes.  Do not over bake; cookies will be soft.  They will puff while baking and flatten while cooling.

The waiting game.

Estragon: Let's go.
Vladimir: We can't.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Estragon: (despairingly). Ah!

-Waiting for Godot

 

Davis: Let's go.
Pottsy: We can't.
Davis: Why not?
Pottsy: We're waiting for the bloody Embassy..
Davis: (despairingly). Ah!

-Probably not Waiting for Godot

 

We wait. It’s what we do. And I tell you what: tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick.

Any day now, a letter from the US embassy stipulating date and time of interview will drop through my letter box. It didn’t today. It didn’t last Monday either, although I had the strongest sense of preja vu that it would.  But it didn’t. So we go through the motions of working, and getting rid of stuff, and never being sure, and talking on MSN and having dates via webcam.

And it’s fine. But frustrating. There is a seemingly indefinite list of things to save up for. Visa, plane tickets, freight, medical examination (to prove I’m not carrying TB or HIV, or any of those other nasty acronyms), wedding rings, Christmas, and on and on and so on…

It’s making life take place somewhere between Melville, Beckett, Kafka and Bridget Jones, all of which came neatly together a couple of weeks ago. At 5:45am my alarm goes off, so I can chat to Stacey for an hour before work. Now usually, she does most of the talking and I confine myself to yeses, noes, LOLs, brbs and emoticons because, well, it’s still bloody night time.

But the morning in question, the old grey matter was somewhat shocked into what passes for alertness at a time of the morning when one could comfortably convince oneself that it’s still yesterday, when a litany of alarming MSN messages from the Dearly Beloved carried somewhat perturbatory news.

We’d fucked it up, royally. Oh boy. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. The paperwork is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You have not only dropped a bollock, but you have dropped an extremely rare 15th-Century lacquered Ming bollock with mother-of-pearl inlays, which was one of the only known remaining pair of lacquered Ming bollocks outside China. And it had just gone ka-ching on the floor.

In all the hurry-up-and-wait which is the visa application process, we had sent all the embassy forms off in August, but had failed to attach my personal documents. Police certificate, Birth certificate and so on. The reason we hadn’t heard was because we’d been put to the bottom of the pile, having forgotten to attach the documentation. We were sure we’d been right not to include this at the time. And now we were equally sure that this had been the equivalent to putting on boxing gloves before handling a precious, extremely rare 15th-Century lacquered Ming bollock with mother-of-pearl inlays.

It all boiled down to Form DS-156K (as distinct from for DS-156). I knew I hadn’t sent my documents. But looking at my copy of DS-156K it specifically stated that we had to attach them to it. We had held off sending them. We may or may not have enclosed the DS-156K without the personal papers. We weren’t sure. We weren’t even sure which-if either- of these courses of action had been correct. I had to phone the embassy and ask whether we’d been right to wait or not.

A very tense day followed, as I waited to get home from work so I could pay £1.20 a minute for the privilege of speaking to Shaq, a Scotsman with an Arabic name working for the American Embassy in London. He could tell me, at least  (for the princely total sum of nine pounds) that I was NOT supposed to attach the documents. So far, so good. But he could not say whether or not the DS-156K had been in the envelope with forms DS-156, DS-157, DS-230 and DS-2001. This was crucial. If we’d withheld it in order to send it with the birth certificate and so on, our application would be held up and our petition might expire, leaving me this side of the Atlantic for another 9-12 months and having to pay for another petition. Shaq gave me a code to put on an email to the consular office, so I could make a proper enquiry. I sent a newly filled-in DS-156K to the embassy by special delivery (£5 for one sheet of A4- thank you, Royal Mail)

Two days later, the reply appeared:

Thank you for your email correspondence.

According to our records, the Immigrant Visa Unit received all of the necessary forms in your case yesterday. You will be notified of your interview appointment date and time shortly.

Sincerely,

Consular Information Unit
U.S. Embassy, London

So, at the price of £14 total and three days of feeling as sick as a dog, the message from the US embassy is this: Everybody, be cool.

And so we wait.