Janus, the god after whom our first month takes its name, has the bizarre iconographic form of a man with two faces, one face looking back in retrospection, the other peering into the future with—well, with what exactly? The custom of the “New Year’s resolution” reflects a general perception that the inadequacies of our previous behavior may perhaps be rescued by intentional life changes: more time doing this, and less doing that. I have to ask myself anew whether publishing a weekly essay, as I have now done for the last six hundred weeks and more, is of the slightest conceivable social significance. The honest answer is “Probably not,” but…
Word comes to me second hand that a friend, who is a regular reader, found my recent excursus on the hypnotic trance in its supposed relationship with recovered memory and clairvoyance heavy weather. That was the very term used: heavy weather. Go figure. I myself of course found it fascinating. Most people who write things, even or perhaps especially when they publish them, know that they are actually writing for themselves. I’ll probably keep doing that but let me at least begin the New Year with the relief of some light weather: the story of our Christmas dinner in the garage.
This is a family story and like most family stories, alas, requires a certain amount of background information. I’ll be brief. Item, you may have already heard about a Covid pandemic? Well, there is one, and it is a real killjoy in terms of its effects on human sociability. Item, some members of my family observe Jewish dietary law; others do not. Item, our exemplary children are fanatically protective of their aging and immunocompromised elders. Throw these three items together into the planning of a family Christmas dinner and you may end up with one situation.
We had no hope for our locked-down and snowed-in Canadians, but there seemed an excellent chance of convening the other 66.6% of our offspring families for a Christmas feast. One of them would be returning for Christmas more or less at the last moment after a lengthy stay in Spain. From the cook’s perspective that would mean the smallest turkey we could find (probably still too large) or the largest roasting chicken (possibly a little meager). However, things change from hour to hour in Covid crisis. We know from Gerard Manley Hopkins that Nature is a Heraclitian fire: changes, changes, constant changes. What might be called Omicron Angst flared up, and the chief executive among our children made the prudential but disappointing decision that the whole event be postponed to sometime in January, sine die.
One does what one can to transform life’s lemons to lemonade. In the previous week I had happened to glance at the NYTimes annual article on “Ten Great Christmas Dishes,” one of which was ham with a root beer glaze*, which sounded both scrumptious and trendy . I used to live in a farming community where many people raised a hog or two and processed their own pork—a delicious Christmas ham being a special delicacy. Covid was an ill wind, indeed, but not so ill as to blow no good. As we would now be on our own, how about a succulent Christmas ham for the first time in approximately fifty years? We already had the chicken, but it could keep. I now set out on one final lightning grocery strike, grabbing a small but expensive ham, together with the right mustard, the right brown sugar, the right exotic vinegar, and a king-sized plastic bottle of A&W. But by the time I got home Heraclitus had struck again. The aforementioned daughter-executive called again to say that though her spouse (the principal kosher-observer) would be in recusal recovering from Covid redux, we could have a modified family Christmas dinner if we were willing to observe a couple of simple but non-negotiable health precautions, to wit (1) nobody under eighty years old could actually enter our house, and (2) the feast would be served off garden tables in the open-air of the car-port.
Flexibility being my middle name, on Christmas morning I was up before Santa or his elves preparing the glaze for the religitimated ham. It was necessary that the kitchen be cleared before ten o’clock for the unencumbered preparation of the main event: chicken and many vegetables. So I threw myself into the preparation of the glaze. You begin with a deep frying pan containing about two inches of the root beer, which you bring to the boil before introducing the other ingredients, then keep boiling for quite a while until it suddenly thickens to a goo. To explain what happened next, I must appeal to the benevolent reader’s good sense and common knowledge. What, I ask you, does A&W stand for? The answer, of course: ROOT BEER. A&W Root Beer Stands dot the map of our great nation. It was only while I was pouring the liquid into the pan that I found that for some inexplicable reason the label on the soda bottle said A&W CREAM SODA! My rush through the supermarket had been a little too rushed. There was no rich, manly aroma of root beer! The sense of betrayal was acute. I had the sinking feeling that “ham with cream soda glaze” was not among the Times’s ten greatest culinary hits, nor even those of the Gopher Springs Gazette. But I soldiered on and am so glad I did. I hope you read in school Charles Lamb’s classic essay entitled “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” in his Essays of Elia. It posits that the discovery of roast pork was a happy (if expensive) accident, the unanticipated invention of a young lad in Old China who was “fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are.” Well, if such a carnivore’s delight came into existence through inadvertence, why not its perfectly inadvertent gastronomic ornamental glaze. I wonder if I need a patent lawyer.
After clearing the carport of its cars, expelling from its tarmac floor half a cubic yard of miscellaneous pulverized crud with a leaf blower, and setting up separate folding tables for purposes of gift exchange and of eating, our chief problem was the cold. Richard softened the cryotherapy imaginatively by setting up on the tarmac apron of the garage the fire pit he had given us for the previous Christmas. An animated blaze at the mouth of the carport offered a possible illusion of warmth, and as you know, illusion is at least halfway there. Between the oohing and aahing over various modest gifts, and the oohing and aahing over the absolutely delicious meal, the echoing carport was noisy with the animal satisfaction of feasting Flemings. Corny wit accompanied the corny ale, fruit juices, and bottled water laid up for the occasion. My best hope had been to pluck mere survivable defeat from the jaws of disaster. Instead of the whole thing being a flameout, it was a flagrant success. By no means everyone sneaked a taste of the Cream Soda Glaze. But the happy few who did had to agree that it was delicious—kind of like light brown sugar mixed with dark brown sugar on a bed of crusted white sugar. Experience of the Nativity Variant led to a family parliament in which it was proposed that all future family feasts be held in the garage—a decision facing possible reversal should the Republicans recapture the House.
*https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022799-root-beer-ham
