Update on Proust

[webcowgirl]

I am still working my way through Remembrance of Things Past, which suffered a bit as I raced my way through Charlie Stross's Singularlity Sky. I'm now at page 886, and Our Hero is deep in the throes of adolescence. Much like Harry Potter, I'm finding that the character is becoming insufferable. Who cares about baby's first hangover, anyway, no matter how floridly you describe it? And I'm feeling like Proust is falling prey to exactly the critique levelled in the book against, I think, a fictional author, in that later in his writing he becomes almost a caricature of himself, at least in terms of his writing style. At any rate, I'm heading well toward the finish line, page 1018, and I'll decide at that time if I will read the rest of this book and learn about his great romance with Albertine.

For the rest of you, something far more interesting: an article about brownies from the New York Times. I've attached the recipe for the "best" brownies, as defined by the author. You know I'll be cooking them soon.

Recipe: Supernatural Brownies

Adapted from “Chocolate: From Simple Cookies to Extravagant Showstoppers,” by Nick Malgieri (Morrow Cookbooks, 1998)

Time: About 1 hour

2 sticks (16 tablespoons) butter, more for pan and parchment paper
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
4 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup dark brown sugar, such as muscovado
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or 3/4 cup whole walnuts, optional.

1. Butter a 13-by-9-inch baking pan and line with buttered parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In top of a double boiler set over barely simmering water, or on low power in a microwave, melt butter and chocolate together. Cool slightly. In a large bowl or mixer, whisk eggs. Whisk in salt, sugars and vanilla.

2. Whisk in chocolate mixture. Fold in flour just until combined. If using chopped walnuts, stir them in. Pour batter into prepared pan. If using whole walnuts, arrange on top of batter. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until shiny and beginning to crack on top. Cool in pan on rack.

Yield: 15 large or 24 small brownies.

Note: For best flavor, bake 1 day before serving, let cool and store, tightly wrapped.

Comments

[adjectivegail]

See, I'd love to make those but the conversions are a bugger. Sure I can google to find out what 350 degrees is in modern money, but how much is two stick of butter?? I don't understand why America uses volumes for measurements of ingredients rather than weight. I suppose this is because I grew up with weights so they would seem more sensible to me. But I really don't see it.

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

2 sticks=one cup, roughly the typical size butter is sold in here. Me, I'd be cross-checking to make sure I got it right. It's hard for me to cook here!

[adjectivegail]

Yes, but, I'm sorry, but how much is a cup? Butter is sold here usually in either 250g or 500g 'bricks', the thought of this recipe using 250g of butter for up to 24 brownies is slightly scary!

I do actually have a set of measuring cups at home, I guess since I'll have to be using them for all the other measurements as well, I can just make sure that the butter's soft and squidge it into a cup, too...

buttery goodness

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Let's see, I've got (http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/gram_calc.htm) 1 T butter = 14.2 grams of butter, so 227 grams, those would be very rich brownies! But that's the point, I think.

MmmmmMMMmmMMM!

Any good strategy for reading Remembrance of Things Past?

[eggradio.livejournal.com]

I recently bought the Penguin edition of In Search of Lost Time. It is a 6 volume thing. I really feel like I should read it at some point. Especially because one of my students wanted to discuss it with me and I had to tell him I've never read Proust. It wasn't embarrassing for me but it did make me feel like I let him down. I said: "Wouldn't you rather talk about Hemingway?" I didn't really say that. But I wanted to. I told him I hadn't read any Proust before. And he said: "What about Finnegans Wake?"

Nope.

I better give him an "A".

Re: Any good strategy for reading Remembrance of Things Past?

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm envying you having that edition! Maybe someone will be nice at get me a copy after I've finished the bit I'm reading now (volume 1).

An article I linked to a while back referenced a French book that asserted it was better to talk about books than to have read them. While I think this was a bit of a joke, it also said that many French readers had been scarred by having to read Proust in high school! So the question to me is, how do you make it pleasant, and how do you make it interesting? To be honest, in some ways I made it "interesting" to myself by reading the Alison Bechdel book Fun Home which referenced this book several times, making it more relevant to me. The kicker was that it also had this quote that "You knew you'd hit middle age when you realized you'd never read Remembrance," and (being almost 40) I felt that meant I simply must read it to prove to myself I could!

To make it pleasant, I would advocate taking your time and truly savoring it. I was reading a really bad SF book when I started this book, and to get into the masterfully written into (which is something like 40 pages) was such a delight, like eating a three course meal after being on a month-long diet of granola bars. If you do a lot of reading, I think you will want to read this book on your own because of the pleasure it will give you. Just try not to get into needing "plot" so much as you want a recreation of an experience; think more Age of Innocence and 100 Years of Solitude. All of the work wading through the wierd descriptions of sunlight on walls and carvings in churches all seem to pay off in the end, I promise, at least for the chapters I've read.

Where I am right now, though, leaves me questioning whether or not to finish off the entire series; he's really hung up on describing these paintings and such and I'm wondering if he's lost his authorial impetus and is now just pushing through for the sake of finishing the project. We'll see how I feel in 100 more pages.