Orange and strawberries

Sea-Tac. Starbucks. Beautiful glass. Sheraton. Insomnia. Starbucks. Beautiful glass. Sea-Tac. Writing. Self doubt. Writing. Self doubt. Very little cooking. This past week I’ve been unexpectedly busy, traveling and re-doing work I thought I’d already done and trying to get into the groove with Orange is the New Black.

And, unlike everyone else in the United States, I have failed.

The first episode featured an image so upsetting I couldn’t wash my mind’s eye clean for days and I trudged through four more episodes then gave up. Everyone else seems to be getting so much pleasure out of that show and damn it, I wanted pleasure too! 

What did give me pleasure last week: strawberry flummery from a recipe in American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland. It's a cornstarch-milk-sugar-egg pudding that you serve with berries, much like panna cotta, but sturdier. While the Time-Life volume is reticent on flummery’s origins, Amanda Hesser isn’t. According to Hesser, flummery is a descendant of a Welsh dish of very dense boiled oatmeal. Dictionary writers have defined it variously as “bland custard” and a “sort of pap and “Something insipid, or not worth having.”

For those of you who love bland custard and pap as much as I do, here's the recipe:

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/3 cup cornstarch
pinch salt
3 cups whole milk
1 egg yolk, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 pint fresh strawberries

1. Mix 1/2 cup sugar, the cornstarch, and the salt in a heavy saucepan and, whisking constantly, pour in the milk in a slow, thin stream. Cook over moderate heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens. Turn the heat down as low as it will go.

2. Ladle a few spoonfuls of the hot cornstarch-milk mixture into the beaten egg yolk, mixing well, and, still whisking, pour it back into the pot. Cook for a few minutes more, but do not let it come to a boil. 

3. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla. Pour into a serving bowl and refrigerate until very cold. 

4. Just before serving, hull and halve the strawberries. Toss with the remaining sugar and then arrange them on top of the flummery. Serve immediately. (Leftovers are tasty, but after a while the strawberries collapse and their juice starts to run into the custard and the whole dish looks a lot less appealing.)