The Last Word On Nothing

This ran July 10, 2020. Over the intervening few years, the kids have tapered off and finally stopped doing this, though they’re still uncontrollably attracted to those little red winterberries that they call birdberries. But on the whole, they’ve moved on to other things and currently it’s perfecting cartwheels (the older one is finally doing perfect circles 90 degrees to the ground, the younger one flumps around on her back) and climbing the maple. I look out the window and there’s kids dangling off the tree, yelling for help because they’re scared to jump; or kids making a running jump at a low branch they’re still too short to reach; or kids up in the tree swatting lanternflies with a flyswatter and against the odds, a lanternfly sometimes plummets to the ground where another kid screams like a siren and stomps the daylights out of it.

I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day.  And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice).  I started taking pictures of them.

After the first few arrangements, I saw the arrangers.  They were two little kids, a big and little sister, though the big sister was the boss and sometimes had help from other little kids.  They’d hunker down, fold up like double hinges, getting closer to their work.  They’d try this, try that, flatten a leaf, put the berry in exactly the right place, the berry would roll away, they’d put it back, thumb and forefingers, pinkies sticking out.  All this would take time. Lately the heat has been plastering their hair to their foreheads in wet curls and their cheeks turn pink.  I think they are enchanting.

This is the first arrangement the little one did alone. She’s probably mimicking her older sister but she’s also seeing it for herself. Why do they do this?  I can see absolutely no reason.  No one told them to, no one rewarded them (I did say thank you but they weren’t interested), no one showed them how.  They’d never seen this done, they were doing it because it was there to be done, because rocks and plants must be there to be made something of. 

And now I’m off onto my theory of the origins of engineering and art.  The origins of engineering, I already covered.

Art has been around since at least the Paleolithic, roughly for at least 40,000 years.  The earliest art was representative, an imitation of the real thing: this is what a woman looks like, this is what a horse looks like.  And maybe, scholars think, drawing a bear  on the cave walls made you less afraid of it, or carving an ivory bison helped you hunt it.  They call this visual symbolism, one thing meaning another thing — like verbal symbolism, the way a letter means a sound, or a sound, a bear.  They say such symbolism is a mark of the first thinking.  I think this is enchanting too.

But it’s not what the kids are doing.  I think they’re going even farther back in human evolution, and nobody would know how far back because arrangements don’t likely leave fossils.  They’re temporary by nature.  The kid arrangements last maybe a day before the plants are too dead to be interesting or the mail deliverer stumbles over the rocks or I have other uses for the table. 

I think these arrangements aren’t symbolic at all, I don’t think they mean a thing.  I think that art generally doesn’t mean a thing, that it’s not standing for anything else. I think it’s the recognition that everything is just its own sweet self. 

I think that recognition has been what is so comforting in this pandemic – social media is full of kittens and crows and flowers and sunsets and elephant-head flowers — that it’s all outside us going about its own life. I think the origin of art is not only in the Paleolithic, it’s in every kid born and stays in them until death. 

The origin of art is Look!  Just look at this, will you!  Look at how shiny the grasses are.  Look at how this leaf curls.  Look how heavy and speckled the rock is.  How interesting the sticks are. Just look! Oh! I’ll arrange them like this. This. Goes. Right. There. Look!

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Photos by me.

It’s another year of constant “ping ping ping” as the acorns leave the trees in wildly large numbers! I last noticed this happening back in 2017, and I wrote about it then. Might as well revisit that post now!

These early fall days have been especially musical here, in my house under the trees. The mornings ding and clink and the afternoons ping and donk and the nights are broken up by knocks, clangs, and cymbal crashes that startle me awake. (Part of my roof is metal.)

It’s the acorns falling, but in a relative hail storm rather than the usual drizzle. The massive dumping of seeds and occasional strike on the head might suggest I’ve totally pissed off some squirrels.

But squirrels pretty much just make grumpy noises and twitch their tails when annoyed. Instead, it’s the oaks showing off their progeny, with gravity’s help. The trees are shedding fruit as though it’s their last chance to seed the land.

That’s not too far from the truth. It turns out we are in a mast year—the boom of the boom-and-bust cycle describing oak (and beech) tree reproduction. The trees weighted down with acorns this fall (a big oak might produce as many as 10,000 of them!) will most likely support a much lighter load for the next three to five years. This is a parent tree’s best chance to spread her genes and grow the neighborhood forest before lean times commence.

I’ve rerun this post before, I think the last time was 2019 and the time before was 2014. I rerun it again now because 1) my Hungarian neighbor/physicist/co-obsessive and I have just shared our nearly decade-old Google doc of orange-peel data with another neighbor/chemist/neutral party because 2) in spite of my fearlessness below, my last batches have been edible but not the least successful and in any case, resemble the Hungarian orange peels not at all, even though both I and my physicist-neighbor keep meticulous lab notes and carefully reproduce each others’ methods and so 3) we hope that a chemist will solve this non-replication problem. So far, the chemist says we’re all going to have to get into the kitchen together and he’s going to watch us control the hell out of every variable. We haven’t done that yet.

I’ve been making candied orange peel regularly for some time now and I say this fearlessly: I have nailed it. The second secret (the first is, never trust sugar chemistry), which I sensed only dimly when I first wrote this, back on May 15, 2014, is that the orange peels have to be thick and taken off the heat early: see the bottom of this post. They’ll still be thickly drippy and will bond to a china plate, so I let them cool on one plate, wrestle them out of their sugar puddles, move them to another plate, repeat until they stop bonding to the plates. The Hungarians do not keep them in the refrigerator; I do, but I have no good reason. A lot of fussing but it ends in revelation. Not that the universal forces can’t shift again and make the whole recipe useless.

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The neighbors came over, maybe a year ago now, and one of them, a Hungarian physicist, brought along candied orange peel he’d made from his grandmother’s recipe.  The physicist is the nicest human on earth, but his grandmother is the one I love; I’d love anyone who thought up those orange peels, their orangey goodness and little spike of bitter, the soft white sweet pith and the dense, bitey, red-golden skin.  I had raptures all over the dining room table.  “Yes, of course you can have the recipe,” said the physicist.  “But I must tell you, you need to be careful how you make them.”

“Oh I know about sugar,” I said, and told him about the hot fudge sauce I made once and reheated twice, and the second time, it made a standing cage over the melted ice cream and when I ate it anyway, I chipped a tooth; and the little left in the pan had bonded to the metal and the pan had to be thrown away.  So the physicist gave me the recipe and the most careful directions, and I made the orange peels and they were perfect, as good as any Hungarian grandmother’s.  Then I made them many more times until suddenly, one day, some mysterious force in the universe shifted.

The recipe no longer works.  I continue to control the hell out of the variables.  I use the same amount of orange peel, two-oranges-worth, every time.  I use the same 1:1 ratio of water to sugar and the same absolute amounts, 1.5 cups each.  I use a pan of the same size, the same stingy amount of stirring, the same low simmer until the water gradually boils off and bubbles foam on top of bubbles, and no liquid remains.  I get them out of the pan fast, spread them on plates, let them cool.  They’re tooth-chippingly hard, they’re like glass.  I throw out whole batches of them, though the Hungarian physicist says, on consult, that if he leaves one in his mouth it eventually melts.  After an hour or something, maybe a whole afternoon.  I am in despair, I can talk of nothing else.

The physicist thinks the glassiness/chewiness depends on the thickness of the orange peels and certainly that’s a variable I haven’t controlled.  And physicists are usually right about everything, so he’s probably right. But I think it’s the chemistry of sugar: it’s complex and finicky, disturbingly so.

Dissolve sugar in water and heat until the water is driven off.  [Digression: why fool with water, why not just heat the sugar? I did that once, put sugar in a pan, forgot to add water, turned on the heat, thought about something else for a while, and when I looked again at the pan, the sugar was a molten, golden syrup.  Perfect.  You think that ever happened again?]  As the water leaves, the sugar solution gets more concentrated and hotter. [Digression on heat: the redoubtable Shirley Corriher says not to use lined copper pans, nonstick pans, or plastic stirring spoons because they’ll all melt; metal stirring spoons get too hot to touch.]  As the solution heats and condenses, its texture changes.  Drop a solution that’s 92% sugar into water and it forms a ball you can shape; drop a 95% solution into water, and it forms flexible threads; drop a 99% solution and the threads snap; and at 100% concentration, no water left, the solution goes from clear amber to brown to black, from 320 degrees to 350 degrees, quickly, so quickly, take your eyes off it, blink, it happened. You throw away the pan.

But sugar is not only complex, it’s iniquitous:  you can’t believe those numbers.  The modern kitchen scientist directs you to guide yourself through this process with a candy thermometer, but the also-redoubtable Harold McGee says that even in the lab, let alone in my kitchen, all those numbers “can vary quite widely and are notoriously inaccurate at higher temperatures.”  In fact, don’t even believe the sugar.  Corriher says that sucrose, when heated, breaks down into smaller sugars which recombine into different sugars which break down again into even different sugars, and by the time you’ve reached the black stage, you’ve gone through 128 different sugars, each with its own color, small, taste, chemical formula, and (I add) texture.

And now I’m outraged.  All I want is candied orange peel, it’s not too much to ask, and instead I get this lethal complexity, this intricate villainy.  Last time I just plain took the peels out of the pan before the water boiled away and they’re quite good but now I’ve got a wholly different problem:  I apparently took them out too early because even cooled, dried, and refrigerated, they’re so sticky I have to surgically separate them from each other.  So I complained again to the Hungarian physicist and he suggested I dip them in melted dark chocolate.

And now the miasma lifts, the despair clears.  Chewy orange peels covered with dark chocolate.  I am at peace with the universe.

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UPDATE:  The Hungarian physicist did a noble experiment.  He assumed I was right and in spite of the recipe having worked before, the peels could no longer now be boiled nearly dry.  He took them out “when they were beginning to look a little glassy — how do you say that, glazed?”  Me: “Glassy is perfect.” — and laid them out on a plate, not touching each other, and let them dry out for two days.  I have replicated that experiment and get the same results. The physicist says, as he said before, that the key variable and the only variable that actually varies is the thickness of the orange peel.

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photo of candied orange peel by Jocelyn McAuley; and of sugar Sanjay Acharya

This year marked my tenth year participating in 10Q. It’s a service provided by Reboot, a non-profit whose aim is to reimagine and reinforce Jewish thought and traditions. Somewhere in the back end of their website now are 100 paragraphs I’ve written over the past decade, each reflecting on an aspect of the year just past and grasping after visions of the next.

I am not Jewish, but there is something special about sitting still and facing yourself in September–the start of the school year, even for those of us no longer in school. Every Autumn, 10Q sends me 10 questions, one after another, for 10 days:

Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you? Are you grateful? Relieved? Resentful? Inspired?

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