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.
#
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.
__________
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.
I was hoping for an extra few hours somewhere in the race between hither and yon to write something of substance, but it didn’t come. I do want you to know that instead of writing, I camped near Crystal Geyser in Utah and listened to it gurgle and throb all night long. I dreamt to the sound, imagining pressure inside the crust of the planet letting off its burden, then building up and letting off again.
It’s not much of a geyser anymore. I remember it sending up a 40-foot-tall plume in the 1980s, a true wonder launching skyward in the desert not far from the town of Green River. The cause of the geyser was an exploratory oil well dropped in 1935. The drill hit a carbon dioxide pocket and up came a violent veil of cold, frothy soda water 60 feet tall. Decades later it was down to 40 feet tall, and down from there until it has become hardly more than a burble over the last several years.
This year, robust aquifer recharge from a snow-rich winter gave the geyser a little life again. In my several-hour stopover, I didn’t see it burst more than five feet above the corroded pipe, launching in arhythmic, gulping waves. That’s more than has been seen in years.
The gas pocket lies about 360 feet below the surface, and groundwater pours into it through the well where the water becomes carbonated and erupts out of the borehole. Water drains back down and the cycle starts again.
What I listened to sounded like an ocean surf that couldn’t decide on its pattern. It guzzled and blew and fell silent for several seconds before bursting again. Rain started up late that night, introducing another layer of percussion to my tent, and I slept to water falling from above and thrusting up below, which is plenty for one night.
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?
Image from “American spiders and their spinning work. A natural history of the orbweaving spiders of the United States, with special regard to their industry and habits” (1889)
My garden has a guardian, an enormous black-and-yellow orb spider. I look for her every morning when I enter the enclosure we built last spring, to keep the deer out and create a protected spot for Calliope to bask in the sun and chase lizards.
She’s mostly blind, this spider. But she can sense me coming. I used to barge into the garden without thinking, swinging open the gate before I realized she’d used it as an anchor. She never fell or swung loose. By the time I spotted her or the remnants of her web, now in tatters, she’d usually retreated to a high spot on the fence.
They say spiders are capable of learning, planning, surprise. Do they also feel resentment?
I’m at the beach (the beach!) and it’s September, and there was a storm recently, so things have been quite chilly and windy and sploshy. Monday morning, I went out for a walk before starting my day of remote work, and I saw this horseshoe crab, and it was moving.
I am told by the friend whose beach house this is that her relatives are thrilled to hear a report of a moving horseshoe crab. Most of the horseshoe crabs they’ve seen in these parts are just bits, like a piece of shell or that tail-thing that sticks out behind, or if they’re whole, they’re dead or mostly dead.
This horseshoe crab was very much not dead.
This horseshoe crab was chugging along. I took a video and, while I could probably upload it here, I am writing this on an inconvenient device at a beach house, so I will instead direct you to the link at YouTube: Drama at the Beach.
If you know two facts about horseshoe crabs, they are probably (1) that their blood is used in pharmaceutical manufacturing and (2) they are “living fossils” – there were horseshoe crabs 445 million years ago. So long ago.
So I suppose horseshoe crabs have been doing this sort of thing basically forever, since before there were dinosaurs. Thanks for letting me hang out for a few minutes of the journey, friend.
Cameron’s new children’s book, National Monuments of the USA, hadn’t gone to print when she and I met up for tea at the annual science writers conference in Memphis last October. She was still fact-checking and finalizing, and having a (tiny!)(Cameron: big!) freakout about how the book would be received.
To teach history to children isn’t easy, ever. When I read Cameron’s book I understood what a challenge she’d accepted. How to celebrate what’s inspiring and beautiful about America, without blotting out the painful truths many monuments were built to commemorate? We talked about that and other things, now that the book is out and the reviews are in.
Emily: Cameron, how’d this project come about?
Cameron: So my friend Kate Siber, who I met working at Outside magazine many years ago, had done a book about the national parks that has the same wonderful illustrator, Chris Turnham, which had the same format: an introduction, full spreads with illustrations of a selection of the parks, and short write-ups about things to see and do in each park. She had done a few books for the same publisher, and she gave them my name. (Thank you, Kate!)
I learned a lot from this book. There were places I’ve never heard of, especially on the East Coast. Growing up in California — I don’t know what your history and civics education was like — but mine was very, ahem, local.
I feel the same. You probably went to California missions in fourth grade, or things like that? I did, too.
Yes, we made Spanish colonial missions out of sugar cubes. It was weird. Did you visit monuments as part of the writing process? Or was it mostly reported from afar?
A lot of it was reported from afar, because when I started doing the reporting a lot of the monuments were still closed or hard to get to. Once some of the travel restrictions were lifted, I thought, this will be perfect: My kids are being homeschooled, basically. Why don’t we rent an RV and go on a road trip for six months? But as the pandemic continued, I realized, no, my kids really need to be at home and have a steady routine, and I do, too. (Also: renting an RV is expensive!). So we didn’t have our full pandemic road trip, but we did take a short pandemic road trip to see six or seven monuments. We also saw a couple in California on other trips, and I had been to several of the national monuments elsewhere in the past.
Were you talking to the boys about it as you wrote the book? Did they have feedback?
Yeah, they did. They had strong feedback about what they liked and what they didn’t like. And by the end of our road trip, it was like, “Mom, do we really have to go to see another monument?”
I remember talking with one of the boys about Tule Lake National Monument, because he was studying World War II and Japanese incarceration in his history class. I was really having trouble with what language to use [for the camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned]. We often call them internment camps, but I guess that’s really not correct. Internment camps are for foreign nationals, but most of the people in these camps were U.S. citizens.
These were concentration camps. FDR even said that in memos, his staff said that in memos. But there’s so much feeling about the word “concentration camp” connected with the Holocaust that I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I wanted to use the real word, but also, I didn’t want to stop people in their tracks and have them stop reading and not learn more about Tule Lake because they’re so disturbed by calling these places “concentration camps.” So I was talking to my son about it for a while, and he really got what I was struggling with. At one point, I said, “What if I said they were imprisoned in these camps?” And he thought that was a good solution–saying what was actually happening there.
So that’s what I ended up doing. I also sent the text to a Japanese-American history organization and to the ranger at the site, and so I had background on the camps from them, too, and a sensitivity reader looked at the whole book toward the end of the process. And it was also really great to talk with my son to get the perspective of a kid who’d be reading this.
