5 a.m., Butter Melts
creative nibbles at dawn, a brew for insomnia; my mother, butter
In my childhood home, 5 o’clock was a busy hour. My older brother, the night crawler in our family trio, would be back home and on his way to bed while my mother and I would be gathering in the kitchen. Our flat was built around a narrow corridor and the living room was also my mother’s bedroom so we developed a habit of tiptoeing. In the kitchen, my mother and I would stand around the bar and we watched the sky hatch from orange to blue as the sun climbed all the way up to our windowsill on the eighth floor.
Cooking wasn’t a priority. We heated up wax inside an old casserole while flicking through advertising magazines, which we had picked up at check-out at the supermarché, and bowls filled with pet food were spread on the floor at the end of the room. The fridge was loud and high, left bare against the wall. My mother buys sandwich bread in bulk and stores it in the freezer because she has always followed the same morning routine: two slices, toasted until golden and hard, salted butter, always, and a spoon of jam (apricot or cherry flavour, Bonne Maman) when she had the option. A mug of coffee from the filter machine. She also brews coffee by the litre and leaves the liquid inside the carafe, until she feels drowsy and reheats it cup by cup in the microwave. Having raised her children as a single parent means that my mother knows the significance of compromising, but a pair of buttered toasts while it’s still dark and quiet outside is something she has never let go of.
Last week, October began and I started the first day of the month by sitting at my desk with one candle (lavender, bergamot and sandalwood scent) and a faint desk light (5W, amber), Spotify’s Classical Mix playing the cello then Einaudi’s Nuvole Bianche, the volume at the lowest setting. I had missed this hour, if spent this way. I find lighting distracting, the beauty of the sky and a spotlight I don’t want to be under when I’m swirling around words and getting to know characters. The early hours of the day are for writing fiction.
I can’t eat as early as my mother, but I have inherited her capricious sleep. The pattern is similar to the one of a nibbler making its way through the day, operating against having a set time for meals and grabbing bits here and there, like a bird who keeps singing so its language doesn’t disappear. On the other side of the energising 5 a.m. start, the promise of a sprawling day threatens me. I progressively lose sight of my shadow as days become one and nights interlude between bursts of passion and melancholia. There are bouts of creativity during the night, but the high cost of not sleeping calls for disappointment – ‘I can’t even dream when I wake-up during the night!’, Pessoa despaired in The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos – like a living fly entangled inside a spiderweb. It’s gluey and I’m cold when I’m tired.
With daydreaming during the night comes proofing bread in my kitchen. The dough I kneaded the evening before, a pledge for sourdough bread on which I can spread a mixture of tinned sardines and miso paste for lunch. I move my hands to protest with Madame Bovary, whose heart waits between hopeful sunrise and morose sunset. It’s ‘almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge,’ in Colette’s words; or, according to Toni Morrison, a time for those who ‘want to beat the sun’. It’s an opportunity to reclaim lost times and, as with most quests for freeing the self, it’s spoiled with brutal instincts for preservation. I still haven’t read Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation; an overload of self-preservation? I loved her latest novel, Lapvona. 5 o’clock smells of boulangerie, it’s when Claude, Giulia and Sophie exit a nightclub in Lisbon in The Yellow Kitchen – ‘Giulia still has energy to burn, Claude’s senses are awakening as the Lisbon baker’s hands begin to roll pastries.’ 5 a.m., butter melts, and last Saturday I cooked something sweet for the first time in months.
My mother wears the sweet tooth in our family, and her favourite is the choux pastry named Paris-Brest. I’m far too scared to attempt making one so I gave a twist to the classic Torta della nonna, with substitutes of oat milk and brown sugar for the crema pasticcera, and a generous amount of cornflour to flirt with the texture of praline. As I said, my mother knows about compromising.
When it comes to the pastry, you’ll need about one portion and a half to be able to cover the tart properly. I find it easier to double my usual recipe and then preserve the extra in the freezer (or you can always use it to make a sweet and sour tart for your lunches next week: beetroot and feta or broccoli and goat cheese work well here).
200g butter, softened on the windowsill and cut in small cubes
450g plain flour
50g icing sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
2 eggs and 1 yolk
Remember that the above measurements will vary with the humidity in the air and your baking mood. I have found that some days/nights are simply not suited for making pastries, so I would recommend using these for the purpose of working out the correct ratio between ingredients.
In a large bowl, mix flour and icing sugar. Incorporate the butter and break the cubes apart with your fingers, until the largest lumps of butter are gone and you have a crumbly mixture. Add the lemon zest and start breaking one egg at a time, kneading in between each. You might want to transfer the pastry on to a flat surface to keep working until you have an homogeneous result. Separate the dough in two balls and let them rest under a kitchen towel.
(Shareable note to self: if it was spring or summer, I would have wrapped them into cling film and let them chill in the fridge. One cheer for colder weather and poor isolation in my kitchen.)
Preheat the oven to 180C fan. Roll one of the two pastry balls and fit it inside a tart dish. Cover with baking paper and spread baking weights or pulses or rice on top. Blind bake for 10 minutes. Allow the pastry to cool down, and roll the other pastry ball flat. Pour the crema pasticcera inside the bottom pastry shell and cover with the second dough (it will reduce as it bakes so make sure to leave a bit of extra over the edges), seal. Bake for 40 minutes or until golden.
I love making crema pasticcera, a fun version of a béchamel. It smells of a delicious hug between sweet and zesty. The advantage of making it first thing in the morning, is that the kitchen warms up and you can preserve the crema pasticcera in the fridge until you need it. The chilling time will also help with thickness.
500ml oat milk (unsweetened), warm
Zest of 1 lemon
60g brown sugar
4 egg yolks
40g cornflour
1 tbsp of Vin Santo, or the liquor of your choice
In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks until they are bubbly (think omelette!), add the cornflour and sugar and keep beating. You’re after the consistency of cold, wet sand after a high tide has retreated.
Put the mixture in a milk pan and get ready to whisk continuously. Turn on the heat at the lowest (lower! You don’t want to reach a boil) and start adding the milk slowly. Add the zest and liquor and keep going until it’s thickened.
Prepare an ice bath with cold water, or ice cubes if you have any. Cool the crema pasticcera by transferring it to a bowl placed over the ice-cold water. Cover with cling film, or if like me you don’t have any, put a layer of baking paper on top and then cover with a kitchen towel, and refrigerate. The important thing is that the cover is spread against the cream directly so a layer of foam doesn’t form at the top.
A final note, if you are topping the tart with blanched nuts, remember to soak them into water for 10 minutes so they don’t burn while the tart is in the oven.
Being back at my desk last week, I realised that I had lost the habit of starting the day with sitting during summertime. I would have been awake, still, but faffing around before settling clumsily on the stool I keep in the kitchen and work on the counter. I will often go for a run before writing then, because I would compromise my soul to feel warmth against my cheeks. Summer, when desire surpasses my ingrained routine before autumn returns, and I find my pace again, preparing for winter.
This edition of The Onion Papers is an exploration of my seasonal manners rather than a secret recipe for productivity – I lie down with my eyes open, turn around and around and I stare at the blank page often, all year long too. Last Saturday, specifically, I had a good hour of writing before the sky distracted me. Cobalt, the bottom was firing up with a bright orange, bleeding into the yellow while the top part of the sky turned lilac, and the light settled into a greyer tone. The airspace looked as if it had fallen down a few floors, calling upon the beginning of a new day as I wondered if it would be snowing in London this winter. I miss summer already, sweet syrup dripping along my forearms, peaches and nectarines, but I yearn for the aloneness winter harbours. Not loneliness, aloneness.
One of the most poignant books I have read about sleep is Marie Darrieussecq’s Pas dormir. I didn’t read it as a collection of essays, but as a documentary. Pas dormir investigates the myth of sleep and explores the realms of not sleeping – this, Darrieussecq writes, is the product of ‘twenty years of travels and panic inside books and through my nights’. Darrieussecq playfully opens with quotes extracted from football trainers’ interviews on the back of games, people who ‘sleep well because their consciousness is healthy’. There, Darrieussecq questions the common belief that those who don’t sleep sorrow through the nights, before she releases the sleepless victims with a literacy of insomnia. Kafka, the reference; Valjean who heals his conscious during periods of insomnia, Victor Hugo who had troubles sleeping too; Marguerite Duras says there are no themes with insomnia, emptiness only, and Nathalie Sarraute helped her case with ‘a small glass of Vodka and a few slices of saucisson’; only tragic heroes are insomniac, said Barthes; and Proust, whose asthma encouraged insomnia that triggered episodes of anorexia that aggravated his insomnia and made his asthma worse. The list goes on, and Charlotte Gainsbourg sings about 5:55 as the time for sacrifice; too late to go to sleep (/to end) and too early to get-up (/to start).
In the closing chapter of Pas dormir, Darrieussecq summarises compromising for the insomniacs: ‘I want a coffee, but if I drink coffee, I will never get back to sleep. I heat-up the water for the umpteenth infusion.’ As a solution to keep warm while lowering down my intake of caffeine, I prepare an infusion of sage leaves and lemon. This is also a good occasion to use the lemons I zested to make the tart.
Water
Sage leaves
Freshly squeezed lemon juice
In a casserole, bring water, sage leaves and lemon juice to the boil. As soon as the water boils vividly, remove from the heat, cover and leave to infuse. The amounts may vary depending on taste and keep infusing for as long as you please. The longer, the stronger. Be careful, this potion turns bitter quickly, but you can always dilute it further with fresh water. It is refreshing.
Another insomniac I admire and who used the time when she couldn’t sleep to create is Louise Bourgeois. Famous for her sculpture installations, print, paint and fabric makings, Bourgeois in my home is the artist who mends psychoanalysis with art-making. Her diaries are entries I read often and I find myself thinking about the bodies she stuffed, the lines she sketched and splattered with red paint, the rawness of emotions she sewed and solidified into sculptures, when I stand in my kitchen in the middle of the night.
‘I’m ready
I have everything the
circumstances ask of me
therefore, I can fall asleep’
Louise Bourgeois, c.1965
Sip, sew, sleep; stutter, simmer; be.
Margaux