Life on Cloud 9
taking recipes on a honeymoon
From Karyl’s Cook & Tell Column (April 28, 1977)
Just give me one more time to wax rhapsodic about a subject which is dear to nobody’s heart but mine—just one more time will do it, honest—and I promise I’ll drop the whole subject of showers, weddings and honeymoons for good. After this, my euphoria will still be there, but it will have to lurk between the lines. That’ll foul up the typesetter for sure and fix the proofreader, too.
We’re back from our hideaway and the big black dog has returned from his two-week vacation at the kennel. Once again, we are the willing victims of his plate-nudging trick at the table, the one he does with his nose, when his radar determines we’re finished with dinner. (Where did I get the grand good fortune to land a man who could stand that goofy dog?) The old stoves are sending up their smoke signals into the evening sky, and it isn’t even me stoking them. (How lucky can you get?) Amie is back from her stay with the neighbors while we were gone, back to following me around the galley and picking up after me, while leaving her sneakers, baseball bat and Seventeen magazines all over the place for me to pick up. We are, in the quaint phrase that used to be engraved on the bottom of invitations to wedding receptions, and maybe still is, at home.
Comes a time, I am told, when one is obliged to descend from the rarefied atmosphere of romance and intrigue and get dinner on the table. Comes a time, a sobering time, when one’s new husband leaves a paperback cookbook on the bedside table on the way to work one morning, a casserole cookbook that has been his Bible as a bachelor. Is it a hint, one wonders? Is he trying to tell me something? Is it time, perish the thought, to stand in front of the stove again and face up to the task of feeding the multitudes? Am I supposed to remember suddenly how to make dinner regularly?
Actually, little bits of recall began to blow drifts in my memory almost from the moment we lifted off on the homeward leg of our journey. Just like swimming, when you’re tossed overboard, it all comes back. I found myself avidly reading the recipes in the airline’s magazine stuffed into the back of my seat. Almost uncontrollably, I felt my hand reaching for the cookbook I’d carried all the way to Honeymoon Hotel—given to me by a friend who met us at an airport layover in the middle of the trip down to Florida. I found I could still read. Menus began to list themselves in my head. I couldn’t hold hands with the man sitting next to me. I had to make a shopping list.
*
Yup, I’m home again, and glad to be. At last, I’ve found someone who owns more shoes than I do (no closet in the world is big enough to accommodate them all), someone with his own vacuum cleaner, making us a two-Electrolux family, someone who can’t stand black Jujyfruits, which is swell with me, because he leaves them and I love them.
Life up here on Cloud 9 is dandy. I plan to stay.
Karyl’s Headnotes
Mixed in with this euphoric honeymoon recall are the memories of good tasting things that made every meal out (all 33 of them) exciting. Key Lime Pie was different at each of the three restaurants I had it in. While it’s somewhat of a Florida cliché, it may be obscure enough in these parts to appeal to some who have never made it.
KEY LIME PIE
14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
4 eggs, separated (see notes)
4-5 limes, squeezed to make ½ c. lime juice
1 T. lime zest from above limes
6 T. sugar
½ t. cream of tartar
1 graham cracker pie crust (storebought or your favorite recipe)
Separate eggs, setting aside 4 egg yolks, and dividing whites into separate bowls of 3 whites and 1 white. Mix together milk, 4 yolks and lime juice and zest. Beat the 1 egg white until stiff and fold into mixture. Beat the remaining egg whites and gradually add sugar and cream of tartar. Fold into mixture and pour into graham cracker pie shell. Bake at 350◦ F until mixture is set, about 15 minutes.
Let the pie cool at room temperature for 30 minutes, then place in the refrigerator to chill thoroughly, about 3 hours.
Amie’s Endnotes
That memory snapshot—my sneakers, baseball bat and Seventeen magazines—tells you everything you need to know about 12-year-old me: tomboy athlete meets wanna-be fashion queen. All that’s missing is my grapefruit-shaped yellow transistor radio that picked up the occasional Red Sox game on Boston’s WRKO station if the wind was right.
I’ll close with a 1-ingredient recipe for a honeymoon salad from my own husband of 23 years: Lettuce alone, no dressing.
By the time you read this, I’ll be back at my island place in Maine. I’ve got a list of things to bake and make in my little kitchen, and a scavenger hunt among the family archives—research for my book. How cool is it that I get to spend the summer with my mom and grandmother, at least in spirit?
See you next time!
The Cook & Tell Library | Recipe Index | Owner’s Manual | Notes | the micromashup
Loved this glimpse and the key lime pie sounds amazing!
Memories of my father who sampled key lime pie through Florida every visit