Take a picture here, take a souvenir

As we turn the final pages of summer, I’m still reflecting on some of its earlier chapters, such as a lovely week in Brittany that ended with a brief separation from my suitcase. The reunion was sweet, because along with dirty laundry and loose sand, there was my usual post-vacation haul—impulse and otherwise—from our time near the Gulf of Morbihan. As I unrolled t-shirts I kept unearthing things I’d forgotten I bought and enjoyed the small bursts of delight that ensued:

Buckwheat flour from the farmer’s market. Two jars of salted caramel infused with toasted buckwheat. Six jars of single varietal honey (chestnut tree, linden tree, wildflower, forest, general Brittany honey, etc.). Quiberon sardines in bright tins. Striped mariner shirts (the very soft off-brand ones you can find in the farmer’s market). Stripey espadrilles. Cassis & violet jam. Socks from Monoprix - so many! Vintage linens from a brocante.

As I unpacked, I reflected on this vacation hoarding impulse of mine, and what it might say about me. Am I just the reflection of a culture that has become ever more grabby as the world burns? I realize that’s probably part of the story, along with a basic need to remember and draw out the essence of a vacation for a little while longer. Some things I couldn’t pack in a suitcase, though: the brisk breezes and sweet-saltiness of the Breton coast and the nutty taste of buckwheat. The stickiness of a Kouign-Amann. The grit of sand in my shoes and the sting of a sunburn. The piles of tiny pink shrimp at the fishmonger with their heads still on.

As I was picking up material goodies from the markets this summer, I was also quietly noting things the other cultures did well and differently from ours in the U.S.—the intangible things you can’t pack in a suitcase or eat later. I want to hold on to these for a bit longer, after the vacation and summer have come to a close.

• Oyster vending machines in Brittany

• Bike culture in Amsterdam and the grace with which people move through the city as one with their bicycles.

• Reverence for nature in Norway. We can all do better! Pick up our trash, learn the names of some wildflowers.

• Hut culture in Norway—wow. The DNT network of hiking cabins are impeccably cared for by volunteers and are clean, stocked with wood, saunas, and odorless composting toilets you sprinkle wood chips into. The one we peeked into, in a remote area, had a separate kennel room for dogs. Upstream from the huts was a mossy spring that served as the water supply (the cabins contain buckets) and we filled our water bottles with this water and drank it untreated.

• The GR34 1300 km-plus coastal hiking path along Brittany’s coastline. We picked up segments of this for afternoon hikes and meandered through rocky coves and oyster farms with their own, small tasting rooms.

• Swedes’ unbridled joy in summer (and Scandinavia generally)

• Garbage sorting in France. My family laughed at my excitement over visiting the compost bin by the port in Vannes where we stayed; inside of the biowaste bin was a little compartment with mulch and a scooper. A brief glimpse inside told me the citizens of Vannes were complying.

• Learning new historical facts and in particular lore from the WWII Resistance, in Normandy’s museums and monuments. I had no idea the role the BBC played in carrying secret messages to the resistance in Europe.

Some of these I will try to knit into the fabric of my own life, here. Similarly, I will take all the souvenirs from my travels and give them out as gifts, enjoy them, make something beautiful that’s a blending of cultures. In this case, it’s my favorite cookies from a local bakery, Bien Cuit, made with flour I bought from a stand at the farmer’s market in Vannes and stowed in my son’s suitcase after I ran out of space in my own.

Salted Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies

Makes 1 dozen or more

• 2 cups (250 g) buckwheat flour

• ⅓ cup (32 g) unsweetened cocoa powder (Dutch process)

• 1 Tablespoon (12 g) baking powder

• 1 ½ cups (300 g) light brown sugar, lightly packed

• 2 sticks/1 cup (227 g) unsalted butter at room temperature

• 1 ¼ cups (200 g) bittersweet chocolate chips

• 1 teaspoon (5 g) strong espresso or coffee

• Powdered sugar for finishing

• Flaky sea salt (Maldon) for finishing

Note: This is a recipe from Bien Cuit, which also appears on Food 52’s website and Bon Appetit (paywall). These spread more, either due to differences in French flour not slicing the dough thickly enough, or some other unknown variable. That’s OK! They were still delicious and tender.

Make Letter Writing Great Again

This morning my 7-year-old observed that “In the olden days people couldn’t text, so writing cards was like texting.”

His comment was timely, because some days it seems all I do is read letters from the olden days, as my thesis project has me poking around back in an era when that’s how you made contact with another person. We forget this now, when it’s so easy to reach out via text or email (and does anyone really call anymore?).

At the risk of sounding very old, I’ll mention that a college friend recently reminded me I was her first friend with internet, back when connectivity was never a sure thing: no cell phones, very slow and shaky dial-up, etc. Anyone who experienced the internet of the 90’s will recall that screechy, staticky sound the computer made as the dial-up modem tried to contact the server, then the moment of suspense when you weren’t sure whether it was going to successfully connect or leave you hanging. After I graduated college and went overseas, I kept in touch with friends and family back home with long, rambling letters. The alternative was to pop into an internet café—remember those?—and hope it wasn’t full of all-day lingerers or out of commission entirely.

But I’ve been going back further than the 1990’s for my thesis project, which focuses mainly on the 1950’s and 1960’s when people wrote really long letters to each other.

Last week I was in the Cecily Brownstone files at NYU’s Special Collections archives. Brownstone (yes that was her real name, and yes she lived in a brownstone) was the Associated Press food editor for nearly 40 years, as well as writing and editing a few cookbooks. She saved everything. She was very close with Irma Rombauer of Joy of Cooking fame, and Rombauer’s daughter, Marion. There are hundreds of letters back and forth between these women, and they are warm and unabashedly effusive. They also report on mundane dailiness; everything from what was blooming in the garden to family drama to the minutiae of health complaints. Lots and lots of health talk.

Although the conversation was not always scintillating it was intimate, and there is an intimacy we have lost in our cursory texts to one another. I’m as guilty as anyone of preferring a ping to picking up the phone…and a letter, what’s that? But our texts, while immediate and sometimes humorous, are oddly emotionless, and it’s so easy to misunderstand the mood or tone in these whittled-down communications—or worry that one’s own text has lost something in the translation. Even messages that are meant to be affectionate can be misunderstood as cold or curt because they are so brief. And let’s not even get into auto-correct mishaps.

Back in analog days, just how did busy, successful people manage the time to write a ten-page letter to a far away pal? My guess is they had a lot more time because they weren’t scrolling social media.

Since my family can’t seem to throw anything out (a blessing sometimes), we also have a few letters going back to antediluvian times, including some young and flirtatious courtship between my great-grandparents when they were sweethearts, not yet married. Those are from the 1800’s and my aunt Katie seemed surprised when we happened upon them, sepia colored and turning to dust among her memorabilia, as we sat digging through the past one lovely day last month.

Then there are the travel letters home from my grandmother to the family (she and my grandfather logged a lot of miles for work as well as for pleasure). In a four-page typewritten missive to her young adult children in 1965, she reported on their travels through Mexico and described, in thrilling detail, a new thing she tried called a Marguerita: “There is salt around the edge of the glass and you sip through this, very fine indeed.”

I wonder if one day we’ll save e-mail threads the way we used to save letters. I already find myself going back through old message chains from when the kids were tiny, and silly back and forths with my Dad when he was still alive. I wonder how we’ll preserve these exchanges for future generations. E-mail doesn’t quite have the tactile satisfaction of unfolding an old, crispy letter. Emails don’t smell the same as old letters do.