VANILLA ROSE DUTCH BABY.

In particular, I’ve given myself the space to read stories posted in Pantsuit Nation, a “private” Facebook group for almost 4 million people. Every morning, I’d find a notification telling me that a few or more of my friends had liked one post or another from the group, and I’d click over to read it myself.

Once there, I’d find stories from people around the US: A 14 year-old girl in Florida, a pick-up truck-driving liberal in Texas, a gay man in Los Angeles. Each of them had stories to tell of ways they’d chosen to stand up for a more inclusive, open-hearted, humane world. And each of their stories, as simply expressed as they were, was filled with so much love, so much hope, that they’d bring me back round to happy tears.

The nightmares have mostly subsided, though what’s happening IRL during the day hasn’t much assuaged the situation. My heart hurts. My mind can barely process the regular onslaught of news. I turn public radio on and off obsessively, wanting and not wanting to know.

And always, always, I seek solace in the kitchen. This fall has been particularly rich in its yield of cookbooks, and I’ve loved settling into the act of reading and crying over one amazing introduction or another. This week, I tucked into Sarah Kieffer’s extraordinary Vanilla Bean Baking Book.

From the moment last year when I saw Sarah post a Neruda poem in confluence with something beautiful she’d just baked, I knew this was a woman after my own heart. Sarah cooks the way I cook, from memory and feeling, from the somatic impulses that arise through heart and mind and onto the plate. She writes in her book’s introduction, of the memories that find her in the kitchen:

Most impressions were beautiful; others, bittersweet. Some brought sheer pain. I was grateful for the time there to bake myself through them all. As I whisked and stirred, the people connected to those recipes and materials were there with me… I discovered I was never really alone.

And so, now, I take the heaviness of my heart into the kitchen. The political and personal heartbreak, the disappointment, the fear. I whip it out into soft peaks of cream, I lash it into the foam of a beaten egg, I incinerate it in the oven. And because I couldn’t bear to dredge up any more pain, I decide to use Sarah’s book to make something completely new to me: A Dutch baby.

Dutch babies are like pancakes on steroids, baked instead of cooked stovetop, replete with butter, redolent with the richness of an almost-custard. I loved my first and cannot wait for my next. Though Sarah’s version is straight vanilla, I decided to up the aromatic comfort and douse mine with rosewater for heart soothing and palatal calm. I finished it with extra berries and cream.

The recipe is easy as can be, and Sarah’s expert guidance instills in me a newfound confidence to try recipes unknown. Her book is pure sweetness for heart and mouth. Make yourself a Dutch baby this weekend, and let it be a solvent for the nightmares and the daymares, for the onslaught of bad news, for the fear and the hope.

This recipe is printed with permission of the author and publisher from Sarah Kieffer’s The Vanilla Bean Baking Book, Avery 2017.