A Family Secret

     In light of Christmas coming up in just a few days, I thought it might be nice to share a little bit of cheer on my resurrected blog: My grandmother's chocolate cream pie filling. I don't believe in secret recipes. Since my grandmother, bless her, is now beyond doing such things, every year this is my limited contribution to our Christmas merrymaking. I'm hardly a master chef (or any sort of chef, honestly. My ideal husband would be some sort of hybrid master chef-masseuse), and I think that's why this pie recipe works so well for me. It's really more like alchemy: mostly superstition and stirring. It's quite old, from a time before cocoa powder or instant pudding (Note: cream pies should never be made from pudding packs. This is heresy).

The original Betty Barrow with me, c. 2012

     You see, in the part of the South that I'm from, people were once (and some still are) very suspicious of fruit. There weren't very many fruits around, either. So instead of things like apple pie or strawberry-rhubarb pie, we made cream pies! Cream pies are strange, miraculous beasts. The most popular are coconut, lemon, and, of course, chocolate. The chocolate pie I make is something like a mousse, served in a crust. Making it is always an adventure for me, as I'm never quite sure what I'll get at the end. Traditionally, such a pie would be topped with meringue (a topping of whipped egg whites), but I'm a heathen and don't believe in meringue, so whipped cream it is. 

      Here are the things needed, and I suggest you have them all out before you get going (I never do this and end up hurling myself around the kitchen trying to get it together while the pot boils at me.)

You will need:  

1 pie crust (They're always better if you take the time to make them)

1 double boiler

1 c. sugar

1/3 c. flour 

A pinch of salt 

2 c. scalded milk

2 unsweetened chocolate squares

2 Tb butter

1 tsp vanilla 

And here are my annotated instructions: 

1. Mix sugar, flour and salt in double boiler while you're scalding your milk somewhere else. 

2. Gradually add scalded milk. I generally have the problem of dumping it all in at once and then remembering it said "gradual." It really is helpful to stir it in a bit at a time while it's hot, so your flour disappears.  

3. Add chocolate squares--sometimes I chop them up a bit before they go in, sometimes I don't. After the chocolate squares are in, you need to let them mostly incorporate, but it'll still look like milk with chocolatey bits floating in it. 

4. Add milk mixture to three beaten egg yolks. This is a truly strange step. What this means is you've got your eggs in a bowl and you spoon most of what you've been cooking into it. If you put the eggs in without doing this, it ends up being cooked egg bits in a chocolate broth. Gross. 

5. Add in butter and vanilla

6. Stir for approximately one year while becoming increasingly hopeless that it will ever be anything but speckly chocolate milk

7. Hope for the best. 

8. Magic (with luck) happens. 

9. Pour in crust and chill. 

You may notice that there are no listen times in this recipe? Well, that's part of the spontaneity of the thing. Honestly, anything could happen here. Last time, my pie came out with little gloops in it. I'm calling it Chocolate Pie with Doodads. Sounds festive, right? Merry Christmas from the Barrows! 

UPDATE 2017: This year my spontaneity manifested in forgetting to bake the pie crust in advance. The filling hung out in the double boiler. It was more patient than I expected. 

Why Rogue One needed a Woman Writer

(*** This post may contain some inadvertent spoilers, though I've done my best to avoid talking film specifics)      

                                    

      I've just returned from a jaunt to the silver screen, probably the best place to spend a winter day as cold as this one. It was a new Star Wars movie, so we went to the nice theatre. Cozy in our cush reclining seats, we settled in to 134 minutes of X-wings, tie fighters, and pew-pew noises. It was a great film in some ways--the effects were shocking, especially in bringing some of the original Star Wars cast back to life for us. There were some stellar cameos, landscapes, aliens. They were daring in some major parts of their story-telling, not flinching from their dark subject matter that seemed to have a particular, contemporary relevance as entire cities in rebellion were erased from the map. All of this was good, and the film is well worth a watch, though I might suggest waiting until children are old enough to deal with the grittier elements.

        My problem with Rogue One is the element of the narrative that I was originally most anticipating: it's heroine, Jyn Erso, the renegade daughter of an Imperial weapons specialist portrayed by Felicity Jones.

        When I found out that, like Force Awakens, Rogue One would be starred by a woman, I was overjoyed. The trailers seemed to portray a young women with a dark past who knew her way around a blaster. I thought, in my naivetee, that she might be the sassy, anti-hero Hans Solo to Rey's young, innocent Luke Skywalker persona. I thought she was the next piece in a new generation of strong woman leads.

       Enter Jyn Erso, introduced as a child and later as a young woman in prison. She's got the tragic backstory and the right, Hans Solo-style costume. There's even a combat sequence where she's completely badass, saving people and blasting storm troopers. She can give heroic speeches to troops. She can climb. She's got the skills. She's got the look.

        So what's the problem?

        The problem is that that's it. They got as far as the look and decided that was plenty. She's an image. Underneath this, Jyn Erso has no substance, no personality. Not a speck of humor. Not even very much bitterness to fuel her quest. Soulful eyes speaking of a difficult past and life of hardship? Yes. And for the first twenty minutes or so, this is enough. I was curious. I was hopeful for more of her to appear, more of a real person. But as the movie goes on and her cardboard dialogue continues to disappoint, I realized that, while she's a brave woman, she's not bravely written.

         With other Star Wars heroes, there's at least a sense of agency. Luke Skywalker is driven by his need to prove himself, to get off Tatooine and be somebody like the father he never knew. Rey, in contrast, is fastened to the planet her family abandoned her on, waiting for them to return for her. Later, she finds a new purpose in her relationships within the Alliance. Even Anakin is driven by the anger instilled in him by a childhood enslaved. A fan of Rogue One might say, well, Jyn is driven by a love of her lost father. But from this recliner, it looks to me like she was simply drifting aimlessly through her life until certain captors (mostly men), force her to join up. Then a man takes her to see a man and then they go try to save a man ... from a man. Is this totally fair? No. But what is Jyn's motivation? The character's shift from drifter to hero is displayed on the screen without being justified by the necessary character development. One minute she's saying no, no thanks, I'll just go--the next she's leading Alliance troops into a battle they can't win. Not much transition between the two, not much deepening of relationships with new companions. And where has she been? What has her life been since she was sixteen? The writers seem to feel it's not necessary to know. But this, to me, cheapens her sacrifices and make her shift into the hero seat less understandable.

         At the end of the day, Jyn Erso just doesn't have a life of her own, beyond the situation she's in. She has the range of a early 2000s video game character (with better graphics). I really don't blame Felicity Jones for this as it seems she's giving a plastic role all the life she can. It's the flat, careless writing. It's disappointing, and it's a little cowardly. To me, it sucked the life out of what would have been a really good film. And I can't help but think that this problem might have been remedied by having a woman among the writers. Clearly these writers know how to write interesting and fully-developed characters, because the minor male characters that make up the hunting band of companions are quite lively (besides Jyn, they are basically all men), though none of them have explained pasts. The writers just seemed to have no idea what to do with their heroine. Kudos for managing not to sexualize her obscenely, but it seemed that this left a void they didn't know how to feel. She wasn't funny, she wasn't kind or ambitious or even particularly angry. She wasn't much of anything, really. Good at fighting. Heroic. Sure. But a real, dimensional person? Eh. Good try, boys.