Samantha Seneviratne - The joys of baking : recipes and stories for a sweet life

Several years ago, at the worst possible time, my dresser began to fall apart.

The drawers groaned complaints when I pulled at them. Splinters pricked my palms as I grabbed for socks in the middle of the night. The handle of the bottom drawer had come off altogether, so I just left it open, and the legs of my jeans were always trying to sneak out to party on their own. Even though it had seen better days, I didnt want to let it go.

I didnt want to let it go because it had seen better days. Fifteen years ago, the dresser was home to my brothers favorite red sweatshirt, his jeans, sweatpants, button-down shirts, and sweaters. It was dark, handsome, and substantialthe kind of thing a real grown-up would have in his apartment. I was envious. I remember visiting my brother in his tiny studio near Times Square. We would sit on the floor and lean against the dresserpractically his only furniturewhile we ate his special mushroom pasta and talked about our plans.

When I inherited it, the dresser became an important landmark in my own life. Instead of filling it with our clothes, my husband, Augustine, thought to turn it into a makeshift hutch. Heavy cookware in the bottom, then stacks of plates, mismatched glassware, and cheap silverware, all the way up. We propped a faux-glitzy mirror on top and set out our alcohol. Not the bar at Balthazar, but nice. It was the beginning of our home together.

But those days were long over when I woke up one sunny summer morning and all of a sudden saw the dresser in a new light. My brother had died. My divorce was looming. Big pieces of veneer were flaking off, exposing the cheap wood underneath. Desperate to start over, I decided to get rid of it right away.

I had the good sense to take out all the drawers, but still the thing felt like an elephants casket when I tried to budge it. Big and blocky, but also fragile somehow. It was completely unwilling to help me get on with my life. I think it was actually fighting me. I managed to slide it out the front door of my apartment and into the narrow hallway. I pushed and pulled and shimmied and got it to the edge of the first set of stairs. Six floors down to the curb, Fresh Kills Landfill, and a new start.

I decided to get under it. I would slide the beast down the stairs, guiding from the bottom. I thought my determination would overcome any weakness in my actual muscles.

I wrestled it down one flight, but then something shifted above me. The only thing I hadnt planned for was gravity. In one quick and heart-stopping motion, I was pinned against the rickety iron railing of my apartment buildings stairway, five flights up.

The sharp wood corners dug into my forearms. The veins in my neck popped out against the strain. The old railing creaked. I thought about yelling for help, but I was still too full of pride. So, I stayed there, quivering and shaking from the strain and the fear, the dam holding back my panic and tears about to burst. No one was coming to help me. There was no one to call. No one was worrying about me. No one would know if I got hurt. Either this thing crushes me or I push back and get out from underthose were my choices.

Somehow, I managed the latter. I battled the thing back into my apartment, closed the door, and sat down on the floor, depleted, sad, and alone. For the better part of an hour I sat staring at the wall, surveying my situation. And then I stood up and reached for the blue and white bag of bread flour.

Cooking is a necessity. Everyone needs to eat. Preparing a special meal can be a joy, of course, but often it feels like a chore, just another item on an endless list of things that must get done.

Baking is different. Baking is a choice. Baking is never a necessity. No one needs a chocolate cake to survive. Except, sometimes, a chocolate cake is exactly what you need to survive. Sometimes, a chocolate cake is the only thing you need in the world. This is a book about and for those times.

Every baking project begins with the imagination of pleasure. Something sparks it. A desire: perfect plums at the market. A craving: salty-sweet. A memory: summer walks with ice cream. A feeling: the dizzy throes of new love. The project takes shape around an idea of sensuous experience. Sometimes, that means the physical satisfaction that comes from the act of creaming butter and sugar, folding pastry dough to create a lattice, or kneading bread. Other times, it means baking and eating and sharing and talking and laughing with a friend. Whatever the pleasure, however it originates and wherever it leads, baking is about making the pleasures you imagine real. Learning to bake is about learning to please yourself.

Yet in this age of Instagram, our baking lives have been hijacked by the hope of pleasing strangers. Seeking approval, we confine ourselves to one emotional registerpicture-perfect and happy, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Heart emoji, heart emoji, double-heart emoji.

My heart is not an emoji. Picture-perfect would be wonderful, but I also believe that a good, full, rich, and satisfying life contains wilder forms of joy.

The very first recipe in the first edition of The Joy of Cooking is not for an aspic, a consomm, or a cheese souffl, as I would have guessed. It is not even cooking. Its a recipe for Gin Cocktail: Two parts gin, two parts orange juice, one part lemon juice, bitters.

The recipe speaks volumes, especially because Irma Rombauer published her book during the middle of Prohibition. Certainly a cocktail is a good way to start a meal. And its definitely nice to have a fail-safe drink recipe at the ready for when dinner guests arrive early. But I suspect that in this case, Irma was the one who needed a drink.