The Morning Reading: Leslie Daniels

I heard Leslie Daniels read this stunning essay last summer at Squaw Valley and have been waiting for its publication in the New Ohio Review so I could read it again - and again.

Well, it's here.

"The Mixer" by Leslie Daniels

excerpt:

When I was a child of two and my mother was mixing my birthday cake, she let me pull my pants down and sit in a plate of cake flour. I remember the paper plate on the floor, and her pretty ankles going between the countertop and stove. She was a child psychologist and she understood that you needed to feel things to know them. The bottom test was my own invention. I remember the exquisite sensation, and the hum of the mixer.

Many years later I was the mother making the birthday cake, the oven preheating, mixing with an electric mixer. It was the morning of the party and I was making All-Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake from The Cake Bible. It's the only cookbook I own for which I have too much respect to mess around with the recipes. I don't care much about cakes, though they are a good meeting place of butter and sugar, but to other people in my life - my daughter who was turning three - cake is important.

I had doubled the recipes to provide for ten three-year-old girls, some older brothers and whichever moms would want a piece. My notations in the margin of the well-worn page of of The Cake Bible read "8 egg yolks + 1 egg to fit brown pan." The recipe is a simple one with few ingredients and good eggs are essential for the transparent flavor of the cake. From my friend Thea's chickens, I had a dozen beautiful eggs, no two alike.

As I used the hand mixer to mix the heavy batter, I was thinking about the real Bible. Raised by atheists, I had missed the Bible entirely except for a stray psalm or hymn from my grandmother. I was thinking that I should be reading the Bible to my children at the end of the day along with the Torah, the Koran, and something Zen, instead of whatever fiction caught our fancy. I was thinking that they need some sacred scriptures beside The Cake Bible for wisdom and as an inoculation against developing religious fanaticism in their later years.

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Leslie Daniels is a writer, an agent and fiction editor of The Green Mountains Review.
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