Accidental Multitasking 

It's that time of year again. The students of Introduction to World Music are throat-singing in the hallways. Throat singing involves the seemingly impossible task of singing two notes at one time, a drone and an overtone. It's a pastime among nomadic peoples of Tuva and Mongolia, made popular in the US by groups like Huun Huur Tu. (You can hear clear examples of throat singing at 3:16 and 6:30 in this video.) With instruction and practice, most people can do this--not at the level of the members of Huun Huur Tu, but satisfyingly enough. The World Music students receive brief instructions, which inspire a few each term to practice as they go from class to class.

Even fewer don't need the instruction. Some people figure out, on their own, how to make one voice into two. The early-twentieth-century American country singer Arthur Miles apparently taught himself to throat sing. Here he is, accompanying his own voice on the song Lonesome Cowboy. I've wondered how Miles came to throat sing. By accident? After hearing someone else doing this? Who could he have heard? How could he have known what to do? I have no idea, and continue to marvel at his ability.

The abilty to produce two things, simultaneously, through one activity is a multitasker's dream. Even those like me, who don't do well with multitasking and try to avoid it, find the concept intriguing. A long time ago. when I was old enough to read but not old enough to use the oven, I read a recipe for "custard-filled cornbread" in my father's Fanny Farmer cookbook. Put together the batter for this bread, the recipe claimed, pour cream over it in the pan, stick it in the oven, and it will transform, "magically," into a layer of custard suspended between two layers of cornbread. I never made the cornbread, but, curious and scientific-minded child that I was, I did spend time trying to figure out the chemistry and physics behind the recipe. How could this two-things-from-one possibly work?

I still don't know. (Can anyone explain it to me in the comments?) And I don't know (or didn't, until yesterday) why it took me over thirty years to try this recipe. True, I moved away from home and I have no idea what happened to that cookbook. But Marion Cunningham re-published the recipe in The Breakfast Book, which I happen to have owned for ten years. A few years ago, the same recipe grew into an internet trend. Certainly, the recipe has been available to me, and yet, I balked, possibly because it isn't the healthiest thing in the world, possibly because I wanted to keep it as The One That Got Away--something I romanticized and thought about with mild longing.

Lately, I've been increasing my efforts to make this recipe. I bought the ingredients for it--twice. I invited some friends over to eat it--only to have to tell them that I hadn't made it; maybe they would like a beer? I vowed to blog about it--only to cook and blog nothing this past week. It took a trip out of my own kitchen to roust me out of my inertia. My friend Deepak graciously provided his kitchen, as well as the enthusiasm I needed to make this cornbread.

I took the recipe and its introduction, word for word, from Marion C. Cunningham's The Breakfast Book (page 52):

Custard-Filled Cornbread
eight servings

This recipe is magic. When the cornbread is done, a creamy, barely-set custard will have formed inside, and everyone will try to figure out how you got it there. Jane Salfass Freiman rediscovered this recipe, which was popular in the thirties; for instance, it appeared in Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings' Cross Creek Country in a much sweeter version.

2 eggs
3 tablespoons butter, melted
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups milk
1 1/2 tablespoons white vinegar
i cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 350*. Butter an eight-inch-square baking dish or pan that is about two inches deep. Put the buttered dish or pan in the oven and let it get hot while you mix the batter.

Put the eggs in a mixing bowl and add the melted butter. Beat until the mixture is well blended. Add the sugar, salt, milk and vinegar and beat well. Sift into a bowl or stir together in a bowl the flour, cornmeal, baking powder and baking soda and add to the egg mixture. Mix just until the batter is smooth and no lumps appear.

Pour the batter into the heated dish, then pour the cream into the center of the batter--don't stir. Bake for one hour, or until lightly browned. Serve warm.

This stuff is good. It really does have a layer of custard in the middle, although the photograph doesn't showcase it. And yes, that is more fruit salad, or fruit salad of sorts: oranges, mint and chopped jalapeno pepper to enliven the custardy, buttery mildness of the cornbread.

Deepak asked me for the name of the orange-mint-jalapeno concoction. "Uh," I said. "Um. I don't know. I just made it up." He thought we should give it a significant name (an inspiring idea for someone who titles her recipes things like "Not Pho" and "Kumquat Experiment II"). We decided to name it for its qualities. Mint cools; hot pepper warms. All three ingredients refresh and invigorate. With that in mind, we came up with "Hot Cold Recharge Medley."

"Custard-filled cornbread" falls flat in comparison, so we got to work on renaming that one. "Remind," Deepak suggested. He has vivid memories of eating custard as a child. "And that's your story, too," he said. I was baffled for a moment. I don't remember ever eating custard when I was little, although I must have eaten some. "You're fulfilling a childhood dream." he explained. He's right. I would never have thought of it, but this cornbread isn't just a multitasker's dream.

My first memory of custard-filled cornbread is a visual one; I can see the opened page of the Fanny Farmer cookbook. That cookbook was only open on the occasions when my father baked banana bread--some of the happiest memories of my childhood. Since my father's death, I have been both averse to moving certain things about him from idealized memory into reality, and, at the same time, desperate to do so. Thanks to Deepak's insight, I identified this recipe as one of those things. I don't believe Deepak could have known all of the significance of his comments, although I wouldn't put it past him to have sensed, on some level.

Such thinking aligns with questions raised by Nancy Mairs in her essay "On Touching by Accident." In the essay, Mairs writes of her own suicide attempt one Hallowe'en, interrupted by a teenage girl in a clown costume who rings Mairs' doorbell in search of a bathroom. In the last paragraph, Mairs says:

I have thought about her often [...]. She entered my life so innocently, [...] at just the moment when I was planning to leave, though she couldn't have known that. And I wonder whether I have done just the same thing myself, wandering through some other's desolation in my costume--tight jeans, soft shirt, dusky velveteen blazer, cane--needing some quick favor on my way. How many times? And when?

There's the kind of multitasking that happens when we walk and chew gum, sing two notes with one voice, or prepare one batter that turns into both bread and custard. There's another kind, the touching-by-accident kind. We ask for one thing, but, in the asking, give something entirely different. Or we find that, somehow, in preparing (or preparing for) one thing, we've also prepared ourselves, or someone else, (for) another.

I'm very glad to have been freed to make this recipe. We named it "New-world Reminder Bread," by the way. "New-world" is for the corn, but I think this is another food that transports those who investigate it to other worlds--old, new, past, future. Throat singing does that, too, some students tell me.