Issue 04 / Exploring Joy, Reimagining Resilience
Engestation
An essay by Jordana Rothman
12 min reading time
12 min read
Resilience is often quiet. It can be seen as a kind of meditation, a sustained focus—the decision to allow yourself to sit comfortably in an in-between place. Resilience is finding the joy, the pleasure—the meaning held inside of everything—despite the swirling clouds outside. Jordana Rothman is not just a creative at Zeus Jones, she's also a former editor for Food & Wine magazine and a recent mother. In 2020, as Jordana and her wife Blake waited for the arrival of their daughter Roux in the midst of a pandemic, she found herself focusing on what she does naturally: cooking. And from that was birthed this meditation on what resilience looks like at home when the world is in an endless state of feud and flux.
It could be old lace or honeycomb or the web of a spider, this sheet of dough, folded over and over and into itself—its layers like pages, a book of fat and flour. But really it is more butter than anything else, which is why you must work quickly, before the heat of your fingertips melts it. And so you are swift with your knife, one hundred or more tiny cuts in this sheet of puff pastry which you will use to wrap a grand savory pie the Germans called kohlgeback, the Russians called kiulibiak and the French, in their way, called coulibiac for the rest of time. You hold it up by its edges, so the weight of the dough stretches those knife slits into wide open eyes, until it is near-translucent, and so near to tearing.
And there, just there is when you have to act, not just with quickness now but with grace too, because the stakes are quite high and really you've come this far. You lay down the veil in one smooth movement, you tuck in its latticed edges—quickly, again, quickly. You brush it with beaten egg so that it will turn golden and lacquered as it bakes, and you crush crystals of salt over the top, and if you were the type to genuflect you might do that. But you are not, and so you take in this thing you have made in its all paleness, in all its before-ness a final time and you slide it into the hot oven, and you hope for the best.
This black-box cooking, this category of food that took shape in the Middle Ages as “engastration” but which I call “things-in-things,” took hold of me (in an almost unbearably literal way), while my wife was pregnant. On that matter, there is so little levity in the particulars of two queer people making a baby. The novelty of swiping through donor profiles like sperm Tinder wears off after the first $1000 vial doesn't bear fruit. All the language of follicles and motility; all the pills that turn eggs into pulsing
neon INQUIRE WITHINS such that the dopey man-milt might have a shot at slouching towards Bethlehem. The drug cocktails that I, a person who often forgets to drink water before 3pm, was trusted to mix and inject into Blake's lovely flesh. That year of pain and loss and the slow trickle of blood that announced the awful news every month—until she was, at last, pregnant. A thing the size of a poppy seed, inside a thing the shape of my wife. You might genuflect. You might hope for the best.
This black-box cooking, this category of food that took shape in the Middle Ages as “engastration” but which I call “things-in-things,” took hold of me (in an almost unbearably literal way), while my wife was pregnant. On that matter, there is so little levity in the particulars of two queer people making a baby. The novelty of swiping through donor profiles like sperm Tinder wears off after the first $1000 vial doesn't bear fruit. All the language of follicles and motility; all the pills that turn eggs into pulsing neon INQUIRE WITHINS such that the dopey man-milt might have a shot at slouching towards Bethlehem. The drug cocktails that I, a person who often forgets to drink water before 3pm, was trusted to mix and inject into Blake's lovely flesh. That year of pain and loss and the slow trickle of blood that announced the awful news every month—until she was, at last, pregnant. A thing the size of a poppy seed, inside a thing the shape of my wife. You might genuflect. You might hope for the best.
BUt Then, this was January of 2020. Don't make me say it.
We were all inside back then. Blake's body grew and we found ways to soften her skin, to make room. Shea butter smoothed into the taut bits, hips and limbs squeezed and tugged. In the kitchen I saw how corn husks would crack when dry, learned to soak them in hot water to make them pliable, folded them around shredded pork and masa for tamales. I'd stand them up in a tall pot and steam them until the dough, stained rust with guajillo chiles, would tell me by scent that it was done.
This was before vaccines (however briefly) made things feel safe again (however nominally). This was when we were still soaping down bags of rice and spraying Lysol on cans of seltzer and leaving packages untouched for a week before opening them with gloved hands. There were appointments we were both advised to skip, and others I wasn't permitted to come to (“out of an abundance of caution” can join “unprecedented times” in the linguistic ash heap). Blake assured me the heartbeat
was in there, that she'd heard it with the midwife, that it had been quick and strong. I pressed my ear against her belly; I tried a shitty doppler; I willed it to thump. In the kitchen I mixed pork and ginger and tender herbs and Szechuan peppercorns, and I pressed teaspoons of the filling into floury wrappers. I ran a fingertip through water and pleated the dumpling skins, lining them up on parchment paper, tidy little parcels to be crisped in a pan. The interiority of some things was unknowable then. But we did have dumplings.
This was before vaccines (however briefly) made things feel safe again (however nominally). This was when we were still soaping down bags of rice and spraying Lysol on cans of seltzer and leaving packages untouched for a week before opening them with gloved hands. There were appointments we were both advised to skip, and others I wasn't permitted to come to (“out of an abundance of caution” can join “unprecedented times” in the linguistic ash heap). Blake assured me the heartbeat was in there, that she'd heard it with the midwife, that it had been quick and strong. I pressed my ear against her belly; I tried a shitty doppler; I willed it to thump. In the kitchen I mixed pork and ginger and tender herbs and Szechuan peppercorns, and I pressed teaspoons of the filling into floury wrappers. I ran a fingertip through water and pleated the dumpling skins, lining them up on parchment paper, tidy little parcels to be crisped in a pan. The interiority of some things was unknowable then. But we did have dumplings.
A literalist would tell you these foods don't really qualify as engastration. Strictly speaking, engastration is the communion of two or more species (TW for the squeamish and/or the abstinent), one stuffed inside another like a matryoshka doll or else grafted together in the manner of P.T. Barnum's half-monkey, half-fish Fiji mermaid—but rather than turn it out on the sideshow circuit, the idea instead is to eat it.
Make no mistake though, the history of engastration is as much about spectacle as any of Barnum's curios. It is said that the cockentrice was first prepared for the delight of King Henry VII, a roast that saw the front half of a suckling pig stitched to the bottom half of a capon, brushed with egg and saffron and gold leaf. The Tudors ate Christmas Pie—turkey stuffed with goose stuffed with chicken stuffed with partridge stuffed with pigeon. Not to be outdone by the English,
the 19th-century French rôti sans pareil—roast without equal—contained 17 birds nested within one another. In India, the Mughlai dish parinde-me-parinda packed an egg into a quail into a chicken into a duck. In Greenland some Inuit people celebrate weddings with kiviak, hundreds of tiny auk (a type of sea bird) fermented inside the belly of a seal. Closer to home we have the turducken, our very own frankenfeat, and its sweeter cousins, the piecakens and cherpumples.
Make no mistake though, the history of engastration is as much about spectacle as any of Barnum's curios. It is said that the cockentrice was first prepared for the delight of King Henry VII, a roast that saw the front half of a suckling pig stitched to the bottom half of a capon, brushed with egg and saffron and gold leaf. The Tudors ate Christmas Pie—turkey stuffed with goose stuffed with chicken stuffed with partridge stuffed with pigeon. Not to be outdone by the English, the 19th-century French rôti sans pareil—roast without equal—contained 17 birds nested within one another. In India, the Mughlai dish parinde-me-parinda packed an egg into a quail into a chicken into a duck. In Greenland some Inuit people celebrate weddings with kiviak, hundreds of tiny auk (a type of sea bird) fermented inside the belly of a seal. Closer to home we have the turducken, our very own frankenfeat, and its sweeter cousins, the piecakens and cherpumples.
What is happening here? This decadence, this pageantry, this bending of nature to the will and whimsy of man? It's hard not to see it as a display of power; a remixing of the natural world, an intervention so outrageous as to take on a kind of icky divinity. Cooking is itself an act of creation; cooking like this, an exercise of dominion.
But we're not going to interrogate what is and is not natural here. Because I'm gay and married and Jewish and parent to a child created by way of donor sperm and IVF. And there are nefarious forces who would like to call this a cockentrice of a kind; or in the words of statutes in NINE AMERICAN STATES, a “crime against nature.” Much better, I think, to play it as it lays. Not a triumph of man over nature so much as of wonder over practicality. Not a conquest of a wild and fertile earth, but a processing of its marvels, a reflection of its mysteries.
That first COVID winter was long and isolated, and we still think now of how strange it was that Blake grew a whole baby in that time and that so few people saw it happen. The baby we called “X” then, suspended within Blake, who was bouncing on a yoga ball and eating mostly grapefruits, and me wrapping my entire body around the both of them. Around us was the house, the snow drifts waist high against the glass doors.
The asparagus and sugar snaps were late that year, but there was so much cabbage. In the kitchen I peeled back a head of savoy, scooped out the heart and replaced it with a ball of ground pork and fennel and bright-yolked eggs, dry wine and old bread. I packed the farce into each green leaf, rolling the petals back into place one by one, like returning a bloomed
rose to bud. It stood high in its pan, a mushroom cloud, glossy with warm butter. In Gascony they call this poulet verte, because it resembles a whole chicken when bound with twine and lowered into a pot to poach. I roasted it instead, until the filling set and the cabbage collapsed into bolts of silk, and we could eat it in tall wedges from bowls balanced on our laps.
The asparagus and sugar snaps were late that year, but there was so much cabbage. In the kitchen I peeled back a head of savoy, scooped out the heart and replaced it with a ball of ground pork and fennel and bright-yolked eggs, dry wine and old bread. I packed the farce into each green leaf, rolling the petals back into place one by one, like returning a bloomed rose to bud. It stood high in its pan, a mushroom cloud, glossy with warm butter. In Gascony they call this poulet verte, because it resembles a whole chicken when bound with twine and lowered into a pot to poach. I roasted it instead, until the filling set and the cabbage collapsed into bolts of silk, and we could eat it in tall wedges from bowls balanced on our laps.
Then x began to knock.
I was too eager, or X was too mischievous, or maybe both of us were too shy, and I was always just missing her kicks. Blake would take my hand and hold it in place and we'd both be very still and stare at one another and she'd say “aw, they were just doing it!” Until one night in bed, when Blake, despite the swell of her belly, made a play for big spoon and I sensed the rumble against my back. All of us felt it. There were fingers and toes now, detailed and conceivable. We made small happy sounds, our baby between us, wanting to be known.
My cooking changed—became less internal, more conspicuous in its joy. When the rhubarb came I used it to assemble an elaborate pattern in the bottom of a cake pan. Flipped onto a wire rack, the finished cake was beautiful but also guileless, just tart and sweet and lovely. I tried something similar with onions, fanning out their savory petals, dotting them with butter and letting their caramel melt into pastry dough. We ate it with gruyere, twisting a knife into the wedge to break off salty hunks.
I made so many tians: razor-thin coins of zucchini in meticulous spirals, layers separated by breadcrumbs, and baked until the squash is just starting to ripple. And as X was beginning their final descent, I began filling a chest freezer for the long days coming—rich broths, braised meats, vats of tomato sauce that had spit and hissed on the stove, cranberry beans in their thick liquor, gingery congee, matzo balls, hulled berries, herbs blitzed with oil and frozen in ice cube trays.
My cooking changed—became less internal, more conspicuous in its joy. When the rhubarb came I used it to assemble an elaborate pattern in the bottom of a cake pan. Flipped onto a wire rack, the finished cake was beautiful but also guileless, just tart and sweet and lovely. I tried something similar with onions, fanning out their savory petals, dotting them with butter and letting their caramel melt into pastry dough. We ate it with gruyere, twisting a knife into the wedge to break off salty hunks. I made so many tians: razor-thin coins of zucchini in meticulous spirals, layers separated by breadcrumbs, and baked until the squash is just starting to ripple. And as X was beginning their final descent, I began filling a chest freezer for the long days coming—rich broths, braised meats, vats of tomato sauce that had spit and hissed on the stove, cranberry beans in their thick liquor, gingery congee, matzo balls, hulled berries, herbs blitzed with oil and frozen in ice cube trays.
We Wrote A Birth Plan. We Played Gin Rummy. We Waited.
When she arrived we named her Roux, for the mother sauce. For fat and flour. For things elemental. Her first food was breast milk. Then Japanese sweet potatoes simmered in broth. Peas crushed with grassy olive oil. There would be time enough for complicated things.
That coulibiac, for example. Your friends will hold their breath as you slice through the lace-wrapped pastry, expose its layers of salmon and rice, dill and egg and very hot mustard. You'll tell them that the tsars once ate theirs with vesiga, the spinal marrow of a sturgeon, but that sort of thing is not readily available in upstate New York. These friends are newly pregnant and so you cook them this special dish, and you tell them it is in a category of dishes you call “things-in-things,” with which you became very familiar when your own baby was finding her way home.
Roux will be at the table too. She will like the buttery crust best, and she will send flakes of pastry flying from her fingers as she signs “more! more! more!” She understands everything you say these days; she doesn't speak much yet.
Inside of her, things are happening. When they are ready, she will know.
