Engestation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.