Homework

I think everyone should, at least once in a while, harvest their own food.  Even if you don’t grow it yourself, it’s worth getting out there in a field or an orchard somewhere and harvesting what you’ll eat.  Ideally, you should do enough of it to get a little tired, and a little bit wishing you were done already, so that it doesn’t feel entirely like A Pleasant Rustic Playacting Adventure but instead you get inside the work of harvesting enough to get it that this is a job, an absolutely necessary job, and like all jobs, something that you sometimes just have to get done whether the spirit moves you or not.

I also highly recommend going out to pick when it is raining, or when the sun and/or the bugs are ferocious.  A little sunburn and eyes that have been stinging with sweat, a proper selection of insect bites, or a good goose-bumped chilled ride home with your goodies, will help you remember later on that the food does not arrive magically at the store or on your plate.  It’s about gratitude, and remembering that you have a bunch of people to thank for everything you eat that you weren’t personally responsible for growing and harvesting and transporting.

This morning, we went out in the rain to pick blackberries.  It was my Belovedary’s birthday yesterday, and he wanted to go berrying, and since we are neither of us sweet enough to melt and we planned to use the fruit immediately after we got it home, we figured picking in the wet would be okay.  Which it was.  It was quiet and lush and very, very wet, and we picked ten pounds of berries and got soaked to the skin.

We brought our berries home, along with some red raspberries and some peaches from the same you-pick, and set about making blackberry pie and blackberry sorbet.  The day being as warm and wet as it was, the pie crust completely refused to behave, but I’m of the school that says it can be ugly as long as it tastes good, so I persevered.  I even took a photo, because I recall some of you folks were curious about what a pie bird looks like in use.  This is what a pie bird looks like when it’s in an ugly, patchworky, lumpy blackberry pie.

We also ate several bowls of berries plain, between the two of us.  There’ll be no scurvy in this household anytime soon, that much is for sure.

With the rest, we made blackberry sorbet.  Blackberry puree, creme de gingembre, a little lime juice, a little agave syrup, a little slug of vanilla extract, and it’s the most lovely fruity mellow thing, with a great texture and a gorgeous color.

Tomorrow it’s back to work with both of us, but we’ll have sorbet and pie to look forward to when we get home, and that’s no small thing.

Do you recognize the objects in this picture?  They look a little like bean pods, don’t they?  Not the nicest bean pods, perhaps.  A little dried-out looking, a little brown and spotty. Probably not good to eat. Or are they?

The little hints of red you can see in there might be a clue as to what’s really going on here.  These aren’t way over-the-hill green beans, as it happens.  They’re kidney beans.  If you have never encountered shelling beans still in their pods, it can be a little startling to realize that they start their lives looking quite different to what we think of when we think about kidney beans, or black beans or flageolets, or any other kind of shelling bean.

They look so different, in their raw and completely unprocessed state, in fact, that many people won’t buy them, afraid that they won’t know what to do with them.  That’s more or less why I ended up with these: a greengrocer friend gave me heaps of them earlier today because they’d been sitting unloved in her coolers for several weeks.  Ironically, the very customers who had told my greengrocer friend how much they loved beans and how they wished they could buy fresh local beans from her had simply not bought them.

When my friend told me a week or so ago that the beans weren’t getting purchased, I said “I bet customers are freaked out by the way they look.  I bet they don’t know what to do with beans that have to be shelled.”  Seems that I was right.  Which is her loss, but my gain, and as a thank-you, I’m  writing this little shelling bean tutorial, so that next time she sells shelling beans, she can point people to a blog post that explains what to do with these unpromising little podlets.

What you do is quite simple.  You sit down with a bowl, and a bowl or bag to toss the empty shells in, and you pull apart the pods with your fingers.

The pods are pretty sturdy.  If they are on the dry side, they will be leathery or cardboardy in texture.  If they are just off the vines, they will be woody but flexible.  Usually all you have to do is pinch the bean to open the seams up, then split down one seam or the other (or both!) with your finger, taking the beans with you.

Discard any beans that are discolored, moldy, extremely shriveled, or extremely tiny.  Throw the shells into the trash or onto your compost pile.

When you’ve shelled them all, give them a good wash in a colander and let them drain for ten or fifteen minutes.

Shelling beans is a fairly quick process.  I know it sounds tedious, but really it doesn’t take long at all.  I shelled almost five quarts of beans in about 40 minutes today, while hanging out in the kitchen with my Belovedary.  That is a lot of beans.  But still not a lot of work.

It’s worth doing large batches of bean-shelling and bean-cooking when you have the time, so that then you will have the beans available when you want them.  Beans can be frozen directly after shelling and washing, or you can freeze them after you cook them.

To cook fresh beans, put them into a large heavy pot or a slow-cooker on the high setting with an equal volume of cold water.  Boil until they are nice and soft all the way through, but not mushy.

You can eat them as-is once they are thoroughly cooked, or use them in recipes, just as you would use canned cooked beans.

A note about kidney beans/red beans:  Red and white kidney beans are high in haemagglutins, a class of chemicals that can cause a form of usually nonfatal but highly unpleasant poisoning whose symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea.  The way to avoid it is thorough cooking of the beans.  A minimum of ten minutes in which the entire pot of beans is at or above the boiling point of water — 212F, or 100C — takes care of it.  This is why if you cook them in a slow-cooker, you should cook them on the higher heat setting, not the lower, and ensure that things do boil properly.

What has it got in its bucketses?  Let’s take a look!

Why, it’s a big bucket of scratch-and-dent stone fruits!  Nectarines, white peaches, yellow peaches, and Shiro yellow plums.

I didn’t think to start taking pictures until we were more than halfway done processing the fruit, but the bucket was originally almost full.  The fruit came from a friend who is a local business owner… it’s all locally grown fruit, but due to bruises, mold, and spots of rot, not stuff that our friend can sell.  She offered me a bucket of the stuff that would otherwise go on the compost heap if I thought I had a use for it.  I leapt at the chance.

Why?  Why would I want a huge bucket full of fruit that no one else would buy?  Fruit that lots of people I know would consider rather revolting, honestly, and discard as inedible?

Because even fruit that looks like it’s way over the hill is often well worth your time.  That’s why.  Not only is it frugal to just cut away the bad bits and use what’s still good, not only does it respect the fruit and the people whose effort went into growing it, but if I’m honest, it’s some of the best-tasting, most fully ripe fruit you’ll ever put in your mouth.  The Belovedary and I snuck an awful lot of tastes while we were converting that bucket of fruit into nearly 18 cups of peeled, pared chunks, and oh man was it delicious.

Besides, for a great many cooking applications, there is no need whatsoever that the fruit be cosmetically perfect or even close.  It’s probably my inner Midwesterner showing, but every time I encounter a recipe for jelly, jam, or chutney that begins with the instruction to “choose ripe, firm, unblemished fruit” I want to scream a little.  If you’re chunking the fruit up into small pieces anyway, cooking it into a puree–or even more pertinently, turning it into clarified juice for a jelly–there is not going to be anything left that will tell you whether the fruit was unblemished or not when you began.  It simply does not matter. Same goes if you’re making cobbler, crisp, fool, clafoutis, slump, brown betty, turnovers, strudel, pudding, fruit soup, or pie, for crying out loud.  So give your poor fruit growers a break.  Give yourself a break.  Use up what’s good, regardless of what it looks like or whether you have to cut away some mushy bits or cope with a bit of rot or mold.  It won’t hurt you.

I mean, just look at that gorgeous fruit.  I won’t lie, we were a little tempted to just grab spoons and dive in, but we thought nearly 18 cups of fruit might be a little much even for us, so instead…

It was time for the Old Black Rum.  I added a cup of spiced black rum, and a little bit of water, and put the fruit into my ginormous off-brand slow-cooker (slow cookers are your friend when it’s hot, as it can do low/slow cooking without heating up the house).

In due time, this will all collapse into a puree… and eventually, by dint of cooking it forever with the lid off at a low temperature, into a rich, delicious, lightly spiced, nicely thick fruit butter.  Which at some point later in the week, when the weather (I hope and pray) breaks a little, I will pack into jars and seal in a hot-water bath.

Then, this winter, when memories are all we have of fresh stone fruit, we can bust out the Scratch And Dent Stone Fruit Butter, and eat and be happy.  Not bad, for a bucket of throwaway fruit.

One week until my book is due.  I picked us some liles and sea holly from the garden and put them in an old mustard jar on the kitchen windowsill so we’d have something pretty to look at.

I believe I mentioned that I have a book due on July 15, and am consequently in what we refer to as Book Deathmarch.

This, consequently, is what the interior of my fridge looks like right now.

My household has been eating, this past week, mostly courtesy of what’s been found in the freezer and the garden.  Right now in the fridge there are two packages of seasoned tofu, two bottles of beer, some garlic scape pesto, half a dozen eggs, a chicken carcass waiting to be turned into soup (that’s the plastic box), a quarter of a container of soymilk, Vitamin D liquid, some olives, some miso, some garlic, and the Magic Forest of Pickled Peppers And Other Condiments.  Oh, and pint of cream because I keep meaning to make caramels for someone and it keeps not happening.  There are some breadcumbs in there too, and almond meal, popcorn, and, in the plastic baggie you can see just poking out of the door, some salt cod.  The rest of the door shelves contain condiments of all sorts, from pomegranate molasses to four kinds of mustard.  And the cat’s insulin.

The cupboard is also starting to look a little less like its usual self.  There’s a big hole where several bags of dried beans used to be, the muesli stocks are pretty much gone, there’s no more peanut butter.  Even the tea cupboard has some wide open spaces in it, a state of affairs so rare as to be shocking.

It’s kind of an interesting challenge to feed yourself and your household when the fridge mostly holds condiments and not many things with which one could reasonably use same.  It strikes me that this task might be easier and less stressful if I just went out and did the hunting and gathering.  I guess I’ll have to carve out some time and do that.

It’s been so hot here, and so dry, the kind of weather we usually don’t see until August. Unbroken 90F or better for more than a week now, and no rain at all. It’s hard on the gardens, and on the gardeners. I water every day, carrying buckets of water from the rain barrels to the beds, because it’s the most efficient way of getting water where it’s needed — I have no desire to waste my water on the grass, or on the drought-tolerant plants. Especially since the hydrangeas are barely hanging in there (you see the heat-related leaf droop in the photo above, and it was only 9 am!) and need the water more than, say, the day lilies.

That said, I’ve been managing to keep things looking pretty green, and growing relatively well. I went out this morning first thing to cut grass and do weeding before it got too hot to work. Before I went in again, an hour and forty five minutes later, I decided it might be time for pictures.

The magic beanstalks have begun producing beans. So far just a few, which I have happily eaten right there in the yard. They’re extraordinary when picked small and eaten raw, with a vibrant, incredibly lush sweet flavor. It’s a treat you only get if you grow them, and one of the best arguments I know for keeping a garden.

Shiny happy brassicas holding hands. Brussels sprouts and broccoli and gai lan and yu choy. You can also see some tomato on the far left and chard on the far right. Some of the gai lan and yu choy are being allowed to bolt and self-sow for a fall crop.

The pumpkins have an extremely vigorous will to live. They are basically taking over a quarter of the back yard, which I am carefully not watering so the grass won’t grow much… since there’s no way to mow around and between all those vines.

Pumpkins At Work!

Cucumbers, purslane, long beans, and the Forest of Herbs. Now that the dill’s going to seed it’s thinner-looking over there. Purslane is often considered a weed, but it’s actually a wonderful vegetable. I grow it on purpose and eat it often. It grows back very quickly, it’s actually hard to keep up with it. It’s extremely nutritious, and tasty.

Cucumber blossoms.

The volunteer long bean plants (I grew them in this spot last year intentionally, and some came back to visit again) are blooming. I love their delicate lavender blossoms. Some varieties have pale blue blooms, others white.

The tomatoes have begun to set some fruit, particularly the paste tomatoes. The peppers are starting to bloom. The eggplants are doing their thing, and beginning to set fruit as well. Soon there will be lots of fruit in the garden. And the kitchen.

I’m dining alone tonight, my Belovedary down at Camden Yards watching the Orioles lose.  It’s a nice night for it.

Dining alone can be a challenge.  Even I sometimes get tempted not to bother cooking if it’s just me, especially when I am, as I am tonight, working late on a deadline.

I try, though, to do it anyway.  Gently, as a kindness, and not grumpily and rushed as if it were an insult to have to get some food into edible condition for my own continued upkeep.

The summer’s first slim zucchini, gently sauteed in olive oil with plenty of garlic and a pinch or so of dried crushed marjoram and oregano.  That’s the secret of zucchini that is meltingly tender but not disintegrating: slow, gentle sauteeing, not too much movement in the pan, use enough oil, and let things brown just a little to bring out the sweetness and provide a tiny bit of structurally crucial crust.

Eggs scrambled over a low heat with a couple handfuls of thinly chopped fat ends of sweet new green onions mixed in.

Salt, pepper, a glass of cold, smooth, friendly Vouvray that’s almost too sweet for this meal.

Here’s to solitude.

I’m not a gadgety cook. I own a food processor, a rice cooker, and an electric stand mixer, and sometimes use them. I use my dishwasher and my electric kettle frequently. But my microwave oven primarily serves as a breadbox. I’ve dispensed with my electric waffle iron because I realized it spent two years unused.  Even my crockpot mostly lives in its box, tucked up between the cabinet-tops and the ceiling, because honestly, I own a big heavy enameled cast iron stewpot and it works just fine.

Sometimes I wish I were gadgetier. Sometimes people give me cooking-related gifts and they are usually of the gadget class. I love getting them. They’re the kinds of things I circle in in cookware catalogs when I am indulging a fantasy kitchen shopping spree. So when I get them my glee is genuine. But the honeymoons are sadly short, because I realize pretty quickly that I just don’t use them. A few years ago I received a gorgeous streamlined art-deco-ish electric panini grill as a gift. I was utterly delighted to be the owner of such a soignee chunk of well-engineered kitchen technology, too, until it had hunkered on my counter for about six months and I just hadn’t been able to come up with enough uses for the damn thing to justify giving up that much counter space. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I made an effort to cook things that I could cook with it. I used it to fry bacon, but I don’t eat bacon all that often. I used it for its intended purpose, making grilled sandwiches, but I don’t eat those very often either. And to be honest, it didn’t perform quite as well as my old, well-worn cast-iron pans. I even went to the extent of cooking boneless chicken breasts in it, although neither of us like boneless chicken breasts very much.

However, owning an object does not magically make you use it.  No matter how badly I wanted to be the kind of person who had a sophisticated panini press in her kitchen and used it all the time to crank out effortless elegant European grilled sandwiches for her friends, it simply didn’t fit in to the way I cook.  I am not an effortless elegant European sandwich kind of girl.  I am a Chinese dumpling kind of girl, and a mess of beans kind of girl, and a stir-frying kind of girl, and a huge bowls of leafy greens kind of girl, and from time to time even a classical-French-braised-dish kind of girl (I do make a mean coq au vin). But into none of these scenarios do elegant European grilled sandwiches come in to play.  Eventually I gave the panini grill to a friend who is much more the effortless elegant European lunchy-type than I, and she is by all reports very happy with it.

The kitchen gadgets I use most often tend to be things that I don’t think other people even think of as “gadgets.” They’re not even very gadget-y. They’re just things that make good kitchen tools, and perform very very well in the roles in which I use them. They’re mostly little, unglamorous, and inexpensive, and while I inherited one of them, I have never received anything in this line as a gift and probably never will. Why not? Well, a dollar box of wire hairpins does not exactly make a splash as a hostess gift.

U-bend metal hairpins are the best cherry pitters around, at least if you’re only doing a pie’s worth or so. They also work pretty well on ripe olives (they’re not sturdy enough for use on green olives) and for hulling strawberries. You can buy a package of a hundred for about a dollar at a beauty supply store, and that will last you years and years.

Of similar utility, and only slightly more expensive, are thin metal small-bowled baby-food spoons. You will use these to hull strawberries too, but also to put stuffings into mushroom caps and deviled eggs, to scoop the innards out of cherry tomatoes (so you can stuff them later, natch), to portion perfect little blobs of garnishes onto things, and so on. I inherited this one. It was a giveaway from the Gerber baby food company (note wee chubby babyface on handle) aeons ago when my parents were in diapers. I can’t remember if this was my mom’s or my dad’s, but I’ve seen similar spoons available in baby-supply depots so I know you can still buy them. You have to look harder now, though, since people seem altogether mad for baby spoons coated in plastic these days. But they’re out there.

There are always several packets of bamboo skewers kicking around my kitchen drawers. Not the big behemoths you use on the grill. Little ones about the diameter of a ballpoint pen ink tube, or thinner. You will use these forever, for everything from testing the doneness of cakes to skewering shut a stuffed fish or chicken cavity to making sure your bacon cooks up flat if you need it to (thread uncooked bacon onto skewer so it lies flat, cook, remove skewer, there you go — works on squid and such, too). Think of them as heavy-duty toothpicks that give you a little extra reach so you don’t singe your fingers. And if you are the kind of cook who goes in for Extreme Decorating of food, I hear these are very useful for positioning things and making perfect little pointillist renderings with the gravy and such.

These flat-nose pliers were made for beading and wirework, but their small form factor, spring-loaded handles, and light weight make them perfect for kitchen use. If you don’t keep pliers in your kitchen you might not think you’d use them, but trust me, if you have them, you will. Boning fish becomes not trivial, but certainly a lot easier when you have the right tool. These pliers’ jaws are slightly ridged inside, so they have an excellent grip on slippery little bones. They’re also fantastic for removing pin feathers from birds and chores of that nature. Cracking small things open, like cardamom pods, is also easy with a pair of good pliers.

These are the kinds of “gadgets” that actually get used in my kitchen. Few of the tools that I find end up in my hand on a regular basis are single-use tools; nearly everything doubles up. I even use my metal measuring spoons for more than measuring. Their thin, sharp, stiff blades mean that they are excellent for coring fruits and vegetables. The teaspoon measure is a great cucumber seeder, the tablespoon works on halved apples and pears. Small sieves remove the pulp and seeds from citrus juice and also let me sprinkle uniform unclumpy dustings of powdered sugar on top of desserts.

But for all that I so rarely use them, I don’t look down on single-use tools. They just have to be the right ones.  I was delighted when my grandmother gave me her vintage 1940′s mechanical plunger-style cherry pitter — if you’re preparing 20 quarts of cherries for canning, you really don’t want to have to pit every single one with a hairpin. (A pie’s worth, on the other hand, isn’t enough cherries to justify having to wash and dry the rather complicated workings of the cherry pitter. That’s where the hairpin comes in handy.)

And I do own a couple of pie birds.  (This one was a gift.)  Pie birds are made of ceramic and they have one purpose in life.  It is a humble one but an important one.  You bake them into your fruit pie, with their  beaks poking up through the top crust (yes, that’s why they’re often glazed in black: four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie) so that the steam from the boiling filling can escape without your pie turning into a volcano of fruit magma and oozing out and, inevitably, over the lip of the pie pan and onto the floor of your oven where it will burn into foul-smelling, difficult-to-remove, carbonized awfulness.

Pie birds are hollow, you see.  And they have a little hole in their beaks.  The steam comes out through the hole.  And they’re kind of cute, poking up pertly through the center of your pie like they do.  They are excellent at doing the one thing they do. There is nothing else I know of that works as well at doing that thing–cutting vents in the crust helps but is not as reliable.  And it is a thing I periodically require to be done in my kitchen.

Every so often someone asks me what tools I find most indispensible in the kitchen.  Usually  I have tried to answer by giving a list of actual items.  Having just written this, I think I have a new answer to that question.  The most indispensible tools in the kitchen are the things that earn their keep.

I admire Michael Ruhlman for several reasons, only one of which is that he has the good sense to continue to live in our shared and quite wonderful home town.  I also admire him for his attitudes about home cooking and about the tendency of modern food writers to tout “quick and easy” recipes whose primary virtue is not how they taste or how nutritious they are but how little time and energy they require.  Ruhlman recently waxed eloquent and a little bit righteously wrathful on the topic at the International Assocation of Culinary Professionals conference in Portland, Oregon, causing a bit of kerfuffle in the foodie blogosphere.

I may well be preaching to the choir here, but Mr. Ruhlman is  right.  We have time for the things that we make time for.  We all get the same 24 hours in a day, and there is no secret confraternity of special chefly people who are magically given extra time in which to cook.

As someone who cooks privately and sometimes professionally, I find it offensive when someone tells me they “just don’t have the time” to cook.  Really?  You are rushing about the world doing things that are so crucial, so vital to the ongoing functioning of the universe as we know it, that you don’t have time to do the work necessary to put food into your own belly?  What, pray tell, are you up to?  Is that the cure for cancer you have tucked into your handbag?  Perhaps a solution to the economic crisis has presented itself to you and you are spending all your waking hours communicating it to world leaders?  No?

I submit that if you have the time to read this blog post, you have the time to cook a meal.   Seriously, an omelet and a quick green salad take about as long to prepare as it does to read these words. If you have the time to read your RSS feed or cruise through your blogroll, you have the time it takes to do something a little more complicated — cube some tofu and cut up some veggies for a stir-fry, truss a chicken and get it in the oven to roast, whatever moves you.  And if you have the time to sit on your firm but pliant arse and watch Tony Bourdain or Paula Deen or whoever for an hour at a stretch?  Yeah.  Don’t bullshit me about how busy you are.

Let me break this down a little further.  We are animals.  Like other animals, we have two basic things we have to do in order to survive as individuals, and we add a third if we want to survive as a species.  We have to breathe and we have to eat.  If we want to survive as a species we have to reproduce.  That’s the real bottom line, those three things.  Those are the things we do not have a choice about: we must make time for them.

Certainly you can make choices about whether you want to eat well or eat poorly, whether you want to control what goes into the food you eat or whether you trust other people to make those choices for you.  You can decide which upsets you more, the idea of having to carve some time out from your schedule to prepare some food for yourself or the idea of never really knowing exactly what mystery substances might have been introduced into the prepared food you so blithely and obediently cram into your oh-so-busy face.   You can choose to make time to feed yourself in ways that provide you with aesthetic satisfaction, or in ways that give you particularly customized nutrition, ways that educate you or challenge you or comfort you or that do all those things and more.  Or you can choose to make only enough time to feed yourself in ways that stop you from feeling hunger pangs for the time being, but nothing more.

I understand that not everyone finds food terribly interesting.  Okay, so I don’t understand that, but I do know that it’s true.  Likewise, I am aware that not everyone enjoys cooking.  (My mother doesn’t and never has.)  And to be sure not everyone has a knack for cooking, just as not everyone has a talent for playing the piano or making small talk at parties.

But everyone can manage some basics. And everyone should.   Cooking makes you responsible for yourself in a very primal way.  It makes you accountable for some of the work that is required to keep you alive from minute to minute and day to day.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask of people.

There’s a Zen teaching that I love that goes like this:

A monk said to Joshu, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.”

“Have you eaten your rice porridge?” asked Joshu.

“Yes, I have,” replied the monk.

“Then you had better wash your bowl,” said Joshu.

With this the monk gained insight.

There are a lot of levels here, and certainly serious students of Zen would be capable of elaborating on a lot more meanings than I could ever hope to draw from this koan.  But among the things I take from this is that part of being a reasonably enlightened human being, by which I mean someone who is aware of and accountable for  hirself and how hir actions fit into the world, is being conscious of and taking reasonable responsibility for the things that are necessary for our continued existence.

If we have eaten from a bowl, the bowl will then need to be cleaned so we can eat again later.

We could throw the bowl away, but that doesn’t solve the problem.  A new bowl would have to be made, because eating is mandatory.

We could make another person clean out bowl for us, but that suggests that we are above doing such things, while another is not, although neither of us is above eating so how could it be true that either of us is above doing the things that have to be done so that eating can take place?

We could stop eating from bowls, and eat with our hands, I suppose.  But that still leaves the problem of the knives and pans and pots.

We could dispense with the knives and pans and pots, and eat food as it comes from plants and animals.  Which still leaves the problem of getting the foodstuffs in the first place.

What I’m trying to say here is this: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

It takes work to keep you alive.

Washing your bowl–or filling it with food in the first place–is not a waste of time.  It’s as important as any of the other things you could do, such as seeking teachings in the case of the monk.

Washing your bowl, emptying your bowl, filling your bowl, it’s the same thing.  The same crucial human thing.  It’s the work that life is.

And yes, you do have the time to do that.

I realized the other day that I almost never hear anyone talk about dusting.

Astonishing, really, when you think about it.  People tend to have so much stuff in their houses, in their spaces, in their lives, and so much of it is, let’s face it, stuff that we don’t use all that often.  I try to be reasonably tidy and efficient about the material objects in my household, but even I end up with stacks of things — mostly papers, notes, mail, and books — that aren’t being used but also haven’t been put away properly.  And they do get dusty, given enough time, for values of “enough” that equal “fairly little, actually.”

That’s not to mention all the things that seem to get dusty the instant they enter your house.  Any sort of cable that dangles in loops or lies on a shelf or the floor is, I think, required by law to collect its weight in dust rhinos and cat-hair tumbleweeds within a week.  Bottom bookshelves are covered by a similar statute.  And any piece of electronic equipment that is not a laptop computer will attract dust to its surface instantaneously.

This all happens much faster if you have forced-air heating, or central air conditioning.  I do not care for forced-air heating and am only grudgingly accepting of central air con.  Mostly I do not like them because their primary purpose appears to me to be to dispense temperature-controlled air from floor level, moving whatever dirt and dust and shed bits of one’s epidermis and jettisoned hairs and tiny particles of cat litter and God knows what else from floor level up into the air.  I am sure that no one will cop to it, but I am equally sure that this entire system was designed to ensure a reliable and consistent deposition of dust on all surfaces.  I further note that I feel that entropy does a perfectly adequate job of dust distribution and does not in fact need the help.   Like a cat, I enjoy a good old-fashioned steam radiator. Much better than holes in the floor that issue conveniently pre-warmed dust.

I dust most of my house every couple of weeks.  Sometimes I do it every week, particularly during pollen season.  I can’t be the only person who does.  But I feel like I am.  No one talks about dusting, at least no one I know.  I occasionally see commercials on the TVs at the gym for things like disposable electrostatic dusters, or spritzes and sprays for dusting with.  But while my friends will commisserate with me and with each other about laundry — a perennially popular whinge — and about organizational troubles such as closet-cleaning or filing, no one talks about dusting, not even to gripe about it.  I find this odd, and a little disconcerting.

I am fond of dusting.  I like to get a clean old sock, or some pieces of old, well-worn, soft, laundered T-shirt, and run them over every surface in the house.  It’s got a bit of an air of reunion about it, dusting does, as I pick up all the various small bits from the mantel in the living room or the top of the chest of drawers just outside the bathroom door and renew my acquaintance with each one.  Sometimes when I dust the bookshelves I find books I’ve been looking for recently, but for some reason couldn’t spot when I was trying to find them, only when I wasn’t.  Now and then I find things I forgotten about completely, and when that isn’t annoying as hell, it can be delightful.

Dusting is satisfyingly instant in its reward.  Dust something and it is, with almost embarrassing ease, palpably clean.  It may not stay that way forever, but it does stay that way long enough that you can dust a room, then stand with your hands on your hips and survey your domain with pleasure, serenely confident that whatever else could be said of your parlor (or wherever), it cannot be said to be dusty.

Dustcloths, too, are satisfying.  You can see what you’ve done.  I’ve always thought that those  nose-pore-cleaning peel-off sticking plasters must have been invented by someone who really understood the visceral reward of looking at your dust-cloth to see just how mightily you have cleaned something.  (The nose-pore-cleaning strips are never, ever as good as dust-rags, though.  I think it’s a problem of scale.  Also they tend to leave bits of crusty adhesive on your skin.)  Just having a room look tidier or glossier or neater isn’t really enough.  Lord Chief Justice Hewart understood: “Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.”  The beauty of the dust-rag is in its evidence.

I cannot be the only one who thinks so.