Author Archives: Samantha

Whodunits and the Untidiness of Real Life

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I like mysteries, both novels and television shows. I am particularly fond of mysteries with a strong “whodunit” element. This isn’t surprising. I love all sorts of puzzles. So naturally when I read a mystery, I want a chance to figure out what happened before the detective does.
Some fictional detectives are particularly good at deducing facts from the crime scene or from the way that suspects present themselves. Sherlock Holmes is famous for his deductions. Even detectives less sharp than Sherlock often draw clever conclusions from little clues–the unfinished cup of tea, the jar of pens on the left side of the desk, the two dirty glasses in the sink.
It’s particularly fun when the fictional detective suddenly realizes the importance of a clue seen earlier, and the reader sees what triggered his realization, without being told what he has finally figured out. In one episode of “Death In Paradise,” for example, Detective Richard Poole opens the blinds onto a sunny Caribbean day and … Aha! It’s time to gather the suspects. And time for the audience to figure out what the detective has just realized.
But there is something that troubles me slightly when it comes to making deductions from the scene of the crime. In real life, there are all sorts of reasons why objects may be left or arranged the way they are—reasons that no outsider could possibly guess.
Consider this photo.
 

Desk, partially tidied up.

What might a detective make of it? The computer mouse is on the left, but the pencil jar is on the right, as are most of the loose pens. Here are a few possibilities:
  1. The victim is right-handed, but the left-handed murderer stopped to check a file on the victim’s computer, moving the mouse to the left side for convenience.
  2. The victim is left-handed, and the murderer has moved the pencil jar—though it’s harder to explain this answer. Was he searching all the items on the desk for something? Or just trying to find a pen that works?
  3. The victim is right-handed but uses her mouse with her left.
  4. The victim is left-handed but rarely uses pens, so pushed them all out of the way (but then why aren’t they all neatly in the jar?)
The answer is (3). I started mousing with my left when I was having problems with my right wrist. By the time my wrist was better, I had gotten good at it. When I tried putting the mouse back on the right, I discovered something interesting. Since the number pad is on the right of the keyboard, if I put the mouse on the right while centering the letters in front of me, I am forced to extend my arm further out to the side to use the mouse than if I give the job to my left hand. So most of the time, I mouse left-handed.
(What else can you deduce from this photo? I’m curious.)
When detectives make their clever deductions from the scene, they do so against a background of expectations. They assume the victim would not carry around someone else’s lost earring in her pocket and accidentally drop it on the rug. They assume a person doesn’t make herself a pot of tea and then leave it undrunk simply because she had a sudden (but otherwise meaningless) attack of heartburn. If medicine is on the bathroom counter, they would assume the victim had used or planned to use it, rather than that she was making a half-hearted attempt to clean out the medicine cabinet. (People in mysteries are much tidier than I am.)
I love to read mysteries with clever deductions, and I love to guess at what the clues mean, just as the detective in the novel does. But I must admit that when we do so, we are both assuming a world without people’s quirks and particular histories. I wonder if someone has written a mystery that acknowledges this fact?
(On an unrelated note, it is annoying when an author gets his facts wrong. Ellery Queen mysteries are great at letting the reader try to puzzle things out, but in one, there is a colorblind valet. The valet’s master knows this, so he writes “red tie” on the list of what he is wearing that week when he wants the valet to pick out a green one, and vice versa. This not only misunderstands colorblindness—red and green would both have looked vaguely beige-y, I think—but it doesn’t even make sense. If the valet could reliably distinguish red from green–no matter how his subjective experience of them differed from other people’s–he would have learned to label “red” those things that other people called “red” and so on. Fortunately, the solution did not turn out to depend on this.)
Till next post.

The Hows and Why of My Mini-baguettes–making French bread just because…

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Recently I’ve been inspired to make bread.

Usually the only bread I make is sandwich bread. We have a Zojirushi bread machine, and I love it. Bread is easy to make, tasty–the only disadvantage compared to store bread is having to slice it. Like Jacob Two-Two, I seem unable to cut a slice of bread that isn’t “a foot thick on one end and thin as a sheet of paper on the other.”

I think what happened is that I watched one too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show. This led to a couple of failed attempts at ciabatta. I blame this partly on the jar of yeast, partly on our oven’s inaccurate temperature readings and… well, the rest is mine. But making the ciabatta reminded me of the class my husband and I took, years ago, in bread-making.

We had actually signed up because I was interested in using different kinds of flour in my bread-machine sandwich breads, but the class turned out to be focused instead on mixing, raising, shaping, and baking types of French bread  (and also some sourdough.) It was a good class, and when I saw that one of our instructors had written a book with all her bread-making knowledge (she was studying bread in graduate school), I naturally bought the book. Bread Science, by Emily Buehler.

The book.

Here I must admit that I have only read parts of it so far. She goes into extensive detail about how bread works. I was interested to learn that the bubbles of gas in the dough are created by mixing–yeast can only enlarge the bubbles, not create new ones. I picked the book up again this week and re-read the sections about mixing, raising, shaping, etc. Then I tried to make the basic bread recipe, which uses a poolish.

A poolish, as we learned in that long-ago class, is a kind of preferment. As in “pre-ferment”. As in, something you make before you actually mix the dough and start the first rise. You take some of the flour, some of the water, and a pinch of the yeast and let the mixture rise overnight, basically. Then you mix that in with the rest of the flour, water, yeast, and salt. The point is to increase the flavor.

The poolish, before it increased in volume.

See the scale in the photo? I love my scale for all sorts of baking. Also, it can read in either grams or ounces. Very handy if you are trying to follow a British recipe, or a very precise American recipe.

I remember that the dough we mixed in class was on the sticky side, but my first run-through turned out incredibly wet dough. I reread the recipe and saw that she had warned that less water is needed in humid weather. Hmm, summer in the South… but then, air conditioning… but still at least 50% humidity… For the second batch, I reduced the amount of water and got a dough that was sticky but manageable.

The dough, before the first rise (I think).

Then two rises, a “pre-shape”, and finally, time to make baguettes. Or in this case, given that I was making a half-batch and had only a regular size cookie sheet, two mini-baguettes.

The mini-baguettes before proofing.

I did not bake them on my pizza stone, nor did I do anything much toward creating steam in the oven. I was still pretty pleased with the way they tasted and their shape. Maybe next time I’ll work on creating a better crust.

The finished bread.

So that’s the “how” of my recent bread-making. The other question is “Why?” Why go to all this trouble when I am fortunate enough to live very near a co-op that has an excellent bakery? (Note: this is where we took the bread class in the first place.)

As I said earlier, I don’t normally make bread apart from easy sandwich bread in the bread machine. I have good reason to make that–supermarket sandwich bread doesn’t taste nearly as good, and while I can get good sandwich bread at the co-op, I have more options if I make it at home. That’s a bit like sewing my own grocery bag or mini-backpack, where I am customizing it according to my own needs and preferences. But when I make French bread, I’m not trying to create something different and personalized–I’m trying to make it as French-bread-like as I can.

So why make French bread?

The answer has to be–to see if I can. Or, because it’s an interesting challenge. Apparently it falls into that category of things which I do just because it is fun to exercise one’s skills. (Crossword puzzles, for instance, or rudimentary juggling.) I suppose if I then got creative with the shaping (braids, crowns, bread alligators) then it would turn into an expression of creativity as well.

So what is the point of this whole post, besides a chance to show off photos of my lovely mini-baguettes? Just that it is a lot of fun to take on a challenge, to exercise skills (must try the ciabatta again), even when it isn’t also an expression of individual creativity.

So go forth and exercise some skills. And eat French bread.

Till next post.

"A Little Princess"–self-discipline, kindness, and imagination…and a bit of moral luck

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Even if you have already read the book A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it is well worth re-reading. I picked it up again this past week to check a quotation and kept finding more and more to like in it.

 For starters, the book is full of lively descriptions. Sara’s wardrobe is enviable, with dancing frocks of rose gauze, petticoats with lace frills, and “velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs.” (14) There are comfortable rooms, with pleasant fires in the grate and soft chairs in which to sit, furnished with books and pictures and “curious things from India”. Later, we find ourselves in rooms in the bare and unwelcoming attic, with hard beds and whitewash flaking off the walls–but such a view of the sky and roofs! Sara herself provides lavishly imagined scenes through her story-telling–laughing merbabies with stars in their hair, fields full of fragrant lilies in heaven, and a sumptuous (though imaginary) feast.

But a story needs more than description, and A Little Princess has more. It has its heroine, Sara Crewe. When the story begins, Sara has just arrived in London from India, the only child of a doting and very rich father. But she is very far from the stereotype of a spoiled rich brat. She is well-mannered, kind-hearted, and very much in control of herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a particular point of the importance of self-control, and we see how Sara manages to restrain herself from unkind or ill-mannered responses, even when she has been much provoked. We admire her for it, and are delighted at how infuriated Lavinia or Miss Minchin is at being faced with such composure and steadfast good manners.

The restraint is not some magical innate goodness, but an effort that Sara makes–sometimes quite a difficult effort.

“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage […] It must be remembered that she had been very deeply absorbed in the book about the Bastille, and she had had to recall several things very rapidly when she realized that she must go and take care of her adopted child. She was not an angel, and she was not fond of Lavinia.” (59-61)

Sara reminds herself that she is pretending to be a princess.

“If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages.” (62) 

Her imagination helps her with the difficult work of self-control.

Sara’s imagination makes her an appealing heroine because she uses it to tell stories to herself and to others. It draws the other children to her (in a world without videos or internet, a storyteller is much valued). Her imagination also helps her through hardships, as she can imagine more pleasant surroundings for herself–or if that is just too hard, she can pretend she is part of some dramatic and romantic story. Rather than living in a dreary attic, she is a prisoner in the Bastille, with Becky as the prisoner in the next cell.

Because Sara is so good at imagining how things might be different, she is also struck by the role of luck in her life. As she speaks with Becky the scullery-maid, she says,

“Why… we are just the same–I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!” (53)

At another point, she tells her friend Ermengarde,

“Things happen to people by accident.[…] A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. it just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? […] Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.” (36)

Of course, when her trials do come, she acquits herself admirably, but we can still puzzle over the role of luck (especially moral luck) in nature and in nurture, and wonder how one person comes to be so patient and determined, while another is self-centered and spiteful.

Sara’s strength and imagination would not make her nearly so appealing if they were not accompanied by great kindness. Sara is kind to the younger children and sympathetic to anyone who is suffering, whether they are suffering from hunger or from humiliation. We want Sara to flourish and be happy–she so deserves it.

I have two last remarks about this book. First, the movie they made of it some while back (set in America) makes a complete mess of it. It mistakes the crucial point. It is not the case that “all little girls are princesses”, as I believe Sara is made to say in the movie. It is true that being a princess is not a matter of wealth or birth or beauty, but Lavinia, for example, is clearly not a princess because she does not behave like a princess. She is neither kind nor well-mannered when things don’t go her way.

The second remark is that this is an old book, and while Sara’s kindness extends to all beings, the book still reflects to some extent some of the attitudes of its time and place. It is worth keeping in mind, but should not stop anyone from reading it.