Professor Butter Beard and Norman Rockwell’s “How To Diet”
“Being a great baker and pastry chef requires the utmost open mind. I try every dessert that comes my way!” — Christina Tosi, chef owner of “Milk Bar”
“Why don’t you weigh 8000 pounds?” I must be asked that question at least twice a week. My goodness! If I ate every single one of my morning meditation bakes, I would be an immobile reality show nightmare episode. Luckily, I live with a hyperactive hound, my neighbors are constantly hungry, my hostess gifts are always baked, and I learned one of my greatest lessons from my chef guru Neil: “Michael, one must learn to taste and not just consume.” I love him.
This lesson is challenged every recipe research season. The first falling leaf sends me into a cozy sofa corner with a stack of baking books ready to be marked with sticky notes as I conjure my lists of Thanksgiving and December holiday cakes and cookies. I want to try them all. And then my karma kicks in and a clever friend sends me one of Norman Rockwell’s “Saturday Evening Post” covers depicting a overly plump pastry chef who in fact has tried them all! I go back to tasting in my mind and dreams and am thankful that I absolutely do, in fact, love carrots.
Norman Percevel Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in New York City, and trained as a painter at the Chase School of Fine Art, the National Academy, the Art Students’ League and a Paris school, the Académie Colarossi. At just 19, he became the art editor for “Boys' Life,” published by the Boy Scouts of America. He held the job for three years during which he painted several covers, beginning with his first published magazine cover, “Scout at Ship's Wheel,” which appeared on the “Boys' Life” September 1913 edition.
When Norman was 21, his family moved to New Rochelle, New York, and he shared a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who worked for “The Saturday Evening Post.” From the 1920s to the 1960s, “The Saturday Evening Post” was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines within the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached two million homes every week. With Forsythe's help, Rockwell submitted his first successful cover painting to the Post in 1916, “Mother's Day Off,” published on May 20th of that same year. Ultimately, Rockwell published 323 original covers for “The Saturday Evening Post” over 47 years.
Paul Johnson, historian and journalist, writes: “Rockwell was an unusually simple, humble, unpretentious and unaggressive man, who delighted in draftsmanship and all the procedures of painting – picking the subject, finding the location, choosing models, preliminary sketches and photographs, changing the composition in the lights of drawings and oil sketches, and working on the actual finished painting itself.”
Forced to meet exacting publishing schedules, Rockwell learned to discipline himself to a degree that Johnson calls “unusual in artists.” His output of paintings was enormous covering the entire spectrum of early to mid-twentieth-century American life. He painted the souls of the middle class depicting all types of trades and professions: barbers, chefs, railroad men, schoolteachers, factory workers, editors, solders and marines, sailors and shopkeepers, politicians and clerks, garage mechanics and students, clergymen and sometimes even fellow artists.
A custodianship of his original paintings and drawings was established in 1969 near his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Norman Rockwell Museum’s collection includes more than 700 original Rockwell paintings, drawings, and studies and also hosts traveling exhibitions pertaining to American illustration. As a pastry chef in the Berkshires, I spent many an evening with friends at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge surrounded by the delicious aura of Rockwell. Even the menu reflects the well-known Rockwell images that dance in our minds – especially around the holidays.
This week I was inspired to experiment with my favorite Thanksgiving flavors – corn, bacon and rosemary. I re-imagined them in a dream, and daringly combined them in a butter-rich pound cake accented with nutmeg, lime, and the sweet sour of Greek yoghurt. I even doubled the recipe and baked sixteen additional mini pound cakes as thank you gifts for my farmers at the Sunday morning market. I believe eating one mini could be considered a “taste” that may bring a satisfied smile to Rockwell’s chubby chef and a bear hug from Chef Neil.
Fresh Corn Pound Cakes with Bacon and Rosemary
Three loaf cakes
1 ½ cups fresh corn kernels (scraped from three ears of fresh corn)
6 slices of bacon, cut into ½” pieces
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
3 Tbsp fresh rosemary leaves, coarsely chopped
Juice and zest of 1 lime
12 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
3 cups white sugar
6 large eggs, room temperature
4 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp kosher salt
Ground pepper to taste
1 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
1 ½ cups Greek yoghurt
1 Tbsp vanilla paste
1) Scrape the kernels from three ears of corn into a medium bowl.
2) Add the 2 Tbsp oil to a medium sauté pan, add the bacon pieces and cook until bacon has rendered its fat and is turning crisp. Stir in the corn kernels and stir to mix. Cover with a lid and simmer for five minutes. Remove from the heat and return the mixture to the medium bowl. Add the chopped rosemary and the juice of the lime. Stir to combine.
3) Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
4) Spray three loaf pans with cooking spray and then insert a piece of parchment paper to cover the bottom and up and over the sides by one inch.
5) Whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, ground pepper, lime zest and freshly grated nutmeg.
6) Cream the butter and sugar in a standing mixer 4-5 minutes until butter is light and fluffy. Reduce the speed to low and add the eggs, 1 egg at a time. Add the vanilla paste.
7) On low, add 1/3 of the dry mix, then half of the yoghurt, 1/3 of the dry mix, remaining yoghurt and finish with the final 1/3 of the dry mix.
8) Fold in the bacon/corn mixture.
9) Divide the batter into the three pans.
10) Bake the cakes until a wooden skewer comes out clean – roughly 50-60 minutes.
11) Cool the cakes in their pans on a wire rack.
