Professor Butter Beard and Vincent’s “French Novels and Rose”
“I’d wish that everyone had what I’m gradually beginning to acquire, the ability to read a book easily and quickly and to retain a strong impression of it. Reading books is like looking at paintings: without doubting, without hesitating, with self-assurance, one must find beautiful that which is beautiful.” – Vincent writing to his brother Theo, August 5th, 1881
I’m addicted to books. There, I’ve said it.
Books are everywhere within my home. One wall is completely smothered with my international cookbook collection. Another wall hugs my European and art history reference books. There are two more bookshelves specifically appointed for my baking library. And then there are the stacks of the “currently reading,” the “plan to read during the semester break,” and the “fully intend to read this year” stacks waiting like a field of snowdrops ready to gloriously bloom at the first hint of spring.
I have been known to disappear during dinner parties at other friends’ homes, gravitating like a magnet to their own personal libraries, scouring through the titles, absorbing them into an internal ever-growing reading list in my head. And yes, I may have snapped a photograph or two of your own personal collection between the dinner and dessert course.
I’m fascinated by what others choose to read. It’s almost like seeing the spark in a student’s eye when one image on the screen finally speaks the same language as their soul. What influenced them? Was it Tolkien? Dickens? Neil Gaiman? Possibly Ken Follett? Or maybe Steven King or Clive Barker?
And then there are the artists. What words formed the minds of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi? What treatise sparked the soul of Vitruvius? Which novel did Rembrandt place on his nightstand before blowing out the evening candle? When Monet sat in his garden chair, what book was at his side as the waterlilies glistened in the light of the sunset?
I’m currently re-reading “Vincent van Gogh – A Life in Letters.” This time, I seem to be centering into the letters written to his brother Theo detailing the artist’s recent “author of choice.” Within the letters, it becomes evidently clear that Vincent loved literature. He enjoyed a direct style of writing, ranging from simple action stories and rebellious characters to books about everyday life and humanity.
He spends time discussing what he was currently processing from reading the Christian Bible and John Keats. He listens and responds to the voices of George Eliot, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Hans Christian Anderson and the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But of all the books he read, according to historians at the Van Gogh society, he was most influenced by Charles Dickens, Jules Michelet, Emile Zola and Alphonse Daudet.
Vincent’s father was a Protestant minister, and as a child, he was encouraged to read moralistic works, often favored among members of the Protestant Christian community. It was from Dickens, that young Vincent learned the importance of charity and humanity. In “L’amour,” written by Jules Michelet in 1858, Vincent discovered the wisdom he could apply to his own love life – including his love for his cousin Kee Vos and the enticing prostitute Sien Hoornink.
Zola’s stories were rooted in reality. He described life as rough and direct as it was lived in Parisian slums and miners’ villages. Like Zola, Vincent desired to provide an honest depiction of what he saw around him: farm laborers, a weathered old man, dejected or working women, a soup kitchen, or a deserted field of corn as winter approached.
When Vincent went to live in Arles in the south of France in 1888, he relished the time reading humor and satire – including “Tartarin de Tarascon” by Alphonse Daudet which provides entertaining caricatures of the southern Frenchman. He wrote to Theo, “His humor impresses me, for nothing that happens in this current era is truly uplifting. Art and humor are the only things that provide any consolation.”
During this same year, Vincent painted “Still Life - French Novels and Rose,” a work that I can directly relate to my own literary journey. It is believed by current Van Gogh historians, that this still life is an ode to modern French literature. “The books with yellow covers are not immediately identifiable to 21st-century viewers,” writes a curator at the Van Gogh Museum, “but Van Gogh's contemporaries recognized them as modern French paperbacks.”
The books lie scattered across one table in Vincent’s rented apartment, accompanied by a single rose in a vase. I can imagine the worn corners turned down, stains of coffee and tobacco, and probably a few missing pages torn from the novel to send to Theo or re-read as he strolled through the village towards to his next location to paint “en plein air.”
I set my book of Vincent’s letters down this morning, post-sunrise, giving into a strong desire to bake cookies. Like Vincent’s table, mine was, in no time, covered with hot sheet pans directly from the oven, walnut shortbreads cooling on wire racks, containers of home-made dulce de leche coming up to room temperature, various piping bags and tips, two mugs of coffee, and yes, three or four other books patiently waiting to be read.
As I sit and taste the first finished cookie, I remember another dollop of Vincent wisdom – “I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening – like a light in the midst of the darkness.”
Walnut Shortbreads Filled With Dulce de Leche
Four dozen finished cookies
Dulce de Leche:
3 – 14 oz cans of sweetened condensed milk
Walnut Shortbread:
1 ½ cups walnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped (toss with ½” tsp fine sea salt before toasting)
3 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp ground ginger
1 ½ cups confectioner’s sugar
Zest of one orange
12 ounces (three sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla paste
1) Remove the label from the dans of sweetened condensed milk. Place the cans on their sides in a large deep saucepan and add water to come 2” over the cans. Bring the water to a boil over high heat then reduce the heat to medium-low to maintain a bare simmer. Place a lid on the pot and simmer for 3 hours. Remove the pot from the heat and let the cans cool in the water for 4 hours. Open the cans and stir the contents of all three cans to ensure it’s evenly mixed. Store covered in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
2) Toss the walnuts with ½ tsp fine sea salt and toast/roast until aromatic. Cool completely and coarsely chop.
3) Whisk together the flour, salt and ginger. Set aside. Place the confectioner’s sugar, orange zest, butter and vanilla paste in the bowl of a standing mixer and cream together on low for 5-8 minutes. Add the chopped walnuts and the dry mix and mix together just until a dough forms. Set aside the dough to rest for 30 minutes while the oven preheats.
4) Preheat your oven to 325 degrees and line 3 baking sheets with parchment paper.
5) Roll ½ of the dough on a lightly floured surface to ¼” thickness. Cut into 1 ½” circles and place them on the baking sheets about 1” apart. Gather the scraps and cut circles again. Do the same with second ½ of the dough. Chill the cookies on the sheet for about 10 minutes before baking.
6) Bake the cookies, one sheet at a time, for 6 minutes, rotate the pan, and bake for another 6 minutes, just until the edges are beginning to brown. Cool the cookies on the tray for 5 minutes and then let cool completely on a wire rack.
7) Once completely cooled, sandwich two cookies together with 1 tsp of the dulce de leche. If desired, dust the top of the cookies with additional confectioner’s sugar.
