Cornell is intense and hot and fun and brain-liquefying and full of hills. I have read more Hegel in the past three weeks than I have ever read in my entire life,1and likely ever will. I saw Judith motherchucking Butler2 speak today, and breathlessly embarrassed myself before Wendy Brown. Hal Foster is speaking in a couple of weeks. It’s great, but my capacities for abstract thought and expression have been considerably tapped out.
With that in mind, I bring you Ways in Which American Food is Different from Australian Food.
Pizza is plentiful and delicious, if structurally unsound.
American bags of flour are folded slightly differently to Australian bags of flour.
Brown sugar comes in a box of some sort, rather than a bag.3
But the biggest difference of all, the one I had been anticipating, was this one:
The stick of butter. Oh, stick of butter, object of my Sesame Street-fuelled childhood fantasies, frustrator of my adult attempts at American recipes using Australian 250g blocks. I tried to explain this to one of the inmates of the dorm I’m staying in, and she couldn’t fully comprehend how Australians could use ‘one giant butter’ instead of a box of four sticks.
So, when a Fourth of July potluck rolled around, all I could think of was the opportunity to make something with a stick of butter. I also wanted to bring something Australian-ish to dinner, and the only thing my theory-addled brain could come up with is rhubarb crumble. I regularly make rhubarb crumble back home, but I decided to try a different recipe as mine calls for 125g of butter, which is slightly more than a stick. So I decided to give this recipe from the wonderful Deb at Smitten Kitchen a red hot go. For something cobbled together in an under-stocked and overcrowded dorm kitchen, it came together quite well. Please forgive the streaks of flour on the rhubarb and Vice-magazine style flash of the picture; I am working with limited tools.
Strawberry and Rhubarb Crumble, with a stick of butter
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen. Serves six.
- 1 1/3 cup flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 6 tbsp brown sugar
- Zest of one lemon
- 1 stick of butter, or 110g, melted
- Bunch rhubarb, washed and chunked
- Punnet of strawberries, washed, hulled and quartered
- Juice of your denuded lemon
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup flour
Heat the oven to 190 degrees celsius if you’re feeling metric, 375 fahrenheit if you’re imperial. Fork together the flour, baking powder, sugar and lemon zest in a large bowl, then mix in the melted butter until crumbly.
In your baking dish, hopefully not be a disposable heat-proof paper number from Wegmans, as I used, toss together the rhubarbm, strawberries, lemon juice flour and a pinch of salt. Actually, no, do this in a large bowl then tip it into your dish. It’d be easier that way. Scatter the fruit with the crumbly topping and bake for 40 to 50 minutes until golden and bubbling. Proceed to make countless off-colour jokes about crumble-eating. May I suggest: ‘Would you like to eat my crumble?’ ‘I’m really enjoying eating your crumble.’ ‘How strange, I’m eating my own crumble.’
1 Which is to say I actually read Hegel.
2 In a word, spunky.
3 Bags of sugar were also readily available from the supermarket, but that’s beside the point.
