Mme Cora's letter
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December 15, 2024
The date squares from Maurice’s wife
I’ve already told you the story of a delicious recipe a sweet customer had given me back in the early days. Do you recall? Her husband, an Irishman, ate big wieners for breakfast. Almost every morning, he’d show up just before 8, sit down on one of the stools at the counter and order three sunny-side-up eggs, a mountain of potatoes and three large sausages he’d swallow in one go. I couldn’t quite understand why he refused to try our delicious omelettes or generous stuffed crêpes. But, like clockwork, he’d faithfully come in every morning to eat the same comforting dish.
This customer, an anglophone, was called Maurice and I eventually named his breakfast order after him: “Eggs Maurice.” This dish appeared on our menu for a very long time and was a best-seller with hearty eaters. As a way to thank me for honouring her husband, his wife brought me a lovely plate of delicious date squares with her own recipe hand-written on a neatly folded, piece of white lined paper. Date squares are just the thing when you want to enjoy a comforting treat that’s both crispy and moist, nourishing and delicious.
Read on for Maurice’s wife’s recipe, to which I’ve added my own touch based on some 37 years of experience as a self-taught restaurant cook.
To make 9 big squares, you will need a well-buttered 8-inch square ovenproof baking pan. I always double the recipe and I wrap each piece separately before freezing, so I always have some on hand for an evening snack. True, I don’t really have a sweet tooth, but give me a cup of black tea, a good movie on TV and one of these squares, and I’m in heaven. I love dates and I often eat some because they’re rich in vitamin C, E, B2 and B3, and they’re apparently excellent for my old muscles and bones. Did you know? Dates contain zinc and iron and help reduce blood pressure and joint pain. It even turns out they’re rich in antioxidants and have anti-aging benefits. Hallelujah!
And now, the recipe! Set the oven to 350°F. Place 2½ cups of chopped pitted dates in a pot with 1 cup of water, 1 cup of brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. My secret? I use orange juice instead of water and replace the brown sugar with a small can (398 ml) of crushed pineapple with its juice.
Slowly cook the dates, stirring until you obtain a purée. Allow to completely cool. In the summer, I place the pot in a large bowl filled with ice cubes or in a snowbank if it’s winter. A snowbank is ideal for cooling fudge and caramel while you whisk or even a big pot of soup when you need to quickly serve a warm bowl to hungry kids.
For the crumble, combine 1¾ cups of quick cooking oats, 1 cup of regular white flour, ¾ cup of brown sugar, a pinch of baking powder and ¾ cup of softened butter in a bowl. Spread half the crumble over the bottom of the well-buttered baking pan. Press down firmly with a fork or your fingers. Next, evenly spread the date mixture on top. Finish with the remainder of the crumble, pressing very lightly and taking care to completely cover the layer of dates.
In recent years, I have been reducing the quantity of oatmeal in the crumble slightly and replacing it with slivered almonds. It’s a great idea that I got from a specialty magazine whose name escapes me now. It seems to always make the squares extra crunchy and every mouthful a bit tastier. The key is to make sure you divide up the crumble evenly. Make sure you don’t put too much on the bottom and run out for the top.
Maybe date squares are a bit like life! Everything is a question of balance. “Knowing how to love is just as important as knowing how to work.” Oh, how those words hurt my ears: I’m certainly no master when it comes to balance. We can always improve, however, and it’s never too late to surprise yourself.
Cook for about 50 minutes or until the crumble is nicely golden. Allow to cool at least 4 hours or overnight before removing from the pan and cutting into squares. I cut them up directly in the pan once they’ve completely cooled and use my egg spatula to carefully remove each piece. I then wrap each square of happiness individually and slip them into the freezer. I divvy up the squares as follows: two or three for myself, two for my neighbour, two for my granddaughter and two for the beggar, like my Grandpa Frédéric, in Gaspésie, used to say.
I thanked Maurice’s wife several times for introducing me to date squares. My Mother had never made any, probably because dates were hard to come by in the Gaspésie in 1950. After Maurice’s wife had shared her recipe with me, I began making them in my first small restaurant, following her handwritten instructions to a T. The customers loved them for a lunchtime dessert. The taxi drivers were the first to ask for a few to take on the road. I had to double the recipe just to meet demand.
Recently, while perusing an old menu displaying “Eggs Maurice,” the famous date squares of the wife of Maurice, the Irishman, came to mind. I had to rummage through my memory, my archives and my old handwritten recipe books to find this famous recipe for date squares. I thought you might like this recipe so you can treat your family and friends over the holidays. You should double it too! From me, to you, with all my love.
Cora
❤️
December 8, 2024
Darken the page, lighten my heart
I believe that creating is more than a gift from heaven. After publishing some 250 letters, do I still have it in me to fight routine? Being creative is a state of mind I cultivate daily. Others do it while drawing, knitting or composing amazing music. Sometimes the flame inside me flickers, wanes or soars.
Writing for me has become the soil of real transformation. To create, I have to take risks, open myself to the unknown, be empathic and advance slowly like a mouse from a cupboard. I feel my way forward, always worried I won’t be able to successfully pull together ridiculous lexical behemoths.
When I was a businesswoman, my favourite hobby consisted of threading lovely beads on a string to make myself bracelets or necklaces I’d wear with pride. I love to create. Today, I assemble vibrant paragraphs to embellish the page. I employ beautiful words; golden agates colouring the meaning of each sentence.
All my lines wish to rid me of fear. I’m training to be at peace with making mistakes, surprise myself and be the sole defender of my viewpoint if need be. So many letters have come from my fingers, so many hesitations, fears and perhaps contradictions. It’s as though I’m weeding a new garden every week; a modest harvest for my readers’ hearts. I love creating so much, adding my personal touch and grain of salt, like a brushstroke or springtime breeze.
I’ve already told you about Julia Cameron, the well-known creativity coach who suggests we take a blank piece of paper each morning and note down by hand everything that comes to our minds in 20 minutes, without thinking or worrying whether it’s neat. As a result, ruminations, worries, small and big frustrations – everything that stops imagination and creativity from emerging – are ejected. By giving myself completely to this exercise every morning, I quickly realized I was also releasing things that didn’t have an outlet. At the mid or end point, ideas, desires and projects come to light too. Cameron also suggests to re-read our texts no more than once a month so as not to impede the momentum.
Creativity experts are unanimous: it’s essential to put our mind to rest regularly, to relieve it from heavy thinking and the usual activities. Isn’t that what I did despite myself during my Alaskan cruise? Every morning, after two or three coffees, I tried to find a topic to write about without any result. Unconsciously, I suppose, I let my thoughts sail on the blue wave. Sometimes I’d desperately search for the heads of surfacing whales, other times I’d be ecstatic over a rose-purple glacier. Unable to translate so much beauty, my white pages remained empty of words.
Recently, I wanted to empty my head and finally open my heart. I shared with you this period of my life in Greece, spread over 10 painful letters. Back in those days, I was trying to escape reality. I wanted to embellish it. I wanted to die. But my babies’ tears brought me back to the present moment, and to life.
As I write these lines, my Zorba the Greek is 91 and still alive, but he no longer dances. He spent the last 30 years in his native land, in Thessaloniki. Our oldest son recently crossed the ocean to visit him at his bedside in a hospital. He was told that his father had contracted a highly contagious virus. What will become of him?
Will I ever manage to forget all the miseries this man caused me? Before death carries him off, may my heart forgive him!
Cora
❤️
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December 1, 2024
The morning’s sky
This morning brings a furious sky like a stormy sea or battlefield, ink blue, black lines, holes in my head and my fingers hard at work, drumming on the keyboard. The days slip between these pages filled with words that make no sense.
Through the café’s window, I observe an angel who’s busy cleaning the celestial vault. They colour the vastness of the sky with a single droplet of blue dye. It makes me forget about my dream, my age and the creaking of old bones. Starting out young and green like my favourite tree, I’ve become an ancient aspen that sometimes trembles. In the back of the lot, this majestic tree and I age together. Our spotted coat of bark is becoming more brittle, but our sap gets a bit wiser each day.
There are a million words in my knapsack that assemble into half-decent stories with each passing day. My imagination has that power. Every morning, it knits a bit of warmth for me. It remembers old victories, deserved trophies and handsome faces I should have loved.
“Writing is only possible by writing,” according to French Canadian author Robert Lalonde. All I wish for is for my mind to turn out nicely written sentences, egregious adverbs and remarkable words that link together to tell a story. I try to soothe my hesitation and fears; I’m afraid of ghosts that might refute me. This morning, the blank page before me is as vast as the Sahara Desert.
Back at my kitchen table, I smell the sweat of the wilted September flowers. My old body trembles; I curse the damned ticking of time. Will I soon see the land promised to good women? I try to put my head to sleep, but it stubbornly insists on dreaming with eyes wide open. Could Morpheus leave me behind?
After drinking a few cups of coffee to wake up, accompanied by one or two biscotti, I start to write while the clothes go around in the washing machine. Five or six times every day, I look for my magnifying glasses. Maybe they’re under a cushion, on a table buried beneath books, behind a couch or in my Mini. I’m always searching for something.
Through the row of windows in my kitchen, I watch as autumn dries to shades of brown; I feel the wind getting colder. The birds have emptied all the feeders. Will they migrate, sleep in the hollow of a tree or in the needles of pine trees? Like I do each year, I’ll throw them a real feast before winter lays its coat on the ground.
As a young girl, I remember writing in the basement, near the old washing machine. The grumpy wringer as background music and the bogeyman’s bright yellow eyes watching me through the window. I was 7 or 8 when I wrote my first poems. Dad sharpened the black lead of my pencil with his pocket knife. I wrote on the back of old calendar pages that Mom would save for me. I’d write new words and short sentences, the beginning of stories that I hid in my pillowcase.
Seated at the kitchen table made from Formica, we’d cut out our drawings and stick them on the back of pages from the calendar using cooked potato skins. In the winter, we’d skate on the ice-covered stream; my nose ran, my young years floated away.
Later, sitting at a park bench in the fall, I’d grab my blue pen and open my notebook. I’d jot down a sentence and then a second, just as wobbly as the first. With loose leaves at my feet and a few ants climbing my leg, waiting for the right word was unbearable, just like it is today.
Lost in thought at my big kitchen table, another fragment of the past appears. April 2016, Kyoto. The cherry trees are in bloom, dressed in every shade of pink and white. I visit the geishas’ quarters on foot in Gion. Their faces and necks are entirely white, their lips a deep shade of red. Their makeup is an art form; their outfits as fine as the work of the Old Masters; their smiles indelible memories...
I’m ending today’s letter with the extraordinary words of the great writer Nikos Kazantzakis in his last book “Report to Greco.”
“My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.”
I try to console this aging heart, to coax it to freely say YES!
Forced to grow up quickly, I often get the impression I’ve toiled too much. I never learned to dance or to love. Sometimes I hear my heartbeat roar like thunder. Maybe it’s a bell that’s ringing or a fire truck siren sounding, or maybe, a handsome lover falling down my chimney?
Dear readers, the sky this morning was heavy with debris and I struggled to write. Was it the raging sky? Was it me? Was it my aging heart, still determined to love?
Cora
❤️
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November 24, 2024
A delicious lemon poppy seed cake
Dear Mireille Mathez,
Thank you for reading my letter every Sunday! At the end of the summer, you asked for my famous lemon poppy seed cake recipe. Here it is, just in time for the Holidays! Of course, you may also try Ricardo’s version and compare the two. Since my friends love food, I always double the portions so they can enjoy seconds or thirds.
Before you start, place the oven rack in the centre and preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Select a large cake or bread pan. The one I’ve been using for 50 years measures 14 inches long, 5 inches wide and 3 inches deep. You could also pour the cake batter into two smaller pans or two round ones, depending on what you have on hand.
My life story has been, for the most part, about survival, and yet, at 77, I realize that living is a lot simpler than I imagined. I no longer try to understand those around me. I simply love them, spoil them and occasionally treat them to life’s simple pleasures. My offspring adore the lemon poppy seed cake, and I always double the recipe so I have some to give the children, my neighbour and, of course, my old friends from the coffee shop, who also love my homemade jams.
First, dear Mireille, to make a double recipe, carefully wash 6 lemons and finely grate the zest. In a bowl, mix together 3½ cups of sifted white flour, 2 tablespoons of poppy seeds and 4 teaspoons of baking powder.
In recent years, I’ve been adding a third tablespoon of poppy seeds. My good friend Eric, a skilled chef, taught me the virtues of this incredible seed. Rich in calcium, poppy seeds are said to strengthen bones and hair, and promote good cardiovascular health. People suffering from anemia can also benefit from their high iron and manganese content to fight fatigue. My friend the chef warned me that poppy seeds tend to become rancid. They don’t have time to go bad in my cupboard, however, because I regularly make this cake. If you get it right, trust me, you’ll find yourself making more.
But back to our recipe. Using an electric mixer, combine the following ingredients in a large bowl until smooth and consistent: 1 cup of unsalted butter, 6 eggs, 2½ cups of white sugar, the finely grated zest and juice from 3 of the lemons. Next, add the flour, poppy seeds and baking powder mix. Squeeze the juice from the 3 remaining lemons and set aside to make a light glaze.
When the cake batter is thoroughly mixed, carefully line the pan(s) with parchment paper, pour the cake batter in and place in the oven. The cake must bake for nearly an hour, but use the toothpick test to confirm whether it’s ready or not. Of course, I also use my sense of smell and sight to tell if it’s time. Practice will quickly make you an expert.
While the cake is in the oven, mix the juice of the 3 remaining lemons with ¾ cups of icing sugar and a little bit of milk in a small saucepan. The glaze will slowly thicken as you stir. Once the cake has cooled, drizzle the glaze over it.
Before you start, make sure you have at least 6 large eggs in the fridge. Last winter, in the middle of a snowstorm, after mixing the sugar and unsalted butter together in my large bowl, I realized I didn’t have any eggs. With 4 feet of snow in front of the garage door, I had to wait several hours before my neighbour was able to clear the driveway. I quickly drove to the nearest grocery store to buy extra-large eggs, which I eventually whisked with the butter and sugar, whispering a prayer to the baking gods for good measure. They heard me, because the cake was delicious! From one baker to another, dear Mireille: don’t forget the eggs, and make them extra-large!
Letter after letter, like leaves falling in the autumn, I’ve openly shared my life story, my hardships, my challenges and my terrible singlehood which, thirsty as I am, I still carry like an empty pitcher in search of a well.
Maybe I should invite my friend Claude over to grate the lemons?
Cora
❤️
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