Working on my new batch of Nwwwlf stories, I’ve been feeling super sorry for the women. The Martha’s Sons stories are set in the first century after landing on Nwwwlf, right smack dab in the middle of the whole sorry process of de-industrialiazation. The world still contains tantalizing glimpses of what humanity once had–a motorbike here, an airplane there. However, without electricity or sensible agricultural policies, without manufacturing, and with such a great divide between the technology they brought and what they know, people are struggling to act High Medieval, much less Early Industrial.
We had family and friends over for my father’s birthday last Sunday, and I started my four-layer coconut cake on Saturday. With my power tools, this is a five-hour cake. First, there’s the cake. It’s got cream of coconut, coconut extract, flour, eggs, twelve tablespoons of butter, and more. My Kitchen Aid standing mixer combines it all for me. I am untroubled and not weary. I make the coconut custard filling on Saturday, too, so it can cool over night. The custard provides the first high-anxiety, adrenaline rush because no one wants scrambled eggs in their coconut cake, even with shredded coconut distributed uniformly throughout. It’s the second day, the day I serve it, when things start getting architectural, and I get my second moment of anxiety: the horizontal cut across each cake layer to double the number of layers, thus proving definitively that dividing is multiplying.
Finally comes the butter cream frosting. The frosting consists of egg whites, sugar, half a pound of unsalted butter, and more cream of coconut. After lots of whisking over a double-boiler, the recipe requires me to beat the egg whites for seven minutes in the standing mixer until they are glossy and sticky. With my puny, stick-like arms I become very grateful for the industrial age, electricity, and my standing mixer. If I had to do that beating, it would take more than seven minutes, and, more importantly, I would never make this cake. It would be too hard. I would not enjoy it, and what if the egg whites didn’t become glossy and sticky? There I’d be, stranded in the final step and serving a trifle instead of a cake.
I remembered reading somewhere as a kid that all the great chefs of yesteryear had been men. Was that because there were no standing mixers? Surely not. I know that Mrs. Patmore in Downton Abbey could make my coconut cake without a standing mixer or breaking a sweat. But my standing mixer allows me to operate on par with her. It makes me more equal. I like it.
Anyway, all this makes me sympathize with the women of Nwwwlf who’ve lost their power tools. Their arms are no doubt stronger than mine, but still: dawn to dusk labor for everything from getting and cleaning eggs before even cracking them open (mine are in the fridge in a nice, clean carton), to whisking for who knows how long. I can’t even imagine. Martha will not be making buttercream frosting, much less meringues, and it will be her sons who get to have the adventures, not her.
My standing mixer epiphany reminded me of the rather wicked observations Judge Williams made in his opinion in the case U.S. v. EPA, which involved the Environmental Protection Agency’s determination as to what constituted acceptable concentrations of particulate matter (PM) and ozone. Small businesses sued the EPA over the standards EPA issued. In the course of discussing the non-delegation doctrine (which is totally not a thing on Nwwwlf), the Judge drily observed:
A zero-risk policy might seem to imply de-industrialization, but in fact even that seems inadequate to the task (and even if the calculus is confined to direct risks from pollutants, as opposed to risks from the concomitant poverty). First, PM [particulate matter] (at least) results from almost all combustion, so only total prohibition of fire or universal application of some heretofore unknown control technology would reduce manmade emissions to zero. See PM Staff Paper at IV-1. Second, the combustion associated with pastoral life appears to be rather deadly. See World Bank, World Development Report 1992: Development and the Environment 52 (1992) (noting that “biomass” fuels (i.e., wood, straw, or dung) are often the only fuels that “poor households, mostly in rural areas” can obtain or afford, and that indoor smoke from biomass burning “contributes to acute respiratory infections that cause an estimated 4 million deaths annually among infants and children.”).
(The Clean Air Act told the EPA to set standards for PM and ozone at a concentration level “requisite to protect the public health” with an “adequate margin of safety.” This is not exactly quantifiable guidance, and the EPA was not proposing zero-risk) What I find charming about the acerbic footnote is the judge’s recognition that getting rid of all pollution might be even worse for us than keeping some. There’s the wholesale-poverty issue, to start with. Then there’s drawing in lungfuls of dung smoke, acute and fatal respiratory infections, four million deaths, and a total prohibition on fire. The loss of a standing mixer is probably not even worth mentioning.
by 