Coffee & TV: The Great British Bake Off, Society Cafe

Welcome to the twelfth installment of my newsletter about my two favorite things in the world!

I am spending this week in Oxford, best known as the filming location of many Hogwarts scenes in the Harry Potter films and also home to a world-renowned university. It's fine, I guess, especially as work travel goes. My brother Matt had to spend nearly eight months traveling from New York to the headquarters of an "international motor conglomerate" just outside of Detroit, living at I'm guessing an Extended Stay Marriott (or Comparable Accommodation from Appendix A) five days of the week, so that's something I remember when I am not super psyched for long haul flights and anodyne hotel rooms and having to "build relationships" (ewww!).

J/K, I do like my coworkers a lot. They are all partnered with small children though, so soon after five every day, they are off to do school pickups and dinners and bedtimes and stuff, whereas I'm off to corporate housing to do. . . . reading I guess? I've done some reading. Right now I'm reading Black Wave by Michelle Tea and it is Great. Being as this is my fifth or sixth trip to Oxford, I've covered what there is to do, tourism-wise, so I try to see some live music if the scheduling works out, but mostly just do what I can to minimize loneliness/homesickness.

My experience is that coffee in England is almost without exception very bad. I hypothesize this is because it has such a passionate tea-drinking culture, but perhaps a English person can give a more nuanced explanation - or even disagree with me! Anyway, my coffee place in Oxford is Zappi's Cafe, a bare bones cafe above a bicycle shop. Everything in Oxford is either above or next to a bicycle shop; it's charming. Zappi's had a ramp perfectly sized for bikes, so you could easily roll your bike upstairs with you. It smelled a little like bike grease and a lot like coffee, the baristas were distressingly attractive, and the coffee drinks would make my lifetime Top Ten list. I still would not order filter coffee there, but the flat whites were as good as the ones I remembered from New Zealand, the perfect ratio of milk to espresso (never bitter, never metallic, never ashy) and beautifully textured foam, every time. I even kept my Zappi's punch card in my wallet for eleven whole calendar months, so I could get my free latte on this trip. Alas, times change, RIP Zappi's.

I had a latte that tasted like nothing at the now-Handlebar Cafe and went elsewhere for the beans to go in my company housing-supplied french press. A few doors down from Handlebar was another new spot, The Society Cafe, which had all the markers of the kind of terrible artisanal coffee shop I love: specialty bean of the day, hand-written tasting notes on brown paper tags, pour over by the cup, snobby-flavored sparkling water, their own t-shirts. Promising! I ordered a latte and waited for the barista to grind my coffee. The latte was so gross I considered putting sugar in it and when I got back to my flat I saw that they had ground the beans for Turkish coffee even though I know I said French press, which is about as wrong as someone can do that and still technically do it.

I hate using a French press. I hate how messy they are and how they're so easy to break and I hate trying to get the mucky grounds out of the bottom each day and cleaning the stupid little mesh part attached to the end of the plunger. I especially hate drinking French press that was made with the wrong grind, because it's bitter and sludgy and the last sip has so much sediment in it you cough and dribble disgusting backwash onto your white shirt. What a disaster! Sad.

Speaking of sad disasters, oh my god this shitshow election. Or, per John Oliver, Election 2016:

and

I hate late night TV, and I've watched some over the past two weeks. I've watched Saturday Night Live. I repeat, you guys, I've watched Saturday Night Live. My favorite thing about myself is that I don't watch Saturday Night Live, and now I don't even have that anymore, that's how bad this election is.

Perhaps there is a g-ddess, though because while Election 2016: Flaming Orange Hellscape Edition is totally happening, so is another season of The Great British Bake Off!!

The Great British Bake Off is a cooking competition show on the BBC hosted by Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins in which 12 amateur bakers compete in increasingly difficult challenges involving cakes, breads, pastry, cookies ("biscuits)", etc. The contestants gather and bake on the weekends, and each week, one is eliminated by tough but fair judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, until one person is crowned the best amateur baker in Great Britain. This individual gets flowers and a fancy silver plate. "It's like heroin," says my friend Bennett.

Is Bake Off addictive? Sure. What I think Bake Off really is, though, if we're using substance abuse metaphors, is sessionable (as distinct from bingeable). "Sessionable" refers to a beer with a low ABV (below 4%), which means you can drink a lot of it over a long period of time without getting too wasted. Some TV shows are bingeable but not sessionable. Transparent, because it builds tension episode by episode and releases an entire season of episodes simultaneously, is bingeable, but it's too sad to be sessionable; you will not feel good after watching several hours of Transparent in a row. Breaking Bad is bingeable but not sessionable. One can, however, watch and rewatch hours upon hours of Bake Off with no ill effects whatsoever, including the loss of self-esteem that often accompanies the reflection of "oh my god, what did I just do all day?"

What you've just done: learned about obscure European desserts and how quickly they can be made without instructions, fallen in love with Mel or Sue or maybe both, come close to tears when someone's "bake" is so good Paul Hollywood offers him/her a handshake, and cringed at more puns than the human brain was meant to handle in one day, but when the subject matter is often formed into balls and horns and buns, or shaped into buildings and human figures, it really can't be helped, e.g.

"I love how you've toasted your nuts."
"I think your sister tastes lovely."
"No one likes small, under-filled balls."
"I'll eat a bit of carpet."
“Messy top, tidy bottom.”
(during Batter week) "Bakers, don't throw your Yorkshires, that's battery!"

Mary: “Why shouldn’t a bun be round?”
Mel: “My buns are round. Always."

Given its obvious devotion to puns I think it's okay for me to say Bake Off is sweet without being saccharine. Because the contestants aren't forced to live in a house together and return to their normal lives Mon-Fri, it doesn't rely on any of the annoying tropes of the typical reality/competition show, like the hot tub/drunk tank or the person who's "not there to make friends." The contestants seem quite eager to make friends, actually. I hope some of them still are! Despite the constant innuendo, Bake Off remains stridently G-rated -- I'm for it, I think we could all use a break from thinking about sex. The bakers are both genuinely talented and genuinely self-effacing, two flavors that go together perfectly, as Paul Hollywood would say. I think this was best embodied by Howard, several seasons ago, re his Japanese tea house made of four different kinds of cookies, of which he said, "When I've done this previously, people were quite impressed. Yeah. It's like, "Wow!"

"That was my mum and dad though."

There are regularly tears on Bake Off -- "I can't believe I'm crying over cake!!" -- but I can believe it. How can you not cry, when you love something so much and get a chance to show your skill on a national stage?

(some spoilers for UK Series 6/US Series 2/3?? [come on PBS get your act together] follow)

Finalist Ian: "I wrote up in my journal, ‘This could be a pivotal moment in my life.’ Then I thought ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s too big, don’t think about that.’ It’s just another weekend in the tent, I've got three things to cook, what’s there to worry about?"

"Quite a lot, actually, but never mind.”

It is so much fun to watch a tent full of people wave baking sheets frantically over their (inevitably) underproofed loaves of bread, trying to get them to cool faster:

How can you see this man, and not feel for him and whatever is breaking his heart in the freezer,

or look at these folks waiting to see if one of their fellow bakers will successfully transfer a precarious multi-tiered cake to a serving tray, and not grit your teeth in anxiety as well?

Back to Bennett's comment, I've never tried heroin, but about ten years ago I did have an unlimited-refill prescription for Vicodin, which I took for a neck injury and also to endure the blindingly-painful early days of extreme heartbreak, which is not an FDA approved usage. I have some ghost of an idea what a large dose of opiates feels like. It feels like nothing, but in a best-possible-scenario kind of way. Bad things are still happening, you can identify them, but they're not really happening to you. I could still feel the parts of me that hurt (the neck pain was actually really bad), I just didn't care that it hurt anymore. My neck was something that happened off in the distance while I watched the last season of The Sopranos on DVD and shivered in my rented, unheated room and felt woozy then asleep and then woke up and rewrapped myself in my comforter, enjoying the tactile plushness of each delineated square of down fluff, sort of slept again, cried a little then lost interest in crying, watched another episode of The Sopranos until the pain crept back to the forefront of my consciousness, finally manifesting as "Jesus my neck is killing me," then more Vicodin, and return to step 1.

I'm not certain what Bennett meant exactly, but being a Bake Off fan does feel a little like this. Yes, a fascist is running for president and I am scared for our civil and human rights and my future and these last two years have been an interminable slog in the gross refuse of the breakdown of our political system, but it's the final next week, and I won't think about any of that for 59 minutes, and it's going to feel good:

Until next time,

Ruth

In other news:
Chloe Caldwell's book is out! It was featured on the home page of the New York Public Library yesterday! The Village Voice reviewed it and you can find more interviews and stuff here. Buy it, fools.