Tango Trance Brownies

Ellen tells me she needs anything chocolate for the festival potluck. No problem. I have just what she needs:

Tango Trance Brownies

Equipment

A stainless steel bowl. Reflecting your shining face, curved to fit.

One small, square pan. A meditation on the limits of experience.

You, the mirror, the vessel.

Soft Butter

This is how butter is made:

A young girl sits in the cool of a deep, shaded porch. Downy seeds drift on sunlit air.

She lifts the churn handle, drops it, lifts it again. Air runs a finger up her arm’s milky flesh. Her thoughts drift to he who will touch her like that, who will awaken her from childhood’s trance. She sighs.

The air caresses her throat, slips down her unbuttoned bodice. She sighs again, deeply, lifts and drops the churn handle.

Respect the girl and her longing. Never buy butter in blocks, hard-pressed, metal-cut, near-frozen. Buy hand-formed lumps cooled in water.

This is how to soften butter:

Take it in your hands. Knead it gently, spreading it thin, opening it to the air. Fold it back on itself, doubling and redoubling, until it grows pliant.

Sugar

In paradise, woody stalks leap from rocky ground. Their thick, dark leaves gleam in the sun and clap at the rain. As much sun, as much rain, as much wind as the sky can give, the cane takes and begs for more.

In the fall, men set fires and the cane swallows them whole. In the ashes machetes slash, women pile and cart. Only then does the cane weep. In the crusher it weeps the sweetest tears of all.

Fill a cup with sugar and lift it high. Pour a slow, sparkling cascade. Hear its last laugh rasp.

The cane never loses its joy. Wet your finger, touch a single crystal, carry it to the tip of your tongue.

See?

Eggs

Two eggs out of round. Self-contained, impervious, asynchronous. Which came first: the egg or the cat?

Strike each egg with the blade of a knife. Let it fall gently. Shape-shifter, it conforms to the contours it finds.

Don’t break the yolk, or a farmer’s daughter will die. She’s there in the chicken house, too.

Chocolate

Beware. Bad chocolate is made by witches who foul it with wax to make it do tricks.

Pure chocolate has no guile. Pure chocolate is tender and willing.

Take it in the cup of your hands. Bring it close to your lips, as if to whisper. Inhale deeply. Let it amplify your desire. Open your mouth as you would for a kiss. Sigh.

There is danger in chocolate, as in a lover’s embrace: You must disengage or be lost.

Blend

In the bowl now: your curving face, sugar rough as whiskers, the lip-like pliancy of butter. Primordial goo, the secret of life. The dark, bitter oil of dreams. Water, air, and fire. Desire and will.

Plunge in your hands. Be firm about this. Now the yolks must break under your thumbs. Palpate. Coax the butter to sugar, the sugar to egg, the egg to chocolate. This will take you a good long time.

Accept nothing less than this: that each loses itself in the other.

Flour, Soda, and Salt

Flour is the stuff of which gravity is made. It is grown by men who plant their feet. Dust-light it binds us, roots us to earth. You could drown a cat with a sack of flour.

Salt is the darling of temperance. Soda makes light, even of dreams.

No one dreams of flour. No one dreams of soda or salt.

Dip your dream-filled hands into the flour. Take away as little as you can. Take soda and salt, grain by grain. Knead them in. They won’t go gladly.

Weep.

Bake
Heat overcomes the too, too solid.

Butter melts flour’s resistance.

Chocolate clings and soaks.

Soda and salt give way to temptation.

Egg’s primordial goo creates something new.

In heat, all melt, all resolve into a cosmic fudge dew.