Professor Butter Beard and Nickolas Muray
“Today I think…..
Only with scents – scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken and wild carrot’s see,
And the square mustard field…..” – Edward Thomas, “Digging”
‘Tis late autumn. The golden and crimson leaves have danced and fallen. Our gardens have been harvested and the earth turned over to sleep and rejuvenate. Mornings are a bit darker and tickle Nellie and me with the subtle scents of wood smoke and sea salt on our sunrise hikes. Winter reading lists are being organized from the stacks of books gathered over the summer. And we allocate specific time to plan and create that magical dream come true – the perfect feast of Thanksgiving.
As a pastry chef, that timetable began to percolate long before the witches, ghosts and goblins of Halloween. Thanksgiving recipes needed to be tested, perfected, discussed with three layers of sous and head chefs and ultimately published to tempt the public’s tastebuds and secure a completed puzzle of reservations. By the big day, hundreds of pies, tarts, tortes and shortbread cookies had been baked at all hours of the day and lined up at the ready for that first ticket announcing a dessert order. I would then stumble home to bake my own (and a few loving neighbors’) desserts to offer at our family’s humble table.
We all have our own personal expectations as we sit around the candlelight feast. The smell of crisp turkey skin and buttery cornbread stuffing. The colors of the cranberry sauce, sauteed beans and roasted squash. The sounds of pouring wine and sparkling water. Images we treasure deep in our minds, stored in our souls like a delicious memory or vintage photograph.
Well-known American artists have over decades captured, encouraged and enhanced those festive memories in their art – most notably Norman Rockwell, Grant Wood, William Eggleston, and, of course, Nickolas Muray.
In August of 1913, armed with $25, a fifty-word Esperanto dictionary, and an unrelenting determination, twenty-one-year-old Miklos Murai arrived at Ellis Island, where he was “processed” and renamed Nickolas Muray. He immediately found work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at Stockinger Printing Co, doing engraving and color separation. He signed up for English night classes, eager to leave behind any trace of his accent, and he proclaimed himself an atheist.
Even at this young age, Muray was already internationally renowned as a champion fencer. He was also a pilot, and a notable lover of women. The most famous of his lovers was Mexican artist Frida Kahlo with whom he lived an affair that lasted ten years. During that time, he photographed her more than any other person outside her immediate family.
In 1920, a friend suggested Muray open his own studio. The young artist moved to a two-room apartment at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, where he lived in one room and worked in the other. Forced to economize at first, Muray kept all the lights out, except for one bulb. When a client rang the doorbell, he would turn on all the lights. Fortunately, he did not have to wait long for his big break.
The art director for “Harper’s Bazaar” commissioned him to photograph Florence Reed, who was then starring on Broadway, and within just a few months, his name was on everyone’s wish list. He was soon photographing everybody that was anybody: actors, dancers, film stars, politicians, and writers. As he grew more successful, he held Wednesday evening soirees in the studio for friends and acquaintances to meet, eat, and drink – many bringing flasks, as the city was deep in prohibition. It was not unusual for Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Helen Hayes, Paul Robeson, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Eugene O’Neill, or even Jean Cocteau to make an appearance.
Following the stock market crash, Muray shifted his major focus to advertisement photography. In 1931, he pioneered the first illustration from a color photograph to be published in an American mass-publication magazine: a swimming pool advertisement in “Ladies’ Home Journal” featuring seventeen live models wearing the “hottest new beach wear in Miami.”
In 1935, Muray won a contract with “McCall’s” to create color photographs for their homemaking and food pages. He used the color “Carbro” process to make rich and enticing photographs of food spreads for the magazine and for other advertisers through the 1950s, with attention to the use of color to garner the reader’s attention. He soon became one of the leading American practitioners working with color photography in the fields of marketing and advertising.
He wrote, “Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people–to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.” Nickolas Muray died while fencing in New York City, in 1965. At the time of his death, he had won over sixty international fencing medals, and was hailed as “one of the twenty greatest fencers in American History.” But for me, he will always be remembered for capturing on film my soul’s image of “Family Arriving in the Kitchen for the Holidays.”
Now with all that being said, for me, holiday feast mornings still begin best waking to the sounds and scents (and memories) of my grandmother’s coffee percolating on the kitchen counter and dozens of biscuits being cut from a buttermilk dough, heavily scented with cardamom, and baked in cast iron skillets. It is the glorious welcome to a day of indulgences and naps, seconds and thirds, and knowing there will be a sliver of pumpkin pie at the ready as Bing and Danny break into “Sisters” during the annual viewing of “White Christmas.” I can then peacefully head to bed knowing there will be one or two leftover biscuits ready to be toasted and filled with leftover turkey and cranberry sauce as a midnight snack – the perfect end to a feast of Thanksgiving.
Cast Iron Skillet Biscuits
8-9 Biscuits
2 ½ cup all-purpose flour (set aside an additional 2 Tbsp for dusting your board and cutter)
2 Tbsp granulated sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp fine sea salt
2 tsp ground cardamom
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
8 Tbsp unsalted butter, chilled
1 cup cold buttermilk
1) Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
2) In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and soda, salt, cardamom and black pepper.
3) Using a box grater, grate 6 Tbsp of the cold butter over the dry mix. With your fingers, lightly work the grated butter into the dry mix until the mixture resembles clumpy sand.
4) Pour the cold buttermilk into the mix and fold together with your hands or a plastic bench scraper until the dough comes together into a clumpy ball.
5) Set your cast iron skillet over a medium low heat and add the remaining 2 Tbsp butter to melt as you cut your biscuits.
6) Pat your dough into a circle about 1 ½” high, flour your biscuit cutter and cut rounds straight down into the dough. (Do not twist the cutter. This will seal the edges.) Cut as many as you can and then gather the dough back together and cut again to end up with a total of 8-9 biscuits.
7) When the butter has melted, and is beginning to brown, dip each biscuit into the butter to coat the top and then turn it over and place in the skillet. Once all the biscuits are in place, move the skillet into the oven, close the door and reduce the heat to 375 degrees.
8) Bake for 20-25 minutes until the biscuits are fully risen and there is a lovely brown on the top. Remove the skillet from the oven and let the biscuits cool in the skillet five minutes before serving.
