Despite the intermittent blasting heat, I am visiting old friends this summer. Donald Drumpf, Brexit, xenophobia, anti-Muslim, anti-semitism, and the myriad distressing signs of rising -- what? fascism? Is this what it felt like in early 1930s Germany? -- make me seek not a hiding place but comfort. My friends live on my bookshelves, especially in the district I've segregated for my cookbooks. I've already pulled out Judy Roger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tammi's Jerusalem has comforted me more than once. Suzanne Goin, Ruth Reichl, and Cindy Pawlsen have all been revisited. 

But over the past year or so, I have neglected the Observer/Guardian food director Nigel Slater far more than he deserves. He's published such rich, weighty volumes that, after the publication of Tender, Vol. 2, I felt, "Ok, enough already, I can't consume any more." However, the first of his books that I repeatedly dived into was the first volume of The Kitchen Diaries. The first year I had it, I followed along with him, cooking through the seasons. His instructions for individual cheese soufflés is brilliant in its simplicity and deliciousness. The roast pork belly with Chinese 5-Spice Powder will remain on my menu. Nigel doesn't so much give you specific instructions as stand there at the counter and cook with you. For a cookbook writer as approximate and vague as Nigel seems to be on first reading, he has an exceptional low rate of clunkers. He creates an illusion of imprecision and improvisation at the same time that he encourages bold gestures in an otherwise recipe-reliant cook. You sense that Nigel would be that ideal coach you desperately wished for in school PE classes. "It's ok, I'm here, just go for it and you'll be fine."

The book of his that I am now re-discovering like a long lost love is Appetite (2000). He won this home cook's heart right at the start when he devoted more than half a page to the cook preparing food for herself alone. Long before the movement to get people back in the kitchen, Nigel was on the front lines, providing strong, compelling reasons why single people should cook for themselves. We should take care of ourselves, comfort ourselves, and bring richness into our lives through flavor. He acknowledges the challenges single people face in shopping for the solitary meals. What endears Nigel to me is his understanding of how soothing it can be to answer only to one's own preferences.

Instead of precise recipes, Nigel proposes a kind of dish, say, "A deep, savory noodle soup," outlines the basic way to make a simple one, and then follows up with a bullet-point list of ways of building on the recipe. Is there a young person in your life in whom you wish to instill independence, sensuality, and creativity? Have them focus those combustible qualities on food through this book.

I made oak ice cream today. The hoopla about Nordic cuisine has, until now, been a parade I've watched pass by my kitchen window. When I try to imagine the flavor elements of the new cooking in Scandinavia, pine needles, salted fish, cured reindeer meat, and gravlax on rye come to mind. As food, none of them repulse me. Rather they evoke in my imagination a spare cuisine for an austere age, in other words, not the makings of an indulgent dinner party. If we thought the new molecular gastronomy was flavorful but meager, Nordic cuisine has struck me as appropriate in a survivalist era, when we are all obligated to hunker down and assist the earth through a rough patch of a millennium or so.

The recipe for oak ice cream in the New York Times held my attention as soon as I noticed it here. How was I meant to reconcile the exquisite flavor of oak smoke in, say, brisket (especially Franklin's brisket) with the unctuous decliciousness of ice cream? I couldn't imagine it until, that is, I went in search of culinary quality oak chips. At The Brewmeister in West Sacramento, an employee showed me one-pound bags of American oak chips and French oak chips. What's the difference? I asked. As soon as he spoke the words, "more vanilla notes in French oak than in American oak," I said I'd take the French. Eight dollars for a pound felt like a bargain. And why didn't I think of the vanilla notes before? Since it's been years since I've drunk oaky malolactic Chardonnay, it didn't occur to me when I first contemplated making the ice cream. The guy's face lit up when I explained what I would do with the chips. He prefers oak when he infuses beer and spirits, like bourbon. 

At home, I made the custard base. The oak-infused cream and milk turned the color of light mocha. I was hoping for the golden tone in the NYT image that accompanies the recipe, but never mind. The custard sat in the refrigerator overnight. Next morning, I churned it in my ice cream maker. I stuck my finger in the frozen cream. Salted caramel! And cinnamon! Wait. Then came the not-so-faint breath of oak at the back of my throat. Extraordinary.

Now I'm wondering what other surprises Nouveau Nordic has. Faviken's cooking doesn't seem suited to a home kitchen. Who is the Yotam Ottolenghi of Scandinavia?

The first time I read T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" (the last and best known of his Four Quartets) was not when up to a few moments ago I thought I had read it. I remembered it as an epigram in a novel that made a deep impression on me in the late 1970s, when I was in my late twenties. John Fowles's Daniel Martin (1977) turned me into a serious reader, although I've been a gluttonous reader since I was a child. At the time I first read Daniel Martin, I was a scruffy political activist winging my way through classes at San Francisco State University. I was not a good student. For reasons having to do with my schooling and my home life, I did not acquire the discipline or the focus academic success required. Feeling certain I belonged there but aware that I had no clue how to study, I stumbled through the portals of public higher education. I chose French literature as my major out of a desire to speak another language. Rabelais, Molière, Racine (C'est Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée burrowed into my brain for metrical rather than libidinal reasons), Voltaire, and eighteenth-century essayists fascinated me in the fleeting seconds my attention span allowed me to settle on their lines. As I subsequently learned, reading completes only half the task of learning to think; learning to write finishes the job. I didn't learn the second half of the task until I entered graduate school, far too late to make me a systematic thinker without the aid of a pen but a thinker nonetheless.

Perhaps because it filled an emotional vacuum, I was able to concentrate far more easily, indeed deeply, on my extracurricular reading -- Fowles, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing. They lured me away from my studies. Especially Fowles. Fowles brought out a visceral reaction in me. When I finished reading The Magus, I threw it across the room before I knew what I was doing. I've never done that since. The French Lieutenant's Woman excited the crossword-puzzle doer in me, trying to keep track of the different planes of narrative time. Fowles set out his character Daniel Martin's story in a way that was easier to follow and I followed it closely. Daniel connects with Jane in his youth, but he's not ready for her. He needs to mature, so the story follows him as he moves from Britain to Hollywood and back, where he find Jane once again. Then he is ready to embark on the longue durée of intimacy. More than a redemption story, Daniel Martin awoke in me a bittersweet sense of homecoming or rather home-longing, the yearning for a place that I left and forgot. I read the novel again fairly quickly. Now that I have learned that no epigram of Eliot's appears in the novel, I am fascinated at this oblique glimpse of my young psyche. I can only suppose that I first read "Little Gidding" around the time I was reading Fowles and somehow recognized a connection. Or maybe I read in some other piece that Fowles used it as his theme. However it was that I came to associate Daniel Martin and the last two stanzas of "Little Gidding," the connection is more meaningful to me today than it was in the past. I fear Fowles's novel will not hold up to another reading, but Eliot's does, even though I perceive a little better the piety in  his poetry. The emotion of rediscovery wells up in me when I reflect on his imagery. It's the same emotion I hope to explore in these pages.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now always --
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame on in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.