Professor Butter Beard and Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid”
“Nature here is extraordinarily beautiful. Everything and everywhere. The dome of the sky is a wonderful blue, the sun has a pale sulphur radiance, and it’s soft and charming, like the combination of celestial blues and yellows in paintings by Vermeer of Delft. I can’t paint as beautifully as that, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go without thinking about any rule.” ― Vincent Van Gogh, writing to his brother Theo in 1888.
Nellie knows Sunday mornings. Every Saturday evening, at bedtime, we play out the well-rehearsed dance to see who can snuggle deeper into the bed and command their territory without pushing the other to the floor. We congenially chat, whispering goodnight, and agreeing that we will sleep until at least 7am, with the promised reward of Sunday biscuits and bacon. But, without fail, at the first hint of 4am daybreak, Nellie’s intentionally loud yawns begin, followed by impressive doggie yoga moves and finally warm rapid-fire kisslicks until I reluctantly agree to wrap myself in a robe and step outside so she can pee and inspect the neighborhood to see if anyone else might be craving bacon.
But, every Sunday morning without fail, we climb back under the still-warm covers, and both pretend to sleep for at least another hour before giving in to the primal call of “coffee, bacon and biscuits.”
It must be the light. Dayspring light is like no other. I find myself drawn to others who share that appreciation. Johannes Vermeer was an exceptional human also gifted with a morning soul. He understood that fresh and full-of-hope brilliance – in his case, a pure white morning light that only exists in the Netherlands.
In Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” a young sturdily built woman who has woken pre-dawn to milk the cows to make the family’s butter and cheese, is shown in a plain room carefully pouring fresh milk into a squat earthenware container to create porridge (bread pudding) from day-old bread. She wears a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up to reveal thick forearms. Morning white Netherlandish light floods through the one east-facing window into the room, illuminating the bare wall and the right side of her face revealing her features but not her thoughts. A foot warmer is on the floor behind her, near Delft wall tiles depicting Cupid (to the viewer's left) and a figure with a pole (to the right).
According to art and food historian Harry Rand, the painting suggests the woman is making a simple bread pudding, which would account for the milk and the broken pieces of bread on the table. Rand assumes she would have already made the simple custard in which the bread, mixed with fresh eggs, expensive sugar and a dash of coarse salt, would be soaking at the moment depicted in the painting. She carefully pours the trickle of cold milk into the Dutch oven to cover the mixture because otherwise, the bread, if not simmering in liquid while it is baking, will become an unappetizing, dry mass instead of forming a crackling sweet crust over the delicate bread custard.
The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the grounded substance of the milkmaid and the worktable. “The light, though bright, doesn't wash out the rough texture of the bread crusts or flatten the volumes of the maid's thick waist and rounded shoulders,” wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic for The New York Times. Yet with half of the woman's face in shadow, Rosenberg believes it is “impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration.”
“It's a little bit of a Mona Lisa effect” in modern viewers’ reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator of the department of European paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and organizer of two major Vermeer exhibits. “There's a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. She is going about her required daily task while faintly smiling. And our reaction is “What is she thinking?”
Nels believes she is thinking about bacon. As I grind the coffee beans and preheat the oven, I am mind-wandering through the morning chores of the milkmaid. Was she also woken with kisslicks from the family hound, or a light loving nudge from her handsome horse groomsman husband, or was it birdsong and the rhythmic sound of light rain on the tile roof? My hands have already formed the Sunday biscuit dough out of pure muscle memory before I am woken from the daydream journey by Nels offering a cheery “howdy bark” to one of her neighborhood dog-friends through the open living room window, which is already flooding the space with the first rays of dayspring light.
Professor Butter Beard’s Sunday Biscuits
10 Biscuits
3 cups all-purpose flour (plus a bit for dusting and rolling)
3 Tbsp granulated sugar
1 ½ Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine sea salt
½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
16 Tbsp (two sticks) unsalted butter, as chilled as possible
1 1/3 cup cold buttermilk
1) Place your two sticks of butter in your freezer for at least 10-15 minutes.
2) Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
3) In a large glass bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and soda, salt and freshly grated nutmeg. Whisk a few extra times – that is a lot of baking powder to incorporate.
4) Use a box grater to grate the chilled butter over the flour mixture. For each stick of butter, grate down to 1 Tbsp remaining (saving your fingers) and place the remaining 2 Tbsp of butter into a 10” cast iron skillet. Turn the burner on low to melt the butter.
5) Quickly toss the grated butter and flour with your fingers until incorporated, leaving bits of butter the size of small peas.
6) Make a well in the mix and pour in the cold buttermilk. Use a plastic bench scraper, or large spatula, to fold together the mixture just until it comes together as a ball of dough.
7) Flour your surface and gently roll the dough into a 6” by 12” rectangle. Fold like a business letter. Roll again and fold again. Finally roll the dough into a 4” by 10” rectangle. Flour a 1 ½” biscuit cutter and sharply cut the dough into 10 biscuits. They should be about 1 ½” tall.
8) Once the butter has stopped sizzling, place each biscuit, one at a time, into the butter and then flip it over (buttering the top and bottom of each biscuit). Once all 10 biscuits are buttered and flipped, place the skillet on the center rack of the oven and bake for 12 minutes. Rotate the skillet and bake for another 8 minutes until the biscuits are deliciously golden brown.
9) Carefully remove the pan from the oven and let it cool for at least 8-10 minutes before grabbing a biscuit!
