The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Jonah's throat was sore, lately. It hadn't bothered him in the last couple days, but Jonah still waited for the pain to resurface, so that whenever he swallowed it would feel like swallowing sand, like it had for the past month or so. This waiting made him impatient, but the painkillers he took somewhat tempered his anxiety. Right now he had a eucalyptus lozenge in his mouth, and he bit down on it - not all the way through, just so his molars sunk in halfway.

Some people have gone out of their way to make a perfectly good Fuji apple smell and taste like a grape. They call it a Grapple. There are also those who feel that plums should taste like apricots and that apricots should taste like plums, hence the booming pluot and aprium markets. Needless to say, when I first heard of Meyer lemons, I assumed they were a breed of fancy Frankenlemons created at some technologically advanced Meyer Institute of Frilly Fruit. Like a fool, I snubbed them.

One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its hidden history of longing, love, and despair. Take, for example, cake. Chiffon cake.

When I was twenty-four, I decided to bake a cake for my boyfriend’s birthday. Matty was a wannabe rock star and the coolest guy I’d ever dated. I really wanted to pull off something cool, something special, something his mother would never have made. The limits of my first apartment kitchen forced my creativity into overdrive. I baked three cakes—chocolate, yellow, and marble—with the only pan I had: a loaf pan. I then inverted these “cake bricks” and stacked them, one on top of the other.