Bake Lady Bake, Bake in my Big Brass Oven

Over the weekend the Saucykitchen turned out about 6-dozen ladyfingers. Eventually, sandwiched with zabaglione, mascarpone, espresso and whipped cream to form a tiramisu. Sure, you can buy ladyfingers at the store, but they are about 4 times more expensive and they are over-packaged: Cardboard, plastic wrap and occasionally a plastic tray, usually imported – a dessert's carbon footprint just shouldn’t even be a concern; and despite triple packaging, pre-made ladyfingers are drier than I like. With money being tight these days, the fact I am quite specific about ingredients and knowing everyday is Earth Day, I spent Sunday morning baking ladyfingers.

Baking is pretty rote; your hands stay and work but your mind is free to roam. Because I was making a triple batch of ladyfingers, my internal ipod started playing “Once, Twice, Three times a ladyfinger”. Then I started wondering how can you be 3 times a lady, not like she is 3x the lady as someone else, but somehow she did three things as a lady, each action reinforcing and elevating the inherent ladiness – so that being 3 times a lady is so much more ladyonderful than twice a lady. While nothing useful will come from over-thinking Lionel Ritchie lyrics that mental exercise did stop me from singing bad 80s pop, badly.

No aging rocker has ever co-opted the French term, Biscuits à la cuillère – roughly, spoon cookies. Italians call them Savoiari - meaning from Savoy, an homage to the alleged birthplace of the wee cakes: The story is they were created to honor a visit from the French crown. The English, who you’d think would be predisposed to the term lady, call them boudoir biscuits or trifle sponges.

Ladyfingers aren’t alone, the namers of food like throw lady in the title to help elevate a product. One of my favorite apples, the Pink Lady, tastes cidery and sweet but its prurient name also helps my purchase decision. The ladyfish is a bony fish used to make fishcakes in SE Asian. The cowpea is also known as the lady pea; lady’s thistle, lady’s sorrel and lady’s thumb are all less than common greens. Okra is the lady’s (possessive) finger although not exclusively, miniature clusters of bananas are also sold as lady’s fingers. Lady crab is a small crustacean found on the Atlantic seaboard. A Lady’s purse is not a diamond studded clutch but a relative to the cabbage.

The problem with lady as a word is that far from adding value, it vexes. It’s not just bad songs from people with limited vocabularies or the fingers on chalkboard reaction to Jerry Lewis or worse, Jerry Lewis imitators saying ‘Hey, Ladeee’, after 20 years in restaurants and retail, calling a female customer ‘lady’ is not a term service industry worker's attempt to defer to one’s superior social status. It is code, not even a super-secret ‘DaVinci Code’, but a pretty straight forward way of telling an emotionally unhinged, privileged, aggressively rude, woman to hush. Even if someone were to use the word in a complimentary sense like Mister Ritchie or the people who write Hallmark cards and romance novels, there is nothing respectable about a lady - a notional concept of virginal, genteel, a title bestowed by a man to socially elevate a woman. It is a far cry from the ideals democracy and meritocracy and a long way from its respectable etymological roots of ‘one who kneads loaves’. Lady is not a word I would ever use, unless I was piping sponge cake in 1 x 3 inch tubes and even then, I have to stop doing that.