No coffee-soaked ladyfingers or slices of poundcake in this light dessert. Use ramekins or pretty glasses. Makes 4 servings and can be doubled.
April 2019
Gone: Missing on Whiteface
Last year on a February afternoon, Danny Filippidis left Whiteface Mountain’s Mid-Station Lodge, clicked into his red Volkls and skied away. According to the Canadian Press, he’d told his friends, a group of fellow Toronto firefighters on their annual Adirondack ski trip, that he wanted to fetch his phone at the bottom of the mountain. And then he disappeared.
The Legend of Hawkeye
Once, not so long ago, a gearhead paradise lay hidden along the stretch of Route 86 near Donnelly’s ice-cream stand. There, at a weathered farmstead, John “Hawkeye” Hawkinson spent a lifetime unearthing and rehabbing mechanical treasures. If you were lucky, you might find him outside, feeding his wild friends or holding court in a wicker chair. And if he was amenable, he might tell you a tale or show off his jaw-dropping vintage car and boat collection.
Unbroken
One day in February 2017, Matt Horner, then 47, was using crampons and a pair of axes to pick his way up Rhiannon, an Adirondack ice-climbing route on the cliffs that form the far side of Chapel Pond. The pond is a small, calm body of water beside Route 73 at the foot of the Great Range. As far as ice climbs go, its cliffs are best known for Chouinard’s Gully, first climbed by Yvon Chouinard, the man known for starting the clothing company Patagonia and the equipment company Black Diamond.
It’s more common for ice climbs to be named by their first climbers, rather than for them. As for Rhiannon, maybe some climbers in 1987 had a thing for Fleetwood Mac. Thirty years later, Matt, a professional guide, was leading his way up the route for a longtime client. She belayed him as he went. At the top, he would get situated and then guide her up. The climb is about 200 feet, and Matt knew he could do it in one push; he had climbed it many times before.
But not that day. When he was about 120 feet off the ground, for some reason, he blacked out. “I woke up a second later,” he recounts, “and I was upside down, facing away from the ice. I was falling like a lawn dart.”
Ice Out
Just as parents measure their children’s height over the years, marking it with a notch and a date in a doorway, Pete McConville measures the ice on Upper St. Regis Lake. He notes the dates of ice-in and ice-out on the cabinet door of his woodshop, a ritual he’s performed since 1990 as the caretaker at Camp Woodmere.
McConville continued the record-keeping from his predecessor, but it’s become more than just a weather log. He’s also noted when the loons came back from their migration, when his father died, or when the Twin Towers fell. “It’s just like a story pole for me,” he said.
But those dates—marking when the lake’s middle is frozen and when McConville can take a boat from the landing to the camp—also represent decades of data about a piece of the Adirondack Park and how it is impacted by climate change.
Nell Painter
Nell Painter was born into segregation at the Houston Hospital for Negroes in 1942. If her family hadn’t relocated to Oakland, California, when she was a few weeks old, Texas’s Jim Crow laws would have dictated where she could go to school, the library, the pool. Family trips in the countryside would be out of the question—too dangerous. Not so out West, Painter recalls in her recent memoir, Old in Art School. “My parents drove us around California with the abandon of southerners finally allowed the freedom of the out-of-doors that had been denied them in the South.”
Now retired from a distinguished career as a Princeton University historian and author of a number of influential books, Painter has traveled the world. In the summers, when her New Jersey home is too hot and muggy for a woman raised on brisk Bay Area breezes, it’s to the Adirondacks that she and her husband, Glenn Shafer, retreat. In their New Russia living room, in front of a picture window framing their shady yard, she recounts how they discovered the Adirondack Park.
Maple on the Menu
My husband and I make a few gallons of maple syrup every year, enough to encourage kitchen experiments. We put it over ice cream, in hot cereal, even in chai. Syrup flavors baked beans, salad dressing, salmon glaze as well as before- and after-dinner treats. Below you’ll find homemade versions of the value-added items you can purchase at a North Country sugarhouse; shortcuts to a couple of classic time-consuming desserts are here too.
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