Good morning. Melissa Clark recently went big on upside-down cakes in The Times, and now that’s all I want to make: peach upside-down cake (above); pineapple upside-down cake with pecans; berry upside-down cake; banana upside-down cake. They’re relatively easy to put together and are perfect for those of us who buy too much at the farmers’ market and wince at the sight of aging fruit on the counter.
“Upside-down cakes don’t require the pristine fruit you’d want for a shortcake or tart,” Melissa wrote. “No matter how wrinkled your peaches or sagging your blueberries, once they’ve been caramelized and baked under batter, they’ll become syrupy and colorful, a shimmering crown without further need of embellishment.”
Follow her lead tonight, and the week will be off to a beautiful start. (Especially if you make this creamy, lemony pasta for dinner in advance of the cake.)
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Now, it’s a long way from chanterelles and new potatoes, but I’m a little fascinated by “Industry,” on HBO Max, a soapy series about ambition that’s set in a deeply unsavory investment bank in London.
There’s a lot of cool-hunting in John Lurie’s downtown memoir, “The History of Bones.” Cintra Wilson, in The New York Review of Books, wrote that “it inspires a visceral, almost sexual level of nostalgia for the late Seventies/Eighties in New York — the scene around the Mudd Club, CBGB, and Max’s Kansas City back when they really mattered and a relevant subcultural demimonde still existed in Manhattan.”
You’ll want to read David Marchese’s interview with Neil Gaiman in The New York Times Magazine.
Finally, here’s the first single from Plains, a new band from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and the singer-songwriter Jess Williamson: “Problem With It.” There’s plenty of poetry in country music: “I drive fast on high alert/Pass the Jet-Pep and the Baptist church/On the county line I’ll be a songbird softly heard/My loose change falling out/Got a heartbreak burn, take the quickest route.”
Listen to that and I’ll be back on Wednesday.
