From Hell To Breakfast Christmas Edition: Musical Review With Recipe. Bruce Cockburn's "Christmas" and Orange Muffins
Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 1:08PM | by Otter 
If you said to me, "Otter, we are going to shipwreck you on a desert island where it is always Christmas and never winter, and you get only one Christmas CD and one thing to eat," the choice would be fairly clear.
The best Christmas album, for my money, is Bruce Cockburn's Christmas.
Yes, I know that Sting's Tantric Christmas is sexier, breathier, jazzier, brooding-er, and so on. Certainly it's more apt to win awards. And it's a fine (if somewhat sedate) album.
But Cockburn's album does the much more difficult job of recovering Christmas songs as songs. It's a Christmas album you would make with your friends in your living room, if your friends didn't include the York Small String and Brass Ensemble and a Scottish harp player.
Cockburn's got a lot of rare gifts, and deserves his status as folk-god. He's a virtuoso guitar player, but there's nothing in his playing that says "Look what I can do." It says, rather, "Look what an average dude can do if he practices guitar for forty-five years and happens to have a musical soul." (The CD begins and ends with very short, playable acoustic guitar solos of "Adeste Fidelis" and "Joy To The World.")
He is as interested in his audience as he is in the music, and more interested than most in the way that the music resonates with the audience. He wants songs to be recognizable, but beautiful in the idiom of people who actually are interested enough in music to make their own: only one or two of the songs on Christmas are too hard for a guitar dilettante to play, but they are all arranged and played with ingenuity.
Consider his double-timing of "Les Anges Dans Nos Campagnes," or his relentless tempo in "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In" in both of which he recaptures the roots of the carol in dance. You can hear T-Bone Burnett and Sam Phillips humming along on "Three Ships" and several other tunes, adding to the Cockburn's Living Room vibe on the record: this is Christmas with people you like, not with paid musicians.
He (re-) introduces his audience to "The Huron Carol," a haunting hammer-dulcimer accompaniment to "Down In Yon Forest," and to a strange African American number called "Mary Had a Baby" that recalls simultaneously the Christian call-and-response music of the Gullah and Storyville in New Orleans. His "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear" imitates Sam Phillips' version of it, tweaking it with the simplest of tricks and singing it in a minor key.
In the years since I've purchased this CD, I've never gotten tired of it.
It's not that he chooses traditionally happy tunes: some of the tunes are really dark. It's that everything he plays, he plays with a kind of joy in Christmas and in the songs that make it what it is. And Cockburn knows that joy is not the same as happiness or glee.
Joy is the thing: you can't create it. But music at Christmas invites it.
Which can also be done with orange muffins.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Hold in your hand one orange. Reflect that it will now form the heart of the burning sun of joy. Or perhaps it is like the Christmas Star.
Juice the orange, and set aside this juice.
Zest the rind of this orange: do this by using the tiny little blades on your grater. You can purchase orange zest in the grocery store, it is true, but then, too, we can purchase muffin mixes and other abominations. Let us not be miserable worms.
This pretentious specimen needs more glaze. It is as if it were saying, "See my restraint?" Forget that. It's Christmas. Drown that puppy in glaze.
Add a teaspoon of baking soda to 3/4 cup of buttermilk and stir it up. Set aside.
Sift a teaspoon of baking powder together with 3 cups of sifted flour. Stir it with a for a bit: sifting doesn't adequately disperse the baking powder. Set aside.
Cream together 2 sticks of butter and 1 cup of sugar.
Add 2 eggs, one at a time.
Alternate between adding a little of the buttermilk mixture and the flour mixture.
Beat in the orange juice and zest.
While you were doing all this, your children were diligently greasing and flouring small muffin tins. This is the most difficult part of the recipe, which makes seventy-odd muffins, all of which must be baked at 350 degrees in small greased and floured tins. And yes, you must grease and flour... I mean, you must have your children grease and flour.... the tins between batches. (Certain heretical elements favor using cooking sprays. They have laid up wrath for themselves.)
15 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees.
You clever thing: you had a glaze ready when the muffins came out! You did this by putting the fresh juice of three oranges (call them Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior) with two cups of sugar into a saucepan and boiling over a medium heat, stirring and being careful not to burn it. Furthermore, anticipating action between the glaze and muffins, you had that in a shallow pan for dipping.
While the muffins are hot, use a fork or something to pry them out, dipping them into the glaze. Set them on waxed paper. If you burn your fingers, shriek in the key of D-major, in descending chromatic notes, imitating Handel's music in "Joy To The World."
Consume voraciously on Christmas morning while tearing open gifts with greedy happiness, or savor them while watching your loved ones being made happy by Christmas cheer.
Spend the next year eating no sugar so you can repeat next year, until it's time to kiss your loved ones one last time and taste your final Christmas, and may it be musical, and may it taste of joy.
Otter
My 13 year old daughter has read this post and howls at me, "I do NOT grease and flour tins!" I have howled back, "I can't account for this loathsome failure on my part as a parent! This year, we will have discipline!"
Reader Comments (6)
Can't you substitute paper muffin cup liners for the discipline? I hate cleaning the muffin pans after even more than I hate greasing and flouring them before.
Susan,
Depart from me, you worker of iniquity. I never knew you.
Though, of course, I DO relate.
Ha! for your update. My 13yo daughter would never do anything so time-wasting as grease and flour muffin tins either. She uses that horrible spray crap--heavily administered to each muffin cave, the sink, the counter-top, the kitchen floor... whereupon she claims not to notice it anywhere but the tin so she can't conceive a need to clean it up.
Thanks, Otter. I know you're a longtime Cockburn fan and I've been meaning to grab some more of his stuff. Listening to this as I'm wrapping presents.
We may share the journey for a long while, traveling the same path, humming the same tunes. But in the way of all things given to us to know, our fellowship is just for a season. Orange muffins? I think not. Observing the birth of the Christ child must, without exception, be occasioned by the making and partaking of King Arthur cinnamon rolls. So has it been, so it is, and so shall it be forevermore. http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/cinnamon-rolls-recipe
I had to print this for my recipe book, just for your commentary. I think you should write a cookbook.