Utagawa Hiroshige II (Shigenobu)
French Woman, Her Child and Pet Dog
(10th month, 1860)

"…inevitable complications always present when CreatingWorlds."

The kitchen smells yeasty, like bread dough with a distinctive fruity backdrop. The scent hovers below overwhelming, still subtle but inescapable, reminiscent of the underlying fruit, but distinctly different. I mentioned to The Muse, as we stirred the pots containing fermenting Mirabelle plums, that I felt as though I was getting to know this fruit far better than I ever had before. Before, we’d rendered it into jam or tarts, or simply consumed it fresh; we saw only its very narrowest representation. After picking it this year, I pitted the fruit and set it out to slowly and quite deliberately rot, rendering its sweetness into alcohol and thereby Creating Worlds that didn’t exist before. This ritual might be as old as civilization, for Mirabelle plums have probably always produced exponentially more fruit than anybody could consume fresh. Ruled by the inexorable laws of Late Summer, the fruit’s natural yeasts and sweetness would set it to festering without any human intervention. Over millennia, a process of sorts has emerged that we can use to do what nature, left to her own devices, could have accomplished unassisted.

I suppose that just these sorts of activities once regulated the civilized world. Beers were first happy accidents, reliant upon native yeasts just doing what yeasts have always quite naturally done. Yeast and sugar are often complicit when CreatingWorlds, for they hold the natural ability to utterly transform. A sticky dough transforms into bread. Some boiled-off sprouted barley becomes beer, and fruit becomes convivial, utterly different from what it was as originally presented, often with an additional pleasing bite. These changes require great patience and no small measure of understanding. I easily imagine these recipes passed down through generations like holy catechisms, guarded with more care than that afforded treasure. These were very likely the treasures the makers would have never otherwise afforded. Now these processes are viewed as craft, which renders them quite different from our modern industrial processes. Their recipes seem fuzzier than any an engineer might design.

I am surprised at just how much guesswork seems to be involved. I viewed a few YouTube videos and consulted my postmodern Oracle of Delphi, Claude®, to gain a general orientation to the subject. I’d proposed making Mirabelle brandy, though Claude® reported that distilling spirits, as they do in the Mirabelle’s native Loraine, would violate both federal and state laws. In any case, the first step in such a strategy would involve making wine, a process that might distract us for two months or more, so we didn’t need to rush our decision on whether to actually violate any regulations. The Muse did similar due diligence. I was surprised at how little convergence we found in the instructions we imprinted on. In practice, we’ve been misdirecting ourselves since, as if we were following the traditional recipes from two decidedly different families. She’s the scrupulous measurer and experienced baker, so I defer to her judgment, regardless of how frustrating that inevitably becomes.

We’re three or four days into the first fermentation, depending upon whose recipe we’re using. I’m learning that my skills lean toward stirring, the so-called ‘turning the batch’. I love floating the hydrometer; ours measures both specific gravity and temperature and seems to magically float in the nectar, which has thickened as we’ve added supplemental sugar and other chemicals. Our kitchen has become like a clean room, with me compulsively spraying everything with sanitizer while The Muse measures minute amounts of arcane ingredients on the digital scale. So far, the world we’re creating seems to be festering well. It does not smell like brimstone or sulfur, both of which tell me the fermentation might be headed toward Hell. I imagine my Dark Ages ancestors fervently praying that their Late Summer fermentation wouldn’t go to Hell, since it was a long way to a liquor store in those days, and the winters were long and lacked today’s more diverting streaming services. In those days, the Old World relied upon its peasants CreatingWorlds every September.

This experiment represents Prosperity created in one of the oldest of the old-fashioned ways, which I almost claimed was the hard way. I caught myself before I declared CreatingWorlds to be a hard way. It’s exacting and sorely patience-trying, but not precisely hard, for it merely mimics life. Any act of creation seems to require more attention than those that don’t result in anything different, Prosperity most certainly notwithstanding. I imagine that if I had been raised CreatingWorlds, I’d treat this year’s fermentation as just another instance in a never-ending series of them, ones stretching back into infinity before and out and into infinity beyond, with The Muse and me tying all that long resulting history together with our presence bickering over technique here. Our minor disagreements and frustrations as we struggle to resolve our two trumped-up family traditions couldn’t possibly be problems. They must be inevitable complications always present when CreatingWorlds.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz