THINKING COOKBOOKS: NIGEL SLATER

by on April 29, 2013 in Thinking Cookbooks, Uncategorized

by Sara Franklin

I have standards—high ones—for the men, friends, and the authors whom I invite into my kitchen. Only the exceptional need apply. Be funny, be bold, be smart, be fun. Do not be fussy or fake. Do have a good appetite.

Nigel Slater made the cut a long time ago. Over the past two decades, his column in London’s Observer and eleven (count them) cookbooks have championed real food, simple food, food full of flavor and imagination that’s cooked spontaneously. In a world drowning in prissy celebrity chefs touting obscure ingredients and complicated techniques that require fancy equipment that I can’t afford to buy and don’t have space in my galley kitchen to house, Slater is the voice of reason. Ease trumps pomp when I cook, and Slater agrees. He’s date night in worn jeans and a sweater instead of a tight dress and tippy heels.

“This is … a collection of recipes … written for anyone who enjoys good food eaten informally… Most of the recipes are based on fresh food with as little as possible done to it, ” he writes in Real Fast Food (Overlook, 1995).

“I like the idea of buying one ingredient that looks particularly good, then mixing it with some pantry staples, and seeing what happens to it.” So, we have that in common, I thought.

“If I am cooking for myself I forget all about cups and spoons, and go with whatever tastes and looks right.” So, I can stop pretending I ever use my kitchen scale? I knew Slater was a keeper from the get-go.

Rare is the cookbook that’s as much fun to read as it is to cook from. But Slater’s nailed the coupling. Though his words make me swoon, it’s his food and easy way with instructions that has kept me coming back.

Real Fast Food starts with a starring ingredient and then proceeds to spend several pages riffing on it. He considers, for instance, mushrooms, and offers them up broiled, stir-fried, served on toast, teamed up with potatoes and garlic, simmered à la crème, turned into mushroom beignets, and then again, wrapped in flaky pastry. Eggs and canned fish get a lot of airtime, too, encouraging weeknight cooks to stick to what’s easy and at hand, however humble. Slater ends each chapter by challenging readers to imagine variations of their own, like the blank pages found at the back of a community cookbook.

Like most of Slater’s books, Real Fast Desserts (Overlook, 1997) is organized by season and relies heavily upon fruits and nuts, say blackberries, apples, oranges, and almonds. The book is full of simple recipes (syllabubs, fools, basic cakes, and sauces to pour over ice cream) and lists of variations that cooks can use as springboards to their own inventions.

I liked the man already. But I fell hook, line, and sinker for Slater when I got my hands on The Kitchen Diaries (Viking Studio, 2005). Chronicling a year in the cook’s kitchen, the book is a treatise on home cooking as well as a calendar of sorts. I’ve used it to remind me of the joys of a particular time of year.

One particularly dreary Saturday morning, deep in the belly of February, I awoke to snow. Again. I’m so done with winter, I thought. I’m tired of gray skies and celeriac, sick of apples gone mealy, mounds of potatoes, bone-chilling wind and slushy sidewalks. I’m ready for spring, for the first tender leaves of lettuce and ramps, cress and peas. Looking for sympathy, or perhaps just to poke at the sore a bit, I reached for the book.

I started with February 1, for the sake of taking in the whole moody arc of this shortest of months.

  • February 1. “The thought of shopping for home-grown fruits and vegetables in February makes my heart sink.” Into his basket, wrote Slater, went beets, carrots and kale for juicing, and (he added, without an ounce of irony) fresh heavy cream.
  • February 21. “There is something romantic about falling snow. I now want something more suited to a world whited over.” Slow-roasted lamb with chickpea mash.
  • February 23 and 24. “There is still snow but it has turned to slush, the odd bits of snow taking you by surprise on your way to the shops.” Bones and gravy for an icy day, aka braised oxtail with mustard and mashed potatoes.

I flipped forward to see if March brought a gentle and promising new start with it. No such luck.

  • March 2. “Fat flakes of snow are pattering against the panes of the kitchen door.” Flatbread and a homemade dip.
  • March 4. “Snow and a chicken stew.”

I know how you feel. Relentless, they are, these drag-on days of late winter.

I paged forward, peeking at the early fava beans of London’s May (Slater dresses the first of the season with hot bacon and its fat) and the apricots of early June (served fresh with orange blossoms and pistachios). What a tease.

The Kitchen Diaries may be my favorite of Slater’s books (I’m champing at the bit for the second volume, due out in the U.S. later this year), and it’s certainly the one I cook from most. But I also have a soft spot for Tender and for Ripe (Ten Speed Press, 2009 and 2010, respectively), that beautiful duo borne of Slater’s experience building, tending to, cooking from, and eating in his backyard garden in London.

“I guess I have always grown something to eat,” he writes in the introduction to Tender. First there were experiments with cress seeds on wet paper towels as a schoolboy, then early attempts in his parents’ garden, followed by pots of tomatoes on a university room ledge, and herbs on fire escapes. “That I would one day turn my own lawn into a vegetable patch was, I suppose, inevitable.”

Huddling by the radiator, scowling at the falling snow, I close my eyes and spirit myself away to the scenes Slater paints. He takes me to a garden picnic on a hot summer afternoon, delivers me to eating barefooted and by candlelight when dinner has been put off until nearly midnight. The first turn of the fall leaves. Dinners on my Brooklyn roof may not carry all the leafy magic of Slater’s London yard, but visions of hot nights when the cooking is foreplay for long, languid conversation makes a protracted winter seem almost worth the wait.

I’ll serve grilled lamb with eggplant and za’atar, and a salad of crisp pole beans, fennel, and Parmesan. To end, there’ll be rhubarb sprinkled with sugar and baked until it turns limp and luscious. Even the dream of the meal is an ode to the days when the living is easy.

It also seems inevitable that a cook so honest and real would become more and more himself, more idiosyncratic and evermore relaxed, with the publication of each book. In Tender and Ripe, Slater wanders out to the garden and his local markets for inspiration. But unlike so many American cooks these days—for whom seasonality has become solemn and a little too predictable—for Slater, it’s all about improvisation and spontaneity. The man buys ripe, messy mangos (surely from farther afield than even the hottest greenhouse in London) to brighten the grumpy days of winter. And, after catching sight of a deliveryman with a hole-punched cardboard box, he chases down discount lychees in the Chinese part of town. What he does with them when he gets home isn’t the point. This is food shaped by mood and whim. Because often, Slater recognizes, we’re not even sure what we’re hungry for until it knocks us upside the head. This is the secret to gratification. All of us have appetites, it’s just that Slater, more than most, lets go enough to sate them.

Sara B. Franklin grew up in suburban New York. A cook and a writer foremost, she’s worn many hats in the world of food. She’s farmed in Waltham and Northampton, Massachusetts; written as a restaurant critic for The Valley Advocate; worked with small farmers at the New York-based WhyHunger; and developed content for the American Museum of Natural History. She is currently in the Food Studies doctoral program at New York University and working on her first cookbook, about the native foods and stories of Brazil. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Food Writing Lives: Jess Thomson

by on April 24, 2013 in Food Writing Lives, Uncategorized

Jess Thomson grew up skiing in Boise, Idaho. A downhill racer, she thrived on the pressures that competitive athletes face, pushing against her own clock.

Now 34 years old and a rising light in the food-writing world, she lives in Seattle with her husband, Jim, an oceanographer and professor at the University of Washington, and Graham, their four-year-old son.  She works the keyboard as she once did her skis and regards her screen as she once did a daunting mountain. A decade of practice is beginning to pay off. Her book, Pike Place Market Recipes:  130 Delicious Ways to Bring Home Seattle’s Famous Market (Sasquatch Books, 2012), was a finalist in the 2013 IACP awards, and the campaign she composed for the Darigold team was awarded  the IACP Corporate Marketing Campaign of the Year.

Fleece-clad, in Seattle’s trademark style—fit and bookish meets farmers’ market—she is circumspect about her success. “The best thing about being a food writer is there’s nothing I hate about my job,” she says. And that’s not something she takes for granted.

With a degree in economics from Middlebury College, her first foray into the work-a-day world was as a compliance analyst in a Boston-based, asset management firm. Thomson was bored to tears. Every day after work, she said she cried all the way to the grocery store near her apartment. When she walked into the food market, however, “everything would be better,” she said, “I realized I needed to make a change and do something that allowed me to be creative every day.”

Two years later, she quit her job and signed up at The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She managed a crêpe shop in Boston and flirted with the idea of restaurant work. But as her skills accumulated, the strength in her hands mysteriously dwindled. In January of 2004, after months without enough strength in her fingers to hold a coffee cup , Jess was diagnosed with lupus.

“I chose personal cheffing over restaurant work, and now writing over personal cheffing, because The Wolf, as I sometimes call lupus, made it plain that daily physical strain was a bad idea,” Jess wrote in a blog post.

Her transition was championed by a felicitous meeting with Kathy Gunst, a Maine-based cookbook author and the “Resident Chef” for WBUR’s “Here and Now” public radio show. “She taught me a lot about cooking,” said Jess, “she also taught me a lot about how she combined writing, cooking, and eating to create a happy life.”

Her mentor takes a certain pride in Jess’s work. “Jess is focused and aggressive, but in an enthusiastic and friendly way,” Gunst said, “She brings a positive energy to writing and cooking that is so attractive to other people.”

These are skills that served her well when Jess moved to Seattle for her husband’s job in 2006.  There, she started a blog, “Hogwash,”named after Rachel the bronze pig at the entrance to Pike Place Market. The name suits what she writes about:  food, life, and Seattle.

Pursuing editors and circulating her clips eventually brought paying work. Jess is the recipe editor for Edible Seattle, and contributes regularly to Sunset, Arthritis Today, and Leite’s Culinaria, where her work was chosen for the Best Food Writing anthologies for 2008 and 2010.

In 2007, she started “The Big Project,” developing and writing a recipe every day, for the entire year. “ I knew that if I wanted to do it, I needed to demonstrate that I could do it well,” she says.

This  steady, determined work brought her cookbook deals. She’s written Pike Place Market Recipes (Sasquatch, 2012), Dishing Up Washington (Storey Publishing, 2012), and Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts (Chronicle Books, 2011). 

The response to the project reminded Jess why she became a cook and writer in the first place. “I wanted to lead people to the kitchen, and, by golly, it worked,” Jess wrote in her last blog post of 2007.

Raised by two busy lawyers, accomplishment figured larger than cooking when she was growing up. “We ate together but we ate different things and we often ate frozen dinners,” she said. When her  mother found time to cook, however, she made great meals. She has what Jess calls, “a common Jewish household cooking ingredient called instinct,” and she passed down that instinct to her daughter. Jess also credits her mother for blessing her with kitchen creativity. She cooks as she writes, instinctually, at full-throttle, and with a touch of the dervish.

“I write best when I have different types of projects going on at the same time,” Jess says. “For me, the creative process works best if I’m also engaging the analytical type-A side, and vice versa.”

She balances blogging, cookbook writing, and freelancing for magazines, with more rigid corporate recipe development and writing. When Jess gets bored with one form , she moves right along to something else, and if she gets writer’s block, she stops to fold some laundry or to take the dog for a walk—another benefit of working from home.

Freelancing does have some drawbacks; Jess has put countless hours into cookbook proposals that she felt were perfect, but went nowhere, leaving her with no paycheck for her bother.

“To be a freelancer, you need to be comfortable walking along the edge of a cliff,” Jess’s husband Jim said to her recently, and that might partly explain Jess’s quick success and boundless enthusiasm for this line of work. She’s been doing that comfortably, on skis, since childhood.

Advice to Food Writers:

“I think a lot of people expect to get the contracts first, but you have to write a lot before you get paid.”

“Learning to write for magazines takes practice. Every magazine has its own voice and editors come back to writers who understand the voice of the publication.”

“In my world, the cookbook is a very heavy business card. The things I make the most money on are the things you’ll never see on the shelf.”

“It’s important to let go of the things that didn’t work because spending time and energy lamenting what you haven’t been able to do isn’t going to pay any money.”

 

Steph Deihl is a cook and writer living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with her husband Doug and their two young children.  She attended Wellesley College and the New England Culinary Institute before cooking and baking in restaurants in New York, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.  Steph has also worked as a personal chef and a recipe editor for MarthaStewart.com.  These days she cooks and writes the blog, One Family Meal, and tries to keep her toddlers out of trouble.  

 

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A Writer’s Room

by on March 23, 2013 in Molly's Blog, Uncategorized

When I was twenty four and a chef in Provincetown, Scott and Robin, architects from New York City, asked me to draw a picture of my dream kitchen. I drew it in the sand at Herring Cove. They built it in one of the small, corner lofts in a former button factory that there were converting to residences in Manhattan. Ten years later I moved into that loft.

It wasn’t a big place, only a third of the size of Scott’s, which occupied the floor directly above and resembled the set for 9 1/2 Weeks. My loft, on the other hand, was washed with filtered, bright light. It was mostly kitchen with miles of white Formica. It was home. Hints of the homes that had proceeded it converged there.

In the decade between the beach and the loft, I’d lived in a big old house in Cambridge where I’d written a novel while staring out toward Julia Child’s front door. I’d lived in a parlor flat on Beacon Hill, learning to write about food and beginning to publish articles. I’d lived in a corner apartment in a former welfare hotel where I wrote my first published book.

The Writer’s Room Boston

The loft was the sort of place I fantasized, but it also shared things, primarily the light and a sense of remove, with every other place I’d called home. I wrote four books and at least a thousand articles in the little cubicle that abutted the little sleeping area on the back wall of the loft. I was at my desk early and wrote until the light changed from lemon to apricot. When the sun began to dip toward the Hudson, I’d head to the kitchen and start testing recipes.

Several hours later, Scott and Robin would wander in, sit on the counters and pick herbs, pit olives and peel garlic as I cooked. Dinner was usually a couple hours of yak-and-snack. After Robin died, Scott arrived alone. There were husbands and others in between, but basically, it went on this way for 23 years.I underestimated how seismic it would be when that loft became a casualty of a marriage-gone-wrong. It seemed like real estate, the sort of loss you shrug off and eventually replace. In fact, the tether frayed was one that stretched back to an era when we, Scott and I, were young and still test-driving selves; prepping dinner was a constant between incarnations. As our selfness-es each calcified into out-sized careers as well as other partnerships and marriages, our yak-n-snack connected us to the lives we might as easily have chosen, the ones we left on the beach.

Cooking together stopped time. It also gave a shape to urban days. In nearly a decade of divorce Diaspora, I haven’t been able to imagine another New York City.

MFK Fisher at her writer’s desk

I lived and wrote in my house upstate, an 1802 row house in a tiny town where my books and desk and kitchen reside. There, my desk is larger, the views spectacular, the light is filtered through pines and tall oak, the silence is profound.

But the solitude I’d lusted after like a stolen dessert when it was life-away-from-life didn’t taste as sweet when it was a way of life. Inevitably, after the summer community decamped and the weekenders’ visits became less frequent, my solitude smacked of solitary confinement.

Every winter, I tried on different New Yorks. The West Village, the Lower East Side, Harlem, Washington Heights — all wonderful, but none was my next New York. In fact, I couldn’t imagine any New York other than Manhattan, preferably Hell’s Kitchen.

Friends urged me to test-drive Brooklyn. No way! I’ve been a subway-phobe since first whiff in 1979. Besides, Brooklyn is not Manhattan. Then a friend who owns a row house not unlike mine upstate offered me a big room overlooking a garden and said: “bring the dogs.” Anything but “thank you” would have seemed more than surly. I left the upstate tundra a couple weeks ago with a suitcase, a laptop, a lot of books and two Bearded Collies who seemed bent on expressing every anxiety I was doing my best to ignore.

The subway! Living with other people! A brownstone instead of a loft!

The dogs slept on top of me the first night in Park Slope, panting, pawing, whining. They were, as my mother used to say “beside” themselves. As a child I would see a second her, jumped from her skin, hopping around in the midst of her six children, wringing her hands when she cried: “I am simply BESIDE myself.”

Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Room

In recent years, the phrase has bubbled up from time to time. It seemed to ask for new meaning, but I didn’t hear it clearly until my first night in Brooklyn. Attempting to lull myself to sleep under 110 pounds of panting fur, I read Alfonzo Reye’s poem of exile, Ifigina Cruel and a line leapt from the page:

“I was another, being myself”

Reyes, a Mexican diplomat in the 1920′s, wrote poems in an effort to unravel the influence of the conquistadors on Mexican identity. Based on the play by Euripides, Ifiginia, who was about to be sacrificed by her father to Artemis when the Goddess pulled a fast one and carried Ifigenia off to her headquarters on Tauris, where she made her a priestess in charge of human sacrifice.

In a twist, Reyes’ heroine had lost her memory and spent her life yearning to go home. She knows that Tauris is not her home, but she can’t remember where home is. She is, therefore, neither here nor there. She is “beside” herself.

Carolos Fuentes quotes the poem in his essay, “How I Started to Write”and meditates on the importance of national and cultural identity in shaping a writer. Like Reyes, Fuentes lived for years in exile. In a way, one sees a place more clearly from a distance. Yet an essential part of the self is cleaved by separation from the familiar.At its best, personal narrative connects the there-and-then with the here-and-now and describes not just a life, but every life. Contextualizing is a particularly important stitch in food writing, where memory so often devolves into nostaglia.

I could, for instance, ride the nostalgia train to a poignant kicker right here simply by gesturing back to Hell’s Kitchen and cooking dinner with Scott. But it wasn’t merely dinner. It was dinner during the time in life when ambition and the appetite for recognition made street drugs seem dull. It was also the unlikely setting — the cheerful, June Lockhart kitchen perched ten stories above grimy Ninth Avenue with its diesel fumes and transvestite hookers and crack pipes. Taken together, the place and its rhythm made the solitude of writing feel like a constant choice, a wondrous stroke of good fortune.

Virginia Wolf’s Writing Room

In print we may ache to return, in fact we don’t go back. We move on, changing the place we’ve left merely by leaving, being changed in turn by the act of departure. We carry places inside us and are delighted when various elements — a particular veiled light, the scale of buildings against sky, the rise of a window or wall, the ambient noise and smells — conspire to make us feel familiar to ourselves.

I know who I am in Brooklyn. My room is every room I’ve ever written in, bathed in filtered light with a sense of remove from the throbbing energy of the street below. Through the tall windows, the muted city sound reminds me that I’ve chosen to be alone with ideas and words.The wild, loopy creativity of Brooklyn’s food scene and small businesses hearken back to Cambridge in the mid-70′s, to the Village in the late ’70′s, times when the culture was rabid for proof of purity as well for as the reassurance that life can be made by one’s own two hands.

There are, as well, little bits of my upstate in the way brownstones march up the quiet streets in Park Slope, in the way people amble along the sidewalks, in the potlucks and food coop, the baby strollers and reading groups, the dogs barking in the back yard. I needed rural exile in order to see and hear these things. Ambition, the freight train blazing toward a glorious future, needed to be turned into something closer to human, alive in the here and now.

Julia and Paul Child at their desk

You start by writing to be noticed. You end by writing in order to notice. Because the more you notice, the more you are alive, the less you are afraid of what you left behind or what may lay around the next bend, the greater your chances of giving voice to something larger than yourself when you reach back into your memory and latch onto, say, the golden moment that was your grandmother’s apple pie.

 

 

 

Additional resources:

Colm Toibin’s Writing Room

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Food Writing Lives: Sandy Oliver

by on March 6, 2013 in Food Writing Lives

SANDY OLIVER

by Stephanie Deihl

Islesboro is a thin fourteen mile long drizzle of an island, a twenty minute ferry ride from Camden Maine, flung in Penobscot Bay. Like so many islands, Islesboro is culturally resolute, impervious to change. The famous and well-heeled second-homers are as cognizant of the decade as they are of stock prices. Among many of the 566 year-round residents, it is as if the local clock stopped sometime around The Great Depression, which suits Sandy Oliver just fine. The woman who invented food history programs in museums and founded the newsletter, Food History News, takes comfort from living in the past.

Ms. Oliver has lived in the same house, a modest, square, 1870 white clapboard, since moving to the island from Connecticut twenty-five years ago. As I steer up her steep gravel drive, the house appears, above, as untouched as a living museum. Then a rooster and two hens appear out of nowhere and not far behind, there’s Oliver, swaddled in a blue knit Lobsterman’s cap and a thick brown barn jacket, disheveled both by the wind and her determination to herd the gaggle back to the barn. I slam on the brakes and creep up the hill behind the Shepherdess and her waddling birds.

Before discarding her jacket and cap, Sandy feeds a log into the 80-year-old, cast iron Dual-Atlantic stove in her kitchen. The stove is fueled by wood and propane. She pulls out the ash trap, dumps it into the bucket and will, she says, eventually spread the ash over the two thousand square foot rectangular market garden that sits to the right of the house. “Nothing here goes to waste,” she says.

Stopping to pat the stove she says, affectionately. “This is great for making baked beans.”

As kids, Sandy and her sister spent a lot of time in places like Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village.  “I think my parents had a sense of enriching our lives, which sparked a longstanding interest in and affection for history,” she says.

Sandy’s sky blue eyes suddenly twinkle at me from behind oval wire-rimmed frames.  “In high school, my little fantasy was that I’d be a famous author of serious historical novels, and I’d have two-martini lunches in New York City with my editor who’d no doubt wear tweed jackets with suede patches on the elbows,” she says.

Ms. Oliver was the first in her family to attend college, and she didn’t get much financial or moral support from her parents. After declaring a double major in English and Journalism and a minor in Theater, Sandy left the University of Connecticut in 1969.  “There was a lot of (Vietnam) protesting on campus, and I ran out of money,” she says.

Instead, she took up weaving and followed her instructor to the Mystic Seaport Museum to help start an apprenticeship program. That idea fizzled, but she was tapped by the head of the department to start a fireplace cooking program.

Ms. Oliver smooths down wind-tangled wisps of her chin-length graying brown hair.  “I always assumed they asked me because I’m a woman,” she says, “but I didn’t know how to cook.  My mother was a 1950’s cook; packaged food, Chef Boyardee, the works.”

Sandy spent two weeks at Old Sturbridge Village learning fireplace cooking and researching recipes from their extensive cookbook collections. She returned to the Mystic Seaport Museum to start the program in 1971, and in the decade to come, climbed the ranks from fireplace cook, to teacher, to supervisor, establishing a specialty and an audience.

She eventually left the museum and in 1988, with her then husband, she moved to his birthplace, Maine.

In 1989, Sandy founded the influential Food History News, a quarterly newsletter for food historians in North America. Pre-internet, it was the source for accurate, detailed historical information about food.   “I’ve always liked the theory, the heavy stuff,” she says.   From her little house in Islesboro, she edited and published seventy-six issues over the twenty-year run, from 1989 to 2009, and created a serious following of academics and influential food writers.

Now, four decades after her first job as a fireplace cook, Sandy is the “mentor” to those earning degrees in the field she helped invent. She has retired from Food History News and written four books on the subject, yet she remains a glorious amateur.

The cooking version of a 19th century naturalist, she still gives talks on Food History topics throughout New England, and recently published a contemporary cookbook, Maine Home Cooking (Down East Books, 2012).  She contributes to three columns, runs a quasi-CSA from her backyard garden, occasionally plans events for summer residents, and somehow managed to throw together a batch of buttery oat scones while we chatted.

Her life looks like that of a Maine housewife circa 1939.  Her house sustains the image.

“This house has its stamp on me,” she says, “I’ve lived with it the way we found it and it has taught me everything I needed to know about doors and walls and ceilings. If I got central heat, I would lose my root cellar.”

Whatever produce she doesn’t sell to her CSA customers, Sandy holds and preserves to get her though the lean winter months. We head down to the dark and chilly basement, the heart of her harvest operation.  The stairway is lined with ropes of onions, and shelves hold a dwindling supply of canned fruits and vegetables, heads of cabbage wrapped in thick brown paper, and a solitary stalk of Brussels sprouts. She opens the freezer and shows me frozen cuts of venison from the recent community hunt, as well as jars of pesto, green beans, corn, and assorted berries.

“The great gift of food history for me is I learned how to live really well on slender resources,” Oliver says, “If you know how to take care of yourself, you’ll never be afraid and will never resort to desperate measures.”

We head back upstairs, and I follow her over to a ceramic vase sitting on the counter next to the kitchen sink, filled with gadgets and trinkets from another time.  She pulls out two spatulas, one from the 1940s and one that she recently purchased new.  She bends them both on the counter and twirls them around in her hands.  The older spatula is stronger and more malleable: clearly superior.  “The past is full of good things,” she says, “good tools, good recipes, good ideas for storing food, and generally for how to live.”

Sandy remains firmly planted on her island, where passions for food and history afford her a life she would choose all over again.

 

Steph Deihl is a cook and writer living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with her husband Doug and their two young children.  She attended Wellesley College and the New England Culinary Institute before cooking and baking in restaurants in New York, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.  Steph has also worked as a personal chef and a recipe editor for MarthaStewart.com.  These days she cooks and writes the blog, One Family Meal, and tries to keep her toddlers out of trouble.  


 

 

SANDY’S TIPS:

This March, Ms. Oliver will teach Writing Food History on Cook ‘N Scribble, a course that will focus on giving food writers the tools and resources to establish a methodology for research.

“It’s true in all aspects of history that you make assumptions about the past based on our modern perspectives or what we think may have happened without taking subtle indications into consideration, which would get us a little closer to the truth,” Ms. Oliver says, “I want to give students a few tools to read critically and avoid pitfalls that food writers tend to fall into.”

 

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THINKING COOKBOOKS: HOME MADE WINTER

by on February 20, 2013 in Thinking Cookbooks

by Sara Franklin

Photo by Oof Verschuren

For many, winter is a season of sparkle and bustle followed by long months of cold and damp, stretched-out nights and bad moods. But I love the cold months, love how slowly the days unfold, snow delays and all. Once we’ve wiped the slate clean, hung new calendars on the wall, and set about the making of a new year, I give myself permission to hole up.

The winter months are all about projects around the house and waking up with a cold nose and good books read in the long stretches of darkness. It’s about building the nest for the coming months, which always seem to pick up momentum as the seasons march on. Yvette Van Boven—an acclaimed Dutch cook, restaurateur, culinary editor, and illustrator—seems to see eye-to-eye with me on this matter, which is probably why I’ve spent so much of my January with her whimsical and wonderful new book, Home Made Winter (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2012).

Born Dutch but raised mostly in Ireland, Van Boven has spent a lifetime tinkering in the kitchen, cooking beside her mother who possessed, said the author in one interview, a resourcefulness born of circumstance: “…Ireland in the 70′s. There wasn’t much to buy in the shops at that time.” Van Boven took after her mother’s resourceful creativity, playing with recipes, jotting them down, and soon was pursuing a sort of hodge-podge, art-infused culinary career. As a fellow freelancer, I feel shamed by her seemingly endless capacity for creation – spreading her talents between screen prints, paper cuts, drawing (her hand-drawn illustrations are strewn throughout her books and articles), recipe development and a variety of editorial work.

These days, Van Boven and her husband divide their time between a dark, stylish Amsterdam apartment—where Yvette co-owns a restaurant called Aan the Amstel with her cousin, Joris Vermeer —and a flat in Paris.

Whole chicken stuffed with pork, veal & sage sausage, photo by Oof Verschuren

Her peripatetic decades seem to have given Van Boven a powerful need for home. In the form of a pantry stocked with preserves; soup-ready roots in dark, dry drawers; a full liquor cabinet at the ready for impromptu parties; and all the fixings primed for her impressive array of cake, cookie and candy recipes. After a tumultuous and nomadic few years, I share these urges. I’ve been spending this winter in Brooklyn—snuggling into my own little kitchen for days on end, simmering pots of Van Boven’s sweet potato and chickpea soup and inviting neighbors for dinner so I can bake another loaf of her apple quinoa cake to share.

In her first cookbook, Home Made: The Ultimate DIY Cookbook (released in the U.S. by Stuart, Tabori & Chang in 2011), Van Boven won hearts and minds with her playful approach to the kitchen arts. Like many of today’s earnest cooks, she’s an ardent fan of building her meals entirely from scratch as often as possible (think gooseberry jam, pickles, terrines and infused liqueurs). But what sets her apart is her aversion to fussiness. She’s quick to offer less arduous routes to home cooked brilliance—Home Made features a recipe for bread “without working the dough” and a whole section on ice creams that don’t demand their own appliances (or even a hand crank, for that matter). Together with not-so-serious photos of the author at work and several step-by-step recipe storyboards (all shot by her husband and often collaborator, Oof Verschuren), the book exudes a sense of curiosity, discovery, and joy, rather than righteous DIY-ism.Home Made Winter strikes the same note, but the frenzy of constant motion—I make this, I travel here, I jump to the restaurant, I hop on the plane—has calmed. Van Boven’s Winter is slower-paced and filled with recipes that suit long, snowbound days. There are soups and stews, grapefruit and lime curd, cured beef sausage, brisket, poached pears with brie, and red wine jelly. In this frantic era in which we find ourselves today, slow-cooked meals bespeak an increasingly rare commitment to staying put.

photo by Oof Verschuren

The beautiful photographs help reiterate the book’s snow-day ambience —a brick chimney puffs smoke out into a gray sky, and in the interior pages, scenes of Irish winter and snowy Paris streets make me want to bundle up and hunker down. In her portrait shots, Van Boven herself seems to be kicking back. We see her walking her dog with a baguette tucked under her arm, laughing uproariously at a café, and chomping down on a chocolate espresso cupcake.

My favorite recipes in Winter are the ones that make me hungry for a simple weekday dinner. The author’s version of Tartiflette, the traditional potato and cheese casserole from the French Alps deploys a surprise — instead of the traditional bacon, she uses a briny shock of salt cod. The dish, writes Van Boven, is best eaten on the couch, with a spoon, a blanket and a good movie. Her hot whiskey, a fixture in Irish bars, can best express its restorative properties  “after a long walk on the stormy coast”. Now this is the kind of winter friend I can get down with.

Even the dishes she proposes for winter holidays — her mother’s colcannon for Halloween, the almond-filled galette des rois she recommends for the feast of the Epiphany, the spice bread and shortbreads of St. Nicholas Eve, the donut balls she likes to serve on New Years — have a homey feel. And though each appeals, I’m more inclined to the dishes that don’t demand a party in their honor. One of the luxuries of winter is inviting a single friend for a meal intended to be eaten while lounging in sweats.

Van Boven’s success with the first Home Made landed her a double book deal—Home Made Summer is due out this coming spring. I imagine I’ll get a copy and continue to delight in Van Boven’s lighthearted approach. But I’m not sure a book about summer—the season of vacation and picnic parties, concerts and days too hot to cook—can trump Winter.  What sets the book apart is the recognition that these slower months are a gift, an opportunity to turn inward, indulge a bit, and take time for the people and flavors we hold dear. That is to say, they’re about making home. And, if we slow down enough to admit it to ourselves, isn’t that all any of us is really after?

Sara B. Franklin grew up in suburban New York. A cook and a writer foremost, she’s worn many hats in the world of food. She’s farmed in Waltham and Northampton, Massachusetts; written as a restaurant critic for The Valley Advocate; worked with small farmers at the New York-based WhyHunger; and developed content for the American Museum of Natural History. She is currently in the Food Studies doctoral program at New York University and working on her first cookbook, about the native foods and stories of Brazil. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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My Year Food Writing: The Importance of Cookbooks

by on January 24, 2013 in My Year Food Writing

BEFORE my grandmother passed away this fall, before she stopped painting flowers and takingphotographs, before her final trip to the ballet, before she made her last batch of sweet, sticky schnecken, before she could no longer eat anything but fudgesicles, before she was forced to sleep for much of the day and could no longer entertain visitors, she took me into the sunroom of her house in Kansas City early one morning.

“Go into the kitchen cupboard, the one below the China,” she said, “Get the cookbooks. We’ll sort through them, you’ll choose the ones you want.” Her voice was fuzzed by the oxygen tube that was strapped to her nose.

It was just the two of us, alone, the sun speckling in through the screen doors and the humid heat of a Kansas City morning in August. My siblings were sleeping, my father running errands, my mother was on the telephone with doctors, always more doctors. My grandfather was in the kitchen in his Joseph A Bank suit eating Grapenuts and Cheerios mixed together in a blue-rimmed ceramic bowl. My grandmother’s arms were skeletal beneath her pink blouse, but otherwise much remained the same. The cockoo clock ticked. The light puddled on the two lacquered card tables on her sun porch. Through the windows, Eric, the gardener, pruned my grandmother’s roses, her delphinia, her dahlias and daisies.

The cupboard contained a chaos of cookbooks, lined, stacked, piled, crammed into corners. Her favorites stood in the front row – a 1932 edition of Thoughts for Food (1938) from which she often prepared a gelatinous Thousand Island Crab Ring Mold, multiple volumes of The Barefoot Contessa, a Spanish tapas book written by one of her friends, The Silver Palate Cookbook. Crammed behind these, other volumes had been gathering dust since before I was born. A Cuisinart cookbook published in the 1980s was virtually untouched. A midcentury Guide to Napkin Folding – good as new.

We began sorting through her collection, spreading the books out on one of the lacquered card tables, considering them as one might bottles in a wine cellar. Of her three children and seven grandchildren, I was the only one who had pursued food professionally – the only one who asked, every time upon arriving in Kansas City, when we would be making the deviled eggs. When I was growing up, she would often pull out an old cookbook, read me the notes that her own mother had made in the margin, and reminisce.

“How I used to love pickled tongue, Willie. Pickled tongue on toast. It was divine, Willie. Really divine.”

That August morning, however her eyes flitted from cover to cover like so many photographs in an old family album.

“Well, you know what to do,” she said. “Make a pile. Whatever you want is yours.”

Some selections were obvious. She placed the cookbooks that she’d read to me, the ones that had already been passed down for two or three generations, into my hands. The 19th century Art of Cookery I’d once found in a box in a closet in her guest room. The Settlement Cookbook with a four leaf clover tucked inside. The duct-taped copy of Thoughts for Food from which she had cooked until her cancer made the smell of savory food unbearable to her but which had also granted her a life’s wish: to eat ice cream always and only and without hesitation.

Beard on Bread, a well-worn copy of the 1973 classic with a sketching of Beard on the cover, big and proud, rolling out dough, caught my eye. I flipped through it — Saffron Bread, Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds, Myrtle Allen’s Brown Bread. I placed it in the TAKE HOME pile. She handed me Italian Bouquet: An Epicurean Tour of Italy, a heavy 1968 volume published by Gourmet. TAKE HOME. The Congressional Club Cook Book. TAKE HOME. Better Homes and Gardens Famous Foods from Famous Places, in all its 1960s glory. TAKE HOME.

 There were community cookbooks too, spiral-bound collections from the country club, from local schools, a holiday cookbook from the women’s society. A thin, stapled booklet with a drawing of a forlorn looking poodle printed on the cover called to me: 120 Best Recipes Compiled for the Benefit of the Las Vegas Humane Society. It looked like a Brooklyn ‘zine, but was an early-century recipe booklet that my grandmother’s great aunt (my great-great-great-aunt) had put together from her ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It was a dessert-heavy collection: Cherry Sponge Pie, Fabulous Chocolate Cake, Oatmeal Crispies No. 1 and No. 2, Snow Pudding. TAKE HOME.

NOW I am home in my Brooklyn pad. There are no flowers outside. I line the windowsill with plants from the local garden shop. I have a miniature desk and a stout bookshelf from Ikea that houses some of the cookbooks that, beginning in fifth grade, I used to teach myself how to cook: Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson and Rose Levy Baum’s The Bread Bible, Thoughts for Food and, of course, the poodle booklet from my grandmother.

It was cookbooks, in great part, that taught me how to cook. The ten-pound cooking textbook that my oral hygienist gave me when I was in sixth grade provided me a solid culinary education. It taught me how to respond to ingredients. And then I learned, by trial and error and doing things over and over again. The fullness of the kitchen can never be realized through ingredient lists and numbered steps alone. But cookbooks have an important place in my life.

I’m 22 now, and in my first home that I must create on my own, I cook by touch and taste and whim. Once in a while, I use a recipe — it’s like having an old friend to dinner. Sometimes there are recipes so inspiring that I must try them.

And maybe, the cookbooks I’ve collected and the new ones I can’t resist buying are, or will someday be, a record of my own life, as certainly as my grandmother’s were of hers.

 

Will Levitt is a Brooklyn-based food writer and the Director of Events at CookNScribble. Follow Will on Twitter @UnderEggWill. 

 This post was originally published on Will’s blog, Under the Egg. 
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A Letter from Dan “The Pig Man”: Say No to Fear and Keep Marching!

by on January 14, 2013 in Uncategorized

Dan “The Pig Man” on the cross

The new year brings new contractions in daily newspapers across the nation. Food and lifestyle writers are early and consistent casualties of downsizing. This strategy is fueled by several assumptions:

1. Heck, everybody eats anybody can write about it (wrong).

2. There’s plenty of freelancers who can knock this shit out cheaper (right, particularly the “shit” part).

In addition to these, there is a tacit sexism at work. Traditionally, food was girls’ stuff, more women than men wrote about it, et voila: anybody can do it!

Dan Huntley, a long-time columnist for the Charlotte Observer and the author of Extreme Barbecue, was not a food writer when he was down-sized from his staff position. He was a police reporter and a columnist — and he was dazed when his twenty-odd year run was cut short. He became an itinerate barbecue guy, wrote a book, and reinvented himself. Today, five years later, he is Dan “The Pig Man” — and he is one happy guy. Recently, he got a mail from a friend who is terrified of losing her job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The paper is shrinking and the layoffs have begun. Having gone through the same thing shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Dan “The Pig Man,” sent along this account of his own experience — and his own reinvention. His message — say no to FEAR and keep marching — is something every freelancer should have emblazoned like stigmata on their palms.

Dan LIVE from Fox And Friends national broadcast at the Democratic National Convention

Dan “The Pig Man” Writes:

Hey,

I’m the last guy on earth to be giving a pep talk to anyone, but I wish I could have found someone to assure me there was a meaningful, creative life on the other side of daily journalism five years ago when my newspaper was downsizing and it was only a matter of time before my number came up.

The weeks of anticipation and not-knowing was the worst part. After 20 odd years as a reporter and columnist at the Charlotte Observer, the fear of getting “laid off” was akin to contracting crotch cancer. Hell, I was so dumb and blindly loyal, I believed I’d be banging out cop briefs until I croaked at my keyboard.

But like scores of others, I was summoned to Human Relations one fine afternoon for the typical adieu. “Shrinking business,” “cutting costs,” “thank you for loyal service,” “in these times…you must understand…how sorry…” I walked out of the office, out of my paper and experienced vertigo for the first and only time in my life.

I was blinded by the daylight, city bus fumes and construction noise – that beeping from heavy equipment backing up. I’ve been through wars and worked crime scenes that paralyze the most seasoned soliders and cops, but after I lost my job everyday life was overwhelming. Everything was too vivid, too immense, impossible to categorize. I realized now that I’d lost the frame of reference that had served me for over two decades as a working writer.

A couple days later, on my official “Termination Day,” my work email was locked down at 6 a.m. and my company ID card no longer worked when I pulled into the parking lot. I was notified at the front door that I’d been barred from the newsroom unless accompanied by a security escort. From shining star to potential perp.

That day, I walked out of the paper and onto the dark side of the Earth. I was as panicked as a little kid who got separated from his mom in a mall.

For months, I was a hot mess, struggling to find my “sea legs” on a shifting deck. The only thing I knew for sure was there was no bridge back. I had to stop imagining that my editors would, at any moment, call and tearfully beg me to return. Much to my amazement, the paper continued to be published every day. I had to edit my assumption about croaking at my desk. I had to reinvent myself.

But first, I had to stand in the unemployment line. The same one whose director had, formerly, ushered me — a media VIP ! — immediately back to her office. When I stood in line, she ignored me. I was just another one of those hollow-eyed dudes doing that slow-mo shuffle jonesin’ for my $127 weekly fix.

As I was standing there, I thought, “I’m an open-minded liberal but JesusChristMotherofGod, these people really do stink – of cigarettes, stale beer, Big Mac-breath, piss-stained pants and kerosene heaters. What the hell am I doing here with this pitiful band of toothless geezers and pregnant tattoo artistes?

Dan making an offering to the Grill Gods

And then BOOM, I looked down at my lard-stained running shoes and realized I hadn’t showered in two days, and had been butchering bloody pork all morning. It was ME that was stinking.

It took time, but my eyes adjusted to the subdued light of my new environment. I developed a little barbecue business. I built myself a rig and a ‘cue house. I wrote when I could, finished a book, got a fancy grant. I pieced it together — thank god my wife is a school teacher and the checks come in like clockwork.

It took time to remember who I am.

Daily journalism was a great ride. You had your skills, you had the daily high of recording, publishing, being read, you had your regular paycheck. But it only expressed a part of my imagination and creativity. The irregular pay thing makes the dark side pretty scary, but the imagination and grit it takes to reinvent when you are shuffling up against 60 is a blast — if you choose to engage the adventure and put down the poor-me’s and the fear.

Journalists live by their wits, but after a few decades, the security of a full time job in a paper dims your wits. You make a lot of assumptions, you go on rote. When you are pushed out into the bright street, it’s blinding. But after a while, you feel more alive, you work your tail off and you’re living like you just graduated from college and anything is possible. Except now your kids are grown and you have grandchildren.

It’s not really that bad on the dark side. It’s like hitting an old bar you used to frequent – the faces are new but it ain’t much changed. And you begin to remember why you had ever hung in such a dark and smokey shit hole – it was where you had once felt safe. In your own skin, by your own wits, headed back to the light.

Dan “The Pig Man”

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TAKING THEIR MEASURE: COOKBOOKS THEN & NOW

by on January 14, 2013 in Thinking Cookbooks

By Anne Mendelson

Photo by Leslie Hasser

Sometimes an article insists on making an unforeseen 180-degree turn. This one certainly did. It was originally meant to take stock of the past year in cookbooks. Almost at once, however, I found myself taking stock of something larger and messier.

As a reviewer of very long standing, I enjoy writing about cookbooks. Or should that be “enjoyed?” Publishers haven’t completely agreed that cookbooks are done for. But few think that they have more than a marginal future without massive transfusions of energy from cyber-culture. Though I don’t expect to write the genre’s obituary in the near future, I think this may be one of the last moments for asking what is, or was, unique about the culinary literature as embodied in real, physical volumes free of “enhanced content.”

A cookbook printed on actual pages is not the same kind of teaching device or thinking experience as anything read online. Take its ability to absorb physical punishment. You can throw it at the wall out of sheer frustration and retrieve it in halfway usable condition, a form of self-expression unsuited to tablet computers. And whether it’s a masterwork or a piece of drivel, it repays cumulative relationships between peruser and perused — hours-long encounters, endless return visits over days or weeks or years — more flexibly than any electronic means.

Many decades ago, that quality of standing still to be grappled with was a blessing tome and many other would-be-accomplished cooks. These young enthusiasts — often the children of non-cooking mothers — spent much time with a comparative handful of trusted cookbooks because there weren’t many other roads to learning. They lastingly bonded with the actual pages on which several pioneering writers (Michael Field, Paula Wolfert, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy), along with some remarkable illustrators, had striven to convince the sufficiently motivated that cooking really made sense.

Cover of The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy

The sustained attention and cumulative effort that devotees focused on their few authorities reflected an ambition summed up in the word “mastering,” as in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The term in itself implied a work ethic, a set of intelligible values rooted in hands-on skills that nobody expected to acquire overnight.

Did those long-ago hopefuls really beget today’s ubiquitous gastroculture? Only in the sense that some prehistoric velociraptor ultimately begot Angry Birds. When I began reviewing cookbooks for magazines and newspapers, I had a sense of belonging to a community of reader-users linked by a coherent frame of reference. Any such community started falling apart a long time ago.

By way of compensation, the world of culinary books has become wonderfully multifarious throughout the falling-apart process. I’ve never seen more garbage in the field than today, or more first-rate work. I think the framework of judgment that I acquired from walking the home-kitchen walk via Field, Jaffrey, et al remains as relevant to evaluating new books as it was when I wrote my first reviews. But part of what it tells me is that cookbooks do some things better and some things worse than the informational competition.

On the plus side, cookbooks excel as easily navigable collections of fixed and — ideally — reproducible formulas, of which the best will progressively gain meaning as a learner keeps coming back to the page. (To put it another way, being able to hold something in your hands uniquely helps you to hold it in your mind.) Well-conceived  recipes are object lessons in the skill of building selective detail into a logically consecutive script. And the overall design of an intelligently thought-out cookbook has space to emerge as you take in the interlocking parts of a stable whole.

Cover of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

On the other hand, the pace of today’s communications leaves cookbooks flatfooted at the starting gate. Because of publishers’ production schedules, they’re fated to be last year’s instead of next Monday’s guess at what, or where, everybody will be eating on Tuesday. They’re also a poor fit with other priorities that arrived along with America’s transformation into Food Fetish Nation.

Cookbooks certainly have accompanied the triumphant foodie bandwagon between the 1980s and the smoked-maple-syrup-slurping present. Still, they don’t wholly belong to it. They can never fully capture the meal-as-rock-concert impact of the evolving foodie scene. Fast-paced live entertainment is just what recipes are worst at reproducing. On the printed page, and especially with repeated consultation of any one piece of text, spontaneous performance loses — well, spontaneity.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, the culinary book scene now regularly embraces things that no cook or cookbook reviewer could have remotely imagined when I was cutting my eyeteeth. Today anyone can take for granted marvelously enlightening books that aren’t recipe-driven — prodigious reference works (see the new edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink), moving family-centered memoirs (Alex Witchel’s recent All Gone), splendid hybrids of history and ethnobotany (In the Shadow of Slavery, Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff’s study of the African botanical heritage in the Americas), incisive examinations of the global batterie de cuisine (Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork). The ranks of available cookbooks now include many facsimiles, annotated editions, and English translations of historic culinary documents, as well as explorations of cuisines that once were hopelessly off the U.S. mainstream map (Naomi Duguid’s Burma: Rivers of Flavor; Linda Lau Anusasananan’s The Hakka Cookbook).

I’m lucky to enjoy the riches of such a fantastically diverse scene. But it has a flip side: the aforementioned breakdown of a shared frame of reference. Beginners exploring today’s culinary literature have more learning options than ever — but without the learning ethos that my generation acquired from plugging away at our meager range of authorities.

Cover of the Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer

One community of reader-cooks has fallen apart, another is coalescing in cyberspace and around the altars of celebrity chefs. More often than not, the energy that members of the new gastroculture pour into talking the talk and glorifying off-the-cuff, subjective personal reactions augurs no good for the future of cookbook reviewing. That was precisely why this article turned around and bit me in the ass almost the minute I began it: I made the mistake of looking at a few online “Best Cookbooks of 2012” lists. On the whole, I found them appalling. The problem wasn’t the actual selections; who expects others to share all one’s own likes and dislikes? What bothered me was the brief evaluations accompanying the choices.  Most sounded like slapdash jacket blurbs knocked out by people running late for an airline shuttle. By and large, they seemed  rooted in no train of thought on the part of the writer, and presupposed none on the part of readers.

Writing book reviews or even capsule notices of any kind should begin with setting yourself standards of critical thinking. It should involve asking yourself how to do justice to both your subject — food, television, politics, the history of toothpaste — and your audience — not a ship of fools, but people who deserve your utmost respect. Such reviewing will surely survive on scattered blogs and websites. But I expect to see less and less of it devoted to cookbooks.

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Write What Scares You

by on January 5, 2013 in Uncategorized

I’ve been writing around a book for a year, amassing scenes and studies whose sole connection is that that they share a folder in my laptop that is labeled NEXT. I decided to allow the piece, or book, or series of essays — whatever the heck it is — to find itself.

Usually I know where I am going and I almost always write against a deadline — generally one that has passed. Fear is one of my favorite motivators.  But for the past year, I’ve been writing without preconception and without an editor holding a loaded gun close to my head.  It’s been scary.

Over time, writers develop little tricks  — the ironic twist, a wink of sly humor, a nostalgic curlicue — that serve as a bridge between thoughts, the kicker to a piece or even, in short essays, an organizing principle.  External pressure is a great excuse for dipping into that trusty bag of tricks. In the absence of that pressure, it’s not as easy to justify hiding behind prose.  There is no easy way out, I have to keep typing.

NEXT has taught me to highlight spots where I am stuck and to just keep typing forward.  When I return to the pages weeks or months later, it’s easy to see the briar patch of my own fear, the marsh of resistance, or the black hole of not-knowing, beneath those highlights.  Often, I’ve brushed up against something that, like twenty extra pounds, I’d rather ignore. I’d rather write around it — do these words make me look fat?

But some of the most powerful prose lurks in those gnarly spots.  The things I skirt, the things I cover up, the things I fear, the things that shame me are, each of them, a hairball of knotted energy.  Each snarl limits a little chord of memory, restricts some imagination, clogs inspiration.  You get used to it, you only notice it was there when it is gone.

I was a restaurant critic when I moved to New York City thousands of years ago, so long in fact that dinosaurs still roamed the island of Manhattan in pursuit of nouvelle cuisine. It was a time when people, at least the ones I aspired to resemble, lived in restaurants and that, along with a significant expense account, was convenient. At the time, my salary at one of the City’s newspapers afforded me a little squat in a former welfare hotel at the corner of 55th and Broadway. It had a neon sign that read: Hot’l Wood’ard.

Soirees de la dump were not, I felt, in the best interest of my emerging public persona. When I wanted to entertain I reserved a table in a restaurant.  I thought about restaurants, wrote about restaurants, talked about restaurants, read about restaurants, ate in restaurants, hung out with our restaurant geeks.

When I wasn’t tucked up to some high-thread count table linen I was hunched over a white Formica desktop that was supported by two under-the-counter-refrigerators and served as my kitchen counter at the Hot’l. I was learning the difference between writing poems and writing restaurant criticism, learning how to report stories, leaning how to write on a typewriter instead of with a quill pen and then just as quickly, learning to compose on the keyboard of a Tandy from Radio Shack. Like I said, dinosaurs still roamed Broadway ten stories below my window.

On that Formica desktop, I worked with Lillian Hellman on the final book of her life, a culinary memoir that she co-authored with Peter Feibleman. I ghost wrote a book about wine. I began writing my first cookbook. I cooked my way through Paula’ Wolfert’s masterpiece, “Cooking of the Southwest of France” and, not long after, began to cook from appetite and heart, instead of ambition and recipes.

But I couldn’t write from the center of my non-restaurant life without writing about where I was, without writing about the Senegalese umbrella vendors whose headquarters were in the apartment next door and who squatted in the hallway scooping tripe from bowls with bread at lunchtime. To write about my life in the old Hot’l, I’d have to write about the palsied folk artist who wheeled her shopping cart full of paint to the elevator each day and pushed it to the park or the sidewalk. I’d have to write about the women who swished past my door in Kimono and sucked Lucky Strikes as they waited for their gentlemen callers at the elevator, the cellist who practiced in the stairwell, the cockroaches, the mice, the Hot’l's owner, a holocaust collaborator who had a fondness for red-flocked wall-paper.

Most worrying, I couldn’t write from the center of my life without writing about the gypsy who, before dying there, lived next door, studied my palm and informed me that my lifeline was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

“Kahn-Flected” she said, “many lives at once.” I’d settled my “conflict,” pushed the dreamy poet to one side, shoved the risky, voice-of-the-street, Girl Jimmy Breslin down deep, and suited up for what seemed like a path to a non-breadline future.

The Hot’l with its creaking dumpster of an elevator, worn floral carpets and air that smelled of boiled goat, tripe and salt cod, of dime store perfume, unwashed laundry, aging flesh, dashed ambition and persistent hope was at odds with the life I’d decided upon. I wore trim little Calvin Klein suites when stepping out to the citadels of cuisine. I peered through the peephole before making the dash from my door. To linger in the hallway, or on a page, might cause me reconsider. No pair of Prada pumps has scurried faster from an apartment to an elevator than mine.

In those years I was apprenticing myself to established forms — the critique, the food feature, the news story. My work was derivative, therefore flat as a crepe in a pan.  Occasionally, a little whiff from the Hot’l would sneak into a story. It was the only time that my prose bubbled and spit.  Writing from what scares you is a lot like unbuttoning the Calvin Klein and pulling on the sweatpants.  You exhale.  You give thanks to the inventors of elastic waistbands.

In addition to the imagination that can fizz from a close brush with something you’d rather avoid, writing what’s true — as opposed to what you thought was so, or wished were so — also humanizes. One of the reasons I love Smitten Kitchen is that its creator, Deb Perelman, writes from where she is: a tablespoon-size kitchen that is as familiar to me as the tiny Magic Chef at the old Hot’l. Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine chronicle a similar challenge in www.BigGirlsSmallKitchen.com.

I read them in part to revisit my past, in part to marvel at how the zeitgeist has shifted — its cool to be under-square-footaged today — in part to be grateful for the six burner Viking, the yards of counters, the four wall ovens that surround me today as I type at my kitchen table.

I also read them because these writers ring true. Their wee kitchens may not be the embarrassment cooking closets were when dinosaurs roamed, but what they are writing about is not, in the end, spatial or generational. It’s about how to Houdini big dreams into small spaces. It’s about what writers do every day.

We sit. We type. We avoid typing. We type some more. On good days, we sit in scary places and give them voice. On really good days, the voice we summon transcends the worrying self and touches something universal, like hope.

Last year, when she was about to post a piece about the financial terrors of writing for a living, Monica Bhide hesitated.

“It felt like a huge risk to reveal,” she said, “I had to convince myself that the piece showed strength, not weakness.” In the end, outing her shame allowed her readers to name their own.

Writing the piece also convinced Bhide to expand a series of interviews she’d done with women who had been galvanized by adversity into a book, Conversations with Exceptional Women: Seeds of Inspiration to Help you Bloom Where You are Planted. The book, indeed Bhide’s ouvre, suggests a practical, self-hope approach to the sitting with the things that scare you.

Talking to Bhide made me aware of the habits I’ve developed by trial and, more often, error, that help keep my spine straight and give a little alloy to my nerve. Embarrassingly, my approach is right out of the Apple-a-Day school.

You can’t summon inspiration, you can’t command courage. You can’t hurry prose. The writing life is an endless pursuit of patience, persistence, productivity and nerve. There is a particular internal homeostasis that supports that long-distance run. That same condition — which I call equanimity —  seems to attract inspiration and imagination.

Reading is the best vitamin a writer can take. I read to be moved, to be jealous, to be motivated, to be distracted, to be absorbed, to be changed, to be awed. I read more than I write. Shortly after I began sifting through the files inside the folder labeled NEXT, I started re-reading the late Judith Moore.

In her collection of essays, Never Eat Your Heart Out and her memoir Fat Girl: a True Story, Moore dove into a fathomless cistern of shame to write about her relationship with food. The essays transcend the food writing genre, and endure, now more than a decade after her death, as literature. I can’t imagine the courage it took to dive into that water, skinless, without oxygen or tether. But reading her make me think twice when I start ferreting around for an easy way out. Reading her makes me want to write.

Happy New Year.

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14 Tips on How to Live Like a Writer from Molly O’Neill

by on January 4, 2013 in Uncategorized

Living like a writer requires writing often, keeping your focus, and a few other things — not the least of which is a sharp pencil. Here are Molly O’Neill’s 14 tips to live like a a writer. WRITE ON!

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