Thinking Cookbooks: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

by on June 12, 2013 in Thinking Cookbooks

By Stephanie Deihl

I wanted to hate Deb Perelman and The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook.  Before publication, I had spent six years dodging the eponymous blog.  As a former line cook, I was dubious of this self-taught food blogger with six million followers who churned out up to three unique recipes a week.  I was sure the recipes didn’t work.

When the cookbook was released in October 2012, her name and recipes exploded across the internet like soda from a rattled can.  I finally clicked on a link to her site and started reading.  I laughed out loud three lines in.  I read on because, well, her writing style is infectious.  She confides in the reader without spilling cringe-worthy details.  She feigns irreverence to lighten her impassioned monologues on everything from poaching eggs to constructing perfect pizza pie, and does it all with a lively wit that makes you wish you knew her personally, so you could call her up to hear more.

I scrolled down to the photos.  I’m not sure I’d ever seen such an artistic display of butternut squash peels on a laminate countertop.  This woman could make dry granola seem mouthwatering.  I re-checked her bio.  Nope, she was not a professional photographer, but had dabbled as an art therapist and IT reporter, and even worked at a bakery long enough to learn how to scrawl “Happy Birthday” on frosted cakes.

I had been blogging six months at this point, just long enough to appreciate how hard it is to achieve the blogging trifecta:  great voice, great photos, and great recipes.  She had the first two in the bag, so I assumed the recipes didn’t work.

Unfortunately for my ego, I walked into my local bookstore to find a Christmas gift for my mother.  There it was, the last copy of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, staring me down.  I opened it up and flipped carefully through the thick, glossy pages.  I could literally feel other patrons hovering, waiting for me to put it down so they could nab it.  My competitive alter-ego took over and I paid for it at the counter; a gift for my mother, for Christmas.

Deb Perelman

Back at home, my fingers ran over page after page of beautifully photographed food and stopped at the recipe for Harvest Roast Chicken with Grapes, Olives, and Rosemary.  The dish reminded me of a spectacular family meal with sausages and grapes that I ate at my first restaurant job at L’Espalier in Boston.  I could still remember the flavor of that silky, salty, and sweet sauce eight years later, and figured this dish might be a close approximation.

I jotted down the recipe before handing the book over to my mother, and made it for dinner the following week.  Preparing the recipe took twenty minutes from start to finish.  I literally threw the ingredients into a pan and let them roast.  The result was crunchy golden-brown chicken glistening with a smooth, deep, plum-colored sauce, studded with briny olives and sweet bursting grapes.  As Deb instructed would happen, my family “licked their spoons clean.”  For me, the meal was tinged with bitter and sweet — this Deb woman really could cook.

The next night, we showed up for Sunday supper at my parent’s house.  The air was thick with roasting meat and I ran up the stairs into the kitchen, expecting to see a roasted bird or loin of pork resting on the stove, ready to carve.  Instead, there was that familiar cast-iron pan full of crispy browned chicken pieces, olives, and grapes.  My mother had made the very same dish.  It was just as delicious as it was the night before, and aside from minor grumblings from the toddler set that we were eating the same thing again, we happily licked our spoons clean.

I made it again the following week for company, and then grudgingly bought a copy of the book so I could try some of the other recipes.  I’ve been cooking from it nonstop ever since.

Deb has said that her inspiration often stems from disappointment; in dishes she ordered at a restaurant or recipes she cooked at home that didn’t taste at all like she’d imagined.  “Nobody hates cooking as much as they hate the roulette of not knowing if their time, money, and efforts are going to be rewarded by a recipe that exceeds expectations,” she says in the introduction.  She wrote the cookbook for the same reason she started the blog – to create a haven of successful no-tweaking-necessary recipes.

It’s clear from the book’s layout, that Deb loves breakfast food and sweets.  She admits shamelessly in her introduction that the line between them is sometimes blurred.  “Here at Smitten Kitchen, everybody agrees that cold fruit crisps make excellent breakfasts,” she says.  Deb even convinces me – a serial breakfast-skipper who would prefer a slice of pizza at 7 AM to chocolate brioche – that this is a brilliant idea because it’s healthier than sugary pre-mixed yogurts.

She follows breakfast with hearty soups, sandwiches, and an inspired vegetarian section – she called herself one for over a decade.  Main dishes span poultry, pork, beef, and lamb and a smattering of fish and shellfish recipes, though she admits that fish isn’t really her thing.  The common thread is comfort food.

This doesn’t mean the book is full of uncomplicated weeknight meals. Take, for example, her chocolate hazelnut crepe cake: Paper-thin crepes swiped with hazelnut pastry cream and stacked eighteen layers high into a neat tower, then drizzled with rich chocolate ganache.  I made a cake just like this for a final pastry project in culinary school.  It took me weeks to perfect and even now, I’m not sure I could write out the five-page recipe with equal parts detail and brevity, as Deb does – bravely holding the reader’s hand through the intimidating step professional bakers call tempering the yolks, and clearly explaining how to achieve the desired thinness of each crepe.

She also offers creative solutions to common food issues.  In the recipe for tomato scallion shortcakes with whipped goat cheese, “The problem,” she said, “Is that fresh-tomato-and-diluted-dressing runoff that puddles in the plate,” because she struggles to keep from licking the plate clean.  She solves this by catching the drip with savory shortcake.  She has me sold, and left wondering why I never thought of it, even after plating hundreds of juicy heirloom tomato salads as a line cook.

Then, it dawned on me that maybe what I considered her biggest issue – lack of professional experience – was really a blessing in disguise.  As a restaurant cook I was so busy perfecting someone else’s vision that I never had time to work on my own.

“I’m a slow, slow cook and even slower at prep,” Deb said in a January 2013 blog post. But maybe this is the secret to her success:  she tastes and tests and tweaks until the recipe comes out to her liking, and then tests it again to be sure.  “I am picky as hell.  And also a little obsessive,” she said in the cookbook’s introduction. But for this line of work, those are admirable traits.

What I learned early on in my culinary career is that if you have unbridled passion for good food, a strong attention to detail, and a willingness to work harder than you ever thought you could, you can become a good cook.  Apparently this can also get you a wildly successful blog and best-selling cookbook to boot.

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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Food Writing Lives: Sheila Hibben

by on June 6, 2013 in Food Writing Lives

by Anne Mendelson

“What is American cooking?” is a difficult question today. It would have been equally difficult in, say, 1776, if anyone had been using such terms. Certainly it was no cinch at the time of the Great Depression, when eager answers flew about with very little regard for the experience of eating.

Some authorities wanted American cooking to be a system for packing nutrients and caloric energy into everybody with a scientific dispatch befitting the world’s most enlightened modern society. Other leaders of taste encouraged the nation’s cooks to embrace sweetness-and-cream femininity in edible form, decoratively set off with Jell-O or canned pineapple. American food manufacturers and advertisers promised instant gratification to both parties through a stream of promotional literature for pre-processed packaged goods.

Meanwhile, various other sects that pursued their own notions between the World Wars included a faction of self-proclaimed gourmets. Perhaps the most showy embodiment of the breed was a fictional one: Nero Wolfe, the gormandizing detective created in 1934 by the mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe’s preference for money-is-no-object repasts requiring pheasant or fines herbes was implicitly steeped in Old World snobberies — until 1938, when Too Many Cooks, the fifth book in the series, portrayed a convention of European-trained maitres cuisiniers brought round to acknowledging the glories of American regional cuisine.

Stout’s secret weapon in this project was a chum in left-wing circles who happened to be the authority on American regional food. That she also detested the very word “gourmet” must have weighed on her high-strung conscience. But for a hefty fee ($2,000, according to Stout’s biographer John McAleer), she agreed to provide culinary lowdown along with an appendix of several dozen purportedly Wolfean recipes. Her name was Sheila Hibben.

Hibben (1888 – 1964) represented yet another wing of thought about the identity of American food: birthright good cooks fed up alike with epicurean poses, quasi-scientific cant, gussied-up visual effects, Madison Avenue strategies, and general amnesia about culinary traditions older than the middle of last week. She was, and remains today, one of the most original observers of the American food scene since there has been a scene to observe.

She had come to attention in 1932 with The National Cookbook, a composite culinary portrait of the United States beyond anything that had been attempted before. It treated American cooking as a cultural heritage both practical and inspiring — a lesson, during what she called a time of “economic readjustment,” in the “balance between what we have and what we make of it.”

Hibben, née Cecile Craik, was tall, angular, well-read, and politically conscious. She liked to speak her mind with a certain sting. From her affluent Alabama family she had inherited unconventional political opinions and an appreciation of true kitchen skills in either black or white hands. At about twenty, Sheila (the family nickname that she always preferred to Cecile) started intermittently transplanting herself to France. When war broke out she undertook arduous nursing duties (later to earn her the Croix de Guerre) for the Red Cross, and also fell in love with an American soldier-journalist-activist named “Pax” (Paxton) Hibben. They married in 1916. Pax traveled on many postwar food-relief missions in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; Sheila often accompanied him until she became pregnant. They had returned to the United States and were living in New York with their seven-year-old daughter, Jill, when Pax suddenly died of pneumonia in December, 1928. His widow faced single parenthood at forty.

In a 2001 interview, Jill Hellendale told me that her mother promptly thought, “What can I do? I can cook and I can write.” She also knew that Hibben was a name to conjure within journalistic circles. Less than four months after Pax’s death she had managed to place a magazine article in The Outlook titled “Food Is to Eat,” protesting the use of food to showcase cloying decorative fads. It was the first of many attempts to champion  unaffected from-scratch cooking against what she saw as enemies let loose on twentieth-century American kitchens: cuteness, pretension, media-abetted sacrifices to fashion or convenience.

The 1932 National Cookbook was the biggest and most influential proclamation of Hibben’s culinary credo. It contained about 850 recipes, supposedly from almost every state of the Union. (Jill, who was of an age to help shuffle index cards into piles in their Greenwich Village apartment, recalled some gerrymandering meant to level out the contributions of over- and under-represented states.) Hibben’s introduction sounded a ringing challenge to do our heartfelt best by the regional blessings showered on this nation.

“We have better materials to work with than any other people in the world,” she announced, citing such proofs as pompano, canvasback duck, terrapin, Celeste figs, and “alligator pears” (avocados). “What country on earth has a better list to delight the heart of a discriminating glutton?”

To her, the real genius of American cooks was a generous instinct for letting such foods’ basic qualities shine through. Eighty years later the dishes she collected stand as evidence of how much has disappeared. Of course environmental casualties like canvasbacks and terrapin can never be replaced. But even less can the frame of reference that would tell today’s would-be sophisticates how peach blancmange, boiled dandelion or turnip greens, shad roe croquettes, calf’s brains with brown butter, pressed clabber doused in cream, clam omelet, beans baked with mutton, or lye hominy boiled in a pot “in a cabin, usually under a fig tree” could ever have brought joy to knowledgeable eaters.

A book-reviewing service would later describe The National Cookbook as “a cookbook that made history.” It could have made even more. Shortly after her husband’s inauguration in March, 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt announced a plan to devise White House menus displaying America’s culinary patrimony, both historic and regional. She invited Hibben, now the obvious go-to authority on such matters, to help choose the best dishes and approaches. But as Laura Shapiro related in a 2010 New Yorker article, the new consultant was rapidly sacrificed to Mrs. Roosevelt’s astonishing penchant for matching the larger U.S. Depression with the most grim and joyless fare ever to blight the White House table.

At first, newspapers touted the project. Hibben, having wangled a New York Times feature article on the comeback of sturdy old food traditions, tried to make Mrs. Roosevelt understand something of her own vision. The effort was doomed. After their inevitable parting, she didn’t mind blowing off some steam. Several years later a Life Magazine profile of Mrs. Roosevelt was able to mention Hibben’s frustration at being unable to persuade the First Lady, ”an indifferent gourmet whose one idea seemed to be to expound the recipes at her press conferences, that the dishes were meant to be eaten rather than printed.”

The National Cookbook had established Hibben’s reputation, but didn’t free her from the responsibility of putting a child through school and college. In 1934 she landed the gig that would be her mainstay for another thirty years: a column titled “Markets and Menus” for The New Yorker, covering news of interest to cooks or diners and irregularly published under the byline “S.H.” Eventually she was assigned another column on home furnishings. From time to time she supplemented the New Yorker income with freelance jobs — usually menu-with-recipes articles tailored to some theme — for women’s fashion and “shelter” magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and House Beautiful.

The permanent New Yorker berth must have been a fiscal godsend. At the same time, it probably was one of the reasons that Hibben’s name gradually lapsed into obscurity. 

Unlike such contemporaries as Clementine Paddleford at the New York Herald Tribune and later Gourmet Magazine, “S.H.” retained little visible profile of her own outside the small world of New York food writers. Nor did she ever try her hand at a major all-purpose American manual a la Boston Cooking-School Cook Book or Joy of Cooking, dispensing soup-to-nuts advice to multitudes. Publishing any cookbook — above all a big kitchen bible — under orthodox commercial auspices means observing shibboleths of recipe-writing that as far as Hibben was concerned merely hindered real learning through smell, touch, and taste. According to Jill Hellendale, demands for stopwatch timings, scrupulously level measurements, or oven temperatures any more exact than “hot” or “moderate” drove her mother crazy. Her idea of enlisting Jill to help with measuring was “Take your baby spoon with the teeth marks and fill it x times.” Any appetite for further food writing cannot have been stimulated by her ladies’-magazine assignments, where editors generally expected just the concessions to cooking-by-numbers and gastronomic chic that most compromised her own instincts and convictions as a cook.

In other words, Hibben was too much of a prickly individualist ever to have become a prolific culinary star represented by a dozen books or successive editions of one best-seller. Consequently she failed to “brand” herself in a manner for twenty-first-century purveyors of pop culinary history to generalize about. The only way to get a sense of her mind and palate is to read her best work.

None of her few other books ever galvanized attention like The National Cookbook. The one that is easiest to find today is the treasurable American Regional Cookery (1946), a shorter and more gracefully arranged — though at the time less noticed — reworking of territory covered in The National Cookbook. Shortly before landing the New Yorker job in 1934, she had also done a collection of recipes using the British AGA stove, which the makers were trying to market in the U.S. Later she would collaborate with the gastroenterologist Sara M. Jordan on a work titled Good Food for Bad Stomachs (1951), the brainchild of The New Yorker’s ulcer-ridden editor Harold Ross, a Jordan patient.

In an era more friendly to culinary contrarians, she might have achieved lasting stardom. As it is, the only work in which one can fully appreciate Hibben’s peculiarly spirited mixture of natural rebel and back-to-first-principles traditionalist is A Kitchen Manual, published shortly before America entered World War II in 1941.

As she firmly points out, it is not a cookbook but an invitation to think about cooking in a probing, leisurely spirit. Nothing could have been more Hibben-like than divining, on the threshold of national crisis, that the mental concentration and hands-on effort involved in good cooking are no escapism but evidence of how a “true cook” grasps the role of cooking “in sustaining and cheering those around her, and knows it for something that touches not only the body of man but his spirit.” 

Defiantly free of recipes or other concessions to conventional expectations, A Kitchen Manual announces itself as “a new kind of mystery story, a book of secrets, a homily on the hang of the thing.” Its mission is to make reader-cooks intuit the variables involved in, say, broiling a noble beefsteak or judging the magical fitness of certain flavor-combinations. Or making a really good consomme — a marathon effort that struck a chord with M.F.K. Fisher, a Hibben admirer. She thought that A Kitchen Manual “should be read at least twice a year” by cooks lulled into habits of neglect. “It takes courage today to write of spending ten hours on a pot of stock,” Fisher acknowledged, and added, “It takes courage even to read Mrs. Hibben, but there is a kind of purging excitement about it,” much as in reading Brillat-Savarin.

A Kitchen Manual seems to have attracted only a few admirers. And the immediate postwar years, as Hibben wryly noted in the introduction to American Regional Cookery, were not attuned to her unique sensibility: “Peace and Freedom have come to us riding on a tide of Ready-Mixes,” while once-fresh hopes of preserving heirloom American dishes had been cheapened into marketable ploys.

The national emergencies out of which Hibben had argued for skilled, lovingly meant cooking as a concrete social priority gradually vanished from America’s rear-view mirror. Prestigious food writers increasingly adopted gourmet airs, something that she had always detested as much in real life as in Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. As time went on, people tended to assume that M.F.K. Fisher had invented “serious” food writing. At Hibben’s death in February, 1964, a garbled Times obituary failed to include The National Cookbook among her works, and a tribute in The New Yorker — longer on affection than facts — neglected to mention that she had written even one book. 

In recent years Hibben’s name has started resurfacing among American food writers, thanks to Laura Shapiro and a few other admirers. It remains to be seen whether her works will ever become celebrated for the qualities that most deserve celebrating.

Eighty-plus years ago, this woman was a champion of American regional food on its own uncontrived, unvarnished merits. She was a two-fisted denouncer of the age’s high-tech shortcuts for taking the cooking out of cooking, and a conscientious objector against perpetrating either cheesy or pretentious makeovers on simple dishes for the sake of journalistic spin. But above all, she believed in a link between mindful, capable, delightful cooking and the kind of world we make for ourselves in other ways; “good behavior is closely bound to good eating” was how she put it in American Regional Cookery. 

This attitude was unfashionable even in her own lifetime. It harks back to earlier American domestic authorities like Catharine Beecher and Sarah Tyson Rorer — culinary patriots who unabashedly linked well-cooked food with private and public virtue. Sheila Hibben firmly believed in what Mrs. Rorer called “the moral influence of a good meal,” and she was able to make the case with more agility and savoir-faire than her predecessor. In the introduction to Regional American Cookery, she wrote of the direct, unfeigned happiness with which her elders used to reminisce about food: “‘That,’ my mother would declare, describing a delicate Madeira jelly eaten with thick yellow cream, ‘was the best thing I ever tasted.’” Everyone, Hibben thought, must have an analogous “best I ever tasted” touchstone — a sort of better self in the taste buds, that can be appealed to as motivation for cooking instead of can-opening. When that has happened:

“Then hunger will truly be fed, and women — and maybe men, too — will know the satisfaction of nourishing with their own strength and skill those whom they love.”

Anne Mendelson is a freelance writer, editor, and reviewer specializing in food-related subjects. She has written and worked as a consultant on several cookbooks, was a contributing editor to the late lamented Gourmet, and has been an occasional contributor to the New York Times Dining Section and the Los Angeles Times Food Section. Her most recent book is Milk, a cultural-historical survey of milk and fresh dairy products (Knopf 2008).

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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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