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Carry Me Home

by on January 25, 2012 in Bios, Writing

In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin is not your usual memoir. The book is based on a collection of recipes crated at Jewish internment camp during the Holocaust. It is written by Cara De Silva, a food historian and food journalist whose family immigrated from Russia and Poland and whose ancestral Jewish experience had to do with Pogroms, not the internment camps of the Third Reich. And yet the book is a memoir, more convincing and real than most memoirs, more alive, more urgent, and far more intimate.

Ms. De Silva said that her research was so intense that she, indeed, time traveled.

“For two years, I spent part of each day with the women of Terezin,” she said.

In fact, she was there, in more than a mystical way. Her research — extensive reading of letters, memoirs and history, and a good number of interviews brought the author face-to-face with the Holocaust. She had to face the fragility of what seems to be eternal, the certainty of death, the uncertainty of when it will announce itself, the incomprehensible capacity for violence that humans possess.

Ms. De Silva’s decision to go with the pain and remove her self-imposed blinders accounts for the deep emotional truth in the book, the vivid immediacy of the story. Her own story did not include the horror of the Holocaust, yet the women of Terezin’s story was a part of her own story, a part that she excavated determinedly, most likely with an 800 pound teaspoon.

The personal excavation led Ms. De Silva deeper and deeper into a shared past. She said that food has the power to carry us back, back, back into our personal historical context, to see ourselves within a particular family, ethnic or cultural tribe, incarnating a set of values, or personal mythologies. Like Dr. Gong, author of The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, Ms De Silva feels that cooking and remembering food is a form of resistance, a way of refusing to be erased. Erased as a person, a race, a culture, a gender, a citizen of a particular place and a particular time.

It’s a long way from the Holocaust and China’s Cultural Revolution, but taken together, the conversations about food in the time of genocide made me wonder about the effect of another sort of tyranny.  The tyranny of the moment, the fad, the fashionable, the story-that-signals-hip, as well as enlightened, privileged, well educated, well traveled, and quite possibly brilliant.

In terms of food story, this sentences the writer to force the square peg of her own food experience into the round hole of a particular heroic myth — the vulnerable person rises from beneath an Everest of junk food — an improbable Phoenix! — and is reborn as a highly discriminating, deeply righteous Locavore. Tales that deviate from this myth are often marginalized today.

It takes a lot of courage to tell the truth, as opposed to a chic, socially and politically elevated truth. And yet, the truth of one’s own experience, no matter how un-cool, geeky, retro, dowdy or embarrassing, contains the gold.

Writers who tell me they don’t have food stories, are usually saying “I am ashamed of my tuna-fish-casserole past.” I say: tuna-casserole is your gold mine. Take heart. Inhale. Dig. — Molly O’Neill

( Cara De Silva is currently time traveling to Venice during the Renaissance. She also makes frequent excursions into the history of Venetian-Jewish food.)

Molly’s interview with Ms. De Silva can be found in our shop. 

Talking Spilled Milk

by on December 7, 2011 in Bios

Matthew Amster-Burton, the creator and co-host of of the podcast Spilled Milk, likes to turn things upside down and look at them from different angles. His skewed view reveals something new, even in the familiar and in his writing — in the Wall Street Journal, GourmetLive and on his site, Roots and Grubs — it reveals a lot about Matthew.

Posed to make the point

He’s a goofball. He lives in Seattle. He’ll do just about anything to get the reader to shake her head and look again. His first book, Hungry Monkey, is about cooking for his firstborn but he is rarely seen feeding her.
It makes you re-think the concept of nurturance. That’s his point.
He says that podcasting has made him a better writer.

“When you’re on the air, it’s painfully obvious when the show has bogged down and no one is saying anything interesting,” he said. “At worst, you get dead air. Good broadcasters are totally intolerant of this situation, and I’ve found that it’s spilled over into my writing: where I might have left a dull paragraph in place and moved on, now I’m more likely to fix it or get rid of it, because it’s the equivalent of dead air.”

There’s no dead air on Spilled Milk. It’s one of the podcasts I listen to when I’m alone in the kitchen, cooking. It feels like friends have just dropped by. I don’t know if its Matthew and Molly’s zany warmth that makes the podcast feel like friends dropping by. It could also be something older, deeper, and only vaguely recalled:

Molly Wizenberg and Matthew Amster-Barton, circa 2010 (image from WWW.KITCHN.COM)

George Burns and Gracie Allen, circa 1953 (Wikicommons Burns_and_Allen_1953.JPG)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we spoke, it was immediately apparent that Matthew is not just another funny guy. He understands what makes good radio and how to make good radio and in our interview, and later on a live-chat with the Food Blog U class at Cook ‘n Scribble, he talked about both.  

 

Photos of Matthew provided by Lara Ferroni.  Photo of Molly Wizenberg from Carla Leonardi.

 

Talking Edible Radio

by on December 2, 2011 in Bios

Initial fantasy of Kate Manchester's Kitchen

I first heard Kate Manchester’s name two decades ago when she was living in New York City and working as a private chef to the irrevocably hip and rich. And then she left. Someone said she’d moved to Santa Fe. I imagined her in a designer kitchen, possibly crushing poblano chilies with a mortar and pestle made from volcanic rock.

Instead, she’d founded Edible Santa Fe Magazine and had become a one-woman radio station.

Long before “podcast” became part of common parlance, Kate was traveling around the country interviewing cooks, farmers, artisanal food producers and other assorted food nuts. She has a casual, conversational style of interviewing that disarms the sort of people I want to hear from — people who make their lives with their own hands and don’t spend much time talking about it.

Revised Fantasy of Kate Manchester's Kitchen (Susan Austin Paintings)

Already, her body of work is an audible map of little-known heros of farms and kitchens nationwide.

I like to listen to Kate on Edible Radio when I am traveling to do my own interviews. Late at night on big highways when the world looks like a confederacy of speeding semi tractor trailers my litttle Saab wagon feels very small and its nice to know that there are other mere humans out there. Someplace.

When I interviewed her for CooknScribble’s Blog U seminar, Kate sounded a little like the pom-pom gal of podcasts, cheering the medium, talking about what can be done on radio that cannot be done in pictures or words. Her enthusiasm was tough to resist. I just purchased a zoom recorder.

Kate Manchester