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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. 

Happy Chinese New Year

by on January 23, 2012 in Recipes, Writing

As a child of a political dissident, Sasha Gong and her brothers and sisters were sent to live in a remote rural area to learn how to be peasants. Like most, hunger was a daily reality. Gong learned to cook at a time when most were starving, which meant cooking with whatever could be foraged. She learned to cook quickly, instinctually and very simply. The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, which she wrote with her friend and fellow historian, Scott Seligman, is a compilation of the dishes that she made as a child.

“The good thing about cooking from nothing is that you learn the taste of the ingredients and learn how to improve each one with the little bit of ginger or garlic or soy you might have on a day,” she said. “there was no time, no money, no access to the ingredients of High Hunan or Cantonese cuisine. I had a memory of that food and I had whatever ingredients I had.”

Text from “Destroy Privately Owned Ducks”: Raising a duck privately was fraught with danger during the Cultural Revolution, since ducks were hard to control and often escaped. The “destroy privately owned ducks” campaign was immortalized on a vase produced in China’s porcelain capital, Jingdezhen. It depicts a group of young people who caught a duck feeding on public grain. They hanged the duck on a tree and wrote a large-character poster criticizing the owner.

The book, she said, allowed her to access some of the bright spots in a very dark time. The food-centric memories she writes in her book are mostly about family and friends, bright moments, when hunger was, at least momentarily at bay and cooks basked in the satisfaction of having made at least a day more bearable.

The Chairman used food to control the society. Eliminating private ownership was, in the mind of his party, essential. Chicken could be owned, but duck could not. In this piece of propaganda, enshrined on porcelain, children are gathered around a hangin’ tree, reading a proclamation that explains why ducks must be eliminated. It is unclear whether this particular campaign was related to the Chairman’s favorite dish — Braised Pork in Soy Sauce, which he ate before battle, before demanding meetings, before facing just about any life challenge.

Like many children, she and her siblings were frequently left alone. She made her first Chinese New Year Meal when she was ten, with other children her own age. Rations were slightly more generous for that national feast and the children created whole braised fish, pork in soy sauce and a chicken. They can be made without a shopping trip to Chinatown — and are sure to bring Long Life and Prosperity to this Year of the Dragon.

Steamed Whole Fish

Ingredients

1 whole fish (about 1-11⁄2 lbs.) or 2 whole fish (about 1⁄2 lb. each) cleaned and scaled, head and tail on (snapper, flounder, pike, bass and tilapia all work well)
3 cups cold water
1 large piece ginger (about 1 inch on a side)
2 scallions 2-3 Tbsp. cooking oil 2-3 Tbsp. soy sauce

This dish tastes equally good with fresh water or salt-water fish, as long as the fish is very fresh. Check the eyes – clear means fresh; murky means look elsewhere. In this dish, you can’t get away with two-day old fish.
If the fish is an inch (2.5 cm.) thick or thicker, score its sides widthwise, making cuts every inch and a half (3-4 cm.) and slicing nearly to the bone to facilitate cooking. If the fish is thinner than that, this step may be omitted.

Bring the water to a boil in a wok or a steamer. Cut the ginger and scallions into shreds about an inch and a half (4 cm.) in length and as thin as you can make them.

Arrange the fish on a platter and cover with half the ginger. Then suspend the plate over the boiling water, mak- ing sure it is not submerged, and cover the wok or steamer tightly. Steam for 8-10 minutes until the eyeballs pop out.

Remove and drain any excess water from the plate. Heat the oil in a microwave for 15 seconds. Sprinkle the scallions and the rest of the ginger and drizzle the oil and the soy sauce on top and serve.

Rock Cornish Game Hen in Soy Sauce

Ingredients

1 small piece ginger (about 1⁄2 inch, or 1.5 cm., on a side)
4 Tbsp. (60 ml.) soy sauce
8 Tbsp. (120 ml.) cold water 1 Tbsp. (12 g.) sugar 1 large Rock Cornish game hen

Cornish hens are not native to China, but they are the closest thing you are likely to find in a Western supermarket to the young, immature hens that the cooks prefer to use in Guangdong Province, where this dish originates.

Slice the ginger into small pieces and put it in a saucepan large enough to accommodate the hen. Add the soy sauce, sugar and water. Then heat the mixture until it begins to boil.

Add the whole hen (don’t cut it up), Then cover the pot tightly and turn the heat down to medium.

Cook the hen for 10 minutes. After the bottom begins to brown, turn it over to allow the other side to brown, turning the heat down to low. Cover the pot again.

Cook for another 15 minutes. Then turn off the heat, but let the hen sit in the covered pot for an additional 10 minutes.

Cut up the hen as desired and arrange on a serving plate.

Braised Pork in Soy Sauce

Ingredients

1 lb. (450 g.) pork shoulder 1 large piece ginger, about 1 inch
(2.5 cm.) on a side 1 Tbsp. (15 ml.) cooking oil 4 Tbsp. (50 g.) sugar 4 Tbsp. (60 ml.) soy sauce
1 cinnamon stick (1⁄2 tsp. or 5 g. powdered cinnamon may be substituted)
1⁄2 cup (120 ml.) rice wine (or any other wine)

This dish is traditionally made with pork belly, but it’s hard to find in many supermarkets and it’s far fattier than other cuts. There’s enough fat in pork shoulder to give the dish a great taste, and still save a few calories and maybe a hardened artery.

Cut the pork shoulder into cubes, about one inch (2.5 cm.) on each side. Smash the ginger with the side of a cleaver; no need to peel it.

Heat a wok and add the oil. When it begins to smoke, add the ginger and then the sugar.

Once the sugar has dissolved completely, add the pork. Stir-fry the mixture until most of the liquid has evaporated, but not until it is completely dry. Then add the soy sauce, cinnamon and wine.

Mix well and then cover the wok tightly. Turn the heat down to medium and let simmer for 1⁄2 hour. Remove and serve.

Recipes reprinted with permission from the Cultural Revolution Cookbook.

Fierce & Mellifluous Food Memory

by on January 23, 2012 in Writing

Some of the most successful memoirists of the 1970′s and ’80′s peered through the lens of their brush with the counter-culture to find the moment the central, existential question that has shaped their choices, triumphs and missteps, the internal struggle whose reconciliation is the basis of the coming of age memoir.  Back then, many of the memoirs were disguised as first novels — think: Fear of Flying (Erica Jong), Blue Skies, No Candy (Gael Greene), The Electric Kool-Aid Test (Tom Wolfe).  Over the past decade, food has taken the place of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. There’s been a population explosion in food memoir-ville.

Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential established the cook-as-shit-kicking-adventurer and minted a tone that keeps me coming back for more — he reads like a latter-day Hemmingway, but this middle class kid is getting dirty in the formerly blue collar world of food, instead of war. Ruth Reichl’s memoirs, beginning with Comfort Me with Apples, found the wistful, romantic skein and gave, as well, an ironic and hilarious voice to a career that food built. Together the two minted a genre. One that is moving beyond simple tales of bone-crunching apprenticeships and the lucky chance of being in the right place (New York City) at the right time (just as food moved from the revolutionary fringes to main street USA).

The subject matter is nearly coincidental to the art of two of the recent bests — Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter and Bill Bufford’s Heat.  Food memoirs such as these are more than stories, they’re literature, an experience, shared transformation. They capture something of their subject matter — its raw, physicality, the daily transcendence of a meal well-cooked, the combat sense of its front lines, the tenderness and whole heartedness of it.

Food memory also offers the writer a mainline to the senses, the conscious self that is constantly sniffing and tasting, seeing and hearing — and forgetting. Awakening buried memory makes personal history shimmer. Talking to Sasha Gong today, I began to understand that looking at the world through food summons the same capacities in writing that it demands of the cook: generosity, forgiveness and joy.

A child-victim of China’s Cultural Revolution, Ms. Gong has written two memoirs. The first, Born American, is a variation on the mix-up-at-the-nursery myth in which the writer explodes her sense of having been born “American” — in love with freedom and individuality — but entering the world in the tightly controlled Maoist Beijing, where both silence and uniformity was enforced. Her second memoir, The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, which she co-wrote with her friend and fellow historian, Scott Seligman, goes deeper into the dark era in which her family was exiled from its urban life to live as peasants on a remote countryside.

The subject itself, she said, made it easier to return to that time, easier to linger and re-feel the feelings, easier to confront its life-long effects. “When you write about food, you fall into the same mindset as when you cook,” she said, “you are generous, even if you don’t like someone, you feed them well and at the table you experience the best part of them.”

She said that the improvisational nature of cooking makes writing that springs from cooking and eating seem less monumental, more of-the-moment. She said that in the very darkest eras, meals shared or, when you are starving, meals remembered, are patches of blue. The food carries you back to the best family memories, the best moments in friendship, community, life. These memories offset the pain, she said.

The food memoir is not, then, a story whose power reflects the obsession of an era, the subject is also a narrow framework with positive association — a boon to the excavation and facing, the reconciling and forgiving that the best memoir writing demands.

Tomorrow, I am interviewing Cara daSilva whose book In Memory’s Kitchen follows a group of Jewish women in an concentration camp and provides another look at the power of food memory in times of terror and tragedy. It can keep you from despair, it can keep you alive.

These interviews are available to The Hungry I students and can also be purchased individually.  Ms. Gong’s interview can be found here.

Sit Facing the Page

by on January 19, 2012 in Writing

Once in a while I sit down at my desk and words fall out of me. I hear a story or a poem like a song. I rock. I hum. I type. This happens a couple times a year. I write every day.

I write the way some people pray or cook or work-out. I write because if I don’t write, the voice in my head that says you-have-nothing-to-say, what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about, how-embarrassing, you-can’t-say-that, you-idiot, you-fraud, who-cares — that voice — wakes up and starts clickety-clacking down the aisle between the desk in my third grade classroom.  If I don’t write every day, Mrs. Gibson, the only bad teacher I had in my life, will tirade. Who do you think you are?  It always begins the same way, a hissing rhetorical query that builds to the same triumphant answer. You are nobody. Nobody.

I write every day to keep Mrs. Gibson perched at her desk at the front of the class room, her lips as red as her pencil, her knees pressed tightly together just below the hem of her navy blue linen sheath. I write early in the morning, hours before Mrs. Gibson would have been up, pulling the pink foam rollers from her head, brushing, teasing and spraying her taupe-colored hair. I sit in a wing chair by my living room window and write by hand in a spiral notebook. After forty minutes, I close the notebook and start the day.

My morning writing has little to do with the writing I do to make a living.  The morning writing is weight-lifting, it is yoga, it is walking three miles a day. It is 1000 milligrams of Vitamin C, dark green leafy vegetables, a sonic toothbrush and regular flossing. Writing every morning doesn’t make it easy to write all day long, but it does make it possible.  It builds courage. It grows me from third grade to mid-life. It allows me to notice how the rolls of flesh above and below Mrs. Gibson’s panty girdle look like soft little baguettes rising against the fabric of her dress. When I am very lucky, it allows me to hear her own children shrieking as the working mother un-rolls her hair, the thump of Mr. Gibson’s feet hitting the floor, the snap of his belt.

****

When I work, I sit at my desk and I type. I write essays about food that are really about life, essays that require little more than remembering and connecting. I’ve written thousands of such pieces over the past thirty years, but every time I start one I think of all the things that I don’t know. I become convinced that I must stop writing and start researching. Research is my form of writer’s block. It is progressive: The more I read the more convinced I become that I do not know enough. That I have nothing to say. That I don’t know how to say it. And who would care, anyway.

Every writer I know has her own version of this dance. Whirling between the terrors gives writing its energy and purpose. A good piece of writing is a travelogue of triumph over the fear of being nothing, the hole in the doughnut. Practice helps. My morning writing is my practice. In thirty years of daily writing, I’ve learned when to keep pushing, when to stop and do some research, when to get up and take a walk. Even so, I’d be lost without a schedule.

Annie Dillard writes that a schedule “defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.” Usually, a simple schedule, hour by hour, is enough of a net for me. When I am struggling and sputtering, flailing and despairing, however, I use a timer. It turns the net into a cocoon.

The Most Reliable Teacher

by on January 16, 2012 in Writing

Our current seminar on writing food memoir, The Hungry I, has me knee deep in reading memoir and reading about memoir. I’m halfway through Judith Barrington’s book, “Writing the Memoir,” for the third time.

Ms. Barrington is a poet. She levies a merciless eye for detail to accessing, imagining, shaping and constructing personal history. Yet, she has boundless compassion for the courage it takes to use the “I word”.

Her tone alternates between the spare and the lyrical, with occasional bursts of language that make everything — the soup that is simmering as I read, the snow that is falling outside the window, the itch of the blanket on my lap, the warmth of the dog’s head on the blanket reminding me that its time for dinner — more vivid.

I swoon for a second — why didn’t I read this before I wrote a memoir? And then I remember, well, I did read it before, and then after, and now after again and perhaps before another. Writing changes how you read as certainly as reading changes how you write.

In a world of precious few mentors, other people’s books remain the most reliable teachers, writes Ms. Barrington:

“Today, the would-be writer must patch together an apprenticeship. If you are serious about the craft, your learning may be helped along by various writing teachers, through writing programs or workshops, or sometimes through less formal meetings or correspondence. If you are very lucky, you may find one teacher to see you through all or part of a long apprenticeship, but more likely you will work with several teachers, as well as peer groups that offer support and critique. But remember that extensive reading is probably the most important ingredient of your apprenticeship, whether or not you have a teacher. You will never become a good writer if you urgently want to write but do not have an equal passion of reading.”

Do You Have To Be A Chef To Write a Food Memoir?

by on January 12, 2012 in Writing

Do you have to be a chef to write a food memoir? We could not answer this question better than Kathryn Hughs has in The Guardian:
 

 

 

 

 

“Food writing is a literary activity, built upon words, sentences and paragraphs rather than flour, butter and eggs. It may refer to the kitchen and the dining room, but it is forged in the library and the study. Someone who reads Hemingway is not assumed to spend their weekends fishing or fighting bulls. A devotion to Agatha Christie does not require you to be either a fiendishly clever murderer or a detective. Even an armchair traveller” who laps up travelogues by Michael Palin or Jonathan Dimbleby while never stirring further than Southwold is an object of benign contemplation rather than sharp rebuke. And so it must be with food writing. You can appreciate its delicious qualities without feeling the least need to pick up a wooden spoon and have a go yourself.”

The Point

by on December 21, 2011 in Writing

Every writer has a way of preparing to write — or avoiding writing. We used to talk about “sharpening pencils.”  You can never have too many. I used to have about a hundred and I wrote on a keyboard. Now I go on Facebook or Twitter. It’s even better than pencils. Rather than worrying about the perfect graphite tip, I can worry about whether I am using social media “effectively.”
Am I tweeting enough to maintain my “following”? Am I “serving my brand”? Why does new technology love objectifying and conceptualizing so much?
These questions seem to bother Amber Naslund, a social media guru and co-founder of  Brass Tack Thinking:
   
“Too often, we try to harness the spontaneous by taking a fleeting, special moment and ‘scaling’ it, repeating it, or jamming it into our slide deck that outlines everything we’re going to do for the year and making it into a ‘strategy.’ And therein lies our eventual downfall. The intangible fabric of humanity is not made of formulas, but the everyday mingled with the absolutely un-scriptable. Happy, fun, and interesting are not things you can effectively engineer. You can recognize it, you can run with it in the moment, but you can’t plan for it. You have to embrace it when.”
Sort of like a sharp pencil.

Why Write About Food?

by on November 29, 2011 in Writing

When asked, somewhat accusingly, why she wrote about food and not something important, like politics or war, MFK Fisher answered the question in her trademark, lyrical style in The Art of Eating:

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”

We’ve posed the same question to writers we’ve interviewed and as well as to a few who were not available to take our call. Here are their answers.

 

“Of the genuine human universals, it’s the only one you can strike up a conversation  with anybody about.   ’What’s good to eat around here?’ tends to go over better than ‘Had any good sex lately?’ ”

—  Matthew Amster-Burton, writer and co-host of the podcast, Spilled Milk

 

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star.”

– Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

 

“It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious mind will hush if you give it an egg.”

– Annie Dillard

 

“How we eat, the people we share our food with, the thousand different ways we can wake up to our senses with one small bite — it’s all part of being human. Writing a list of what you ate for  breakfast may not matter that much. But sharing with me how you came to be sitting at that table, sharing that food, with those people, in that moment? That’s life. I want to know all about it.”

– Shauna Ahern, Gluten-Free Girl

 

“Food is an important part of a balanced diet.”

– Fran Lebowitz

 

“Writing about food creates intimacy. Food makes it possible to tell stories that can be difficult to tell (especially family ones)”

– Anne Bramley

 

“Food writing may be the last safe haven for the liberal arts personality. You have to know a little about a lot to do it well. History, economics, politics, cooking, chemistry, biology, physiology, ecology, art, agriculture, You can write about anything while appearing to write about food. You can change the world. But only if you are willing to work like a stevedore and earn less than barista.”

– Molly O’Neill

 

” I cannot think of a subject other than food that has so many ‘spokes’ emanating from its core. The food writer has an open playing field, the opportunities are endless. Recipe are just one aspect of this field, and a pretty small aspect at that.”

– Mindy Klapper Trotta

 

“Food lets you give the reader a sense of pleasure, place, season, and culture in only a few words”

– Katie Boyts

 

“I feel powerless after I read most stories about the environment and politics and the economy, but when these subjects are framed by food, they still touch a raw nerve, but they can leave me energized and convinced that I can make a significant contribution.”

– Simona Carini 

 

Image Source: Robert Moore Kulicke (1924-December 14, 2007) 

Stay With Me

by on November 23, 2011 in Writing

DO RE MI FA SOL LA TI DO

Voice is the blogger’s primary tool.

Voice isn’t something you choose and put on, its who you are. Voice has attitude, but it is not merely attitude. Voice is a point-of-view, but for a food writer, it is the point-of-view that’s been reduced by the heat of life, boiled down to its essence, filtered again and again through the constant accumulation of intellectual and sensory experience.

Voice is who you are and who you wish you were. It is where you come from and where you dream of being. Voice is the words that you choose and the cadence in which you combine them. Long before you start typing, however, voice is what you notice, how you see it and what you choose to write about.
When your subject connects with a current topic, a public fascination, a fleeting, though widely held concern you connect.

The person I wish I were has already settled on a menu, shopped and done most of her prep, her pre-dawn chopping keeping time with Hildegard Von Bingen as she chants Gregorian in the background. The woman I am is still trolling Thanksgiving blog posts, looking for help, looking for diversion and looking for friends. Some harvest-themed leads kept me reading far too late to consider chopping at dawn. Here they are.

101 Cookbooks: “Placerville, California is apple country. This time of year, apple farms line nearby country roads and all manner of apple products are sold – apple pies, dumplings, fritter, ciders, doughnuts, sauces, cookies, and of course…caramel apples.”

Fresh 365: “I love how a taste or scent can magically transport you to another time and place. Thumbprint cookies do just that, taking me back 20 years, to my friend’s kitchen, which was always a perfect place to snack after school.”

Farm House Table: “When my grandmother made pastry, she used the palm of her hand for a measuring cup. After years of practice, she knew the soft weight of a cup of flour or exactly how much sweet cream butter to cut into the dough.”

Chocolate & Zucchini: “It’s been a bit of a mushroom fest around here lately: Maxence and I went foraging in the forest of Rambouillet earlier this month, and we came back with six and a half kilos of mushrooms between us (that’s fourteen pounds).”

Lick My Spoon: “I recently revisited one of my favorite cozy neighborhood gems, Firefly, and was just smitten with their Fairy Tale Pumpkin Soup with Gingerbread Crouton, Golden Sage and Brown Butter.”

Lottie and Doof:  “Traveling at the start of Autumn had me in constant awe of the bounty of food at the markets in Europe and happy(ish) to return to my kitchen and actually make something.”

Seven Spoons: “We’d had apples and pumpkin already for our pies, yet I still had the lingering twitch to make another. One with walnuts. And maple. As you do, this time of year.”

Smitten Kitchen: “I know everyone says that this whole early-baby thing “goes by so fast” and “blink and you’ll miss it” and I believed them, I really did. But I hadn’t prepared to take a bite of this cake last week and push it away disinterested because it’s “too fall/wintery for right now”, look at the date on my phone and realize that, holy gingerbread (see how baby-friendly we’re getting here at SK?!), it’s freaking November already.”

Photo credit: Library of Congress/OneBigTable.com

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