011: My Kitchen: Literary Food Writing & Cookbooks, Part 1
An ode to the books that made me a home cook
Welcome to Home Cooking Diary, a newsletter on my journey as a home cook. Part cooking log, part recipe recommender, and part chronicler of my thoughts as I feed myself and my family.
This is the first in a series of posts about the tools and staples I employ in the kitchen. On Wednesday you’ll receive Part 2, a more comprehensive list of cookery books I recommend.
When I think back on when the cooking bug bit me, there wasn’t one thing that finally motivated me, but rather a gradual process. I think mostly aspirational in my desire to be more self-sufficient (i.e. it’s a good idea to know how to cook a meal, just as it is a good idea to know how to build a fire—still working on the latter). But I know it also had something to do with books. Not cookbooks, but literary food writing, a genre that I became addicted to and continue to devote precious reading time to all these years later. Genre aside, reading about cooking, whether in novels or memoir or essays or cookbooks, often lures me to the kitchen.
While I can’t definitively recall the first site of inspiration (and I deleted my Goodreads account, so can’t verify!), I would bet it was Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking (followed immediately by More Home Cooking), which the title of this newsletter pays homage to. A pair of essay collections that I believe would inspire even the most cooking-averse to cook. I read them for the first time in 2011, the year I began working at the publishing house that publishes Home Cooking. I eventually found my way to her novels as well, but I fell in love with Colwin first with her food essays collected in these two volumes, as most do. Happily her novels have experienced a well-deserved revival as well. There is no author I have talked up more in my life, both personally and professionally, and here I go again!
In these essays (originally published in a column she wrote for Gourmet), Laurie comes across as an accomplished, confident, yet carefree home cook—but she isn’t perfect. It’s impossible to imagine her obsessing over a mistake or fretting over whether her guests enjoyed the meal. She clearly had an intuition in the kitchen and knew how to prepare anything, but she was also an impeccable hostess who gathered the best people together, and amused her guests so thoroughly that they didn’t even notice if the chicken was overcooked—which, by her account, it sometimes was. She made wonderful home cooking seem approachable to a very inexperienced me. Colwin imbues the task with fun and confidence and ease and improvisation, so as to make it not just aspirational, but feel within my grasp.
Soon after, I read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn—a novel peppered with recipes throughout—whose tension and drama (infidelity) is worked through with cooking as a backdrop. A comic, lightly fictionalized account of Ephron’s breakup in her marriage to Carl Bernstein, Heartburn protagonist Rachel Samstat’s recipes help to critique the state of marriage as it’s disintegrating. There is the now iconic Dijon vinaigrette that Rachel chides herself for teaching husband Mark to make just before she discovers his poorly hidden affair. And then there is the Key Lime Pie—an affirmation of Rachel’s excellence as a homemaker, and all around putter-up-with-of-his-bullshit—that she throws in his face once she has accepted that her marriage is over. These emblems of gendernormative homemaking reinforce the the injustice of Mark’s betrayal.
Then, I found my way to M.F.K. Fisher, whose books I binged somewhere around 2013/14. Consider the Oyster is the gateway drug to The Gastronomical Me and the rest. Around that same time I also read books by legendary British food writers, Elizabeth David and Patience Gray. Dipping into David’s French Country Cooking or Mediterranean Cooking or Italian Cooking instantly puts me in a good mood. Highly recommend!
One thing all of these books have in common is that they were written at a time when their authors could reasonably assume the reader had enough knowledge and skill for cooking to keep their “recipes” spare of detail and very conversational. So they are a bit harder to cook from but much more fun to read than traditional recipes and cookbooks. I find I must write Colwin’s “recipes” out in a notebook first, trying to fill in the blanks, before I begin. One of my favorite things is close reading a passage of literature to attempt to recreate the meal a character prepared or ate. I found myself doing this most recently when reading Sanaë Lemoine’s novel, The Margot Affair, highlighting every meal and cooking passage in the novel with the intention of trying them out later. Sanaë’s Tomato Tart I’ve made and discussed here (the recipe is available online), but I’m also dying to make the character Brigitte’s caramelized pear clafoutis. It’s not just the food as described that captures my awe, but the ease and elegance with which the characters prepare food: “In winter she kept eggs by the windowsill. She plucked two from the carton and slipped them into the roiling water one by one, her fingers almost touching the water . . . As we waited for the eggs to finish cooking, she drizzled slices of bread with olive oil. We ate the eggs with sea salt and a splash of red wine vinegar.”
I relate to the longing to embody such effortless grace in the kitchen, as Margot does watching Brigitte make soft boiled eggs. I find myself yearning to be like that, and then I remind myself of how childish and futile feelings of aspiration can be. But they do inspire me to improve this part of myself.
Julia Child’s My Life in France and her editor, Judith Jones’s The Tenth Muse are twin memoirs that, in my view, are even better read back-to-back. Jones cooked her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking when it was merely a manuscript “out on submission” and receiving rejection after rejection. Spoiler: she decided to publish it. It’s an incredible story of how a book miraculously found its ideal editor. How lucky we are to have these memoirs from two of the women (not the only two) to bring French cooking to American home kitchens.
Though I confess I’ve never cooked from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, having never much gravitated to French cuisine at home. Coming from an Italian culinary family (I’m the only person in my immediate family who doesn’t have a career and background in food and/or wine), Marcella Hazan is the authority I first turned to. Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking was the only cookbook steadfast in my home for a long time. I did finally seek out more instructional recipes, beyond hers, and went through a brief Ina Garten phase, more fascinated by her persona than by her recipes. I have not revisited her cookbooks (I should). For the most part I relied on New York Times Cooking, without following any one recipe author in particular. I cooked from all kinds of recipes—you name it, they probably have it—and found my footing that way in the kitchen.
Finally, there are two cookbooks from 2017 that stick out as my entry points into the contemporary cookbook genre, finally branching out from Marcella: Colu Henry’s Back Pocket Pasta and Alison Roman’s Dining In. I probably cooked every single recipe that appears in Colu’s book that same year (the spine is broken! Bonnie Slotnik’s Spinach pasta is my fave), and Alison Roman was the first cookbook author who captured a bit of fandom within me, due to her winning combination of a charismatic personality and really fucking good recipes. For awhile Dining In and her latter book, Nothing Fancy, were my go-tos.
Once the pandemic hit I was suddenly cooking every single meal for us—a welcome lifestyle change for me, that in retrospect I was very fulfilled by. At that time I also began finding inspiration in Instagram posts and podcasts, and yes, newsletters. I loved the way cooking exploded during those months.
I lay all of this personal history out, because I never quite appreciated how inextricably linked my cooking history is with literature and reading. Therefore it seems fitting to begin my series of posts on the kitchen, and its practical tools, with my beloved food books and cookbooks. The ones I’ve read and cooked from numerous times and probably will forever.
Watch out for a more comprehensive list of books, becuase I love making lists—and it’s impossible to discuss all of my favorites here. I barely touched on cookbooks!
Until then!
xo
Nice piece. 😊 Cookbooks rock! Literary food writing rocks even more. I like "Soudough, or Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market," by Robin Sloan. After reading it, I came to think of my sourdough cultures as being more pet-like. 🐾