I’ve always wanted to write about food but have wondered if I’m allowed. If I’m qualified. As a home cook who needs a recipe and has little culinary imagination, what could I contribute? I love to cook, sometimes. I love to bake, always. The alchemy of butter, sugar, and desire can fix a lot. When it works.
Mostly I love to eat.
As I felt “unqualified,” this landed in my inbox from Deb Perelman, of Smitten Kitchen fame:
“In the summer of 2007, the Smitten Kitchen was about to turn a single year old, and I want to make this absolutely clear: I had no idea what I was doing. … I’d started the site as a place to share recipes I felt were worth repeating, and fully expected it to last six months before it fizzled into oblivion as I knew very little about cooking and presumed most people preferred to get cooking advice from people who had a clue. Instead, I was heading into the site’s one-year mark with a steadily growing audience and despite lacking any central guiding philosophy aside from “I want to make this today,” I still love so many of these seemingly random picks.”
She didn’t know what she was doing! She knew very little about cooking! I think her blog became so popular because of her writing (her recipes are great, too, reliably successful). I’ve always looked forward to her little essay at least as much as the actual recipe.
“I want to make this today,” is my guiding principle in the kitchen, skill be damned.
Good food writing is as essential as good food. MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David, Ruth Reichl and Laurie Colwin. I adored Phyllis Grant’s blog, Dash and Bella, and was a very early reader of Smitten Kitchen. It was mostly because of the writing. All this recent whining about wading through writing to get to the recipe is baffling to me (I will not link to these buzzkills). If it’s well-written, a food essay is delicious and then you get a recipe! The reading is the sustenance, the recipe is a gift. If you don’t like it, scroll! Turn the page! Sheesh.
Early June is a great food moment here in the northeast. Yesterday was the season’s first CSA pickup and it feels like a heavy, dark door has been thrown open on a green landscape, lush and sunsoaked. We brought home an overbrimming bag: Potatoes, beets, and carrots from last year’s cold storage. New radishes. Kale and chard, arugula, butterhead lettuce, and spring salad mix, some from the lately chilly fields and some from the greenhouses. Tuesday will be my favorite day now, all the way until early December. Every Tuesday - fill my bag in the barn, see friends, wander the fields to pick whatever’s up. Calm myself down.
Very soon it will be strawberries. And sugar snap peas. The cherries are babies and the white blackberry flowers are gone, heralding the near arrival of berries. Later, we’ll pick green beans and basil; cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, and romas; raspberries and flowers. Once the basil is up, I bring home bags every week and put up pesto. I used to make the pesto, sans cheese, and freeze for winter use, but my son (a chef) taught me to just freeze the leaves. Easier and even more delicious. Marcella is my pesto guide.
The farm is my happy place, a raft in every storm. I’ve dragged myself there every week, for many years, through the worst and best of times. I’ve cried in the field, where no one sees me but the clouds. It’s easy to get lost, in the best possible way, in a tunnel of tall cherry tomato vines. Hands and forearms covered in yellow tomato tar. Pick a few, eat a few. It feels like real work, schlepping around the wide fields and gathering food for the week, but there’s something deliciously decadent about it. Probably because I don’t do any of the hard labor. I just pay up, show up, and smile. Haul it all home and cook.
Phyllis Grant is an aspiration. Maybe a mad crush. Read this little essay and tell me she isn’t all that. Or mainline this one and then go make yourself some strawberry ice cream. The berries are hitting any minute. I’m in love with her wordsmithery, her food, her brave voice, her yogability. Read her book, Everything is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes. Thank me later.
So yeah this is turning into a mash note.
Food is love. Making it is therapy, eating it is sensuous bliss, and reading about it is necessary. Sometimes it's hard, just a spoon of peanut butter barefoot in the dark kitchen, alone and unsure. Boxed wine and market cookies while the world breaks. One warm strawberry under a hard sky on the worst day. The ritual will save us, though. Put something in a bowl, give it to those you love, and you will beat back the wolves for a minute. Or just put one perfect thing in your own mouth, like MFK Fisher’s tangerines (a long excerpt, but I couldn’t cut any of it!). Read it slowly. Savor it. You’re welcome.
“In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l'interieure. That is Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those pulpy white strings that hold the tangerines to their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.
Take yesterday's paper (when we were in Strasbourg L'Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot the ink stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course - it might be hard to ignore her belligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.
After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. You are sorry, but -
On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.
The sections of the tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.
There must be someone, though, who understands what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings."
Oh to write like Fisher.
Today, I’m going to make granola. My daughter is coming over and we’ll eat good bread with goat cheese and new radishes, talk about her young expanding life and my midlife contractions. Her text just said, “anything for lunch there?” Maybe the food will fix it. The harvesting, cooking, and eating; the thinking, reading, and writing. It all comes back to food, every day.
If all you do in a day is feed someone - even just yourself - it’s enough.
Cheers!
Lisa
Things to share:
I discovered a new Substack, Lickedspoon, and love it so far for the market haul pics and the house-in-the-south-of-France fantasies. That apricot tart is flirting with me.
I’ve tried to write about food. Here I am crying in the strawberry patch. And this one is about the therapy of winter bread making.
I really want to make Ruth Reichl’s anchovy bread. I want a Mae Rose cocktail (I may hate it but am drawn like a moth to flame). This is my go-to granola (I omit the brown sugar and add flax seeds - it’s perfect). I made this double mustard potato salad recently, and it was … very mustardy. And very good. I want a lemon posset - nursery food, it says. Yes please. Jamie Schler’s Navette cookies from Orange Appeal. I’d like to make my own gravlax. My husband made buffalo burgers with dry fried onions, gorgonzola, and arugula that haunts my dreams. I’m getting hungry.
I love the way Padma Lakshmi eviscerated an obnoxious dismissal of her native cuisine. I’d love to explore the wide world of Indian food. Any recs? Is it Madhur Jaffrey still? I want to play with lots of spice.
And lest you think I’m a food snob, I’ve been eating potato chips and chocolate peanut butter cups while writing this. A great combo, it turns out.
I'm salivating!
Gorgeous Lisa ❤️