I Am So Popular: Words to Eat By
My friend Mike and I were recently reminiscing about the awesome way Cap’n Crunch shreds the roof of your mouth, leaving all those little strips of irresistible-to-your-tongue skin hanging down, like some beaded curtain in a 1950’s French bistro. Mike, not even knowing that I had recently discovered a knock-off “healthy” organic version of peanut butter Cap’n Cruch, was excitedly telling me that he had just discovered a “healthy” organic version of the regular stuff. This prompted an animated swapping of childhood cereal memories, not unlike the scar-sharing scene in Jaws.
Stud that he is, Mike was proud to announce that, having been lactose intolerant as a child, he didn’t just slice up his mouth roof like the rest of us who at least soaked our C’nC in milk for a few seconds before scarfing it down. Oh no, for him the experience was like shaving without the benefit of shaving cream. And he was delighted to revisit the sensation now that Kashi makes Honey Sunshine, the cereal with the name of a stripper, so that he can do so and still claim to be nourishing his body.
A while back, I wrote here about how growing up very poor involved, among other things, a steady diet of frozen white bread past its expiration date, blue-tinted rehydrated powdered milk that was undrinkable, and “meat” that came in a tube. Part of the fallout has been a never-ceasing fascination with and love of restaurants, even though I was a waitress for fifteen years and, having witnessed what goes on in commercial kitchens, I really ought to know better. Another bit of fallout comes in being one of those people who often buys name brand foodstuffs, even when the generic likely has the same ingredients. And yet buying genuine Lucky Charms over what I call Lucky Organs - the HEB brand featuring grayish, misshapen dehydrated marshmallows—is extremely important to me.
I’m also starting to think that my obsession with food writing relates back to those bad old culinary days of my youth. The one kitchen highlight for me was that, lemons to lemonade and all that, as the middle child pressed into indentured servitude that included cooking for my five younger siblings, whenever I could, I’d sneak in little experiments at the stove. My ingredients were limited but my imagination was not. I experimented with breads and pastries (my humongous petit-eights an example of a good mistake, since they certainly were hefty enough fare for even the sweetest tooth). I’d also try to sneak in a little cheese when making “Girl Scout Stew”—a combination of elbow macaroni, tomato soup, and fatty ground beef—prompting my change-is-not-good father to take on look and demand, “What the hell is that?!”
Over the years, and with increasing voracity of late, I have indulged in countless food memoirs including Julia Child’s My Life in France, Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, all three of Ruth Reichl’s wildly self-indulgent but nonetheless entertaining books, a hundred pages of so of The Apprentice, and I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti by Giulia Melucci, which, as I mentioned over at my blog, was sort of like a too-long email from a long lost former college roommate. For whatever reasons, excepting one of the Reichl tomes, I chose to indulge in the audiobook version of all of the above. This is semi-curious behavior, since some of the books include recipes which you might think I’d like to keep copies of.
Nah. For me, one great thing about food writing is not tracking down new recipes. For while I will sometimes use a cookbook to guide me (Moosewood and an old New York Times cookbook being my most reliable companions when I do choose this route), more I am looking for interesting stories to inspire my own shuffling around en la cocina. I might be afraid of heights, shoelaces and umbrellas, but I am no scaredy cat at the stove. Like keyboards, to me a kitchen is merely an opening, a place to translate thoughts, feelings and desires into something more tangible, be it a book or a salmon pesto pizza atop dough I was taught to make thirty-two years ago by my sister’s then boyfriend Vince Orlando.
So when I listened to Melucci’s book, I resented her $250,000 book advance, but I very much appreciated that it prompted me to swing by the little market in Mandola’s where I picked up some clams and capers and sundried tomatoes which I later mixed with onions and garlic and fresh herbs from my garden, sprinkled with a little sea salt, coarse black pepper, and cracked red pepper flakes and piled on top of whole wheat spaghetti, even going so far as to break the never-put-cheese-one-seafood-dishes “rule.” (I used both a small handful of pecorino and a more generous serving of Parmesan.) The results, I must say, were beyond delicious.
A couple of weeks ago, I picked up MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, originally published in 1943. Fisher is regarded in some corners as one of the finest food writers ever. I was immediately sucked in less by the food descriptions (though those are lovely) and far more by what came across to me as rampant narcissism. Now, in real life, narcissists mostly bring me down (though I must concede that empirical evidence suggests that they can be rather good in bed not because they care about your needs, but simply because it pleases them to have that sort of power). But my friend Rick captured it when he said that the nice part about reading narcissistic writers is you can shut the book and turn them off when you need a break, unlike the narcissists that corner you in the office and at parties.
There is so much to take from the life of this woman who was a scandalous single mother in the 40’s, who despite the fact that at one point she had six books of literary acclaim to her name she was forever hustling for the next hack magazine gig to keep herself afloat, who was a magnet for men who fancied themselves so much more than they were while living in great part off of Fisher’s parents’ money. I worry that reading all this strife—nearly ninety years worth packed into a mere 500 pages—is exacting a great toll on me, like I am feeling all that condensed pain to my very core. And yet I cannot put the book down, too eager to read about the next crisis and the next, about the disappointment of overbearing editors and the stress of taking assignments for money vs. love.
And through it all, the thing that sustains her both physically and spiritually is the food. Her writing and her cooking serve as excellent metaphors for one another, examples of how at least in some arenas we may pick and choose the ingredients that most please us and serve them forth to the guests who gather at our tables, even if they do so sometimes driven by nervous curiosity than genuine hunger.
Spike Gillespie totally fucked up a pot of pasta recently. She blogs at www.kntibuzz.blogspot.com and www.spikeg.com. There are, like, two tickets left to the final Dick Monologues on July 2nd. Email spike@spikeg.com to reserve seats.
