In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Characters in Pavese’s work follow the unchanging traditions of the countryside, including eating much polenta, easily made from medium-grind cornmeal, like this.

Film buffs will know the Italian modernist writer Cesare Pavese (1908–50) because his novel Among Women (Tra donne sole) was the source for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Le Amiche. But I came across his work in the unlikely location of a cookbook, English food writer Diana Henry’s How to Eat a Peach. Pavese, Henry writes in a chapter entitled, “The Moon and the Bonfires (and the Hazelnuts),” was born in Piedmont in Northern Italy, and his native landscape was “almost a character” in his work. She quotes him as saying that, if you live there, you “have the place in your bones like the wine and polenta.” How to Eat a Peach is formatted as menus drawn from Henry’s travels and interests, and her Pavese-Piedmont menu, inspired by the 1949 novel The Moon and the Bonfires, offers an ox cheek stew, white truffle pasta, and a hazelnut-strewn chocolate cake. She suggests an accompaniment of the local Barolo or Dolcetto wine.

This was intriguing to me, and more so because Henry’s book had already been something of a journey. It falls into a category that’s strangely frequent in my life: cookbooks that at first I don’t use, but then I do. The book is beautiful, broody, and atmospheric. I certainly imagined myself cooking from it, but in practice the menus felt obscure and the titles too specific and unalluring—“Darkness and Light: the Soul of Spain” or “I Can Never Resist Pumpkins.” Is that really what I want for dinner? Do I have to cook the whole menu? How to Eat a Peach ended up on the shelf where it remained, mocked occasionally by my children for having a stupid title, until months later I did what I should have done in the first place and read the introductory essays. Henry’s writing is vivid, personal, and seductive, and contains gems like the introduction to Pavese. Now that I know the backstory, I do want “the Moon and the Bonfires (and the Hazlenuts)” for dinner. And now that I’ve read Pavese, I’m delighted by Henry’s idiosyncrasy in choosing him as inspiration for a meal. She acknowledges that his writing is “not cheerful”—and this turned out to be an understatement. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

“ … oh I only know about God when I enter the hairy mouth of the wild sugar apple … ” Hilst’s creative use of foodstuffs to mean genitalia is one of the joys of her prose. Here, an engorged chayote rests suggestively against Hilst’s novel The Obscene Madame D.

The recipe for the work of the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) is equal parts language and nonsense, obscenity and literary references, disparagement of writers and striving toward God. It’s thrilling to read but challenging as narrative, which is perhaps why Hilst is famous in her own country but not in ours. Despite a fifty-plus-year career and a sweep of honors, Hilst wasn’t published in English until 2012. If she’s known at all in the U.S., it’s in the shadow of the Brazilian grande dame Clarice Lispector, who worked in a similar vein.

My favorite of Hilst’s novels, Letters from a Seducer (1991), is the centerpiece of a late series often considered her masterwork. In it, Stamatius, a homeless writer, begs on the street for “everything that you are going to throw in the trash, everything that isn’t worth a dime anymore, and if there’s leftover food we still want it.” Hilst’s work resists quotation; it’s difficult to find a place to stop. Every line is a pirouette. The passage continues: “The burlap sacks fill up, bric-a-brac books stones, then some people put rats and shit in the bag, what faces those rats had, my God, what injured little eyes those rats had, my God, we separated everything out right there: Rats and shit here, books stones and bric-a-brac there. Never any food.”

Stamatius’s perspective bookends a series of letters of obscene invective—we assume he’s found or stolen them—from a man named Karl, a slick bourgeois, to his sister Cordélia, who has retreated to a nunnery, perhaps to get away from him. These letters begin: “Cordélia my sister, come out of your cloister. / the countryside ages women and cows. / Once again nourish your holes / With gentle swine-cresses, blunt poles / Or if it’s pussies your tongue wants / I’ll get you dozens: mature cunts / Youthful cunts, purple cunts / for your vile, repressed feelings.” Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The old-fashioned matriarch in the Cazalet Chronicles believes in just adding more bread crumbs to the rissoles if there’s not enough food for twenty dinner guests.

The English writer Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) is best known for the Cazalet Chronicles, a series of family dramas set around World War II that overflow with scenes of meals being prepared for a large English country estate. Published between 1990 and 2013, the books are five floral-covered bricks totaling nearly three thousand pages and centered on the children and grandchildren of a rich English timber merchant, known as “the brigadier,” and his Edwardian wife, “the duchy.” The story concerns the Cazalet family at large as well as their lovers, spouses, children, governesses, great-aunts, cooks, and cousins, all of whose struggles for love, fulfillment, and a place in the world make for page-turning reading.

It was the opinion of Howard’s contemporaries that this was not great literature, and though she hung out in elevated literary circles—most notably as the second wife of Kingsley Amis and the stepmother of Martin Amis—she was often dismissed as a writer of “women’s fiction.” But Howard’s books hold up. She has a dazzling ability to depict a character at a moment of crisis, catching a young woman midstream as she gives up one dream for another or drilling in on a telling lie, a glint of cowardice. It also takes enormous technical virtuosity to keep her huge cast of characters distinct in the reader’s mind, and a master class could be taught from the timing of her interlinked plotlines. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

My thrifty-housewife version of Ma’s “scrap bag” is this colorful mixture of sanding sugar left over from children’s parties. l used it to make sparkling cranberries for the top of a vinegar pie from the book Farmer Boy.

Everyone who grew up on the Little House books has their own particular treasured food memory from the books. How Pa butchered the pig, smoked the meat, and used every bit of it, down to inflating the empty bladder for the girls to play with as a balloon. The spring on Plum Creek when they ran out of food and ate only fried fish and “crisp, juicy” turnips. Ma frying “vanity cake” doughnuts, so named because they’re “all puffed up, like vanity, with nothing solid inside.” Almanzo stuffing himself from the following spread at the county fair: pumpkin pie, custard pie, vinegar pie, mince pie, berry pies, cream pies, raisin pies …

Reading these books—or rereading them as an adult, which is arguably an even better experience—makes me want to cook, eat, wear calico dresses, sleep on a straw-tick mattress, and plant seeds in the freshly tilled earth. With their lengthy descriptions of cooking and other homesteading processes, they’re the perfect inspiration for a from-scratch Thanksgiving meal; they’re all the more seasonally appropriate because the holiday’s roots lie in scarcity, the way the Ingallses’ lives did. Thanksgiving also presents an opportunity for reckoning with Wilder, whose work has been criticized in recent years for its cultural insensitivity toward Native Americans. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

A Satanist witch from Mexico with whom I correspond on Twitter (I’m intrigued by her insights but nervous when she tweets things like #TakeMeDarkLord) wrote not long ago that all cooks are witches, though she didn’t mention the obverse: Can all witches cook? If the writer Shirley Jackson (1916–1965), a self-styled witch as well as one of the greats of twentieth-century literature, is anything to go by, the answer is yes, and the rule becomes interesting: domestic goddesshood is not quite what we expect from a horror writer, as Jackson was often (mis)labeled.

Jackson’s most famous story is “The Lottery,” first published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and known to every schoolchild in America for its surprise ending, in which a group of ordinary-joe villagers stone a woman to death on a bright spring day for no reason other than “tradition.” The story’s message is the deplorable nastiness ordinary humans can get up to when they feel socially sanctioned, and it has stung readers for generations. Its massive notoriety, however, somewhat overshadows Jackson’s other accomplishments, which include an extraordinary run of short fiction published from the forties through the early sixties; a string of novels that includes The Haunting of Hill House and her 1962 masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; and, oddly, two cheery best-selling memoirs—for which Jackson was well known and hugely beloved in the fifties—about raising children.

These seem like disparate genres, but knowing the two motherhood memoirs are out there brings Jackson’s work into focus. The reader realizes, with a chill, just how many of Jackson’s horror stories start in the grocery store. Jackson’s horror is domestic horror. Her concerns were women’s concerns. Even the stoning in “The Lottery” is conducted “in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.” Jackson’s work is “part of a vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James,” as Ruth Franklin writes in the wonderful Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. But Jackson made a “unique contribution” to that tradition: a “primary focus on women’s lives.” Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

It has long been a dream of mine to steal or reprise the premise of a column called War Nerd, which ran in the English-language Moscow newspaper the eXile in the nineties. As I recall, the column examined contemporary conflicts and current events with an awareness of the region’s history of war. Since war and war history are among my reading preoccupations, or were before I became a cooking-from-literature columnist and my reading list skewed almost entirely to “books with food in them” or “books that might have food in them,” I imagined myself qualified. The modern Italian classic The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), has both food and war, but alas it showed up that dream as a delusion—a brief Google search determined that the original War Nerd, Gary Brecher, is still at it for a relaunched online version of the eXile.

The Leopard’s setting is Sicily in 1860, the year Garibaldi returned from exile and the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, began. Prior to that, as many of us remember vaguely from high school history, modern Italy was a cluster of nation-states, often ruled by foreign powers. Sicily, united with Naples as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was ruled by a French Bourbon king. Lampedusa was a descendent of Sicilian aristocracy, and the book is loosely based on the experiences of his great-grandfather, who appears as the character Don Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina.

I have long wondered why, exactly, The Leopard is so popular in America—more than one well-meaning literary friend has tried to force it upon me, and until a recent decluttering, I had two copies of it, without having read it once. The book is beautifully written and has a sexy subplot about chaste young lovers feverishly fondling each other in the abandoned rooms of the baroque family castle, but don’t many deserving yet obscure works-in-translation fit those categories? Moreover, the Italy it presents is not the one we think we know. Read More