August 31, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking With Pearl Buck By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. I’m in Vermont for the summer, living in the town of Winhall, where Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an American famous for novels about China, lived during one of the strange closing chapters of her long, strange life. Every day, I pass Pearl Buck Drive and the road to Buck’s summer home. Nearby is the old Liftline lodge on Stratton, where she and the 38-years-younger ‘dancing instructor’ who was her companion in her final years liked to have dinner. After Winhall, Buck, the dancing instructor, and his young, male entourage moved a few mountains over, to Danby, Vermont, where she ended her years, “seated at the window in Chinese silk robes, drawing five or six thousand people each summer as the town’s sole tourist attraction,” according to the excellent and riveting Hilary Spurling biography, Pearl Buck in China. Read More
August 3, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Buchi Emecheta By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Nigerian expatriate writer Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) in her own words was a “sort of” successful novelist in the London of the 1970s and 1980s. Her books are juicy and plot-gripping, more fun to read than titles like Second Class Citizen, The Slave Girl and The Bride Price might imply. Emecheta’s topic is a difficult one—the grim fate of women in Nigerian and Nigerian emigré society, and the worsening of their already fragile social rights caused by urbanization—but the effect is often oddly consoling. There’s inspiration in her sense of injustice, in her insistence that her character’s lives should be better. Emecheta’s personal story is also inspiring. Many of her books are set in the Ibuza of her youth, but Second Class Citizen in particular is semi-autobiographical, and tells the story of Adah, a young woman who schemes to get an education and— despite being forced into marriage at sixteen years old manages to emigrate to London. Eventually she leaves her husband—single-parenting five small children in conditions of desperate poverty—and becomes a writer. Read More
July 20, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Leonora Carrington By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. To capture the weird factor in Carrington’s work, I used a molecular-gastronomy technique to make balsamic gel beads. Surrealism today is mostly a chapter in art history, so it’s difficult to appreciate the wildness and power it once had, or to imagine (or fear) that it might rise up from the pages of a book and possess a cook and her kitchen. But it felt like that’s what happened when I essayed to cook from the works of the English-born surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). Carrington’s works are full of animal familiars, animate vegetables, and impossible foods like “pomegranates and melons stuffed with larks.” In one story, there’s “a plump, fat chicken with stuffing made of brains and the livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve with a few drops of some divine liquor. This chicken, which had been marinated—plucked but alive—for three days, had in the end been suffocated in vapours of boiling patchouli: its flesh was as creamy and tender as a fresh mushroom.” Well then! As one might imagine, cooking that dish, or anything from what one introduction calls the “writhing, dense thicket” of “Carrington’s version of Jung’s collective unconscious,” was intimidating, and I was concerned that anything edible would be too ordinary. I didn’t have access to larks or live chickens. I had no giantess tart pan, and I don’t quite have the stomach to make truffled brains or suffocate anyone in patchouli fumes or marinate her alive. To my surprise, though, the spirit of the book seemed to rise up within me, and the mostly invented recipes were better than I knew I could dream up, brighter and more sour, weirder and more delicious. I thought they looked right and tasted even better. Read More
July 4, 2018 Eat Your Words Grilling with Homer By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. I’ve been reading the Iliad recently, the world’s first war classic, concurrently with Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, which uses the epic poem’s central plot line to cast light on modern war trauma. (We will get to why this makes sense for grilling, I promise.) The Iliad, attributed to Homer (seventh or eighth century B.C., possibly), tells of a dispute during the Trojan War between Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces, and Achilles, his star warrior. The fight is ostensibly over a girl, but really, Shay says, is over Achilles’s sense of being sold out by the top brass. The terrifying killing rampage that Achilles subsequently goes on, in which he breaks all of his culture’s social and moral rules, is, Shay says, our first recorded instance of war crimes. Shay is a psychologist who works with veterans, and it’s partially his project to explore how ordinary men, even good men, can commit atrocities, how, as he puts it, “war can destroy the social contract binding soldiers to each other, to their commanders, and to the society that raised them.” Shay says that the Iliad’s great tragedy is not the one the marauding Greeks inflict on the Trojans but is the undoing of human character, the destruction of a person’s social ties. Read More
June 22, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Eileen Chang By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The 1940s wartime Shanghai in Love in a Fallen City, a book of short stories by Eileen Chang (1920–1995), is a bitter and glamorous world of cruel relatives, opium addicts, poor and angry students, Japanese invaders, and young women discreetly selling themselves in “jaunty, clopping” wooden clogs and beautiful clothes. These stories were written when Chang was enjoying a burst of literary stardom in her twenties and are considered to be some of her best. But even at the time, the world they captured was “being pushed onward … breaking apart already, with greater destruction still coming,” as Chang writes in the introduction to the book’s second edition. And of course it was wholly destroyed. The Communist revolution followed the war, and there was no place in Chinese letters for Chang, who was an impoverished daughter of the Chinese elite. She immigrated to Hong Kong in 1952, and though she never stopped writing, she died in obscurity in Los Angeles in 1995. Read More
June 8, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Fyodor Dostoyevsky By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. “An Onion” is one of the most famous chapter headings in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and refers not to Russian cuisine, in which onions are a staple ingredient, but to a story the character Grushenka tells about a wicked old woman being pulled up from the fires of hell by holding onto an onion proffered by her guardian angel. The woman lived a bad life but once gave an onion to a beggar, and it’s this single good deed that might save her. The anecdote is meant to demonstrate the possibility of God’s forgiveness, and its teller, Grushenka, says of herself in one of the book’s climactic scenes, “Though I am bad, I did give away an onion,” indicating her readiness to be saved. (As for the old woman, the other dammed souls try to grab her feet and be pulled up too, and she selfishly starts kicking them away. The onion breaks, “and the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day.”) Read More