May 25, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Pather Panchali By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Bengali novel Pather Panchali, Song of the Road is best known in the West as a Satyajit Ray film but the 1929s classic is also one of the most popular titles from prolific Indian author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894–1950). It chronicles the lives of two poor children in rural India. The great animating spirit of this beloved book is that, despite their poverty, the children’s experience is one of abundance. Every path in the village is beloved to Durga, the elder sister, “she had known them all her life, so naturally and intimately that they had become a part of her…they were her own dear friends, her lifelong companions.” Though Durga and her brother Opu are often hungry, their lives are a paradise of guava and mangosteen and custard apple trees, simple but delicious dinners made by mummy, and festival treats and feasts. On a day when Durga makes a picnic of dal, rice and eggplant snuck from her mother’s stores, Opu reflects, “To think that they were out together sitting under a date-palm tree with leaves from a custard apple tree lying like a carpet all around them, and that it was real rice and real vegetables that they were eating! How wonderful it all was!” Every bite these two take seems to be bursting with flavor, and small things like the quest for ingredients to make “a mango pickle” with oil, salt and chili become major plot points. Read More
May 11, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Émile Zola By Valerie Stivers In her Eat Your Words series, Valerie Stivers cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. It’s finally the season for the farmers market, which inspired me to dig out my copy of The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola (1840–1902), a book whose descriptions of the central Parisian market of Les Halles in its heyday are perhaps literature’s greatest market scenes. Zola was friends with Cézanne, and he spends a very many pages in painterly descriptions of Les Halles, where at dawn, for example, “piles of greenery were like waves, a river of green flowing along the roadway” and the light “seemed to transform” cabbages into “magnificent flowers with the hue of wine-dregs, splashed with crimson and dark purple.” Later, “the swelling hearts of the lettuces were ablaze, the various shades of green burst wonderfully into life, the carrots glowed blood-red, the turnips became incandescent in the triumphant radiance of the sun.” Read More
April 27, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Angela Carter By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The writer Angela Carter (1940–1992) had many guises as a novelist, fairy-tale writer, and feminist theorist but was always occupied with archetypes of womanhood; her heroines undergo dark, gory, and magical processes of becoming brides or lovers, wolves or girls. I’ve loved Carter since first encountering her book of cultural theory The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography at Brown in the nineties (for a course entitled History 99X: Pornography and the Politics of Culture!). In it, she argues that the work of Marquis de Sade has liberating feminist underpinnings, and in the process takes something dark and frightening, like being a young woman in a world where one’s body is a porn object, and molts it into something slightly better, a promise that sexuality can offer freedom too. Along the same lines, the book I’ve chosen to cook from this week, Carter’s 1967 novel, The Magic Toyshop, is a fable about a girl, Melanie, stepping out of the sane, safe, and sexless world of childhood and into the world of womanhood, which is “as distorted and alien as its miniature in the witch-ball.” She ultimately survives this dangerous transformation but only after being mock raped by the patriarchy—represented metaphorically during a puppet show where she plays Leda and her evil uncle controls the puppet strings of a swan described as having an “empty body … white and light as meringue.” After this climatic scene, Melanie burns the house down and escapes with her siblings, her lover, her abused aunt, and her self-respect. Read More
March 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Alexandre Dumas By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. If the lavish feasts and epic drinking sessions of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), are any indication, seventeenth-century France was the era of the gourmand. The musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and their young friend d’Artagnan, the Gascon nobleman who is the book’s hero, are frat boys of a different era, men for whom an ordinary evening at home is thus: Porthos was in bed, and was playing a game of lansquenet with Mousqueton [his servant], to keep his hand in; while a spit loaded with partridges was turning before the fire, and on each side of a large chimney-piece, over two chafing dishes, were boiling two stew-pans, from which exhaled a double odour of rabbit and fish stews, rejoicing to the smell. In addition to this … the top of a wardrobe and the marble of a commode were covered with empty bottles. The musketeers know no moderation. They order multiple bottles of wine for a quick drink, and at one point, one of them consumes an entire wine cellar. When Aramis plans to eat an omelet with a side of spinach, his friends ultimately convince him to say to the waiter, “Return from whence you came; take back these horrible vegetables … Order a larded hare, a fat capon, mutton leg dressed with garlic, and four bottles of old Burgundy.” Read More
March 2, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Langston Hughes By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Langston Hughes’s 1931 classic Not Without Laughter, recently rereleased as a Penguin Classic, tells the coming-of-age story of Sandy, a light-skinned black youth in a small, mixed-race Kansas town in the 1910s. Sandy wants great things for himself but can’t see how to achieve them in a world rife with racism. Late in the novel, he muses that “being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs.” Out of context, this may seem simplistic, but it follows Hughes’s devastating explication of how the adult black role models in Sandy’s life have tried, and failed, to thrive. Sandy’s mother is a cook for a white family. She feeds her own family on scraps from her employer’s table, bringing home things like “a large piece of fresh lemon pie,” “two chocolate eclairs in her pocket, mashed together,” or “a small bucket of oyster soup.” Sandy’s grandmother, Aunt Hagar, cleans laundry for whites. She works herself to the bone for pennies with the belief that a quiet respectability will, in the end, save black people. Sandy’s father, Jimboy, and Sandy’s aunt embrace the blues and enjoy what they have, though Hughes does not sugarcoat the reality that what they have is too little. Read More
February 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin By Valerie Stivers As a not-quite-heterosexual high-school girl, I considered the grand science-fiction gender experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), one of my formative love stories. The book was published in 1969 and won Hugo and Nebula awards, but it was still radical when I devoured it in the eighties and is still radical today. It tells the story of Genly Ai, a human-diaspora interstellar explorer who arrives solo on the planet Winter to convince its citizens to join the Ekumen, a benevolent interplanetary federation. Ai is a human man, but the humanoid people on Winter have no gender and instead go once a month into a kind of estrus called kemmer, in which their bodies are spontaneously inspired to become either male or female, for the purpose of sex. (Sounds fun … right?) As a person who is always a “man,” Ai is considered a pervert on Winter, but in their society—unlike ours—this isn’t a very big deal. More central is how Ai grapples with his relationships with the local people, in particular a government minister named Estraven, who may be an ally or an enemy or a friend … or more than a friend if Ai can expand his categories. Hot beer: the drink of choice for the maybe-lovers Estraven and Ai. Le Guin said that she wrote her science fictions as thought experiments, skewing our world in search of moral insight, and her imagined society on Winter poses questions of how humans would organize themselves if we could all bear children and if we saw ourselves as humans first and sex objects only sometimes. It’s much more than just a love story, but in high school, I took it as one. Genly Ai’s long, slow, dawning appreciation of Estraven—and especially a night when he sees his friend shirtless, by a fire, as “gaunt and scarred … his face burned by cold almost as by fire … a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light”—set my standards for the highest romance. Read More