January 5, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Sylvia Plath By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. In her diaries, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) liked to boast about her “damn good” lemon-meringue pie, which she was able to produce even under difficult conditions. She once wrote that she “cooled lemon custard and crust on cold bathroom windowsill,” presumably due to lack of refrigeration at a rental apartment at Smith College. Pie-making enthusiasts will know that keeping the dough cold, cold, cold is the trick, and also that the fridge is pretty essential for setting a lemon curd. They will marvel, as I do, at Plath’s excellent domestic skills. Read More
December 15, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Chinua Achebe By Valerie Stivers This is the sixth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. My winding path as a reader has led me to a personal specialty in Nigerian literature. I know about the country’s civil war from 1967 to 1970, its languages and ethnic groups, its Harmattan winds and mellifluous names. I can name-drop hipster cafes in Lagos, where I have been only in fiction. My first love was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, but my random late-night Internet searches for her biography and interviews turned me on to others, to Chigozie Obioma, to the feminist expatriate Buchi Emecheta, and finally to the éminence grise Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). Achebe was one of the founding fathers of post-colonial African fiction, a writer who worked in opposition to the racist literature of his British-educated youth. Achebe’s essay critiquing Heart of Darkness, written in 1975, was a revolutionary event in Conrad studies, and to this day he’s one of the most-lionized of all African writers. Achebe had a keen eye for social organization, which means he writes a lot about food. In his 1956 classic, Things Fall Apart, yam farming is the lifeline of the village, the size of a man’s harvest determines his status, and his multiple wives each make him a soup to go with his evening foo-foo, a pounded yam dish. How is foo-foo made? Is it good? If I were the wife of a polygamous yam farmer and competitive about my cooking—which of course I would be—would my soup be the best one on the evening’s table? Or would I be like Nwayieke, a woman in the village “notorious for her late cooking,” the sound of whose wooden mortar and pestle is “part of the night.” Naturally, I want to know. Read More
December 1, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Sybille Bedford By Valerie Stivers This is the fifth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. The decline of the continental European aristocracy just before World War I doesn’t sound like a promising period for food … until you read Sybille Bedford (1911–2006). Bedford was the daughter of a German baron (part of the anti-Prussian aristocracy) and a wealthy Jewish German woman from Hamburg. She had Jewish blood and glamorous friends, and she escaped the Nazis with the help of Aldous Huxley. Her greatest novel, A Legacy, first published in 1956 and reprinted by New York Review Books Classics in 2015, is the story of two German families, one based on her father’s family, the other on Berlin’s rich Jews. These beautiful and inflexible characters collect objets d’art, gamble, eat sumptuous feasts, and unwittingly play their parts in the rise of fascism in Germany. It’s one of the book’s many pleasurable sophistications that the narrator is barely a character; once you’ve seen her parents—seen her legacy—you’ve seen it all. Read More
November 10, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Zora Neale Hurston By Valerie Stivers This is the fourth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel on black Southern womanhood by Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), people eat soda crackers with cheese, drink lemonade or sweeten their water with ribbon cane syrup, and serve whole barbecued hogs with sweet-potato pone. A man on a spree offers fried chicken and macaroni for all, and Janie, the heroine, leaves her first husband after frying him a hoe-cake to go with his coffee. “She dumped the dough on the skillet and smoothed it over with her hand. She wasn’t even angry,” Hurston writes. Instead of a loveless marriage, Janie insists on having the sweet things in life. Her second husband buys her “the best things the butcher had, like apples and a glass lantern full of candies.” And her great love is a handsome man 15 years her junior whom everyone calls “Tea Cake.” (A tea cake is a classic of Southern cooking that’s actually a simple round of sugar dough with a crisp bottom and chewy texture, something between biscuit and cookie.) Hurston’s belief that the pursuit of happiness and sensuality was a worthy life goal, especially for a black woman, was radical when the book was published. She was criticized for being “pseudo-primitive,” too female, too personal, not promoting black causes in the right way. Hurston died in obscurity and was only rediscovered in the 1970s thanks to the efforts of Alice Walker, who was teaching at Wellesley at the time. Read More
October 27, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Barbara Pym By Valerie Stivers This is the third installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In my alternative literary universe, people who wish to read romances would be given one option only: Barbara Pym (1913–1980), an English writer whose dry, hilarious, unsentimental 1950s novels of spinsters and curates, office girls, bored wives and nebbishy male intellectuals are as insightful about the gender wars today as they were when written. Readers would start with Excellent Women, Pym’s best-known work, move on to second-best Jane and Prudence, and take special caution with Quartet in Autumn, a later, darker work written after Pym’s fall into obscurity. All materials would be issued in vintage Plume editions from the 1980s. As domestic comedies, Pym’s books make great use of food, though her women are likely to be poor or bewildered cooks, and the meals are as often absurd as they are comforting. In Crampton Hodnet, a husband announces an affair while topping and tailing gooseberries for a pie. In Jane and Prudence, the cosmopolitan Pru considers herself sophisticated because she rubs garlic on the bowl before dressing the salad. And though Pym herself was not a consummate cook, her food writing inspired her sister, Hilary Pym, and friend Honor Wyatt to publish a cookbook based on her works after her death in 1988, with excerpts to accompany the recipes. Hilary Pym explains: Read More
October 13, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ivan Doig By Valerie Stivers Whipping up recipes from a fictional 1930’s creek picnic. Ivan Doig’s characters take their food seriously. Doig (1939–2015), a canonical writer of the American West, was shaped by the effects of the Great Depression. His family were Scottish farmer-settlers. In his 1978 memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, Doig recounts his ancestors’ struggle to ranch the poor, high-altitude land of the Tierney Basin. It was a “peculiar” and “maybe treacherous” country where instead of homesteads, the land “turned out to be landing sites, quarters to hold people until they were able to scramble away to somewhere else.” In English Creek, the first novel in Doig’s acclaimed McCaskill trilogy, the 1930s landscape is littered with abandoned farms. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jick, cursed with a teenage boy’s appetite in a rural environment of relative scarcity, is always on the lookout for his next meal. I find reading and rereading Doig’s work to be a moral tonic. It’s soothing to encounter a writer who values small communities, stewardship of the land, and the merits of human endeavor. He extracts meaning from the simplest things—a teenage boy’s appetite, for example—and when pleasure comes along for his characters, he celebrates it fully. Cooking to keep up with Doig’s women, though, is a challenge. Here’s a description, through Jick’s hungry eyes, of a Fourth of July creek picnic prepared by his mother and a friend: Read More