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
September 29, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Gogol By Valerie Stivers This is the first installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1830s, peasant style was fashionable, literature was becoming more democratic, and, somewhat weirdly, the poet of human baseness, Nikolai Gogol, was producing some of the best food writing to be found in the Russian canon. His eerie and baroque first collection of short stories, Village Evenings Near Dikanka, is a series of narrations by a beekeeper to the folks gathered in his cottage at night as they’re served snacks: “Delicious beyond description! … Pies you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams: they melt in your mouth! And the butter—it just runs down your lips when you bite into them.” Every time I read Gogol, I want to cook like the Ukrainian housewives in his stories. In this post, I try to re-create a spread from the 1959 edition of Gogol’s collected works. Read More