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

The piecrust Tower of Babel. From the bottom: plain, chocolate almond, rosemary, oatmeal, and mascarpone.

In the novel The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino (1923–1985), Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a young man from a noble family, apple of his parents’ eyes, climbs a tree one night during dinner—because he is refusing to eat his dinner—and then never comes down for the rest of his life.

It’s a strong stance on a meal.

It’s also a strong stance on our world, “the world as it is,” as Calvino once wrote in a letter. The young baron retreats because he is revolted by the decadence, provincialism, militarism, stupidity, and corruption of his aristocratic family, who serve, among other things, as a stand-in for the Italian Communist Party. The writer fought alongside the Communist partisans as a young man in World War II (against the Fascists and the Nazis), an experience that shaped his worldview and ideals; at the time of the book’s writing, he had recently renounced his membership. The rejected dinner—a dish of snails served up by a mad sister—conveys, partially, his disgust for the revealed truths of Stalinism. In some cultures, snails are a delicacy, but these have come from a barrel of “clotted opaque slime, and colored snail excrement.” The sister also makes a “pâté of mouse liver,” and sets “locusts legs, the hard, serrated back ones” onto a cake “like a mosaic.” The worst dish is “a whole porcupine with all its spines” that “not even she wanted to taste.” Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, August 28, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, click here, or scroll to the bottom of the page.

I crusted the gamekeeper’s “simple chop” with mushrooms—not what Lawrence intended but I’ve made the recipe (from his fellow Briton Mary Berry) half a dozen times since.

Few people could have been more off-grid than the English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) during his sojourn at a cabin eighteen miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife, Frieda, lived without electricity, kept chickens, built an outdoor oven, made adobe bricks and “a meat safe to hang from a tree branch,” evicted nests of rats, and traveled two miles on horseback for their milk and mail, their butter and eggs. The time Lawrence spent at this place—called “punishingly remote” by the biographer John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider—was relatively short, a span of months in 1924 and 1925, but he considered it home, and after his death, Frieda returned there to live until she died in 1956.

It’s a lonely moment for me and an off-grid moment for many of us, so it seems time to pay a visit to Lawrence, his work, and his food—and to ask what can be learned from literature’s most notorious outcast. Read More

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

A mushroom like the one Abbott grew in his car.

The Haight-Ashbury poet and activist Steve Abbott (1943–1992) has had an unusual and charmed second act as a domestic icon, though he was not known for his cooking. Abbott was married in his midtwenties while he was a student at Emory University, and he had a daughter in 1970. After his wife was killed in a car accident in 1973, he became a single parent to two-year-old Alysia Abbott and moved to San Francisco with her in what we would now consider to be astoundingly bohemian circumstances. Among other legends is the time when Alysia was eight weeks old and Abbott “took some LSD and went into the bedroom to play with her,” tripping out on the baby’s rolling eyes and flailing legs. Abbott saw “a monstrous id” and explained that “I had to leave her presence because I was too psychically vulnerable.” He also relays that when Alysia was small, he survived by catnapping between work and childcare, and hitting the gay bars only between midnight and three in the morning (and presumably leaving her unattended). It worked out. As Abbott’s daughter grew, she became a sidekick and confidante. Photos from the time show Alysia posed in costume for the cover of one of Abbott’s poetry books or curled up with him on extraordinary seventies furniture, with obvious affection beaming from every frame.

In 2013, the grown-up Alysia published Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, which details their experiences as a family. In part because of that book’s ongoing success, Steve Abbott’s work is back in print as of December 2019, in the collection Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, published by Nightboat Books and edited by Jamie Townsend. Alysia has been a tireless promoter of her father’s legacy and explains in public appearances that she chose to tell their story the way she did because while gay parents have become more visible and accepted in America, the heritage of groundbreaking families like hers is less known. And so many gay parents of her father’s generation—including her father himself—died of AIDS that it has fallen on their children to tell their stories. Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, May 15, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, click here, or scroll to the bottom of the page.

My hands smell like strawberries and chicken liver, and I’m drinking a Vernaccia, the “good white wine” of The Decameron. In the middle of cooking, I flip through my phone, scrolling through the orange banners announcing death tolls. It’s incongruous and heartbreaking. As a schoolchild, I used to thrill myself with the horror of the World Wars and spent hours in the library daydreaming over what epoch-defining disaster would happen to me. Vietnam was over. Nuclear fears were easing. It was the Reagan eighties and then the Clinton nineties, and it seemed impossible anything could change. But now the epoch-defining disaster is here, and I’m worrying about the health of my friends and family members, and worrying, too, about all the people grieving or suffering, and I feel uneasy about cooking and eating well under the circumstances. It’s possible that the relative abundance of Vernaccia and tasty giblets could soon dwindle in my household as well. Like everyone else, I’m wondering what changes will come next.

The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), is a book that sits squarely on one of history’s great pivots. It was completed in 1353, four years after the black death wiped out an estimated 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population, an event that scholars in the book The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? argue was catalyst for massive change, though they note that the plague also served as a crucible for shifts that were already underway but as yet unseen. Boccaccio, who lived in Florence, probably wasn’t an eyewitness to the plague, but his father was the city’s minister of supply, and The Decameron contains one of history’s best accounts by a contemporary of “the late mortal pestilence,” an occasion of “not merely sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death,” which mysteriously seemed to spread not just by contact with the sick but by touching their things or even looking at them. (Does that sound familiar?)

Boccaccio chronicles how “divers apprehensions and imaginations were engendered in the minds of such as were left alive,” with some deciding to “shun and abhor all contact with the sick and all that belonged to them” and wait in temperate isolation, while others maintained “that to drink freely, frequent places of public resort, and take their pleasure with song and revel” was the way to go. Nonetheless, “in this extremity of our city’s suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved.”

This horror, though, is only the book’s frame. A group of wealthy young nobles, seven women and three men, flee the plague-ridden city for a country estate, where they occupy themselves at “tables covered with the whitest of cloths” and picnic in idyllic glades. The aristocrats eat “dishes, daintily prepared,” drink “the finest wines,” and tell raunchy stories, ten per day for ten days, which are the main contents of the book. Read More

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

The Kolyma Stories and my extended time indoors offered me the opportunity to use up some obscure items that have been languishing in my pantry.

The complete stories of Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), published by NYRB Classics in two newly translated volumes, contain some of the bleakest and most powerful writing we have about the Soviet gulag. They’re also terrifyingly and indelibly about food—that is, about starving to death. Shalamov was first arrested in the twenties, when he was a student at Moscow University, and then again in 1937 for Trotskyist activity. He spent the next seventeen years in labor camps, including on the far northern island of Kolyma, where he mined for gold in some of the most horrific conditions in all the gulag. He found no redemption in the camps, writing that they were “a negative school of life in every possible way. Nobody can get anything useful or necessary out of the camps … Every minute of camp life is poisoned.” Yet in the decades after his release, he boiled the horrors he’d seen down to their pure essentials and shared them via this extraordinary body of work. Shalamov is plainspoken—“he knew his material perfectly, and wrote in a way that everyone can understand,” notes the translator Donald Rayfield—but prolonged immersion in the work reveals him as a better Solzhenitsyn; the stories are compulsively readable despite their subject matter, as compressed and brilliant as the Arctic snow. The temptation would be to compare them to “metal number one,” as gold was called by the Soviet authorities—if Shalamov had not so loathed it.

I was reading the first volume, Kolyma Stories, two weeks ago as New York City shut down due to the ongoing public health crisis. He was the only writer who didn’t feel frivolous—not because there can be any comparison between America’s sudden food insecurity and the Stalinist gulag’s conditions of prolonged starvation but because I have been depressed by the human behavior on display. To me, social distancing seemed to erupt spontaneously, and I found it heartbreaking. Even if it will later emerge as necessary and the best decision, I’m hopelessly stuck on the idea that distance is bad. I read a Leslie Jamison piece about being sick with the coronavirus and caring alone for her two-year-old, and on an emotional level, I’m outraged that I can’t bring her soup and human kindness. Read More

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