Eat Your Words
Cooking with Sylvia Plath
By Valerie StiversIn 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