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

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

“ … oh I only know about God when I enter the hairy mouth of the wild sugar apple … ” Hilst’s creative use of foodstuffs to mean genitalia is one of the joys of her prose. Here, an engorged chayote rests suggestively against Hilst’s novel The Obscene Madame D.

The recipe for the work of the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) is equal parts language and nonsense, obscenity and literary references, disparagement of writers and striving toward God. It’s thrilling to read but challenging as narrative, which is perhaps why Hilst is famous in her own country but not in ours. Despite a fifty-plus-year career and a sweep of honors, Hilst wasn’t published in English until 2012. If she’s known at all in the U.S., it’s in the shadow of the Brazilian grande dame Clarice Lispector, who worked in a similar vein.

My favorite of Hilst’s novels, Letters from a Seducer (1991), is the centerpiece of a late series often considered her masterwork. In it, Stamatius, a homeless writer, begs on the street for “everything that you are going to throw in the trash, everything that isn’t worth a dime anymore, and if there’s leftover food we still want it.” Hilst’s work resists quotation; it’s difficult to find a place to stop. Every line is a pirouette. The passage continues: “The burlap sacks fill up, bric-a-brac books stones, then some people put rats and shit in the bag, what faces those rats had, my God, what injured little eyes those rats had, my God, we separated everything out right there: Rats and shit here, books stones and bric-a-brac there. Never any food.”

Stamatius’s perspective bookends a series of letters of obscene invective—we assume he’s found or stolen them—from a man named Karl, a slick bourgeois, to his sister Cordélia, who has retreated to a nunnery, perhaps to get away from him. These letters begin: “Cordélia my sister, come out of your cloister. / the countryside ages women and cows. / Once again nourish your holes / With gentle swine-cresses, blunt poles / Or if it’s pussies your tongue wants / I’ll get you dozens: mature cunts / Youthful cunts, purple cunts / for your vile, repressed feelings.” Read More

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

The old-fashioned matriarch in the Cazalet Chronicles believes in just adding more bread crumbs to the rissoles if there’s not enough food for twenty dinner guests.

The English writer Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) is best known for the Cazalet Chronicles, a series of family dramas set around World War II that overflow with scenes of meals being prepared for a large English country estate. Published between 1990 and 2013, the books are five floral-covered bricks totaling nearly three thousand pages and centered on the children and grandchildren of a rich English timber merchant, known as “the brigadier,” and his Edwardian wife, “the duchy.” The story concerns the Cazalet family at large as well as their lovers, spouses, children, governesses, great-aunts, cooks, and cousins, all of whose struggles for love, fulfillment, and a place in the world make for page-turning reading.

It was the opinion of Howard’s contemporaries that this was not great literature, and though she hung out in elevated literary circles—most notably as the second wife of Kingsley Amis and the stepmother of Martin Amis—she was often dismissed as a writer of “women’s fiction.” But Howard’s books hold up. She has a dazzling ability to depict a character at a moment of crisis, catching a young woman midstream as she gives up one dream for another or drilling in on a telling lie, a glint of cowardice. It also takes enormous technical virtuosity to keep her huge cast of characters distinct in the reader’s mind, and a master class could be taught from the timing of her interlinked plotlines. Read More

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

My thrifty-housewife version of Ma’s “scrap bag” is this colorful mixture of sanding sugar left over from children’s parties. l used it to make sparkling cranberries for the top of a vinegar pie from the book Farmer Boy.

Everyone who grew up on the Little House books has their own particular treasured food memory from the books. How Pa butchered the pig, smoked the meat, and used every bit of it, down to inflating the empty bladder for the girls to play with as a balloon. The spring on Plum Creek when they ran out of food and ate only fried fish and “crisp, juicy” turnips. Ma frying “vanity cake” doughnuts, so named because they’re “all puffed up, like vanity, with nothing solid inside.” Almanzo stuffing himself from the following spread at the county fair: pumpkin pie, custard pie, vinegar pie, mince pie, berry pies, cream pies, raisin pies …

Reading these books—or rereading them as an adult, which is arguably an even better experience—makes me want to cook, eat, wear calico dresses, sleep on a straw-tick mattress, and plant seeds in the freshly tilled earth. With their lengthy descriptions of cooking and other homesteading processes, they’re the perfect inspiration for a from-scratch Thanksgiving meal; they’re all the more seasonally appropriate because the holiday’s roots lie in scarcity, the way the Ingallses’ lives did. Thanksgiving also presents an opportunity for reckoning with Wilder, whose work has been criticized in recent years for its cultural insensitivity toward Native Americans. Read More