The Birthing of a Food Writer...

When I try to recall a time that I was not in relationship with food, I cannot. I'm not talking about my first memory of eating, or my awareness of my favorite food, or even my memories of food and family. There is an intimacy for some of us around food and what we do with it, how we perceive it, how much we think about it. Even how we use it in our lives. For me, food has always been at least, a preoccupation. Thoughts of when we were eating, what I was eating, what I could be eating, or would like to be eating,...well you get the picture...these kinds of thoughts danced through my head daily even as a young child. Particularly interesting to me was what other people were eating and in the 70's, prior to the dazzling array of food shows on television, my best foray into the eating behavior of others was the school cafeteria at Spencer Elementary in Spencer, WV. I was fascinated by the lunches that my classmates would bring to school. I would sit and watch as they unpacked their delectable mysteries. From their campy lunch boxes with matching thermos (the first object of my desire as I was literally a brown-bagger most days)..."Hey kid! What's in that thermos anyway? What is that pink dome shaped cake wrapped in cellophane?" It's was so pink, and even a few seats away there were enough preservatives in that cake that you could catch that first whiff as the bearer of the lovely mass of white flour and refined sugar snapped the wrapping open...it filled the space between us and I would forget myself momentarily. I would generally find myself, unable to stop, needling the poor child who possessed the object of my desire for just one bite so I could indulge my fantasy....I was nine.

Lest you worry dear ones that there was not enough food in my house let me assure you that I am not talking about physical hunger. This is especially noteworthy to me as I grew up in an area, known still today, primarily for the levels of poverty that exist. But in West Virginia there is a rich food culture that is a combination of practicality and down- home tastes which still teases my homesick pallette. It wasn't until I began to raise my own family that I began to see the ways that my Grandmother, who raised me, did her best and was stretching our food supply to accommodate a lean income. There was always a warm and substantial meal on the table. Often this meant something that seemed fun and novel to me, like eggs, bacon, and pancakes for dinner. Breakfast at night! I thought it was a delight, and I can see now that it was all that we had in the pantry at the time. But I went to school with children whose only meal for the day would be what they got on their cafeteria tray and this is a hunger I am blessed to say I have never experienced.

My desire for food is nothing that seems to fit in Maslow's hierarchy. It is not about filling the body or physical survival. It's the feeling that you have when you're eating something especially delicious, it's filling all your senses and you know you should stop. Maybe you were full a few bites back, but what you're eating is such a lovely experience that you must keep going...stopping is not an option, you must savor every morsel of what is in front of you. You're trying so hard to hang on to it, and when you take that last bite, you lament its absence, wonder if maybe you might have a little bit more room for just a little more...one more bite, one more glance a that dome shaped cake with its tantalizing artificial aroma, or even one more minute with my grandmother's discarded, outdated and forgotten cookbooks.

Early on, I was drawn to a surplus of old cookbooks belonging to my grandmother and her mother. They were tattered, dusty, smelled like old books do...musty...a word I don't hear much these days. A couple of my favorites were actually falling apart at the binding. There was nothing on the exterior to suggest in any way that a young child would be drawn to them, much less entertained. But something did draw me to them initially, a pull long forgotten because inside was a bounty so unbelievable to this budding foodie (a term not even in existence at that time) that it overshadowed most of what came before it. Inside were recipes that pulled me back to an era that is almost forgotten in our graceless age of cooking and living. A cornucopia of recipes that hearkened back to an age of hospitality when you had a parlor, "received" guests, and served crustless sandwiches with things like watercress on them. I of course had no idea what watercress was when I was nine, but I imagined it to be the most exquisite sandwich ever made, and really that fantasy is still with me now. Equally engaging to me were the endless array of recipes for things that were pickled or sandwiches that had cream cheese and meat with a little salt and pepper as their dressing, or custards....I remember custards in clear Pyrex bowls coming out of the oven, we actually called those "custard bowls" in our house. Their yellow goodness speckled with nutmeg calling to me from their little cups...

Perhaps your familiar with the wonderful collection of recipes from Cook's Illustrated "America's Best Lost Recipes". Thirty years later, pouring over Cook's nostalgic collection of recipes evokes the very memory of the food I'm talking about, and I still imagine cooking and tasting those dishes. Although I am pretty certain I will not make biscuits and creamed tomatoes anytime soon as I know no one who eats in my kitchen would dare even sample that dish, I would be genuinely satisfied to think of the recipe with fondness, write about it's comforting properties, the aesthetic of the sweet red tomatoes soaking into that pure white fluffy biscuit and then talk about it forever with you or anyone else I could get to listen. As a nine year old, I knew I would not be cooking the food I was reading about and my thoughts of them were my own little secret that I had no desire to share with anyone.

In fact, in our old home, built by my great-grandfather, those cookbooks were an escape. I would lose myself for hours in the reading of those recipes I knew I would never sample. I would wile away the hours in the fantasy of their aesthetic, history, and culture. In the hot and unbearably humid West Virginia summers, I would escape to a spare room in our house that was so cold we never used in the winter as it was too hard to heat with its one gas stove and filled with all the antique furniture my grandmother deemed unusable, but she couldn't quite discard. In the summer though, this room received the bounty of shade provided by majestic maples my great-grandfather had brought from the surrounding woods and transplanted in our yard. The perfect place to hideaway with my companion books, building menus like a "grown-up" knowing I would not cook them. But consumption dear ones was never the purpose, I see that now. It was the beginning of an education and the birthing of a foodie now apparently a food writer...yes, I said it I am a food writer....although, having said it, I use the term with caution and in the most conservative and humble way. It was the birthing of an addiction, a passion for talk of the endless aspects of food to anyone who will listen. The evolution of a bookseller whose favorite shifts are the ones were she can work near the beloved cookbook section so that she can make sure the books are arranged just so for other food lovers, help find the perfect cookbook and watch the delighted face of the person as they anticipate taking it home, and talk to her food soul mates who could spend hours in that one section...yes, I'll say it....my foodie "peeps".

But sometimes there's no one left to talk to, or everyone has heard my stories, or I am scheduled for weeks far away from my beloved cookbook section, near the business section and I need to find a place to have these conversations. It must be time to embrace my other passion and and start writing and at least take the risk to think about embracing the vision of myself as a food writer since the conversations running through my head about food are endless. I could talk about a Tudor's biscuit, or fresh asparagus, or my years as a vegetarian and then vegan, or my inability to completely give up sugar, or Michael Pollan's rules for eating, or the best cashews, or how on earth a person who can talk about food this way could ever develop an eating disorder, or how post-partum depression led to a Food Network obsession that reawakened my passion and let me to make the best shrimp and grits you've ever tasted. And I will confess to you now dear ones, that I often cook dinner with a narration running in my head as if I were doing my own cooking show.

Like my desire, the topics for this blog are infinite. I hope it will be your amuse-bouche. A little something that does not fully satiate your own desire, but inspires you to want. Or at least inspire you to leave a comment so that we might dialogue , or that you might converse with your own self, or someone else. Something that deepens my ongoing relationship with food as well as yours. More will be revealed....