Books for Living

  Colwin admits that she has “no idea whether or not the American family is falling apart.” But she does “know that many people still like to cook for their family, but that when they rush home after a day at the office they may not have a lot of time and energy to spend on cooking.” What she provides is a book of essays about cooking and food and life. And she includes an important caveat up front: “These essays were written at a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens are going hungry in the streets of our richest cities. It is impossible to write about food and not think about that.”

  These are elegant essays about topics from all the equipment you might ever need in the kitchen to how to disguise vegetables (from adults as well as from children) to feeding a crowd to easy cooking for exhausted people. And at the end of almost every essay is a simple and satisfying recipe: potato pancakes, shepherd’s pie, old-fashioned steamed chocolate pudding, salt-free baked chicken with garlic and apples, and a black cake from the West Indies that is “to fruitcake what the Brahms piano quartets are to Muzak.”

  In one chapter, on what she calls nursery food, a specific category of home cooking that evokes the wonderful, mushy, fork-only meals of childhood, she writes of the comfort that old favorites can bring, and how she was filled with gratitude after a friend made her a shepherd’s pie after the death of her father. It was just what she didn’t know she wanted.

  “Parts of a nursery dinner,” she writes, “should be eaten without any utensils at all: corn sticks, cookies, steamed carrots and baby lamb chops.” The ideal is “something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion—something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe. A four-star meal is the right thing when the human animal is well rested and feeling rich, but it is not much help to the sore in spirit who would be much better off with a big bowl of homemade soup.”

  Colwin was a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist; she died suddenly, of a heart attack, at age forty-eight in 1992. She left a husband, a daughter, eight works of fiction, and two beloved books about food and life, the second one a sequel to Home Cooking called More Home Cooking.

  Nigella Lawson is another cookbook author who, in writing about the role that food plays in our lives, writes about life. And about death.

  Nigella’s sister, mother, and first husband all died of cancer. In her book Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, she ends with a chapter about food at funerals and what you can bring to those who are grieving.

  “It may seem odd to talk about what you eat at a funeral as a way of celebrating life,” she writes, “but at every level, that is exactly what it is. Nor do I mean a celebration in that cheery, if faintly maudlin sense of giving someone a good send-off, though that is a part of it. Any food is a vital reminder that life goes on, that living is important. That isn’t brutal: it’s the greatest respect you can pay to the dead.”

  Nigella describes how for some the act of eating “can seem like the cruelest demonstration of the dreadful disparity that now exists” between the living and the dead. But she reminds readers that you cannot bridge this gap “by acting as if you, too, have died.”

  She also wisely points out that no one is given a choice as to how they will react: “some eat out of grief, some lose their appetite.” And she explains how food “marks a connection between the living. There is nothing you can say to someone who is bereaved that can make anything better and even the notion that you could make it better can feel offensive, even if the wish is declared out of kindness. But you can help, you can make food. And if you can’t cook, or haven’t got time, you can shop.” The one thing she implores you not to do if you are shopping for someone who is grieving is to ask questions, like “what they’d like you to get or what they might want to eat. Decisions are impossible: you have to do it, and do it without drawing attention to the act.”

  As an example, Nigella describes how a friend left some bags of groceries for her on her doorstep when she was grieving. “She hadn’t told me she was going, she hadn’t asked what I needed: she just left the bags outside the side door with a short note.” Nigella comments that it was “one of the kindest things anyone could have done.”

  The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis is a book filled with stories of generosity and kindness. It is as much a poetic memoir as it is a cookbook, and reading it brings me from my city apartment to a place I’ve never been: Freetown, Virginia, where Edna Lewis was born in 1916.

  Lewis begins her book by telling the reader that Freetown was “a community of farming people. It wasn’t really a town. The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and they wanted to be known as a town of Free People.” Her grandfather, she writes, was one of the founders.

  The restaurateur and activist Alice Waters, in her foreword to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Taste of Country Cooking, writes this about Lewis and her classic book: “She enjoyed a childhood that could only be described as idyllic, in which the never-ending hard work of farming and cooking both sustained and entertained an entire community. In 1976, with the publication of this lovely, indispensable classic of a cookbook, she brought her lost paradise of Freetown back to life. Thanks to this book, a new generation was introduced to the glories of an American tradition worthy of comparison to the most evolved cuisines on earth, a tradition of simplicity and purity and sheer deliciousness that is only possible when food tastes like what it is, from a particular place, at a particular point in time.”

  Waters compares Lewis to “another notable advocate of simplicity, Mahatma Gandhi,” who “famously remarked that we must become the change we want to make in the world. Like Gandhi, Miss Lewis was as radical as she was traditional. To become the change she wanted to make, she left the racially divided South and plunged into the maelstrom of New York City, working variously as a typesetter for the Daily Worker and as a dressmaker for Marilyn Monroe, among other jobs, before she became the chef of an East Side restaurant in Manhattan called Café Nicholson and, later, of Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn.”

  Edna Lewis would go on to found the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food. She would be named Grande Dame des Dames d’Escoffier International. And she would write three other books, two alone, and one with her friend Scott Peacock. She died in Decatur, Georgia, in 2006, at the age of eighty-nine.

  The Taste of Country Cooking is organized by season. Lewis walks the reader through all of the harvests and traditions and holidays, meal by meal. There’s an Early Spring Dinner after Sheep-Shearing, and a Midsummer Sunday Breakfast, and a Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast, and a Dinner Celebrating the Last of the Barnyard Fowl. There are feasts: Emancipation Day and Christmas Dinners.

  Just as each season has its meals, each meal has its recipes. My favorites are Lewis’s citron preserves, new cabbage with scallions, hot buttered beets, braised leg of mutton, caramel layer cake, oyster stew, hickory nut cookies, beef kidney pie in puff pastry, smothered rabbit, dandelion wine, and her shad with roe. And the best recipe ever for eggs sunny-side up.

  It’s a book that ends with four of the sweetest words in the English language: “Serve with warm gingerbread.”

  So that’s the food. But Lewis presents the ethos behind the food. She writes, “Whenever there were major tasks on the farm, work that had to be accomplished quickly (and timing is important to farming), then everyone pitched in, not just family but neighbors as well. And afterward we would all take part in the celebrations, sharing the rewards that follow hard labor. The year seemed to be broken up by great events such as hog butchering, Christmas, the cutting of ice in winter, springtime with its gathering of the first green vegetables and the stock going away to summer pasture, the dramatic moment of wheat threshing, the excitement of Revival Week, Race Day, and the observance of Emancipation Day. All of these events were shared by the whole community, young and old alike. I guess that is why I have always felt that the people of Freetown wer
e very special. They showed such love and affection for us as children, at the same time asking something of us, and they knew how to help each other so that the land would thrive for all. Each family had its own different talents, its special humor, but they were bound together in an important way.”

  This is a book about looking after one another, and looking after the future: “If you have a spot of land, do plant a few apple trees, particularly if there are children around to enjoy them. We are still enjoying the apples from trees our parents planted 45 years ago.”

  Lewis describes her childhood with joy. She writes lovingly of her parents; and the excitement of having cousins come to visit; and the joy of going shoeless from March until the end of summer; and of making ice cream; and being too excited Christmas Eve to eat more than the oyster stew that began the feast.

  Near the end of The Taste of Country Cooking, in the section on late-winter feasts, comes a passage that reminds the reader how precious and hard-won was this idyllic childhood:

  It was in between these daily chores that the people of Freetown found more time for visiting each other. There were visitors from nearby communities, especially to visit with Grandpa. A person of his age group (80 years and older) would arrive on horseback or in a buggy, unbridle his horse, and put it in the barn with ours. Then he would visit us for a week or two or three. We liked having visitors. It gave the house a festive air and neighbors would drop by to greet the guest. We children were able to be alone in the next room and relax our behavior without being noticed. A great fire would be going in the fireplace, and we would serve homemade cake and homemade wines that seemed to have been made for just such occasions. There would be lively conversations, with the aged men doing most of the talking and the young adults of my father’s age group listening. I would be listening, too, hanging between my father’s knees and watching the logs burning in the fireplace and bugs desperately trying to escape from the burning logs with only me being aware of their desperate plight. I was too young then to understand why so much time was spent in discussion. It was only afterward that I realized they were still awed by the experience of chattel slavery fifty years ago, and of having become freedmen. It was something that they never tired of talking about. It gave birth to a song I often heard them sing, “My Soul Look Back and Wonder How I Got Over.”

  This world that Edna Lewis describes to us so lovingly, that inspires readers to want to celebrate the seasons and do more for our communities and plant trees that will bear fruit long after we are gone—this world, as she tells us at the beginning and end of her book, was created by people who grew up enslaved.

  In a New York Times Magazine article about this book, food writer and cookbook editor Francis Lam writes about the foundational role that Edna Lewis and black southern cooking played in the creation of today’s American cuisine. Lam also writes about the world in which Lewis grew up and lived: “She wrote The Taste of Country Cooking, in her 50s, in the 1970s, after years as a political radical, after the civil rights movement, after marching for the Scottsboro Boys.” He quotes Lewis’s friend Peacock saying, “She could see the ugly in the world.” But, Lam adds, Lewis “refused to let the past, her past, be defined by anyone else but her.”

  A cookbook can do far more than give recipes for tasty dishes: it can introduce us to new places, help us celebrate life, comfort us in loss, and show us how to live. A cookbook can even remind us of America’s original sin, which is manifest in the countless inequities that exist to this day, and inspire us to listen more carefully to one another and do more to fix our world. And it can help us remember to be grateful for the labor of those who farm and bring us the food we eat, and for the extraordinary gift of having meals every day and people we love to share them with.

  “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

  Quitting

  BARTLEBY, a clerk in a story by Herman Melville, is the patron saint of quitters. He’s the yin to the yang of Ahab, the Melville character who absolutely refuses to quit in his pursuit of Moby Dick, a big white whale.

  I found myself thinking of Bartleby at a tech conference in Austin, Texas. I was listening to a lecture by a famous venture capitalist who had made hundreds of millions for his investors and himself by funding Internet start-ups. In his speech, he rattled off the names of some global business legends, people who had founded many of the world’s most successful companies. He asked the audience to consider what these people had in common. Then he answered the question he had just posed:

  “They never gave up.”

  I found this inspiring. It’s not an original message. But it’s a compelling one. We’ve been told this all our lives: Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But as I pondered it more that day, it began to gnaw at me. First, all these business legends probably had quit something—school or another career. Maybe they’d originally wanted to be jazz musicians and basketball stars, and maybe they quit those pursuits. That they didn’t quit the activity that finally made them famous tells me very little. And is obvious.

  That’s when Bartleby popped into my head.

  I parked that thought.

  Then I came across a video that was being widely shared on the Internet. It was a graduation speech at the University of Texas at Austin given by a genuine hero, a man who had for thirty-seven years served the United States with great honor as a Navy SEAL and who had attained the rank of admiral and commander of US Special Operations. He was giving advice on how to change the world, based on his experiences from navy training, the SEALs being the elite special forces arm of the US Navy. It seemed to me to be excellent advice—starting with making your bed every morning, something my mother also taught me (though it didn’t quite stick). But then came the end of the speech. He was describing a bell that was in the center of the training compound. And he said that when you rang the bell during SEAL training, it meant you were done, finished, you quit. The bell was always there. You could ring it at any time. You could ring it if the training was too grueling, if you no longer wanted to wake up at 5:00 a.m., if you were sick of swimming in freezing water, if you were worn out, if you decided that this whole Navy SEAL thing just wasn’t for you.

  His advice was simple, he said. “If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.”

  And I thought, Hell, no.

  I mean, sometimes you have to ring the bell. Or admit that your business is tanking. Or just plain give up. Even if you really want to change the world.

  It’s of course true that everyone who succeeds didn’t give up—how could it be otherwise? But it’s also true that many people kept going years after they should have stopped. Many people bankrupted themselves and their families pursuing a dream they had no chance of achieving. And in a culture where no one is allowed to fail, it’s preferable to lie about where you are than admit you are in trouble, especially if that admission means that every lifeline will be immediately removed.

  “Fake it till you make it” is great in theory. But often it really means fake it until you go under.

  And as for not ringing that bell—that just doesn’t make sense. The bell is there to be rung. If you realize that you don’t have the stamina or motivation to be a Navy SEAL, then of course you should ring the bell. With no shame whatsoever. The last thing we want in the Navy SEALs are people who don’t think they have what it takes to be there. And they should be encouraged to self-identify as soon as possible.

  Bartleby popped back into my head.

  I’m a longtime bell ringer. I bail. If I’m reading a book and I don’t care for it, I stop. At the theater, if I’m bored, I’ll leave. I will wait until intermission—but then I’ll run, not walk, to the nearest exit.

  The other day I was watching a television show and saw footage of a young British man who decided he really wanted to try bungee jumping—the extreme sport where you plunge off a bridge or tower and hurtle toward the ground, with the only thing coming between you and death (or horrid injury) a rubber cord fixed around
your ankles. This young man got to the top of a bungee platform in Thailand and was all set to jump. He confessed at that moment to being more than a little scared. Not uncommon in the world of bungee—the woman who was set to jump right before him had decided, after several minutes of hesitation, not to jump. Back down she went.

  Again, there was Bartleby.

  But this fellow decided to ignore his fear. So he jumped anyway. And something happened that almost never happens: the cord became detached from his ankles. And so he didn’t bounce right back up as he expected but rather plunged like a missile into the hard surface of a lake. He was going eighty miles per hour when he hit the water, and he sustained grievous injuries. His spleen ruptured on impact; his liver tore; his lungs collapsed. He almost died. Only after a month in the hospital in Bangkok was he able to return home.

  That’s what can happen if you don’t quit when the voice in your head tells you to. But there’s also a danger to quitting every time you experience fear or uncertainty or anxiety or trepidation. If you do that, you miss out on adventure and excitement. You don’t expand your world. And sometimes no matter how much you might like to quit, you really shouldn’t.

  The key is knowing what’s at stake.

  Certainly a great deal was at stake when Winston Churchill said in a 1941 speech, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

  Thank goodness Winston Churchill and the British people had such firm resolve during World War II. Ringing the bell, as it were, would have been catastrophic for the world. Sometimes quitting isn’t an option. But much of the time, it is.

  Often, though, the hardest thing isn’t quitting—it’s staying quit. People may try to coax you back into the game. You may well try to do that to yourself.