I May Have To Eat My Words

-



Can I be the only person incensed to find a recipe online that I hope to try, then forced to scroll down five screens-worth of background and recipe development information before I get to the list of ingredients or method?

Almost puts me off my dinner.

Contrarily, give me a book of good narrative food writing, and I am in heaven.

Years ago I wrote a weekly column for my local community newspaper, having non too graciously suggested that the previous food 'columnist' - who did not exist in person, but whose column was shared by the local reporters - be quietly consigned to a dark table near the kitchen. (Luckily, I knew the editor, so he took it on the chin, and acceded to my suggestion. And those were the days when community papers paid!)

For more than a year I wrote about Boys and Beans (I had recently inherited two stepsons), Greek Food (having never been there), Comfort Food (I am deeply attracted to mashed potato in all its guises), Learning to Bake Bread (from my Italian mother-in-law who made it weekly in a pink plastic baby's bathtub - with any old coats hanging on the back door layered on top for the rising), Lard Carving (having judged a high school food program contest), and other culinary preoccupations  and delights.

I was in heaven. Until the editor started running two of my columns a week, making it hard to meet such demanding deadlines. 

When I am writing, I sometimes feel that I would rather be teaching. And vice versa. 
And when I am cooking, I often feel I would rather be reading about it. And vice versa.

When I would rather by in my favourite armchair than in the kitchen, I have a shelf of staples to choose from, including:

The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher
Home Cooking and More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin
The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for Life, Love and Art by Jans Ondaatje Rolls
Yashim Cooks Istanbul by Jason Goodwin
Home is My Garden by Dorothy Hammond Innes

None of them fresh out of the oven. But all worth a taste.


Comments

  1. Anonymous18 September 2024 at 13:26

    You are definitely not the only recipe reader incensed by the eternal drivel one must wade through to get to an actual online recipe. It drove me back into the comforting pages of my hard-copy recipe books.
    Loved your blog and am still smiling as I picture that pink plastic tub of bread dough raising the coats ever higher.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous19 September 2024 at 10:19

      Tx. For taking the time to comment.

      Delete
  2. Dorothy Mandy18 September 2024 at 14:01

    Love your blog. I resent the ads but still I do the search for recipes for oddball ingredient which is harder to do in traditional cookbooks. It always amazes me when you relate yet another one of your occupations.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

48 Days and Counting

-
Image
 I leave for a trip to the UK in 48 days. Can I get my longstanding Work in Progress (WIP) The Return of the Summer Fish completed in a good draft form by then? (And by longstanding, I mean I have been working in it, on and off, for about 15 years. And have many draft scenes to prove it.) Since Creatively Human: Why We Imagine, Make and Innovate came out just two weeks ago, I have been at loose ends. I have a number of abandoned projects, and until recently little energy or motivation to get back to any of them. But Summer Fish is close to my heart, a memoir-based midgrade novel about two sisters efforts to reconcile after almost a year apart. Set in the Middle East where and when I grew up in the late-50s. Everyone who shared that time with me is gone - my parents and brother. And my sister, on whom the character of Lena is only very loosely based, is now living with vascular dementia in a care home in the UK. I am the only one who remembers. Over supper last night I decided to ...
Read more

The Church in the Dunes

-
Image
A Song of Cornish Summers :  The Church in the Dunes Leaving behind beach towels spread across damp sand gritty sandwiches crusts abandoned flip flops  men dozing in deck chairs their heads tied up in white hankies mothers warning offspring  not to swim so soon after lunch the rapturous cry of kids swamped by waves the rattle of the donkey’s bell and the cry of the ice cream man we escaped to the dunes.   It was an uphill slog sand filled our footsteps as soon as we walked out of them. We waded into the sun cut our hands on the sea grass we grabbed to help us up the unstable incline sand filtering into our sandals.   At last we reached the crest. Below, lay the central roofline of St. Piran’s church now enclosed in a concrete bunker fourteen hundred years after St Piran came here from Ireland in his small coracle. We knew all the tales of Celtic holy men St. Piran, St. Budoc and St. Blaise, the folk legends Tregeagle, Madgy Figgy and the piskie thresher, and eve...
Read more

Three questions for predatory marketers

-
Image
They crawl out of the shadows everywhere - on Facebook groups for all kinds of writing and writers. In our Messenger inboxes. In emails from unidentified senders. Telling us they will edit our book, make a trailer, design a cover, help us reach thousands of readers, get reviews, get us on best seller lists, help us make millions… Most often unsolicited, unwanted, and unwelcome. And sometimes relentless. Recently a woman Messaged me in response to my upcoming book cover reveal on a BC writers’s Facebook page. Would I hire her to make a trailer?  My response: ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ Could we at least talk? ‘No. I work with my publisher on promotional material.’ (In fact, it’s on my to-do list to do myself, but she didn’t need to know that.)  Could I share some visuals with her? She can help with trailers, covers, reviews…  ‘No.’  (Are you kidding!) And so it went, until I reported her on the group, told her that her actions were predatory, and blocked her. It was my ...
Read more