The current book on the go is one of the Persephone books. I really like the idea of reprinted books that would other wise disappear and they always do such a beautiful cover liner with a matching book mark. I'm reading Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekell. She wrote these little essays for the Times. It's apparent that she isn't really doing the cooking. In the first essay she begins the recipe with instruction to 'your cook'. The recipes are written as paragraphs and the time the lamb should be cooked begins at 4 and goes until dinner time.
Dinner time?
The current book by the chair is Maman's Homesick Pie, which is a memoir by the Donia Bijan who also wrote The Last Days of Cafe Leila. I just finished the latter. I grabbed it on a whim when I was in Bellingham and wasn't expecting much. I was so wrong. The writing is strong, direct and evocative. Food drives the narrative in both books and in the memoir there are recipes. The first recipe is for tea and includes warming the pot and warming the cup. It's a very tender account of her parents exile from Iran and her own love of the smells and flavors of Persian food.
I am more engaged by the second book. The writing in the first one is almost impossible to follow. It's old old old style. I find it amusing but I'm never anxious to pick it up.
I often find food writing tedious. Too many adjectives. Nothing is revealed.
I haven't written on this blog for three years. The original idea for the blog was to reveal the way I think about food and cooking, maybe blow away some assumptions about how fat people think about food. Or not. Maybe just develop my thinking about something that preoccupies me.
Food in the books by Bijan often begin with smell. My nest smells like peaches and bacon at the moment. Peaches because the last ones from the market took four days to ripen enough to try and a week to have any flavor. Now they are redolent and compete admirably with the smokey salty smell of the bacon I cooked for breakfast. I know there will not be any more peaches all too soon. Although they started late so they may keep coming for awhile. Peaches define my summer.
This summer has been odd. There's a problem with my mouth.
We have great lettuce in the Hood. It's only available for a few months. It comes from Zion Farms. I've been known to eat it with no dressing. Not this year. I do OK in the morning with my yogurt, honey, peaches and berries. But in the afternoon I'm hungry and nauseated at the same time. I've had to send bags of rotten salad fixings to Mandy's pig. I just don't get it together. If I do get it together I can barely finish. The food feels bad in my mouth. This bad feeling doesn't seem to happen if someone else cooks. At least not as much.
I had hoped that the trip to SF might call me back to food and it sort of did. Yesterday I made this big plate of beauty and enjoyed it.
I don't know what's wrong with my mouth. Maybe just more grief stuff.
Maybe the books and the trip are calling me back to cooking and eating. It feels like it's taking an act of will. I want to write more. Not necessarily about food. Just write. And I want to cook more.
These are the things I love so it shouldn't be this hard.
