Dear Bread Fans,
I get excited about baking always, but Thanksgiving steals my imagination. I think I’m reliving the excitement of the first Thanksgiving I cooked with friends in Seattle. I pored over cookbooks from the fifties with pasteled photographs, trying to identify classics that belonged in our goofy rendition of this myth-making meal. I made a centerpiece with my friend Meeghan, stuffing long gloves with crumpled newspaper and fixing them to a styrofoam base with a few plastic flowers and real fallen leaves to make a creepy-fun decoration.
The dishes I made were a mishmash of everything I’d read. Stuffing with cornbread and wheat bread, sausage, sage and apples. An apple pie, too, but with cranberries. A pecan pie with pumpkin. Or, maybe my combinations didn’t surface as I first steered the giant meal’s ship. I probably stayed closer to prescribed foods. But I felt the itch to mess with with traditions. I am certain.
One of my cousins said once that I’m always reinventing the wheel. He’s right. I’m inclined to seek another world, reading and writing, and dreaming with family and friends.
I’m convinced that a better rendition of reality is available. What we’ve got certainly needs improvement, and so I hunt.
The books I’ve read lately — Meth Lunches, Class and The Lost Supper, each name flaws with the food status quo. New cookbooks on my table could be similarly described. Rose Wilde’s Bread and Roses, Klancy Miller’s For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food, and Michal Korkosz’s Polish’d: Modern Vegetarian Cooking from Global Poland pose alternatives to presumed norms. Maybe that is always the job of a book, to carve out physical space for ideas and arguments that seem contrary to the norm. To dream.
And dream I do. My heart flutters as I anticipate preparing for Thanksgiving. I’d like to think I am immune to the presumed plenty of American eating, in a country where so many people have so little. But I’m snug in an idea of traveling to the bosom of family, going over the river and through the woods as Lydia Maria Child wrote in her poem almost 200 years ago. The travel is emotional. I absorb concepts of what the meal should be from pie pictures dotting the landscape, on magazine covers & social media. I inventory what I want to pass around the table, and remember the ‘bustin-out chutney’ my sister in law made 25 years ago. Dried apricots, currants, lots of ginger and garlic, recipe from Madhur Jaffrey. I have quince on the counter, though, and they will bust out the chutney
I wonder who will make the gravy, my brother or me. Our dad made it until he had his strokes. I urged him to make it with me one year, and he didn’t like standing at the counter and holding the whisk, even as my husband held him steady. Every move he couldn’t make was an insult to the person he remembered being.
They say you are what we eat, but I think we are what we remember.
I’ll make squash pampushky, garlic rolls, based on Olia Hercules recipes, and think of her books, especially the commemorations of summer kitchens in the cookbook of that name, and other kitchens in Kaukasis. What we make is transitory and also reminiscent. We are singing across the white and drifted snow through prototypical New England woods. We are making recipes that we’ve made, performing family music, epics in the kitchen. Thank you Rebecca May Johnson for Small Fires and noticing and naming the value of our activities, for hoisting the work of feeding out of the gutter of the ephemeral.
Time is always whirring in our minds, the hands of the clock spinning forward and back. Now is salt and pepper we shake on the present, trying to taste it.
I hope you all have memories to lean on, or loved ones, or both, and that you have room to enjoy cooking and thinking about food.
Love, Amy
NOTES & RESOURCES:
I will be speaking Saturday November 18th at the Troy Public Library, 100 Second Street, Troy, NY 12180 at 2 p.m. about the Local History of Factory Bread. No registration necessary. There will be snacks and zines.
Andrew Janjigian pulled together a great Friday bread basket about Israel and Palestine last week on Wordloaf.
Olia Hercules, author and activist, is making incredible resources on cooking, and I’m really excited about what she’s doing for food writing, too. If you want to explore writing about food, I suggest you check her out.