Home Cooking

Home Cooking is not really a cookbook--it is essays on food, with some recipes at the end of each chapter. The essays contain Laurie Colwin's theories about technology, health and sociality. And it is impossible for Laurie Colwin to leave out love: she is always talking about what she cooked for various boyfriends and what they cooked for her.

Food, according to Colwin, connects you to others and to the past: "No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers." Colwin writes about how food connected her to social movements, such as the student protests of the 60s and how food was the way that she volunteered (at a soup kitchen and at her daughter's school).

On the other hand, she also recognizes that food is also great alone:

"Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam."

Being the one in the kitchen also allowed Colwin to be on the edge of the party, which she preferred. Food is the basis of social life, for Colwin, and it is a social life that she tolerates, but about which she is ambivalent: "It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called a social life."

Colwin rants about people's reliance on too many kitchen gadgets and describes her own low-tech lifestyle (how conservative of her!): She didn't have a food processor--rather, she had a grater: "As ever, next to the contraption is the box of Band-Aids, since it is impossible not to grate your knuckles as well." (Ain't that the truth! She doesn't mention the slices of fingernail that must end up in grated food.)

She also praises tag sales. I myself was raised on garage sales, so this indicates to me that she's a very sensible woman. Like anyone who finds something special at a garage sale, she wants to brag about her purchases: "Until, at another tag sale, I bought a hand-held electric beater for fifty cents (thirteen years ago--bought second-hand and still going strong)..." She isn't fussy and praises multiple-uses appliances--on her list of necessary kitchen items is "A decent pair of kitchen shears, which can also be used for sewing, cutting the flowers and opening parcels." I love people who aren't fussy.

Also on the list:

"A pair of cheap tongs--no kitchen is complete without them.For picking up asparagus or other vegetables, for pulling the stuck spaghetti from the bottom of the pot, for grabbing cookies that have fallen off the sheet in the oven. Tongs can easily be unbent to form one long arm with which to retrieve things that you have accidentally kicked under the stove, and then they can be bent back into tongs again."

This reminds me of Little Gidding, where there was a crack between the counter top and the stove, down which things always would fall when I was cooking. This used to stress me out unbelievably (I'm a bit of a neat freak all the time, including when I cook, which is what, incidentally makes me such a slow cook. Well, that and it's genetic, I think, on my father's side), until I decided that it was simply hilariously funny. After which I would laugh loudly and not worry about it when I dropped things down there. Especially spinach. For some reason, I found spinach the funniest thing to drop down that crack. My poor roommates!

In general, Colwin's essays praise openness and eschew snobbishness. She emphasizes home cooking over too-fancy of cooking. She complains about picky eaters and those who are always on diets. She holds herself up as a model dinner party guest: "I do not keep kosher and, therefore, I am a kind of universal recipient--the O Positive for hostesses. I can be fed in combination with anyone." There is one food, however, that she has an animosity towards--iceberg lettuce. In an essay called, "Feeding the Multitudes," she writes, "The way to get the core out of a head of iceberg lettuce, we were instructed, was to bonk it forcefully on a counter. The core would then pull right out, and that, in my opinion, is all anyone needs to know about iceberg lettuce, except that when a head of it falls to the floor, it bounces, ever so slightly."


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