More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

Since Laurie Colwin typically writes about where she is in life, this volume of essays and recipes is all about family friendly food appropriate for the busy working woman. It addresses how to cook with kids and the return of home cooking for busy people. She articulates a sane position on food--it isn't fuel, it's nutrition. You should like the process of getting and making and eating food and your kids probably will, too.

The feminist in me loves the gender equality she articulates with regard to food: "I do not believe that delicious food is a frill. I do not believe that putting dinner on the table should be the job of a usually very tired woman who has worked all day. We have to get our sons into the kitchen with us and teach them how to cook so that as adults out daughters do not end up working to a frazzle while our sons sit around reading the newspaper. If we don't know how to cook--I mean men and women--we should learn how. Real men may not eat quiche, but there is nothing more attractive than a man who knows his way around the kitchen without making a huge production of it."

Her essays contain a good bit of reflection on tradition. She writes about children and tradition: "As every parent knows, children are great traditionalists. All you need do is set is something in motion and you will find yourself doing it the same way, year after year after year. Psychologists say this is good for us. The things that keep mankind going--ritual, stability, routine--are beginning to fray, and we are all the worse for it."

She writes about the dark side of tradition: On peoples' dislike of turkey: "In my opinion the poor turkey is a mere scapegoat for the mire of conflicted feelings flooding our psyches at holiday time." ..."Although turkey is delicious in itself, it is burdened with context, as they say in the literary criticism racket." And later, "The real emotional issue is the stuffing. People feel about stuffing the way they feel about their childhood toys. They do not like change or surprises. What they are after is comfort and stability."

She sees tradition as involving change: "This menu is now my tradition, but I know that in not too long a time my daughter will grow up and decide that it is her turn, and we will travel to her household for Thanksgiving. And there I will find the traditional meal, totally renovated and redesigned: the beginning--for that is the way these things go--of a new tradition." (This passage is pretty sad in light of her early death.)

Colwin includes an essay about food appropriate after flying. She expresses some firm opinions about what to serve jet-lagged people. This crops up in the short story, "Passion and Affect," in the collection of that same name: "Doria had uttered one entire sentence, at dinner, over the quiche, which Holly felt was a meal appropriate for people who had been on planes. Doria said: 'Jet lag is the true disease of the late twentieth century.'"

The essays, much like Fr. Schall's books, includes recommendations for loads of other books--both cookbooks and literature. Colwin recommends Mary Poppins or the early novels of Iris Murdoch for how to throw a tea; Anna Karenina for a novel filled with food; Barbara Pym's novels in general; Farmer Boy for descriptions of American food; and Randall Jarrell's only novel, Pictures from an Institution, which I didn't know existed.

Her writing is, as always, wonderful. So I'll leave you with some straight Laurie Colwin. First, on chicken in the midst of vegetables: "You set the seasoned chicken in their midst like an ocean liner amongst tugs, and the result gives you a main course and vegetables."

She's always using hyperbole, which I love: "A chicken sandwich is a mood elevator. If they were served in prisons, people would commit felonies to get in. A proper chicken sandwich makes a person feel like an indulged child and a sophisticated adult at the same time."

On Butter: "After you have been a very good person for a very long time and are as thin as a bean, you may decide to fall briefly into sin." After which she provides a shortbread recipe.

Love always sneaks in: "It always seems to me that cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food. You do not have to be a genius."


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