{"id":82798892,"date":"2022-11-16T13:30:49","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T13:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=82798892"},"modified":"2022-11-16T13:30:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T13:30:49","slug":"cookbooks-as-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=82798892","title":{"rendered":"Cookbooks As Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Great, I thought. It is not mango season and it is not mango country. And I knew those bright flavored gums would not cut it.” – Aimee Bender, “Fruit and Words”<\/h2>

I was reading Rick Martinez\u2019s<\/a> Mi Cocina<\/a><\/em> this week, and only sort of for recipes. Sure, I made arroz verde (rice and herbs remain an undefeated combo) and frijoles de olla<\/a> to pair with some crock pot carnitas (using a modified version of Dan Sinker\u2019s tacofancy GitHub<\/a> recipe), but that\u2019s just because Brendan<\/a> was coming over for dinner. Mi Cocina<\/em> caught my eye on the shelf because I wanted to read some good food writing and look at some pictures of Mexico.<\/p>

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Food writing is thrilling. Say nothing of the simple sensory details of tastes and smells and sights, food writing automatically sets scene I want to be in. A kitchen with an omnipresent Grandma. The chaos of a restaurant. The act of coming together for a meal. The low-stakes rule-breaking of a late-night snack. There\u2019s a reason Hemingway always had his characters eating and drinking. There\u2019s a reason every Fast and Furious<\/em> movie has a cookout. Meals, and the preparation of meals\u2014that\u2019s where people come together. I\u2019m not saying anything new here, shoutout Gregg Popovich and the famously international San Antonio Spurs.<\/a><\/p>

People think of picture books as being lesser than, for kids. That\u2019s stupid. I like an ornate book. I\u2019m not saying we all gotta be crazy-ass William Blake. I just like books with a visual component. John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse did this wonderfully in Seismosis<\/a><\/em>. What Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Tim Rutili did with Polaroids in Selenography<\/a><\/em> was rad. Sidebrow\u2019s Anthology<\/a> is dope as hell. <\/p>

Here\u2019s my dream: some stories, some poems, y\u2019know, multimodal stuff. But also pictures, like the big beautiful spreads in cookbooks. Pictures that maybe sort of illustrate what\u2019s going on in the text, but also stand on their own and add new meaning to the text. And if the occasional recipe sneaks in there? Well, the door was unlocked already. This is place for stories behind recipes, btw. <\/p>

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The joke with cooking blogs is \u201cI don\u2019t care about how little Braelyn and Kaelyn won\u2019t eat their vegetables unless you hide them in banana bread, just gimme the damn banana bread recipe,\u201d and sure, that\u2019s a fair criticism of food bloggers. When you are actually whisking the roux for the gumbo, you need that \u201cskip to the recipe\u201d button. Especially if you\u2019re double-checking marinade ingredients with salmonella fingers because one hand is for patting seasoning into chicken and one hand is for scrolling recipes on your phone. <\/p>

Wash your hands thoroughly when handling poultry, but for the love of your kitchen, do not wash chicken. This information is public so feel free to share it. <\/p><\/div>

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But I like food writing. I like celebrating something as ephemeral as a meal. What\u2019s so special about eating? Most people do it, every day, who cares? But that\u2019s just it. That\u2019s what makes it so fun to explore and celebrate. And so many angles: Bourdain\u2019s punk Romanticism<\/a>, Rick Martinez\u2019s eye on area-specific joys, Michael Twitty\u2019s historical rigor<\/a>, MJ Santiago\u2019s poetics of gas station meals<\/a>. My beloved Bob Sykora, the poet laureate of Dunkin Donuts. My friend Hannah Cohen, the poet laureate of the Waffle House<\/a>. Rax King\u2019s \u201cFuck You Bobby Flay\u201d<\/a> ethos, an essay that made me realize I hated Bobby Flay all along. Food is what we invented poets for. Those drunks at Heorot didn\u2019t even want Beowulf to kill Grendel until they\u2019d eaten dinner and gotten hammered with him first. The poet recorded both events.<\/p>

Sorry you got an email, <\/p>

Chris<\/p>

Thank you for reading shipwrecked sailor. This post is public so feel free to share it.<\/p><\/div>

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5 Links To Make You Hungrier: <\/p>