Discomfit

It's good to feel discomfited by one's choice of reading matter from time to time. Sometimes I feel quite frustrated when food writing is too pretty or nice. I've chosen some books and essays that have taken me out of my comfort zone or encouraged me to think about the everyday and universal in fresh ways.

A Twitter recommendation led me to ‘A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food’ edited by Nilanjana S. Roy. Inside, there’s an extract from Radhika Jha’s novel, ‘Smell’ (titled ‘Initiation’) which made me reel.“Reluctantly I went over to the sink and, taking a deep breath, plunged my hands into the filthy water. Lumps of half-dissolved food brushed against my hands and disintegrated. The stench was horrible- the water had embalmed all of last night’s flavours, but now they were rank and disordered, fighting with each other to stay alive," she writes. We are slowly initiated into the synapse-blaster that is a busy kitchen, a place where hot, heavy odours awaken the passions, rouse and subdue the gorge, and burn the skin and ears with the spatter and hiss of cold onion hitting a hot pan. “The onion’s smell is the smell of dying,” her aunt says. “The smell leaves the onions like a dying breath leaves the body and enters the rest of the food.” After reading this, I will never not be conscious of the smell of a sink filled with washing up or a collapsed muddle of onions that are as jammy and sweet as decay. I am also conscious that reticence in the kitchen has as much to do with its visceral nature as it does with the lack of practical cooking skills. Food writers and experienced cooks will happily plunge their fingers deep into slippery carcasses, grind spices that smell of butt cheeks, and scrub mud and bugs off root vegetables without considering how off-putting all these things can be to the novice cook whose lack of knife skills and knowledge of cooking times is the least of their worries when faced with a fish requiring dissection.

“I baked a chicken the night I left my wife,” writes Abe Opincar in chapter one of ‘Fried Butter: A Food Memoir”. It’s the Sabbath, and his family gather to light the candles and eat a “chubby-thighed roasting hen.” What a deliciously discomfiting read this essay is. We eat chicken when we are unwell or distressed. We rhapsodise about its healing properties when turned into soup. I have never heard anyone say they can no longer face the soup they love because of its association with illness, bitterness, sadness, or loss. “I’m feeling,” I said, “that I have to go home and bake a chicken,” is Opincar’s response when the couple’s marriage counsellors ask him what he is feeling. This is an elegiac book, and all the better for it.

Judith Moore is a brave writer. How many food writers would lay bare their own adultery in such an honest way? In ‘Never Eat Your Heart Out’ she writes, “We tend to think sexual intercourse . . . is the most physically intimate human act. Preparing meals for another person, in its own way, is more intimate, so much so that I sometimes wonder that we dare eat what strangers feed us. Bare hands rub and finger the cabbage and carrots and raw meat. Sweat on your palms, so slight that not even you feel it, carries your body salts and other castoffs into everything you touch.” Unsurprisingly, her husband gained eighteen pounds during her ‘adultery year’ as his wife cooked her way through Elizabeth David and Larousse and juggled her liaisons with Peter, a man she met in the supermarket. It wasn’t guilt that made Moore an expansive and generous cook and feeder. Rather, it was her giddy cross-pollinating happiness, and this is where Moore subverts the narrative we might otherwise have expected. She blooms. Her domesticity eases her passage through the lies and confabulations of her double life. The physicality of cooking becomes more important to her; she rejects the modern American woman's labour-saving kitchen conveniences as too divorced from the messy and sensual reality of hand-shredding cabbage for coleslaw. Moore still pays the price- marital trust has been fatally damaged- but she cannot resist a final, honest, and defiant sign-off.

A trip to the American southwest next year has me knee-deep in books set in New Mexico. I’m particularly taken with ‘Coyote in the Kitchen: A Memoir of New and Old Mexico’ by Anita Rodriguez, which came about in part because of the paintings she made of people eating and making tamales and chicos or feasting in a woodland lit with midnight blue light, their bodies half flesh, half skeleton. I am mesmerised by her work. “Death is so deeply a part of the human story that omitting it diminishes life,” Rodriguez writes, as she disinters and exposes the secrets the lie at the heart of her own family and a society that has been historically very cruel to its indigenous people.

Here is an interview with Anita Rodriguez, which also features some of her art.

Ntozake Shange is a stunning writer. What do eating and writing ‘American’ mean when your history is Pan-African American she asks in her book, ‘If I Can Cook/You Know God Can’. When the author visited Austin in 1995, she referred to the then writing of this book and confessed to having put a small bed in her kitchen so she could stay close to the source of her work while resting between periods of writing. How fabulous is this? (Although it also tells us as much about the labour involved in the writing of such a book.) Shange’s explorations into the lives of the African diaspora has taken her to Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, as well as London (there’s a vivid essay about Brixton Market) and the USA where she asks questions about identity and celebration of it through food. Shange reminds us of “the tens of thousands of African-Americans who are committed to an ‘other’ way of life besides the American way.”

Toni Tipton Martin’s newly published ‘Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African-American Cooking’ is a great companion read to Shange’s book of essays. It’s a sure-footed and modern culinary revocation of racial and class stereotypes, and if this interests you, then her first book, ‘The Jemima Code’, is essential reading.

Here's a review of The Jemima Code by Alexander Smalls, another one of my very favourite authors.

Finally, I shivered my way through ‘The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning’ by Wendy Trusler and Carol Devine, an account of the first Antarctic clean-up punctuated by recipes which is a rather reductive way of describing this most unusual and disconcerting of books.“The first thing that comes to mind about Antarctica is not likely food. But if you are going to spend any time there, it should be the second.” states the preface and through provision lists, journals, letters, menu plans, science notes, and a series of visual and verbal vignettes, an extraordinary (and bloody cold!) story unfolds. It’s a true topographic kitchen. Published in 2013, this book deserves more attention; I wonder if Greta Thunberg has read it?



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