Welcome to Tales From Topographic Kitchens
Our psychological topography is reflected in what we cook, where we cook it, and how we learn to do both. Our kitchens are the lay of our land and food writing can be an excellent navigational tool, a way of developing greater insight into ourselves and other people. What is an intensely personal choice- what we choose to read-can develop an extra patina of meaning when we discover that our favourite writings are also loved by others.
I have always tended to Cherchez La Nourriture in whatever book I am reading at the time and this obsession began at a very young age. The books I loved most were those with well-written and evocative scenes of food, eating, and cooking. I remember Alison Uttley's A Country Child where meal after bounteous meal issued forth from a farmhouse kitchen in Derbyshire; the depredations endured by the Nolan family in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as they sought to make the scraps of meat and droopy vegetables brought with a few cents last all week; the culinary largesse of the Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May, and jolly drawings of apples in my Ladybird books that were so shiny, green and red, I felt I could reach into the page, pick one right off the branches and scrunch into it. These images and the memories of how they made me feel remain vivid to this day.
As I got older I began to read specifically about food after finding battered copies of MFK Fisher's How To Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me in a bookcase belonging to my step-grandmother who died when I was very young. Aged just twelve, I understood little of what I read, but on a visceral level, I could feel what MFK meant when she wrote about hunger as an intertwining of three basic human needs: food, security, and love. I went back and reread the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Enid Blyton and saw how the privations of pioneer life, and of wartime rationing in the case of Blyton, might express themselves in vividly detailed scenes involving food.
By the time I was 13, I was the proud owner of my own bookshelf dedicated to cookbooks, most of them purloined from relatives or bought for 5p from a jumble sale book pile or charity shop. I absolutely believe that the hit and miss nature of these second-hand sales trained me out of snobbery when it came to prejudging what might be worthy of my reading time and what might not. It also gave me a lifelong obsession with kitsch or niche cookbooks- and if I happen to encounter both of these qualities in one book then you will not find a happier person on this planet.I have well over four thousand books to do with food and cooking and I dare not begin to count the ones on my e-readers. These books have all been read and many are reread until they fall apart and need mummifying with tape or replacing (with a heavy heart). A damaged book is a loved book in my home; velveteen rabbits every single one of them.
So....welcome to my TinyLetter, a regular maildrop of links to the best food media and, I hope, an easier way for you to keep track of my recommendations. These are the writings I love the most.