Reading About Food To Stay Alive

A partial personal history in cookbooks, recipes, and kitchen camaraderie

A really lovely thing happened a few days ago: Andrew of Wordloaf cross-posted my essay from September about ethically grown (and expensive) flours. Wordloaf has been a favorite newsletter of mine for years now, and Andrew has been a kind reader of my newsletter, too. I'm grateful to his readers who read it on Wordloaf and came over and left thoughtful comments or subscribed (hi!). It means so much. This one-woman newsletter is grateful. 

Reflecting on Andrew's generosity and reading Wordloaf made me consider where I go for recipes and kitchen camaraderie. Currently, I'm most actively reading newsletters, but I also love cookbooks. I'm as likely to cook the pizza Ebraica published in Wordloaf as I am to open up Cucina Povera and cook a crostata. For most cooking, I rely on my brain, which has amassed and accumulated recipes, techniques, and ideas over many years of reading cookbooks, food blogs, and newsletters. 

After moving into our new place last week, I have all my cookbooks about me after packing them away in January. Sorting through the books, deciding which ones I'm done with and which I'll keep, showed me that my tastes and interests are shifting. The cookbooks serve as an aging marker since I've been collecting them since middle school. Today, I'm more likely to read a personal essay, memoir, or academic article about food. I'm less likely to read recipes, although there are exceptions–and in a way, I feel like I'm relearning or entering into the next phase of cooking that continues to eschew meat more and more and embrace vegetables, grains, and legumes.

Two cookbooks by two very different men I keep for almost purely sentimental reasons: Sweetie Pie (1997) by Richard Simmons and I'm Just Here For the Food (2002) by Alton Brown. What a pairing! Sweetie Pie is filled with weight-conscious language and calorie counting, along with ridiculously great recipe intros. We weren't huge Richard Simmons fans, and calorie counting wasn't something I grew up with, but my mom and I cooked from it regularly. I flipped through and found the recipes stained with greasy fingerprints and sticky splatters: the two biscottis (chocolate and almond-ginger), the Sealed with a (Meringue) Kiss, and "I'm Late, I'm Late" Carrot Cake.

Alton Brown's book (his first cookbook) is less dog-eared, but I pored over the pages to learn about food more technically. It was the first cookbook I remember using like a textbook. This book was purchased for me by my parents (possibly as a birthday or Christmas gift), who knew I watched hours upon hours of his show Good Eats on the Food Network. I was decidedly in love with the nerdy food guy. Maybe I still am.

The Secrets of Baking (2003) by Sherry Yard and The Professional Chef (2001 edition) by Culinary Institute of America were both given to me by a family friend who had worked at restaurants in California. I was in high school, deciding between going to college for cooking or journalism (I chose journalism.) Baking was my main interest at that time. Cooking was something I did for family meals, prioritizing feeding my three younger brothers, and baking felt free from practical need. More fun. In The Secrets of Baking, I found more splatters and cooking notes in the margins of the lemon curd recipe. That was the only recipe I cooked from the book, but I read the whole thing (with highlighter in hand), and it expanded my baking vocabulary and filled my imagination with butter, sugar, and fruit. The Professional Chef, a literal textbook, I barely cracked open. It sat imposingly on my shelf, perhaps letting me know culinary school was not where I wanted to go. I used it for a green goddess salad dressing recipe (of all things) and then to press flowers.

Two cookbooks I added to my collection since January are Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora (2022) by Reem Assil and Cucina Povera: The Italian Way of Transforming Humble Ingredients Into Unforgettable Meals (2023) by Giulia Scarpaleggia. What I look for in a cookbook is partly the same – the photography, the stories – with a newer focus on getting outside my white U.S. bubble to expand my understanding of the world through food. 

Cookbooks are a crystalized moment in time, whereas newsletters (and blogs) are a closer conversation between writer and reader. I value both and search out both at different times for different reasons. My relationship with reading about food is as cyclical as my cooking and eating habits. I think about food in the context of a family because I've cooked for mine daily (in some capacity) since I was 12 or 13. Transitioning between my parents and brothers, to living with roommates, to cooking for the family my husband and I started. A constant through all the changes was (and is) reading about food.

The work of cooking is real, and the resources for finding out how to do it, whether looking for recipes or finding encouragement, are vital. I learned a lot from my mom directly, and from watching her, and, in true millennial fashion, I also took to the internet. If it was possible to tally the sources of all recipes I've cooked, AllRecipes, Epicurious, and Food52 would be in the lead over any cookbook. And I spent even more time reading the blogs I loved, like Orangette by Molly Wizenberg, Smitten Kitchen, and Joy the Baker. I sought ways to be in the kitchen, how different people made it part of their lives, and how they fed themselves and their families. At times, I'm sure I was searching for a magic solution (do this, not that), but over the years, I've learned what everyone I ever resonated with was saying: Learn from others, yes, and find your own way.

There's no systemizing myself out of the work of eating, and that's good. It keeps me in touch with my body. This belief is why I'm suspicious of the foods that seek disembodiment. Foods that are based on efficiency only and remove the act of cooking. There are the science-y ones (Soylent and Athletic Greens come to mind), but also the highly processed heat-and-eat meals peddled to people who are so overworked they don't have time to cook. Food products that remove us from the labor of cooking, while I understand the desire for them, make me cautious. Cooking reminds me to see the humanity in myself and others, and I need this practice in a world that pits us against each other.

Reading and writing about food continually reminds me that we share more in common than we don't. I've written about how making dinner is made harder by the U.S. culture’s devaluation of home cooking, but continuing to eat and feed people is precisely what's needed to stay connected. Especially in times that are so divisive and violent, it becomes an act of resistance to see the humanity in all people. The seemingly mundane act of feeding myself and my family connects me to a broader community and joins me with everyone who needs to eat something daily – i.e., the world's population. No matter if our body is in Arizona, if our body is in Gaza, if our body is in Israel, wherever we are, we need to eat.

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Reading - Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States by Hector Tobar (found via the blurbs on the back of the book I mentioned last week, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Olivia.) In non book form: Explanations Are Not Excuses by Sarah Schulman.

Writing - This—and just barely! I’m pretty exhausted this week.

Cooking - Scrambled eggs and toast is about it. My kitchen will be in more order soon.