I arrived home at dinnertime, braindead from a long day of car and plane travel but determined to eat a home-cooked meal. “There are all these vegetables,” my boyfriend had told me on the phone, when I was in the cab from LaGuardia. “Should I do something to them? I could boil some water and put some pasta in it.”
“That … sounds good,” I said. But it sounded risky; this is a person who once cooked me a pencil-eraser textured “omelet” that contained raw onion and slices of hot dog. “Actually, why not wait till I get home? Just get some pasta and some kind of cheese, and I’ll figure out the rest.”
A few minutes later, I was staring into the refrigerator, asking myself a question I ask myself so often that by now I tend just to think of it by its first initials, as some Christians do when they ask themselves how Jesus would tackle a dilemma: WWLCD? That is to say: What Would Laurie Colwin Do?
Colwin is not a household name like Julia Child or a brand like Ina Garten or Nigella Lawson; she died in 1992, before the concept of “Food Network Star” – or the Food Network itself – had been invented. But her influence has been far reaching. In the two short books of essays about food that comprise her entire cooking-related oeuvre (she was primarily a novelist), she eschewed lessons in technique or admonishments about rules. Even more than Child did, she made the production of good, simple “home food” seem not just accessible to every cook but irresistible. She never pretended that the boring parts of cooking were anything but boring. “It is wise to have someone you adore talking to in the kitchen while you make these eggs,” she writes, “or to be listening to something very compelling on the radio.” To Colwin, the point of cooking was eating–eating with family and friends, definitely, but also straight from the pot, ravenous and gloriously alone.
Colwin’s official culinary credentials, she confesses early, are nil. She grew up in a family of enthusiastic cooks and eaters in Long Island and went to high school in Pennsylvania, then moved to New York City to attend Columbia and worked in book publishing upon graduation. Around the time that her early short stories were being published in The New Yorker, she was living in a two-burner, kitchen-sink-less Greenwich Village studio which is the setting of what many think of as her signature essay, Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant. The essay revels in the independent and idiosyncratic rituals of private domesticity, and Colwin describes shopping in the Village at a time when there were still a few pushcarts selling vegetables. Recovering from a hangover (“I had gone to a party and disgraced myself”) via a home-cooked meal constructed from the “four veal scallops, a little bottle of French olive oil, a bunch of arugula, two pears and a Boursealt cheese, and a loaf of bread from Zito’s bakery on Bleeker” that a concerned friend brought over, Colwin writes, “I would have wept tears of gratitude but I was too hungry.” Like many meals described in these books, this was “one of the most delicious” of her life.
It’s a testament to the infectiousness of Colwin’s enthusiasm that her recipes seem appealing even though the food she described was often unappealing to the point of being categorically gross – and she knew it. Her favorite foods include mashed vegetable fritters, meatloaf, steamed puddings, and the jelly that surrounds cold leftover meat, spread on toast and eaten for breakfast. Her enthusiasm for fermented Chinese black beans is boundless, and in several of her recipes these salty, pungent beans are combined with cheese, or yams. “A cold steak sandwich is sort of disgusting, but it is also sort of wonderful,” she confesses, after specifying that this sandwich must include the hardened cold meat drippings, plus butter, because “this is a recipe for people whose cholesterol is too low.” And “Chicken salad has a certain glamour about it.” In a chapter titled “Kitchen Horrors,” she includes a recipe for something called Suffolk Pond Pudding, a suet-heavy British dish that a horrified guest describes as tasting “like lemon-flavored bacon fat.” “I ate almost the entire pudding myself,” she gleefully reports. It’s also refreshing to read a cookbook written by someone who unabashedly confesses to having made baked chicken and a particular creamed spinach casserole literally every time dinner guests came over — for years.
This essential weirdness translates to a sense of unlimited permission, which might be why Colwin is especially beloved to people who, like her, specialize in writing non-expert, enthusiastic reports from the front lines of cooking trial and error – in other words, food bloggers. Indeed, some of them see her less as influence than as a sort of spiritual ancestor.
“Her personal tone anticipated food blogging,” says my friend Sadie Stein, with whom I regularly cook Colwin-themed potluck dinners. She is an avid food blogger who often references Colwin; indeed, the title of her food blog, Queen of Puddings, is a reference to one of Colwin’s beloved British boiled desserts. My friend Lukas, a cookbook author and food blogger who also attends the Colwin potlucks, thinks about Colwin in these terms: “She’s sort of the grand dame of food blogging—or at least what food blogging aspires to be.”
Like a blogger, Colwin is chatty and digressive. A recipe for broiled fish — which is, more or less, “broil the fish” — includes a long anecdote about jigging for striped bass, seasickness, and eventually describes Colwin’s first trip to a real Chinese restaurant. Some of her essays don’t include recipes at all, or they include anti-recipes, as in her essay “Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea.” Rather than caution readers against repeating her mistakes, Colwin encourages them to make their own. “We learn by doing. If you never stuff a chicken with pate, you will never know that it is an unwise thing to do.” The inevitability of what Colwin calls Kitchen Disasters is a nice thing to keep in mind when you’ve just rendered $30 worth of organic salmon inedible via a combination of hubris, cluelessness, and absentmindedness about how long a particular fennel bulb had been in the fridge. (Believe me).
On that jetlagged evening, I kept various Colwinian epigrams in mind as I took stock of my options. There were a lot of vegetables. Maybe a salad was in order? “The basic point of a salad, as every schoolchild ought to know, is that it is green, quick, and easy to fix,” Colwin wrote in her essay About Salad. But I wanted something slightly more solid than a salad, something that Colwin might call “comforting” or “consoling.” (She calls almost everything “consoling,” which I find comforting.)
Of course, Colwin had a specific idea about how jetlagged people ought to be fed, which she expressed in an essay called “Jet Lag and How To Feed It.” The only problem with the idea of adapting the meal described in that essay for my purposes, however, is that Colwin presumes that the cook and the jetlagged person are not one and the same. Her prescribed three-course meal of veal-enriched lentil soup, ham sandwich with parsley butter (“to make the person drink the quantity of water he needs to replace because he has been dehydrated by the atmosphere of the cabin, which is like unto the Mojave desert”), finished with a little plate of shortbread fingers, an orange or, in summer, a little plate of raspberries – all accompanied by “lots of beer” — sounded absolutely delightful, but if I had attempted it I would have found myself eating it around breakfast-time the next day. I got started on “lots of beer” and put water on to boil while I contemplated my next move.
Without a clear idea of what I would eventually be eating, I began dicing some of the ripe tomatoes sitting on the counter. “In this world of uncertainty and woe, one thing remains unchanged: Fresh, canned, pureed, dried, salted, sliced, and served with sugar and cream, or pressed into juice, the tomato is friendly, reliable and delicious,” Colwin wrote, and while the sugar and cream variation sounds disgusting, she is absolutely right about the rest. The tomatoes were so ripe and good that, with some quickly-boiled corn cut off the cob, a diced shallot, a little light-green mildly hot pepper, some crumbled feta cheese, and lots of good olive oil, salt and pepper, I had a delicious, albeit odd, sauce for spaghetti.
“It was definitely not an elegant meal,” Colwin wrote once, about serving succotash, lima bean casserole, polenta with hot pepper, and a very strange-sounding curried broccoli soup that contains orange zest and nonfat yogurt in addition to the broccoli. “But it was a very satisfying, lip-smacking meal, after which everyone felt perfectly content. In these trying times, that’s about as good as it gets.” In an era when everyone (me included) seems tempted to photograph and display their food immediately on the internet, and when many food writers presume that the cook not only knows where to get jicama but is fully capable of brunoising it, it’s easy to forget that this kind of contentment is the real goal of cooking, and eating. But Colwin helps me remember it.
*
This piece originally appeared in Gourmet Live.
Tags: emily gould, food, laurie colwin, writing
I’m literally sitting here with one of Laurie Colwin’s cookbooks, the one that falls open to a chocolate-smeared page, because I’m going to make my version of her version of Elizabeth David’s flourless chocolate cake.
As indispensable as her cookbooks are, it’s Colwin’s novels that got into my bones. She describes people with the same weird specificity that becomes its own kind of familiarity, making characters into people as real as any I’ve known face-to-face — and of course she describes their meals with delicious intimacy.
I’ve been reading her since high school, and was buying one of her books for a long train journey when the clerk said to me “It’s so sad about her, isn’t it?” I burst into tears right there at the cash register.
I find them very good reading when I am sinking into a depression, because she fills the world with small tangible pleasures: food, flowers, objects, colors – and it tends to shock me out of getting listless about the world. At the same time, her characters are often miserable, even though there is nearly nothing wrong with their lives, and it’s good for me to see and acknowledge that it is OK to be unhappy, even if there is no real reason to BE unhappy. And even though the characters are moping about small personal crises like, for instance, being loved when they don’t deserve to be loved, it is obvious that they are still lovable and worthy people, even though they are sad.
What a loss.
My problem with a lot of food bloggers is that their tone is so forced – and now we are being casual! we are chatty! we make wry references to our husbands! – but the best of ’em transcend that. I can see how this would influence them. She sounds like a lovely woman whose chicken and casserole dishes I would be delighted to share.
This is probably the biggest issue I have with watching The Pioneer Woman. She just comes off as if she doesn’t really want to be there. Her recipes are perfectly lovely, but she seems so stiff behind the camera and I feel bad. 🙁
I’ve only seen one episode of The Pioneer Woman – it was a Christmas special, I think? And you’re so right. It seemed like she didn’t want to be there, her family didn’t want to be there, and nothing about the food/presentation seemed…genuine?>> ETA not that it didn’t look great, it did; it just looked made-for-TV great. But it must be incredibly difficult to turn your life into a TV show. It’s much easier to edit and rewrite a post than it is to make your kids eat 15 biscuits until they do it ‘right.’
I saw in another comment that you had just read a lot of Anthony Bordain! I just finished Kitchen Confidential a few months ago and sort of love/hated it. The glimpse into kitchen culture was great, very raw, but again seemed so put on, in a different way – blindly hypermasculine? It was really interesting and totally nuts!
Yes, that was the one I read! I have three other of his books, but I’ve been spacing them out because though I love him (the Jersey is strong in him, as it is in me), I can only take so much hypermasculinity before I want to jump off of a bridge.
I was so surprised when I first watched the show, because her voice in her blog is pretty funny, clever, and playful. On the show, she’s, like you said, stiff. But hey, if someone said, “would you like to make a nice paycheck and do a TV show” I’d be down, even though I’d HATE being on camera. I think that might be what’s at work there.
Definitely. From what I’ve seen/read, her blog and cookbooks are waaay different in tone from the show. I suspect you may be correct.
Oh god yes. I love Smitten Kitchen and Orangette for the recipes but man does the smug domestic twee-ness sometimes threaten to send me into a rage fit.
I’ve never read anything by Colwin, and I’m very excited to start, thank you! Also, this was fantastically written.
Toasties – I’ve loved MK Fisher since finding a $3 copy of How To Cook A Wolf around age 15, and just read Tender At The Bone this last year and found it completely compelling if not quite as awesome as my long love for MK Fisher. I also have a treasured copy of The Gentleman’s Companion, which is gonzo amazing food and drink recipes and if you haven’t read it please read it!
Soooo, any other foodish essayists you might recommend?
I just read “Provence 1970” in which Fisher’s nephew writes about her and Child and all these other wonderful culinary thinkers and now I have several of her books piled at my bedside waiting for my attentions. Can’t wait to read them.
Thank you!
Not strictly an essay, but the long digressions in Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook about her life as a teenager in France and the early days of her cooking are some of my favorite food writing.
I’ve never read her, thank you 😀
I’m fond of Molly Wizenberg’s memoir with recipes, A Homemade Life.
thanks!
If you haven’t read it, St. Julia’s My Life in France is worth a read, as is Fuscia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper.
They’re a little old-fashioned, but Calvin Trillin’s food books (American Fried, Alice, Let’s Eat, and Third Helpings) are also a delight, and have been collected together in one volume called The Tummy Trilogy.
Although not a memoir, but a history, I also have to recommend Anne Mendelson’s Stand Facing the Stove, which is about the mother and daughter who gave us the Joy of Cooking.
i LOVE Calvin Trillin! I moved to NYC right after reading the Tummy Trilogy (finished it on the way) and discovered that my apartment was right around the corner from Shopsin’s. I cannot tell you how many times I went there. And how crushed I was when they closed/moved.
3rding the Calvin Trillin trilogy – dated, but delightful. Did you read the essay he wrote about his wife in the NYer just after she died a few years back. I CRIED like a baby. Such a beautiful tribute.
That essay is actually what got me into reading Trillin. It’s very touching.
! I am very definitely interested in reading the history of the Joy of Cooking
Thanks for all of the recommendations…I think I might start with Trillin given all the enthusiasm here 🙂
I tried very hard at one point to read MFK Fisher, because my boyfriend *loves* her books and gave me a bunch of them. I found I just couldn’t get into her writing style, for whatever reason. Maybe I need to try again.
I will say that “How To Cook A Wolf” gives some pretty solid advice and recipes for people on a tight budget, though.
I have begun to realize that there’s maybe a special kind of love for writers who get to you somewhere between 13-16, and introduce a way of thinking of a kind of presentation of information for the very first time. My thoughts on that are a little inchoate, but this is the sense I’m starting to get from reading friend’s teenage favorites lists, my BF included.
I never met her, and she’s been dead for most of my adult life, but I consider Laurie Colwin my good and valued friend. Her novels and food writing are things I read when I’m sick or sad. Her words feed me even more than her recipes do. I would not want to do without her.
(And her recipe for Black Cake is a wonder of humanity. I am one of those weirdos who likes fruitcake, but Black Cake is another thing altogether. i don’t know that it’s delicious, really, but it makes me feel as if I’ve been waked up, shaken hard, and set steady on my feet. The first bite always makes my nipples hard.)
Her novels and food writing are things I read when I’m sick or sad.
When my sister had pneumonia, I went over to check in on her. In addition to a list of groceries and household goods and a trip to buy her some pho, I promised some movies and asked if there was anything else she needed. She answered “Bring all the Laurie Colwin!,” so I did, including the copy of Family Happiness I’d finally broken down and ordered for myself, and which had only just arrived by mail.
But she felt better, all righty.
Ooh I love black cake. I use Maida Haetter’s Banana Black Cake, which my mother calls “The Cake of a Thousand Ingredients.” It’s delightful. http://mhbakeoff.blogspot.com/2011/10/banana-blac…
(I love fruitcake too, and am a bit of an evangelist about it)
I’m not a huge fan of fruitcake (or the traditional British Christmas pudding), but I did find a really good recipe for a sort of fruitcake-for-people-who-hate-fruitcake in Delia Smith’s Cookery Course. It’s called a “St. Stephen’s Day pudding”, and it’s sort of like a spicy cake with raisins and dried cranberries. Good stuff. (You steam it, rather than bake it).
http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/s…
I was gifted Laurie Colwin’s books by my aunt about 10 years ago, and loved reading them. I was pretty devastated when I looked her up online – I think trying to follow her on Twitter? – and realized she had died years before. She remains one of my favorite food writers.
The short story collection that’s called “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant” (it includes Colwin’s essay) is also a really good mix of pieces by different food writers about eating by yourself.
Laurie Colwin always feels like a friend, as if any minute she could be that knock on the door with that one ingredient you were missing. I especially love her two essays on the comforts of gingerbread, and I love the old-fashioned gingerbread recipe, too. Winter comfort food.
I don’t even cook, but I devoured all of her books. So good.
I remember bursting into tears at the breakfast table reading Ruth Reichl’s essay about Colwin after her death. She’s completed the entire next years’ worth of columns for Gourmet, and they ran them all. My mother was appalled (by my tears, not the magazine. “Who died?” she asked, and then scoffed. “You didn’t even know her.” But I did.
My Colwin potluck offerings tend to be the Buttermilk Chocolate Cake (you can whip it up in under an hour) and the marvelous, stupendous, astonishing Nantucket Cranberry Pie.
A reply to RuncibleSpoon above:
I loved Ruth Reichl’s second memoir, Comfort Me With Apples, and Luisa Weiss, whose blog I adore, also has a cookbook-y memoir, My Berlin Kitchen.
Thanks, Reichel’s second memoir is definitely on my list, and I don’t know Weiss.
A reminder of the existence of Laurie Colwin’s food writing is exactly what I needed on this grumpy day of small irritations.
Her linked story collection Another Marvelous Thing is one of my most beloved books.
When I was younger, I demolished all of the Diane Mott Davidson mysteries and found myself more interested in the food than the story itself. After reading a ton of Anthony Bourdain, I think I need someone a bit friendlier to read. Thanks!
“something called Suffolk Pond Pudding, a suet-heavy British dish that a horrified guest describes as tasting ‘like lemon-flavored bacon fat'”
Awwwww. I’ve made this myself, and it was fabulous. (Well, the one I made is called Sussex Pond Pudding, but I expect it’s the same thing– a suet pudding made with lemon and brown sugar). You cut into it, and there’s a *whole lemon* in the middle. What’s not to like??
Suet puddings are delicious and typically not at all bacon-y tasting. There are lots of wonderful, traditional British recipes involving suet (like jam roly poly, apple dumplings, etc.) Using suet to make a pastry crust does make for a fairly heavy dessert (it’s really nice in the winter, say, after you’ve been snow shoveling for hours), but I’ve never noticed that it has any particular flavor. It’s not really any weirder than using lard in pie crusts, which is pretty unnoticeable to most people.
A good pudding resource:
http://www.greatbritishpuddings.com/
Colwin included Suffolk Pond Pudding in her essay “Kitchen Horrors,” but she says it was actually “a culinary triumph, in my opinion. In my opinion are the crucial words.” She loved it. No one else at the table did.
I’ve experienced that so many times! Sometimes you know something will be a bust, and sometimes you don’t. I think often of the Christmas gathering at my in-laws when I brought the onion-garlic jam that my own family usually snarfles up before I get a more than a taste. I put it out with a block of cream cheese, a pile of crackers, and some baguette slices. Every single one of my in-laws murmured some variant on “Onion… jam? How interesting,” took one polite taste each, made the kindest of yum-yum noises, and backed off, rigid smile in place. I got to eat the whole dish myself and I loved it.
I’ll happily take any leftover onion jam you might have lying around…
You can make your own!
oh man, your in-laws’ loss! That sounds great! Thanks for including a link to the recipe. 😀
But then again, I love many jams and jellies that other people do not – the light of my life is a pomegranate pepper jelly, with goat cheese, on the crustiest bread I can find. Beautiful!
Jam on cheese on crackers is all kinds of brilliant, and people almost always recoil if they haven’t had it once. My parents started with guava jelly on blue cheese on saltines and i moved on to guava paste on blue cheese on stoned wheat thins. Recently I located three or four different fruit jellies at Trader Joe’s and they suggested different cheese! I did not know jam was good on different cheeses! So I tried it, and then after all the recommended pairings, I went through a series of unrecommended pairings and they were all stupendous, and then I remembered that we used to put strawberry jam on toasted cheese sammiches.
tl;dr – jam on cheese = win!
Manchego and quince paste forever! 50 million Spaniards can’t be wrong!
oh definitely yes!
It is the same thing. I have the Jane Grigson cookbook Laurie got the original recipe from. I think she just misremembered the name. I haven’t been brave enough to try it.
I have only ever heard it called a Sussex Pond Pudding (and as someone from Sussex, I’m horrified at being mixed up with Suffolk).
Yeah, I make no claim that Colwin is correct about the name, but that’s what she calls it.
The Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler! It’s less memoirish, more a description of a cooking and eating philosophy (not as preachy as that makes it sound). I found it very original.
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese is funny and interesting and the “everyday bread” recipe on p 3 is worth the price of the book. Reese writes a blog called the Tipsy Baker which is much better written than most food blogs, to my mind (she was a book critic before she was a food blogger).
I make her Nantucket cranberry Pie all winter long and in the summer I make it with sour cherries, then with peaches, and last with plums, and then it’s time for cranberries again. Make it -it is so good and so easy.
Okay, who else had to google “brunoising”? Be honest.
(sheepishly raises hand, runs away)
And jicama. I am not a cook, although this essay makes me reconsider that stance.
I’ve just been on my annual Laurie binge. First the food, then the stories, then the novels. The girl loved her some celery salt. Also, all of her novels have just been released for e-readers, is wonderful news. Also Facebook fan page.
My Ultimate Post-Thanksgiving Turkey Sandwich: wheat bread, lots of mayo, lots of celery salt, lettuce, turkey.
This is why I love the Tipsy Baker. She is raising kids and chickens and goats. All have good days and bad. Recipes succeed and recipes fail. She write about both. No melodrama, or annoying, cutsey self-deprecation. She’s honest and opinionated about recipes, authors, and restaurants. An authentic voice rather than a presented image
Having said that, I love me some Nigella, but that’s just my gayness talking.
“Colwin is not a household name like Julia Child”
Depends on your household, and your friend circle!
I actually find her kind of depressing to read, because her novels seem wish-fulfillmenty and desperately wealthy to me. I don’t know enough about her to know if she herself was rich and beautiful and well-loved but her characters always manage to be even if they think they’re not. So unlike life.
IIRC, she was neither rich nor beautiful, but she was very well loved.
Laurie Colwin has shaped the way I think about what to feed children (that young unspoiled palate! like tiny supertasters), how to be a good host when you are learning to cook (make one thing and buy the rest! smoked salmon is key here), how to learn to cook Chinese dishes (be Chinese or rich) – big influence on my life.
Although I have only ever made two or three of her recipes, I find myself thinking in her terms about food – like what is home cooking and what is restaurant cooking. Hamburgers are restaurant food. Scrambled eggs are home food.
A friend and I used to do Fruitcake Day every US Labor Day: one of the things I miss most about living in Chicago. But she and I have very different Fruitcake Philosophies: she likes a wodge of fruit and nuts barely held together by cake, and I like a nice cake with some fruit in it.
My favorite one was sour cherries, candied lemon peel, and almonds that marinated in cherry brandy.
I am of the same philosophy as your friend, but the combination you described sounds divine.
Yeah, I make no claim that Colwin is correct about the name, but that's what she calls it.
Queen of Puddings isn’t a boiled pudding! It’s a layer of custard, given a bit of strength with some bread crumbs, then a layer of jam, topped with meringue.
From around age twelve or so, (I’m 44 now) I practical stood by the mailbox waiting for the next issue of Gourmet to arrive to see if it had a feature story from Laurie Colwin. I was devasted when she died, knowing I’d never read another new piece from her, in her inimitable easy-going, but super knowledgable style. Thanks for honoring her.