Previous installments of Jessica Valenti’s “Eat Me” column can be found here. Most recently: Sunday Sauce.

I grew up in a house in Long Island City, Queens that my great-grandparents bought almost 100 years ago. There was an apartment upstairs and over the years the downstairs was a paint store, my grandfather’s butcher shop, and a candy store that turned out to be a front for a fraud and hijacking ring. (My

…

Previous installments of Jessica Valenti’s “Eat Me” column can be found here. I call it Sunday sauce, my grandmother called it “gravy.” The anything-but-plain tomato sauce--the cooking of which dominated the afternoon--is the food I probably associate most with my childhood. My mother would let my sister Vanessa and I dip pieces of bread in it as it thickened, the bread melting under the sauce’s weight. It seemed as if it simmered for hours,…

Jessica Valenti’s “Eat Me” column appears every other Friday at 3pm. Previous installments can be found here. My grandmother was not the cookie-baking kind. Don’t get me wrong, she was supremely loving: my mother was her youngest, the baby, and my sister and I held special places in the grandchild hierarchy. She brought over gifts and cared for us while my parents worked. But Nanny Ann took no shit. When my sister and I…

Jessica Valenti's "Eat Me" column appears every other Friday at 3pm. Previous installments can be found here. To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have started with scones. They’re not the easiest thing to bake - I can never get the dough right - but somehow breakfast baking seemed like less of a betrayal than straight up cookies or cake. But my sad, lumpy-not-in-a-good-way chocolate pear scones were definitive proof that I needed to up…

When I was growing up, my parents owned a women’s clothing store in Queens named “Nancy’s Shoppe,” after my mom. I assume the extra ‘pe’ on ‘shop’ was a fancifying effect. They sold bras and underwear, the unsexy kind - huge, industrial-strength bras that only came in black, white, and beige and that were stacked in boxes behind the counter. The clothes were generally bedazzled sweatsuit sets, and wool pants with elastic waists. There was…

Why hello. If you’ve read me before, it’s likely been of the feminist variety - so you may be surprised to see me writing about cooking. Clearly there are connections between food, cooking, politics, and gender. I’m not gonna get too deep into all that. Yes, feminism will come up now and then, but for the most part I want to talk about food itself. Because food is awesome. It tastes good. It’s fun to…