Cookbooks As Literature
"Great, I thought. It is not mango season and it is not mango country. And I knew those bright flavored gums would not cut it." - Aimee Bender, "Fruit and Words"
I was reading Rick Martinez’s Mi Cocina this week, and only sort of for recipes. Sure, I made arroz verde (rice and herbs remain an undefeated combo) and frijoles de olla to pair with some crock pot carnitas (using a modified version of Dan Sinker’s tacofancy GitHub recipe), but that’s just because Brendan was coming over for dinner. Mi Cocina caught my eye on the shelf because I wanted to read some good food writing and look at some pictures of Mexico.
Food writing is thrilling. Say nothing of the simple sensory details of tastes and smells and sights, food writing automatically sets scene I want to be in. A kitchen with an omnipresent Grandma. The chaos of a restaurant. The act of coming together for a meal. The low-stakes rule-breaking of a late-night snack. There’s a reason Hemingway always had his characters eating and drinking. There’s a reason every Fast and Furious movie has a cookout. Meals, and the preparation of meals—that’s where people come together. I’m not saying anything new here, shoutout Gregg Popovich and the famously international San Antonio Spurs.
People think of picture books as being lesser than, for kids. That’s stupid. I like an ornate book. I’m not saying we all gotta be crazy-ass William Blake. I just like books with a visual component. John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse did this wonderfully in Seismosis. What Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Tim Rutili did with Polaroids in Selenography was rad. Sidebrow’s Anthology is dope as hell.
Here’s my dream: some stories, some poems, y’know, multimodal stuff. But also pictures, like the big beautiful spreads in cookbooks. Pictures that maybe sort of illustrate what’s going on in the text, but also stand on their own and add new meaning to the text. And if the occasional recipe sneaks in there? Well, the door was unlocked already. This is place for stories behind recipes, btw.
The joke with cooking blogs is “I don’t care about how little Braelyn and Kaelyn won’t eat their vegetables unless you hide them in banana bread, just gimme the damn banana bread recipe,” and sure, that’s a fair criticism of food bloggers. When you are actually whisking the roux for the gumbo, you need that “skip to the recipe” button. Especially if you’re double-checking marinade ingredients with salmonella fingers because one hand is for patting seasoning into chicken and one hand is for scrolling recipes on your phone.
But I like food writing. I like celebrating something as ephemeral as a meal. What’s so special about eating? Most people do it, every day, who cares? But that’s just it. That’s what makes it so fun to explore and celebrate. And so many angles: Bourdain’s punk Romanticism, Rick Martinez’s eye on area-specific joys, Michael Twitty’s historical rigor, MJ Santiago’s poetics of gas station meals. My beloved Bob Sykora, the poet laureate of Dunkin Donuts. My friend Hannah Cohen, the poet laureate of the Waffle House. Rax King’s “Fuck You Bobby Flay” ethos, an essay that made me realize I hated Bobby Flay all along. Food is what we invented poets for. Those drunks at Heorot didn’t even want Beowulf to kill Grendel until they’d eaten dinner and gotten hammered with him first. The poet recorded both events.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
5 Links To Make You Hungrier:
Obligatory personal link: The Line Break is back! Bob and I did not mean to go away for so long, we promise. On this episode, Bob reads “Broken Light Bulb Flickering Away” by Noor Hindi. I read an excerpt from Meadow Slasher by Joshua Marie Wilkinson. There is a mention of quesadillas.
We dropped new poetry in Cotton Xenomorph this week: “Anomaly with Cupbearer” by Rebecca Martin has a line about club sandwiches that made me laugh in the middle of some lines that made me feel very tense.
Look: I love pizza. I love quesadillas. I will never understand the impulse to combine the two, and I refuse to try.
Wanna watch Serge Ibaka serve Giannis Antetokounmpo lamb tongue? Keep in mind, Giannis didn’t know you could dip Oreos in milk until last season.
You know you’re not getting out of this post without some Anthony Bourdain in Chicago, right?
