Connections between books is one of those things that make me feel like the sun has come out, the lightbulbs are turned on and the world is a brighter place. When random readings share an idea, it's one of those endorphin-producing phenomena that we all can use.
The latest connection in my reading was between a collection of essays and a novel. Geraldine DeRuiter's If You Can't Take the Heat has the subtitle "Tales of Food, Feminism and Fury", which is an accurate description of the essays. But one of the major components of the collection is the way food is more than a way to feed bodies. Food feeds souls. Making food feeds the soul of those who perform this essential function.
She quotes Michael Twitty in his brilliant book, Koshersoul:
This is why we cook for one another, share food and talk about food and beyond -- we just want to be family to one another.
DeRuiter talks about asking her husband's grandfather for stories about the food he grew up with over and over. She writes about how she learned to make some of the food that Seymour loved throughout his life. She recreates a fancy pie with a definitive recipe that has proved elusive. Because
This is what it means to love someone. You cook for them. You help them carry the weight of their own memories.
Tracking down various versions of the pie recipe and then trying to make it are time-consuming activities. But to DeRuiter, they are worthwhile.
But it is a small sacrifice to make, a relatively insignificant piece of time and energy in exchange for the enduring memory of a dish. The madeleines are almost done. Tear it off the wall, hurl it to the ground, on a grand, cosmic scale, it keeps ticking. There is no stopping the clock. But sometimes we can slow it down. We can make recipes and eat the food that reminds us of our loved ones, and it is as though they were with us and for a fleeting moment we have all the time in the world.
That's how I feel when I make a lentil soup recipe my grandfather first made, and use the techniques he taught me to make an omelet or work with muffin ingredients. I never mastered the way my grandmother's sister made shortbread, with her adept way of mixing the butter in. Or Grandma's way of making pie crust. She made a pie every day when she and Grandpa first were married, and I don't remember her using a recipe by the time I came along. Yet no other pie crust will be as flaky and a reliable way to contain whatever goodness it contains, whether sweet or savory.
This connection came up in Tommy Orange's amazing second novel, Wandering Stars. This is a book to take one's time with, to let the stories of a family in the years following the Sand Creek Massacre be absorbed into one's heart and mind.
After escaping the massacre, and surviving years at a strange castle-like structure where he was part of a Wild West Show to entertain white people, the protagonist is living in Oklahoma on reservation land. They are given rations that include flour, although many just throw it away. But he makes bread with the flour. It feeds his body and his soul.
I was making bread in my kitchen. I'd been telling my son, Charles, stories about my life, all that had happened to me before I became his father. I made good bread. ... You need sustenance, but you need a little variation too if you can manage it. ... But bread did the trick, and you could make a stew or a soup out of just about anything, then sop it up with some bread, and that could become something more than what it was, even if just while you ate something decent and filling, that sole comfort could carry you. ...
I'd lived enough life, almost died enough times to know when a good thing came along, a thing you didn't know could fill you right up, which only when it filled you let you know there'd been a hole in you before.
Those times you were in the kitchen, either making something or watching a loved one make something? That is the stuff of life. How Proustian. As he wrote in In Search of Lost Time:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
A taste, a smell, and we're right back in that place where we initially encountered it. Food connects us to each other, and to ourselves.
Or, as my longtime readers know what’s coming:
Only connect … live in fragments no longer!
Do you have such connections in your reading? I’d love to read about them.
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