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Discussion Posts
• The writing for today’s posts really took my
  breath away.
• It is important to include a quote from the
  readings to demonstrate your engagement with
  the text to get full credit.
• I haven’t docked points up to now, but I will start
  with today’s post.
• If you did not include a quote for today, there is
  still time to add one. I won’t be grading it until
  next week.

Cook Along Sessions
• The Group Cooking Activities have been made optional due to the
  pandemic.
• I would be happy to do some demos on zoom if there is interest in
  the second hour of the three class periods we have reserved for
  paper assignment check ins.
• Take a look at the Activity Worksheet on the course website and let
  me know which items would be of interest.
• Slack Sourdough Bread (the lazy way to make bread) or Gluten-Free
  Sourdough Bread
• How to make a soffritto or mirepoix (a soup or stew flavor base)
• How to make a bone broth (“Without a good broth nothing can be
  done.”--Escoffier, “Broth can bring back the dead.”—Peruvian
  proverb)
• Spanakopita

The Art of Food Writing

         MFK Fisher
      Molly Wizenberg
        Iris Gannon
       Kate Thomas

Food Writing as a Genre
•   Food writing as a modern genre.
•   The “familiar essay”: A short prose composition (a type of creative nonfiction)
    characterized by the personal quality of the writing and the distinctive voice or
    persona of the essayist.
•   Nigel Slater’s Toast is an example of a book-length memoir that documents a life in
    relation to food.
•   Carol Counihan’s notion of a “food-centered” life history.
•   The familiar essay shares with poetry the ability to work from the particular to the
    general, to make small things signify something much bigger.
•   This relationship between the particular and the general takes the form of
    metonymy (a part that stands for the whole).
•   A 19th Century genre reborn in the 2000s with the explosion of food-themed blog
    writing.
•   Molly Wizenberg’s blog Orangette, started in 2004.
•   But MFK Fisher had already established a genre of food writing in the early
    twentieth century.
•   Kate Thomas’s short-lived food blog Syllabub
•   Iris Gannon a student in this class.

MFK Fisher
• Her nom de plume was intended to make her gender
  ambiguous, but the writing itself makes her gender
  explicit.
• Women’s food writing up until that time had been
  limited to cookbooks.
• She invented the modern genre of creative food
  writing.
• Born in 1908. She must have been ten years old in the
  story ”A Thing Shared.”
• Writing in a nostalgic mold: Evoking a lost world
  through memories of food.
• A time when there was still a connection to the farm
  and a car trip was a major expedition over rough roads.

Food is more than just food.
• It establishes a connection between the inside and the outside of
  the body that is at once biological, psychological, social, cultural.
• It is also multi-sensorial.
• The best food writing evokes all the senses.
• In the anthropology of food, the object is to capture all the complex
  meanings of food through people’s sensorial experience.
• Food is not a trivial matter.
• It is the essence of our humanity as biological, social, and cultural
  beings.
• A cause for philosophical reflection on our connection with nature
  and with others.
• “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is
  broken and wine drunk.” (MFK Fisher)

Food and Social Connection: Words
        that celebrate this power.
• Commensality: Con (with) mensa (table)
• Companion: Con (with) pane (bread)
• Conviviality: Con (with) vivere (to live)
• The Slow Food movement retrieves the notion
  of a convivium: what it calls its local chapters
  worldwide.
• The power of food to create a the feeling of
  social connection: a common substance.

Gastronomical Me
•   ”To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of
    your passion, and learned your place in the world.” (Santayana).
•   The Measure of My Powers: narrating her developing passion in cooking and
    cuisine. Similarities to Slater.
•   What can we learn of the world of her growing up that appears as exotic and
    different from our present? How does the writing evoke an entire world that no
    longer exists? The road to the farm. Wartime crews of old men and boys.
•   Time and the rhythms of the seasons in the act of “putting up” the harvest.
    (“short, but violently active cannings” “…triumphant in the race against heat and
    rot”)
•   “A Thing Shared” describes a lyrical moment, the experience of the sublime.
    Everything keenly remembered as if bathed in light (“such queer clarity.”) A sense
    of being lifted above our normal state of consciousness (”at least once to every
    human”). The mirror stage. A sense of self emerges. (“I saw the golden hills and
    the live-oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since.”) (the peach pie as a
    sublime object). First, it was the peaches, Second, the crust.
•   The pudding: The first time you cooked something by yourself. Mishaps along the
    way. A passion for cuisine (akin to Slater). The measure of her powers.

Molly Wizenberg’s Blog Orangette
• Her writing is often compared to MFK Fisher.
• This entry is a writing of grieving and
  celebration.
• Writing about food was really about writing
  about her father.
• “The profoundly human joy of making and
  sharing food with the people you love.”

Iris Gannon and Kate Thomas
•   Gannon’s entry was inspired by the Fisher reading. A contrast with Fisher,
    the process is much more joyful, the experience that Fisher longed for but
    lacked due to ”Victorian acesticism.
•   Kate Thomas, from the blog Syllabub (sweetened whipped cream flavored
    with wine, similar to zabaglione in Italian).
•   Carnival fare: foods that go with ketchup.
•   In search of lost flavors.
•   The joys of foraging: Black walnuts, chanterelles
•   The heritage apple orchard
•   Colonial America had over 7,000 varieties of apple.
•   Heritage apples are not picture perfect. (Michael Pollan’s idea of a
    “notional tomato,” what it looks like is more important than how it tastes.)
•   Pied beauty (having two or more colors)
•   “Brutal shelf-life” of the supermarket (the arctic apple)
•   And the joys of pie. A crust that is “operatically flaky.”
•   “Is not crust the whole point of pie.”
•   Whole cloves as a “vicious surprise.”

“Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley
           Hopkins (1877).
 Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that
swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and
plough