Food as Muse of Poetic Flights of Prose

        Food is poetry: its blended tastes, its visual beauty, luscious smells, and atmosphere of conviviality. Food, family, and friends are as closely entwined and as beautifully symbiotic as the New Dawn rose winding among the branches of my apple tree. If there is a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, a graduation, a solstice gathering, I want to celebrate with friends and family around food. If I want to do something special for someone, I'll invite that person to eat at my house If I have an apology to make or a thank-you to give, I'll bake cookies for the recipient.

        The poetry of food showed up again and again in my radio commentaries on Jefferson Public Radio, broadcast from Ashland, Oregon, between 1981 and 1988 and then again between 1996 and 2009. Once after a reading in Yreka, California, when I read the essay called "The Carberry Creek Dessert Bake-off" (scheduled for blog posts on October 7 and 14), a woman said, "I love your food commentaries. Why don't you write a book of food essays with recipes?"

The conviviality of food (in my new house)

        That idea morphed into this blog. More than a recipe, each post is an essay, usually accompanied by at least one recipe, and in many cases several recipes, of whatever food was mentioned in the essay. Many of the essays were written while I was living on a remote mountainside in Southern Oregon in a little house without electricity. Along with pies, soups, and salads, that non-electric kitchen produced stories, many of which reflect the various stages of my life in that house: when I was single-parenting my son, Ela; when he was grown and I lived there alone; when I had a little propane refrigerator; when I didn't; when I was vegetarian and then wasn't. The stories are about the poetry of food. The recipes are given so the reader can evoke a poem of his or her own with the same food.

        But the span of time in this blog goes back years before that kitchen, back to my childhood in Georgia, and then stretches beyond the years in the non-electric house to the house I live in now, with electricity, on the same piece of land. The geographical span also extends beyond the mountain house to kitchens in Sweden, to food in France, to restaurants in cities and towns, to picnics and pot-lucks and parties.

        You will find in these posts recipes to suit any cookbook: vegetarian and meat dishes, salads, desserts, appetizers, breads, breakfast foods, pastas, sandwiches, soups, and sides. You might begin to notice a preponderance of dessert recipes and thin pickings for salads. The reason for this imbalance is literary, not dietary: I have more stories about desserts than about salads. I am not giving dietary advice.

        Most of the photos were taken specifically for this blog, not at the time of the essays they go with, although I will include some long-ago photos when they are relevant. Blog posts will fall into chapters: "Cooking in a Non-electric House" (15 posts), "Food from the Past" (16 photos), "What We Eat and Why" (8 posts). "Outdoor Eating" (6 posts), "Harvest" (6 posts), and "Eating from Other Kitchens" (11 posts). I plan to post every Monday.

        Below is the first essay, a story about the kitchen in my old house, the house without electricity. It sets the scene for the first chapter of weekly posts. It does not have accompanying recipes. The photos were taken while I ws living in that house. Next week's post will include recipes.


Who Says You Can't Cook in My Kitchen?

       I once had a French boy friend who was, he said, a very good cook, but he refused to cook in my kitchen. I cook quite well in it, but I have to admit it isn't an ordinary kitchen. Not only does it have no electricity; it is also spread around three rooms. The propane cook stove and the sink with its blue tile counters are in the original "one-room cabin" room of the house that I later expanded.

The kitchen end of the one-room cabin

The pantry sticks off one corner of that room, and the RV-size propane refrigerator sits on the back porch. Preparing meals, I have reason to be grateful that this is a small house, since I first walk to the pantry for ingredients, then back across the house to the sink for washing vegetables or mixing sauces, then back again to the stove for cooking, and then back to the counter at the sink for dishing food onto plates. Maybe François was too lazy to cook in my kitchen.
        In winter, the kitchen shrinks: the pantry becomes the refrigerator, and I cook on the wood-burning stove. I chop vegetables at the sink and merely turn on my heel to scrape them into a frying pan on top of the stove, saving steps, just as in a model kitchen in Sunset magazine.
          There is an oven, but it's only big enough for one cake pan (I can't make layer cakes), and there is no control panel to let me know when the oven knob is turned to a particular temperature, so I have to guess at temperatures according to the size and color of the flame. When I think I've got it right, I close the door and let the oven heat up. Then I check the thermometer on the rack inside. If I've guessed right, the pie goes in. Otherwise, my baking might be put off for as much as an hour as I try to adjust the oven temperature because once the knob is in place, it tends to stick, and when I turn it up or down, it jumps, and then it's hard to guess where the flame was before and where it needs to be now. Maybe what François was lacking was patience.

Me, cooking in my kitchen, early 2000s

        Counter space is at a premium in a kitchen that still doubles as a sitting room, and wherever space is tight, patience is necessary. If I'm cutting up vegetables, I balance the cutting board on the thin strip of tiles in front of the sink, being careful not to overweight one side of the cutting board, or else it'll tip over and dump vegetables either into the sink or onto the floor. It's even worse if I'm putting unbaked cookies on a cookie sheet, which balances in the same place, because unbaked cookies can't be picked up off the floor and washed.
          Because it doubles as a sitting room, my kitchen has a couch in it, under my bedroom loft (or, my living room has a sink I'm it).

Bedroom loft, couch, oven

If my arm gets tired when I'm whipping egg whites, I can sit down on the couch and put the bowl in my lap. Pie crusts are rolled at the counter to the left of the sink. A shelf above restricts upward motion (but how much upward motion do you need in rolling out pie dough?), and though there's plenty of elbow room on the sink side of the space, on the other side a pole wall separating the kitchen from the back entrance gets in the way. I wield the rolling pin with short, stubby strokes, like an ice skater on too small a pond. Because I was used to it, I could make a good pie crust in my kitchen, which is more than François ever did. In fact, given how many meals, cakes, and pies I have produced from my kitchen, I can't understand why François refused to cook in it. He just had to get used to it.








Next week: "Sulky Oven," with recipes for rummy raisin brownies and cranberry pear torte.