Imaginative Worlds
I think about food all the time. I always know what’s in our refrigerator and throughout the day I mentally transform it into dinner. When I can’t sleep, I plan imaginary dinner parties or dream up meals that are made from only pink ingredients. I think about food as an escape from making food — all those long hours at the bakery fry station, I liked to envision how I would make the store’s desserts better at home. I keep lists of things like the best sandwiches I’ve ever had or bagel toppings I’d like to try.
Food is generally not considered to be a noble subject of thought. Probably that’s because animals think about it constantly, and it’s always been important to separate ourselves from animals. Probably it’s also related to cooking being the traditional domain of women. The quotidian, the stuff of survival, the rhythms of home and family; this does not impress American society the way science or mathematics does. I know that certain types of people respected me more when I told them I wrote code instead of cooked. The truth is that I was only ever interested in creating spaces, and I wanted to shift from online to in-person.
When you’re imagining a dinner party, you’re creating a space. Pouring a drink, alcoholic or not, feels like the first act of care for guests and gives them something to do with their hands. An appetizer at the center of the table draws everyone around it, which starts the flow of conversation. A set dinner with multiple courses will feel fancy and special; pizza night with ingredients laid out on the table invites collaboration and creates a more casual intimacy. A ramen dinner could steam up the windows and seem cozy, while fresh vegetables in a series of salads with the windows open feels relaxed and endless. The kitchen transforms into a completely new space with the food and people and energy that runs through a gathering.
A cookbook is a fascinating object because it doesn’t merely create a world for a reader to step into, it aims to give the reader tools to make a version of that world themselves. A great cookbook writer, like any writer, conjures up visions in your mind’s eye of what a dish looks like and where you might eat it, but also demands more imaginative work as you mold the scene around your own home and ingredients and friends or family. Giving instructions centers the reader in a way no other writing quite does. I flip through cookbooks admiring the pictures and noting the ingredients but with half a mind on what I would change or what unique combination of things I would serve together.
I just spent a wonderful week with my parents and brother, who flew to New York from California for our first time together since Covid. There are so many aspects of being together in real life that are profoundly different from Zoom dinners or phone calls, but being able to make food for and with them is one of the things I fixated on in the weeks leading up to our reunion. We rented a place near Hudson where they’d meet us after their flight, and I planned a Spanish tapas meal that I knew would be flexible with an unpredictable schedule, and because my brother likes patatas bravas. The next day happened to be Mother’s Day, and my mom loves enriched doughs and creamy pastries, so I modified a King Arthur cinnamon roll recipe with a cardamom and pistachio filling and made a labneh icing with orange peel and orange blossom water. It would have been special to be together no matter what I cooked, but bringing the tray of warm rolls and coffee out to the deck where my whole family sat at the table was exactly the moment I was imagining for so long.
What I’m reading
I think they weren’t just cookbooks. I think they were about other worlds.”
- Diana Henry in conversation with Charlotte Druckman in Women on Food
I used to read about food and plan make-believe meals and menus, and imagine what I would cook. I was very close to my maternal grandmother and would write to her every week from school. Soon, those letters contained ideas for recipes, or she’d send me a recipe she’d cut out of a newspaper or magazine, and I’d write out recipes I’d found for her. It was a recipe swap as conversation, and I think that has been a central tenet of my work…I loved my grandmother’s file of cut-out and stuck-in recipes from all over the place: I flicked through it much more often than any of her photograph albums. It made me realize that cooking could occupy a whole imaginative world.
- Nigella Lawson Q&A with Charlotte Druckman
I picked up Women on Food a few weeks ago and have loved dipping in and out of the excellent interviews and essays. There was initially something off-putting to me about the title of the collection — I wondered why “women” as the organizing factor, and whether it meant to wash away cultural differences with its focus on gender. I wasn’t familiar with Charlotte Druckman’s work though, and her choice of people and the way she sets them up with free rein to speak through essays or well-conducted interviews banished any concerns. I’m meeting so many writers and thinkers I didn’t know before and almost every piece resonates with something different in me.