When I only cooked for myself
Thank you for reading enough! This week's issue unraveled into a longer piece than I could finish today, so below is the brief version. You'll be sure to hear more about it in the future.
When I was ten or eleven, I sequestered myself in my family's tiny '50s-era kitchen and promptly ruined it. The recipe for cinnamon candied almonds proved more complicated than I imagined, calling for dipping the nuts in egg whites and then in a cinnamon sugar mixture. I was not a precise worker, and the kitchen surfaces were soon covered in brown sticky gunk. This coincided with my family needing to leave for an event, and my Mom, when she laid eyes on the kitchen, was (rightly) upset. Worst of all, I thought, the nuts came out of the oven fused to the pan and inedible.
In December, I saw Alicia Kennedy retweet an opportunity to get an early copy of Rebecca May Johnson's book SMALL FIRES, which is being released in the US this year. I DM'd Rebecca, gave her my information, and her book appeared in my mailbox yesterday. A decadent gift from her publisher. Forget finishing my book or attempting to publish it--I will follow my bookworm heart and stay in writing just for the ARCs. Seems more fun! (loljk)
Early in SMALL FIRES, Rebecca references the feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici who argued that "housework is not seen as work because it is considered an expression of love." Because of this entanglement with love, cooking is "non-work." Which then can become a trap, a cage. Julia Turshen just wrote about the relentlessness of feeding ourselves, and Alicia Kennedy recently wrote about creating "magic out of monotony." I want to write about all of this more.
My early cooking memories are often connected to my refusal to clean up the space around me. And my Mom's insistence on this wild idea of "Cleaning as you go," which I ignored. My cooking was selfish and young, I was selfish and young. I only wanted to make sweet things and flit from the kitchen with my plate full and my hands unworried by tidying.
Part of the 'burned almonds' story I didn't know as a child was that my parents were stretched. Thin. They had just moved cross-country, bought a house, and were trying their damndest to re-integrate into their extended family after leaving for school. A half pound of almonds was expensive. I knew the waste I was responsible for as I threw away the rock-like almonds. And yet, they gave me space to cook and experiment, within reason. What a gift. Being expected to clean was also a gift.
I've learned to clean as I go. And I've also held onto the desire to (sometimes) cook for expression and experimentation, separate from the need to eat and feed my family. I'm glad that selfish fire is still flickering. And part of this newsletter is finally writing about food, cooking, domestic labor, and love in a way I've yet to attempt.
Reading: The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney. Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson (Out on June 6!) Part two of Victoria Melendez's series on prophetic imagination. In Our Own Hands: tools for talking abolition & transformative justice with little ones by Rania El Mugammar. Still reading: Body Work, Indiana, Teenager, How to Write as If Already Dead.
Pre-ordered: Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell about Fear by Erica Berry (Out on Feb 21!) Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid edited by Wren Awry (Out on March 7!)
Writing: Ping-ponging between an essay and a short story. Need to pick one to attempt to finish first.
Cooking/Eating: Grapefruit. Canned soup. Takeout. Random dinners with canned oysters, sweet hot jalapeños, corn chips and avocado. This last week was a big push of packing and cleaning, I hope to do some more cooking in the near future.
