It turned out to be a food-themed reading, and some poets stuck more closely to that idea than others. At least one wrote beautifully about the revelation of eating truly fresh farm eggs, and, being a devotee of all things egg myself, this was my favorite of the day. As I listened, it struck me that poems are uniquely made to consider food in a way I, a prose writer, may not get to. The reading had a sense of pleasant oddness, and of the pointillist way a poet can illuminate a single moment, teasing out its participants, its emotions, its conflicts and unexpected layers. When I think of food prose, I tend to think of either the service type—here is how to cook this, what this is, who creates it, or where to eat it, plus poetic descriptions for a more appetizing read—or the one I am more partial to, the food story. But the story of food can be awfully repetitive after a while, no matter how heartfelt and well-done. (We know how this goes: My mother made this dish for me, even if only once in my benighted childhood; or Here is a moment I cherish through a faint overlay of loss and time.) The pleasure in these poems was that many of them were free of the need for story and arc and instead delved into the poet’s own idiosyncratic experience of the food before her, its source, its associations, the sensory experience of consuming it and the companions with whom she was dining.

It’s usually not the same experience I can draw upon, and I like it best when that’s the case—that can be as startling and bracing as when you realize that, say, you and the person beside you have just experienced the same moment in totally different ways. I am generally more drawn to prose because story is how I think things through, how I communicate and consider –and obviously nothing says a poem cannot tell a story—but here I suddenly appreciated the poems that set story aside in favor of the fullness, and the smallness, of the moment.

Which brings me to my very favorite food poem of all time, and perhaps my favorite poem too, Seamus Heaney’s “Oysters.” I’m predisposed to love any poem about oysters, because oyster is one of those words I luxuriate in seeing on a page. I return to this poem every now and then over the years and for me its brilliance never dulls: Here is the flavor, the scent, the sound, the emotion of this sensuous and barbarous meal.

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean –
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

I remember mentioning this poem to Tin House’s late poetry editor, Amy Bartlett, back when I was an intern, and admitting I loved it but didn’t know what it really meant. I think it’s about the pure experience of the moment, she said, and I think she was right. The poem is not evoking a moment of pure beauty (though the poem itself is a thing of pure beauty); it contains discomfort in its appetite, the shiver of unease that needles us even as we reach for pleasure. So, yes, it is about the moment of eating an oyster, or an egg, and just the moment, but when it’s done like this it is as large as the universe.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Bread and Butter, the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long, and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

It always sounds fun, but I have been around long enough to see that drinking during the holidays is an activity fraught with peril. It is not just that an extra glass or two unleashes a year’s worth of simmering resentments, although it does, or that early drinking, coupled with the let-down after the present-opening, can lead to ill-conceived events like “Mandatory Family Dance Party,” which it may, or that at these parties an injury or two seems inevitable, which it is. I am much more concerned about the drinks people dare to call martinis.

Mandatory Family Dance Party

Tin House has strong feelings about our house drink the martini, and anyone who attended our first writer’s workshop may recall the sloshy vigor with which we doled them out before getting a hold of ourselves in year two. Still, that year ushered me into a brief flirtation with the life of the martini, but it was really all about the glass. It’s such a dangerous little thing, so easy to spill, so elegant in its Art Deco way. It has none of the belled curvature of a delicate wine glass, nothing to suggest that this drink is a gentle lull, which is only fitting. A martini glass is both beautiful and unwieldy, slick but not sleek. It looks wonderfully cool to be holding one, but also requires some attention to prevent a bloody mishap. I imagine it is much like a pet ocelot in that way.

Anyhow, it’s no wonder that people try to serve all kinds of non-martini drinks in these glasses, just for the fun of hauling them out and peering at them in the twinkle of the Christmas lights.

And if you want to do this, great. It’s quite pleasant, if you cannot drink alcohol, to have some very tart N/A cocktail in a martini glass—I recommend one called, somewhat erotically, a Pink Pearl, made with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and orgeat, an almond and rose-water syrup. It’s a bit fiddly to squeeze all that fruit, but given that the people stuck drinking the N/A drinks are either busy with the work of getting home alive, staying sober and contributing to society, or growing humans in their bodies, it’s the least you can do.

You will notice, however, that I do not refer to this drink as a martini. Just because it is served in a martini glass does not make it a martini. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet I still recall the ignominious end of a New Year’s Eve when someone made me what he called a chocolate martini and which was an unholy mix of Bailey’s, something chocolatey and creamy—it may have been actual cream and Hershey’s syrup; the mixing took place in an undisclosed location—and vodka. It had the very flavor of a bad idea. I feel drunk and ill just telling you about it.

And unscrupulous people will do this to you every chance they get: apple-tinis and vanilla-tinis and cream-tinis and all other manner of crap poured into my beloved martini glass. I can’t even tell you the last time I had a real martini, and yet the abuse of their iconic glassware still cuts. I really feel that if someone had offered me a “Cream Choctail” or some other appropriately awful-sounding thing, I would have known even in my addled state to flee. But calling things a martini is always good, deceptive marketing. All I can tell you this holiday season is to stick with one path or another if you are polishing up your cocktail glasses: either call the drink whatever it really is, be it sugared citrus soda or creamy chocolate horror, or go with the classic, silvery, dangerous animal itself.  And maybe if we drank from these lovely glasses more often we wouldn’t go so nuts every December.

You start with a trusty pot. This is of course after you’ve made it to Aimee Bender’s secret kitchen, in an undisclosed location in southernmost southern California.  Or, if not her kitchen, at least a clean one, tidy enough that your purpose remains focused and without distraction. You are making soup. That is all. This one thing. So, no toys, couches, television, radio, etc. No bills on the counter, etc. And yet, the kitchen must be purposive. This part I leave up to you.

In terms of pots, for Aimee the soup pot is a an old orange creuset; the rest of the cookery includes a bunch of old dented pans and wooden spoons she’s grown attached to over the years. She’s lost track of where they’re from, but some of them she’s had since college. This is as important as will be the bowl, at the end, from which you drink the soup. See below.

Starting out, you can definitely bring choppers into your kitchen space. Communal root chopping, that is—for any good pot of soup starts with this things that grow underground. For me, it’s onions in some kind of fat with a splash of white wine for light soups and red wine for stews. For Aimee, it’s many things but always carrots. Garlic, celery root, taro, burdock, parsley root, desert yams, prairie turnips, bush potatoes—all good roots. Stems, bulbs, rhizomes, and tubers in general are good here: ginger, tiger nut, cattails, lotus root, sunchoke, day lily. Gather and chop them. Especially if you have a garden to harvest and are in season, this is a good time for conversation (if you are not—as I often am—cooking in absolute silence). At some point, though, whether in silence or in conversation, the role of the choppers and harvesters is over. If you have a lot of these folk, give them something to discuss, some children to watch, a cake to pick up, some apertifs to enjoy, and get them out of the rangetop area. Two cooks for a single broth is twice as much as you need. If you want an elegant soup, only one cook. But we are cooking together, so are open to a bit more of a mess.

In fact, the openness to mess is what I’ve come for. Aimee was once and hence will forever be one of my teachers. And of late, I have been a bit stingy with soup ingredients. Generally, I like to minimize them. Worse, I spend too much money on ingredients that are a bit too dear. Once, I filled up a whole extra carry-on with ingredients from Formaggio Kitchen in Boston and brought them home to Colorado, for cooking soup, and paid them off over the course of a few months, and was afraid to use them because they were so expensive. This is ridiculous. There’s more. I generally won’t use pork fat, or beef, or chicken fat, or fat from any animal, including, nine times out of ten, butter, which limits things. These can be brittle and complex ethical issues, what we will and won’t cook with. We are, however you categorize things, creatures eating creatures. But there isn’t anything, Aimee tells me, that she won’t cook with. I believe this is something to aspire to, this kind of openness. As with life, so with soup. It is not my own idea but a wise one to use all the ingredients of your life, all the messiness, all the muck. Aimee in fact tells me she is a messy cook, she needs slack from the ingredients, and likes to give them slack too. This is a beautiful notion, and I will never forget her sharing it.

That said, you can’t be totally open or totally stingy with your soup. I am liberal with some things, like the non-animal fats I use, especially olive oil, sesame oil, and coconut oil. I am also liberal with alcohol when I cook. Sometimes, bourbon or a smoky scotch goes in the stock instead of wine; sometimes, a dark beer (never pale ale, nothing with a lot of hops). And Aimee, for all her inclusiveness, has limits: no noodles. In a soup, she says, they just seem wrong.

Try to identify yourself along this spectrum, so you can push against your tendencies a little bit. I know, for example, that a soup base of chicken fat and then filled with egg noodles (and butter and pepper) would be so good. Such a pot of soup may be somewhere in the future—next time, perhaps, Aimee and I meet to make soup—but we are not ready for that yet.

So for now, though this all feels to me like a lesson in the presence of a master, we compromise. We agree on some roots and stems, and to start, we agree on lentils.  In fact, what Aimee has to say about lentils is critical. So far in her soup-making, she tells me, she likes how about halfway something releases in the lentils and the flavor gets much deeper.

When you’re first starting out with a pot of soup—and every batch is different, even if the recipe is quite measured (there can be rain outside the window or snow, it can be hot, your company can be bitter, you company can have gas, etc.)—you can trust that something, like the lentils, will release and make the flavor much deeper. In fact, it is wholly a matter of trust. For the most part, you can’t count on which ingredient will release. Counting on anything in this way will prevent the release of, say, the fennel, if you’re concentrating so hard on the release of shallots in the butter and grains of paradise that your very thoughts crowd out and inhibit the simple and earnest fennel.

In the spirit of non-stinginess, we talked liberally as we chopped.  As we did so, I asked her several questions, and divulged many secrets, and vice versa, and we both vowed to leave all of this out of all recipes and soup-making reports. But the truth was, there wasn’t anything very surprising or interesting about our secrets, and fortunately we had plenty of salt, which we had to add to the room through the soup. Here’s the thing: if you’re preparing a soup, or any meal, you really shouldn’t have many big secrets. If you have some juicy ones, before you even start chopping, go outside and walk around the city a little bit, make some phone calls. Say what you need to. Stop in the grocery and pick up some good aged bourbon, or some pork fat, for the soup you will eventually, one day, make.

This is actually quite important. Here’s an example of where I failed on this count: at one point, Aimee tells me she aspires to borscht and Italian wedding soup. That she has a great butternut squash recipe, and also makes a chicken soup, and is working on matzoh ball soup. But, she says, she has some work to do there—on the matzoh balls. Now, myself, I make a pretty good matzoh ball soup, maybe four times a year. But I use the pre-packaged matzoh crumbs. Everything is pre-measured and laid out in rules for me; the proportions for egg, oil, salt and pepper are written clearly on the back of the box. I don’t ask Aimee if this is what she means; I assume she means some more complicated way of preparing matzoh balls that I can’t even imagine.A ceremony—as all recipes are, especially those handed down—that in fact I have no right to. I was raised Catholic in Cleveland, Ohio (which is where I got my taste for matzoh, as well as gefilte fish, which my sisters and I begged our parents for and called magic fish), then moved to a famously evangelical community in Illinois for middle school and high school, where there was no matzoh, or even the language to talk about it.

Suddenly, in the kitchen with Aimee, I had the tighteness and irritation of self-doubt and evaluation and cultural analysis turning wheels in my chest and belly. You can see how my internal dialogue crowded the tidy purposive space; maybe even soured some of it with unspoken assumptions, divisive notions. I would like to master the matzoh ball soup too. And not in the store-bought way. So, you see, when you are cooking soup, especially with another person, it is best to say everything, and have an open window too. No matter the season.

Halfway through our process, because lentils take a while to soften, we started cleaning out the kitchen cabinets—not so much out productivity but because we were there, in the kitchen, and reaching for spices and chatting about them. In so doing, we found a can of black turtle beans, which Aimee hadn’t known was in the cabinet. The ingredients on the can read: turtle beans, water, salt. We wanted them in the soup.

Everything changed.

“Is this going to work?”

“What tastes good with beans and lentils?”

“Right. And what among those ingredients do I have in this kitchen?”

We spun the lazy susan around and chose cardamom, and cumin, and a can of chopped tomatoes.

“Now that we have added cardamom, we are going to have to add a little coconut milk.”

“And some chopped mangos?”

“With beans, lentils, and tomatoes? Wonderful. That sounds just right.”

“Roasted pepitas.”

“Yes.”

“You have to know when to stop.”

“Let’s stop.”

We scooped the soup into bowls, which Aimee chose. I will not describe them, but will only say—and this was a point on which we both agreed—the bowl is very important. The weight of it, who made it, why, or what you don’t know about it, and above all, how it feels in your hands.

But by then, everything had changed again.

“There actually isn’t much chill in the air out here. Not great for hot soup.”

It was a pretty warm breezy night.

“Maybe it will cool off a little later.”

“Let’s go outside.”

So we went outside, and were poking around in the white sand under the moonlight when my teacher took a quick breath and showed me what she’d seen: a rare desert flower. Edible too. Its petals were white, thin as tissue, and it had a deep purple heart.

“This is what we want,” she said. “This will be our dinner.”

“No soup?”

“You have to know when to let an idea go. Don’t get all hung up on soup. You know?” She sat down giving the little bunch of flowers space. “But here’s the thing, she said. Here’s the big question. This is a beautiful stand of flowers.”

“Beautiful,” I agreed.

“Not that much nutrition.”

“Only a dozen calories,” I guessed.

The question is, what are you going to do with the fifteen calories–what will be worthy enough of destroying such a beautiful thing?

Bonnie Nadzam’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Iowa Review, Epoch, and many others. Her first novel, LAMB, was the recipient of the 2011 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Nadzam’s second novel will center on a modern-day witch, so she has been spending much time at the cauldron – her writing desk – casting narrative spells.

Bonnie’s What You Have Soup

&nbspThe key to this soup is not going shopping for anything. You already have everything you need.

First, you need a fat: butter, lard, oil, peanut butter…

And a root, bulb or stem: leek, lotus, fennel, ginger, onion, garlic, radish, yam…

Chop the root, bulb, or stem and cook it slowly in the fat until it softens and changes
color (without burning). Really try to stick with one ingredient here. Don’t get all
enthusiastic. This step should take a while.

Add a salt source: soy sauce, liquid aminos, salt itself…

You need a liquid: cow’s milk, almond milk, coconut milk, apple juice, beer, coconut
water, Seven-up…Add the liquid and the salt source, to taste—however salty you
want it. You probably want it less salty than you think you do, but only you can say.

You may want a little sweet, but be careful, because you probably actually don’t.

Fruits/nuts/vegetables to put in the soup: chopped celery, apples, cashews, frozen
peas, corn, etc. Not more than three. Ideally two. Set them aside in a bowl. You’ll add
these last minute so they don’t get soggy or lose their color.

You need seemingly counterintuitive spices. Think of the mindset of finding a fresh
verb phrase or unusual adjective/noun paring. This is the same sense you use to
find the counterintuitive spice combination. This is not teachable, because you
already know how to do it and you have always known how to do it. In fact, you
can’t imagine how long you have known how to do it. If you can’t figure it out, freeze
the stock and read 9-12 excellent novels or a single work of Shakespeare (very
slowly) until you get familiar with the feeling in your body when you see a fresh
word pairing. Then write a novel or two, or at least a couple of stories, to practice
finding and honing this skill yourself. You can substitute painting, sculpting, etc.,
but any work of art or craft that comes with directions will take you in the opposite
direction, so don’t use any of those. No guidebooks, no how-to software, no pre-cut
pieces, etc. or you will forget you were even making soup.

Once you’re ready, defrost the broth, and come back to your spice cabinet. Choose
these two spices and add in just the right amount to the broth.

Very important here to trust yourself. Add a grain if you like—but not if it’s to cover
up the broth flavor. If the What You Have Soup broth tastes terrible, that’s ok. Try
not to judge.

I had little firsthand experience with turkeys before this, except for the flocks that patrol the UW Arboretum and which are hulking and smoke-colored. The turkeys I saw last weekend at the molecular biologist’s house were a variety of heritage breeds, from pure Spanish white to a mahogany colored Bourbon Red to a Bronze, which looks exactly like an old painting of a turkey, with a scarlet wattle, iridescent breast and white-tipped wings. There were also geese and chickens and ducks, poking around the yard and in the henhouse. Every bird seemed vivid and surprisingly beautiful, the ducks a heathery grey, the roosters with golden heads, bright fuchsia combs and brilliant, green-black bodies.

The amazing thing to me about seeing the full animal—or, the one time I visited a cadaver lab, the human body–is how densely packed we creatures are, the odd mix of tough membrane and delicate coils of intestine, the way everything nestles so tightly in the body cavity. Before I saw this kind of thing I used to imagine the inside of a body as more of a sparsely populated landscape, but it’s more like those images you see of hibernating animals curled over and on top of each other for warmth. The beauty of the inside of the animal is completely different from that of its feathers or its markings, more about the beauty of utility than vividness. The innards were a beigey clay color, with shadings of yellow, burgundy, green and brown. The nascent eggs were a cluster of translucent beads of varied size.

I enjoyed this process in the way a cook enjoys knowing exactly what the product is, or the way a curious student loves dissection, which I once did as well. While I usually try to say yes to any remotely interesting prospect that comes along like dressing turkeys or attending a three-hour church service in a religion I don’t share, I don’t know if writerly rigor would have made me say yes if I weren’t already interested. Then again, I did go to that church service, which is as rare an activity as it gets for me. And then again, the service may have been longer than three hours—that’s just when I finally snuck out. I’ll have to see if I actually follow my own rules the next time I get the chance to do something interesting that doesn’t also lead to dinner.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Bread and Butter, the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long, and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

All of this is a way of saying that a few years ago on a winter afternoon I re-read Jane Eyre for the tenth time while eating rice pudding and a tangerine, and it was one of the best damn moments of my life. I don’t even eat rice pudding very often, and when I do I want the everyday version made with milk and not cream, with nutmeg and vanilla, and maybe some dried fruit. The tangerine was just a random addition because I wanted a little brightness, some additional sugar without more pudding, but it turned out to be one of those perfect tangerines that pops up now and again amid the desiccated, sour, dimpled ones. Something about the rice in particular–its gentleness, the sweetly prosaic nature of the versions I like best, and its cozy English connotation–makes it an ideal companion to a novel in which one so often feels cold, shut out, and physically fragile.

Why do magazine writers (it is always magazine writers, usually the ones exhorting us to slow down, enjoy life, or lose weight) love to opine that one should eat without reading, as if this is some triumph over the ills of modern life? I fail to see why a refusal to combine two of life’s greatest and most democratic pleasures would make me a calmer or happier person. Here’s what makes me a calm and happy person, on the rare occasions I approach that state: a bowl of a pasta with a glass of red wine and a paperback mystery I can carry anywhere, dip into as I please and be swept back up, and not worry that I’ll miss some nuance as the wine kicks in.

Part of the greatness of reading and eating is that one tends not to read upsetting or gory books over a meal; nothing ruins a nice meat dish like a gruesome death scene. I suspect Kafka would not lend himself to this. Nor do I recommend extremely dense or challenging books during a meal, either—save the philosophy or lit crit for the next time you find yourself sitting alone on a hard chair in a white room with no discernible source of light. On the other hand, there is something almost too sybaritic about pairing an airy confection of a book with its pastry-based equivalent, by which I mean it is something you should absolutely do as often as possible. And while you could do worse than basing your menu on the characters and having mackerel and cold beer with Hemingway or rogan josh with Jhumpa Lahiri, the point is not to make a big production out of it. If all you have around is eggs and toast and a book you’re kind of enjoying, the two will elevate each other, anyway. And if twenty years later you find yourself forever associating Gail Godwin with baked polenta, roasted vegetables and fresh mozzarella, you may not recall every detail of the book itself so much as you recall the little table in your studio apartment, the crackle of the library’s plastic book cover, the minuscule half-stove and mini-fridge of the kitchen, and the view of the park outside the window. But that’s fine too.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the forthcoming novel The Back of the House, the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

This statement was the first thing that has ever made me want to read a Bond novel or potentially see a Bond film. There’s always been something so unpleasantly leathery and paternal about the various Bondsmen over the ages, with their turtlenecks and their deeply tanned incipient jowls. The character always seemed too revealing a peek into the private den of someone’s father. But I was feeling a little combative over Gopnik’s “greedy writer,” so I skimmed my way through From Russia With Love, a bit of Dr. No, and Goldfinger. (Also, Tin House readers, I sometimes fear you are all so busy reading the latest blistering and high-minded arguments about the role of criticism in literature that you’ve not had time to explore pulp novels about spies and gin. You’re probably better people for it.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Gopnik is right. Here’s Bond on breakfast in From Russia with Love:

Breakfast was Bond’s favorite meal of the day. When he was stationed in London it was always the same. It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black and without sugar. The single egg, in a dark blue egg cup with a gold ring round the top, was boiled for three and a third minutes.

It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country. (Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as a perfect boiled egg.) Then there were two thick slices of wholewheat toast, a large pat of deep yellow Jersey butter and three squat glass jars containing Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ strawberry jam; Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade and Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum’s. The coffee pot and the silver on the tray were Queen Anne, and the china was Minton, of the same dark blue and gold and white as the egg-cup.

Suddenly I understood what Gopnik meant by greedy writers, and why Gopnik’s word “excitedly” is right on. Bond’s fetish, from the china to the egg cookery, is noted in absurdly loving detail, though Fleming likes to pull back a bit as well—Bond may be rigid in his tastes but the fact that he’s amused by taking a culinary stance on the mythical perfect egg suggests that he’s not really this silly. He gets to have it both ways.

Similarly, in Goldfinger, Bond allows himself to be wined and dined by a mysterious man named Du Pont. At a restaurant decorated with pink and white flourishes and staffed by “a pansified Italian,” Du Pont orders an appropriately feminine-hued meal of rose champagne and stone crab, which Bond devours:

The meat of the stone crabs was the tenderest, sweetest shellfish he had ever tasted. It was perfectly set off by the dry toast and slightly burned taste of the melted butter. The champagne seemed to have the faintest scent of strawberries. It was ice cold. After each helping of crab, the champagne cleaned the palate for the next. They ate steadily and with absorption and hardly exchanged a word until the dish was cleared.

As one might expect of such a man and such a meal, Bond’s inner tough guy soon rebels, but only after he has thoroughly enjoyed himself:

Bond thought, I asked for the easy life, the rich life. How do I like it? How do I like eating like a pig and hearing remarks like that? Suddenly the idea of ever having another meal like this, or indeed any other meal with Mr. Du Pont, revolted him.

In this moment, of course, Bond is like that man who decides immediately after sex that he is terribly afraid of intimacy. He’s drowned himself in the rosy, fatty, strawberry-scented luxuries of the world, enjoyed it tremendously and therefore allowed the reader to experience it with him, but then retains his spy cred by resisting.

What this reminds me of most, Ian Fleming would probably not be pleased to know, is a scene from Little Women. Meg has been swept up in the whirl of a rich friend, whose maid dolls her up in a lovingly detailed gown, and a dangling earrings tied on with a bit of pink silk, and for once Meg is swathed in all the fine lace and silk the world can offer. But then she decides it isn’t for her at all—I believe she sees the March girls’ friend Laurie at the ball, looking at her new self with disdain—and turns her back on it. Like Bond’s readers, I am always just happy to get the details of the rich life before the moral victory for naked earlobes and good plain muslin frocks everywhere.

Bond gets to have it both ways when it comes to women, too. Here is the other Bond moment that I could not quite shake. In Dr. No, Quarrel is Bond’s local man in Jamaica, and Annabel Chung, the girl from whom Bond and Quarrel are trying to extract information, is a spy for the evil Dr. No. Just before the moment below, Bond has let go of Chung’s arm, disgusted with himself for causing her pain but not getting his information. It’s quite big of him. He relaxes and observes, however, while Quarrel indulges a little more light torture.

A Quarrel Bond, served w/ a side of Honeychile.

[Quarrel] took the Mount of Venus, the soft lozenge of flesh in the palm below her thumb, between his thumb and forefinger. He began to squeeze it.  Bond could see his knuckles go white with the pressure. The girl gave a yelp. She hammered at Quarrel’s hand and then at his face. Quarrel grinned and squeezed harder.[….]

“…Dat a fine piece of a woman, de Love Moun’. When him fat like wit’ dat girl you kin tell her’ll be good in bed. You know dat, cap’n?”

“No,” said Bond. “That’s new to me.”

“Sho ting. Dat piece of da han’ most hindicative. Don’ you worry ‘bout she,’ he added, noticing the dubious expression on Bond’s face. ‘Hers got nuttin but a big bruise on she’s Love Moun’. But boy, was dat a fat Love Moun’! I come back after dat gal sometime, see if ma teory is da troof.”

I found this passage of Bond and his hopeful hench-rapist chilling. The creepiest part about it is that same sham that shows up with the stone crab scene—both girl and food offered for the reader’s delectation before we’re assured that no, Bond won’t indulge in buttered crab as a habit, and that he’d kind of like it if Quarrel didn’t test his Love Mount theory. (He tells him to get married and settle down.)

It’s not breaking news that the Bond novels are sexist. That’s a pillar of their appeal, and when one encounters a naked girl on a beach named “Honeychile Rider,” it seems a fair bet that Fleming is on at least one joke. What makes these passages interesting to me is the way these books ease right up to the line of sumptuousness or violence (as it was perceived in the Fifties anyway; it’s well over the line for most contemporary readers), dive in and wallow in it for a while, and then hasten back to the safer territory, where we can pretend we remained all along.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

Fictitious Dishes by Dinah Fried

That Alice in Wonderland photo is what I keep returning to. I’m not sure if children’s literature provides more food memories than adult books do, but it does seem to give food a more elemental feel. Children’s book food has social and economic context, but somehow seems less preening than it can in work for adults.  There’s rarely a lot of description where the simple word “cake” will do, and its purpose for the characters is more essential too. In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novels, basic food sates desperate, starvation-level hunger or makes ill, wan children round and healthy, and in Russell Hoban’s charming Bread and Jam for Frances , it is one of the daily ways a parent persuades a child to open up her routines. (Her mom packed wee lunches of a dozen little selections! She wrapped up twists of salt and pepper in waxed paper to go with Frances’s hard-boiled egg! Even a badger had better lunches than I did. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this book doesn’t number among my mother’s favorites.)

Then there are the Little House on the Prairie books, which are basically a chronicle of the daily grind of planning how not to starve, but they never read as an unending task so much as the texture of life. The books’ food-focus is not news, but my perception of it has changed. As a child I found the Ingalls’ cooking a pleasant diversion: Ma colors the butter with carrot! Maple candy hardened on plates of snow! I developed an obsession with the vanity cakes fried in hot fat in On the Banks of Plum Creek, and when my mother refused to use her limited free time to devise and perfect a recipe based on the book’s brief description, I decided she lacked fortitude.

Whenever I write about myself as a child, I wonder why my mother even talks to me.

My own attempts at Little House-like endeavors have been sparse and unsuccessful. I once decided to make butter with a couple of gallons of organic whole milk, forgetting that modern whole milk lacks the fat of nineteenth-century whole milk. I took over a friend’s kitchen, flung droplets all over her walls by whipping around a large quantity of milk to no other demonstrable effect, then finally admitted defeat and gave the big bowl of frothed milk to the person with the best metabolism.

It was only when I read the books again just a couple of years ago that I no longer identified so strongly with Laura as a girl, but with her parents. (Okay, not Ma’s virulent racism, so much—and Ma is a killjoy in many ways besides, but I imagine we’d all lose patience with Pa always feeling some inchoate need to haul his family along on a new, doomed adventure.) It suddenly occurred to me that I was probably ten years older, give or take, than Ma and Pa. I felt an odd shifting of responsibility, like the realization that I was supposed to have been doing something for many years and did not, instead just horsed around with Laura in the yard, batting at a pig’s bladder when I should have been thinking about making the damn headcheese so we could live through January.

Anyway, food becomes a constant occupation and challenge—the tending of food, the preservation of food, the stretching of food when there was no guarantee more would be forthcoming from the woods or the plains or the stores that might not extend credit. It’s perilous.

Can you get that feeling of peril from a composed, serene shot of milk and porridge, a dish of sugar cubes? Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, after all, are harrowing, in a way that’s hard to get across with a little milky tea and some flowered china—not only can she not trust anyone or anything, but no one much notices or gives a shit about her. I never liked those books when I was little; they made me nervous. I kept thinking that any book with all that tea and all those cakes and bunnies would be light and comforting, but I was wrong every time.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

"A sorrowful food moment is hard to shake off."

–In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris’s guitar teacher, Mr. Mancini, seems almost swaggeringly masculine until his persona—or Sedaris’s view of it– starts to crack, and one day Sedaris glimpses him eating alone, dipping his hamburger into a “sad puddle of mayonnaise.” I don’t think the word “sad” is even necessary, but years later I still feel like going back to bed just thinking about it. I might not feel so gutted if the mayo had just been spread on the bun.

–As a teenager Rosemary Mahoney spent a summer working for Lillian Hellman, which she later described in the book A Likely Story. I read this book years ago, so my recall may be faulty, but two memories linger from it: 1, William Styron appears to have been a terrible person, and 2, the image of Hellman, in a moment when as I recall Mahoney was feeling a blend of rage and pity for her, consuming a meal of lentils and sausages. I think of this every single time I am confronted with even a mention of lentils and sausages, a dish that seems so hearty and wintery and inelegant, meant to comfort and sustain, and maybe that is why it feels so vulnerable an appetite for a woman who made it her business to be a terror.

–And for a culinary kick in the teeth so powerful and layered that it almost feels good, there is always Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “At Mrs. Sen’s,” (from Interpreter of Maladies) in which Calcutta-born Mrs. Sen is briefly a babysitter for an eleven-year-old boy named Eliot. This story is a primer in storytelling through food from start to finish. It’s also a study of loneliness and isolation, from Eliot’s mother’s constant refusal of food to Mrs. Sen’s constant production of it. At first, Mrs. Sen’s stationary blade, with which she settles herself on the living room floor to cut up great piles of vegetables, chicken, and fish, makes her seem proud and even warrior-like—it’s wickedly sharp and curved “like the prow of a Viking ship.” It’s also a bit of her lost community—Mrs. Sen describes all the women working together to prep food for gatherings, rather than alone with a boy marooned on the couch with a snack while she works.

As the story goes on, the food she prepares and the ongoing effort to obtain the best ingredients are essentially her only source of pleasure and industry, a way of passing the empty hours but also a standard to maintain. There comes a moment toward the end of the story, when she and Eliot have taken the bus to buy a whole fish, and on the ride home, a blood-lined bag at their feet and crumbs from clam cakes still clinging to the corners of their mouths, when every single thing about the journey to procure, prepare, and enjoy food, feels tainted. I could write many pages on the food in this story, but this is the moment I never forget: Mrs. Sen unaware of the crumbs at the corner of her mouth, the fish that seems to other passengers to be smelly and foreign, and what allure, authority, and power she has had for Eliot is dulled. She feels brought down to his level, no longer a trusted adult but an equally lonely companion. Honestly, the story hits its points hard, but it does so with such precision and such restrained emotion that the effect works. It’s the crumbs that do it, I think, the hard-won fish that no longer seems a prize, the eggplant cubes expertly prepped and then tossed in the garbage when the meal no longer seems worth cooking. I’m still not over it.

In writing classes, I have sometimes asked students to jot down a brief description of a meal—no scene or story or characters consuming it, ideally no editorializing or narration, just a succinct description of food on a plate or table. Often the students resist at first, suspicious of the focus, but after a few questions their expressions sharpen slightly and they get to work, most of them already planning where this stripped-down start will take them. The catch is that when they are done they are told to pass their descriptions to another student, and write a scene based on what they’re given.

The fun of this exercise is that even the most deliberately uninspired student ends up finding plenty to extrapolate from the most basic list of ingredients. Still, out of sheer perversity I began to wonder if I could come up with foods that could appear in fiction but be total blanks and say absolutely nothing, the beige wall of fiction food.

I started off basic. How about pasta? Practically everyone eats it. Not even spaghetti and meatballs, which might say Italian-Americana—if a character cooking pasta alla puttanesca, does it really tell us anything about her? That turned out to be a bad example, since puttanesca means “whore-style.” Well played, subconscious. And in fact this was how it turned out every single time. I was totally unable to avoid grafting a series of assumptions onto every single food. I tried foods that are trendy-common and dated-common, fairly specialized foods, and foods that are so outdated no one eats them and foods so ubiquitous that almost everyone eats them and no one cares. Each one led me down a path.

Bill carves a turkey. Discuss.

Observe: Bill sat down to a bowl of soup. Translation: Bill is lonely and the soup is canned, or else I would have told you it was spinach-lentil and then you’d know that Bill is still lonely, but also vegetarian, meaning he will always have the friendship of the animal kingdom if only he were wise enough to realize that.

Bill enjoyed a slice of cake. Translation: Bill is a child, and/or it is his birthday. Worse, it was recently his birthday but now that’s finished, and the cake is leftover and probably a little stale. Now everyone is depressed, not just that lonely guy with the bowl of canned soup.

Bill drank a glass of water. Translation: Bill is obviously in recovery. Or thirsty. Or hot. Or maybe dying. We have no way of knowing in which state of extremis Bill is languishing, but bothering to tell us he is drinking something only to have that something be mere water calls more attention to itself than saying he drank a glass of gin. It’s actually a pretty hostile move on the writer’s part when you think about it.

Bill is eating pig’s ear salad. Once upon a time this would have told us Bill was a poor hog farmer, wasting not and wanting not. Now it tells us Bill is the sort of guy who sports a pig tattoo and whose girlfriend has bangs and pickles her own rhubarb.

On Wednesday, Bill rolled out pasta for pumpkin ravioli, which he planned to serve with sage and browned butter sauce. Bill is unemployed, but making the most of it.

Bill rubbed the chicken all over with a stick of butter, then placed the chicken in the oven to roast. Bill’s been reading Julia Child, either the first time in the Sixties, or during her more recent resurgence, when everyone remembered how much we love Julia Child before we got sick of people blogging about her and forgot it again. Either way, the whole stick of butter marks both Bill and the chicken as sybarites. Frankly, I am a bit concerned about his recovery.

In short, Bill had a harrowing time at my hands. By the end I was just imagining him sitting at an empty table and staring into space, but that just made it worse, so I gave him a slice of bread.

When I ask writers for a food essay, they sometimes say they aren’t really foodie people, or don’t come from foodie people. This doesn’t mean that they have no story to tell about food, however; it often turns out that they have a more interesting story than foodie people who do come from foodie people. Instead they cling to a single hard-won memory: the egg sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, the occasional loaf of fresh bread, the red currants served with biscuits and whipped cream in an otherwise ramshackle childhood. (There are exceptions. A friend of mine once told me, rather grudgingly, how his grandfather butchered pigs and cured prosciutto in the garage of his New Jersey house, adding doubtfully, “I don’t know, is that really all that special?”)

People seem to feel that loving food and writing about it manages to be both louche and twee and maybe they’re right: all those rhapsodic descriptions of oozing cream, all those fucking cake pops. It gets to be a bit much. The other day I saw a recipe for teensy cakes cooked individually inside eggshells and it cast a poison-yellow blight across my soul, just for a moment.

Anyway, everyone assumes a food essay must be an extended appreciation for some rare or totemic item, and it’s true that there are plenty of essays like that, and also that I love them and make no apology for that. But there is a delightful, crabby exuberance to be found in the exploration of really terrible food. Sometimes it is the wasteland that sets the stage: MFK Fisher’s childhood was dominated by an abstemious grandmother with stomach issues and a Christian loathing of pleasure; whenever I think of this awful woman I think of the most dispiriting phrase in the English language: “boiled dressing.” Fisher had a few moments of gustatory pleasure as a child—that was her egg sandwich, plus the dishes made by a family cook who seemed just fine until she murdered her mother and herself—but by the time Fisher married young and moved to France she was ready to branch out in more ways than one. In her best work the food is paired with a dark little twist, be it wartime privation, loss, death, loneliness, or some unmet sexual craving.

Even more fun is when it isn’t the emotional setting that adds that necessary prickliness, but a truly matchless culinary failure. I’m not talking about mothers who served a lot of casseroles–mere boredom is not enough. I mean items like baloney cups, formed by placing a slice of baloney in the microwave with a chunk of quivering Velveeta on top and heating them up until the meat contracted into a tortured little cup of cheese. I have never actually eaten one of these, which my sister in law apparently ate a lot as a child, but sometimes when my guard is down the image of that fleshy, puckered cup floats across my brain.  It has that kind of power.

This is a too-little-traveled narrative avenue for writers who have encountered real crime-against-nature food, or who have unknowingly caused themselves to be served something like a medieval-style herring pie. People think they only get to write about food if they had an Italian nonna or just returned from a jaunt to Bangkok, but I’m telling you, baloney-cup-eaters, there is room for you, too.