crumbs, sweet wrappers, crisp packets
book recs for when you need a little something to tide you over
At this time of year I am always peckish. I’m wandering back and forth from my desk to the cupboard, cubes of chocolate or segments of pomelo, allowing myself to be distracted by all the supermarket offerings. When I spent a semester abroad in the US my housemate introduced me to candy corn and I made myself ill with it. I like the lie that you might have just a little, just a little, just a little bit more, like sneaking pages of a good book between all the work you should be doing. Here are a few books with an appreciation for eating in snatches, in handfuls.
Food comes in large portions in Elaine Castillo’s AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART: a birthday feast, stacks of restaurant trays, piles of frozen microwave pizza, an unforgettable scene with heaped plates of pancit. Food is its own love letter, furious and demanding and expressive, and the love comes in hopelessly huge amounts, even when it makes you ill. Smaller portions arise once in a while, tamarind candy, a just-fried empanada “crackling under her teeth”, cup noodles, but even they are fraught with tension and emotion. The novel is the story of Hero De Vera, who emigrates to the US after a decade spent fighting in the guerrilla New People’s Army in the Philippines and of the families she builds, the families that surround her, in both the Philippines and her new home, Milpitas. At its heart is the best queer love story I have ever read, sexy and romantic and thrilling, with a stubborn and saucy love interest who is, if you’ll forgive me, a total fucking snack. I wanted to eat her up: I settled for eating up the book.
(buy @ hive)Laurie Colwin’s lovely novel Happy All The Time is good and her short stories are even better but my favourite of her work is HOME COOKING, a memoir disguised as a recipe book. An excellent reader-friend (the best kind of friend) gave it to me for my birthday last year and it is now a comfort read, one that is rewarding to dip into now and then when you need a hit of warmth and kindness. Reading Home Cooking feels like your best mate coming over to take care of you when you’re sick, looking over her shoulder and feeding you gossip as she makes you soup. Colwin has an eye for details, for smaller bites: a story about a friend flying cream for her from England to the US, a caviar allergy which she reports cheerfully makes her “a cheap date”. One caveat: I have never tried any of the recipes. The book was published in the 80s and I worry that the meal selection reflects some of the excess of that period (“Creamed Spinach with Jalapeño Peppers”; “Chicken with Chicken Glaze”). At the same time, she makes everything tempting, even—or perhaps especially, to my wife’s dismay—a recipe for “Beef Tea”, which I come closer to making with every grey tiptoe into winter.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)It’s been a year and I’ve been well-behaved so I get to rec another Naomi Novik novel: SPINNING SILVER, a take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale featuring a stern and brilliant Jewish heroine, a literal ice king, fire demons, tsars and tsarinas, and a running question asking what you’ve earned, what you want and what you’re willing to pay for it. It hands out new POVs like someone shaking cards out of their sleeves. Just as you’ve gotten used to your three heroines, Novik slyly slips you a new distinct and enthralling perspective: you want another? And another? Here, try this one — and one more? Food, when it appears, is almost always in mouthfuls, not nearly enough and yet so enticing—a portion of porridge, cherries spooned into tea, a fresh egg—that you keep turning the pages, hungry for more.
(buy @ indiebound)One of my greatest treats in a while has been Colette’s CHÉRI, the story of fifty-year-old courtesan Léa de Lonval and her twenty-five-year-old lover, Chéri. (My translation was by Roger Senhouse: I liked it.) It’s hard to know how to read this novel, exactly: a thinly disguised lesbian love story? A matriarchal power fantasy? A steamy study of internalised misogyny? It was kind of all of the above, while also being sturdy and sensuous in its prose, from Léa and Chéri’s neverending power battles (they look at each other “in open hostility”) to Parisian scenery to sex scenes that are frequent but never once embarrassing, no mean feat. Instead you have a “kiss… such that they reeled apart, drunk, deaf, breathless, trembling as if they had just been fighting” and “a whole animal chant of desire, in which she could distinguish her name - ‘darling’ - ‘I want you’ - ‘I’ll never leave you’ - a song to which she listened, solicitous, leaning over him, as if unwittingly she had hurt him to the quick.” It’s a slim novella, just over 100 pages, and I encourage you to gobble it up. But maybe tear out the last chapter, which is nonsense.
(buy any number of great editions on ebay)
ALSO CONSIDER: the recipe breaks in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, along with everything else in Heartburn; Hemingway missing lunch in A Moveable Feast, going on long hungry walks and making up a list of the food he’s going to tell his wife he ate; Brad Pitt munching his way through Ocean’s 11; the pop song “Hot”, by Avril Lavigne, a love song howled as she picks her teeth clean with him; “Bless butter. Bless brie./Sanctify schmaltz. And cream and cashews”; Edmund’s Turkish Delight, of course.