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118 The Recipe in the Writing Class In the past my creative nonfiction class has focused on times and places important to students’ lives—memoir, but with an emphasis on looking outward more than in. Students did excellent work, but I wasn’t satisfied with the class, if only because it became the occasion for one young writer to get liquored up and take the train to interview an ex-boyfriend, whom she said she’d hurt badly,to draw fresh blood.I started thinking of changing the focus to food writing instead.I suppose a student might get liquored up and take the train to tell mom her beef stew is greasy, but someone needs to after all. There are many approaches to writing well about food, from journalism to memoir to political and cultural histories.The best, going back to that of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the Montaigne of food, is both thoughtful and evocative. Some writers, such as A. J. Liebling in Between Meals, make food a fetish.Others,such as Maupassant in his short story “Boule de Suif,” use it as backdrop and motif for drama.The very best, such as Isak Dinesen in “Babette’s Feast,” treat it as a human need as soulful as love. The temptations of the form are there in its function: mastication is a private act, even when done in public, and food writing can easily become onanistic. The worst of the memoirish genre is set in the eternally bronze glow of the setting sun of a distant land, the prose purple and flowery, and reading it is like eating gloppy pasta al forno soaked in lavender perfume. M. F. K. Fisher, born one hundred years ago, is known as a food writer, but she said she wrote of hunger.The New York Times wrote,“In a properly the recipe in the writing class 119 run culture, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher would be recognized as one of the great writers this country has produced in this century.”I use her essays even in fiction classes. For Christmas I got the fiftieth-anniversary edition of her The Art of Eating, a 740-page collection of several earlier books including Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf. It’s this last one, written in 1942, that provides an interesting nonfiction form I might call The Recipe, which got me thinking about how to restructure my nonfiction course. The book was written when wartime shortages had compounded the problems of the Depression, and Fisher offers sensible advice in each chapter about how to make do, provide nutrition, and even enjoy oneself at table. Along the way she illuminates her times. For true emergencies, the essay “How to Stay Alive” ponders what’s needed spiritually and nutritionally to survive on what was a few cents a day in her time. It includes a recipe for making a slumgullion of “ground whole-grain cereal,” a tiny amount of cheap meat, and loads of vegetables (“wilted and withered things a day old maybe . . . [or] the big coarse ugly ones”), stewed three or more hours: I know, from some experience [that it] holds enough vitamins and minerals and so on and so forth to keep a professional strong-man or a dancer or even a college professor in good health and equable spirits. The main trouble with it, as with any enforced and completely simple diet, is its monotony. It must be considered, then, as a means to an end, like ethyl gasoline, which can never give much esthetic satisfaction to its purchaser or the automobile it is meant for but is almost certain to make that automobile run smoothly. All this sounds more applicable with each morning’s news. Each chapter of How to Cook a Wolf contains one or more recipes, a selfimposition on form, like rhyme in poems, that Fisher doesn’t usually use in her work. In the introduction to Serve It Forth (1937) she says, “Recipes in my book will be there like birds in a tree—if there is a comfortable branch.” Even when she stops a story and starts a recipe, she’s just continuing in another mode, since her recipes are also full of commentary, explication, and metaphor. On baking bread: “From there on, when you first assemble the ingredients, the dance begins. It is one that should be rehearsed a few [3.135.183.89] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:22 GMT...

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