The Hungry Muse
My mother wasn’t a good cook. She burned spaghetti and was overly dependent on the Hamburger Helper line of packaged food products. Before dinner, she’d serve us cocktail sausages and smoked oysters on crackers.
This was from the same woman who preferred to juice her own oranges and who sent my brother and me off to school with peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches. Lettuce might have been healthier than jelly, but nobody ever wanted to trade for our lunches.
I’m thinking back on all this because I’m in Key West for a two-week literary seminar focused on food and its place in literature, and more specifically on the links between food and memory. There are lectures, cocktail parties, writing workshops, and several hundred writers and eaters in attendance.
Two of my favorite Southern writers are here: Roy Blount, Jr. and Julia Reed, both of whom wax poetic on oysters and good bourbon. Other speakers include Ruth Rachel, the former editor of Gourmet, and editor extraordinare Judith Jones who “discovered” Julia Child and published such renowned food writers as M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard. Frank Bruni, the gay former New York Times food critic and author of the new book Born Round is here too.
These people are not only professionals, they’re serious foodies. While I might pass as one with my rosy cheeks and thickening waist line, I neither seek out the latest restaurants, nor do I live to try new recipes in the Sunday Times. I write about driving to the Smyrna Diner to eat pan-fried muskrat, taste-testing fruitcakes, and figuring out what to do with a bottle of whipped cream flavored vodka.
Here in Key West, I prefer to gobble a late night slice of pizza with the drag queens and go-go boys on Duval Street than to dine on sautéed black grouper with pasta purses and lobster and foie gras butter at Café Marquesa.
You can imagine then my trepidation when asked to write a couple of food pieces for discussion and critique, including a 3,000 word story inspired by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and his childhood memory of the taste of the “Madeleine.”
Do these people know my limit is seven hundred and fifty words? That I’ve never read Proust? Hell, I’m not even one hundred percent sure what a “Madeleine” is. A dry cookie? A little cake?
But I’ve come to Key West to challenge myself, so write I do, a long story about drinking Belgian beer with my brother and then a couple of shorter pieces, including one about the time my mother decided to cook a pot roast in the engine of our Buick station wagon during an eight hundred mile drive from the mountains of North Carolina to sunny Miami.
Yep, you heard that right. Apparently, an economical and ever practical 70s housewife could use engine heat to cook a scrumptious meal for her family while on a driving trip.
My brother and I eagerly helped our mother wrap and seal the pot roast, potatoes, carrots, and onions in three layers of tin foil and then wedge it into a secure place in the engine. My father did not share our amusement.
Somewhere off I-75 at a Stuckey’s in South Georgia, we stopped for our “carbecue” supper. Hungry and excited, I watched my mother lovingly set a picnic table with paper plates, plastic cups and cutlery, and a big jug of iced tea. There must have been flowers. I’m certain Southern Living magazine or whatever other women’s magazine she got the idea from would have recommended a centerpiece.
When my father went to lift out the silver foil packet it was bulging and dripping with half-cooked meat and vegetables and reeking of exhaust fumes. He let out a roar of expletives as it burned his hands, and in a fit of anger he flung the whole stinking mess into a field beside where the car was parked. Picnic over. We dined instead on hot dogs and pecan rolls in the station wagon, and my parents didn’t speak to each other until we got to Miami. The divorce was imminent.
This anecdote and my other stories receive positive feedback from my fellow writers in the workshop. Amusing. Good imagery. A strong voice, they say.
What I’m learning in Key West is that writing about food is really writing about life. It’s almost confessional. Food as subject can provide us with subsistence, pleasure, and diversion. The important thing is to write what you like. Pepperoni pizza yes. Le Cordon Bleu no.
Bon Appetit.
Reach Rich Barnett and read more of his stories on Rehoboth at www.rehobothwithrich.blogspot.com.