Volume 1, No. 28: Food Stories + Popovers

Greetings, readers and eaters! My house is finally completely unpacked and it is an amazing feeling. I’ve been more focused and productive in the past two days than I have been in months. Apparently having my flour organized and my dishes on shelves makes a massive difference in my quality of life.

This week, I’m talking food stories. I’m a baker, so you probably knew it was coming. I absolutely love books about food. Cookbooks, food memoirs, food nonfiction: give it to me. Most of all, though, I love fiction that deals with food. Food is such a big, complicated part of our lives. There is so much richness in stories about food because food means so many different things to different people. It can be comforting or traumatizing. It can be a connection to cultural identity or a source of cultural separation. Food is wrapped up in history, geography, memory, family, ritual, ethnicity, and just about every interpersonal relationship that humans experience. So here are three books I love that all have a lot to say about food.

The Books

Backlist: Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi (Fiction, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020)

I have been waiting for a chance to write about this book, because it is one of my all-time favorites. I read it back in January, and then I reread it on audio a few months later because it is just that good.

The story follows two estranged Nigerian sisters, close as children, who grew apart from each other in the aftermath of trauma (CW for child abuse and rape). The story moves through time, as the sisters grow into themselves as adults, always carrying the wounds of their separation with them. They reunite for the first time in a decade at their mother's home in Lagos, where, finally, they begin to repair their relationship. Intertwined with their story is that of their mother, and these various timelines blend and weave and move together in so many interesting and beautiful ways.

Taiye and Kehinde are brilliant characters, rendered with so much love and detail. Their lives are deeply grounded in the real world. They deal with hard things and ordinary things: relationships, work, family. Everything they experience—first love, heartbreak, new friendships, loneliness, homesickness—is palpable. Every moment I spent reading this book felt simply like being in the world with these women as they went about their days.

One of the reasons this novel feels so lush and real is because of the way Ekwuyasi writes scenes. Scenes are the stuff of life; they’re what our relationships are made of. Ekwuyasi’s scenes are full of emotion and tension and movement. She writes from inside moments: wandering the streets of London stoned, cooking dinner for your lover, making a new friend on a balcony, drawing in a sketchbook. Every single scene pulses with life. I found myself wanting to slow down and savor the details, while also wanting to read faster, greedy for every drop of this novel, desperate to know what would happen next. It’s not an especially dramatic book—it’s a character-driven story about sisterhood and queerness and grief, food and marriage, art and healing. But it’s full of relentless forward momentum that makes it almost painful to stop reading.

Ekwuyasi writes about food with incredible deftness. Throughout the novel, Taiye is in culinary school and works in restaurants. So food is central to the plot, and to Taiye’s understanding of herself. But beyond that, Ekwuyasi uses food to capture emotion. She writes about brewing matcha after sleeping with someone new for the first time, about experimenting with a bread recipe until you get it right. There are tender scenes of lovers sharing a late-night snack. There are poignant scenes of Taiye baking in her mother’s kitchen in Lagos, using food as a way to reconnect with her family. Ekwuyasi writes about cooking as forgiveness, cooking as apology, cooking as a form of intimacy. But she also writes about cooking alone in your apartment, making an ordinary breakfast. Food, in this novel, is celebration and despair. It’s a way of grieving. It’s an offering. It’s boring, ordinary sustenance. It’s a language.

Then there’s the queerness, which is so messy and layered. Taiye’s queerness is central to her identity. It's also casual, incidental. Here is a queer character who gets to be fully herself, whose queerness means different things in different contexts, shows up in different ways depending on who she’s with, where she is. We get to watch her explore and mess up and atone and figure out how she wants to be queer in a million different ways. Ekwuyasi also writes about queer friendship with so much honesty and nuance. Every scene that involved queer friends made me want to settle in and never leave.

Ekwuyasi does something really interesting with the narrative, which moves between three POVs. Kambirinachi, Taiye and Kehinde’s mother, is an Ogbanje, a spirit who lives many lives, haunting families and causing misfortune. But Kambirinachi has chosen to live one human life, and her Ogbanje kin aren’t happy about it. The tone of Kambirinachi’s sections is distinct; it doesn’t have the same pulsing aliveness that Kehinde and Taiye's sections do. This feels like a conscious choice. Kambirinachi is not exactly of this world, but she’s struggling to carve out a place for herself in it anyway. So much of this book is about what we carry, the seen and unseen traumas, histories, and experiences that live inside bodies and shape lives. There is so much that Kambirinachi and her daughters don't see in each other, and sometimes in themselves. Telling their stories so differently exposes the hurts and silences and spaces between them. It heightens the emotional impact of the whole journey.

Honestly I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface on everything that’s going on in this book. I don’t put much stock in star ratings, but, for what it’s worth, this is a five star-read for me. It’s rare I rate more than 5 books with five stars in a year.

Frontlist: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Memoir)

This is a beautiful memoir about grief and food. It appears, at first, to unfold in a straightforward way. Zauner grew up in Eugene, Oregon with a Korean mother and a white American father. She writes about the difficult relationship she had with her mother growing up, and how that relationship changed when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. At the time of the diagnosis, Zauner was in her mid-twenties, and just starting to tentatively find a softer, healthier way to be in relationship with her mother. Her mother’s illness cuts that process short; instead of having years to work though all the tangled strands of their relationship, Zauner returns home to Oregon to care for her mother while she’s dying.

The narrative is mostly linear. Zauner writes in detail about taking care of her mother while she was sick. A huge portion of the book is about the intimacy, strangeness, and pain of watching someone you love die. The story doesn’t begin with the grief of losing her mother; it begins with the grief of witnessing her mother’s death, the grief of an unexpected seismic shift in a life. The linear structure is deceptively simple. Zauner takes her time describing the hardest and most painful time of her life. It gives the book immediacy and weight. The slowness of the narrative makes the last part of the book, in which Zauner writes about life after her mother’s death, painfully hard to bear at times. This is a memoir about journeying through grief, and Zauner writes down that journey with incredible vulnerability. She doesn’t shy away from the gross parts, the ugly parts, the contradictory parts.

Throughout, Zauner writes about food with astounding skill. It opens with her sobbing in H Mart after her mother’s death. She describes in detail the various Korean dishes her mother cooked and they memories they evoke. So much of the book is about culture and family and memory, about how losing her mother feels in part like losing a connection to her Korean family and heritage. So the specificity with which she write about Korean food feels especially moving. It’s as if she’s writing a way back to herself with every dish she describes, every food she learns to make after her mother is gone, every seasoning, dish, and ingredient she claims as hers.

In one of the most poignant passages in the whole book, she writes about learning to make kimchi after her mother’s death. The act becomes a kind of elegy for her mother, but it also marks a transition into a world without her mother, and thus without her mother’s kimchi. It’s a heartbreaking scene, this self-caretaking, a daughter teaching herself a beloved recipe when her mother cannot.

It’s obvious that Zauner loves food, but she also writes about the places food cannot touch. There’s a memorable scene in which she and her father travel to Korea after her mother’s death, and treat themselves to a meal in a great restaurant. But neither of them can enjoy the food, and their attempts to do so are painful to witness. The book is full of contradictions like this. Zauner captures all the bizarre and unexpected ways that grief moves in and out of a life.

She reads the audiobook and I highly recommend it.

Upcoming: The Heartbreak Bakery by A.R. Capetta (YA Fiction, Candlewick Press, 10/12)

This is a book about food magic—literally. Syd is an agender baker who works at the Proud Muffin, Austin’s queerest bakery. After a breakup, Syd accidentally pours so much anger and hurt into a batch of brownies that the various couples who eat them all break up. Horrified, Syd sets out to get every couple back together by baking a series of magical treats designed to give the couples exactly what they need, whether that’s forgiveness, honesty, or a new spark of excitement. Along the way, Syd falls for a cute bike messenger named Harley. Romance, self-discovery, and a whole lot of baking ensue.

This book is fluffy, delightfully queer, earnest and sweet, and full of recipes. I’ve really enjoyed A.R. Capetta’s books in the past, and I love this one for all the same reasons. It’s funny and lighthearted. Example: Near the end of the book, Syd hosts a Big Gay Bakeout fundraiser to save the Proud Muffin. One of Syd’s co-workers and a judge at the event says to one of the contestants: “But what makes it a bisexual babka?” I mean, how can you not love a book with a line like that?

But it’s also so genuine and deals with the real challenges of being a queer teenager. Syd learns a lot over the course of the book about standing up for yourself and being a good friend, taking responsibility for your actions, and what it means to actually open up to someone you love. It’s also heavily steeped in queer culture in a way that’s both fun and a little over the top—but over the top in a way that feels true to being a queer teenager newly surrounded by queer people. Syd is so fiercely queer, and I love this. I remember what it felt like to be seventeen and in a room of queer people for the first time, and that’s the feeling Capetta writes into these pages: the giddiness, the sense of relief, the excitement, that edge of “Is this real?” and “do I really belong here?” The Proud Muffin is a refuge, a community space, Syd’s home away from home, the beating heart of the novel.

Then there’s the sheer magic of the baking. The book is full of food descprionts. Syd narrates recipe after recipe, describing how to bake various pies, chocolate chip cookies that will make you feel all your feelings, and lemon ginger scones, to name just a few. Scattered throughout the book are recipes, some for baked goods (like the breakup brownies), but also for more abstract things (A Big Gay Bakeout, Honest Pie, The Worst Night). Baking is how Syd works through anger and loss and confusion and delight, and all of those feelings make their way into the bakes. But even without the magic element, this is such a lovely story about a determined and creative baker who loves food and what it can do.

As a baker, this book delighted me. It’s out October 12th, and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

When I was thinking about food stories from my life, popovers was the first one I thought of. It’s not an especially interesting story, but it’s an old one. Popovers are what my family eats on Christmas morning. I have no memory of when this started, only that it’s been going on as long as I can remember. My dad made them when I was a kid, and then at some point my brother took over. For years, I was convinced I could never make popovers as perfect and lofty as my brother’s. They’re actually absurdly easy, but I always associated them with special occasions. They were something my brother made, not me.

I still love eating popovers on Christmas morning, but I no longer adhere to the story that they’re only for the fanciest of breakfasts. I can make popovers, and so can you! This recipe is from the Tassajara Bread Book, and it is literally one of the easiest batters you can mix up and put in the oven. Eat them on any ordinary weekday morning, eat them for dinner, tuck one into your pocket for a snack.

I Can Make These Popovers and So Can You

Ingredients:

• 120 grams (1 cup) all-purpose flour

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 3 eggs, beaten

• 1 cup milk

• 2 Tbs melted butter

Put the flour and salt in a medium bowl. Add the eggs, milk, and butter. Whisk until smooth.

Preheat the oven to 450. Grease a 12-cup regular muffin tin or two 6-cup popover tins (it doesn’t matter which; they’ll rise either way). You want to smear the sides of the muffin cups with oil (vegetable oil of any kind works) and let a little pool on the bottoms, too. Stick the greased pan into the oven to preheat.

When the pan is hot, fill each cup 1/3 full with batter. Bake at 450 for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 and bake for 10-20 minutes longer. Do not open the oven for at least 30 minutes! If you do, your popovers will fall.

That’s it. Fill them with butter and jam, or cream cheese, or roasted veg, or spiced ground meat, or leftover roast chicken, or literary anything else that you enjoy eating

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Early Fall Sweet Pepper Soup

There are some people who do not consider a pureed soup a full meal, but I am not one of those people. It is soup season now, and I will be happily making and consuming soups of all kinds for the foreseeable future: vegetable soups, brothy soups, hardy stews, bean soups, creamy soups. This is one of those “time to use up whatever’s left of last week’s CSA share” soups, and it’s a delightful one. You could make yourself a cheese toastie and a fried egg to go with it, or eat it with a quick salad. Or you could forego greens and protein and enjoy it with plain buttered toast, like I did. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not dinner.

Slice some leeks into thin half-moons. I used about ten small ones; one big one will do. Slice an onion, too. Or, if you don’t have leeks, make it 2 or 3 onions. Heat some butter and olive oil in a large soup pot and toss in your sliced aromatics. Add some minced or pressed garlic, as much as you want. Cook over medium heat until everything is soft and glistening. Add salt and pepper and some fresh thyme springs. Meanwhile, chop up some sweet peppers. I used about twelve small orange and yellow ones. 3-4 big bells will do. Add them to the pot along with a few sliced tomatoes if you have any. Add a quart of stock, any kind. No stock? Use water.

Bring to a boil and let simmer for 30ish minutes, until the vegetables are very soft. Puree with an immersion blender, or let cool for a minute and then blend it in a blender-blender. Add the juice of a lemon, a few sprinkles of cayenne or Aleppo pepper if that’s your thing, and a tablespoon of honey. If you want, add a little cream. Taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking.

The Beat: The Heiress by Molly Greeley, read by Ell Potter

This novel centers a minor character from Pride & Prejudice: Anne de Bourgh, Darcy’s intended finance. I have to admit that I can’t remember a thing about P&P (sorry!) but I am enjoying this. As a sickly baby, Anne is prescribed laudanum, and soon develops a dependence on it. As a child and young woman, her family continues to insist that she needs the drug to keep her healthy. It isn’t until she’s nearly thirty, after her father dies, that Anne realizes that it’s the opium itself making her sick. She flees to London to make a life for herself. It’s a quiet, slow-moving book, and I appreciate what it has to say about agency and power. I’m just getting to the queer part—Anne meets a woman in London whom she’s immediately drawn to—and I’m excited to see where it goes. I love Potter’s narration, too. When Anne finally stops taking opium, her voice gains strength and clarity; during the first part of the book her narration is almost dreamlike.

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I rounded up 8 works of epic poetry on audio. I also wrote about my experiences being a comics reader vs. being a comics fan.

Now Out

Hooray! The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine is now out. I absolutely loved it. I wrote about it a few weeks back, and I also reviewed it for BookPage. But that’s not all! A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett and The Good Arabs by Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch are now available as well. Go forth and find yourself copies!

The Boost

A few yummy tidbits:

• Queer Soup Night!

• I don’t know all of the farms here, but this is a cool list.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I am utterly in love with my new morning walk. I am constantly amazed that this is the little patch of earth where I get to live. I can’t wait to watch the sunrise from up here this winter.

And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!