He lays a hand on my arm. He looks me in the eyes, and then, resignedly, he looks off toward the mountains. Then at me again. “I killed a man, Witold, do you understand?” Again he looks away, at the sky; clearly, talking to me is not bringing him the kind of relief he might have been hoping for. “He was standing next to me, roughly as far away as my brother is now.” And he points at his brother, who is sitting quite close by. “And I shot him dead, you see?”

Then he waits for me to say something.

I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know how to enter into the mood of this conversation. It’s 2009 and in the place we’re sitting, just a year earlier, the Russian invasion of Georgia was under way. I’m wondering how to get myself out of this pickle. I’m on my own, drunk, among some Georgians the size of oak trees; we’re surrounded by mountains I can’t name. A while ago they told me they’re descended from princes—as I already know, here in the Caucasus there’s often someone claiming to be royalty.

But then they started telling me that their great-uncle was Stalin’s brother—that’s an advance on the usual story, because although everyone in Georgia is proud of Stalin, I’ve never met any of his cousins before.

Especially since I know that Stalin’s brothers died as soon as they were born.

But now they’re telling me about the Russian soldiers they killed during the recent war between Russia and Georgia. Four big, beefy guys, with necks like tree trunks.

It’s all too much for me. I’m trying to devise an escape plan.

But before I can make a move, one of the men lunges at me. He pins me down. And holds on.

*

He couldn’t stand cooking. When he was a child, his mother had various jobs. One of them was as a cook. Supposedly that was why for the rest of his life Joseph Stalin hated the smell of food being cooked, and had all the kitchens serving his dachas and houses built at a distance—which was true of the dacha in New Athos that I visited in Abkhazia.

When he and his comrades were exiled to Siberia by the tsar, they agreed that they would share all the duties equally—the cooking, the cleaning, and the procurement of food. But it soon became clear that Stalin had no intention of cooking or cleaning. He just went hunting and fishing.

Yakov Sverdlov, who was in exile with Stalin, was particularly angry with him. “We were meant to cook the dinners ourselves,” recalled Stalin years later. “At the time I had a dog, and I named him Yashka, which naturally displeased Sverdlov, because he too was Yashka [the diminutive of Yakov]. After dinner Sverdlov always washed the spoons and plates, but I never did. I ate my food, put my plates on the floor, the dog licked them, and everything was clean.”

Toward the end of their exile, when they were living with a third communist, Lev Kamenev, whenever it was time to wash the dishes, Stalin would flee the house.

After the revolution he ate with his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, at the Kremlin canteen, which in those days had the reputation of being one of the worst in Moscow.

The French writer and communist Henri Barbusse visited Stalin shortly after Alliluyeva’s suicide and said of his living conditions: “The bedrooms are as simply furnished as those of a respectable second-class hotel. The dining room is oval in shape; the meal has been sent in from a neighboring restaurant. In a capitalist country a junior office clerk would turn up his nose at the bedrooms and complain about the fare.”

According to Vyacheslav Molotov, who headed the Soviet diplomatic corps, Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins.

*

Let’s go back to my meeting in the mountains.

It all started innocently enough. I was in Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, in the beautiful mountains of central Georgia. I was driving around the picturesque neighboring villages to find the local wine producers that used to supply the Kremlin cellars—the only wine Stalin drank was Georgian.

“Wine producers” sounds very grand. In fact, every self-respecting farmer in Georgia has some vines and reliably makes fantastic wine, as well as a sort of brandy, often 70 percent proof, known as chacha. It was a cottage industry of this kind that I was looking for.

The Georgians’ boundless hospitality made my work impossible—because how can you get any work done when everyone you visit brings out the wine and the chacha and has to treat you before they’ll answer your questions? After half an hour you’re too well oiled, and besides, the day is still young, the nature is beautiful, your host is friendly, so why on earth do any work? And then once we’d had a drink, every single host told me that a plane used to fly from Moscow just to fetch Stalin’s wine. What’s more, every other host swore he had documents to prove it, and two of them even showed them to me, though first of all, they were in Georgian, and second, I was too tipsy to understand them or remember anything about them.

So I’d been having a jolly time driving around Gori for several days when I encountered the first of the Tarkanishvili brothers. He was in his off-road vehicle, just leaving the allotment he’d inherited. He had a bit of a paunch, and he was wearing a cap with the logo of an American basketball team. When he heard what I was looking for, he told me, in broken Russian, to call him that evening.

“You won’t regret it,” he said. “My family has a better story about Stalin than anyone else. In all of Gori.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

*

The following evening the brothers drove me into the mountains. They tossed into the back of their pickup truck a sheep that they’d butchered for shashliks. On the way all four of them started talking over one another:

“As a true son of our land, Stalin created a ‘little Georgia’ for himself in Russia. And did what he could to be surrounded by Georgians. Best of all, family.”

“Your family won’t betray you because they know that if they did, they’d have nowhere to come home to.”

“That’s why he kept all his sidekicks, those Molotovs and Khrushchevs, on a short leash. They knew that one false move and blam! You’re gone, grand Mr. People’s Commissar. Only the Georgians had peace.”

And so our journey flew by. On the way the gentlemen told me about their sports successes: one was a wrestling trainer, another trained weight lifters. They managed competitors at the international level.

By the time we reached the mountains, we were very well acquainted and fairly well canned, and the brothers finally decided to tell me about Stalin.

“For many years it was a secret—our father told us the story of Uncle Sasha, but he always stressed that we weren’t to repeat it to anyone…”

“Which was pointless, because in Georgia everyone knew anyway…”

“Our great-uncle Alexander, or Sasha, was Stalin’s brother. Don’t look at me like that! He was his brother. Boys, he doesn’t believe us…”

“He will soon. Listen, Witold. Stalin’s mother worked for our great-grandfather as a cook. And once or twice he and she…well, you know, they did what guys and gals do. When he found out she was pregnant, he married her off to the illiterate cobbler Vissarion.”

“Vissarion knew how to write! But he drank like a fish.”

“I heard he couldn’t count to three. Whatever the case, he had no idea what was going on. And when he realized, he took to beating the kid badly—really badly.”

“Little Stalin was always running away to spend time with our great-uncle Sasha, who was the same age as him, and who was also the son of our great-grandfather. They became friends, and many years later Great-uncle Sasha became Stalin’s cook and food taster at the Kremlin. Well, look at that—he still doesn’t believe us.”

It’s true. I didn’t believe a single word.

*

For many years Stalin, following Lenin’s example, didn’t attach much importance to food—those men of the revolution were sustained by something else. Just like Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva was clueless about cooking. Whereas Stalin himself knew how to make pretty good shashliks—he’d learned that at home in Georgia.

But when Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932—some say she couldn’t take it when she realized her husband had deliberately starved Ukraine—Stalin wanted nothing to do with shashliks or any other food. He became withdrawn and sank into a depression. Like others in the government he ate at the Kremlin, in the canteen. For the children who remained with him, the state hired a cook, apparently a rather average one.

Many years later Vyacheslav Molotov recalled that the food cooked for Stalin “was very simple and unpretentious.” In the winter he was always served meat soup with sauerkraut, and in the summer, fresh cabbage soup. For a second course there was buckwheat with butter and a slice of beef. For dessert, if there was any, cranberry jelly or dried fruit compote. “It was the same as during an ordinary Soviet summer vacation, but throughout the year.”

The brothers went on to tell me several stories about their great-uncle, and then about the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. The oldest one, Rati, really did lunge at me. But it turned out he just wanted to hug me and raise a toast to Poland’s president, Lech Kaczyński—the Georgians adore him because he defended their country against Russian aggression. For them, the brothers told me, Kaczyński is as great a hero as Stalin.

The next morning, once we had sobered up enough for one of them to be able to drive, they drove me back to Gori. We said goodbye with less enthusiasm, as you do when you have a hangover, but we promised one another we’d be friends for the rest of our lives. And although I haven’t seen them since, I remember our meeting with great fondness. But for many years I filed away the story about the great-uncle who cooked for Stalin along with the myths and fairy tales that people sometimes tell me on my travels.

I was very much mistaken. Great-uncle Sasha really did exist. More than that, he genuinely revolutionized Stalin’s eating habits; he got him out of the depressing Kremlin canteen and reminded him of the wonders and vitality of Georgian cuisine, as well as the virtues of the Georgian feast with friends. Stalin made use of these lessons to the end of his days.

Was he really the great-uncle of the four brothers who treated me to lamb shashliks that night? That I don’t know and am likely never to find out—I have tried to find them again, to no avail.

__________________________________

Excerpted from What’s Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork by Witold Szabłowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Copyright © 2023. Available from Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Onions remained predominantly a wild plant in the Americas much longer than in Europe and Asia.

The French explorer Jacques Marquette, traveling the shore of what is now Lake Michigan in 1674, relied for nourishment on an onion that the Indigenous locals called cigaga-wunj, which means “onion place” and is the origin of the name Chicago. In more recent times it has come to be known as the Canada onion, Allium canadense, and it grows wild in much of North America from New Brunswick to Florida and west to the Rocky Mountains. It is fairly easy to spot because it has a very strong onion scent and it flowers spectacularly in great globes of little pink or white blossoms. Today it is favored as an ornamental plant.

But some historians and naturalists insist that the wild onion that gave Chicago its name was actually the nodding wild onion, Allium cernuum. It is called nodding because it does not stand erect and, unusual for onions, is bent over even when flowering. It announces itself with white or deep pink or rose flowers with a strong scent of onion. According to a description from the 1890s, these onions look “bright on the whole since the reddish hues prevail. They are often in such quantities and grow so thickly that little else is noticeable where they stand.”

Such bright wild patches are a very rare sight today, even in their native habitat such as the Chicago area, though they are also found in Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

*

There are seventy species of wild onion native to North America. Native American Indians harvested them and sometimes ate them raw, but also used them to flavor cooked dishes or would eat them as a cooked vegetable. Onions were also used in syrups and in dyeing. Roasted wild onions and honey were used by Native Americans to treat snakebites.

There does not appear to have been much cultivation of alliums by Native North Americans, with the notable exception of the Aztecs. But Europeans could not imagine life without cultivated onions and so brought them with them.

Christopher Columbus, apparently finding no onions on his first voyage to the Caribbean, which was a voyage of exploration, brought along onion seeds, cattle, horses, and sheep on his second voyage, which was a voyage of colonization. In 1494 his crew planted onions in what is now the Dominican Republic.

But Mexicans may have already cultivated alliums. Hernán Cortés, in his march of conquest from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, found that the local people cooked onions, leeks, and garlic. According to Cortés, they ate an onion called xonacatl. This is a word in Nahuatl, the original Aztec language that is still in use. Today it means “onion,” but what kind of onion the original xonacatl was is not certain. In Mayan the word is kukut. Francisco Hernández, a physician to Philip II of Spain, was sent to Mexico from 1570 to 1577 to report on the flora. According to Hernández, xonacatl was an onion with a “split roof,” which probably meant a split bulb, more like a shallot.

Pre-Spanish cooking, much of which is still in practice, does not use a great deal of alliums. The rich sauces called moles involved dozens of ground-up ingredients but rarely an onion. The famous mole from Puebla, mole poblana, uses some five different chili peppers, chocolate, ground tortilla, seeds, and a dozen other ingredients including garlic, but no onions. Mole manchamanteles does include both boiled onions and garlic on its long ingredient list. Mole de olla also uses both onions and garlic.

It is far easier to trace pre-Spanish Mexican cooking than Sumerian, because the Spanish recorded what they found and the Indigenous people still have their culture and are continuing to cook the dishes they made before the Spanish arrived. Some modern inventions have crept in. City tortillas now are made by machine, but the people in Indigenous villages think this is a disgrace and tortillas there are still made by hand, exclusively by women. Recipes still call for xonacatl, but today cooks usually use the onion the Spanish brought. This is historian Heriberto García Rivas’s recipe for xonacatl in his cookbook Cocina prehispánica mexicana:

In a little hot chia oil, fry three onions finely chopped. Add three ripe zucchini squash, peeled and  quartered, a tablespoon of yucca or sweet potato flour, stir with a wooden spoon, mix in six large peeled and seeded tomatoes, maguey or corn syrup, salt, pepper, herbs, cook slowly.

*

It is not certain that the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest ate the bulbs of wild onions, but it is known that, like ancient Europeans, they ate other bulbs. They were particularly fond of camas, Camassia quamash, which, like onions, used to be thought of as a lily variety. More recent botanists have decided it is in the family of the agave.

White pioneers learned to eat camas in desperate times, noting that it was similar to but sweeter than an onion. But there is another camas that is deadly poisonous, known as “the death camas,” which grows among the edible camas and creates understandable reluctance among newcomers to harvest these bulbs. After the Nez Perce gave some good camas to Lewis and Clark, Lewis described it as “a tunicated bulb, much the consistence, shape and appearance of the onion; glutinous or somewhat slymy when chewed.” He thought lilies and hyacinths tasted better.

As in Europe, Native Americans were extremely fond of the wild onion called ramps, or ramson, a strong-smelling species. They cooked ramps as a vegetable sautéed in acorn oil. These alliums are among the first green vegetables to come up in the spring when little else is available and so were greatly valued, even used in religious rites by some tribes, including Chippewa, Cherokee, Ojibwa, Menominee, and Iroquois.

Early European colonists considered eating ramps to be a desperate move, and their smell was associated with extreme poverty, but they learned from Native Americans and these wild vegetables became an important resource for starving settlers. Native Americans continue to value these wild plants, but because of overharvesting and destruction of wild lands, they are becoming hard to find. They often grow undisturbed on the lands of national parks, but the reason they are undisturbed is that picking wild plants from national parks is illegal.

Native groups have tried to be granted an exception, but that is a difficult fight. Cherokee were charged in 2009 with illegally harvesting ramps from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, despite the park being situated on their traditional plantgathering lands. This is an ongoing fight for a number of Native American groups.

Europeans preferred cultivated onions because that was what they were used to. One hundred and fifty years after Columbus, there were still few onions cultivated in the Caribbean or North America. When Richard Ligon, escaping the English Civil War, moved to Barbados in 1647, he carried with him not only seeds for sage, tarragon, parsley, and marjoram, but also onion seeds, and thus began Barbados’s onion cultivation.

The first Pilgrims brought onions with them on the Mayflower. Onions were planted in Massachusetts in 1629 and in Virginia in 1648. The founding father known to be a great onion eater, George Washington, seemed passionate about them, and ordered onions to be planted at Mount Vernon, according to a 1798 report. Thomas Jefferson left detailed accounts that show that onions were a staple crop on his Virginia estate, Monticello, before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, and even on land he owned before construction began on the estate in 1769. He seemed to have favored white Spanish onions, but Madeira and tree onions were also planted. Amelia Simmons, author of the first cookbook published in independent America, in Hartford in 1796, recommended Madeira white onions if you prefer a “softer” flavor and “not too fiery.” But, like Pliny, she also recommended red onions.

By 1806 the new Americans were raising six varieties of onions, and by the time of the Civil War, there were fourteen popular varieties.

*

The Easterners who went west in the mid-nineteenth century found few onions under cultivation. They greatly missed them, even though they liked to call them “skunk eggs” because of their strong smell. Because of their ability to store well, onions later became a basic provision for migrating pioneers on the wagons that went west. An 1860 issue of Hutchings’ California Magazine listed onions as one of the “necessities” for an eight-day journey into the mountains.

Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the widow of the infamous George Armstrong Custer, did not write of his racism and genocide, but she did write about onions while camping in the west with Custer, saying that they were “as rare out there, and more appreciated than pomegranates are in New York.”

Custer and his younger brother Tom, who also died on the Little Bighorn, were zealous cepaphiles. But apparently, in a rare criticism, Elizabeth was not fond of her husband’s onion breath. In an 1873 letter to his wife while on an expedition to the Yellowstone River, Custer wrote that he was filling up on onions now that he was away from her. “I supped on RAW ONIONS; I will probably breakfast, lunch and dine on them tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after ad libitum ad infinitum . . . Go it old fellow! Make the most of your liberties! . . . If you intend to eat raw onions now is your only time for ‘missus is comin.’ ”

Custer seems to have taken onions as he found them, but some Americans wanted more—they wanted them bigger, smaller, stronger, milder, sweeter. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries onions were to become big business.

 __________________________________

From The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food – Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes by Mark Kurlansky, on sale November 7th from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 2023. All rights reserved.

I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet.

I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal. I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. “A bottle of vermouth,” he said, “you should just open it and look at it.” Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand. When I do add vermouth I apply Hemingway’s formula, 15:1, in honor of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who liked gin to outnumber vermouth in the same ratio he wanted to outnumber opponents in battle. The toast I make, with whoever is present, is usually the one I learned from the late Caroline Herron, a former editor at the Times Book Review: “To the confusion of our enemies.” The toast Jack Nicholson makes in Easy Rider—“To old D. H. Lawrence”—isn’t bad, either.

“The world and its martinis are mine!” Patricia Highsmith exclaimed in her diaries. Martinis inspire this sort of enthusiasm. Frederick Seidel, in his poem “At Gracie Mansion,” refers to an ice-cold martini as a “see-through on a stem.” The poet Richard Wilbur liked to add “fennel juice and foliage” to his. I’d like to be like Eloise, in the children’s book by Kay Thompson, and keep a bottle of gin in my bedroom. If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.

Occasionally I’ll mix a vodka martini, recalling that Langston Hughes appeared in a Smirnoff advertisement. Vodka martinis flush out the snobs, who don’t consider them martinis at all. Roger Angell, whose New Yorker essay “Dry Martini” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, admitted that he and his wife moved from gin to vodka because vodka was “less argumentative.” The best paean to the vodka martini appears in Lawrence Osborne’s amazing book The Wet and the Dry, which is about trying to get a drink in countries where to do so is against the law. Osborne decides that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster.”

Don’t get all excited, as did Kenneth Tynan, and try to take your vodka martini rectally. Tynan had read, in Alan Watts’s autobiography, that this was a good idea. Tynan had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.

I make my first drink on the late side because I like it too much. I also want to prolong the anticipation. Alcohol is, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, constant proof that God loves us. I drink more than most people but less than some. I don’t have an especially big tank; my tolerance is not Homeric. But almost nightly I drink two martinis and, with dinner, a glass or two of wine, without negative effects in the morning. If I have that third glass of wine, my morning at the desk becomes an afternoon at the desk.

Drinking alone doesn’t depress me, the way it does some people. Franklin didn’t recommend it. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone,” he wrote. But Christopher Hitchens said that solo drinks “can be the happiest glasses you ever drain,” and Norman Mailer, in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, praised what he called “that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking.” When alone, I’ll put on good loud music, of the sort my wife, Cree, does not especially like (jazz or Hüsker Dü) and read magazines and eat cheese until I get tiddly and head for bed. But I prefer companions. When I learn that someone new is coming over, I mentally ask the same questions Kingsley Amis did: “Does he drink? Is he jolly?” Alcohol can bring out the poetry in a person’s soul.

In 2006, Gary Shteyngart, the irrepressible author of novels such as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story, gave an interview to the Denver-based magazine Modern Drunkard. It’s one of the great interviews of the new century and some enterprising young editor should print it as a chapbook. In the meantime, find it online and send the link to your friends. James Baldwin may have said, “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink,” but that was a long time ago. Shteyngart’s complaint is that writers don’t belly up to the bar with the enthusiasm they once did. “We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone.” He added, “It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.” I’ve tried my best to keep Gary, from my own apartment, company.

“Why didn’t everyone drink?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in Book Four of My Struggle. “Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”

Dawn Powell made a similar point in her diaries. “A person is like blank paper with secret writing,” she wrote, “sometimes never brought out, other times brought out by odd chemicals.” In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq wrote, “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.” Amis—a copy of his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis should be in every home—put it this way: “The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”

America’s founders understood all this. Barbara Holland, in her book The Joy of Drinking, reminded her readers that in 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Fifty-five delegates consumed fifty-four bottles of Madeira? Which founder let the side down?

_______________________________

Excerpted from The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Dwight Garner. All rights reserved

I’d finished writing, I thought, when I sent the essay to my editor, but my editor had other ideas. Questions came back for which I had no answers. Suggestions came back with which I did not agree. The clock was ticking, I knew, and in New York the clock ticks faster than it ticks here in Tennessee. I went to the woods anyway.

People often ask how long it takes me to write an essay, and I wish I knew how to answer. When I start, I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know what wandering route I must take to get there. The whole thing is an exercise in faith. It begins with an image, a feeling, a vague sense of why something matters to me. It never begins with a plan. I just start writing and trust the words to keep coming. I need the words themselves to guide me, to tell me where to go and why. When I lead workshops, I tell young writers to write. That is my whole pedagogy: Just write. Trust the words to come. If they don’t come, go for a walk.

Always I find more answers in a forest than I find in my own hot attic of a mind. Scientists have made studies of the walking brain, and the results are dumbfounding. Given a test that measures creativity, college students sitting at a table produced unremarkable results. But when scientists put them on a treadmill, or sent them for a walk around campus, their brains lit up like the night sky. The students who walked produced 60 percent more original ideas than the students who were seated.

The study measured only the cognitive effects of a body in motion, walking on a treadmill or along a familiar route. I would like to see an fMRI image of a mind in a forest, even one as carefully managed as my local park, where the trails are mulched with donated Christmas trees. A forest so small that the cars on nearby roads are audible from every place on the trail.

It was raining the day I was on deadline, and I like the woods best in rain. There are fewer people on the path. The dampness softens the ground and muffles the sound of my own footsteps. The heat-dulled leaves of the canopy grow visibly greener. The understory goes greener still.

Best of all, in a wet world deadfall and soil erupt into fungi. Delicate whorls of polypores make a bouquet of fallen pines. Bright elf cups are scattered across the leaf litter as though a parade has passed by. Glowing angel wing mushrooms fruit on the hemlock like a bridal veil trailing along the path. Chicken of the woods make yellow and orange ruffles fit for a square dancer’s skirt. Oh, their marvelous fungi names! Firerug inkcap, turkey tail, witch’s hat, stinkhorn, jelly fungus, shaggy scarlet cup!

These are flowers of the shady forest, the silent scavengers of deadwood and rotting leaves. In living trees, they can form a symbiosis, colonizing roots and helping trees absorb nutrients, creating vast underground networks that allow trees to communicate with one another and even share resources. In dead trees, fungi soften wood, making it hospitable for insects, a place that can be carved out by birds in need of a nesting site, or animals in need of a hiding place or shelter from the cold. Fungi, too, can turn death into life.

I rely on apps and field guides to identify mushrooms, but their color variations seem to be endless, and I have no idea if I’m right. I would never eat a mushroom that grows wild in the woods. There are too many ways to be dead wrong, an adjective I choose deliberately, and too many purposes for fungi when they remain in the woods. I squat, I admire, I take pictures, I move on.

In one fallen tree, the transformation has been unfolding for so long that a little cave has opened up where a branch once joined the living oak. Over years, dead leaves collected in the cavity and turned into soil. In the shelter of that death-opened place, new green life has sprung up: moss and clover and some sort of trailing vine I can’t identify. In the center, as carefully arranged as if a florist had planned it for a centerpiece, rises one woodland violet. Every time I see it, I remind myself to come back in springtime to see it in bloom.

By the time I reached the violet that day, I had already stayed out too long, but suddenly I understood how to fix the problem in my essay. I texted my editor to tell him I was on my way back to my desk. As an apology for my tardiness, I included a photo of the secret terrarium in the fallen oak.

“Like a little tree womb,” he wrote back.

And that’s exactly what it is. It’s what all trees are when we leave them alone.

 __________________________________

Excerpted from The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl. Used with permission of the publisher, Spiegel & Grau. Copyright © by Margaret Renkl.

I used to be a chef. Some might say “once a chef, always a chef—.” I don’t. I cooked through college to pay the rent, and some of my bosses were cool enough to let me experiment because I was curious, wanted to learn more about how things are the way they are. I came to understand this as art-energy. It was raw tongue and fire-proof hands and swollen feet in 120-degree heat.

Food haunts me like music does. Sometimes a flavor reveals itself in color, other times the sound of butter crackling in a hot pan is a sign from the universe—I must walk off the line to play drums or jump into the ocean, exchange sweat-salt for sea salt. There is magic in food. Yet I dreamed of wriggling my way out to become a writer, which my body understood but my brain had been convinced was an unattainable dream.

I co-owned a restaurant in Puerto Rico for nearly ten years. I was born with salmon on my tongue, but my family comes from the tops of extinct volcanoes rising from the desert in Dinétah in Arizona and New Mexico. When I missed home I ordered fresh Anaheim chiles to roast, skin, and freeze, and I had beans and hominy shipped in for brunch, that most-hated shift of our brood. We made our own bacon with heritage pork bellies, baked biscuits, made our own sausage. Everyone raved about the duck confit hash, crisped in smoking duck fat, topped with a poached egg and hollandaise.

I ate a lot of fish down there: blackfin, skipjack, yellowfin. I cut dorado so fresh, their muscles twitched as if tickled by my fingers in their open bellies. Braised lamb shank was another favorite—braised anything, really, because it’s the process that matters most, the slow build, the long simmer in a low-temp bath. One of my favorite things to prepare was duck. The ones we got slid out of a waxy cardboard box naked and headless. The breasts I cured and smoked. I would confit the legs in their own juicy juices, and roast the rest of the carcass for stock.

Processes are a series of moments in passing. We get better, more efficient, at the peel, fry and smash of tostones from a branch of platanos a farmer drops off ten minutes before service. I was determined to be defined not by my final product, but how I drove up the hills in Rincón in search of green papayas to yank from their milky stems in order to make that famous salad. More than the customers’ preferences, I was interested in the communities we built, in part by sourcing locally: we had potion-makers, brewers, distillers; I chose fishermen based on how burnt beyond red they were—crisp—and because their rates were fair, and they bled the tuna well.

I wouldn’t let my cooks call me ‘chef,’ kind of like how later I only half-believed myself if I introduced myself as a poet or writer. For a second there I thought I may have been one of the nicest chefs I’d ever worked for, but it didn’t take too long for me to resemble the kind I hated, the red-nosed and puffy-eyed cynic, mean and conceded, the pride of a tidbitting cock a shining display of red waddles, combs, and giblets. Maybe I wasn’t cocky, though I did start to feel rage, and frequent panic attacks. Chefs rarely mean anything personal when they scream at you through the server window; we’ll always drink Medalla and whiskey after the shift, blasting Motörhead or Madonna if that last table ever gets up.

Kitchen work gets you down, burns you out. Maybe you’ve heard it’s tribal, too. My first kitchen job, I recognized kin in those clowns preparing delicious, precise, and consistent food at a frantic pace, and I admired them. Between the age of 18 and 34, I worked in restaurants in Flagstaff, Santa Cruz, Portland, Olympia, Fairbanks, New York, Chicago, Rincón. No matter where I went, there they were: fellow misfits and migrants and mentally ill, vagabonds and artists, a wild tribe where I felt comfortable, but didn’t belong, necessarily. I was smart (i.e., anxious) and ambitious and ever-expanding. I out-grew it long before I had a chance to call myself a proper chef. I was, after all, still just a sensitive poet-fish out of water.

What I didn’t realize until later was that chef-life was part of my training as a writer: I was absorbing a sensory vocabulary, inventing new language. I saw flavors before I tasted them. I could smell how three items on a plate bloomed in front of a customer before I even poached the pears or braised the pork belly or reduced the balsamic. The texture of crispy duck begged for the dark red sweet of roasted cherry tomato. I don’t recall if I was synesthetic before, or if it’s something one can cultivate, but it effects our very nature of perception, which became a source of power for my novel.

I made a living as my own boss at a popular fancy restaurant on the beach in Puerto Rico, which sounds like a dream, but I became someone I didn’t recognize anymore. Eventually, as I felt myself fade away from cooking and the industry altogether, I made an active decision to leave in order to change, transmute. It’s a life I could have made work, but at great sacrifice. I wasn’t bored so much as exhausted. If I didn’t write my way out, chances are I would have died under a palm tree with a swollen belly and leathery neck.

What is this about—that longing? It feels like a quest for transmutation, acceptance of constant growth and change. Less about the search for compatibility than it is about recognition: to be seen versus to be on the margins. Will I forever feel like the outsider, the duality of Navajo woman and white man, the bi-polar, simultaneously creative and logical crazybrain?

The answer is always: pizza. And sushi. Not at the same time, though it does sound like something I’d try make work.

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Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

To write about food means always occupying the realm of the ordinary. We can be reporting on deforestation for palm oil production, the destruction of mangroves for shrimp harvests, or the atrocious working and animal welfare conditions in industrial meat-processing, but, for the reader, it will all come back to the grocery store, the kitchen, and the menu they’re faced with at a restaurant. How do we navigate this thorny terrain—which includes labor rights, climate change, loss of biodiversity, corporate greed, colonialism—without overwhelming but instead empowering, entertaining, and encouraging that reader?

For me, as an essayist and cultural critic who’s nonetheless a food writer—meaning, at the end of the day, that I am trying to entice my reader to consider what they eat and occasionally instructing them precisely on how to cook a dish—it requires that I implicate and insert myself into this human dilemma. After all, I have to eat too. How do I do it?

I write in the introduction to my book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating that in order to trust someone on the subject of food, I need to know about their personal eating history and appetites. This isn’t because I want to measure my own appetite against theirs to ensure we line up, but because it provides significant context: What purpose does food serve in your life? I want to know, so that I can understand why you’re choosing to take it as a focus, whether in a writing career or just one essay. It’s a uniquely parasocial genre, for good reason: We’re entrusting each other not just with words, but with our bodies, our tastes, and our time at the cutting board.

I’m a vegetarian, former vegan, and one-time vegan bakery owner who’s worked at Starbucks, Panera Bread, and an East Village wine bar. I met my husband while he was a bartender and I was a writer on assignment. I grew up on Long Island, spent years in Brooklyn, and now live in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My upbringing consisted of all the Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Greek food one might imagine a kid just outside New York City would eat, plus Puerto Rican food influenced by my paternal grandmother’s heritage. In my family, we make a kransekake at Christmas not because we’re Norwegian, but because a Bay Ridge-dwelling ancestor was taken by the sight of this cookie tree when walking through Little Norway during the holiday season. I spent over a decade eating vegan food in New York and anywhere else in the world I found myself, chronicling and documenting the emergence of plant-based food as a cuisine.

My eating biography, while without specific allegiances, includes a lot of experience—as eater, as server, as cook—and a commitment to what tastes good. All of this is useful knowledge for my perspective, and it’s why there is a touch of memoir threaded throughout what is ostensibly a cultural history: If I could grow up eating everything, how did I end up with all these ethical concerns and commitments around the food system?

I take the ordinary, the everyday, the ancestral, and the political with me when I write about how we eat today, how vegetarians and vegans in the U.S. have eaten for the past 50 years, and how we could eat in the future if we were to remove meat from the center of our plates. How do I eat and what do I cook when I feel the weight of all this on my shoulders? How have I not allowed it to crush me? Let me tell you.

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No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy is available now via Beacon Press.

Bananas are a fruit that unites the world. We may not all eat the same variety, but we all know a banana when we see one. Depending on where you live and what kind you eat, they are sweeter or starchier, creamy or tough, all loaded with potassium. Per person in the United States we eat about twelve kilograms (twenty-​seven pounds) of bananas a year, more than any other fresh fruit. Elsewhere around the world, bananas are part of the daily diet. After maize, wheat, and rice, they are the world’s fourth most important staple crop. In some regions bananas provide 30 to 60 percent of daily calories. Though there are thousands of varieties, most of us in the western world eat only one: the Cavendish. These are the sweet “dessert” bananas we find piled on grocery shelves, hanging in convenience stores, and ever-​present in cafeterias. Cavendish are also known as “export bananas” because most are not consumed in the tropics where they are grown but instead are shipped to the United States, Canada, Europe, China, and elsewhere. Of the twenty-​two million tons of bananas exported to the United States, Europe, and Asia, most are grown in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many of those are grown in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

The rest of the world’s crop, grown on large and small farms and in backyards around the world, are a variety of cooking bananas or plantains (which are bananas that tend to be starchier and tougher skinned) with names like matoke, Lacatan, Rhino Horn, and Pisang Awak. More than one hundred different plantain cultivars grow in West and Central Africa, where they are a staple food for over seventy million people. For millions of small-​scale growers and family farmers the fruit provides both calories and income. Over a million people are employed by the industry, picking, packing, and growing the roughly one hundred billion bananas consumed each year. Many of those millions are employed by companies like Chiquita, Fyffes, Dole, and Del Monte, all growing primarily Cavendish. The fruit sustains a $40 billion global industry.

The banana plant is easy to mistake for a tree, but it is the largest known herbaceous flowering plant. Banana plants belong to the genus Musa and are recognizable by their large, long, fibrous leaves that umbrella away from the stalk. The plants grow, produce flower and fruit, and die. New banana plants grow as shoots that sprout up from the main stem’s base, making each generation a clone of its parent. The cultivated fruits, whether Cavendish or any of the popular varieties of cooking bananas, typically have no seeds. The lack of seeds means that from a genetic standpoint we have been eating the exact same kind of banana for some fifty years.

Depending on how and where it is grown, a typical Cavendish plant bears fruit seven or eight months after planting. The bananas emerge from the plant’s weird, oversized, and unmistakably sexual flower, which produces a single bunch of bananas. The large, drooping bunch is composed of dozens of banana “hands,” the smaller groups of five or six or more bananas that we find hanging by the checkout counter in the market. By harvest time a full banana bunch weighs between twenty and thirty-​five kilos (forty-​four to seventy-​seven pounds). The plant is an incredibly productive herb.

Bananas are Luis Pocasangre’s life work. Pocasangre is the research director and professor at EARTH University in Limón, Costa Rica, where he oversees 439 hectares of banana plants. He grew up in Honduras, the original banana republic, where, he says, “bananas were everywhere and everything.” Even the tennis courts on which he learned to play the game were owned by Chiquita. That he decided to devote his career to bananas was the natural course of things. The banana world is incredibly international. Pocasangre received his doctorate in Germany, but before that he studied plant breeding and biotechnology in Costa Rica, while working on a project for a French agricultural organization. Then he worked with Phil Rowe, a legendary scientist and banana breeder. Over three decades Rowe worked for United Fruit in Honduras, where he bred disease-​resistant, good-​tasting bananas for both export and cooking. Pocasangre now grows several of the hybrids developed by Rowe at EARTH, where he also teaches sustainable agriculture and how to grow bananas to students mainly from rural communities.

Bananas grown for the market need a lot of care, which translates to countless hours of labor. Throughout Pocasangre’s orchard the developing bunches are protected inside bright blue plastic bags that protect the fruits from pests. There are plenty of predators who feed on the sweet, starchy fruit: nematodes, thrips, weevils, beetles, bacteria, and fungi, any one of which might scar, rot, or spot the fruit, ruining the perfection we consumers expect. On a conventional plantation the inside of the bags are treated with an insecticide like chlorpyrifos. The chemical is a known neurotoxicant that has been withdrawn from some markets. At least one study of children living near commercial plantations found that they had been exposed to potentially harmful levels of the chemical. For these reasons and others, in 2021 the US Environmental Protection Agency banned its use on food crops. At EARTH the bags are treated with a combination of garlic and onion oil, and an unmistakable sulfurous smell wafts across the plantation. In addition to the plastic protection, banana workers slip cardboard sheets between each cascading row of banana hands to prevent them from scarring one another. Large, ripe bunches travel from field to processing plant, hanging from a wire tram that runs throughout the plantation like some otherworldly commuters on a trolley. When the banana tram arrives at the processing plant, the fruits are power-​washed and examined for blemishes. Workers pick dead “flowers” from the end of every fruit. Then the hands are separated from the bunch and floated in large vats of water as workers pick, pack, and label the best-​looking banana hands for export. Each banana you buy has been handled with kid gloves by dozens of workers. Boxed bananas are loaded onto a container truck ready for their journey to the United States, Europe, or elsewhere. Some travel for a week or two before they are unpacked and laid out at Whole Foods or Aldis and labeled “sustainably grown.” The rest are sold locally.

One of Pocasangre’s research interests is using beneficial microbes and a probiotic sort of fungus called Trichoderma to prevent insect pests like microscopic nematode worms. Some strains of this common soil fungus, along with other amendments like composted banana plants, are a biological treatment for the nematodes that eat the plant’s roots. Treated plants stand tall. Untreated plants lean on bamboo poles because their roots can no longer support the tall stalks. The alternative control is injection of pesticide gas. The biological treatment works well on bananas, but “bananaeros”—​banana growers—​are a conservative group resistant to change, so many still rely on conventional pesticides.

EARTH’s plantation land is split into widely separated blocks that Pocasangre and others use as a living laboratory to test sustainable solutions for growing the fruits. Between the blocks are forest, wildlife, and river. This arrangement of agricultural crop interspersed with native plants is a form of agroforestry, an alternative to the sweeping, singular monocrops. By not planting every inch of soil with crop, pests and pathogens can’t easily travel from one host to another. It isn’t hard to imagine how the spacing could discourage the spread of a fungus that might otherwise travel from leaf to leaf or root to shoot. Some blocks at EARTH have papaya trees interspersed with the bananas; others combine Cavendish with different cultivars like red Macabu and plantain.

“A real bananara,” says Pocasangre, “will be three thousand, six thousand hectares all in the same banana-​growing region. No separation. Grown as a monoculture because it’s more profitable.” Some plantations are even larger. The vast majority of Cavendish are grown in this way, as monocrops, making them ripe targets for fungi.

A century ago a fungus identified as Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense nearly destroyed the banana industry. The disease caused by this fungus (the so-​called Race-​1 strains that are actually different species) became known as Panama disease or Fusarium wilt of banana. The favored host of the fungus was not the Cavendish but a banana variety called Gros Michel. Gros Michel bananas were the first “big banana.” That cultivar’s popular history began with its discovery in Southeast Asia. A nineteenth-​century French naturalist impressed with the fruit brought a bit of banana plant to the island of Martinique. From there a French botanist brought it to Jamaica. The fruit grew well on the islands, and because they were encased in thick yellow skin, they shipped well too. And it ripened aboard ship. Within decades Gros Michel bananas were popping up on farms all along Central America’s Caribbean coast.

By the late nineteenth century, bunches of Gros Michel bananas were offloading at ports in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Boston. Americans found a new fruit to love. The lucrative combination of desirable and cheap caught the attention of a Cape Cod ship captain and a Boston grocery worker. In 1885 they formed the Boston Fruit Company, the first commercial banana company. Later renamed the United Fruit Company, by 1930 it was worth more than $200 million. The company’s dark history and that of other early exporters is detailed in John Soluri’s book Banana Cultures and Dan Koeppel’s Banana. As complicated as the business end of bananas was, the agricultural history of the Gros Michel was for a time simple: growers planted it and it grew. By the early twentieth century the tropical fruit was flourishing in Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Guatemala, and anywhere else growers could profit from planting it. By 1913 Americans were eating on average over twenty pounds of bananas a year per person, and United Fruit had seventy thousand hectares in production.

Of the hundreds of known strains of Fusarium most are harmless saprobes living in the soil, sending out filamentous hyphae, and feeding on dead things. But the Race-​1 fungi were insidious killers. No one questions how the fungus spread across Gros Michel plantations: the constant growing of monocrops enriched soils with spore. Wherever soil traveled, spores did too: on plants or suckers, on the soles of a worker’s shoe, on a truck’s tires, with trickles of water, and in floods, hurricanes, and typhoons. Bits of banana plant including leaves, commonly used for packing, could move the fungus farther away.

The industry’s response was to cut virgin forest and create new fields. Some fields were flooded and then replanted with shoots from infected plants. Because flooding suffocated both the disease-​causing fungus along with much of the beneficial soil microbiome, the disease came back with a vengeance. Old plantations were left to rot. Over the years United Fruit scientists tried and failed to find a suitable replacement or breed a resistant, palatable hybrid banana. Eventually industry losses began draining millions of dollars a year from the bottom line. It wasn’t just United Fruit or just Central and South America; the fungus hit growers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, wherever Gros Michel grew. And the growers were to blame. They just kept planting the same old thing in different places.

The outcome was disastrous. It would have destroyed the entire industry except that the Race-​1 fungi were also limited because of their affinity for the commercial banana. The fungus doesn’t infect most other strains of banana, including Cavendish. The Cavendish banana had been known by horticulturists for at least half a century. It was believed to have originated in China, shipped at some point to the island nation of Mauritius controlled by the Dutch, then the French, and then the British (the nation became independent in 1968). When the banana arrived on the island sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century, the British horticulturalist and physician Charles Telfair planted some in his garden. In the late 1820s Telfair sent a sample of the plant back to England, which was planted and then replanted in gardens of wealthy collectors of exotic plants and animals. The banana eventually set roots in the garden of the sixth Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish. Throughout the century the Cavendish banana traveled to colonies and locales in the South Pacific, Egypt, and South Africa.

The Americas at that time had no use for the fruit; they had the Gros Michel. Even as the banana industry took off, the Cavendish was considered too delicate compared to the Gros Michel. The banana didn’t ship as easily as the Gros Michel, which could be tossed onto ships in bunches. The Cavendish was easily bruised and so had to be boxed. Some thought it wasn’t as sweet. Still, it looked and tasted familiar enough, and when Race 1 emerged, it was resistant. Grudgingly the industry switched, changing the process of picking and shipping, and pulling on the kid gloves to provide consumers with the perfect, unblemished banana. Within a few decades Cavendish bananas were growing across enormous monocropped plantations, replacing the Gros Michel. By midcentury United Fruit rebranded with the rollout of the “Chiquita” brand and its eponymous jingle. In 1990 the company rechristened itself as Chiquita Brands International. As a global produce company it remains one of the largest distributors of bananas in the United States.

Now Chiquita, along with the rest of the industry, is facing another round of the dreaded Fusarium wilt. This time it is a highly aggressive fungus called Fusarium odoratissimum and known as Tropical Race-​4, or TR4. Unlike Race-​1 strains, this fungus infects Cavendish plants. To paraphrase Koeppel, the industry could almost have expected this sort of reckoning. And yet they essentially invited the fungus to the table by providing it with a nearly endless monocrop and a means of travel.

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Excerpted from Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic by Emily Monosson. Copyright © 2023. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.

My husband, a professor of electrical engineering by trade, is the kind of obsessive for which I have an affinity in my writing life. A refugee born in Latvia, John loves Latvian rye bread fervently. He eats Latvian rye several times a day and is unable to leave home without a five-pound loaf crowding the shirts and shoes in his carry-on. This bread, a talisman for his lost homeland, nourishes him physically and spiritually and it shapes his identity.

A couple of years after I published God in a Cup—which follows three young hotshots who were transforming the specialty coffee industry around the world and reports what took place in their interactions with coffee farmers, coffee traders and each other—as I pondered what next, John took the plunge and co-founded a teeny company marketing Latvian rye bread, online and in gourmet stores up and down the east coast.

John was now in the food business. I wrote about food. For the first time in our marriage, our professional worlds converged. Now when we entertained, which was often, Latvian rye bread was on the table front and center as a food and as a subject. I didn’t mind. To my surprise, our friends adored John’s bread.

One night I had a dream in which the title of my next book revealed itself: The Rye Bread Marriage. But I had no story, just the name.

As I contemplated this title without a book, two things were apparent: The story of Latvian rye bread, and John’s deep connection to it, would be central. Also, this book would be a platform for me to tell the story of John’s dramatic wartime childhood, something I had long wanted to do. I had no idea how these stories related to one another.

As to the marriage part of The Rye Bread Marriage? I played around with the idea of rye bread as a third partner in our union, a third spouse taking up room in our bed, but that idea didn’t go very far.

And so I decided to stick with what I knew. Despite my intimate connection to the subject, I figured I would do with rye bread as I had done with coffee: delve into the rye bread world, reporting on the history, focusing on a few key people who were changing the industry today Rye bread, however, was not a burgeoning industry in which I could identify and shadow a few key players who were changing the world. Bread, in fact, had been around in one form or another for 30,000 years. Its history was vast.  As to Latvian rye bread? I didn’t speak Latvian and, except through osmosis, I knew little of Latvian culture. Until recently, I hadn’t even liked Latvian rye bread. (My conversion is one of the subjects I cover in my book.)

John and I traveled to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. We visited bakers and bakeries. I interviewed people. John translated. I came home and wrote drafts describing the bread scene in post-Soviet Latvia. My agent, the always tactful Eleanor Jackson, said mildly, “I don’t think you’re there yet,” by which she meant, most of what I wrote was boring. The liveliness of God in a Cup wasn’t coming through. The material I wrote describing John’s and my adventures in Latvia was pedestrian, except one comic scene capturing John’s anxiety and our bickering about the map as we drove from Riga to the town where John was born to interview an oven maker.

I dug into files on my computer containing stories, written in the first-person and never published, about John and me, our marriage and our family. But how and where did these scenes from a marriage connect with the history of Latvian agriculture, the meaning of rye bread in Eastern Europe and the terror of John’s family fleeing Westward in war-time to escape the Russians? By now, I realized these three subjects were my themes. I had no idea how could I weave them together to make a cohesive story.

I enrolled in a few half day classes. Although I was writing nonfiction, I asked friends to recommend books teaching the basics of writing fiction. I had a sense that some of the problems I faced were craft-related. How to frame a story that has no obvious beginning and no end? How to build scene upon scene in order to create a clear and dramatic narrative arc? How to use sensory detail to add immediacy and specificity to people and places–this one I learned from re-reading Joan Didion.

I applied to and was accepted to a writing residency program, this one in Virginia, sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA).

VCCA changed my life. I met Sarah Pleydell, a novelist and theater artist, recently retired from the University of Maryland where she had taught creative writing for thirty years. 

I had been a kind of lay teacher (neither analyst, nor trained writing teacher) at the certificate-granting psychoanalytic writing program for which I wrote some of those essays I found in my files. As a journalist with decades of practical experience, I was good at helping students figure out what worked and what didn’t, but I wasn’t a real writing teacher. Sarah was. When we returned home from VCCA, I asked her if she wanted to teach a workshop with me on imagery. I picked the subject of imagery because I didn’t understand it, but I sensed it was important to the book I was writing.

Our classes employed techniques Sarah had developed in her many years of teaching. We began by asking students to focus on the sensory, describing in language that was concrete and unadorned, a plant, a keepsake, an heirloom, a piece of chocolate. Metaphors and similes, not allowed. Memories and associations, not allowed. Focusing on the concrete removed students’ fear, and it set in motion a process that led in time to the spontaneous and unself-conscious production and retrieval of images from students’ unconscious minds.

The way to learn, clearly, was to teach.

Working with students as they moved towards discovering the images that resided within themselves (another way of saying their own unique language), I realized that feeling unequal to the task was part of the task. I realized that I, like our students, could circumvent self-doubt, and discover untapped realms of feeling, memory and truth, by hyper focusing on the real. Block out the inner voice and in time the inner voice will shout back at you.

I started to understand the difference between the work I had done as a journalist and the work I was struggling to do now. What separated journalism and literary memoir was a kind of density of language. Imagery was a way of squeezing language in a vise, leading in time to a condensed form of language containing many layers of meaning. Understanding this helped me realize that the rye bread in The Rye Bread Marriage was one of my book’s subjects, yes, but it was also the metaphor that in time would weave my book together, enabling me to move back and forth among my subjects.

Slowly I opened myself to my own power as a writer. Letting go of my sense of literary insufficiency, led to discoveries related to structure and storytelling. I embraced the complexity and depth of my story. I gave myself permission to tell the story of my marriage, our marriage.

The book, ostensibly, and more than ostensibly, was about John. His life, which is far more dramatic than mine. His passion for rye bread. His eccentricities. But it was my voice, my inner life and perceptions in which readers would be immersed. I figured out that it was I as the narrator, who had to play the fool. It was I who had the lessons to learn. That learning became my narrative arc. (Had I cast John in this role, the book would have become an exercise in marital finger-pointing.) My opening up my role as narrator, led to an opening up of my understanding. I was able to see and describe my husband in his own terms, separate from me, without judgment, with compassion. I was able to see and describe myself in the same way. As I wrote about our marriage, I came to know our marriage in a far more nuanced, compassionate and accepting way. Psychologically and in a literary sense, I was changed, transformed, by writing this book, which finally, I suppose, is why any of us write: to know ourselves and the world anew.

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The Rye Bread Marriage: How I Found Happiness with a Partner I’ll Never Understand by Michaele Weissman is available from Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

A thing that has always been a source of inspiration for me is the city, is my environment. I wasn’t born in New York City, but I grew up here in the city. I feel like it’s an endless source of inspiration culinarily. It’s a melting pot. You can use Mexican ingredients with French technique. You can use French ingredients with Japanese technique, and it’s all acceptable. It’s all fair. You can draw from so many different things. Your city, where you are, your place, is an infinite source of inspiration. I think of urban terroir. People talk about the terroir of cooking. It seems like they always think of chefs out in the countryside cooking, but look around you.

New York City is an endless opportunity with flavors from all over the world. Inspiration is everywhere. You look up, and you see metal, and you see steel, and you see glass, and you see stone, and you see a tree popping through the concrete. You realize the way the sun passes through a fire escape is maybe a way you can arrange food on a plate. You never know where the inspiration will come, but your surroundings, the city that you live in, or the places that you’ve been are infinite opportunities, sources for inspiration.

I tell my cooks that you never know when inspiration will strike, but you have to be prepared at all times. So to this day I still carry a notepad and two pens for redundancy because you never know when you’re going to have a good idea, but you have to be ready to receive it when it happens. My mother told me— she’s a graphic designer by trade—she said you can’t plan for inspiration. You can’t know when inspiration will strike, but you can go hunting for it. You can go after it. You can’t wake up and say, “Today I’m going to be creative,” but you can wake up and say, “Today I’m going to try and be creative.”

So it’s Tuesday. Let’s try to be creative. Let’s get those books off the wall. Let’s look at some photographs. Let’s just look out the window. Let’s stare out the window for a bit and see where we can get inspired and how we can get inspired. Let’s go out to lunch, but be ready at all times. You never know when it’s going to happen, but you have to be ready for when inspiration strikes because the wonderful thing about it is that you just don’t know when it’s going to happen, but it can happen at any moment, and it’s important that you’re ready for it when it happens. It’s important.

*

One thing that has always stuck with me is to learn what other people are up to. I’ve always been a note taker and written down some ideas as a young cook, things I wanted to do, and I wrote down this idea of a chocolate cake that had a liquid chocolate center. I thought, Now that’s a unique idea. Fast-forward a couple years later. I’m working at Jean-Georges, working for Jean-Georges and JoJo’s, and I see the molten chocolate cake, and I go, “Oh my goodness.”

I clearly wasn’t the first, and then I go to find out that Michel Bras also had a molten chocolate cake. Perhaps he was the one who invented the molten chocolate cake, and I realized that I needed to know what other people were up to, that it wasn’t just about my ideas.

I had to learn what was going on in my industry, in my craft, in my art, in my field. And so reading is absolutely one of the best pieces of advice I can give anybody. Read. I spent all my free pennies and free minutes as a young cook buying cookbooks. I now have a cookbook collection of over 2,500 books. I love to read them and reread them. It’s a wonderful thing.

Cooking is a skill, a craft, and you’re never going to learn it all. That’s the wonderful thing about cooking is that it’s a never-ending opportunity for education. You’ll never learn it all. You can pick a discipline. You can pick a cuisine. You can pick an ingredient, and you can study it and get knowledgeable about it, but there’s no one person who knows everything there is to know about cooking. It’s a never-ending thing. That’s what makes it so fun and so wonderful. It never ends, but you have to know what other people are up to. That’s one way to get inspired.

Once you realize what other people are up to, it will inspire you to have your own ideas and build off them, but it’s important to know the prior art and to know what’s out there. I began pre-internet, so I started with books. Now you can get on the internet, or you can get on Instagram, or you can do both, or you can buy books. You should do all of those things because they all have different ways of teaching you how to learn and ways of engaging with your subject matter. We as cooks must learn what other people are up to. Otherwise we’re at the risk of repeating them. Working in a vacuum is a terrible idea. So I really, really encourage people to learn what others are up to, to get out there and read and learn.

Jean-Georges, who was my biggest culinary inspiration, also used to say, “Simple. Simple.” He was always taking things off the plate. He said it’s easy to hide when you put a lot of stuff on the plate. Take things off the plate. You’ve got to take things off. Less and less and less, and that’s what you have to do: take things away.

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Excerpted from Chefwise: Life Lessons from Leading Chefs Around the World by Shari Bayer. Copyright © 2023. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved.

A classmate in an undergrad writing workshop once said to me, “Did you know that the word wine shows up in every one of your stories?” He was absolutely right, but I’d had no idea until he told me. To me, the phrase “a glass of wine” is one of the beauties of the English language, and though I didn’t drink much wine in undergrad, I realized I was mentioning it simply for my own pleasure—I wanted to place an object in my story that was beautiful and desirable, to me and to my characters. Our brains take certain pleasure at the mere sight of certain words on the page: for me, the words wine and cream set off little starbursts in my head, so much so that I will recall even an unremarkable scene involving those words for years, even decades.

This love for food-related reading goes all the way back to my childhood. One of my early favorite books was a picture book by Russell Hoban called Bread and Jam for Frances, which is the story of a picky little badger who scorns everything except the titular sandwich. Sick of trying to persuade her to eat anything else, Frances’s mother finally obliges and serves her bread and jam while the family eats a wide variety of appetizing meals and her friends unpack the most glorious little lunches involving tiny salt and pepper shakers and hard boiled eggs and cookies and clusters of grapes and so on. (Eventually Frances realizes variety is better than monotony.) I was not a picky eater, so for me the lesson of this book was that I needed to get my hands on tiny salt and pepper shakers for my school lunches.

I was equally obsessed with the food of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, or rather I was obsessed with the series because of the food. Recall, if you will, that while Laura and Mary are contentedly batting around pigs’ bladders and treasuring water served in little tin cups they got for Christmas, Ma and Pa spend their lives working desperately day and night not to starve. No wonder the food was so important. But it was joyful, too. Ingalls Wilder took the time to describe the way tart lemonade with sugary frosted cake at a birthday party changed the taste of both, or how Ma fried little puffy cakes in oil–vanity cakes–for Laura’s own homespun party. I assumed that my busy mother of three could figure out a 20th century hack for this recipe. She refused, for some insane reason. Forty years later, I’ve been content to leave it in my imagination.

I was mesmerized by anything about other people’s food habits and desires, what they liked and what they hated and what they ate without worry about fat or calories. Do you realize Harriet the Spy ate milk and cake every single day after school? That in Judy Blume’s novels, grandmothers were always tossing raw eggs into milkshakes to nourish their skinny grandchildren? Edmund Pevensie throwing away his soul and his family for a taste of Narnian Turkish delight sounded fairly reasonable to me. Sure, siblings are blood, but are they delicious?

As I got older it was more about what I hoped to learn. There are many pleasures to Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s lone novel and roman à clef about the end of her marriage, but one of them is a classic pasta dish I read about there and have been making ever since: fresh tomatoes, basil, olive oil, tossed with hot pasta. That’s it. It felt like a dish I could make after school as a teenager, and so I often did, chucking in chili flakes or capers or skipping the fresh herbs if I didn’t have them. I still make it, along with much of Italy, because it is a classic for a reason. But back then it was brand new to me.

Sometimes food writing was aspirational, other times it was simply heartbreaking. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “Mrs. Sen’s,” a young American boy watches his babysitter, Mrs. Sen, try to get settled in the U.S., and part of his interest is in the cooking that fills their time together. But an expertise that is fascinating and rich to him and to the reader–his own mother suddenly seems rather limited and withholding in comparison–can become a source of vulnerability and foreignness out in the world, when a bus driver asks if Mrs. Sen can speak English and tells her to open a window to avoid disturbing the other passengers with the whole fish they’ve traveled to obtain.

Like any young food obsessive, I got deep into MFK Fisher for a time, which meant I became obnoxious in fresh new ways: even I suspected I should pull back on phrases like “honest bread.” So much of her writing captivated me: the cauliflower she cooked with cream and cheese, the pheasant aged almost to the point of rot, the peas picked, cooked and eaten practically in the field. But the undercurrents of sex, anger, grief, and darkness are what make her work more than mere travelogue. Husbands had a habit of appearing and disappearing without much explanation—Fisher’s biography is fascinating in its own right, though she did not choose to lay it out in detail in her own work—and more than once she used a meal to reveal the upheavals going on around the table. In one of my favorite essays, a young and newlywed Mary Frances happens upon the aftermath of a scene in which a man seems to have dined on grapes and bread while his desperate girlfriend lay naked before him. He satisfied his appetite by deriving pleasure from refusing hers, it seems; he left crumbs and grape skins on her bare belly. I had never considered that food could be a tool of so much more than mere sophistication, but true desperation, manipulation, desire, and even monstrousness.

Anyone who has encountered me in print or person has heard me talk about Laurie Colwin, and I’m heartened to see that her influence seems only to keep growing decades after her death. Colwin’s fiction and nonfiction are the antithesis of every snobby cliché; she exhibits interest, amusement and pleasure at nearly every food the world could offer (the exception was the British dish “starry gazey pie,” which involves a clutch of eels gazing out of a pastry crust toward the heavens). She is of the school that says you always tell us what the characters are eating, and so am I.

The literary food moment that has lodged in my brain most recently, but maybe the most effectively, is a passage from Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter. It is nothing more than a paragraph of young Gabrielle sitting on her mother’s lap after dinner, but it is a powerful evocation of the physicality of childhood. Our early time with our parents is one of near-boundless physical intimacy with their looks and their sounds and their habits and their powers and frailties, even as they do nothing more than, say, crack walnuts or peel clementines. It’s one of those passages I give to students, writers, readers of all stripes. I go back to it over and over myself, collecting the moments when the words light off those familiar starbursts in my brain.

It’s a pleasure-seeking that can shape your life. I took a job in a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in my early twenties not because I wanted to open my own restaurant or become a chef. I wanted to learn on the job and with an employee discount, sure, but I also just wanted to be in a place where we talked about the things that made me feel full of delight. That job lasted only three years, and yet in my writing I keep going back to the things I learned there: the theater of a restaurant, the immense, repetitive and yet gratifying work of growing and producing food and wine.

That’s why when I started researching the wine industry for my novel Wine People, I returned to an old restaurant colleague. She’d gone on to work in wine importing, and I realized as I talked to her that by learning about wine, you can learn almost anything: it can send you down paths of history, gastronomy, family relationships, chemistry, ambition, geology, geography, agriculture, travel. I love a glass of wine, but I am most entranced by all the stories that can unfurl from it. “Wine was the one thing that taught me everything else,” my friend told me. And I know exactly what she means.

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Wine People by Michelle Wildgen is available from Zibby Books.