Readers and Reading discussion

Does anyone here love Laurie Colwin and her food writing as much as I do? I think I might be called a Colwin groupie, and believe there are a lot of people like me around. I know that she is still being written about, admiringly, so many years after her death. I find articles and remembrances of her published all the time. I have a large collection of these.....

I am going to post some articles and remembrances here...this week marks the 17th anniversary of her death. The first two are by her daughter, Rosa

Mother
Rosa Jurjevics

“Do you remember?” My father asks me.
“No,” I reply.
He steeples his hands, looking at me charmingly.
“Well,” he begins, as he does when he is about to relate some-
thing humorous, “you were about seven...”
I groan.
But he continues. “It’s true. You used to go up to your mother
at her desk and peer over her shoulder while she was working. She’d
tell you ‘I’m typing.’ Then you’d whine, of course, and ask how much
longer she’d be busy, and she’d say until she was done. You’d look at
her petulantly and tell her, ‘Well, type faster!’”
I shake my head. “What a brat.”
“No,” he says, taking a sip of his coffee. “It was sweet.”
We are sitting across from each other in a cafe in San Diego,
where I now live. My father has traveled from New York to see me
and, over lattes and chais, we have fallen into a conversation about
my childhood. This particular moment he has mentioned I abso-
lutely cannot recall.
I bite my lip.
“I just don’t remember,” I tell him.
He nods. He knows.
There are many lost memories. They are just gone, misplaced
somewhere in my transition to adulthood, never to be recovered.
I sigh heavily into my cup. Would I be able to call them to mind if
she were alive, I wonder. Would I feel the same need to remember
these moments? If she could just be there in front of me, in the fl esh,
would they hold the same weight? I ponder this a second, then decide,
No, probably not.
Probably not.
What I remember about my mother—something I am often
asked—is not an entire picture. Assembling her is, for me, a little bit
like sifting through the fi nds of an archeological dig; things must be
examined and then fi tted together to make the whole. There is, fi rst,
her physical self: the long sleeves of her sweater pushed up to her
elbow; the Chinese gold hoops she wore in her ears, so pure I could
bend them in my toddler’s fi ngers; the loops of her hair, held back
with combs; her feet, often tinged blue-black by her fl at-soled shoes.
Then there is the feel of her, both tangible, like the soft, slight oili-
ness of her cheek against mine, and intangible, like her presence at
my elbow as we mixed batter side by side.
In the mirror, I see her, at odd, startling moments that send me
running for my camera. I can isolate the part of my face that resem-
bles hers, capture it for a moment in order to study it. Sometimes it’s
my mouth, which turns up at one end when I smile; sometimes it’s
my eyes, though they are lighter than hers and don’t hold the almost
haughty cast hers do in photographs taken when she was around my
age.
It scares me, our resemblance does, when it decides to appear.
It can overwhelm others as well, particularly old friends of hers, who
see our likeness more than most. After looking deeply into my face
for some time, one mused, “It’s like looking at a ghost I haven’t seen
in forty years.”
I don’t have the memories these people have. They are the ones
who give me the pieces I need to assemble her, the stories that give
her shape. They tell me of her fantastic dinners, multiple-course af-
fairs full of wine and laughter; of her favorite phrases, like “morally
bankrupt” and “out to lunch”; and the quirky songs she used to make
up to entertain me as a small child. There are her cookbooks, which I have read cover to cover,
that serve as chronicles of our life together. Although written for the
public, they are invaluable to me privately, a blueprint of sorts for
what things were like back then. They weren’t written for this pur-
pose, as my mother had no knowledge of her impending death. She
couldn’t know that my sense of her would have to rely so heavily on
her essays and stories, that her words would take on more than she
ever intended. For me, her cookbooks are not the product of her as
a writer. Instead, they are one of the biggest parts of her that I still
have. In them, she is purely my mother.
In many ways, I am like her. I have navigated parts of her life
she has not been here to share with me. I’ve read the same books she
did during her childhood, antiquated and fanciful stories of adven-
turous families and plucky children, of cats that walked by them-
selves and magical babysitters living in upside-down houses. During
a particularly angst-ridden time, I played her old Beatles records,
learning every skip, every crackle. I live now in a small, one-room
apartment as she did, making my meals in a toaster oven. I have a
cat, too, will probably always have a cat, her favorite animal, no mat-
ter how beastly hers could be. Our deepest dreams even coincide,
her desire to sing backup in a Motown girl group meeting my long-
ing to do the same in a rock band.
And I, too, am a writer.
But I am also not like her. I cannot cook, a failing many will
attest to. I do not dress in her “uniform” of black skirts and striped
shirts, opting instead for sweatshirts and shorts. My limbs are long;
hers were short. At fi ve foot six, I would be half a foot taller than my
mother, and would have to stoop to hug her, to whisper something
silly in her ear the way I used to.
I think of her often. She is always there, a presence even in
death. The oddities that once peppered her desk now hold spe-
cial places of honor in my tiny home; the red-and-black-speckled
fountain pen, the trinkets box, the little yellow clay cat she made
and shellacked. The books she wrote sit on my shelf. I can be driv-
ing down the endless California freeway, sitting on my surfboard in
the middle of the ocean or walking down my cracked neighborhood
sidewalk and there she’ll be, at the forefront of my mind. Mom.
And I’ll wonder what she wanted for me, what life she imag-
ined I’d have. Would she ever have thought I’d settle three thousand
miles from the home we once shared? That the eight-year-old girl
would grow into a writer, a (terrible) surfer, a girlfriend, a runner, a
drummer, a computer nerd?
Would she, too, look over my shoulder as I work away at my
computer, pushing my hair away from my face to tell me, tongue-in-
cheek, to “type faster?”
I don’t know. I like to think she would have.
============================

http://www.rosajurjevics.com/clipfile...

Nice article but Laurie Colwin's name rings no bells.

deborah

Deborah, Laurie was a food essayist for GOURMET many years ago. She died way too young, at 48.

Her books, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking are still in print and are in the collections of many people I know, here and elsewhere. I cannot tell you how many times I have re-read them and given them as gifts. They are just wonderful!

Thanks for sharing, JoAnn. I was not familiar with either, but it was a nice article about Mothers and daughters.

Donna in Southern maryland

Count me as a Laurie Colwin groupie...I think I have all of her books and I've read and reread Home Cooking and More Home Cooking...

Jeanie/KY

Me too, Jeanie. I loved her books, her sense of humor, her writing style. I can't believe she's been dead for 17 years. Great article by her daughter. Thanks for posting it, JoAnn.

Here's more from my endless supply...this is a tribute to Colwin, conceived last November and printed here...parts of it are from her memorial service. Scroll down after her photo.

http://newhavenreview.com/wp-content/...

JoAnn, thanks for introducing me to this author. It amazes me that i can miss people like this! LOL!

deborah

JoAnn, I also get great satisfaction and comfort from the Home Cooking books. Thanks for reminding me of them and Laurie Colwin . . . maybe it's time for a re-read!
Sarah

Anna Quindlen wrote this about Laurie Colwin 8 years ago... adapted from an article in GOURMET magazine


With Passion and Affect
by Anna Quindlen

For the writer attempting a portrait in words, a quick sketch of Laurie Colwin is a snap. Collected colanders and birds' nests, wrote letters with a fountain pen on thick blue stationery, favored flea market china and linens, liked English shoes and horizontal stripes, cooked for a homeless shelter and school fairs, was obsessed with nuns and jugglers — yes, that's right, jugglers. The material is so specific, so vivid, so quirky that the assembled ingredients on paper have the feel of some exotic recipe. But Laurie improvised in the kitchen more than she followed recipes, and she proved in her novels, her essays, and her short stories that a good writer doesn't substitute the accumulation of detail for emotional resonance. Her books piled high on my desk, she seems to be warning me to keep this in mind, not to reduce her to the sum of her eccentricities.

Talking to those who loved her, or even to those with whom she had quarreled, is like constructing a flowchart of the worlds of writing and publishing in New York City. She introduced editors to promising writers and women to promising men, engineered meetings and friendships among the literate, the intriguing, and the up-and-coming. A deus ex machina with aggressively curly hair, she invited them all home, first to the one-room place in Greenwich Village — "a little larger than the Columbia Encyclopedia" — then to the apartment on the seminary block in Chelsea, where she lived with her husband and daughter. "Somehow or other I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd," she wrote in the opening sentence of one of her much-beloved pieces about food.

It was not just a crowd. It was a gerrymandered family, a family related not by birth but by interests, intellect, temperament, by being single and searching or paired up and fearful, above all by Laurie, who became the hub of the wheel, passing on recipes, little gifts, and advice, solicited and un. "You had to surrender the moment you walked in the door," said Rick Kot, one of her editors. "I remember when she decided to match up her publicist with a juggler she met in the park. She would not take no for an answer." Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, met Laurie through the novelist Scott Spencer: "If Scottie doesn't bring us together I'm going to hit him over the head with a cutlet bat," Laurie wrote in one of her ubiquitous postcards. "She was a tremendous interrogator," Quinn recalls. "You might not be ready to say you were seeing someone and the next thing you knew she'd have a dinner party and seat that person to her right. She turned your life over in her mind. 'I need it for my art, Al,' she'd say when I held back. 'You have to tell me.' And I always did. She created a home for all of us."

It was a home for friends from every part of her life: friends made during the years growing up in suburban Philadelphia as part of the smart crowd, the ones who quoted Eliot and drank strong coffee; friends from her days as an editor at publishing houses and as a literary agent's assistant; friends she made in a career as a fiction writer that began when she published her first short story in The New Yorker, at the age of 25. Since then, her writing has never been out of print.

Her work routine varied little. She wrote endlessly in notebooks, spent a good deal of time thinking and reading and listening to music — Brahms and Puerto Rican brass and middle-period Motown. "Then she'd sit down at her Hermes 3000 and produce however many pages she could produce in twenty minutes," recalls her husband, Juris Jurjevics, who runs the Soho Press, a small publishing house. "She thought herself a lazy person and therefore she was very disciplined."

It is difficult to write about Laurie's fiction without preaching either to the converted or to the clueless. Nine people out of ten have never heard of her, or at least read her; the other one becomes ecstatic, even incoherent, at the mention of her name. "She is definitely cultish," says Rick Kot. She was well known in writers' circles for the kind of comedy of manners usually associated with the British, which isn't surprising since she was a pronounced Anglophile who endlessly reread Middlemarch and knew all of Orwell. The voice in her work is wry, knowing, but warm and loving, too, not arch. The writing is prime. One character in "A Big Storm Knocked It Over", her last novel, is described as a huge man: "You felt that had he been stripped of flesh, two medium-size women could have played gin rummy in his rib cage."

Those who did not care for her work labeled it domestic, as it was, as she was. The characters seem, like Laurie, very specific. In perhaps her best-known novel, "Happy All the Time", one woman's apartment is decorated carefully: "On a white table was a bird's nest, an Egyptian figure in blue stone, a Russian matchbox, and a silver inkwell." This is no accident. "There was always a question of how much fiction there really was in the novels," says Juris. "All her girlfriends are in there, every old boyfriend, a lot of old employers who come off badly. Laurie was a big believer in revenge." Her characters work at things like book design and city planning, practice law, and study art. And during the arc of their fictional adventures they usually do no more than marry and have babies, commit adultery and fret about it, lose their jobs or lose interest in them. But that, of course, is the arc of real life, and the strength of these books is that the arc moves inexorably toward those moments that come to us all when we understand ourselves and the world. One of her best short stories, "The Lone Pilgrim," ends like this:
On the one side is your happiness, and on the other is your past — the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone's hand — Gilbert Seigh's — and strain through the darkness to see ahead. The readers to whom this spoke adored her — and her vision of a harmonious life. But when reporters came to call, she was a little touchy about the assumption that the pretty and privileged existence of some of her characters was in fact her own; "I speak fluent fuckinese," she said in one interview. A profile writer was ordered to meet her at a deli, not at home, because, Laurie complained, "I'm tired of reading about my china teacups and my cozy little house." (Of course, she eventually took pity on the writer and brought her home, throwing open the door to her daughter's bedroom and saying, "Here's the best room in the house.") Within the insular world of book publishing, the ruptures in some of her friendships were legendary and often mysterious. For readers, however, the names of her books, which drove her editor husband crazy — "We almost broke up over one title" — suggested she led a halcyon life. Happy All the Time. Family Happiness. Goodbye Without Leaving. These were not so much fact as aspiration.

She was ahead of her time, or not quite of it. When she began publishing, more than two decades ago, American fiction was in thrall to writers who relied heavily on clinical depression and chemical substances, anomie and ennui. Of all the words associated with Laurie Colwin, ennui would be last on the list. She had wild enthusiasms for everything from Korean pickles to old doilies to brown and white patterned china, and her friends remember her trademark greetings and odd nicknames. For Juliet Annan, who had been her British publicist, it was "Well, look at you my fine friend!" — in, Annan recalls, "the voice she used to talk to the cat — immensely affectionate." Pat Strachan, a book editor who met Laurie at the school both their daughters attended, remembers that Laurie signed herself "old slave," in a show of pretend chagrin at the demands of motherhood. When everyone in New York was wearing black and going to clubs, Laurie was wearing horizontal stripes and going to the farmers market. "Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home," she wrote. Rick Kot says it was difficult to persuade her to tour the country promoting her books because she was wary of elevators and airplanes.

When she was given the opportunity to write about food regularly for Gourmet, she decided it would be a welcome counterpoint to her other work, offering, her husband recalls, "distraction and safety." The food essays created their own avid audience; today, the two collections of those pieces, "Home Cooking" and "More Home Cooking", outsell her other work by more than three to one.

These, too, were ahead of their time. In an era when many people were still writing about cooking as though it were transubstantiation, Laurie produced pieces about dreadful dinner parties and comfy suppers that ended with recipes for things like Sautéed Vegetables and Poached Egg in One Pot. One essay begins, "As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical." As Laurie herself might have written, either you like this sort of thing, or you don't. The voice is almost corporeal, undeniably hers. Perhaps that explains why her friends find those particular pieces difficult, even impossible, to reread today. Perhaps it explains why her daughter, Rosa, now 17 and a writer herself, reads and rereads them all the time. Laurie Colwin is utterly alive in them. Laurie's novels contained no great tragedies, no wrenching dislocations, but her life, which so many readers mistook for her work, did. One morning in October 1992 she simply failed to wake up. She had high blood pressure and had relied heavily on Chinese herbalists for help, and her heart gave out. She was 48 years old and the author of ten books. When I saw the familiar Nancy Crampton book-jacket photograph — striped shirt, aureole of curly hair — I thought for a moment that some poor guy in the makeup department at The New York Times was going to get the ax for dropping onto the obit page a picture that was supposed to appear in a book review.

She was buried in Connecticut, at the country place where she loved to spend summers and tend a garden. Alice Quinn says that someone saw a fox nearby watching as the simple pine box went into the dark.

There are certain people so flagrantly alive that their deaths seem an affront to nature. Laurie Colwin was one of those people. The essence of her writing lies not so much in those vivid small details — the pecans in the pancakes, the striped wool stockings, the plates painted with cornflowers — but in the eternal notion of pushing on through everyday matters into the light of life. It was the essence of her existence, too.

Her husband is married now to one of her former writing students, a woman to whom Laurie introduced him, in what in her own novels would be seen as a kind and useful act of posthumous matchmaking, albeit one with a poignant edge of irony. "Laurie had this linoleum block she'd made on the shelf in her office, one of those things you carve as a kid and press into ink and stamp things with," Juris remembers. "I found it the other day and I looked at it and it has one word carved into it. Joy. That story's too sentimental to use."

No it's not.

— Adapted from an article by Anna Quindlen, Gourmet, August 2001

Thanks you for the articles on Laurie Colwin. I have read her fiction and liked it. I always have enjoyed reading about her. I do not own any of her cook books which seems like something I will have to amend one day soon.

R. wrote: "Thanks you for the articles on Laurie Colwin. I have read her fiction and liked it. I always have enjoyed reading about her. I do not own any of her cook books which seems like something I will have to amend one day soon..."

Her books are more about food than they are cookbooks.....her writing is great! I am giving the "set" to my daughter and my sister for Christmas.

Here are some more Colwin articles/memories for her fans:

http://www.thenewhomemaker.com/bookso...

http://bakerina.com/bakerina/comments...

http://thegarden.typepad.com/a_bite_t...

(this includes a Colwin essay and recipe)

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/sf/bo...

http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/re...

http://www.blogher.com/there-was-dori...

Great links! Reading this stuff gave me the urge to re-read all of Laurie Colvin's books. They are just wonderful.

Cynthia wrote: "Great links! Reading this stuff gave me the urge to re-read all of Laurie Colvin's books. They are just wonderful."

I just got her other-than-cooking books from my beach house. I especially want to re-read the short stories because that is where she started and got known. I may have to buy some of the books from ABEbooks, as apparently some people have borrowed mine and not returned them!

I have been "re-visiting" Laurie Colwin's books of food essays Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen and More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. I had forgotten how wonderful they were.

I have chuckled more than a few times at how opinionated Colwin was. I never noticed that the other times that I read these books. She had little patience with many food trends and cooks.

It made me sad when she wrote about how her doctor had told her she needed to cut back on her salt intake (she LOVED salt) because that long-ago essay was a precursor of her early death.

JoAnn/QuAppelle wrote: It made me sad when she wrote about how her doctor had told her she needed to cut back on her salt intake (she LOVED salt) because that long-ago essay was a precursor of her early death.
~~~~~~~~~~

I can so relate. I never add salt to my food. I also read labels on all processed foods. Restaurants are a nightmare for me. I don't want to order a plain baked potato and the salad bar every time.

If a packaged food has a lot of sodium, back on the shelf it goes. And let me tell you, it seems 90% of processed food is crazy high in salt.

Even though I've been eating this way for about 2 years, I still love the taste of salt. Though most foods in restaurants and processed foods taste way too salty for me. I guess that's a good sign.

Not too long ago I ordered a pasta, escarole and breadcrumb dish in a restaurant. I thought I was making a relatively healthy choice. Well, it was so salty I couldn't even eat it. :(

Alias, Colwin said that after a month on a low-salt diet, she seemed to taste it more than she used to.

I would lick salt off the palm of my hand if I could! Especially a good sea salt.

I just read an article in Prevention magazine's Feb/2010 issue about hypertension.

The author, Dr. Arthur Agatston, noted that sugar is also a culprit in high blood pressure. :( Am I to be left with nothing good to eat! Just kidding. I've been saying I want to cut back on sugar. This article just gave me the push I need. I didn't know about the sugar connection to BP.

His recommendations are:

~ limit salt to 1000 mg
75% of the sodium our diet comes from prepared foods such as soups, cereals, cheese, and deli meats.

~ Get 4.7 g of Potassium daily
only 1% of women get this amount. Men only 10%
Good sources: prune juice, dried apricots, tomatoes, oranges and bananas.

~ Get 1,200 of calcium daily
Good source: Low or non fat yogurt and milk, salmon, and broccoli.

~Eat more whole grains. In 2 studies of 60,000 people tracked for 10-18 years, people who ate whole grains had significantly lowered hypertension.

~ Consume no more than 6 tsp. (100 calories) of sugar daily. sugar can raise BP and triglycerides and cause weight gain.

Sorry to hijack your cooking thread and make it a health thread. :)

Awww thank you Laurie Colwin. I'm making your Friday Night Supper tonight.

Ali wrote: "Awww thank you Laurie Colwin. I'm making your Friday Night Supper tonight."

Pot Roast, right? How was it?

I bought Country Ribs yesterday so I can make this recipe of hers...I am no fan of barbeque sauce so this was appealing.

BAKED RIBS

For one side of ribs you need:
one cup of olive oil
one half cup tamari sauce
about 4 tablespoons of honey
the juice of one lemon
fresh ground black pepper
and lots and lots and lots of garlic peeled and cut in half.

Let the ribs sit in this marinade as long as possible – overnight in the refrigerator is the least, two days is the best.

Then put the ribs in a roasting pan (you can either cut them into riblets or leave them in one pieceand cut before serving) and put them in a slow oven – about 300 degrees F – and leave them there, pouring off the fat from time to time, for three to four hours.

What is left, as a friend of mine says, has no name. The ribs are both crisp and tender, salty, sweet, oily but not greasy and very garlicky. You gnaw on them and then throw the bones on the platter.

A finger bowl is actually appropriate here, if you want to be fancy, and so is the kind of heated washcloth you get in a Japanese restaurant. Plain old wet paper towels will do as well.

You can cook these ribs in the morning and eat them in the evening. They should not be cold (although a leftover rib for breakfast is considered heavenly be some people) but are fine lukewarm, and can be kept in a warm oven with no ill effects.