Fruitcake!

Yesterday I made fruitcake, the kind where you raid the Whole Foods bulk aisle for fancy dried things and then soak the cake in booze and age it for a month. The Anne of Green Gables-reading part of me likes doing something so "old fashioned" (if not downright medieval); the drinker in me likes the booze part; and the adult reader in me thinks of Laurie Colwin:

Lately I have begun to think less of holiday and have turned my attention to the idea of winter, of trying to fill the house with good things... I want to make a gesture toward that longed-for simpler time by producing something that is made only once a years.

(from the essay "How to Face the Holidays," in More Home Cooking.)

Also: BOOZE!

Laurie Colwin On Turkey

Kicking off the holiday week, here's one of my favorite food writers being insightful about Thanksgiving:

So many other people seem to dread turkey [...] In my opinion the poor turkey is merely a scapegoat for the mire of conflicted feelings flooding our psyches at holiday time. It is hard to divorce turkey from the expectations of family, the sibling rivalries, the unspoken resentments, the secret rages that occur in even the happiest families. Add to this the exhaustion of travel or the exhaustion of preparing to welcome traveling relatives, and even the tenderest, juiciest turkey may be as sawdust.

She then goes on to call just a turkey breast "turkey devoid of drama." I wonder what she'd have to say about Tofurkey!

Reading Cookbooks

I was going through some Laurie Colwin again last week and found this:

You want comfort; you want security; you want food; you want not to be hungry; and not only do you want those basic things fixed, you want it done in a really nice, gentle way that makes you feel loved. That's a big desire, and cookbooks say to the person who's reading them, "If you read me, you will be able to do this for yourself and for others. You will make everybody feel better."

Let's read some cookbooks!

Thing #28: Learn How To Can

Thing #28 on the list of 30 Things always seemed like it was going to be hard, but making jam is easy!

These were the berries from the u-pick farm. This is probably a year's supply of jam for a single person.

As Laurie Colwin says in the excellent chapter "Jam Anxiety" (in More Home Cooking):
...I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they make bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel this way, in fact, nature does most of the work. Jam making is, actually, a snap...

Food I Cook For Myself

Oyster stew is a traditional Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve supper in my mother's family, but only she and I like it. Mr. Isbell doesn't care for it either, but since he was at band practice last night, I made some for a week-before-Christmas-eve dinner for myself. (And Toby. Toby, I discovered, is a big fan of oyster stew.)

I've started reading some M.F.K. Fisher again, to compare her with Laurie Colwin, and in Consider The Oyster I found this about oyster stew: "mildly potent, quietly sustaining, warm as love and welcomer in the winter."

And also very popular with spoiled housecats.

Things That Are Soothing: Laurie Colwin

I only recently discovered Laurie Colwin as a food writer (I still haven't read her novels) and got Home Cooking and More Home Cooking in quick succession from the library. More Home Cooking in particular has been a delight: How can you not love a cookbook/memoir whose first chapter begins with, "There are those of us--the harried, cowardly, overextended--who find the beginning of December to be life's most trying time."

She encourages us to hang in there until New Year's Eve, when we can stay home with "a couple of similarly New Year's Eve-phobic close friends" and eat delicious soothing food, including salmon and marinated Brussels sprouts and lemon rice pudding.

The books are smart, engaging, funny (read the "Jam Anxiety" chapter) and most of all encouraging. And we all need encouragement.