Becoming a Writer
It’s funny how things work out. You pick up a book in a bookstore or a friend presses you to …
Tag Archives: Food writing
Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
A Victorian M. F. K. Fisher? Maybe. Certainly M. F. K. Fisher knew of Elizabeth Pennell, for she says in …
Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: M. F. K. FISHER
Anyone who reveres food and eats oysters, who yearns for security and longs for love, and who seeks out experiences and thinks much must discover M. F. K. Fisher. Just who was M. F. K. Fisher and why did James Beard, that gentle giant of the food world, call her a national treasure? And why did John Updike refer to her as “the poet of the appetites”?
The Gifts of Food Bloggers
To celebrate the holiday season, and the Twelve Days of Christmas as it were, I’d like to raise a glass …
Reading about Food: Musings on a Cold Winter Morning
Brillat-Savarin, a French philosopher, once wrote “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” He sure had that right. Food serves as a metaphor for some larger truths about humanity. In contemplating food and our ways of dealing with it, we learn certain things about ourselves. When we talk about food, we’re really talking about ourselves. What is revealed in the way a culture approaches? What’s revealed in our culture when we contemplate our approach to food?
Cookbooks for a Desert Island, or an Autumn Afternoon
[Note: Apologies to readers who tried to access The Forme of Cury online link yesterday---for some reason it was linked …
The Lady From Chatham, Virginia
Southern hospitality is not gone with the wind, at least not in Chatham Virginia. Food writer Patricia Mitchell,* owner of the now-closed Sims-Mitchell House Bed & Breakfast, makes sure of that. And you can’t expect anything less from a woman who called her first 1968 Mustang “Penelope.” You know, after Odysseus’s wife, who kept the home fires burning and the soup bubbling while the hero was off slaying monsters and avoiding Sirens.
Every day Mrs. Mitchell’s guests enjoyed baked concoctions at breakfast that would cause Scarlett O’Hara to swoon, even without tight stays or Rhett Butler lurking around.
