Digging into sounds

I don't know how I've managed to fall in love far more easily with cookbooks than with fiction, but I suppose it's because a good cookbook -- the kind I like -- manages to integrate the best elements of each. To me, it is the loveliest two-in-one, like being at a dinner party and enjoying both the meal and the company. You are greeted with a moving, terrific story, and instead of leaving it at that, you are met with a recipe so that the stories may continue, each stemming from that original, lovely story.

I rarely buy books. I was ordered to get rid of most of them prior to my move from Windsor to Toronto and I've tried to keep my collection modest and limited only to the ones I've loved, the ones I use and the ones I've been given by special people. Despite this, I still have plenty, and I'd like to think one day I will have enough space to house a small library and shelve my favourites. However, I bought Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, and I'm glad I did. It's a wonderful read. Everyone who reads it says that. It's not a glossy, full-colour cookbook filled with a lot of mediocre recipes. Instead, it guides you. Adler helps you along, showing you how to make stock, how to make the most of leftover brines and juices. It's about stretching food, not only to save money, but so that you truly appreciate the value of your food.

Tamar Adler is a former editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine and has cooked at esteemed restaurants Prune, Chez Panisse, and Farm 255.

What follows is one of my favourite excerpts from the book and rather representative of the content.

"We have different loves. Mine are food and words. Others' are how buildings slant away from dark sidewalks, or how good it feels to solve an equation. I say: Let yourself love what you love, and see if it doesn't lead you back to what you ate when you loved it.

It helps me to think of meals I've cooked or eaten before, if not for the food, for the light in the room or in the sky when I ate. What the light looked like, or what music was playing. It doesn't take more than my opening a window, head lifted to the air, for the sound of glass against a marble table, or the rustle of the wind to remind me that I've sat at marble tables outside, drunk out of glasses, listened to their light clatter on the table, noticing a rustling wind.

I may not remember what I ate, or whether it was the lunch where I realized I do not like black pepper to have been ground before I use it, or the one where I spilled water in my lap, but I will remember how the day felt on my face, and my creative soft self will have been awakened. So I listen hard. I listen with purpose of remembering. And this digging into sounds and into days I have heard and felt roots future meals in the unchangeable truths of past ones.

Let smells in. Let the smell of hot tarmac in the summer remind you of a meal you ate the first time you landed in a hot place, when the ground smelled like it was melting. Let the smell of salt remind you of a paper basket of fried clams you ate once, squeezing them with lemon as you walked on a boardwalk. Let it reach your deeper interest. When you smell the sea, and remember the basket of hot fried clams, and the sound of skee-balls knocking against each other, let it help you love what food can do, which is to tie this moment to that one. Then something about the wind off the sea will have settled in your mind, and carried the fried clams and squeeze of lemon with it."

For consideration

"Grocery money is an odd sticking point for U.S. citizens, who on average spend a lower proportion of our income on food than people in any other country, or any heretofore in history. In our daily fare, even in school lunches, we broadly justify consumption of tallow-fried animal pulp on the grounds that it's cheaper than whole grains, fresh vegetables, hormone-free dairy, and such. Whether on school boards or in families, budget keepers may be aware of the health tradeoff but still feel compelled to economize on food -- in a manner that would be utterly unacceptable if the health risk involved an unsafe family vehicle or a plume of benzene running through a school basement.

It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. "Economizing," as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year's clothes again..."

"Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains generates about three times as much money for your local economy. Studies from all over the country agree on that, even while consumers keep buying at chain stores, and fretting that the downtown blocks of cute mom-and-pop venues are turning into a ghost town. Today's bargain always seems to matter more."

-Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

No meal is made alone

"Unless you live alone in a cave or hermitage, cooking and eating are social activities: even hermit monks have one communal meal a month. The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers. In my kitchen I rely on Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, the numerous contributors to The Charleston Receipts, and Margaret Costa (author of an English book entitled The Four Seasons Cookery Book).

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends. People who like to cook like to talk about food. Plain old cooks (as opposed to the geniuses in fancy restaurants) tend to be friendly. After all, without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago." -Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

Sebastian Junger, sitting down to dinner, community:

I went to a reading by Sebastian Junger the other night, author of the recently released War. He's a fascinating man. You have to respect someone who, acknowledging that short stories do not a rich man make, decided to up and leave to become a freelance war reporter. You certainly can't accuse the man of taking the safe route when he's at 30, 000 feet, spending time with soldiers all over Afghanistan. I found what he had to say about the war so very interesting and provocative, and was immediately enlightened in ways I didn't imagine I'd be when I left my apartment that night.

On evenings like last night, when I'm feeling particularly down, great news or no, I go back and remember the meals I've enjoyed over the past year and the people I've shared them with. It flat-out makes me happy. Most of us will not experience what Sebastian Junger experienced; we will not know suffering like that, or pain like that, or loss like that. We will not know, first-hand, what goes on overseas. We will not know the oil spill like those who live off the gulf coast will know it, and we will not know the loss of aquatic life the way those whose careers depend on it will know it. For many of us, our biggest battles will be of a more intimate nature: death, heartbreak, concern over being able to make rent, disease and illness in the family, childbirth, finding a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes they feel mighty and overpowering.

But I think that there's something profoundly life-altering about food. We eat together after a funeral. We feast post-wedding. Inmates set to die get their last meal. We get together over a potluck, or a potato bar. We enjoy a movie accompanied by popcorn or Junior Mints. A pic-nic in the park with fresh lemonade to toast summer, or ice cream and popsicles in August to keep us cool. Before my grandfather died a few years ago, a cup of vanilla yogurt with berries from Tim Hortons was the only thing that appealed to him. That's what I remember about those last days -- my grandfather holding up a cup of yogurt, his feet covered in cold cloths, listening to an old cassette tape of Johnny Cash while my great-uncle mocked him for his music preferences.

I don't need to point out the many reasons we eat. But food ignites the senses. It re-invigorates us. It reminds us.

After all, someone had to plant the seeds. Someone harvested the fruit. Someone cleaned, drove, ordered, stocked. Food isn't just fuel; it re-affirms the relationships we have with each other, and of the reality that we are intrinsically bound to one another by our collective need to fill and nourish our bodies.

If a shitshow's going to hit -- which it surely will to all of us, sooner or later -- perhaps it's best we gather around the table and sit down to a square meal. Let's hang out on a patio and put back a couple pints. Let's laugh a long while about life and disappointment and misery and happiness, and let's toast to being able to keep on doing this, to keep on getting to know one another better, to find ourselves lucky enough that when the time comes, we will be welcomed into the innermost corners of each other's lives. Let's hope we know almost instinctively when to listen and when to speak, when to hold fast and when to let go, and how to comfort each other in a way that keeps for longer than a meal. It might happen that we lose our footing while going through a dark tunnel, and we're going to need that foundation if we ever expect to muster the courage and the confidence to put on that hard hat, yell "Where the hell did my flashlight go?", and keep on trudging.