As I stated last week, Thursday night I had plans to go to a reading by Cathy Erway at Word in Brooklyn. If you live in New England, you are well aware that Thursday was dreadful with its wet snow. Sure it looked pretty when you were indoors looking out. But when you were walking in the insta-slush that was forming–not so fun. Despite the snow, I made it to the reading and then was sad that I couldn’t eat any of the crostinis that Erway had brought. Why do you hate me gluten?
The reading was great. I consider it to be a bit free form as the snow meant people were arriving in waves. Erway would read a section (starting with her adventures in dumpster diving, because who isn’t curious about someone actually pulling food out of a trash bag on the street?), answer a question or two, and then read from another section at the audience’s request.
By the time I had made it home, the rain portion of the weather was getting more flake-like and I went to bed with a food craving that I’ll discuss in a moment. Come morning the “snow” was blowing sideways and I happily returned to bed when my boss called to tell me she was closing the office. Hurray for a three day weekend! Most of my morning was spent diving into Erway’s book The Art of Eating In.
Quick rundown of the book–Erway decided to stop eating out. In New York. Which is a huge feat when you realize how many people in this city have NEVER. USED. THEIR. STOVE. (Seriously. I know so many people who have a pristine kitchen because they eat out or order take-out for every meal. At most they have some yogurt and beer in the fridge. Maybe a pint of ice cream in the freezer, but more likely vodka.) Two years later she was an Internet sensation having blogged her project and having gotten involved in local supper club, slow food, and cook-off groups, as well as checking out subcultures such as the previously mentioned dumpster divers and foraging groups. And she got a gig writing on the Huffington Post and a show on Heritage Radio Network.
Then she got a book deal. Bitch.
I jest. At the end of the reading I got to speak with Erway a little and she comes across in person as really sweet and adorable. And she comes across that way in her book. Out of all the foodie memoirs by New Yorkers going around these days (Julie and Julia by Julie Powell and I Loved, I Lost, I Ate Spaghettiby Giulia Melucci), The Art of Eating In might just officially have become far and away my favorite. This isn’t some life crisis saved by food, it’s simply a girl who by saving money and eating healthier manages to learn more about the social and cultural roles of food as they apply to her.
Back to my story. A little after noon I got it into my head that I was going to make cupcakes. A friend was celebrating her birthday with a big night out and all the girls were coming over to my place before heading down the street to this underground event a block away. What’s great about this group of girls is that I wasn’t the only one with food issues–there was a vegan, another Celiac, and one with a nut allergy. These sounded like the most disgusting cupcakes ever because I was going to make ones that EVERYONE could eat. Vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, soy-free, nut-free cupcakes. They can’t possibly be good.
Except the recipe is award-winning–like Best Cupcake in New York award-winning. I really wish I had invented it, but alas Erin McKenna, owner of Baby Cakes, beat me to it. Thank god she wrote a cookbook so I can make these suckers at home.
I was so inspired by Erway’s chapter on bread making that I trucked off into the snow to the grocery store, where they only had three ingredients. To make matters worse, one of those three ingredients was potato starch. And I am not eating nightshades. There was almost a temper tantrum of terrible-two proportions right there in the aisle. I haven’t been deprived of cupcakes all this time (case in point: Star Trek-a-Thon), but they are crumbly* and sugary and DAMMIT I WANT THESE CUPCAKES NOW!
Cupcakes aside, I threw a pretty darn good party with homemade hummus. Not as exciting, but whatever. There was also champagne, which made up for things.
Loved the book. Like I said, it’s the best of the foodie memoirs I’ve read–you actually learn about food and cooking. Erway states early on that a professor in college once put her class on a week long media fast. He had at one point done a longer term media fast living within communities that actively shun modern media and technology (Amish) and ones that simply don’t have access. The self removal from what is essentially an overload and glut of noise left him (and the class) with a better understanding of media. Removing one’s self from restaurant culture while actively cooking (rather than just popping something into the microwave) means learning more about food and community that comes with eating.
Colin and Salvatore, on Five Borough Book Review, recently readJonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and quoted from the book:
‘We are made of stories,’ Foer writes; ‘We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves. If my wife and I raise our son as a vegetarian, he will not eat his great-grandmother’s singular dish, will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.’
Erway makes a similar point, how we cook at home connects us to our family and friends in ways that eating in a restaurant won’t and makes us more aware of our food and sense of self:
I was at a dinner party one night, and my neighbor in the next seat told me about how, during a phone conversation with his mother, he’d expressed a little frustration with paying for restaurant food. She followed up by mailing him a stack of recipes written by his Dominican grandmother. Not only were they greatly helpful in allowing him to re-create some of the dishes he’d always loved, but he said it was almost like receiving a diary from his grandmother.
Restaurant eating changes one’s food philosophy drastically. When your food arrives, made by a stranger in a different neutral setting each night, we actually disconnect from the food. Food is about more than just taste–food is social,** economics, geography, history, and more. Erway points out a common problem among those raised in the city when she encounters two teenagers while berry picking in Prospect Park–they do not know where their food comes from.
Erway eventually ended her two years of not eating out in New York and called it the end of an era. Reading the chapter could not have come at a more fortuitous time. I too ended an era the same night as I reached this point in the book. After twenty years as a vegetarian, I ate meat. This changes my food lifestyle and opens up new avenues of thinking as I redevelop what I believe about how I eat. With Erway, there were so many grey areas as to what constituted eating out or not as well as limited social interactions. For me, choices in food open up and I have to reevaluate why I chose to stop eating meat in the first place and all my own grey areas which included eating eggs or a beef based broth. My decision had been weighing on my mind for quite some time. On my way home from the reading all I could think about was how much I wanted a pork chop. A pork chop! It’s not easy to finally change to a long time habit, but it can result in some interesting changing and a reawakening desire for foods not eaten in a long long time.
*Lesson time: Gluten-free cupcakes mean no traditional flour. Gluten is a protein in wheat that is full of sticky power. It’s used as thickener in sauces and dressings. Without it, bread made from rice or quinoa flower is dry and crumbly. Most of the time it tastes bad too. McKenna’s recipe uses Xanthan Gum to recreate the hold Gluten has. I wouldn’t know if it actually works because I didn’t get to make the cupcakes.
**I can’t for the life of me remember where I read this, but an author explained a trip to Germany and arriving late at night. On a health kick, s/he had a salad and went to bed to recover while his/her companions stayed up drinking and eating bratwurst with the locals. Come morning, the author was still jet lagged and out of sorts while the socialized and communal eating and drinking had revived everyone who had stayed up.
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Sounds like a very interesting book. It has to be very difficult not to eat out in NYC. With the varieties of food and the convenience at your fingertips – I can understand why New Yorkers never use their kitchens! I’ll have to pick up a copy. I actually saw it on the bookshelf this past weekend – but didn’t grab it.