Memoirs, False and True

Hanukkah, Solstice, Christmas, New Year — the time of holidays, these various festivals of light, can seem to place upon one a heavy obligation to rejoice. During this particular year’s holiday season, one friend has lost his oldest friend in life, our son-in-law his father and a sister-in-law, and yet another sits day after day by the hospital bedside of his wife, looking for hopeful signs of improvement. 

The holidays can be a difficult time even without Death (or sad reminders of it) at the door. For other people there are other wolves — unemployment, insufficient income, poverty, and all manner of fears for the future, financial and otherwise. The news brings grim stories daily.

I seek refuge in reading. The three books I’ve been reading this week are all written as first-person narratives. Though only one is a memoir, the two novels take on aspects of memoir, and in one the author’s own voice breaks through his tale on more than one occasion. Other people’s lives! How do other people come through difficult patches? One reason for reading memoir, even for reading fiction, is to seek an answer to that question. Recently, for example, I read and reviewed a memoir written by my own cousin (our fathers were brothers), and my sisters and I have not done yet sorting through memories brought to light by that book. But a stranger’s memoir may just as easily strike a reader’s heart.

In one of the later chapters of her memoir, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home, Jessica Fechtor writes of the time in her recovery from brain aneurysm and subsequent surgeries when she started writing a food blog and happened upon How to Cook a Wolf, by M.F.K. Fisher. 

With the war in full swing, the wolf at the door was hunger, the literal hunger that people faced on a rationed existence, but also the hunger for peace, for simple pleasures, and the authority to determine the nature of one’s own appetite and feed it accordingly. 

Government agencies encouraged the public to think scientifically about how they might cobble together their recommended vitamins and nutrients each day. M.F.K. Fisher urged her readers to take a different approach…. The key, she believed, was approaching the stove with all the powers of one’s mind and one’s heart…. 

And so, How to Cook a Wolf is a book about cooking with courage and faith. It’s about granting oneself permission to feast, really feast, on whatever scraps you have before you, despite the wolf nearby—in fact, because of him. 

And this is what Jessica Fechtor’s book is about, too. She is a lovely writer, and from the way she explains her recipes it’s clear that she is also a lovely cook. By “lovely” I mean gracious, heartfelt, with a sure, knowledgeable, loving touch. One finishes her book wishing to be part of her life but happy to realize that the author’s life is complete as it is, that the wolf has retreated and that even before his retreat, in the darkest hours love was never absent.

About Where the Sea Used to Be, a novel by Rick Bass, I cannot say as much, as I’m only 68 pages into the 445-page book. The main character appears in the third person, but another character, who has yet to appear directly onstage (though constantly present in the thoughts of the two before us) appears in quoted passages from a journal he wrote years before. We are in a remote valley of Montana, in deepest, coldest winter. Maintaining sanity is as crucial as maintaining physical life. The author has his character, Wallis, dreaming of the earth far below the snow-buried surface, and I am reminded of a nonfiction book by Bass, Oil Notes, one of a handful of books (see here for others) that captures the allure of geology, the romance of rock. 

In Where the Sea Used to Be, Bass gives his own love of geology to his character, Wallis, and seduces a reader into Wallis’s underground dreams, but there is another layer, historical and personal rather than geological and abstract, to my reading of this book, as so many sentences make me think of the late Jim Harrison. How I hope he read this book! (Surely he must have!) I can turn to almost any page and find a passage that puts Jim reading it in my mind. Here, for example, is one:

…It was hard for him to imagine the specific processes that had given rise to those individual cementings below; hard to imagine the specific processes that had held an ancient land in place; but that night, in his dreams, he imagined that perhaps those old lands were held in place by a quietness and enduringness—a smoothness of fit. The way rain falls, the way snow falls. The way birds sleep. The way lichens grow in red and blue mosaics across damp boulders and old stone walls. The way a log rots.  

The slow moths that emerge from the log’s orange rot. 

If the wolves howled that night, he didn’t hear them. The snow absorbed everything.

My third book of the week has been Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a book I’ve been avoiding for almost as many years as I avoided Kristin Lavransdatter, and one that, finally immersed in the pages of first the latter and now the former, I am enjoying equally. What a romp! The introduction of the Wordsworth Editions paperback by Cedric Watts is very helpful. Still, it took a while—many pages—for me to enter the book’s spirit, which is the only way to enjoy reading Tristram Shandy.

It occurs to me this morning, having begun M.F.K. Fisher’s wolves at the door, summoned up again by Jessica Fechtor, and having continued through the Montana wolves of Rick Bass, that Sterne gives us a long meal designed to take our minds off life’s metaphorical wolves. The book itself (in its many volumes) is the hobby-horse of the fictional narrator, Tristram, as recreating the siege in which he received his wound is Uncle Toby’s hobby-horse, and Tristram says of his: 

For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him — ’Tis the sporting little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour — a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick — an Uncle Toby’s siege — or an anything, which a man makes a shift to get astride on, to canter it away from the cares and solicitudes of life — ’Tis as useful a beast as is in the whole creation — nor do I really see how the world could do without it —

In an earlier passage, Tristram mused on what kind of subjects would suit him, if he were a monarch—and I’ll never find that passage again this morning, but what he wanted was that his subjects would be merry. And so Sterne, as author, and Tristram Shandy, as character-narrator, do all in their power to make readers merry, to carry us on their pages out of the present weary hour and “away from the cares and solicitudes of life.” 

Exchanging our own concerns for those of another when reading a memoir, taking temporary leave of reality altogether to lose ourselves in a novel — I do not see that either form of reading is irresponsible escape. There are lessons to be learned from others’ lives, even from the lives of fictional characters, and laughter does us good, too.

Around our old farmhouse, the howls come from coyotes rather than wolves, actual rather than metaphorical, and to our ears they are the sound of home, but, as Tristram would say, that is another story entirely, and let us not get sidetracked onto that now.

Courage and faith. Imagination. Joy and merriment. Those are my themes today. And I wish you happy reading for the quiet hours of your holiday, and if you have no quiet hours, I wish you joy of merry noise! 

Playing Catch-Up or Running in Place?

October seems to be going on and on, delightfully, and at the same time it is hurrying by. This is the last week, and what have I done with the beautiful month?

I have read two ARCs of novels in the past week and am now embarked on a book I must review very soon. Still have not started The Lacuna yet (I’m pretty good at meeting deadlines, but any more I cut them pretty close) but have picked up two or three other books and dipped into them, feeling guilty as I did so and doing it, anyway. What are these guilty pleasures? Oh, there’s Raymond Chandler, for one. Not one to be kept awake by the whodunit question, I find it easy to fall asleep over Raymond Chandler. And now there’s A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, the letters beginning in 1906. This edited volume of years of the famous advice column is a microcosm of the immigrant experience. Somehow, also, when reading it I don’t feel that one hundred years ago is such a long time, either.

I get up at four in the morning to huhnt for a job through the newspaper. I have no money for carfare, so I go on foot, but by the time I get to the place there are hundreds before me.

The writer of this letter knows how to run an iron milling machine, how to drive horses and train colts, he served in the cavalry in Russia, but he can find no work in New York.

If I had known it would be so bitter for me here, I wouldn’t have come. I didn’t come here for a fortune, but where is bread? What can I do now?

But life is not all reading. My raspberry-blackberry jam is made, and I got eight little jars out of berries picked and frozen many weeks ago. Now, will I get out to pick elderberries this week or lose that season once again this year? And why is the elderberry season such a will-o’-the-wisp, anyway? Now you see it, now you don’t. Elderberries, vinegar, sugar, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, cayenne—voilà! Elderberry catsup!




When I looked up that recipe for a wild game condiment, one I made many years ago in one of my cherished old cookbooks, Going Wild in the Kitchen, I stumbled on the instructions for pickled nasturtium seeds. “Pick the seeds when fully developed but before they become hard,” then brine overnight and process in jars with boiling vinegar. Maybe this is why I haven’t yet pulled out the nasturtiums and incorporated the rotting straw bales into the garden soil for next year! I need to pickle the nasturtium seeds!

Then there’s the project soon to be unveiled on this site that will announce a new partnership between Dog Ears Books and a local cause in which we strongly believe. Soon, but not quiet yet. Details are being worked out, which to say that I and others are working on details. Sigh! No, the details don’t work themselves out, though wouldn’t it be great if they did?

Meetings, meetings—how did I get involved in so many meetings? Here’s another one coming up on Wednesday morning. Sarah’s a bit disgusted by this turn of events and longing for January and my shortened winter work week, when we will both have plenty of time at home to play in the snow.

Is that really what we’ll be doing in January? We’ll see. For now, let the little dog dream. What can it hurt? I’m dreaming, too. It gives me the courage to keep my nose to the grindstone for now.

And meanwhile, what of the wild grapes? Surely something can be made of them, too?

The fruit of the wild grape is of exceptional flavor. It makes a delicious tart jelly and can be made into wine as well.

Some books are for learning, some are for escape, some for guilty pleasure, and some are obviously guilt-inducing. What will you choose to read during the last days of October?

Gumbo Stuff

What a lot of nerve I have, blogging about gumbo when I’ve never lived in Louisiana or Texas and have not a drop (as far as I know) of Cajun or Creole blood! But gumbo is what I wanted to make for David and Michael’s combined birthday dinner the night before Phase 2 of the kitchen remodeling project was kicked into high gear. Only after making my own chicken-sausage-shrimp gumbo, very slightly modified from Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook, did I seek out other versions.

When it comes to recipes for gumbo, the variety is infinite, but two themes are always present: (1) The roux made with browned flour is essential, as are (2) celery, onion and green pepper. The rest, as far as I can see, is up for grabs.

Paul Prudhomme, in his Louisiana Kitchen cookbook, starts by coating chicken pieces in flour, salt, garlic powder and red pepper and frying the chicken, adding more flour and oil to the bits left in the pan to make his roux. He recommends high heat and constant whisking. The lower the heat, the longer the cooking time.

If you brown the flour in the oven (as I did, the night before making the gumbo), how long should it brown? Different cooks’ opinions and experience call for anywhere from 35 minutes to 2 hours. Some say to stir; others say “Don’t touch it!” But however you brown the flour, attention à la roux! “If the roux is underdone, the gumbo will have a kind of floury taste and texture, whereas if you burn the oil, it will taste like burnt oil.” The site giving this important advice looks very authentic and has recipes for catfish gumbo and crawfish gumbo, too.

Some people use tomatoes, others omit them. If you’re using sausage in your gumbo, what kind of sausage should it be? Andouille is held in high regard. Smoked sausage, in general, gets big votes. I had (organic) chorizo in the freezer but then, at the last minute, worried that its spiciness would overpower the chicken and shrimp I had set my heart on. Turned out it was not a good day for sausage shopping at our local grocery store, and I didn’t have time to go anywhere else, so summer sausage got the nod.

Then—well, I’ll give you some links to a few recipes I found online, then tell you how I made mine, which as I say started from a cookbook, one on my shelf at home. If you have a good cookbook library, see what you can find. As for online recipes, there are many, and what I’m giving here is only the tip of the iceberg. Gumbo is good eatin’ on an Up North winter evening.

Let’s start with a recipe from south Louisiana. Looks good. In another, the flour is not browned. Can it be for real? I’m dubious.

From New Jersey comes a recipe that instructs the cook to brown the flour in pot. Many recipes use this method. The ingredient list from this Texas recipe leaves out the okra, with this note: “And while the word gumbo stems from the Bantu term for okra, kingombo, I didn’t add that as well even though it’s quite common to include it for both flavor and its thickening power.” Personally, I cannot conceive of gumbo without okra. But then, I am only a damn Yankee, doin’ the best I can. Anyway, I’ll be trying variations in future, but here’s what I did this February:

Chicken, Sausage and Shrimp Gumbo

First, the night before, I browned flour in the oven in a shallow pan, "roasting" it for 45 minutes and stirring 15 and 30 minutes along. The aroma is strange. I was glad I got that smell out of the way the night before.

Late Friday afternoon, I cooked chicken pieces in a big cast iron pot with lots of water for 45 minutes to create a good, rich broth and then removed the chicken pieces to cool in a colander.

I chopped celery, chopped green pepper (excuse me, bell pepper), chopped onion and garlic and sliced green onions (scallions) and tossed these into a second big pot with olive oil and sauteed the vegetables, turning often with a spatula as they cooked.

To the sauteed vegetable mixture I added the browned flour and, a bit at a time, some of the chicken broth, stirring as it thickened.

Skinning chicken pieces, I took meat off the bones, cut it into small pieces, and added chicken pieces and sauteed vegetables with flour thickener to the broth, along with a can of diced tomatoes oregano, salt and pepper. Unfortunately I was out of bay leaves (at least, I couldn't find them in the confusion of the kitchen project, with boxes of ingredients and piles of dishes all over the house), so I added a very small amount of chopped sage (three small leaves, chopped fine), harvested from outdoors at the last minute. Summer sausage, diced large, was added at this point, also, and then everything simmered for another 45 minutes. While this was simmering and smelling better and better, I had plenty of time to shell and devein the shrimp.


About 20 minutes before dinner I added a bag of chopped okra, and, ten minutes later, the shrimp.

At the very end, I added the filé gumbo powder (which is ground thyme and powdered sassafras leaves).

I served the gumbo in big flat bowls with a pile of steaming rice on top (some people ladle the gumbo over the rice), with hot sauce on the side, an option for diners. Delicious, if I do say so myself!

Sorry I didn’t photograph the gumbo and rice in the bowls. It was beautiful, but we were very focused on digging in.

The next morning, the kitchen was half-gutted again (not the sink and new countertop side), old flooring taken up so new tile could go down. It will be a couple of days before we’ll be cooking in the kitchen again, but--lunch for the remodeling crew? Where’s that pot of gumbo?

Good-by, James Joyce, Until We Meet Again

For the last meeting of our Ulysses study group, Marilyn offered to prepare an Irish dinner and bring it to Steve’s house on Gills Pier Road. My assignment (that is, I volunteered to do something, and this was Marilyn’s suggestion) was to make the Irish soda bread. She found a recipe for me, as follows:

2-1/2 cups all purpose flour
2-1/4 cups whole wheat flour
¾ cups rolled oats
1 T + 1-1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. salt
¾ tsp. baking soda
1-3/4 cups buttermilk
6 T unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Knead on lightly floured surface and shape into a 9” round loaf. Slash an X on top of the loaf. (Why? Tradition!) Bake 1 hour at 350 degrees. Transfer to wire rack to cool completely.

Since David and I are preparing an imminent departure from home and I have been trying to use up everything in the house, I didn’t want to buy whole wheat flour and decided to get by with only unbleached white. Bought the buttermilk. All set on Wednesday afternoon. --Oh-oh! Short over a cup of flour! What to do? Substituted uncooked cereal of various grains, including cornmeal. There! Along with rolled oats, that will be a hearty bread! (It was.)




Suggestion: if you try this recipe, add the buttermilk to the dry ingredients and stir it in, then the cooled melted butter. I poured cold buttermilk into cooled butter, and the butter immediately lumped up in an alarming manner, producing my second moment of panic. The finished product, however, turned out presentable and edible.


Marilyn brought her aromatic lamb stew in a crockpot, but we did not dig in immediately, tempted as we were. (I’m speaking for myself, at least.) Our fearless leader, Big Steve, had prepared excerpts for us to read aloud, one from each chapter of the book, and that was the first order of business. It was delightful to share these passages again and recall their places in the story. A little Jameson’s didn’t hurt, either.

I intended to get a picture of the stew but (once again!) was distracted by eating and forgot my camera, lying ignored on the table beside me. Also, Marilyn, a retired lawyer, had interesting observations to make about the decision of the judge to allow this book into the United States, effectively lifting the ban that had previously been imposed. Needless to say, we all agreed with the judge that Ulysses is a work of art and not “obscene material.” Other topics discussed over dinner were: What does the future hold for the three main characters? What do they think of and feel for each other? How would you rate this book next to everything else you’ve read? If you could be a book—or take only one book to a desert island—would you consider this one? Others? What others? What will you be reading next? Will you read this book again someday? Would you recommend it to other people?

We all agreed that Ulysses was well worth the time and effort; that the study group had helped us get through it and get much more out of it than we would have alone (the rest of us gave Steve the major credit, while he said the group had pushed him to keep going); that we felt enriched by having taken this work into our lives; and that James Joyce was a genius. Over Marilyn’s Bailey’s cheesecake, we listened to a recording of the last of Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book. Everyone was smiling.


This group was a resounding success! Thank you, Steve! We parted in a glow of accomplishment and warm feelings toward one another.

Out on M-22, Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern is closed for the month of January, as usual. Owner Paul doesn’t fly off to Belize or anything, though he may take a little getaway time in the U.P., but in general January is his month each year for undertaking a refurbishing project, something that can’t easily be done around restaurant patrons and bar regulars. One year it was new stools at the bar; another year all the table tops were refinished. What will it be this year? We’ll find out when we return in the spring.



Note: I am uploading this post from the Leelanau Township Library in Northport while we wait for a call from Van's Garage in Leland to tell us they've got the snow tires on the vehicle we want to take to Florida. Checking e-mail and updating the blog from a library feels somewhat like being in Florida, with these differences: this library is smaller, cozier--and full of friends! We will miss this place and these people while we're gone.

Another Idea for Green Tomatoes

They had been sitting out on the table on the porch for weeks, not turning red. A couple turned a weak, pale orange, but the rest remained green and hard. Finally David asked if he could throw them into the compost pile. Tomatoes from our garden—toss them out??? “No, I’ll deal with them tonight,” I promised. So after dinner, as he was leaving for his studio and I was settling into my reading chair with a good book, he stuck his head back in the door to remind me that the tomatoes were waiting. Drat!

The good news was that I found a recipe for something called Green Tomato Mincemeat in that old stand-by, can't-live-without-it book, Putting Food By (1973). The bad news was that the recipe assumed the cook would be (1) making a huge batch of the stuff and (2) canning it. I just wanted to get the job done, not perform math (to cut the recipe down to the small number of green tomatoes on hand), so, I winged it and measured nothing. Chopped the tomatoes. Chopped up an apple. Found what looked like enough raisins. Got out the apple cider vinegar, the last of some apple syrup I was tired of seeing in the cupboard, cinnamon and (since I didn’t seem to have the other spices called for) “pumpkin pie spice.” Got it all simmering in the double boiler and sat down with my book at last. Before we went to bed, green tomato mincemeat was resting in the refrigerator.

On Halloween, when I got home earlier than David and our houseguest, I thought I’d make a green tomato mincemeat pie. My first impulse was to make regular piecrust, but then I noticed the store-bought graham cracker crust I’d bought weeks before, for some reason (I’m sure there was a reason), and never used. Feeling lazy and guilty, I quickly shifted to Plan B: store-bought crust and streusel topping with rolled oats, brown sugar, etc. Was this cheating?


Sunday morning when David asked if there was anything for breakfast, I suggested green tomato mincemeat pie with cheddar cheese. He elected to give it a try, and I must say it was delicious. It was so good that I recommend graham cracker crust (you could make that from scratch) and streusel topping for green tomato mincemeat pie, and, in fact, I’m thinking that maybe next year it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put up half a dozen jars of green tomato mincemeat.

Next, these chestnuts must be dealt with, but Thanksgiving isn’t that far in the future, and nothing says Thanksgiving like cream of chestnut soup.

Lazy Morning Thoughts

These wild turkeys have nothing to do with my morning thoughts, but I spied the flock wandering around Northport the day after Thanksgiving, too late to post them for the holiday, and they’ve been hanging out on my desktop ever since, waiting their turn on the blog.

Luxuriating beneath the covers for the second snowy morning in a row, my mind drifting from one thing to another until it reached Mackinac Island, I found myself asking, “How did I get here?” Then a reconstruction: I had begun by reminding myself of the new Bill Moyers book. This brought to mind a weekend philosophy conference (1994?) at the Aspen Institute, with Moyers scheduled as moderator. He could not attend, due to illness, a great disappointment to me, but the conference itself was a glimpse into another world for me. About a dozen graduate students, of whom I was one, had our expenses paid by the Institute. The only other female grad student was a young, beautiful, brilliant rabbi’s daughter. All the males were clean-scrubbed conservative Catholics, natural law adherents. “Law all the way down,” one of them affirmed. I couldn’t resist teasing him a little: “I thought it was turtles.” This memory brought in its train the wonderful turtle sculpture on Mackinac Island….

One of the young Catholic men, learning of my love for Bergson, loaned me Maritain’s book on Bergson. (It did not tempt me to transfer my allegiance.) This memory led me to reflect for the –nth time on Bergson’s treatment of Xeno’s paradoxes. Bergson’s basic insight was that the paradox is not in reality but in the intellect’s analysis of reality. (We know, after all, that the arrow does reach the target, whatever the paradox has to say about the impossibility of this result.) His second insight: intelligence leads us astray when we apply it outside its area of expertise, which is inherently practical. Thus the paradoxes and conundrums that result from metaphysical inquiry.

Oh, no, not more philosophy! Very well, then, how about chocolate? There is a wonderfully simple recipe on the Baker’s baking chocolate box for Chewy Chocolate Drops. I will not reproduce it here but will suggest an addition, one I have not yet tried: chopped dried cherries. Chewy Chocolate Cherry Drops! That may be the best idea I had in my morning musings.

P.S. forget the icing. The cookies don’t need it, cherries or no.