The Fact of a Doorframe: A Food Story and its Otherwise

 

Increasingly, I find myself giving particular shape, weight and density to the most recent beginnings of a scholarly project that is focused, in part, on people's histories, experiences, and memories of food, particularly as it relates to the at-home preparation and serving of food.  This version of my food story begins when (and probably because) three things happened, and in rather quick succession, in December 2016: (1) I bought an old cookbook for fifty cents at a nearby resale shop; (2) I bought a set of decorating tips at a restaurant supply shop, and (3) my father died--rather suddenly and unexpectedly. As a way of coping with the last of these events, I baked. And baked. And baked. And then not knowing what else to do, I baked still more. That this is what I chose to do is puzzling since I'd not grown up baking or being around bakers. But the cookbook came in handy, providing me with ideas, measurements, times, and temperatures, and the decorating tips helped me learn to make what I baked look much better than they might otherwise have looked. And so I baked. And then I baked some more. 

I remember a conversation with a former student around this time. "I can't stop," I told her. "I should be doing something else--writing something, reading something, something scholarly. I am wasting my time." She told me to trust where I was at, what I was doing, and to be okay with not knowing why, or what it was all for, at least for now. 

With time and in between bakes, I continued to selectively develop this particular version of my food story, forging connections between this new project and one I'd been interested in exploring some 20 years ago when I entered grad school in 1997: Examining late 19th-century/early 20th-century American cookbooks as a form of women's narrative.  

 *

Years before I began stabilizing this particular version of my food story, I began searching for a poem I had read while taking a community college course. The year was probably 1992 or 1993. Knowing that the poem was about a door, I thought the poem might have been "The Fact of a Doorframe," but upon finding that poem, I realized it was not the one I'd hoped to find. My memory had tricked me. Again. 

At some point, years later, I was able to find the "door poem" I'd been hoping to find. And while my memory was half-accurate (the poet was, in fact, Adrienne Rich), it wasn't that poem, but a poem called "Prospective Immigrants Please Note."

This is that poem: 

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

*

Increasingly, I find myself giving particular shape and weight and density to a story about a food project that begins in December 2016--one that selectively, simultaneously, also begins in 1997. It's a story that I'm not ashamed to tell, one, in fact, that I am proud of telling, a story that makes sense in an academic context and is in keeping with the person I've become. Yet in choosing to tell it this way, I fail to acknowledge the potential of what, following Wittgenstein, might "also be otherwise." 

*

An otherwise: After (barely) graduating from high school in 1981, I applied for a waitress position, suspecting that it was not a job I'd be good at, but reasoning that this was precisely why it would be good for me. I got the first job I applied for and would spend the next 13 years at that restaurant.  

This thing I'll describe was not the first or last (or even the very worst) thing of this sort that I'd experience in those thirteen years, but it is the one I think to tell about now, perhaps for no other reason than because, like Rich's poem, this one is also about a door. 

It happened on the morning of another bullshit 9am Saturday meeting. These meetings were rare, but always a waste of time. A time for the owner of the restaurant to gather us together to tell us that the register was coming up short (yet again, and by a lot) even though I suspected this was not true, but was just another way to divide us, to ensure that we'd all be watching each other closely, keeping tabs, suspecting one other, when he was away.

As I recall, it wasn't even my "time in the box,"** so I'm still not sure why he chose to do this to me that day. Perhaps (simply?) because he knew he could. And if he knew if he could, of course he should, and of course he would. He always acted. It was part of our job to absorb.

Our bullshit meetings were held in a windowed portion of the restaurant overlooking the parking lot. In my mind's eye, I see him pacing, waiting for us to arrive, keeping track of who was there first, second, third, and so on. It's likely that he saw when I arrived, noting also that I waited in my car until exactly 8:59 am to enter the restaurant. That I waited would be seen as a small act of resistance (and it was) and likely enough to set him off (and it was). Then again, it was only ever these little things-- most of us who stayed were only able to do so because we knew better than to ever initiate something big.

I'll never know if he made a big show of locking the front door, but I suspect he did not, knowing he'd appear more powerful if he did not, knowing that others would likely notice that I was not there. Or, failing that, they'd know when they heard the sound of someone pulling, but just once, against the front door. 

And so I sat there, on the cement, in the heat, in front of the door for the duration of his bullshit meeting, hating that I couldn't leave, feeling scared that I might--if not today, someday--but mostly feeling increasingly ashamed of all these years of not taking better care of me. "And so I just sat there and waited. Like a dog," I've said when describing this to the handful of people I've trusted enough to share this part of my life with. "Just like a dog."   

* 

It was years and years (maybe 20?) after finally leaving (and Rich's poem played at least a small role in helping me to do so) that I returned to that restaurant again. I went back mainly because I finally could--almost everyone I knew back then had been forced out or moved on--and because I just really needed to see that door again.

But the front door had been changed at some point, replaced. And though I can't remember exactly what the old door looked or felt like (but if bodily memory serves, it was large, solid, made of heavy wood), I knew this one was not it, not my door. This one was mostly glass, see-through, not the same door. Not my door. Not my door anymore. 

*

Yesterday morning, I read a piece of scholarship by Carole Counihan and made note of the following passage, thinking it might be useful for my current project: 

“Because food is so often the work and language of women, food stories emphasize the importance of woman and challenge the centrality of men. Because women are sometimes forced to serve and cook for others, food can be a channel of oppression. Yet through cooking, feeding, eating, and fasting, they can express their own views of self and others with creativity and power (Counihan 1999). Food-centered stories are a weapon against the silencing that has always been a central weapon in women’s oppression (hooks 1989) and a tool for feminist ethnographers who can collect food-centered testimonios and follow Zavella’s (2001, 354) goals to ‘render all of these testimonios into a narrative, theorize about their meanings in ways that the subjects would recognize, and make women’s lives accessible to wider audiences.’” (295-6) 

* 

Rich suggests that one risk associated with doors has to do with remembering your name. As an academic, I've finally grown to love my last name--it feels increasingly and precisely like who I am and it's how I identify. My last name is my research, my teaching, my publications, my writing; it's who and what I become through writing, as a writer, because I write. If memory serves, when I was in the restaurant, I wore a small plastic tag so that customers would know my first name. 

I am cognizant that there are so many other starting places for this particular food story--so many other decades, years, and moments (times when I was feeling good, bad, happy, sad, angry, silly, confident, or just indifferent) that I could draw together and shape into some kind of explanation of how this new project informs and is informed by my own history, experiences, and memories with food. 

The door is (another) one. 

**When it was your time in the box, he would ignore you, make you feel invisible-- a way of keeping you in line, keeping you small, reminding you that you were dispensable, that whatever you did (and often it was nothing, there was nothing) could get you fired and what would you do then because no one would ever hire you.  Sometimes your time in the box lasted a couple of days, sometimes it was longer. As much as it sucked being the one in the box, this, in my opinion, was always better than witnessing someone else being in box, because when that happened it was hard not feel grateful to him for not choosing you.  

doing things: on film fixer and egg whites

 

For the past two years or so, I've been baking. A lot. In the years prior to that, I took photos. A lot of them. My interest in making cakes hasn't replaced my interest in making photos, though it has had an impact on what I tend to photograph these days--a heck of a lot of cakes, cookies, donuts, etc. as well as, at times, glimpses of the ingredients/processes/recipes involved in those makings. And it has impacted as well what I use to make those photos (always digital, always my ipad, always quick clicks--never a film camera, never fixer, never infrared film, never the slowness of darkroom images). 

Admission: Every time I post to Facebook a photo of something I've baked, I dread the question I know will likely come: some or another variation of the "who gets to eat all this stuff?" question. 

I. dread. it. 

But, yet, I get it. People make food in order to eat (or gift or share) food. The prospect of wasting food is unthinkable. Inexcusable. Bad. Very bad.

When I think of all the photos I've made (I have in mind here photos shot on film, not digital images), and the time I've spent making them, this comes first to mind: So often this process was not motivated by the final product (e.g., seeing a print or negative image of whatever I'd attempted to capture), but by (in no particular order): my need to hold a camera; to get out of the house; to understand things as only a camera can help me understand their potentials; the desire to smell film fixer; to stand in the dark of my laundry room and feel the film properly align (or to feel it refusing to properly align) with the plastic film reel; to stand in the light of the laundry room, agitating the film and worrying that my impatience during this part of the process could result in under-developed film, and/or wondering whether, after all this effort and all these steps, something has gone horribly wrong and that the film I'm about to release and rinse will not contain any images at all. In truth, there were plenty of times when I was out shooting images when I could not have cared less about what I was shooting or the prospect of seeing how the camera recorded what I was shooting. Rather, framing and pulling focus on something (anything, really) and pressing the camera's shutter release was just a way to get to the part of the process I really wanted and needed to experience at the time--the smell of the fixer, the plasticky sound of the film reel snapping together, the feel of the film being fed into the reel, the careful heating and/or mixing of the chemicals.

Another memory: The day I met Chris, I had a half-finished roll of infrared film in one of my Holga cameras. Rolls of Efke 120 infrared were, at the time, about 10 bucks (the price would steadily increase before the film was virtually nowhere to be found/had), and I could not justify wasting five bucks just in order to smell some fixer. So, despite my fear of driving, I headed to the nearest park and went through the motions of finishing up the roll of film so that I could get back home and feel and smell the process of developing images about which I could have cared less. 

* 

In "Recipes for Theory Making," Lisa M. Heldke likens recipes to theories, suggesting that both are "most usefully regarded as tools we use to do things" (256). And even before this she contends that people "create new recipes and experiment with old familiar ones for all sorts of reasons"--reasons that may include, but certainly are not limited to, producing some food. In point of fact, sometimes "food is a sort of accidental byproduct [of the process], second in importance to some other aim" (256). 

Two years ago, December, my father died and my reaction was to bake. A lot. I mean a lot. Strange, really, because baking wasn't anything I did much of (or cared much about doing) prior to that. Though as Facebook reminds, prior to that December I'd sometimes make a box mix cake or batch of brownies--makings that were usually motivated by my sweet tooth, my refusal to pay bakery prices, and (most-decidedly) my desire to enjoy the final product. 

Read: I wanted to eat some brownies, so I made me some brownies. It was as simple as that.   

Until two years ago when it wasn't at all that simple. It was also the time at which I started baking from scratch and learned how incredibly zen I could when working in/with the medium of icing. 

A memory: In the December of 2016 (or maybe it was January 2017) it didn't seem particularly odd that I'd be making three batches of (baked) donuts in a day. Or maybe it did? (Yes, it probably did when/if someone asked me who was eating all those donuts. Before I came to expect this question, I recall that it struck me as such an odd and uninteresting question, like "if you are given one question to ask about donuts, why make it that one?") 

To be clear: During this time, I wasn't making three batches in the way one would if one owned a bakery or if I were making them for my students (e.g., making the batches all at once). It was, at once, more leisurely and more urgent than that: I'd make one batch and then later in the day I'd need-want to make another. And then maybe I quit for the day or maybe I'd make another. And so I'd batch again--and for as often and as long, and for as many batches as it made sense to do so. Eventually, my body-mind would say "enough." And then I'd stop for the day and likely begin again the next day. Maybe it was donuts again. Or maybe it was something new. But during that time, it was rarely (and certainly not only ever) just about the donuts.   

And then there was this past December and the macarons. So. many. fucking. macarons. And I can tell you this: In terms of a final product, it was even less about the macarons than it was about the donuts. I love donuts. Macarons? Not so much. I think they are kind of foolish and not so very tasty. And maybe that explains part of the problem--I could never really honor them or want to be with them in the way I always want to be with my cameras, with donuts.    

Given the excuse/incentive to speculate now on the similarities and differences between these two Decembers and all the extremely needful baking I did during each of them, I think baking my way through December 2016 (and January 2017) felt. . .I don't know. More necessary? Less negotiable? The best I can say is this: At times the camera feels like a part of my body, it's how I think and see and move and laugh and breathe. My body always knows when a shot is good--my heart pounds and the back of my legs react. This was similar to both how and what baking was for me that December. There wasn't a choice. There was only this, these motions and smells and textures and sounds that made sense. There wasn't another thought. It didn't feel like a choice, though maybe it was?

Macarons were/felt different. I wanted to stop, but couldn't stop, I didn't want to stop, I wanted to stop. It was decidedly ingrained routine (like watching myself on a loop, waking each morning, bringing egg whites to room temperature, measuring, measuring, doing the same thing again and again) but it also felt like a choice. At least when the macarons first came out of the oven. But then shortly thereafter it wasn't. If they came out, I needed to do them once more to prove the last batch wasn't a fluke. If they didn't come out, I needed to do them once more to prove that the last batch wasn't a fluke. (rinse and repeat--keep on making something you probably only want to make because they are so simple to make, so impossible to make right, keep on making something you sense can sense your disregard for them.)  

I see now that the way I'm telling this sounds like a horrible way to spend a December. And it was/wasn't. I loved working on and working out techniques for wet-on-wet batter designed macarons and ideas for testing out new designs and techniques were often what motivated much of my making. (I loved the way my macs looked, but rarely how they tasted.) But I often felt an acute separation between me and the making (my body and the ingredients, the expectations/aptitudes I brought to an instance of making vs. those of the ingredients and my techniques, etc.) and this wasn't something I recall feeling in December 2016 or when shooting and developing film. Macaroning was never like breathing or being or holding in the way I am with a camera or in the way everything in December 2016 was. In my mind's eye, when I see myself macaroning, it's always with a furrowed brow.

What's most inexplicable to me now is how (and exactly why) it all just ends--this kind of needful (and I'm sure as it looks to others obsessive) making-as-baking. But it does. And I rarely see the ends (or even the beginnings) coming. 

As best as I know: It's just so necessary one day and then just seemingly and completely irrelevant the next. The needful-joyful (and making is always, at least in part, incredibly joyful because necessary) usually starts up again, catalyzed by some things I think I can name and by many more I cannot. 

In thinking of my many making-baking friends, my question for them would not be about who eats/enjoys what they have made but questions about the things (humans, nonhumans, memories, aims, desires, fears, absences, presences, futures, etc.) that motivate their makings as well as their not-makings.

One of my best baking memories to date: Smelling something recently that brought to mind the scent of film fixer.  

on longing

 

I've been reading Bee Wilson's First Bite: How We Learn to Eat.

"Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; 

it shapes all our yearnings" (41). 

"To anticipate pleasure in the next meal--something that can take the better part of the day, in my experience--is always a form of memory. And each mouthful recalls other mouthfuls you've eaten in the past" (51). 

It has probably been over 40 years, but I think I can still remember the taste of space food sticks. They were delicious. 

Sometimes when I'm at the grocery store, I pick the longest line (even if I only have a few items), just so that I can look at what other people are buying. I like to imagine what their lives are like based on what they are buying.

I would give anything to taste Kellog's cinnamon Danish-Go-Rounds again. 

Related thought: Suzy Q's do not taste the same as they did when I was young. I am convinced it is how they are made that's changed and not a result of me or my tastes having changed or my memory of them being inaccurate.

I recently made a cake from scratch that I managed to make taste exactly like Suzy Q's used to taste.

At seventeen/eighteen: Pushing open the door of the beauty supply, promising myself I would not eat anything else till I came back and touched the door again. 

I can (and often do) eat the same exact thing for dinner for weeks at a time and still look forward to it. Sometimes even more on the seventh night than on the second.

One of my dream jobs would be to work as a cashier at a grocery store.

After (barely) graduating from high school, I waited tables for about 13 years. I could not often remember customers' names, but I only needed to wait on a person once and could remember exactly what they ordered each time they came in. One evening, a family I'd waited on before came back into the restaurant after having moved away. They'd not been back to the restaurant in at least seven or eight years. I recited for them everything they used to order, including how the father liked his steak cooked. 

Sometimes people would bring other people into the restaurant and say, "look at what she can do." I remember another time a woman told me that this aspect of my memory made me "dangerous."  (FWIW it's been years since I've thought about this woman, but now that I'm remembering her, I also remember that she always ordered a Carta Blanca beer.)

I've always been a food hoarder, though it's not (quite) as bad as it used to be. Still, frozen food makes my heart pound more quickly than other kinds of food.

Grad school, Papa Del's. The wait for the deep dish pizza was long. Sitting with a friend and scribbling ideas on the back (and front) of their paper place mats about ways of creating alt-responses to student work. The ideas came so quickly that day.    

At 17. Another deep dish pizza--to this day, I swear, the best I've ever had; keeping company with the funniest boyfriend I've ever had. Timing the laxatives correctly.  

For decades now, I've been in the habit of having only one meal a day. Looking forward to dinnertime structures my day and gives me something to look forward to. If I eat during the day, the rest of the day seems ruined, pointless. 

I remember eating donuts in Maine in the 1970s. And Carole King's Tapestry playing over and over again. Donuts, Maine, and Carole King's music are still three of my favorite things. 

Dunkin' donuts were always the birthday treat.  

Skim milk is one of my favorite things in the world. 90% of the time I drink it while standing up.

Upon learning that I would be taken out for a sushi dinner during one of my first invited lectures, I practiced beforehand because I had never had sushi and didn't want to look foolish. The night we actually went out for sushi, one of the women from the university taught us all how to eat edamame.

I am always on the lookout for leopard silverware. It's the one item that I'd really like (but have not yet found) for my leopard print collection. 

Speaking of leopard--I think the only reasons I'm drawn to leopard/cheetah print patterns is because they remind me of my favorite candy flavors--toffee, coffee, maple, peanut butter, etc. 

Every time I walk into the grocery store up the street, I am struck by how it smells exactly like the Piggly-Wiggly I sometimes shopped at 30 years ago.

When I get stuck or stressed out about something I'm working on, I will often go into a supermarket. Seeing everything being so plentiful and arranged in careful rows makes me feel calm inside and helps me think better. 

I totally understood it every time a customer complained that the dish hadn't been rinsed before we filled it with salsa. Cilantro tastes like soap to me too. 

I got weak in the knees the first time I saw a customer pour the salsa from the serving dish into his empty water glass and drink it before asking for more. 

Another time, another customer, maybe in his mid-thirties?  He came in shortly before closing, always by himself, always ordered the same thing, and then would sometimes fling some of that food beneath the table and against the wall. He did this two or three times before one of us confronted him, asking him not to do that again. He never returned.

The first time I had Indian food I understood how food could be like a language. Or a musical composition. 

I don't understand people who don't keep ice (i.e., to put in drinks) on hand.

I never really enjoyed drinking water, but then at some point I taught myself to like it and now it's something my body craves. 

Many of my daydreams seem to involve the preparation and/or eating of eggplant. 

Sometimes my dad would take us out at night to get nutter butter cookies. I would beg him to leave some for the next day. But most often when I woke up, they would be gone. 

I don't often go out to eat, but if a friend tells me he/she is going to dinner somewhere, I'll immediately go online and look at the menu, trying to decide what I'd have if I went to that restaurant. I'll sometimes do the same thing when I'm watching any of the Real Housewives franchises and they show the name of the restaurant the women are eating at. 

I like to get to know people and their food tastes/habits by playing the "would you rather have ______ or ________?" game with them. For instance, if the theme is salty snack foods the first question might be "would you rather have cheetos or fritos?" If they answer fritos, the second question might be, "fritos or doritos?" If they say fritos again, I might say, "okay, fritos or dry roasted peanuts?" I always feel a bit of a thrill when I give them an option and that say, "oooh, that is a tough one!" or when I feel like I've zero in on one of their favorite foods in the world.   

Granny's donuts in Schaumburg (they were first located in Woodfield Mall but then moved to a location at Roselle and Nerge) had the best donuts I've ever had. Ever. 

If weight/health, etc. weren't of any concern, I think I would always and only eat fried foods. 

I often wonder what it would be like to be able to eat whatever/whenever you want and not gain weight. I suspect that eating would not be nearly as exciting or meaningful as it is for me now. 

I remember deciding to apply for a waitressing job because my sense was that it was the job that would be the most difficult for me to do and/or to be good at. I don't remember exactly why or what aspect of the job made me think this. 

People can be really happy to see you when you are walking in their direction carrying the food they've ordered.

I remember dipping black jelly beans in mustard. It wasn't delicious, but I was still curious about how putting two things I liked well enough separately might taste when paired together.  

I don't care for (and rarely ever use) almond extract, but I also think it smells like happiness.