Coming to and becoming through

In less than an hour's time, I'll begin the last of the scheduled interviews for this project. While I anticipate scheduling still more (or at least a few more) interviews over the summer and fall, today marks the end of intense eleven week stretch of interview time—time that I was fortunate enough to spend with people willing to share with me their memories of, and experiences with, baking/cooking.  

Yesterday afternoon I interviewed the 100^th interview participant in this study. [Note: To date 113 people have participated in the study but some opted to fill out the questionnaire on their own time instead of sitting for an interview.] At the end of our time together he said something along the lines of, “I hope I had something different or new to offer—and that you hadn’t already hit a saturation point of hearing a lot of sameness of/in experience.” And the really amazing thing is that with regard to hitting a saturation point, well, I have not.

I can remember many weeks, particularly at the start of a week, wondering if maybe I should have ended sooner, capped things sooner, that surely what I’d be learning or hearing this week and the next and the next would only be minor variations on things I’d already heard before. And there certainly were common themes or responses. (At the start of most of the interviews, for instance, I’d ask people to complete three sentences, offering the word or words that first come to mind: Cooking for me is _______; baking for me is ________, and food for me is _____. By far, the most common responses to the last question was either “complicated” or “life.”  For the other two questions, common responses might be “therapeutic,” “joy,” “fun,” “a way of showing love,” “not something I enjoy,” “creative,” or, especially with baking, “precision.” But then, with my 100^th interview participant, a response I’d not heard before, and one that made me laugh: “Baking for me is a television show.”)

So I was often surprised at the end of each week (and thankful, after all, that I’d not capped things earlier) to find myself often, if not always, learning (hearing?) new things—something that, in turn, helped me (and continues to help me) to complicate, recast, and ultimately reconsider what I’d learned/heard in the previous weeks of interviews.

This is surprising. . .yet then again, not at all. Definitions of (or senses of, attitudes toward, etc.) baking and/or cooking are different, people are different, and so it stands to reason that they ways one comes to and becomes through one’s baking and cooking experiences would also be markedly different. And as a researcher/listener, I was constantly changing. At the end of each interview I was different—what I knew was different and, as a result, what I could think to ask and where, specifically, I wanted to linger was different. While the interview questions themselves stayed more or less the same over time, the order in which questions (as well as follow-up questions) were asked and, with this, the way stories would unfold, where that unfolding would take us, differed a lot depending on the participant. So that there was more difference than I anticipated is surprising. Yet not.   

I struggle with what to do now—how to begin the 12^th week—since I can no longer count on the interview schedule to tell me where to be, when to be there, and, generally speaking, how to be. So much of my sabbatical was spent not having to decide how best to use my days. While there were certainly days when the very last thing my body wanted to do was to sit in front of a computer for most of the day (shout out to Aleve for helping me through most days), it was nice not having to think about what I should do with my day or what I should be doing instead with my day. For the past eleven weeks, I always felt like I was spending my time in the best and wisest way.   

on learning about (and from) other people's lives

Someone once asked me if I had a favorite yard sale/thrift store/estate sale find and I think I responded by saying that any number of favorites come to mind depending on the day, but all for very different reasons. Finding packs of old Polaroid film (and hoping against all odds that they'd still make images), is a very different kind of favorite find than the diamond ring I found in the bottom of a bag of wigs that I paid four dollar for, or paying twenty bucks for that big, old beautiful Frederick Weinberg lighted sculpture just sitting there on top of a pile of junk. And all these things represent different kinds of favorite when compared with others, more sentimental finds: The painting of the Boston Terrier Chris bought for me at a Goodwill on one of our first dates (I had named the dog in the painting Diana Tripod long before we found a real one that matched the painting), or the round blue suitcase from the 1960s that I bought as a travel suitcase for my other dog, Dorothy--a suitcase that is covered in stickers representing all the states she'd traveled to. 

But, really, my first of the favorite finds (and what I'd call my most important find to date) was found exactly nine years ago today when I paid two dollars for two boxes of old 35mm, 120, and 4x5 negatives.

Early today, I did my 64th interview for a new project focused, in part, on other people's memories and experiences with cooking and/or baking. After the interview proper ended, we talked a little bit about the ability (or privilege) to pursue (or, conversely, not to be able to pursue) projects about which one is really passionate. I've been lucky, in this respect. I loved the project that became my dissertation and, much later, my first book, and I love this new project. In all seriousness--it's what I go to bed thinking about and the first thing I think about when I wake up. And it's what I think/do for most of the day. And I'm grateful for this. I cannot imagine anything else I'd rather be thinking about, thinking with, or doing.

The box of negatives (the first of my favorite finds and what I'd consider to be my most important find to date) represented the work about which I was probably the. most. passionate. The negatives came to me (and I to them) at an in-between time--I'd just finished up my book manuscript and was in that place of not knowing what I'd do next. I remember feeling slightly panicked--what if there was nothing else I really wanted to do or say, nothing I really cared about as much as the dissertation and first book project? The thought of having to produce scholarship just to produce it made me feel sick. And scared. I remember telling myself that it was fine if I didn't find something right away, that odds were something else would come along about which I'd feel passionate, but I don't know that I really believed that.

I remember the whole of the spring and summer I spent with this collection. I remember sitting down at my scanner each day and saying aloud (to the scanner, to the negatives, and to the strangers depicted in them--most, if not all of them, deceased), "Okay, where are you taking me today? What do you want to show me about who you were? About what and who was important enough for you to save, to document in this way?"

And, of course, this purchase led to others, to so many others, many of which would serve as the basis of the scholarship (and much of that video-based): more negatives, still photos, home movies, scrapbooks, letters, travel diaries. I felt incredibly interested in what I was learning. I felt incredibly connected to (and, at times, consumed with and by) what I was making. I don't think I'd ever been (or, really, that I ever will be) as experimental, as alive with my learning or making as I was during that six or seven year stretch. And I felt especially honored to have and to know and to touch these things--to look after them, to care for them, to try to honor them, these traces strangers, the dead, had left behind. And part of me hates that I gave it up, that I changed course--and not even for a very good reason. Perhaps for the most cowardly reason of all.

But here I am now. Nine years ago today I began learning how involving it could be to learn about other people's lives via the visual-verbal traces they left behind and today I finished my 64th interview learning about other people's lives via their lived experiences with cooking and/or baking.

And this new project, like the last, came to me (and I to it) at another in-between time, or a just-in-time-time. As was the case after finishing my first book, I knew that I'd not likely continue doing what I'd been doing and was worried that I'd not find another project about which I'd feel passionate. One that I could not not imagine myself doing, something that I'd want to wake to do, that I'd want to go to sleep thinking about, one that I'd want to think about, to write (or compose) about pretty much all of the time.  

Insofar as I've spent the past six or seven years working with the dead, I can say that working with the living has a definite perk: the living often like to talk about Brussels sprouts.

Oh, there you are! On identification, action, and inaction

I rarely do anything without first envisioning myself doing that very thing. Take driving. I would never, could never, just get into the car and drive because I needed something or needed to be somewhere. I'd need, instead, to first see myself getting into my car, pulling out to the street and (hopefully) making it to wherever I needed or was expected to be. I imagine myself getting into the car, hearing NPR, pulling onto the street, encountering stop signs and stop lights, and detours (and how in the case of detours, I'd just turn around and go back home), and I always imagine how grateful and lucky and accomplished I'll feel if/when I arrive back home safely.

Or take writing my dissertation: I knew I had to do it, and I wanted to do it, but I was unable to do anything until I could see myself writing a diss. [Of course, part of the problem here was that I hadn't really seen or even read a diss till I audited a class with Peter Mortensen, so part of the problem was not even knowing what I was going for--what I was supposed to envision and then envision myself doing.]

I've written elsewhere about the moment when I knew I'd have to interview people for this new book project--that it made little sense for me to write exclusively about what cookbook authors said should or shouldn't happen in the kitchen. Yet before I could imagine myself even interviewing people (a daunting prospect for me because I'm shy and always assume people will be very mean to me for no reason, but not quite as scary as the prospect of getting in a car), I needed first to envision myself going through another equally daunting process, the IRB approval process, something which, in turn, would eventually allow me to begin envisioning myself interviewing people about their lived experiences in and around the kitchen.

As I detailed in that earlier post, the catalyst for all these actions, for all this necessary envisioning, began pretty much seconds after I read this line in the 1932 edition of Ida Bailey Allen's Modern Cookbook: "By her kitchen shall she be known." My first thought: I don't know that that's true, but I like the way the line sounds--if I could ever really envision myself writing another book, it would make for a good chapter title or epigraph. My second thought: Oh shit, having read this line, having considered this thought (can people really be known by/through their kitchens?), I know that I cannot not interview people. Put otherwise, the book I had been trying to envision myself writing just became dependent on still other envisionings.

*Apologies in advance for the second sentence of this next part if anyone I've interviewed 

for this project is actually reading this post and has expressed interest in learning what I find!*

At this point, I've interviewed about 39 people for this project, with another 47-50 interviews scheduled to take place in the next month and a half. Nothing makes me more anxious than when an interviewee asks when I'll be sharing my results and/or expresses interest in seeing the finished product/s, in learning what I find, in looking forward to reading what I find. With regard to the first question my answer has been "at CCCC 2020, I suppose. . .I mean, if I get in," and with regard to the matter of being interested in what the final product will be, in what I find/learn, all I can say is, "yeah. me too. tee-hee."

In all fairness, I knew the nice, smooth, tidy rug I'd begin fashioning for myself based on the cookbooks I was reading would be pulled out from under me when I started listening to what women (and men) actually did in the kitchen, how they learned who, what, and how to be with food, and how they felt about baking/cooking/food. So it makes sense to say that I know way less now about this project than I did (than I could begin to envision) before reading that page in Ida Bailey Allen's text which caused me to begin envisioning everything leading me to the point at which I am currently at now. In fact, I might know just a little bit less with each and every interview I do. But this is, I believe, ultimately a good thing. A great thing, in fact. A thing that will make for a much better book, something that underscores for me that there is so much about these complex worlds of cooking and baking and food that I hadn't imagined being possible (that the cookbooks couldn't help me imagine), that I hadn't thought to ask about, that I wasn't aware of even mattering. So, I'm okay with not knowing what the data, these stories, these lives, will ultimately suggest or reveal. 

My bigger problem (and what really unnerved me about people expressing interest in my findings) is that it wasn't until this morning (yes, really, this very morning) that I could actually envision myself *really* writing another book, this book, the point of which (at least insofar as the interview data is concerned) is, of course, still tbd. My biggest source of anxiety since starting the interview process  has been this: While I knew there was decidedly a book here--even a good book here (and this is something that seems a bit more clear with every interview I do), I worried that I would choke, that I not be able, ultimately, to help it come together. That, in the end, I would just not be able to see myself doing so. 

Just as Bailey's line triggered something that allowed me to begin envisioning the steps I've have to take to help ensure this would be a more successful book project (compared, for instance, to one that just dealt with the cookbooks), a line from page 168 of Sarah Walden's Tasteful Domesticity triggered something in me that has (finally) allowed me to begin envisioning--not, of course, the book I will eventually, finally complete (again, it's too early in the interview process to see what, specifically that will be), but the one I will begin--and, insofar as I've spent the past two years thinking and writing about cookbooks, the one I have already begun--to write. There is nothing particularly revealing or revelatory about the line itself (save for the fact that it, just like this very blog post, is about the relationship between identification and action/inaction), but I include it here, mainly so I don't have to go looking for it again: "Cookbooks guided women to form a sense of collective identity and turn that identification into action."

And so, with the help of Walden's words, I finally sat down this morning to begin drafting the prospectus, writing down ideas for chapters, chapter titles, epigraphs, arguments, and authors that I can envision using in certain parts of the book, leaving blank the portions of the prospectus that deal specifically with the interview data.  And for me, at least when it comes to the envisioning of a book, it's all a matter of prospectus. If I can prospectus it, I can see it. And vice versa. 

on eating, leaving, returning

It was six years ago yesterday (as Facebook reminds) that I returned (for the first and only time) to a place I had left behind almost 25 years ago. As I've detailed elsewhere, not much had changed except for the front door. And this too: Everyone I knew or worked with at the time had left, simply moved on, or (the more likely scenario) had been replaced. Had this not been the case, I'm not sure I'd have returned at all. Then again, perhaps I would have. I just really needed to see that front door again.

This place was, for me, for thirteen years, a kind of home. A food home. (I remember some afternoons looking out the window facing the parking lot, touching the white stucco wall and thinking that I could stay here, somewhat happily, forever--I remember thinking this expression in my head--"snug as a bug.") And insomuch as my memory has always been most alive, most vibrant, most feeling when it comes to food, a memory place. And it was a place where I lived, where I embodied, where I practiced daily, many of the concepts, theories, and ideas I'd go on to learn names for and read more about in graduate school: available means of persuasion, play, affect, embodiment, pedagogy, variations on a theme, re-purposing/remediation, transfer, rhetorical situation, code-shifting/meshing, composing, performance.

At some point, maybe ten years in, I recall asking the owner for permission to take some classes at the local community college. I had no other career plans or aspirations (however horrible the day-to-day could be with the owner and some co-workers, the restaurant money was terrific and many of the regular customers had come to feel like family), I recall "just wanting to know things." (For reasons I still cannot make sense of, reading Oedipus Rex and learning the periodic table of elements stand out in my mind as things I needed to do.) I'd routinely overhear customers talking about things about which I knew nothing, and I just wanted to know some things too. I wanted to be interesting. To know things. To have something for me. I wanted to speak as passionately about some things as some of my customers did. But I think part of me needed to understand that things outside the restaurant, or who I was (or could be) outside the restaurant, could be different. Other. Better. But mainly just different.

In the end, I was given permission to take some classes (but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays--the deal was that he'd build the schedule around that, but no more than that), but cautioned me to "be careful not to get to smart," or rather, "to watch how smart I think I'm becoming."  

Once I became an assistant professor, I recall someone asking me how one goes from being a 13-year career waitress to a grad student and then assistant professor--as though that journey is somehow miraculous or at least anomalous. What surprises me is not that fact of this journey/translation (others have certainly left careers, gone to grad school, changed careers, etc.), but that it was a transition that I was actually able to make. Truth is, if it hadn't gotten so bad that I felt I had no other choice, I'd have stayed. I have stayed until I'd been replaced. And that's what scares me most--to think of what I'd have done after I had been replaced. At least in leaving, I felt that I'd exercised at least a little agency.

What's hard to explain to others are the reasons for staying. So, usually, I don't even try. It's easier to say nothing, to cherry-pick and share only the details of those years that give me joy or that resonate with certain aspects of my academic journey, and keeping silent about others. As a result, there are times when those 13 years feel like they have nothing to do with who I am now, who I've become. At other times, I suspect they have everything to do with who I am now, and the person I fear I haven't quite yet become.

I recall that when things were especially rough, one of the hostesses, Parvin, would try to comfort me by saying, "this will make you strong--like bull." And often times staying felt like the greatest act of resistance. . .or power. That nothing that the owner did (or, largely owning to his management style, helped to occasion) could break me or impact me. That I was proving that I strong and resilient enough to stay. To endure. To keep silent.

And the money. The money and the "job [in]security" (i.e., as long as you were feeling insecure/replaceable, your job was secure) were always reasons for staying. As I'd come to understand, having had it stated directly or routinely implied by the owner for so many years, there was nothing else, really, for someone me--for people like us--besides or beyond this job. It was something I learned (however grudgingly at times) to be grateful for. At least I had this. No matter how bad it got, it was something I could count on, something I knew.

And the customers. I wanted to stay for the customers because they were kind and generous and because I often felt like I could be my best and most diverse me when interacting with them. Some would even think to ask me what I wanted to be, to do, someday. But where school was concerned, I took care, especially, never to get too smart. Or to think I was getting too smart.

As of yesterday, I'd completed 27 interviews for a new book project that deals, in part, with people's memories and experiences with cooking and/or baking--and with food, more generally. Even during (or maybe even especially during) my waitressing years, my best dream, my life goal, was to write a book. Even back then (or maybe especially back then) writing was always a way to manage emotions, to feel more in control, a space to imagine alternatives, and a place to be my best self or at least something more like the self I wanted to be.

The book I imagined myself writing then is like, yet totally unlike, the book I'm working on now. The book I imagined myself writing then would have been comprised of stories (short stories) that had little, if anything, to do with food. The book I'm writing now will also be comprised of stories (of lived experience, taken from cookbooks) that will have so much, if not everything, to do with food.

"By her kitchen shall she be known": On Envisioning a Book Project

As a grad student faced with the prospect of writing a dissertation, and then again, as a junior faculty member needing to write a book for tenure, one of the things I struggled with was the matter of actually, literally, seeing, picturing, or envisioning myself actually writing that diss, that book.

This inability to envision myself doing something wasn't necessarily related to my lack of confidence and/or the voice inside my head that always tells me that I'm fooling myself, that I'm undeserving, that I'll never be good enough (something I dealt with a bit here in my own food story) but had more to do, I think, with the sense of there being too many moving pieces--pieces I couldn't envision myself knowing how to put together. I knew articles. I could think articles. But a book is like an article times 5 or 6 or 7. For me, the struggle was not only imagining what these pieces would be, but how they'd actually all fit together. 

A couple weeks ago, I was looking at a short video from SWR featuring Ellen Cushman talking about how you know when you have a book project, specifically, a "good" book project. As I watched the video, I thought about how I'd respond to the question and I knew I'd say simply--"I know when I have a book project when I can actually envision myself writing one." As to the question of when I know I have a good book project? When I first begin worrying about finding someone who will agree to finish my book for me if I should die before it's done.

Two days ago, I took the (super-scary for me) first step of soliciting volunteers to be interviewed for a book project that I can finally/actually envision myself writing. Though I've been reading about, thinking about, and sometimes writing about cookbooks and domestic advice manuals for a couple of years now, it wasn't until I came across this line from the 1932 edition of Ida Bailey Allen's Modern Cook Book--"by her kitchen shall she be known"--that I began seeing the potential for this reading, thinking, and sometimes writing to actually become a book.

I remember coming across this line about a year ago and thinking, "hmmm. that would be a great book or chapter title or even an epigraph." But it was also at that moment that I first began accepting what I suspected to be true--that if I were to do a book focused on cooking/baking practices, I could not, in good conscience, do so without talking to people (not just women, but anyone who would talk to me) about their kitchens, about what they know and how they are known.

I remember vividly looking again at those words on the page--"by her kitchen shall she be known"--and wishing I hadn't run across them, that I hadn't just admitted to myself that in order to envision myself writing this book, I'd have to do more than to consider, analyze, and quote from cookbooks, advice manuals, and other the print-based texts I'd been collecting. This is not to say that great books can't come from the analysis of print-based texts, it just meant that I could not write one like that--not after admitting to myself that I also wanted to learn more about people's kitchens and processes of knowing and being known.

And this, in turn, meant that before I could do anything in terms of working toward the book I could finally begin to envision myself putting together (one that treats these print-based prescriptive texts in relation to or in dialogue with these accounts of lived experience), I'd need to find the time and patience to do IRB training, to fill out the paperwork, to wait for approval, etc.

And after all the patience and waiting and learning associated with the IRB-approval process (this is the point I'm at now), the worrying part begins: worrying that no one will want to participate, worrying that I'm just waaay to shy and awkward to talk to people (even about something I'm deeply interested in), worrying that technology will fail during the interview and I'll not have a record of it, only what I can remember. . .and on. and on. and on. Working with my cookbooks, by contrast, feels more orderly, safer.  The prospect of doing interviews has always placed me way outside of my orderly little comfort zone.

And while it's far too early to know what, exactly, the book will be, do, say, or mean--what I learn during the interviews and how I'm able to put these stories together will help determine those things--I finally feel like the book will definitely (at some point) be. I mean, I think I can finally see it?

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. 

beautiful inedibles

There are (at least) two kinds of people. The first kind starts a book (or movie, or relationship, article, book project, or even a meal--really, choose what you will) only to find it really sucks. I mean, really sucks. But they keep with it anyway, because they can't bear the thought of not finishing what they started.  The other kind of person quickly cuts his/her losses and moves on to the next (hopefully better) kind of thing. 

I am (too often) the first kind. Meet my beautiful inedible. 

 

A bit of background: I’m currently working on a book project focused on the rhetorical dimensions of what Sherrie Inness terms “kitchen culture”—the various discourses about food, cooking, and gender roles that stem from the kitchen but that pervade our society on many levels.” (3).

Beyond being interested in the persuasive potentials of food, I am particularly interested in the way food might be used to inform, instruct, introduce, map, to navigate, memorialize, motivate, enact, ritualize, destabilize, connect, divide, and how it might serve as an opportunity for inspiration, fantasy, escape, creativity, play, and artistic expression.  In short, I am interested in the complex, highly-distributed, embodied, and performative aspects of what I’m calling an edible rhetoric. 

To better understand the various ways people use food (and vice versa), I began looking at cookbooks and advice manuals published between 1930-1978. More recently, I've begun examining more current/contemporary texts and forums--cooking blogs, YouTube videos, discussion forums, etc.  And soon, as the third and final component of this research, I will begin interviewing people about their experiences and histories with, and memories of, cooking/baking. 

  

Because I feel strongly about the importance of living the research--that is to say, in keeping with food scholars like Lisa Heldke, I think it's important that those who think and/or write about food are also actually doing food,  I will, every now and then, take the time to make something (most often a baked good) I find in the older cookbooks or online. Almost without fail, the recipes in the older cookbooks are successful and delicious. Almost without fail, the newer recipes are. . .well, not quite as delicious. 

Case in point--today's effort. A piece I'm calling, simply and deservedly, "my beautiful inedible." 

  

Like the first sort of person described to start, I knew, almost from the get-go, that this pecan pie cake was not going to be good. It was my first time making swiss buttercream and while my meringue-making skills were pretty much on point (this, thanks largely to the past month and a half I spent obsessively making macarons--the kicker is I don't even like macarons, but that mattered less than the fact that I'd committed to them), I hadn't really anticipated the butter part and its impact on my feelings toward this cake. Again, my brown sugar meringue was (I thought) pretty much on point. Case in point: 

 

But then I added the butter. So. much. butter. Ewww. In fairness, the recipe warned that not everyone is a fan of butter. that. much. butter. Again, in fairness, I think the swiss buttercream was doing and being exactly who it was supposed to be, it just wasn't my cup of tea. But, still, I persisted.

Step two: making the pecan pie filling. I didn't have the best feeling when the recipe called for cornstarch, but I'm nothing if not obedient. (Add to this the fact that I'm not nearly skilled enough--nor will I ever likely be--in the science of baking to feel comfortable improvising my way around a discomfort like this.) The filling looked okayish when it was still warm, but when I engaged with it a couple hours later, it looked like refried beans. You'd think it was refried beans, but the wiggly kind of refried beans.

Given that I was (not counting glazing the nuts for the top and/or decorating the cake) about 2/3 of the way done and so very much committed to seeing this through, I made the layer cakes. And this went well--I baked up some nice even layers. 

I went on to construct the cake, opting to use a can of store-bought white icing instead of the swiss buttercream for the outside of the cake, hoping that I could have one tasty element (not counting the glazed pecans or the cake itself) associated with this cake. I knew that I'd be using the swiss buttercream for the top of the cake (I was really happy with the color and texture--it was just the butterbomb taste that was off-putting), but figured that I could easily enough scrape that off if I had a piece. (The tougher part, I knew, would be scraping out the gelatinous pecan pie filling between the layers.)  Luckily for me, my dog, Jerome, made sure that I wouldn't have to go to all this trouble to enjoy a piece of cake that I'd likely not enjoy. But I've gotten ahead of myself. 

But since I'm already pretty much there, here it is: I'd just finished taking photos of my beautiful inedible when the phone rang. Realizing that I had left my beautiful inedible unattended, Jerome quickly helped himself to one side of the cake. [Interestingly enough, like me, he seemed to enjoy the store-bought white icing more than the swiss buttercream, since he pretty much left the sbc untouched.] 

Prior to the phone ringing, I had been on the fence about whether to not to just trash the cake. Actually, I'd considered cutting my losses much earlier in the process--first, when I tasted a bit of the sbc and, then again, when I saw how grossly the pecan pie filling had set up. I suppose I kept with it because the payoff, for me, is always with the decorating. If I could make something look good (even if it didn't taste good or the texture was off), I'd have some small sense of accomplishment. And I'd have had another opportunity to practice something I enjoy doing and something at which I am always hoping to get better. 

And here is where baking is so much like writing. Or maybe where it's not so much like writing, but should be. With baking I think I'm still too much of the mindset that all the time and effort should result with a tangible, shareable (and hopefully, delicious) thing. That if it doesn't, why bother? With writing (or video-making) I guess I bother mostly to learn more what I'm capable of doing--and what I am not capable of, what doesn't work, and to imagine what could work better, differently. It's tempting, I think, for me to see this cake as a failure. A waste of time and resources. Yet if I assume more of my writer's mindset, I can begin to reflect on what this cake helped me to better understand, to know, to experience, or to imagine doing differently next time--like to trust my gut when it comes to cornstarch, to know that I'm able to successfully make sbc or glazed pecans or pipe a fairly smooth rope border. And to know that I do not care for sbc and will not likely make it again. 

Unless, of course, one of the recipes in the older cookbooks invites me to do so. 

a month (or more) of macarons

I've been making macarons for about a month and a half now--and here's the kicker. I don't really even like them--the taste, the way they look. (too sugary, boring. I'd rather eat and look at pizza.) Part of me wonders if my struggles with macarons are a result of not liking them, like maybe they sensed this?

I got into this because I wanted a challenge (and a challenge it has certainly been) and because I happened upon this recipe. Insofar as anything maple serves as a kind of gateway drug for me, I figured this would be the best (and most delicious) place to start. NOTE: I've attempted this recipe a half dozen times and have never been able to get my meringue to the consistency shown in the images here. The macarons still came out (although they weren't pretty--a little too wrinkly on top) and tasted fine, it's just that nothing in my process ended up looking the way things did for the original poster.

I was planning on this being a one and done kind of hobby, but this recipe led to others and then still other recipes and methods--Italian led to French and then to Swiss, and then back again to Italian. I think I've tried almost every recipe and method out there at this point.

My experience with macarons has been hit or miss, mostly miss. It seems I can produce a full mac if I don't mind them having weak and wrinkly tops OR I can produce a great looking mac with a strong and shiny top shell, but the tradeoff is often having to deal with hollows. Ah, those dreaded hollows--some of which are diminished when the macs are filled and matured, others never go away.

In late December, my macaron-making happened to overlap (however briefly) with my sugar cookie-making and I started wondering about applying some wet-on-wet royal icing techniques to the macarons. If I could do this with cookies, why not with macarons? At least I could make macarons that were (at least to my eye) a little more interesting.

I knew that many were applying color, texture and/or design to their plain macaron shells post-bake, but I wanted to find a way to do the design pre-bake, at the batter stage. As powerful a motivator as maple is for me, leopard print is even stronger. And so, my goal was to make leopard print macarons. After this, I promised myself, I'd stop making macarons (and that was almost a month ago).

I made this how-to video for one of my macaron groups, showing how I've adapted for macarons the wet-on-wet royal icing technique, but since making that video, I've begun to experiment with other colors, designs, and shapes. A small sampling:  

 

And, continuing on with the Boston Terrier theme, perhaps my favorite macs to date--inspired by a dollar thrift store painting we bought seven or eight years ago.

In a nutshell, my attitude toward macarons was (and still is) this: If I could do it (had done it) with royal iced sugar cookies, why not try it with macarons? And so doing this:

 
Naturally meant trying this:

Another valuable cheat/lesson I've learned along the way--best way to make the best of the ugliness of a wrinkly top? Dip 'em in chocolate.