I have mentioned twice, in passing, that last night's posted cornbread and prosciutto stuffing recipe was created by the late Laurie Colwin, who I used to describe as "my absolute, positive favorite living writer" until that terrible Sunday in October of 1992 when, curled up with my brand-new fiance in our fourth-floor walkup studio on 15th and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia, I opened the Inquirer and read it: "Laurie Colwin, 48, Prolific Author." I felt the texture of the air change after I read that headline, rather like the way the air changes when you are suddenly slapped across the face. All of a sudden, you realize that the air you have been breathing up to that moment has been filled with something familiar and reassuring, and that something is snatched away from you and replaced with something hard and mean, and you know you will be breathing it for the rest of your life.
Before I go any further, I must clarify: Laurie Colwin and I had never met. To say that I considered her a friend feels like the height of presumption to me, simply because she had friends, plenty of them, people in whose lives she was embedded, who lost much more than I did when they lost her. I could try to claim some kind of kinship or meeting of minds based on how her writing, both her fiction and her essays for Gourmet that eventually turned into the collections Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, but the fact is, our minds never met and any feelings of kinship are strictly one-sided. Nevertheless, I can't deny that with the exception of my parents, Ms. Colwin was the single greatest influence on my adult cooking life. I bought my copy of Home Cooking the year I graduated from college and began to cook for myself, and it is safe to say that I have thought of Ms. Colwin at least once a day ever since. It is thanks to her that I started shopping at the Union Square Greenmarket the year that I moved to New York; that I began searching out meat and poultry and eggs and produce from non-intensively-farmed sources; that I bought and read The Taste of America, the book that caused a quantum shift in the way I thought about food, cooking and history; that I started buying bags of fermented black beans in Chinatown to throw into my tomato and eggplant sauce; that I started reading Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, the other two-thirds of my culinary triumverate; that I discovered what a beautiful thing English food could be as long as it was prepared with care and skill; that I learned how to make jam, and thus developed the confidence to branch into jelly from there. I once wrote an essay about her for the foodies.com e-group newsletter, in which I mentioned that my copies of Home Cooking and More Home Cooking were so worn out that they were pretty much held together by faith and little else. In addition to cooking from these books, I read and reread and reread them. I read them on the subway, to and from work and the market. I have read them in the bathtub. I have read them while in the throes of depression, and I have read them while recovering from migraines, when I felt just well enough to read but not well enough to do anything else.
My introduction to Laurie Colwin began long before she started writing for Gourmet, before I'd had even the slightest idea of what sort of hold she'd have over my own foodways. Her short story "My Mistress," part of the collection Another Marvelous Thing, was included in the 1985 Best American Short Stories collection, edited by Shannon Ravenel. "My Mistress" is a sweet sad beauty of a story, the tale of the adulterous lovers Francis Clemens and Josephine "Billy" Delille, who carry on an affair as sweet as it is futureless. Francis is a middle-aged, wealthy, socially prominent husband and father of adult children; his life is orderly, the kind of order born out of having money and applying it usefully and well. Billy is an economics professor, married to a mathematician as brilliant and socially maladroit as she is; she is messy and no-frills, living in cheerful chaos, dressed in ratty clothing and shoes held together with duct tape. They both love their spouses. Francis is a devoted father. Billy knows that one day she and her husband Grey will have a baby. They are embedded in their own lives, fiercely in love with the details of those lives, fully aware that each is baffled by the way that the other lives and would wither were they to live in such circumstances, and yet they love each other with an intensity that shakes them. I read this story in college after a steady diet of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. To say that it shook up some preconceived notions I'd had on a subject about which I knew absolutely nothing is putting it mildly. Not surprisingly, I found the most evocative and deeply-rendered moment in the story to be the one that involved food. Frank and Billy decide to go to New England for a stolen vacation. As they lie in bed together, Billy announces that she is going to fix them a snack, and returns with a plate of toasted cheese on bread. Francis observes that this is the first thing she has ever cooked for him, as her sustenance usually takes the form of tough little water biscuits and a squirt of seltzer from a siphon on her desk. Billy watches him contemplate the toasted cheese and she bursts into tears, admitting that she has no idea what sort of meal he may have wanted. They end up devouring the hot, slightly greasy, crunchy sandwiches, keeping them warm in a cold room, and in that moment, everyone -- Francis, Billy, the reader -- has exactly what they need.
Ms. Colwin was an absolute genius at conveying mood through food in her novels and stories. She wrote about admiring Barbara Pym and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers for putting food to terrific use in their books, but I think that she had a pearl-perfect talent for it, easily on a par with Washington Irving in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Her novel Happy All the Time, about two cousins, best friends from childhood, and the women they end up courting and marrying, is rich with food metaphors and signifiers. After the first night that Guido Morris and his beloved Holly Sturgis spend together, he feels overwrought by the consummation of their relationship, dazzled and panicked, and he is unnerved and infuriated by Holly's unflappability as she calmly does the Sunday crossword puzzle, sitting at table in her nightshirt, "neat as a cupcake." Misty Berkowitz spends nearly half the book putting up a prickly, elegant defense against the attentions of Guido's cousin, Vincent Cardworthy; when she realizes that she has fallen in love with Vincent and agrees to marry him, she feels "as well-placed in the universe as a fresh loaf of bread." Holly, independently wealthy and a pursuer of knowledge for knowledge's sake, is also a marvelous cook; her perfectionist and mercurial nature is tempered by the generosity of spirit that shines through her cooking. She prepares kippers, scrambled eggs and a croquembouche for Vincent and Misty's wedding breakfast, and she and Misty join together in a newly-found sense of kinship and affection and produce the meal that ends the novel: grilled striped bass that Vincent and Guido catch earlier in the day, salad, potatoes, a Lady Baltimore cake they buy in the village where they are spending the weekend. Even lines that seem like throwaways are full of meaning: in her last novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, she starts a sentence with "After they devoured a few excellent sandwiches..." and suddenly I found myself at a posh overpriced midtown deli, ordering smoked turkey and boursin cheese on an onion ficelle. Now that, I thought, is a writer.
A Big Storm Knocked It Over and More Home Cooking were her last published works, appearing in 1993, nearly a full year after her death. More Home Cooking was particularly agonizing for me to read, because I knew this would be it: no more trolling the library for her new novels, no more Gourmet columns. I could not imagine a universe in which there were no more words to be had from her, and while I have( just barely) reconciled myself to this, it always catches me around Thanksgiving and manages to land at least one good blow, not unlike the one I caught on my ear last week on the subway. Thanksgiving is usually a high point of the year for me, for the whole food-preparation ritual, for the four-day weekend, for the Thanksgiving birthday I have once every six years. At some point, though, I remember that Ms. Colwin's final column for Gourmet ran a month after her death, in which she wrote about finally tiring of the cornbread and prosciutto stuffing, and coming up with a new stuffing that was so successful that there were no leftovers, and her sadness about not being able to eat a nice plate of cold stuffing for breakfast was mitigated by the fact that she had found a new stuffing she could eat happily for years. She closes the column by saying that someday it will be her daughter's turn to host Thanksgiving, and she looked forward to see what new traditions would begin at her daughter's table. I think of this, and I miss her so terribly.
(A beautiful tribute to Ms. Colwin by her childhood friend Willard Spiegelman, printed in Gastronomica, can be found here. One of my favorite essays from Home Cooking, "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir," can be found here.)
Thank you. That was lovely. I have never read Laurie Colwin, and now I feel that I must.