Pop Culture Care Package: Laurie Colwin

Maybe you don’t know what you’re doing. Welcome to the club! This is where we build some quality mallet-striking confidence that would make Julia herself proud!

Many of us who are so privileged as to be able to work from home during the pandemic are, if not cooking more, certainly thinking about food more. If I’m taking it easy with leftovers or a frozen meal, I’m enjoying my friends’ Instagram stories about what they’re cooking and baking (and if I’m baking challah or wrangling a roasting tin of root vegetables, I’m putting it on my Instagram stories for my friends to enjoy). We’re watching the cooks of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen slide ever more inexorably into cabin fever, doing deep dives into the Smitten Kitchen archives, sharing sourdough tips. This very newsletter has seen its own published culinary content spike, featuring Dame Margaret’s game kitchen experimentations, my great-grandmother’s challah recipe, and Future Celebrity Chef Cassie Niespodziewanski’s Greatest Shelter In Place Hits!

What of the person who likes to eat just fine but doesn’t feel especially curious about cooking as a creative endeavor? Or the person who might like to try their hand at cooking but feels out of their depth when people on Twitter start talking about the finer points of heritage dried beans and the best storage methods for fresh spices?

Friends, say hello to Laurie Colwin, whose anthologies of essays — Home Cooking and More Home Cooking — are gateways to the kitchen for the reluctant home cook. If you have anxiety about cooking or just don’t know where to start, essays like “A Harried Cook’s Guide To Some Fast Food” and “Three Chocolate Cakes” are full of heartening encouragement totally devoid of smoke-blowing, relatable talk about her own kitchen failures, paired with enticing recipes. When I first More Home Cooking way back in 1999, I had some experience cooking and baking, but I had no confidence to just try something I read in a cookbook. Colwin’s essays changed all that for me.

Colwin’s genius is in her permissiveness. By chronicling her own idiosyncrasies — her texture and flavor preferences, her very decided opinions nestled right up against admissions of gaps in her knowledge, the things she’ll splurge on and the ones she can’t understand bothering about — she’s constantly giving the would-be cook space to figure out their own way of doing things, and to do exactly that. Every essay is laced with a bracing dose of “yeah, you might mess this up, but nearly everything is fixable, so why not give it a whirl?” so potent it has the power to launch you up out of your comfy bed to take a crack at making a Nantucket Cranberry Pie, because you have the ingredients and you just want a slice right now, and by god, you can do it. Laurie said so.

Nantucket Cranberry Pie (which is actually a cake)

Ingredients:

• 2 c chopped cranberries (you could do this with plums, peaches, raspberries, or super-tart apples too/instead. For fruits out of season, frozen is dandy & I would not bother to defrost)

• 1/2 c chopped toasted pecans

• 1 1/2 c sugar, divided between 1 c and 1/2 c

• 2 eggs

• 3/4 c melted butter

• 1 c flour

• 1/2 tsp almond extract

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F

2. Jumble up the fruit and nuts in the bottom of a greased 9-inch springform pan (a pie plate or any other baking dish you have handy will do nicely, too), then scatter 1/2 sugar over top, cutting back on the sugar depending on how sweet the fruit you’re using is

3. In a bowl, mix together the eggs, butter, sugar, flour, and almond extract, combining quickly so as not to over-mix, until smooth

4. Pour the batter over the fruit-nut mixture and bake for 40 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean

Colwin’s note about the ease of this recipe: “This cake is so easy a child could do it, and if you happen to have a child or two lying around, I suggest you set them to work for your next dinner party.” I can tell you from experience that even when this cake turns out looking so-so or maybe a little singed around the edges, it always tastes sensational and if necessary, can be salvaged with the application of vanilla ice cream.

Moira knows you can do it, and so do I!

Some Closing Notes!

First up, BA Test Kitchen darling Claire Saffitz’s forthcoming book, Dessert Person, is now available for pre-order and there’s a great piece about her as a role model for failure in Avidly. Highly recommended.

A bit more reader’s advisory: I first got to know Laurie Colwin through her fiction. I’ve been a huge fan of her novels ever since my dad brought home Goodbye Without Leaving from the library & said, “I think you might like this, it’s about a Nice Jewish Girl who runs off to be a backup singer for Ike & Tina Turner, basically.” Her fictional oeuvre is best described as coming-of-age comedies of manners for grownups, and if that would float your boat, my two favorites are Happy All The Time and Family Happiness. Those titles may sound quite saccharine, but they are tartly witty and go to some dark corners of the mind, particularly around the burdens women frequently take on in the name of wifeliness and motherliness. Family Happiness is about how an otherwise very upstanding wife & mother’s begins to understand her own rage and need for boundaries via the unlikely vector of an extramarital affair. Somehow this is not remotely sordid? Meanwhile, Happy All The Time gives us two emotionally vulnerable male protagonists who basically spend the book being wiped out by the love they feel for their partners. I’m very overdue to delve back into both of these comfort reads, and now seems like the perfect time.

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