Orts & Reports: Snail Mail, Recipe Rituals & Soul Food

All the News That's Fit to Eat in 3 Small Bites

Small Bite #1: You’ve Got Mail!

Last summer, I featured a Berry Crumble recipe mailed in from Julie B. Hughes a subscriber and author who had become my first recipe swapping pen-pal. Since then, my collection of snail-mail correspondents has expanded like a post-holiday waistline. Food lovers and food-writers and friends old and new are digging out forgotten boxes of notecards stashed in drawers and closets. They’re rediscovering the joy of signing letters with a flourish of ink…and the challenge of locating a postbox that doesn’t involve a road trip.

Catching up on handwritten correspondence dovetails nicely into Digital Detox Day, a new experiment where I retreat to the offline world of analog activities. Like reading books made of, ummm…paper and two-a-day runs (energetically endorsed by the quadrupeds) and baking way too many sweets and organizing my pantry along with, ugh, the stack of recipes I mentioned in the last issue, which brings me to…

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Small Bite #2: Recipe Rituals

I cook somewhat intuitively—swapping ingredients here, tweaking seasonings there—but, still, I seem to need the scaffolding of a recipe to make a dish come together properly. It’s like playing the piano: I can’t play music by ear. Recipes are my sheet music.

They’re also my comfort food, future fodder for family dinners and foodletters. And in short order, I’ve accumulated a boatload of recipes. I’m a collector, as my father liked to call himself while proudly nodding at the 4,000+ books on his shelves…which, in my trying-to-be minimalist opinion, is really just a way to not call yourself a hoarder—something I definitely do not want to be.

This year, I’ve resolved to at least get a handle on the collection which seemingly multiplies overnight. I’ve combed through the clippings, the Cook & Tell archives (it’s an entire room, people), the vintage cookbooks, the index cards, the apps, the emails, the magazines, the newsletters. I’ve tossed and kept and filed. And I’ve created a master “Recipes to Make” list, divided into various categories. It’s a far cry from fancy, just a simple Word document. This gig needs to be fun, okay? As Ben & Jerry say: if it’s not fun, why do it?

Besides the master list, I’m noting each recipe I make on giant Day-Glo orange sticky notes (decidedly un-fancy) pasted to the front pages of my recipe scrapbook. Some—not always the best, yet maybe the ones that tell the best stories—get transcribed into the scrapbook. Some become field notes in my daily journal. Some get published in this newsletter or shared with friends and pen-pals. Some are relegated to the annals of my What Not To Cook notebook. Stay tuned. We’ll be covering those gems in a future issue.

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Small Bite #3: What Feeds My Soul

• Vintage Reads: Marjorie Standish’s Cooking Down East, the bible of Maine cooking. There’s nothing more authentic than opening an old cookbook and finding a note from a ghost tucked in the pages.

“An old Maine recipe,” Standish wrote, “is just as much of an heirloom as a lovely antique.”

• Readers, Baking: Sharon Cortelyou , a subscriber in St. Louis who writes the always-provocative Brain Food newsletter, recently baked Sister Sesame’s Three-Grain Bread from Cook & Tell’s The Bread Also Rises issue. And sent proof, because pics or it didn’t happen, right?

“It is a substantial bread,” Sharon notes. “I added a little more liquid to make it easier to work with.”

• Birthday Celebrations: The digital edition of Cook & Tell is one year old this month and I continue to be astonished at how this project came about. At age eight, I aspired to be a famous novelist, but life and an inexplicable insurance career got in the way. If you’d told me then that I’d follow in my mother’s footsteps and become a foodwriter a half-century later, I’d have spit out my glass of Tang. And if you’d told me I’d actually love writing about the vortex of food and words and art, I’d have choked on my Space Food Sticks. And yet, here we are. Welcome aboard! It’s so good to have you along for the ride.

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