This past Tuesday, I finished teaching the March sessions of “the Food Essay,” a class I designed and really love—indeed, I believe in its structure more the more times I teach it, the more I see different cadres and types of students engage with the readings and illuminate their perspectives in the discussions. The final session is on recipes, specifically narrative recipes, the recipe as an essay, the ways in which ideas like “embedded discourse” and “embodied personal narrative” can be achieved through telling someone how to cook a dish—getting into the choreography of it, the thinking of it.

The lecture includes quotes from Lisa Heldke, Rebecca May Johnson, and others, and in the readings, we go back to the 1980s and bring ourselves up to today, in order to get a deep sense of what more a recipe can be beyond a set of ingredients and instructions. How can we bring the lessons of narrative recipe writing into our other pieces? How can we use them to learn to better express movement and scent, sights and sounds? It concludes the class because I think we have to engage other kinds of essays before the class will be ready to understand recipes as such. So many people say it’s their favorite of the classes; its readings really open something up for folks.

Below the fold, I’m going to include a PDF of one of the readings that people really fell for, and it’s one that in rereading last week—and rereading is key, too, to the class—I realized really informed how I approached On Eating. I’m also including a brand-new example of narrative recipe writing that I encountered this week. Narrative recipe isn’t a new genre, but it’s one that offers readers and home cooks a moment to reconsider the significance of the daily work of cooking, something that is also addressed in some of Tomato Tomato’s first pieces: “Dear Sandra Marzano,” a satirical advice column on recipe theft by Ariana Gunderson, and “Saltie Memories,” a stroll through memory lane via a long-gone beloved Brooklyn restaurant and its cookbook by Nikkitha Bakshani.

If you’re a member-supporter here, you get access to all posts (including the recipe archive), the Tomato Tomato Discord, the Salons and Book Club meetings, and you support the work of the new magazine, which is free to read, because I decided I didn’t want to keep anyone out and I wanted to see the work shared and referenced. What’s the point of publishing stuff that’s going to be locked away or expensive? It’s just me toiling here as the editor, creative director, and social media manager, for now.

You also support the free essays I send out each Monday and allow me to keep the newsletter going, providing platforms to other writers and thinkers, and managing the community space. The conversations we have are rich and accessible, and are designed to make the acts of thinking about food and culture broadly available. And while I’ve seen paywalls lose their luster over the last few years, that doesn’t make the labor free. I appreciate those who’ve stuck with me over time—writing and publishing books has distracted me, for sure, but after this one comes out, I’m going to be really focused on the newsletter and the magazine for a while.