A few months ago, before I organized my new publishing system a bit better (I’ll talk about the post-Substack life in more detail next Friday), someone emailed me to say my publication no longer met their needs because it “was perhaps too scholarly.”
If anything, I’m hoping to make work like Anny Gaul’s Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato more accessible to anyone who might care to learn more about food, its histories and its systems. I know that I’m a food writer with a niche audience, many of whom are academics of various stripes, but I’m not an academic.
“Friction” is trending, because life has become frictionless through our screens and apps. Reading work that challenges us is another form of friction. What I hope to do, especially with the Desk Book Club and Salon Series, is open the gate to the worlds of media, publishing, and food studies for my readers: We learn and talk together. With that in mind, let’s get into Nile Nightshade.
The Food Essay 7 p.m. EST sessions begin in March. It will be five weeks of close reading, discussion, and considering how to approach different types of essays in our work. I’ve added Newsletter Workshop 2.0 and The Self-Edit Workshop sessions in February, and you can bundle them. One-on-one editorial consulting is available, as well.
The book begins by establishing itself as a “kitchen history,” one that sees the domestic as of as much relevance as what happens outside the home. It is through bringing this supposedly private realm into conversation with “the farm and the market,” as well as written archives, that a “culinary public” is forged:
“...I assemble a history of tomatoes in Egypt as ‘kitchen history.’ In the most basic sense this is a history told from the vantage of the kitchen. It rejects the separation of the home and kitchen from “public” realms that have more commonly served as the setting for the writing of history. Kitchen history extends tendrils of inquiry into the farm and the market, placing cookbooks and state archives in conversation with oral histories and street cries.”
Gaul repeatedly reminds the reader that cookbooks reflect the needs and taste of the middle class, which is interesting to think about in terms of our own contemporary culture: Whose lives do our great cookbooks reflect? How could food writing and scholarship do a better job of bringing a wider demographic perspective into their ideas of the “culinary public”?
Another thing I definitely want to discuss with Gaul on Monday is where food writing and food studies meet. There are moments in Nile Nightshade that certainly veer into food writing as we popularly understand it, descriptions of "unctuous ghee” and “the smooth and gentle texture of weeka.”
I was thinking about Hanna Garth’s Food in Cuba when Gaul writes of how people protested for more than the “caloric staples like bread.” The people demanded more; they demanded what Garth called “a decent meal.” As Gaul writes, “The public’s vision of the good life—and popular critiques of the state’s failure to provide it—extended to vegetables too.”
Questions for you, to discuss in comments or in Monday’s meeting, that I hope show how we can apply scholarship to our everyday food thinking:
How would you describe your own culinary public?
Which cookbooks accurately depict your own taste and way of life? Which are aspirational, and why?
Why does a sentence strike you as “food writing” and when does it become “food studies”?
Which vegetables are part of your vision of “the good life”?
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