Writing about Food

Last year I began a document ambitiously titled "A Year in Food." For two months (ok, so nothing like a year) I wrote as often as I could find the time, about what I'd been cooking. Re-reading it this morning was a revelation: the meals I made! The time I spent! Fall cooking always gets me going, and this year fall has started and stopped so often that I've lost track. But still. Last fall I made bread just about every other day, soups, roasts, crock-pot meals... it made my mouth water to remember it all.

I've been wondering why I wrote about it, though. Mom used to keep lists of the dozens and dozens of cookies she baked every Christmas season. I think they are still there, on a back page in her old Joy of Cooking (the one whose spine cracked so long ago that even the tape she used to hold it together has atrophied). She would consult the previous year's list every Advent when she started up again. Did she keep the lists to remind her of what we'd liked? Out of some obsessive-compulsive need for order? To get "credit" for the work she'd done?

At some level I think that's it, with my "year in food" as well as Mom's lists. So much of mothering, so much of living, goes unacknowledged. So many days I wonder "what did I do today?" Keeping a list, writing about food, gives me a tangible reminder of my activities, activities that leave no trace except in the expanding and contracting waistbands of my clothes. As I read through my cooking journal from last year I was astonished at how much I accomplished--the cooking, the feeding, which were my primary focus, but also the things we did with the kids, the academic work I did--I recorded them all (or most of them) and I really did get a sense of how much I had done. All this evanescent work, still there on the screen.

I told Ann the acupuncturist that I thought of my knitting as "creativity lite"--as something I could do relatively quickly, without a full investment of mind and heart, that ended up in a tangible product. More and more I realize I need to be making things, whether it's scarves or cookies or earrings or words on a page. Words on a page may be the most satisfying, but they also require the greatest investment. So last year, I guess, I invested the time in cookies and breads, then doubled their value to me as products by writing about them as well.

I still think a book recounting a year in food could be interesting. But mine petered out in December in the pre-Christmas rush and I never returned to it. What if I started in January?