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Eating and Reading
On food and food writing
I’ve always wanted to write about food but have wondered if I’m allowed. If I’m qualified. As a home cook who needs a recipe and has little culinary imagination, what could I contribute? I love to cook, sometimes. I love to bake, always. The alchemy of butter, sugar, and desire can fix a lot. When it works.
Mostly I love to eat.
As I felt “unqualified,” this landed in my inbox from Deb Perelman, of Smitten Kitchen fame:
“In the summer of 2007, the Smitten Kitchen was about to turn a single year old, and I want to make this absolutely clear: I had no idea what I was doing. … I’d started the site as a place to share recipes I felt were worth repeating, and fully expected it to last six months before it fizzled into oblivion as I knew very little about cooking and presumed most people preferred to get cooking advice from people who had a clue. Instead, I was heading into the site’s one-year mark with a steadily growing audience and despite lacking any central guiding philosophy aside from “I want to make this today,” I still love so many of these seemingly random picks.”
She didn’t know what she was doing! She knew very little about cooking! I think her blog became so popular because of her writing (her recipes are great, too, reliably successful). I’ve always looked…
