LAFFlines #19: Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts
Nope, nothing to see here. Most definitely not was I trying to bury a treat in the couch cushions. Here, read your book. The sorghum cookies are on page 174.
First up in my cookbook taxonomy—um, no, love-of-my-life husband Steve, I am not talking about preserving, stuffing, and mounting dead animals. That’s taxidermy.
Let’s start again: First up in my cookbook taxonomy are coffee table cookbooks. In coffee table cookbooks, food is art, and the broccoli is vogue-ing.
Pages of eye-popping, seemingly impossible pies or come-hither pasta, scalloped and lithe, draped like lingerie on a marble countertop, are pristine. They’ve never been to the kitchen. Then there are the tomes—the cooking bibles, the sturdy compendia that you did highlight, a bit, once, and now use, along with Principles of Neural Science, as yoga props. Third, we’ve got the field guides. Dog-eared. Splattered. Penciled and starred and often spiraled, pages hanging on for dear life. Jammed alongside the cutting boards behind the mixer. Beloved as the velveteen rabbit, but a lot more useful. And now, my favorite: literary cookbooks, specifically lyrical cookbooks. Lyrical cookbooks have language you can taste. Lyrical cookbooks are poetic with stories and perspectives and voices that wake you up. Lyrical cookbooks invigorate your soul as much as your appetite. You read them propped up in bed at night, savoring the words like truffles. The next morning, when you step into the kitchen, their meanings have seeped into your bones. The apple has a new weight in your palm.
Professor Wilkinson’s “No-Egg Scrambled Eggs” have green bell peppers, white onions, and curry powder. I switched it up with sweet lunchbox peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, sundried tomatoes, turmeric, black pepper, and black salt (Kala Namak).
The best lyrical/literary cookbook I’ve read in a while is Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by University of Kentucky professor and former Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson. My recommendation: Start by reading only the first sentence of each chapter. Read the sentence, then move on to the next chapter. The combination of those first sentences is an exquisite poem in and of itself. Maybe pause to gaze at the photos of Black Appalachia. Or perhaps you’ll notice the styles of the text on the page—short indented italic parts (recipes written in the vernacular), long indented italic parts (historical fiction), the neat sections of typically-formatted recipes, the dense paragraphs of history and genealogies. There’s blackberry soup, a mother with schizophrenia, tears over eating Henny Penny’s babies, a wife who bought her enslaved husband’s freedom, two pandemic Thanksgivings, and butter, butter, butter. Poetic and culinary turns abound…including a recipe for seitan.
Herb Roasted Potatoes and Tomatoes
No, tomatoes are not in season. But flavor always is.
Rustic comfort, any season.
Scrub and slice your potatoes (I used two Russet baking potatoes, with the peels) into nickel-thick discs. Toss the discs with olive oil, dried sage, dried rosemary, dried oregano, fine sea salt, black pepper, and olive oil in a large mixing bowl. Pave a well-oiled baking sheet with the herbed potato discs. Roast at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove the sheet from the oven and carefully flip over the potato discs. If the potatoes seem dry, drizzle (or spray) them with oil. Layer sliced tomatoes (I used five tomatoes-on-the-vine) over the flipped potatoes. Sprinkle the tomatoes with the same spices you used for the potatoes—sage, rosemary, oregano, sea salt, black pepper. Roast for another 20-30 minutes, or until the tomatoes have ruptured and begun to caramelize. Use a spatula to transfer the potato-tomato stacks to a plate. Top with LAFF protein crumbles and a few flakes of Maldon sea salt. (A side of steamed broccoli rounds out the meal.)
New Option for Getting LAFF
If you’d like to pick up your LAFF order at Millstone Kitchen, email me at hello@laffkitchen.com.
Roanoke Co+op (Grandin location)
Eats (Blacksburg)
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Last Note
LOL + love-of-my-life (a.k.a., Steve) = LOmL. Here’s the meme LOmL sent me yesterday: “Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that a marriage should be between one person who puts their keys in the same place every single time they walk through the door, and another who doesn’t know what county they left them in.” My keys are in Montgomery County. But where in Montgomery County is a recurrent mystery. And Rose is of zero help.
Cheers to each of you,
Abby