I.
My wonderful friend J. just gifted me with a copy of Luisa Weiss's new book, My Berlin Kitchen. I've been a huge fan of hers ever since I first moved to Berlin in January 2011. We were moving there, we joked, as a rite of passage, like everyone in our demographic apparently does at some point - except for Weiss, who is in fact a native of the city and whose Berlin, located in a not-very-hip neighborhood in the West, is wonderfully removed from the expats sporting aggressive Fascistic haircuts. I began to read her main blog, The Wednesday Chef, and often her side-blog, Berlin on a Platter, an ideosyncratic survey of the Berlin restaurant scene. She rarely tells you about the hot new places in Mitte, but instead about nondescript Korean fried chicken joints. The Wednesday Chef discussed the recipes she cooked for herself in equally ideosyncratic and personal fashion, and I began to read because I was in need of some ideas. Berlin is not such tremendously foreign culinary territory, and my yuppie neighborhoods in Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg were surprisingly hospitable to vegetarians, but you can kiss your kale or broccoli rabe goodbye, and salad greens always seemed to be a choice of either watercress or watercress.* I encountered kohlrabi, which I'd only seen in the very fancy vegetable garden at Hollister House, rows of stark green sculptures sticking up from the ground. I'd certainly never cooked it. I'd never before gone near a parsnip or a rutabaga. (The former, it turns out, are great when sliced evenly and tossed lightly in olive oil and salt, assuming that you do not forget about them in the oven while you are streaming the Royal Wedding on the internet; and I soon discovered a love of turnips, sliced thinly, sprinkled with salt and served on a piece of thick, chewy bread spread with good Irish butter.)
I came for the potential recipes, but stayed for Weiss's writing, limpid and appealingly friendly, and because the idea that cooking could be expressive or enjoyable was new to me. Only in the past two or three years have I found food blogs or books or even the idea of cooking to be at all interesting. I enjoyed my food, I just had no interest in the process by which it got to my plate. My sister and mother used to give me a good knife or vegetarian cookbooks for Christmas, and I'd think, I suppose you're trying to tell me something. My occasional desires to bake flared up like fevers and just as quickly departed, leaving the countertops sticky with cocoa and sugar and scraps of dough; but the prospect of daily cooking - really cooking, not just throwing a sweet potato in the oven - was something that didn't interest me on a creative level at all, even as New York grew thick with self-professed "foodies" touting their omnivorousness.** Even growing vegetables did not particularly interest me. (I still tend to be a basil-and-herbs-and-you're-done kind of gardener, although I might rethink this position, should I ever have a garden again, having seen the wonderful integration of vegetables and fruits with herbs and flowers at the Liebermann Villa this past summer.)
I began to read The Wednesday Chef and the even more fantastical Desserts for Breakfast. I think that what I admired, at first in an inchoate and unrealized way, was that these authors wrote at all, let alone that they should write about their creative passions. My love for gardening was wordless, something expressed in substance when I had a garden, and something mourned when I did not. My gardens were for me alone, not shared except during our parties, when I found myself made slightly and characteristically uncomfortable by how proud I was for other people to see them. Gardening, like so much else, was a private activity (and even when I imagined my great Life's-Work garden, it stayed private; it never had anything to do with my career; it was anonymous). As for writing, I'd long since segregated the fact that I once had been a writer from my present life, as though it had all happened ages before and I was looking back passively from my last days. When, in the spring, my friends gently suggested (at a food festival!) that garden design was something that I could write about, that I could put to paper (or screen) all the thoughts which no longer had anywhere to go but the walls of my head - well, to say that they "planted a seed" in "fertile soil" would not only be cliched, it would not even be accurate, because it would not express how revelatory this idea was to me.
* Memo: but spargel season in Berlin is a revelation.
** Complaint: enough with the bacon.
II.
I envy these writers in another way, because cooking and baking, their creative passions, can be exercised and enjoyed year-round. Every season inspires. But I am entering into the season when I am not merely gardenless, but nearly everyone is, everywhere around me. There is less to see and less to do. I am not a gardener of houseplants or a lover of hothouses. Garden tours grow thin on the ground.
In fact, for a long time, reading about gardening was what got me through the winter. When the days got shorter and darker and there was nothing to be done, no bulbs to plant in hard soil, when there was no longer so much as a single fiery leaf left to admire, I'd turn to my garden books. While I was down at my parents' last weekend, I wandered into the living room and found on the shelves an edited collection of my least favorite garden books, the ones that I was willing to leave behind when I moved out. The earliest iterations tended to be tedious how-to's that one skims for information, but which don't capture the imagination. Then there was Traditional English Gardens, a paperback that I got when I was about fourteen, the first garden book I really loved, heavy on the color photos of National Trust properties and rippled and ridged from all the times I must have read it in the bathtub. Elsewhere, in newspapers and magazines and blogs, I will sometimes recognize photos of, say, Ham House, and I will think back to Traditional English Gardens, the book where I first encountered them.
I've barely paid attention to my garden books these last several months, had gladly lent Penelope Hobhouse's On Gardening and other favorites to friends and family. And then, the other day, I noticed on my bookshelf in Brooklyn Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, right next to The Oxford Companion Guide to Gardens, and I felt a slight twinge. Fall, you know, does this to me: this mix of dread and appreciation and exhaustion and relief. On those days when I will have left and returned home both in darkness, I know, I will feed hungrily on these pages. What I now wonder is whether I might sustain myself in a different way, what recipes I might write for myself this winter.
My wonderful friend J. just gifted me with a copy of Luisa Weiss's new book, My Berlin Kitchen. I've been a huge fan of hers ever since I first moved to Berlin in January 2011. We were moving there, we joked, as a rite of passage, like everyone in our demographic apparently does at some point - except for Weiss, who is in fact a native of the city and whose Berlin, located in a not-very-hip neighborhood in the West, is wonderfully removed from the expats sporting aggressive Fascistic haircuts. I began to read her main blog, The Wednesday Chef, and often her side-blog, Berlin on a Platter, an ideosyncratic survey of the Berlin restaurant scene. She rarely tells you about the hot new places in Mitte, but instead about nondescript Korean fried chicken joints. The Wednesday Chef discussed the recipes she cooked for herself in equally ideosyncratic and personal fashion, and I began to read because I was in need of some ideas. Berlin is not such tremendously foreign culinary territory, and my yuppie neighborhoods in Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg were surprisingly hospitable to vegetarians, but you can kiss your kale or broccoli rabe goodbye, and salad greens always seemed to be a choice of either watercress or watercress.* I encountered kohlrabi, which I'd only seen in the very fancy vegetable garden at Hollister House, rows of stark green sculptures sticking up from the ground. I'd certainly never cooked it. I'd never before gone near a parsnip or a rutabaga. (The former, it turns out, are great when sliced evenly and tossed lightly in olive oil and salt, assuming that you do not forget about them in the oven while you are streaming the Royal Wedding on the internet; and I soon discovered a love of turnips, sliced thinly, sprinkled with salt and served on a piece of thick, chewy bread spread with good Irish butter.)
I came for the potential recipes, but stayed for Weiss's writing, limpid and appealingly friendly, and because the idea that cooking could be expressive or enjoyable was new to me. Only in the past two or three years have I found food blogs or books or even the idea of cooking to be at all interesting. I enjoyed my food, I just had no interest in the process by which it got to my plate. My sister and mother used to give me a good knife or vegetarian cookbooks for Christmas, and I'd think, I suppose you're trying to tell me something. My occasional desires to bake flared up like fevers and just as quickly departed, leaving the countertops sticky with cocoa and sugar and scraps of dough; but the prospect of daily cooking - really cooking, not just throwing a sweet potato in the oven - was something that didn't interest me on a creative level at all, even as New York grew thick with self-professed "foodies" touting their omnivorousness.** Even growing vegetables did not particularly interest me. (I still tend to be a basil-and-herbs-and-you're-done kind of gardener, although I might rethink this position, should I ever have a garden again, having seen the wonderful integration of vegetables and fruits with herbs and flowers at the Liebermann Villa this past summer.)
I began to read The Wednesday Chef and the even more fantastical Desserts for Breakfast. I think that what I admired, at first in an inchoate and unrealized way, was that these authors wrote at all, let alone that they should write about their creative passions. My love for gardening was wordless, something expressed in substance when I had a garden, and something mourned when I did not. My gardens were for me alone, not shared except during our parties, when I found myself made slightly and characteristically uncomfortable by how proud I was for other people to see them. Gardening, like so much else, was a private activity (and even when I imagined my great Life's-Work garden, it stayed private; it never had anything to do with my career; it was anonymous). As for writing, I'd long since segregated the fact that I once had been a writer from my present life, as though it had all happened ages before and I was looking back passively from my last days. When, in the spring, my friends gently suggested (at a food festival!) that garden design was something that I could write about, that I could put to paper (or screen) all the thoughts which no longer had anywhere to go but the walls of my head - well, to say that they "planted a seed" in "fertile soil" would not only be cliched, it would not even be accurate, because it would not express how revelatory this idea was to me.
* Memo: but spargel season in Berlin is a revelation.
** Complaint: enough with the bacon.
II.
I envy these writers in another way, because cooking and baking, their creative passions, can be exercised and enjoyed year-round. Every season inspires. But I am entering into the season when I am not merely gardenless, but nearly everyone is, everywhere around me. There is less to see and less to do. I am not a gardener of houseplants or a lover of hothouses. Garden tours grow thin on the ground.
In fact, for a long time, reading about gardening was what got me through the winter. When the days got shorter and darker and there was nothing to be done, no bulbs to plant in hard soil, when there was no longer so much as a single fiery leaf left to admire, I'd turn to my garden books. While I was down at my parents' last weekend, I wandered into the living room and found on the shelves an edited collection of my least favorite garden books, the ones that I was willing to leave behind when I moved out. The earliest iterations tended to be tedious how-to's that one skims for information, but which don't capture the imagination. Then there was Traditional English Gardens, a paperback that I got when I was about fourteen, the first garden book I really loved, heavy on the color photos of National Trust properties and rippled and ridged from all the times I must have read it in the bathtub. Elsewhere, in newspapers and magazines and blogs, I will sometimes recognize photos of, say, Ham House, and I will think back to Traditional English Gardens, the book where I first encountered them.
I've barely paid attention to my garden books these last several months, had gladly lent Penelope Hobhouse's On Gardening and other favorites to friends and family. And then, the other day, I noticed on my bookshelf in Brooklyn Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, right next to The Oxford Companion Guide to Gardens, and I felt a slight twinge. Fall, you know, does this to me: this mix of dread and appreciation and exhaustion and relief. On those days when I will have left and returned home both in darkness, I know, I will feed hungrily on these pages. What I now wonder is whether I might sustain myself in a different way, what recipes I might write for myself this winter.
Dear Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteI am enjoying your blog tremendously. I read the preview of My Berlin Kitchen and ordered the book. It is delightful so far. Hope you are doing well.
Your once-upon-a-time-across-the-hall-neighbor,
Anna