Cooking and craving (and an exciting announcement!)

Hi and Happy New Year!

Before getting into this month’s essay I want you to know that I’m sending you love and power as you wade through this horrifying time of year when diet culture, healthism and pervasive anti-fatness are amplified in the name of a New Year, New You. If you’re looking for some affirming material to digest, here are some options, and if you have other recommendations, you can drop them in the comments:

Listening

• Diet culture’s racist roots with Sabrina Strings

• Gender dynamics in food media and marketing with Emily Contois

• Maintenance Phase Podcast

Reading

• Fearing the Black Body: The racial origins of fatphobia by Sabrina Strings

• “Flawed methods and inappropriate conclusions for health policy on overweight and obesity” by Katherine Flegal, et al. 

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The best thing I’ve ever taken from a cookbook wasn’t a recipe. It was this:

“All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be [vain] to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.”

-Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal

It is true.

Cooking is a concert of many efforts. It might not always seem as romantic as Adler’s depiction, but making flavour is never something you do alone. 

Cultivating a cooking practice is always about processes of collaboration, with ingredients, elements, methods and memories. With hands and tongue and nose. With resources and necessities and desires that span time and geography.

When I cook, often I’m conspiring with basil and olive oil, knuckles deep in dough, kneading the enzymes of my palms into the flour that came to me by many other hands. I’m also usually following a craving that’s a hazy memory of a thing I ate once, somewhere that I can’t quite place.

Following a craving can be a delightful, though not uncomplicated, pursuit.

Craving, can take you through time to commune with ancestors, across an ocean, home. It can lead you to moments you thought you forgot, and knowledge you didn’t know you had. The pestering thrum of a craving can help you pull together the perfect rendition of a dessert your mom made once, a long time ago.

But along the pathways craving offers, you’ll graze tender places: the limits of your climate, budget, energy, health, memory. Craving is another word for longing.

Cooking is the movement towards craving, poorly choreographed and with fickle partners. It is reaching through time and space, brushing, grasping for a bitterness, a brightness, a texture or char, and sometimes missing. 

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Inspired by the intricacies of cooking and craving, I am launching a new part to this newsletter called “Making Do.”

In addition to my monthly essays, on the 15th of each month I will be releasing a recipe of sorts. I say “of sorts” for a few reasons: 

1. Cooking is a practice, not a prescription. It’s going to look and feel different for everyone.

2. I’m not a professional cook, and so, I want to leave space for mistakes and failures, of which there will be many. I don’t know recipes by exact measurements. My methods will likely be “wrong.” This project isn’t about professional cooking. It’s about playing with flavours and textures and ingredients and cravings, and sorting out how I can translate these movements into helpful cooking cues for myself and others.

3. I want these offerings to be adaptable as well as functional, inspired by the methods of my food teachers who are not professional cooks either. Some recipes, or components of a recipe, will have exact measurements for ease but I will also cue you to taste and adapt a recipe as you see fit. In other words, there will be room for you to play, follow your own cravings, and share those journeys, if you’d like. 

With “Making Do” I’m most interested in cultivating engaging and accessible ways to communicate cooking cues and substitutions that hold space for many cravings, bodies and budgets. This isn’t something I can do alone, so your feedback in the form of comments or emails (melissa.a.montanari@gmail.com) is going to inform my cooking and writing practice! 

My first questions for you are:

• What do you like and/or dislike about the recipes you’ve used or encountered in the past? (ie. long preambles, inaccessible ingredient lists, calls for too many utensils, complicated instructions, etc…)

• Would you like an audio recording of the recipe?

The first issue of “Making Do” will release on January 15th and will feature a zesty, fresh and bright carrot-ginger soup!

I’d really appreciate your help spreading the word!

Reading

Fiction

• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

  This was a recommendation from friends and I loved it! Queer necromancers in space is the only way I can describe it and I think that was how it was described to me. Plus, it’s a series!

• The Pump by Sydney Warner Brooman

  Another great recommendation! This was a quick and engaging read that feels like a bunch of short stories woven together. All the stories are set in this fictional town in Southern Ontario with a tainted water supply. It’s weird and creepy in the best ways.

• Motherthing By Ainslie Hogarth

  Yet another wonderful recommendations. I’d describe it as a dark domestic horror that is consuming, gory, and rife with food metaphors.

Non-Fiction

• Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron

  Borrowing a line from Duke’s summary because there is no way for me to summarize all this book offers: “Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism.”

• The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

  This book builds on Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and is about disability justice at the end of the world, focusing on the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Watching

Both are gory food/ eating related horror-ish films. Loved them both but Bones and All was easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. 

• The Menu

• Bones and All