COQ AU VIN

Posted on January 17, 2013 by judith

Leicester Square Station

October 2005, I was to meet my daughter, Hannah, in London where she was taking  dreamy courses like “The British Museum,”  “Shakespeare,” and “Contemporary Drama” at U. C. Berkeley’s campus abroad. We were to find each other outside the Tube stop at Leicester Square and, as I approached the station, I began to look around. When she left home in August she’d been dressed in her uniform of jeans, polo shirt, sweatshirt, and sneakers. But the young woman I saw from a distance was wearing boots, a long black skirt, and a stylish, close-fitting, suede jacket.  Hannah? I wondered. Continue reading →

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LIME JELL-O

Posted on January 7, 2013 by judith

               From the memoir Tasting Home, forthcoming with She Writes Press, 2013

My mother died on January 5, 2010, at 101 years old. Six months earlier, in July, my husband, Bill, and I had paid her a visit her at the continuing care center in Hemet, the city on the edge of the Mojave where she and my father had retired. We found her waiting in her room, hands folded across her lap in her lightweight wheelchair. There was nothing wrong with her legs, but she had gotten tired of falling down all the time from the vertigo. Continue reading →

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CHRISTMAS IN COMPTON

Posted on December 17, 2012 by judith

“Many household food memories are a mixture of conviviality and tension.”
— Janet Flammang, A Taste for Civilization

I was a miserable child, made more miserable by my embarrassment at being fat and used to listen in astonishment when adults around me blandly observed that “childhood is the happiest time in your life.” I desperately hoped this was not the case! I was growing up with parents who were hardly there, with a brother who lived in a boy world and never talked, and in a town best known in the 1950s as the place to go for pre-owned cars. I took refuge from my discontents in eating, which at our house was easy to do because my mother’s most consistent form of nurturing was to bake.

Our Compton Home

Leftover pies lurked in our kitchen along with stray tins of fudge and a cookie jar, shaped like a rooster, that was always full, and it was the norm in our family to sample several desserts at once. My parents taught dance every evening, so they stayed trim, while my brother’s boyish metabolism kept him this side of emaciation. Only I was overweight, and thus my one reliable form of mothering sent me further into awkwardness and shame. Still, I turned to food for comfort and especially on holidays when my mother served  a smorgasbord that felt like love and that, with the power of pleasure and of ancient ritual, drew our disjointed family together. Continue reading →

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THE NEXT BEST THING REVISITED

Posted on November 30, 2012 by judith

The idea of this blog hop, The Next Best Thing, is to answer ten questions about our work and then to tag other members of our writing communities to do the same. If we read each other’s answers, we will get to know each other’s projects, and that’s a good thing!  I was tagged by Edith O Nuallain who describes her fascinating new novel at http://inaroomofmyown.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/my-next-big-thing/.  Take a moment to read her answers. Betsy Graziani Fasbinder, another She Writes author,  will answer questions about her novel Fire and Water at http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blog/list?user=0l6ztebtrf2c3 in the next few days. If you are interested in being the next to answer questions about your work, contact Betsy.

For those interested in my answers about Tasting Home, the food memoir I am publishing with She Writes Press, please scroll to the end of these blog pages.  In the post you are currently reading, I am answering questions about my next project, a feminist mystery.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

OINK! An Emily Adams Mystery

Where did the idea come from for the book? Continue reading →

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MY BOOK HAS A COVER

Posted on November 20, 2012 by judith

TASTING HOME: COMING OF AGE IN THE KITCHEN. She Writes Press, February 2013. The history of a woman’s emotional education,  a romantic tale of a marriage between a straight woman and a gay man, and an exploration of the ways in which cooking can lay the groundwork not only for personal healing and intimate relation but for political community as well. Organized by decade and by cookbook,  Tasting Home draws us into an extraordinary, but familiar,  journey through the cuisines, cultural spirit, and politics of the 1940s through the 2000s. It comes with recipes. ISBN 978001938314 03 2

Advance Praise for Tasting Home:

“In this . . . elegantly written work Newton has completely taken us by surprise.  . . . there’s a sense of tension, of expectation, of waiting for the other shoe to drop that creates a subliminal buzz. Her vibrant writing has . . .  energy and  momentum . . .. [and through] her personal story, Newton manages to weave in the entire course of the culture, a reflection of her skills as an historian and an accomplished writer as well as a born storyteller.”

–Jeanette Ferrary, author of Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer  and M.F.K. and Me.

“In this captivating memoir, Newton draws the reader into a world where major events
are brought to life with poignant food memories. Each vignette is pitch-perfect, lively, and engaging, striking a delicate balance between self-disclosure and universal themes of acceptance, love, community-building, and political engagement.”
— Janet A. Flammang, author of The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and
Civil Society

Tasting Home  is more than a food memoir. Influenced by the civil rights struggle, the women’s movement, and the AIDS epidemic, it is an odyssey of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth.  Cooking serves as a powerful metaphor for the difficulties and pleasures of relations among mothers and daughters; husbands and wives; gays and heterosexuals; and racial-ethnic groups.  Like a grand meal, Tasting Home is a resounding success. —–Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for  Civil Rights.

This evocative memoir creates a tapestry of the personal and the political, weaving together stories of family, friendship and community, of love, birth and death.    Punctuated by favorite recipes for thoughtfully prepared meals, this vivid narrative celebrates matter of both the kitchen and the heart. —-Wendy Martin,  We are The Stories We Tell and More Stories We Tell.

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FRIDA’S FIESTA

Posted on November 12, 2012 by judith

(from Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen, She Writes Press, 2013)

This chapter follows “Labor Day in the Kitchen,” during which my daughter and I cook twelve dishes for a large buffet, a celebration of  a new multicultural graduate program

 On the final evening of our cooking marathon, we dressed for the buffet. Hannah wore a blue top, a short black skirt, and golden, shoulder-brushing earrings. I wore a long black skirt, a black shell, and a black silk jacket with a necklace I’d made of coral beads and one large turquoise stone.  It was supposed to look like one of Frida Kahlo’s. The invitation had borne a photograph of Frida standing in a doorway, surrounded by a border of orange and fuchsia flowers. I had described the graduate group party as a “chance to talk politics and wear all your jewelry at once.”  Luisa, one of Gabriela’s graduate students, had asked, “What does she mean, ‘wear all your jewelry at once?’”  Gabriela had answered, “She means, ‘just do it.’ Express yourself; be who you want.” Continue reading →

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A TASTE OF LA SCALA

Posted on October 29, 2012 by judith

Our sense of delight is in a great measure comparative, and arises at once from the sensations we feel and those which we remember.  Samuel Johnson, Rambler #80 (December 22, 1750)

It was the afternoon before the evening at La Scala and my husband, Bill, and I had bought expensive tickets. Well, one seat was expensive and the other was not. One was for a red velvet chair at the front of a red velvet box with a full view of the stage and the other was for a stool right behind the chair with only a partial view. (We planned to trade seats as the opera progressed.)

We were thrilled at the idea of going to La Scala—the history! the great performances! the discerning audience! the glittering chandeliers! I thought more than once about those Impressionist paintings that portray silk- and jewel-clad women, and soberly dressed men, lounging in gilded boxes that are stacked one on top of the other like layers in a golden wedding cake. Continue reading →

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IN OTHER WORLDS

Posted on October 9, 2012 by judith

(from Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen, forthcoming with She Writes Press 2013)

 Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.  Miriam Beard

 That I ended up in a commune with a baby and three men owed much to my year in Laguna Beach and to the ways it struck me–after my long sojourn in the East–as “otherworldly.” This otherworldliness took many forms, which is the way it often is with places that seem radically different from your own. Seemingly disparate encounters with the “new” add up, changing you before you know you’re changing, giving you ideas about living that you never had.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading →

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EATING VENETIAN: CICHETI

Posted on September 24, 2012 by judith

 

Cantine Schiavi

We are sitting on the ledge of a low brick wall that separates the sidewalk from a small canal in the Dosoduro, a quiet and unusually verdant section of Venice. My husband, Bill, and I are eating cicheti (chee-KEH-tee) or Italian tapas that, in this case, consist of crostini–slices of baguette toasted with olive oil and topped with creamed salt cod, creamed salt cod with parsley, mushrooms and ricotta, and something sweet that might be figs and mascarpone cheese. Continue reading →

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Labor Day In the Kitchen

Posted on September 13, 2012 by eric

How do you peel a walnut?” my daughter asked as she looked, not too happily, at the mound of nuts on the kitchen table.  We’d spent three days in the kitchen laboring over the twelve dishes we’d planned for a large buffet, and chiles en nogada, or chiles in walnut sauce, were the final stage of our cooking marathon.  That very evening some forty faculty and students from all over campus would be arriving to celebrate our new multicultural graduate program, and if any dish could instill a sense of community it would be chiles en nogada.

Making simple recipes like tacos de crema, macaroni with serrano chiles, and refried beans had been easy and even pleasurable, but the chiles in walnut sauce were posing a challenge. I’d combined Frida Kahlo’s recipe with one I’d taken from the Internet, and the latter called on us to peel the walnuts before pulverizing them for the sauce.

“Mom,” said Hannah, rubbing at one of the walnuts, “this brown stuff isn’t coming off.” Continue reading →

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