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Hungry for Home |
written by Amy Rogers
September 2003
ISBN: 0970897286
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Behind the Book
A Note From the Author
This is my earliest memory of food: My family is eating at Pearl’s, a Chinese restaurant near Detroit. At the age of five or so, I’m digging into a plate of shrimp with lobster sauce, which I’ve already declared my favorite dish, there or anywhere.
In another culinary snapshot, I’m waiting in line outside a barbecue restaurant with my parents. I know the wait will be worth it. Some years later, I’ll start writing down recipes in Home Ec class and adding them to my mother’s box of index cards that are stained with gravy or goulash.
My mother and both grandmothers were terrific cooks. Intuitive and unflappable in the kitchen, these women of Eastern European descent were the embodiment of hard-working practicality as they created from commonplace ingredients dishes that seemed so mysterious as to be almost magic. Everyday cuts of meat, after slow cooking with sweet wine and herbs, turned the color of burnished mahogany. Lowly chickens and humble root vegetables were transformed into soups with miraculous curative powers. Even something as ordinary as a sour dill pickle was remarkable for its perfect bite.
But that was only part of what shaped the food writer I was to become. Other women worked in our home during our family’s few prosperous years, and these African-Americans influenced me as much as any relative. “Honey, when you grow up, you fix your husband some of Mellie’s salmon croquettes,” my favorite would say while she stood at the stove. “And if he doesn’t like them, you hit him in the head with a rolling pin!”
In another recollection, I see Mellie and my mother sharing a meal of fried chicken feet, hot from the skillet, neither woman too proud to admit her enjoyment of a dish most people would disdain as unfashionable.
I had been a journalist for a few years when one day I noticed that in many of the articles and essays I’d written, food was part of the story. I began to deliberately seek out such stories, especially those in which I could reveal what was meaningful to the people I profiled. I wanted to capture the sense of the unexpected, too; the small moments as well as the milestones made even more memorable when food engages the senses. For inspiration, I read M.F. K. Fisher and Julia Child, Beard and Brilliat-Savarin, but my favorite was Laurie Colwin, a self-professed “home cook” whose kitchen exploits were those of a modern-day woman, not a chef or a scholar.
I conceptualized Hungry for Home partly in tribute to my adopted Carolina home, and to the men and women who have taught us that while food is universal, it’s also deeply personal. The book is more than a sampler of recipes and stories. To me, it represents something of our shared history, dreams and memories, and I hope it tempts you to partake often of that most delicious dish of all: the abundance of life’s possibilities. |
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