Feasts Past Ann Hood guides us through “life, love, and food” in her new collection of essays, Kitchen Yarns. By olivia gunn kotsishevskaya Remembrance of w i n t e r g u i d e 2 0 1 9 4 3 HUNGRY EYE beowulf sheehan baskets they’d made themselves overflowing with eggplants, tomatoes, fruits. So we had this building called the shack, and I just have so many memories. There was a big kitch- en table—I actually have that table now— chairs, and a couch. And I used to lie on that couch on a hot summer day and just watch my grandmother and great-grandmoth- er roll out pasta, cut watermelon, cook corn, make sauces. We’d all eat in there because it was cooler than the house. “Then, you know, progress happened. My great-grandmother died, we rear- ranged the yard, and the shack was knocked down. From then on, all our family meals were cooked in a tiny kitchen—no counter. Somehow, as many as forty people would be fed inside that kitchen on Sundays and on holidays. My grandmother was the ma- triarch of the family after my great-grand- mother died. She was around four foot elev- en. Bright red hair—not dyed. It just nev- er turned gray. Curly hair. She’d stand in I ’ve been happily reading the news- paper,” Ann Hood says during my phone call that’s interrupted her morning routine. “Well.” She stops. “Not happily, because the news is never good.” She’s got a voice like Bacall (but natural, not honed) and a sweet, warming humor. Full disclosure: As a home kitchen dweller and reader, I’m smitten. “I’d almost call it an accidental book,” Hood says of her newest, Kitchen Yarns. She’s written numerous books and essays through- out her career, which kicked off with her first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, published in 1987 when she was still working as a flight attendant for TWA. “It wasn’t until someone pointed out to me, ‘Do you know you use food a lot in many of your essays?’” that her new project sparked. “It wasn’t really intentional. I just believe food is such a portal into bigger emo- tions, that when you’re trying to write about grief, or disappointment, or even something joyful, it’s easy to land on a happy food or a sad food memory as a way to explore a larg- er theme.” And the memories overflow in Kitchen Yarns. Hood guides us from her childhood home’s tiny kitchen filled with the aromas of red sauces, fresh vegetables, and herbs to the streets of Rome, where she fell madly in love—with spaghetti carbonara. “I’m from an Italian-American family. We moved into the house where my fam- ily lived [since] 1887. When I was a kid, we used to have a building we called ‘the shack.’ It was just one big room: screened windows, a big six-burner stove, a double sink, and a table. It was in West Warwick, [Rhode Is- land], a small mill town, all immigrant fami- lies. There was a big community garden ev- eryone in the neighborhood shared. It was very common for me when I was young to see women coming from that garden with there, and out of that kitchen would come our lasagnas at Christmas, the seven fish- es for Christmas Eve. After she died, it was my mom in there. My mom passed away in February, and I’m getting ready to sell the house. It’s a very emotional time for this book to come out. We’ve had it since 1887. How many years is that?” The essays included in the collection were written over the last 10 years, a decade that’s presented Hood with plenty of mate- rial on top of an already colorful life. After winning the Best American Food Writing Award for her essay “Tomato Pie,” the last essay in Kitchen Yarns, Hood’s editor told her to look through more of her work. “I did that and realized that, yes, I did have a lot but not very many that were representing my present life—I’d gone through some big life changes. So from that luncheon to last year, about two more years, I wrote around three or four new essays that dealt with life chang- es like my son going off to college, getting a divorce, moving out of my home I’d been in for 25 years, and then a happy ending—get- ting remarried.” Hood doesn’t sensationalize the moments you might expect her to. She maintains a stunning candor in her writing. In “My Fa- ther’s Pantry,” she tells of her father’s bat- tle with lung cancer and how a simple box of Shake ’n Bake still offers a dose of reas- surance. In “Allure,” she writes of a time in her life when she was “living the exact life I should be living,” without keeping from us the monumental losses she’s suffered: her brother’s sudden death at 30 in a home acci- dent, the death of her five-year-old daughter, Grace—she couldn’t write for two years after Grace’s death. Hood never shies away from the good, the bad, or the ugly matters of life. Not to mention the recipes. “But there was a brief time when I felt solid, rooted, happy, right…