{"id":15656,"date":"2019-01-02T14:13:35","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T19:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=15656"},"modified":"2020-07-02T10:19:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-02T14:19:23","slug":"remembrance-of-feasts-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/remembrance-of-feasts-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembrance of Feasts Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Winterguide 2019 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Ann Hood guides us through \u201clife, love, and food\u201d in her new collection of essays, Kitchen Yarns<\/em>.<\/span><\/h3>\n

By Olivia Gunn Kotsishevskaya<\/span><\/p>\n

\"WG19-Ann-Hood\"\u201cI<\/span>\u2019ve been happily reading the newspaper,\u201d Ann Hood says during my phone call that\u2019s interrupted her morning routine. \u201cWell.\u201d She stops. \u201cNot happily, because the news is never good.\u201d She\u2019s got a voice like Bacall (but natural, not honed) and a sweet, warming humor. Full disclosure: As a home kitchen dweller and reader, I\u2019m smitten. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d almost call it an accidental book,\u201d Hood says of her newest, Kitchen Yarns<\/em>. She\u2019s written numerous books and essays throughout her career, which kicked off with her first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine<\/em>, published in 1987 when she was still working as a flight attendant for TWA. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until someone pointed out to me, \u2018Do you know you use food a lot in many of your essays?\u2019\u201d that her new project sparked. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t really intentional. I just believe food is such a portal into bigger emotions, that when you\u2019re trying to write about grief, or disappointment, or even something joyful, it\u2019s easy to land on a happy food or a sad food memory as a way to explore a larger theme.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

And the memories overflow in Kitchen Yarns<\/em>. Hood guides us from her childhood home\u2019s tiny kitchen filled with the aromas of red sauces, fresh vegetables, and herbs to the streets of Rome, where she fell madly in love\u2014with spaghetti carbonara.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m from an Italian-American family. We moved into the house where my family lived [since] 1887. When I was a kid, we used to have a building we called \u2018the shack.\u2019 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 Island], a small mill town, all immigrant families. There was a big community garden everyone in the neighborhood shared. It was very common for me when I was young to see women coming from that garden with baskets they\u2019d 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 kitchen table\u2014I actually have that table now\u2014chairs, and a couch. And I used to lie on that couch on a hot summer day and just watch my grandmother and great-grandmother roll out pasta, cut watermelon, cook corn, make sauces. We\u2019d all eat in there because it was cooler than the house. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThen, you know, progress happened. My great-grandmother died, we rearranged the yard, and the shack was knocked down. From then on, all our family meals were cooked in a tiny kitchen\u2014no counter. Somehow, as many as forty people would be fed inside that kitchen on Sundays and on holidays. My grandmother was the matriarch of the family after my great-grandmother died. She was around four foot eleven. Bright red hair\u2014not dyed. It just never turned gray. Curly hair. She\u2019d stand in there, and out of that kitchen would come our lasagnas at Christmas, the seven fishes for Christmas Eve. After she died, it was my mom in there. My mom passed away in February, and I\u2019m getting ready to sell the house. It\u2019s a very emotional time for this book to come out. We\u2019ve had it since 1887. How many years is that?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The essays included in the collection were written over the last 10 years, a decade that\u2019s presented Hood with plenty of material on top of an already colorful life. After winning the Best American Food Writing Award for her essay \u201cTomato Pie,\u201d the last essay in Kitchen Yarns<\/em>, Hood\u2019s editor told her to look through more of her work. \u201cI did that and realized that, yes, I did have a lot but not very many that were representing my present life\u2014I\u2019d 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 changes like my son going off to college, getting a divorce, moving out of my home I\u2019d been in for 25 years, and then a happy ending\u2014getting remarried.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hood doesn\u2019t sensationalize the moments you might expect her to. She maintains a stunning candor in her writing. In \u201cMy Father\u2019s Pantry,\u201d she tells of her father\u2019s battle with lung cancer and how a simple box of Shake \u2019n Bake still offers a dose of reassurance. In \u201cAllure,\u201d she writes of a time in her life when she was \u201cliving the exact life I should be living,\u201d without keeping from us the monumental losses she\u2019s suffered: her brother\u2019s sudden death at 30 in a home accident, the death of her five-year-old daughter, Grace\u2014she couldn\u2019t write for two years after Grace\u2019s death. Hood never shies away from the good, the bad, or the ugly matters of life. Not to mention the recipes. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut there was a brief time when I felt solid, rooted, happy, right\u2026<\/span><\/h6>\n
My friends lived in my neighborhood, in historic houses like mine. There were filmmakers and artists and dancers and writers, and on weekend nights we drank wine and ate expensive cheese, fed our kids quesadillas and put on a video for them to watch while we ate coq au vin<\/em> or mustard chicken. On one of these nights someone proposed a progressive dinner: appetizers at one house, main course at another, dessert at a third\u2026<\/span><\/h6>\n
Again, I can\u2019t remember what we ate, just the memory of one woman taking all the kids to her house across the street to watch a video and the stars hanging heavy over us that summer night\u2026 So Mary\u2014she was in charge of dessert\u2014went home and came back with two beautiful peach pies. These were not typical peach pies. They had a shortbread crust and a moist filling and the peaches were ripe and perfect, as only peaches can be at a certain time in summer. In his poem \u201cFrom Blossoms,\u201d Li-Young Lee writes about the pleasure of eating \u201cnot only the sugar, but the days.\u201d \u2014From Kitchen Yarns<\/em><\/span><\/h6>\n

\u201cFood ultimately brings comfort\u2014whereas some songs that come on, you burst into tears, or if you see a picture or catch a certain scent. I lost my daughter Grace when she was five in 2002. She died in April. Her sixth birthday would\u2019ve been in September. She was only five, so she didn\u2019t have a very sophisticated palate. But her favorite meal was just pasta, butter, and Parmesan cheese. And she loved cucumbers. So a dream dinner was that and sliced cucumbers. I\u2019ve eaten that on her birthday every day since 2002 when she died. It just still connects me to her. There are some things I still haven\u2019t been able to do even though it\u2019s been 16 years. But eating her favorite meal and remembering cooking it for her, sitting next to her while she ate it, the funny way she said \u2018noodles.\u2019 That dinner, simple as it is, still brings me comfort.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/span>nd that bite that whisks her to treasured days like Proust\u2019s madeleines in Remembrance of Things Past<\/em>? \u201cScallion pancakes and fried dumplings at Hua Yuan, my favorite Chinese restaurant on 42 East Broadway in Manhattan, always bring me back to China, where streets are lined with woks filled with bubbling oil to fry these up. That was 2005, when we went to adopt my daughter, Annabelle.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ann Hood guides us through \u201clife, love, and food.\u201d
\nBy Olivia Gunn Kotsishevskaya<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[233],"class_list":["post-15656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-winterguide-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15656"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18953,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15656\/revisions\/18953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}