“It was my mother and I didn’t want to betray her, so I had to try to find a really fine line with putting something that was truthful and that actually conveyed what happened to us. I had to protect her reputation. But I also wanted to have enough truth and authenticity in it. It was very difficult to straddle those two opposing things.”
But Barbara Johnson’s great gift to her daughter was this book, agreeing to be part of it, knowing the risks of travelling with a writer, inadvertently being the catalyst for this writing from the heart. In the book Johnson writes, “if I had known that those weeks and months were to be my mother’s final days, I would have kept holding her hand and never left her side once”.
By de-emphasizing the rigidity of the recipe and making the experience of cooking more subjective — more welcoming of the variation that can exist in any given fridge and the agency of every cook — these cookbooks are forced to teach, and in the process to take on that role of the frugal caretaker. They are guides to developing instinct, and with instinct comes the ability to see a use for even the most idiosyncratic ingredients. There is no point in wasting, because something good can come out of everything.
the world is ready for new deities
the ancient ones are struggling, stumbling
around at 3am, looking for the lavatory
humanity tangled in their feet