Cindy on November 24th, 2008
It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.” â Laurie Colwin
Earlier this month, it was hard to find a cooking magazine that didn’t feature a masterpiece of a roasted turkey perched on a ceramic platter and encircled with a trio of traditional side dishes. While I appreciate the beauty of an expertly presented meal, those magazines never fail to stir conflicting waves of nostalgia and guilty reminders of my culinary incompetence.
To most readers, the cover photos are practically iconic. Representing the ultimate American family meal, they evoke warm-fuzzy images of cheerful grandmothers fussing in the kitchen, close-knit clans pulling their Windsor chairs to the table in unison, and fathers leading everyone in prayer. But hold on. That’s Norman Rockwell’s vision of a holiday, isn’t it? For those who’ve recently lost loved ones — or whose family circle is reconfigured by divorce or distance — it’s another picture entirely.
The holidays are especially hard on women who feel compelled to replicate the festive meals and glamorous parties featured in shelter magazines this season. As one friend put it, even the “easiest” recipes and the “simplest” instructions for decking the halls require a fair amount of preparation — and angst. And by the time we’re ready to serve The Feast, we’re ready to drop from nervous exhaustion.
I truly enjoy hosting casual dinners for intimate groups, and I consider entertaining a labor of love. But the holidays set the bar too high for me. I suspect we’d all enjoy the festivities even more if we could relax and minimize the yuletide fuss. When we gather around the table this week for Thanksgiving, let’s count our blessings and find joy in the unique way we choose to celebrate — with or without the turkey worthy of a magazine shoot.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! – Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on October 26th, 2008
Home is where one starts from.” — T. S. Eliot
The first chilly day of the season is enough to send most people outdoors to prepare the garden for winter, or to the hardware to stock up on snow shovels and rock salt. Not me. I throw myself into domestic overdrive â- inside the house.
Down from the top bookshelves come my soup-and-bread cookbooks. Out of storage come the slower cooker and the Dutch oven. And off to the grocery I go to stock up on peas, beans, cornmeal, barley, and other staples that rarely take up pantry space in the summer.
Making soup from scratch is one of my favorite autumn rituals. By four o’clock, my writing deadlines have been met, and it’s time to sauté vegetables in the kitchen while Oprah chats up her guests. Like cookbook author Molly O’Neil, I find âreassurance in the aroma of baking bread and simmering stews.â Life doesn’t get much cozier than this.
Over the years, I’ve discovered that the domestic arts — cooking, baking, decorating, and home-caring — provide the creative balance I crave after spending hours writing or editing. Until recently, though, I was always a little embarrassed to flaunt my domestic side. That was before I was introduced to the work of Cheryl Mendelson, who describes herself as a working woman with âa secret life.â She adores keeping house.
Mendelson is a lawyer, professor, and author of Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House (Scribner). Weighing in at 884 pages, her hefty guide is the first of its kind to be published by one author in nearly a century. It contains everything you need to know (and some things you don’t) about stocking a pantry, setting a proper table, hemming a skirt, building a fire, choosing a cookbook, and deodorizing pet stains.
âBy the time I reached young adulthood,â she explains in her introduction, âmodern suburbia had little interest in housekeeping and even less respect for it.â
Like many women of my generation, Mendelson threw herself into a career and spent a few years posturing as âanti-domestic.â After work, while poring over her collection of vintage housekeeping manuals, Mendelson began to suspect that men and women of the post-Betty Crocker era could use some basic home economics training. It didn’t take much research to prove her theory.
âOver and over I found myself visiting homes where the predominant feeling was sepulchral, dusty, and deserted, or even hotel-like, as my own had once become,â she recalls. âIt’s housekeeping that makes your home alive and turns it into a small society in its own right.â
Mendelson’s standards are a lot higher than mine. She lists, for example, more than a dozen âcommonâ food pathogens that were never covered in my biology classes. She also insists that the âmost effectiveâ floor-washing is done on hands and knees. Not in my house. But she’s right on target when she claims that the domestic arts deserve a lot more attention and a little respect.
Apparently many homemakers agree, since sales figures for her book have remained healthy since the first edition was published in 1999. This bodes well for other domestic divas who’ve labored in secret for years. And just imagine: If a Harvard Law School grad can revel in housework and publish a best-selling book about it, well, maybe the rest of us can finally come out of the broom closet. — Cindy La Ferle
– Parts of this post were excerpted from Writing Home, my collection of short essays on home, family, and the domestic arts –
Earlier this month, it was hard to find a cooking magazine that didn’t feature a masterpiece of a roasted turkey perched on a ceramic platter and encircled with a trio of traditional side dishes. While I appreciate the beauty of an expertly presented meal, those magazines never fail to stir conflicting waves of nostalgia and guilty reminders of my culinary incompetence.
