Part historical discussion, part food and recipe blog, part literary fangirl-ing, Paper and Salt attempts to recreate and reinterpret the dishes that iconic authors discuss in their letters, diaries, essays, and fiction.
Nicole is a voracious consumer of both food and literature. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she currently cooks in a very small kitchen in New York City, and currently reads almost everywhere.
Email: nicolevil at gmail
Great concept. Keep it up. Enjoying your writing.
Thank you! Glad you’re enjoying it so far.
I love this.
For my creative writing thesis in 96, I wrote “The American Literature Cookbook.” Some recipes, if I can recall …
-Walt Whitman, “Leaves Of Lemon Grass Chicken”
-Ben Franklin, “Thanksgiving Eagle Surprise”
-Cotton Mather, “Meatloaf In The Hands Of An Angry God”
-Herman Melville, “Bartelby’s Burned Boston Butt”
Corny, sure, but I got an A. Looking forward to more recipes.
What a great idea – and way more fun than 99% of theses out there. “Thanksgiving Eagle Surprise” definitely makes one curious …
I love it! Great idea and delightful writing.
Thank you! So glad you’re enjoying it.
What a fabulous idea. Love it, especially as a UK based Americana nut. Will most definitely share this.
Thank you so much for sharing! There will be an inevitable Dickens 200 post on the UK side of things, but I admit it is quite US-centric … at least for now. Hope you enjoy =)
Also, I noticed you wrote about Old Bay – it’s a bit of an addiction for me, and if you haven’t sprinkled it over popcorn rather than butter, try it ASAP!
Love this!
cool concept, great writing! as a librarian and foodie, right up my alley. sharing it on fb…
Thank you! I’m always excited to hear from librarians, as a dedicated patron (and former clerk, years ago …). Made my day!
Fantastic site. I baked 18th century biscuits last year for a walking tour promoting one of my books. Taught me more than a week in the library. Well, to be fair my boyfriend made them, and I made notes and did a lot of tasting!
It’s amazing how transporting it can be, isn’t it? I’m looking at some 1850s-era recipes now and I’m gaining a whole new understanding of that feast scene in A Christmas Carol. How were the biscuits?
Very good! Flavoured with rose-water and coriander. I wrote a post about it on a blog I do with a group of other historical fiction writers here: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2011/09/have-biscuit-by-imogen-robertson.html Amazing how much engaging with the practical can tell you. I want a Dickensian feast now.
I love this – thanks for sharing! I’m always nervous about baking with rosewater, but now I want to try it. Especially since many of these recipes have very little (or none) of the salt we’re used to, having those strong flavors helps mitigate that.
Hi,
I enjoyed your site so much that I posted it on my blog over on the Boston Globe’s website, Boston.com. Here’s the link:
http://boston.com/community/blogs/creative_type/2012/02/cooking_by_the_book_letter_dia.html
I also tweeted it, too.
Great project!
Delia
Thank you so much – and I love that photo of Hemingway’s kitchen (I have a very similar oven …). It makes me want to track down more. New blog idea!
Great idea, looking forward to more…
I love everything about this blog, I wrote about you in my column “food daily” on http://www.lifo.gr – but I’m afraid it’s in greek…
How cool! Thanks so much for passing on the link.
it’s here
http://www.lifo.gr/team/fooddaily/28996
If you’re taking requests, there’s also Agatha Christie and her love for Devonshire cream!
Thank you – and that’s a wonderful idea! Filing it away for future reference …
I really love the concept of this blog. I’m tweeting it! I’ll try to do some research to find out what Irish playwright J.M. Synge’s favorite food would have been. I’ve been into baking Irish soda bread ever since returning from the Aran Islands this summer. How are you going about your research? Seems like it would be quite the task! Best of luck and keep ‘em coming! -Emily
So far, I’ve been focusing on published letters, essays, and diaries that mention food. Most of them do, at some point, although it’s rarer to find full recipes – but you can get a sense of the dish and try to recreate it that way. There are also a surprising number of recipes in library collections of private papers – things that people accumulated over the years of cooking, and that got preserved with everything else (luckily enough!).
I absolutely love this. SO happy to have found you!
Hello,
I couldn’t find an e-mail adress to contact you.
Can you please contact me from this adress?
I’m the editor of a poetry site. I’d like to recount your blog on our site and our social media pages. Thank you.
will be bookmarking your site immediately! I love to read, I love to cook, I love to eat. I love to read books about food. Tackling food as inspired by books and authors is a terrific concept for a blog and I’m excited to have found you. Will be back often!
I am intrigued.
Excellent combination, the taste of reading, reading the taste …
I loved the concept and the work you’ve done to research all the information. You should do a combination cookbook/short biography/ with photos, copies of letters etc. I would be first in line to get a copy. I loved the idea of making and eating the same food as the literary heroes of my life! Cudos!
Thanks so much! I think an “edible biography” would be really fun. And you’d have a built-in menu for book clubs!
Adore your blog. Literature and cooking are my two non-people loves. Recently I made my students Emily Dickinson’s coconut cake, and they really liked it. Have you tried it?
http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/emily-dickinson-sweet-genius/
Funny you should mention the coconut cake – it’s one of the first things that got me thinking about starting this blog! In my experiments with it, I found it to be a little too dry and dense for me. I hadn’t read that part about dipping in the sherry, though. Makes a lot of sense! Do you have any photos of your cake?
What a great concept for a blog, thank you. Would you consider setting up a feed (RSS or Atom) for it? I’ve gotten so used to reading everything through my feed reader that I’m afraid I would forget to check for new posts otherwise (curse my Web2.0 attention span!).
Thanks, Michelle! I believe if you plug in “http://www.paperandsalt.org/feed” into your RSS reader, it should start updating with new posts. But let me know if that doesn’t work and I’ll investigate!
Totally works! Thank you
wow
What a pleasure! Love your posts!
Thank you – hope you enjoy!
Marvelous!
Hi Nicole, Great blog, really enjoyed reading through your posts. I now intend to eat like a famous writer every lunch and dinner time for the rest of the month.
My day job is community coordinator for the Guardian.co.uk/culture and I think our books site readers would enjoy your blog. Do drop me an email or tweet (@Hannah_Freeman) if you’d like to discuss. Thanks!
So glad to have stumbled upon your blog. Love the concept and your posts!
Thank you so much! I am drooling over your latest post – leeks are one of my favorite things, and you make them look lovely.
Hi! I came across your blog via CRAFT and I feel compelled to visit your tasty place. I’m so happy to see fellow bloggers that share the same passions for literature and food as I do. Lovely!
So glad you found the blog, and happy to meet another reader/eater!
I love the premise of your blog…great concept in combining literature and food (a nice combination to enjoy simultaneously). It will be interesting to learn through your blog what dishes inspire certain writers — I like to discover different things about writers — other than just their writing. For example, I learned recently that Nabakov was also a curator of butterflies.
Thanks, Frances! I love that fact about Nabokov, too – you might be interested in this neat chart with more day jobs of famous authors (Faulkner was a postmaster!). http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1g8RCb/flavorwire.com/78351/awesome-chart-famous-authors-day-jobs
Many thanks! I’m really enjoying this link!
What a thoughtful blog. Delightful. Thanks and good luck for the future.
Thank you so much for stopping by!
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Hooo boy. Where to start. Let’s just that I’m here to stay for a while. I finished reading all your posts…yes, all. From the start. And I’m loving it here! Looking forward to more.
Thank you, and likewise! Mango and chocolate cupcakes – why haven’t I done that before? And here I have some mango and chocolate just sitting in my kitchen. Can’t wait to make them!
Nicole, I’ve nominated you for the Kreativ Blogger award. Your posts are a delight! I love the thoughtful detail!
Such a delicious idea this blog of yours .. read about it in The Guardian newspaper 18/2/12 Review section written by Lindesay Irvine. You’re on the same page as a piece on Michael Ondaatje … wow! I’ve added a link to your blog here http://www.vegboxmonologues.co.uk … my last entry … picnicking in Jane Austen’s brother’s kitchen
Oh, how cool! Thanks for letting me know, and for the link. You version of a Scotch Egg looks delicious. I’ve been looking up some recipes for Jane as well. Will let you know how they turn out!
i love your site, great idea!
Have you seen Yummy-books? It’s been around since 2010. Your site is very similar to it.
Saw the Agatha Christie headline on the Bon Appetit website and followed your link in the article, interesting blog, thanks!
Thanks so much for reading, Suzanne! Hope you’ll stop by again
Love to read, love to eat, love to eat while reading, so I love this site! My favorite novelist, Iris Murdoch, famously lost a pork pie in her incredibly cluttered kitchen; she never found it. So Iris’s pork pie would be a welcome recipe. Thanks!
Thanks for reading, Deborah! That’s hilarious – it makes me feel much better about the state of my own kitchen. I haven’t found an errant pork pie in it yet – but now I will have to make one!
Hi! My name is Sue, and I’m from SlimKicker, a fitness/diet app and online website. I found your blog a few days ago and it captured my interest!
I’m contacting you b/c we’re about to release a fitness tracker (similar to FitBit) early next year, and are looking for bloggers who would be interested in getting 1 for free to review when it is out (negative or positive).
Would you be interested in doing this? You can email me at: sue (at) slimkicker (com) with ‘Review’ in the email heading if you are.
In case you don’t know, our online website SlimKicker basically turns your fitness/diet goals into a fun level-up game. The tracker will work in conjunction the website, and allow people to track calories burned and number of steps they walk automatically. The more they exercise, the more points they rack up! That’s basically how it will work.
Anyway, hope to hear back either way…
- Sue
P.S. You can choose not to display this comment as this is more of a private comment
Read a blurb about your blog in today’s Sacramento Bee and decided to check it out on the chance that you are the one and same Nicole who was my student at La Entrada in 1996-97. I am pretty sure it is you! I love the posts that I have read so far.
Oh my gosh – hi! Sending you a note now!
I am so pleased you wrote about Virginia Woolf. I am “sharing” it on my blog, with information about your blog. I am a writer who has taught courses on literature and food, and I am a fan of both, as you are! Thank you!
I was very impressed through the depth of knowledge you chose to share listed here.
Thanks for taking the time to write down such an insightful
and educational piece
What a lovely concept for a blog..So happy I stumbled upon this via the exPress-o blog…keep it up! I look forward to following
Awesome idea. Love it! So glad I found you.
cheers* sabh