10 Life Lessons from Writers & Chefs (and a Giveaway)

On January 12, 2014 By paperandsaltIn General77 Comments

“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.” —Anaïs Nin

I never was much for resolutions; the self-analysis and self-critique we go through every day seemed like enough to keep me busy for a lifetime. Two years ago, though, I made my first serious attempt at a larger, grander goal: starting this blog. It’s been a joy to write and research ever since, and has introduced me to people around the world who love reading and eating too (often at the same time; maybe even while reading this post).

Needless to say, I’ve become a fan of resolutions, and who better to borrow from than famous writers and chefs themselves? So here are 10 pearls of wisdom from my literary and culinary idols that I’m trying to adopt in 2014. See if you can guess who originally wrote them—the answers are below.

Get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)
Plan ahead. Plan carefully and shop in advance for what you need. Planning saves money, as well as time and steps.
When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.
Try never get drunk outside yr own house [sic]
Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power.
Try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!
Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.
If time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.

Did you guess who said it?: 1) Susan Sontag, 2) James Beard, 3) Ernest Hemingway, 4) Jack Kerouac, 5) John Steinbeck, 6) Charles Dickens, 7) Julia Child, 8) Henry Miller, 9) Hunter S. Thompson, 10) M.F.K. Fisher

To jump-start that conviviality, I’m celebrating Paper & Salt’s birthday with our annual giveaway: a Cuisinart Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven (5 quart, in white).

Trust me, you will want it. For one thing, it’s the perfect vessel for this (which, given the cold, would be a good dinner right about now, no?).

There are ways to enter the giveaway (and yes, you can enter twice):

1) Comment on this post
2) Sign up for the Paper & Salt newsletter (everyone already on the list will be automatically entered to win!)

Giveaway closes on Monday, January 20. The winner will be announced in the next post and in the January newsletter. Apologies to those abroad, but only U.S. residents are eligible to win.

Good luck! Stay tuned for our regularly scheduled programming next week; or, in the immortal words of Mark Twain, “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

Virginia Woolf: Cottage Loaf

On January 25, 2013September 2, 2013 By paperandsaltIn 20th century, Breads and Pastries42 Comments

Every time I get discouraged by writing, I engage in a bit of schadenfreude, and soothe myself with the frustrations of others. “I write two pages of arrant nonsense after straining … Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading.” That’s Virginia Woolf while writing The Waves, but I’m pretty sure I said the same thing, more or less, while writing this post.

This constant self-effacement is a theme that runs through Woolf’s letters. Her talents didn’t really lie in the library, she would tell you. They were in the kitchen. “I have only one passion in life — cooking,” Woolf wrote to her friend (and occasional lover) Vita Sackville-West. “I have just bought a superb oil stove. I can cook anything … I assure you it is better than writing these more than idiotic books.”

Where Woolf hesitated to praise her own writing, she wasn’t nearly so shy about her talent for baking. “Cooked lunch today and made a loaf of really expert bread,” she wrote. Bread was her specialty, particularly a traditionally British double-decker creation: the snowmanesque cottage loaf. Her dedication to the kitchen was unusual for a woman of the upper-middle class. She did, however, draw the line at doing the dishes (“How servants preserve either sanity or sobriety if that is 9/10ths of their lives … God knows”).

In Recollections of Virginia Woolf, Louie Mayer, the Woolfs’ cook, marvels at Virginia’s calm expertise. “She showed me how to make the dough with the right quantities of yeast and flour, and then how to knead it. She returned three or four times during the morning to knead it again. Finally, she made the dough into the shape of a cottage loaf and baked it at just the right temperature.”

It’s Woolf’s birthday today; she would have been 131, although she didn’t make it even half that far, her mental illness wearing her away. But from Woolf’s letters, the time she spends cooking seems to be its own rest cure, clearing her head of everything else but the dough. “My bread bakes well,” she writes in her diary, and it resounds like a soothing mantra. If all else fails, I tell myself, my bread bakes well. My bread bakes well.

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Raymond Chandler: Swordfish Siciliana

On July 23, 2012September 2, 2013 By paperandsaltIn 20th century, Fish1 Comment

What to cook for Raymond Chandler on his birthday? If he’s known for anything vaguely digestible today, it’s Terry Lennox’s gin gimlet recipe from The Big Sleep: “half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.” Sometimes that can be the basis of a whole birthday dinner menu, but it’s usually unintentional (and ill-advised, if my “popcorn and whiskey” birthday was any indication).

But it turns out Chandler had more than a few recipes up his sleeve – maybe even a cookbook’s worth. While working on The Long Goodbye in La Jolla, California, he wrote to editor Dale Warren with another surprising proposal. “Somebody really ought to write a cookbook and put in all the things that the regular cookbooks leave out, the things which, if you’re a beginner, the cookbooks don’t tell you,” he said. “Also, any decent cookbook should have a few special recipes, a touch of the unique. And this I could easily supply.”

Seen through his letters, Chandler becomes the Mark Bittman of La Jolla. He’s minimalist in his approach to food (his recipe for pork chops: “Cook them in their own fat, they bring everything with them that is necessary except salt and pepper.”). But he’s also deeply critical of Americans’ slide into non-cooking, 50 years ahead of the curve. He scorns his neighbor’s dependence on “a deep freeze unit in his garage where he keeps enough food for six months … Most of the other food he eats comes ready-prepared and half-chewed.” If you think that’s harsh, Chandler goes on: “I sometimes wonder what we are here for. Certainly not to use our minds.” It’s a relief he wasn’t around to see the rise of the Hot Pocket.

Chandler would have turned 124 today; I’ll celebrate my own birthday later this week. No popcorn and whiskey for me this time around. We’re older now, and wiser. We use our minds. We plan our menus. And there won’t be anything frozen or ready-made, although there may well be a gimlet or two.

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