Content Tagged ‘food’

It is holiday feast season so I thought I would rummage through Ecotone’s Sustenance Issue to get some ideas for avoiding that same dried-out poultry and canned cranberry sauce. The bounty therein was plentiful, and I couldn’t stop with the traditional five-item list. So give your Aunt Henrietta an extra glass of white zinfandel and let your tastebuds celebrate alongside you in this collection of fantastic recipes.

Appetizer:

1. Reading Camille T. Dungy’s essay “Differentiation” I found myself wandering the snowy planes of an Alaskan town discovering a food culture I had no knowledge of. Since I am not in the habit of catching and processing my seafood by hand, I decided on the next-best thing: to start our feast with a salmon fish cake courtesy of BBCGoodFood.com. I’m not suggesting that you go crazy and make your own mayonnaise tarter sauce but I am alsohttp://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/braised-mustard-greens-recipe not not suggesting that.

Main Course:

2. It is a challenge to read Randall Kenan’s essay “Greens: A Mess of Memories About Taste” and not imagine the tangy savory flavor of mustard greens filling you up and making you feel at home. You don’t have to be a Southerner to appreciate the mastery of imagery and sensuous textures Kenan weaves into his essay. Being a firm believer in the power of bacon to make anything better, I found a recipe, courtesy of Rachel Ray, that combined the two. If Aunt Henrietta is huffing and puffing about not having those mashed potatoes, just give her a taste of these greens and ask her, “Ain’t it good? Ain’t it good?”

3. I am particularly excited about this next one. Sarah Becan’s comic “Les Curds du Mal” is both savory and enraging. After spending time learning about the politics of importing French cheese, you’ll want to jet off to Paris directly for a bit of Brie. Although we now know that our imported cheese is subpar, we’ll take what we can get and, after finding this recipe, courtesy of Saveur, we want it. And this recipe for a Tartiflette might make it taste even better.

4. Many of us here at Ecotone and Lookout have holiday histories that are steeped in tradition. But after reading “Breaking the Jemima Code: The Legacy of African American Cookbooks,” an excerpt from the book The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cooks, we’ve learned that many of our tried-and-true traditions have origins we’re unaware of. In the spirit of acknowledging that Toni Tipton-Martin gives us, let’s get rid of that salty swine and savor something new. I’m sure by this point Aunt Henrietta is on board and ready for whatever the table delivers—just make sure no one starts talking politics! Here’s a recipe for Herb Roasted Leg of Lamb offered up by Toni Tipton-Martin herself via the JemimaCode.com

Dessert:

5. The Sustenance Issue of Ecotone is a trip not only through physical sustenance, but also the emotional and historical kind. Here at Ecotone we celebrate the knowledge and healing the comes through the sharing of stories. This next recipe is inspired by Matthew Gavin Frank’s essay “Spoon Bread.” Frank’s candid examination of his own family and cultural history in Nebraska is awe inspiring. And mouth watering. This recipe for spoon bread is courtesy of Martha Stewart.

6. Emily Hillard’s essay “Heavenly Work: The Fleeting Legacy of the Shakers” asks us to imagine how a community interacts with its history. I couldn’t imagine a sweeter way to end a foray into new traditions. So, we perused Emily’s blog, Nothing in The House, and found a recipe for Red Wine-Poached Seckel Pear Tarlets that will have Aunt Henrietta dreaming about next year (and after all that white zinfindel we doubt she’ll turn down anything poached in red wine). If this particular tartlet is not your style, check out Emily’s blog for a plethora of options.

From all of us here at Ecotone and Lookout, we wish you a season filled with good sustenance of all kinds: good friends, fiesty family (wink wink, Aunt Henrietta), tasty food, and robust literature.

–Reneé LaBonté, Lookout intern

In House Guest, we invite Ecotone and Lookout authors and cover artists, as well as editors from peer presses and magazines, to tell us what they’re working on, to discuss themes in their writing or unique publishing challenges, to answer the burning questions they always hoped a reader would ask.

The following excerpt is from from the West Virginia essay in Matthew Gavin Frank’s book, The Mad Feast, out this week from W.W. Norton, which is a collection of fifty essays, one for each of the U.S. states. Each essay begins with a foodstuff typical of said state and then digresses from there, engaging various shadowy back alleys of regional history—sometimes beautiful, sometimes atrocious—in an attempt to uncover the answers as to why we eat what we eat, where we eat. Matt’s essay, “Spoon Bread,” about Nebraska, appears in Ecotone’s Sustenance Issue.

Though rat meat often bears traces of pesticides, heavy metals, and human excrement, and though most residents of West Virginia (save, perhaps, for the town of Marlinton—famous for the annual autumnal Road-Kill Cook-Off featuring such local delicacies as pothole possum stew, rat gumbo, and the awesomely named Peter Caught-on-Tail Gate Roll) long to shuck the backwoods “barefoot and pregnant” stereotype (after all, we have the lowest birthrate in the U.S.), my uncle empties the traps into a stockpot as his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather did before him, adds the water, the tomato, the salt and pepper, and the hot red peppers (his personal touch). Uncle cracks his knuckles, says something about infertility, about eighty-hour underground work weeks, about coal as black lipstick, the sort he’d smear Aunt’s face with when she was alive and well and simmering anything but rodent on the range.

According to Calvin W. Schwabe’s book Unmentionable Cuisine, step one of Rat Stew: “Skin and eviscerate the rat and split it lengthwise.” Uncle dips his face into the stockpot’s steam and inhales. He calls you to the stove, puts his arm around you. You watch the little nuggets of sour meat surface and dive down, surface and dive down. You think of the pride of Debbie “The Rat Lady” Ducommun—a Californian, no less—as she said, “I do as many necropsies of rats as I can, and between 1998 and 2003 I took measurements of the hearts of 150 rats.” You take comfort in the suspicion that you are not nearly as obsessed.

You know this: that in Bordeaux, vintners trap rats that inhabit the wine cellars and subsist on the fermenting grape juice. The vintners skin and eviscerate the rodents, then brush their bodies with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots, and grill them over a fire of broken wine barrels. Apparently, the resulting meat bears the flavors of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and petit verdot grapes, the latter of which is known in French wine circles as the “little stiffener.”

You try not to think little when you think of fertility, and worry about the heritability of Uncle’s mistakes, anatomical and otherwise. You watch little heart tumble over little rib and little liver. You try to pick out the tenderloin, the neck meat. The feet. The hands. You try not to think of the appendages that anchor us into the mine shafts that only want to constrict, the earth filling itself back in, becoming whole again. This, we call collapse. You tell yourself each night in bed that those are canaries screaming into some implacable, original depth, and not the rats in the kitchen. You try not to think of stiffening bodies, of rigor mortis, of the 2010 mine explosion in Montcoal after which not a single survivor was found. The names of the dead were not released.

After a long hiatus, we’re finally back with our weekly Lit News Roundup.

Hearty congratulations are in order for several Ecotone contributors:

Shawn Vestal recently won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for his story collection, Godforsaken Idaho, and we couldn’t be prouder that two of the stories in the book, “Winter Elders” and “Opposition In All Things,” first appeared in the pages of Ecotone. “Winter Elders” also has a home in our best of Ecotone fiction anthology, Astoria to Zion.

And Ecotone 16 contributor Molly Antopol’s stunning story collection, The UnAmericans, made the 2014 longlist for the National Book Award in Fiction. You can read “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” in full on the Ecotone website.