The Situation of Stuck in the Shoulder with You

Dear Tamar:

I live in beautiful Northern California. We are blessed with an extraordinary bounty of vegetables and fruit year-round. However, we have just entered a particularly challenging “shoulder season” for fruit—straddling a stretch of exquisite citrus, but not yet approaching stone fruit season. We are avid farmers market shoppers, and I’m wondering if there is an approach—philosophical or tactical—that could bring a zestier outlook on this otherwise lean fruit scene.

-Stuck in the Shoulder with You

Dear Stuck in the Shoulder with You,

I don’t think I’ve ever answered a “top five cookbooks” question without including Edna Lewis’s 1976 Taste of Country Cooking. If I have, it was of fear of being repetitive or boring—I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t count it among their favorites. A 50th anniversary edition came out this year, marking a half century of relevance.

Taste of Country Cooking is a perfect book, entirely sui generis. It’s in its own category, making its quirks and conversational tone, its vivid poetry of the commonplace, its positioning of memory at the heart of cooking—which a reader can like or decline to like—the essence of its perfection. Taste of Country Cooking is a song sung only once. I love it.

How could one not?

“I will never forget spring mornings in Virginia…Spring would bring our first and just about only fish—shad. It would always be served for breakfast, soaked in salt water for an hour or so, rolled in seasoned cornmeal, and fried carefully in home-rendered lard with a slice of smoked shoulder for added flavor…There were the unforgettable English peas, first-of-the-season garden crop cooked and served in heavy cream along with sautéed first-of-the-season chicken. As the new calves came, we would have an abundance of milk and butter, as well as buttermilk, rich with flecks of butter. Rich milk was used in the making of gravies, blanc mange, custards, creamed minced ham, buttermilk biscutes, and batter breads, as well as sour-milk pancakes."

I’ve tried in the past to articulate what makes Lewis’s descriptions so moving, so alive, so directly addressed to human appetite. I’ve mostly used the crutch of calling her prose magical or incantatory. (To any young writers out there: Be not deluded. These are crutches, no matter how many senior writers use them.)

Your letter asking about how to deal with the “shoulder season” finally gave me language I’ve feebly sought for years. Edna Lewis’s lush writing is a repeated illustration of seeing the world as it is—dappled in dark and light, in death and birth, in lack and abundance, fading and brightening—and describing only the latter states, from a perspective of familiarity with the former.

If you were to return, sentence by sentence, to the extract above, you’d see that what reads as a celebration of bounty is a trick of celebrating silver linings. (I’m mixing metaphors. Mea culpa. This is why I don’t salute the end of gatekeeping editors.)

I’ll do a hasty job of showing what I mean. Here is a second description, just as accurate, of the ecosystem Lewis describes.

Winter was lean in Virginia…We almost never ate fish, and if we did, never more than a single variety, once a year. There wasn’t good refrigeration, so we had to eat it as soon as possible after catching it—which we had to do ourselves. There was only one way of cooking the fish—which was similar to how we cooked everything, using all of a pig and a good deal of corn…The situation with vegetables was similar: no fresh vegetables for months at a time, which meant enduring the same flavors—canned corn and canned beans and canned succotash (a combination of the two!)—at every meal. Our dairy came from our own farm, and winter was a time of lean and little milk (no fresh grass for cows to eat) as well, limiting any foods that relied on it. No rich gravy, no custards or biscuits. We didn’t even have pancakes.

It’s a ham-fisted attempt, made to prove a point: (At least!) two things make Taste of Country Cooking’s prose so evocative. 1) Edna Lewis’s familiarity with lack and 2) Edna Lewis’s choice to recount that lack exclusively in terms of the capacity for delight it afforded her.

Yes, of course this is an elliptical paraphrasing of the adage about hunger being the best seasoning—alternately attributed to Socrates, Cervantes, Benjamin Franklin, and a Brazilian old wife. I still think it’s a useful one.

Dear cook, trying to learn—in whatever small way I can—the wisdom of Edna Lewis, I haven’t explicitly stated my advice, but left it to be inferred. That’s not entirely appropriate for an advice column though. Here is how I recommend you deal with this “shoulder season:” Stay in it. Seek no escape. Read and re-read the glimmering truth in Edna Lewis’s appreciation of the first shad and the first spring peas, which rely entirely on their long absence. Sit without fruit for days or weeks. Open the last of last summer’s cherry jam. Watch the blossoms fall from cherry trees and the small fruits begin to swell. When you taste the season’s first cherry, then plum, then apricot, let all the time before it open your mind and heart to its miracle. Sit down and describe it. Be stuck until you unstick.