How To Cook (and Dress) A Wolf
These are the busiest weeks of the year, these couple before Christmas.
I sort of like it.
On Sunday, A— and I threw a clothing swap at our place. We had a dozen ladies over. She made cinnamon buns and I made tea sandwiches (Pernod-marinated fennel and green apple and minted radish, and lox and cream cheese on tiny pumpernickel bread) and gingerbread from an M.F.K. Fisher recipe. A guest brought hot buttered rum. After snacking, we all dumped our clothing into a sea in the middle of the living room, and had at. I think most everyone found some good loot. I had an awful lot of fun and feel almost Christmas-ready. In addition, I am the proud new owner of a bottle of Pernod.
I’ve been re-reading M.F.K. Fisher’s How To Cook A Wolf this week and last. I adore this book, and I adore Fisher: her specific advice, but even more than that, her wit and tone. Re-reading has given me an opportunity to talk about her work with some friends, and I’ve been writing about her elsewhere. Obviously, Fisher is a food writer, and it’s in that context that people usually talk about her—even though it’s common to point out, as Fisher herself did, that she wasn’t so much a food writer as a writer who happened to write about food. Food was her metaphor, or metonym, for life.
But in re-reading her, I realized how much of her philosophy about food comes down to attitude. Like the song says, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. I think that applies to Fisher big-time. And the way that she did it was with great confidence. I like reading her as a lesson in self-confidence, and in fact, I found her a joy to teach for that reason, when I taught her to my undergrads at Cornell. The scenes from Fisher’s books (mostly The Gastronomcial Me) that I remember most involve confidence and power; they reveal Fisher, at different stages in her development, discovering the power of food, and how she can use and enjoy and direct that power (which often but not always intersects with sexual power). There’s the scene where she watches her uncle order with creativity and authority at a restaurant, and decides she wants to be like him. The episode of the “Hindu eggs” in her childhood kitchen. The wonderful descriptions of herself on shipboard, crossing the Atlantic, and the man who falls in love with her just because she sits and eats alone with composed pleasure. The scene where she doctors up a disgusting airplane meal into something bearable, and feels proud of herself for her resourcefulness.
That, to me, is Fisher’s lesson: that you can eat (or, by extension, do anything) with intentionality, composure, and in the way that most pleases you—and that, within limits, you can do this regardless of how well-off you happen to be. If you get the hang of it, she suggests, other people will see these simple achievements as a remarkable and powerful thing. If you manage not to be blown off course by the whims and expectations of others, you might even make people mad occasionally.
I think that every teenage girl should have to read The Gastronomical Me, for role-model reasons.
So as I was going around this week thinking about M.F.K. and food and attitude, these thoughts began to bleed over into fashion. We were planning the clothing swap, and I’ve been looking up and down Manhattan island for a wool coat, which seemed like a simple thing to find until I started looking. Hundreds of styles of fashion coat and not one of them, yet, is the platonic ideal of classic wool stylishness. So, in my seeming inability to settle for something that isn’t exactly what I want, I keep looking.
But in the meantime, I was thinking about clothes, and I started wondering whether M.F.K.’s wisdom about eating doesn’t apply to fashion as well. To wit: maybe it’s not so much what one wears as the way one feels about wearing it. I can feel great in an outfit one day and dumpy in it another. I can feel that there is nothing to wear one morning, and approach my closet another with a spirit of, I don’t know, fun or playfulness or something, and come up with a combination that makes me feel buoyant all day. So, as nice as new clothes are (and they are, they really are), maybe what we own is less important than the determination to look good.
I don’t know about you, but I shop in obsessive spurts. Thinking about one thing I need gets me to think about other things I need, until suddenly I don’t know how life can even go on without a new pair of sneakers or a set of wearable black high heels. List-making and frantic comparison shopping ensues. And either I buy something, or the need rolls over like a storm—somehow, life does go on, six months pass by, I still don’t have Thing X, and it doesn’t even seem to matter anymore.
Somehow, in the last two weeks, my obsession alighted on sample sales. I think the clothing swap has me reasonably sated (once I find or forget about the perfect wool coat, that is), but before it happened, I spent a few afternoons weaving into and out of anonymous-looking buildings in midtown, up to showrooms like stores with no street-level presence. Hidden stores. This was a new world to me. How do they work? Do norms shop there, or are they just a place to show wares to buyers from other stores usually? Anyhow, these places honeycomb New York, a world inside a world, and that’s interesting. On the rainiest night last week (it poured…for hours and hours), I walked in the wet dark up to the Diane Von Furstenberg sample sale, and scored myself a damn beautiful blue dress for $75.
Attitude might be important, but a beautiful blue dress won’t hurt.
I made it out of the DVF sale just as the lines were becoming ridiculous. When I was there, the atmosphere in the communal dressing rooms was still reasonably sorority-like, women telling each other whether or not they looked hot in that, etc., and shaking their heads together at the drill-seargent-like barking of the dressing room attendants. It felt like some weird fashion version of being in the trenches together. The next night, I met up with Anna and we stopped by a launch party for a book, which was pretty much a non-starter since everyone else in the bright, tiny room it was in seemed to know one another and also be a contributor to the book. So we went around the corner and had dinner at Momofuku instead. One oyster, one order of pork buns, one freaky weird cauliflower side with boquerones (not the best vegetable thing I’ve ever had there) and one serving of twist soft serve later (quince and maple, maple clearly the ass-kicker), we were on our way, just as the noodle-craving crowds were starting to clot in and around the doorway. It was cold outside. Damn cold. And somehow we got to talking about New York City and masochism.
When I’m in a certain mood, I get to wondering whether New Yorkers as a group are masochistic. Whether our relationship with our fair city revolves around the little thrill we get when she treats us so unkind. And the way we swoon when she shows us a little scrap of solicitude! People here are willing to rave about things that people in other places would find normal, or maybe even sort of lame: a withered strip of cement with an only partially-obstructed view to the sky is not, to my knowledge, known as a “garden” anywhere else in the world. New Yorkers’ baseline requirements for elbow room are low, our tolerance for ambient noise and bustle amazingly high. On the other hand, Anna pointed out, maybe New Yorkers are simply tough, and maybe that’s to be lauded. In a country where we’re supposedly fatally addicted to comfort, New Yorkers are always lining up and muscling each other out of the way for the privilege of doing something uncomfortable, endurance-testing, or inconvenient…and then bragging about it.
We weren’t able to settle this line of thinking before we got to the Trader Joe’s wine store, where she dropped me off to stand in a half-hour-long line with my several bottles for the party (I didn’t mind it), and walked on down, herself, to see a rock show in the Village.
So, without too awfully many omissions, that makes a week. See you again before the Christmas!
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