Storybelly Extra: Food, Glorious Food!

Why is there So Much Food in Deborah Wiles' books? :>

I am not a food writer, but I write a lot about food. I am not a foodie, but I scour recipe websites for the food projects I’ve set myself up to conquer (ha) — biscotti, chiffon cake, popovers, caramel, eggnog, pimento cheese, mayo, sauerkraut, meatballs that don’t taste like cardboard rocks. The list goes on.

I surrounded myself with my books so I could pick out passages with food in them, quickly realized there were just too many, and this newsletter is already long enough. I took off my thrifted apron… it says “food” on it… ha.

Weekly, I’m making something food-related, often something new. I missed St. Patrick’s Day completely yesterday, as my day was over-packed with Other Things, including one more birthday; so overpacked (does that word have a hyphen?) that, when I stole a couple of hours from it to “do nothing” and reset (re-set?) I crawled in bed and read a book, which restored me, then I slept the sleep of the dead but not really dead, so today I hope to make the Irish Blackberry Fool (NYT unlocked) that I have all the ingredients for and was so looking forward to yesterday.

I don’t cook to be restored, or for a break. Cooking requires my attention. Richard Osman does not. He understands that he is there to entertain me, with murder and humor and — now that I think about it, having finished We Solve Murders with minutes to spare before Libby reclaimed it — not much food. Hmmm.

This morning, after I finished making my coffee and while the boiled eggs for the week were steaming, I put a whole chicken in the crockpot then floured and sauteed some stew beef from the farmer’s market (YDFM in Decatur) for a beef stew we’ll eat later today. I’ll pick the chicken from the bones and make bone broth, much later today, and we’ll have chicken for many recipes this week.

I took photos of my work, hahahaha.

I am not a photographer, but I photograph a lot of food. And ingredients. And my flour canister. And my mother’s rolling pin. It’s history! Food “situations” loom large in my life. lol. Omg, I did just write that, so come with me, let’s talk about what we write about when we write about food. It’s not murder.

Read any of my books (and many blog and social media posts) and you will encounter food.

Why? Because it is so handy to this writer, and to so many of us. Food is a writer’s tool. It evokes strong emotion from both the writer and the reader. Here are six things that food does for a story. There are more:

Food creates your characters. What do your characters eat? What do they say about what they eat? In Each Little Bird That Sings, Comfort and her Great-great Aunt Florentine live with their family on the floor above their funeral home. You can imagine all the funeral food that comes into that big rambling house and enormous kitchen. Comfort and Aunt Florentine are writing “Fantastic and Fun Funeral Food for Family and Friends.” Really! My brownie recipe is in the book. So is Mrs. Elling’s Chicken and Potato Chip Casserole, and my mother’s sweet iced tea recipe. Each recipe is set-aside on its own page. What kind of characters sit at the window with binoculars to watch people arriving for funerals, and judge their food after, putting only the best into their cookbook?

Food enhances setting. In Freedom Summer, “Annie Mae makes dinner for my family every night. She creams the corn and rolls the biscuits.” And later, “Mama helps my plate with peas.” “Daddy stirs his iced tea…” You know you’re in the South, from the food, the word choices, and the characters. You know that Annie Mae is the cook, and the illustrations show you that Annie Mae is a black domestic worker. You see the white family at dinner in the dining room, and you also see, unwritten but shown in the art, and implied in the text, how Annie Mae and her son eat in the kitchen.

Food pushes the plot forward. In every book I’ve written, I’ve incorporated a meal, at least one gathering with food, where my characters can talk to one another, secrets can be revealed, arguments started or resolved, mysteries hinted at, problems solved, wisdom passed on, decisions made, and the story moves forward. Having a big meal together is almost like a shorthand, or shortcut (short-cut?) to eliminating many tedious scenes delivering information piecemeal.

Food celebrates cultures. In a book I’ve written but have not sold — This is Cambria Bold! — I explore different cultures through the lens of blended families, ancestral homes and ancestors, and the food of their people. I so love this book. We will find a home for it. In the meantime, there is the competition to prepare for, the National Not-Quite 4H-Club County Fair Crisp Cooking Competition. You can imagine, maybe, all the ways that apples appear in many cultures.

Food brings communities and families together… for better or worse! Some of the liveliest scenes in my books take place at a dinner, a picnic, a restaurant, breakfast, a birthday, a funeral, making root beer floats, where the food seems incidental, but it’s the reason people are gathering. It’s harder to authentically have people decide to meet en masse somewhere and talk things out, but if they find themselves together for an event where there is food, even if it’s “just” the breakfast table, well then! Anything you need to happen, can happen here, while you’ve got everyone together. Or maybe someone important is missing? Why? What happened? In Each Little Bird That Sings, think of Comfort’s dog, Dismay, missing, while Comfort and her family have ice cream sundaes for breakfast — a “hero’s breakfast,” says Aunt Goldie, her idea for the rescuers, that she serves on the front porch. A distraught Comfort — “where is my dog?” — tries to eat, but loses her breakfast… over the railing it goes. She is enveloped by her family, in her grief. It was food that brought them together to that moment.

Food allows you to remember your own childhood (for better or worse, too). Remember, you are mining your life in service of story. Franny talks about the canned biscuits that her mother removes from the oven a minute before they are done so she can insert one quarter of a slice of American cheese inside each one before returning the pan to the oven, in Countdown. I watched my mother do this dozens of times when I was a child.

In Revolution, a full-on, lively Sunday dinner with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, sliced tomatoes from Uncle Vivian’s garden, butterbeans and buttered biscuits is being consumed as an argument erupts over the preacher’s sermon about opening the doors of this 1964-Greenwood, Mississippi Presbyterian church to “everybody under the sun, no matter what color.”

I tapped into my own history as I wrote this story, and brought my characters together through food in this scene, food that’s doing all six of the above things food can do for you, at once. Food is an incredibly versatile tool.

I took a break while writing this essay to check on my chicken in the crock pot, and to add carrots and potatoes to the simmering beef in the stew pot. I see that my ops-guru, Zach, has started farro in the rice cooker. I see knobs of garlic on the counter, and scattered bay leaves, from his efforts. The plot thickens, as does the stew. Jim will appear at some point and make one of his signature salads, I will cut the birthday-party leftover corn off the cob and cream it. We will have a meal. End of that story, beginning of another.

Cooking for my people is my love language. Cooking for others creates stories — and recipes — that people will pass down for generations, in the way that my mother passed down her mother’s directions on how to cook a turkey, which I highlight in a Storybelly post about narrative voice (scroll down on that post for a photo of Mom’s handwritten recipe). Mom was a journeyman/woman cook, a woman who came of age cooking after World War II, when Birds Eye and Chef Boyardee and Pillsbury’s canned biscuits were coming of age in 1950s kitchens. I highlight Mom’s pink kitchen in Countdown, when Franny tells us, as a list, which meal each night of the week entailed, every week. That was my Mom’s way: Functional. Practical. Efficient. Simple. Precise. You see how food describes us?

Just about anything you write can be enhanced by food, whether or not you like to cook, or cook at all. I am preaching to myself here, because my current work in progress, Charlottesville, has precious little food in it right now. Must remedy that, if possible.

This is a post for everyone, as all Storybelly Extra posts are. Tomorrow, in the Writer’s Lab, we will take this idea of food (and first chapters, as I wrote in yesterday’s Digest) a step further. I think we’ll add in some ancestors. It’s a recipe! A recipe for a Lab Coat assignment, one that I will do with you, and that we do for fun and for whatever else suits us.

You can join us in the Lab, here — all are welcome.

And if you want to exercise your chops in advance, put me a food memory in the comments. I will start, as soon as I pull the chicken from the crock pot off the bone. Let’s make it a one-minute write, for all subscribers. Whatever you can write for a minute — you can time yourself — so it’s a freewrite for one minute, okay, maybe two. Whatever comes to mind. There are no mistakes. Include ancestors if you like, or a first time, a last time, something food-adjacent. It’s your story. Go!

xo Debbie