THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021 59
BOOKS
SEASON TO TASTE
Laurie Colwin’s recipe for being yourself in the kitchen.
BY RACHEL SYME
COURTESY RF JURJEVICS
I
n “Home Cooking,” a collection of es-
says first published in 1988, Laurie
Colwin states one opinion after another,
as plainly as boiled potatoes. “Grilling is
like sunbathing,” she announces. “Every-
one knows it is bad for you but no one
ever stops doing it.” Along with outdoor
cooking, outdoor dining is out, too: “I
do not like to eat al fresco. No sane per-
son does, I feel.” During Colwin’s brief
career, and then well beyond it, count-
less readers and cooks have aspired to
her idiosyncratic recipe for sanity and
self-reliance. Its ingredients were laid out
primarily in her columns for Gourmet
(which “Home Cooking” collects), and,
if Colwin’s opinions were bluntly put,
they weren’t obvious: she insisted that
simple chicken salad had “a certain
glamour,” but rarely extolled chocolate
(“I don’t love it”). She wasn’t a polished
homemaker in the Betty Crocker tradi-
tion or a highly technical haute-cuisine
enthusiast like Julia Child, and though
she was a working woman in New York,
she didn’t fit the type who returned from
the office to a sad fridge full of SlimFast.
Colwin spoke, first and foremost, to
harried middle-class cooks, assuring them
that their inner “domestic sensualist” was
within reach: you could be both a hedo-
nist and a pragmatist if you mastered a
few basic techniques, and splurged on a
few not so basic ingredients. Through
her writing, at once bossy and intimate,
Colwin barged into kitchens and made
herself at home, the kind of cook who
grabs the spoon and starts mixing the
batter her way. And you won’t be irked
for long: her brown-sugar gingerbread
with lemon brandy really is delicious.
Colwin was most prolific as a fiction
writer—she published five novels and
three story collections—but it is her cu-
linary legacy that has aged best. When
she died from an aortic aneurysm, in
1992, at the age of forty-eight, some four
hundred heartbroken letters arrived at
Gourmet, and nearly a thousand people
crammed into her memorial service in
Manhattan, many of whom had encoun-
tered her only through her writing. In
the decades since, Colwin has become a
saintly figure among a certain type of
eager, urbane home cook who uses real
butter and has at some point hosted an
impromptu dinner for six. The tone of
today’s food blogs is more casual than
clucking, but, as a 2014 piece in the Times
noted, there is still a “guardian-angel-
style attachment” to Colwin’s strict ethos
in the kitchen. And now Vintage and
Harper Perennial are reissuing her work,
including “Home Cooking,” “More
Home Cooking,” and all her fiction.
As a food writer and a fiction writer,
Colwin is a bard of burgeoning adult-
hood. Her forte is firsts: first shitty job,
first apartment, first poached egg, first
marriage, first affair, first homemade loaf
of bread. She wrote about people with
minds and lives not yet fully cooked, who
are nervous about what everything will
look like when it finally comes out of
the oven. For much of Colwin’s twen-
ties—the era of her own firsts—she lived
in a tiny West Village apartment with
two stove burners and no kitchen sink.
In “Home Cooking,” she describes the
best meal she ever ate there, after a night
of heavy drinking, when a friend arrived
bearing four veal scallops, two pears, a
bunch of arugula, and a round of Bour-
sault cheese. “We got out the card table
and set it, and washed the arugula in the
bathtub,” Colwin writes. That night, she
squeezed comfort out of constraint, put-
ting in the effort despite a pounding
headache, because with Colwin just the
right amount of effort—enough to dirty
a dish but not zap your conversational
energy—is always what’s required.
C
olwin was born in 1944 into a Jew-
ish family in New York. They
moved around—Manhattan, Chicago,
Long Island, Philadelphia—and what
remained consistent throughout was
food. Colwin’s father brought home
Colwin embraced the experimental, and even failures could be “triumphant.”
