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keen ear for dialogue, a wry sense of
humor, and killer vinaigrette recipes, but
their spheres were distinct. Ephron, who
had Hollywood money, often kicked off
her dinner parties in the storied Apthorp
building with pink champagne. One of
Colwin’s favorite entertaining dishes
was a hot dip made out of frozen spin-
ach, evaporated milk, jalapeños, and
cubes of Monterey Jack cheese. Writ-
ing about pot roast, Colwin laments that
when she was starting out as a home
cook “a substantial meat purchase
seemed as daunting as buying an er-
mine stole. Therefore I settled on the
cheaper chuck steak, cut thick, and I
stand by it.” It’s in part out of budget-
ary concern, she says, that “Home Cook-
ing” includes so many chicken recipes.
(Though Colwin, who was ahead of the
curve when it came to certain healthy-eat-
ing trends, does suggest serving pricier
“organic chicken,” in order to avoid
“feeding anabolic steroids to friends and
loved ones.”)
In “French Movie,” Billy, the grad
student, is fixated on her lover’s wealthy
wife: Billy “had heard three or four or
five times the story of how Vera had
packed an entire set of yellow French
crockery into her suitcase by seamail-
ing all her clothes home from Paris.” By
contrast, in “Home Cooking” Colwin
suggests a minimalist approach to cook-
ware. “Until I went to a tag sale and
found a food mill for three dollars, the
kitchen strainer and the wooden pestle
were all I had to help me purée the soup
or the vegetables,” she writes.
Colwin’s gospel was simple, sump-
tuous food done well: potato salad, crusty
bread, beef-and-barley soup, shepherd’s
pie, chocolate wafers, zucchini fritters.
She wasn’t particular about process. “If
you are civilized,” she wrote in one rec-
ipe, “you can arrange the vegetables on
a plate and put the egg on top. If you
are not, you can eat it right out of the
pot.” She had a taste for delicacies, rec-
ommending Bibb lettuce with chunks
of pâté de foie gras and lobster meat,
but was never delicate about them: she
proudly advertised this dish as “a salad
loaded with cholesterol and fat.”
Colwin’s fans often gush about her
anti-perfectionism in the kitchen. And
it is true that Colwin is a generous
apologist for gloppy casseroles and
grainy fondues. She recalls an evening
when she made a pasta so gluey that
even her husband’s stoned friend no-
ticed something was off. “Wouldn’t it
be groovy if we could dump this what-
ever it is in the garbage and go out for
dinner?” he wondered. (Colwin agreed.)
With a novelist’s appreciation for a
good story, she notes that “there is
something triumphant about a really
disgusting meal. It lingers in the mem-
ory with a lurid glow, just as something
exalted is remembered with a kind of
mellow brilliance.”U
ltimately, the joy of reading Col-
win’s food writing is that she is
doing much more than teaching you
how to function in front of a stove.
She has a few solid recipes—try the
corn-bread-and-prosciutto stuffing—
but her brusque kitchen style is really
a sly way of urging you to trust the
strength of your convictions. About
cooking fried chicken, she writes, “Un-
fortunately, most people think their
method is best, but most people are
wrong.” (She’s against breading and
deep-frying.) Still, her opinion wasn’t
the only one that mattered (the “spe-
cific hatreds” of guests “should never be
trifled with”), and she encouraged read-
ers to form their own: experiment with
spices, pick a favorite fish, bake a des-
sert enough times that you no longer
need to look at a recipe card to make
it. Competence was one of her goals,
but confidence was the real point.
If confidence was what allowed Col-
win to deem a botched meal “trium-
phant,” it didn’t mean she lacked em-
pathy for those who lost hours, or even
years, to wayward mistakes both in and
out of the kitchen. “One of the things
that bothers me about the way I am
viewed is that people say, ‘Oh, the books
have happy endings,’” Colwin said in a
1990 interview. “There is not one single
happy ending in any book written by
me. They are all unresolved endings.”
The format of a recipe might seem to
guarantee more closure: you can make
Colwin’s cinnamon pears baked in a ta-
gine perfectly on the first try, then serve
up a happy ending at every dinner party
thereafter. “Unless you want to live on
cold cereal,” Colwin wrote of this des-
sert, “there’s nothing easier.” But writ-
ing about ease, for Colwin, is also a way
of writing about difficulty. As she saidof one story collection, “My mission was
to describe a certain kind of struggle.”
Colwin’s titles are ironic—nobody is
really “Happy All the Time.” A con-
summate doyenne who advises readers
that “it is wise to have someone you
adore talking to in the kitchen,” Col-
win is nevertheless often on her own.
In one of her finest essays, “Alone in the
Kitchen with an Eggplant,” she calls the
vegetable “the stove top cook’s strongest
ally”—as if ingredients themselves were
keeping her company. Cooking for her-
self, she “fried it and stewed it, and ate
it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold.” She
ate eggplant with honey and eggplant
with Chinese plum sauce. She “ate it at
my desk out of an old Meissen dish,
with my feet up on my wicker footrest
as I watched the national news.” Years
later, Colwin writes, once she didn’t have
to be alone, she still enjoyed this ritual.
Today, her solo eggplant ceremony might
be labelled as “self-care” (Use the nice
china yourself! You deserve it!), but Col-
win never offers recipes for total seren-
ity; she is, after all, still watching the
news while she eats. The pleasures of
food, in her writing, are matter of fact.
You get out of it what you put into it;
you’ll enjoy eating the cake precisely be-
cause you made it.
At the end of “Happy All the Time,”
the two couples escape New York and
end up in Salt Harbor. They stay at the
Scott’s Fisherman’s Inn, where guests
can rent “rooms with kitchens for those
inclined to eat their catch.” Colwin’s
characters, of course, are inclined. The
four friends are not fully at ease with
one another, but eating together is one
thing that comes naturally. Holly has
brought her own salad dressing from
home, along with “four wooden candle-
sticks and four beeswax candles.” She
serves the group Lady Baltimore cake,
a preposterous and precarious construc-
tion, filled with brandy and chopped
dried figs and covered in frosting. They
enjoy a bottle of champagne, but when
it’s finished “they were suddenly sad.”
Someone scrounges up another bottle,
and they are momentarily relieved, rais-
ing their glasses to “a truly wonderful
life.” We know better than to trust this
toast; in the morning, they’ll have head-
aches. But for now the meal isn’t over.
They believe what they say, and belief
can be very filling.