Ann Hood, hard times & the comfort of the kitchen.

Ann Hood has written nine more or less autobiographical novels, two books on knitting, lots of essays and articles including essays and articles on food, and now a sort of culinary memoir that addresses the central aspects of her life, some of them searing.

Hood writes with blunt emotion about her considerable losses. She lost a beloved sister to a botched wisdom tooth extraction, a daughter to strep at the age of five, her father to lung cancer at only 67 and suffered a number of bad matches before her happy marriage to another member of the culinary gentry, Michael Ruhlman.

The death of her daughter devastated Hood. She could not write for two years so learned to knit for a therapeutic purpose, which makes the title of the kitchen memoir, Kitchen Yarns, a delicious double entendre. Its subtitle describes the subjects she surveys, Notes on Life, Love, and Food; she is too generous and self-aware to highlight the sorrowful times.

Hood is an adherent, predictably, of Laurie Colwin, beloved of the Jane Austin brigades and an inescapable influence on women authors of a certain age. There is good reason for that. Although she died tragically of cardiac arrest in 1992 at the age of 48, Colwin left a large and impressive body of work.

She wrote with a humane clarity rarely found in print, and the accessibility of her prose should not mislead anyone into underestimating the depth of her thought. Like Hood she wrote fiction as well as essays, including two nonfiction collections of essays about foodways. Like Hood her recipes tend to the simple but not insipid and she is candid and comical in recounting her mistakes. Colwin was the first person we Appreciated here at bfia, back in our first number from October 2009.

For years the internet has buzzed with stories about women searching for the ‘new Laurie Colwin’ and a lot of them have settled on Dorie Greenspan. In response she dutifully and profitably has become a brand. Her latest of many cookbooks, for example, is called Everyday Dorie. She is, however, too unreflectively sunny and one-dimensional for the role.

Colwin did not limit her output to cookery and never wrote a cookbook. Instead her two volumes on foodways take the form of essays about her life and the lives around her that involve the process of cooking for friends and family. Each essay includes a recipe or recipes and a number of them also recount the ‘pizza deliveries’ that followed her failures in the kitchen.

An English influence is evident in the culinary essays. In fact, Colwin was an acolyte of English food at a time when that form of devotion attracted derision. In Home Cooking she discloses that she relies on “the wisdom of cookbook writers” including Margaret Costa, Elizabeth David and the great Jane Grigson. She read and reread classics including the eccentric and wonderful Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England. Colwin also cooked from the work of the immortal Edna Lewis, whose writings steeped in the black southern tradition share substantial similarities with the historic foodways of Britain.

Hood is Colwin’s more deserving heir in terms of culinary literature. Colwin’s preference for cooking at home over dining out is explicit; Hood lives in Providence but never alludes to the city’s raft of exceptional restaurants and discusses most but not all the food she remembers in a domestic rather than public setting.

Her format and style are similar to Colwin’s, possibly purposely so. Hood’s writing is somewhat slighter, and the British influence slighter still. Unlike Colwin’s work, bad usage creeps into some of her prose and she could use a better editor. The hackneyed “here’s the thing” (page 182) has no place on the page; neither does the popular, ungrammatical and grating usage ‘I like that something does or something is’ that omits the required object as in “he liked that this pie had cheese in it.” (page 223) Exclamation points should be banned as well but Hood likes to scatter them through her passages.

On the subject of grammar the verb should be plural for “there was lots of wine and lots of friends and such good cheer…. ” (page 149) In terms of typography e. e. cummings should not be capitalized and Hood means to use a third of a cup of broth at a time to her risotto, not “a third cup at a time.” (page 142)

Repetition mars Kitchen Yarns, including serial iteration of the hideous “deliciousness” in the last quarter of the book. Hood also repeats the same facts on a single page (201). Ten of the twenty-seven essays appeared earlier and it shows. We need not be told so many times, for example, that Hood was ‘a flight attendant for TWA’ or that as a teen she modelled for Jordan Marsh. W. W. Norton and Co. owes its eminent author a better duty of care.

These irritants do not destroy the pleasure of reading the collection though, and it would be a shock if Hood does not count for good company over food and drink. Like Colwin, Hood likes to cook with children and any parent should appreciate the passages about spending time in the kitchen with her son through the years. Hood displays a wry, baffled humor at the refusal of her adopted daughter to eat much of anything, charting her finicky phases; only white foods, no two foods may touch on the plate, nothing too hot or cold, nothing that crunches; parents will recognize those foibles as well. Some of the language in Kitchen Yarns dances; “butter,” for instance, “waltzes in a frying pan.” (page 168)

She never puts on airs but never plays the underprivileged proletarian either. Her recipes are plain, even unremarkable, but accessible and reliable. Her beloved mother Gogo (names that toddlers mispronounce stick) did live into old age and cooked until the end. Her food, and therefore Hood’s, is predominantly Italian American (lots of red sauce for drowning eggplant, meatballs, sausage), although Hood herself also cooks traditional Italian dishes; spaghetti carbonara discovered on a TWA layover in Rome, the simplest risi e bisi for the fussy daughter.

To the horror of her husband Hood likes American cheese but her insistence that “it is the best cheese for a grilled cheese sandwich” is indisputable. She might have said the same about the cheeseburger notwithstanding the proscription of the food police. (page 205)

Campbell’s soup, supermarket Brie in the small round box, bags of baby carrots, celery seed, instant ramen (with American cheese and an egg) and other shockers inhabit her dishes while, maybe best of all, Hood insists on Thomas’s English Muffins over anything artisanal, gluten free or organic. Huzzah for the revenge of the WASPs.

Hood herself is not vengeful, although she does allusively settle scores with her ex-husbands, and does dip into British foodways in a matter other than the muffin. She smokes her own salmon and paints it with marmalade, an inspired innovation we are embarrassed not to have known.

So buy her book. It is good for a break at work or for the bathroom, its pages turn fast and its voice is friendly and reassuring in these parlous times.