Don't Forget This - Brooks Thrash

I can’t remember which I learned to be first: a cook or a writer. It’s tempting to make the case for these twinned selves, the caretaker and the showoff, as the Janus faces of my nature. Certainly the caretaker is manifest in how I cook: generously, prolifically, always doubling portions, tending towards roasts and pies and bread and stews: things that nourish, things that aspire to be but might stop short of gourmet perfection. Nothing too show-offy or beautiful. In short, my mother’s daughter.

To continue with the metaphor, it’s easy to sketch the writer as the attention seeker, the quintessential middle child, the one who views the world as an audience who awaits her presence with bated breath. “Don’t forget to distinguish yourselves!,” Richard would proclaim, half in jest, as he watched us from the front step of our house in Sudbury. We’d be stumbling down the kelly green yard towards the bus stop, his three blonde progeny. We weren’t quite sure what to do with the benediction. We were, like anybody else, part ordinary, part special. It was the 80s. We lived in a Boston suburb. Our town was brimming with new, indulgent money – fat shiny issues of Gourmet and Bon Appetit clogged the neighborhood mailboxes, and everybody was always going skiing. We, the Martins, weren’t quite at that mark. We put on our rugby shirts and left the ski tags hanging on our CB parka through spring. We tried to blend in.

I’d already distinguished myself, quite strikingly and unapologetically, when I was in elementary school. In 1981, in the fourth grade, I started a project to keep occupied while the rest of the class was doing spelling and reading: I wrote a cookbook. The recipes were adaptations of foods that were mentioned in two novels by my favorite author, Louisa May Alcott: the sentimental, autobiographical masterpiece, Little Women, and its somewhat tepid (I was always a critic) but nevertheless narratively satisfying sequel, Little Men.

A teacher drove me to the Concord, one town over from Sudbury; Concord had a nicer, more appealingly “old fashioned” library, and a substantial collection of American Victorian period cookbooks. I found recipes in cookbooks of the 1860s for the foods that Alcott mentioned, like molasses candy, steamed brown bread, and plum pudding. I made them in our kitchen in Sudbury, marveling at the old metrics of measure like “a tea cup of flour” and a “bird’s egg-sized lump of butter.” It was a form of play, as much as dressing up like Wonder Woman was a form of imaginative immersion in Super Friends – for as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to live in what I privately referred to as “the olden days,” and I was powerfully attracted to the attempt at verisimilitude that cooking old recipes represented.