home cooking
For writer Judith Moore, cooking has always been a family affair, but the results have been mixed. BY LAURA MILLER Photo by Sibylla Herbrich for someone who claims she decided to write about food because she simply didn't know enough about anything else, Judith Moore has done all right. A writer and editor, Moore has just published "Never Eat Your Heart Out," a sort of culinary memoir that garnered a rave review in the New York Times from Susan Cheever, who described the book as a "tart, satisfying" account of how "the meals [Moore] has made for herself, for family and friends, have been deeply complicated, with all the excitement, exotic richness and delicious sensuality that her days have sometimes lacked." Tart is right. Moore, who spent 20 years in the kind of small-town marriage conservative pundits hold up as a paragon, dishes out plenty of sour with the sweet in this intimate recollection of meals cooked and served. She can make your mouth water when she describes the dense, spicy flavors of her homemade plum chutney, but she can also make you shudder at the "treacherous" aroma of her hated grandmother's fermenting sauerkraut, which "veers so near the odors that precede death." For Moore, writing about food is just the simplest way of writing about the pleasures and agonies of life itself, whether the subject is as cozy as rice pudding or as horrific as a gory, sweaty "pig sticking" on her grandmother's farm. Salon visited Moore in her home in Berkeley, where she moved in 1982 when the aftermath of an adulterous affair she had splintered her marriage. Although she and her husband remain close and haven't divorced, Moore seems entirely content in her current life, sharing her sunny flat with a dachshund named Lily and a jaunty assortment of stuffed (as in taxidermy) animals. A lot of your book describes canning, baking, feeding guests and babies, very domestic kinds of cooking. Now that you live alone, what do you cook?
But you used to cook so much. Now I write. I just don't seem to be able to do both. When my kids come to visit, I can't figure out how to work and pay attention to them at the same time. I remember being at the office and Rebecca -- a perfectly capable human being, more capable than I am -- was visiting and said, "Oh, mom, I'm thirsty." I went nuts -- "Let me go get you a Coke!" I couldn't do both things at once. But I almost never cook for myself. Every once in a while there's something I really want, and I'll make it for myself -- like rice pudding, and I've made tapioca pudding, things that you can't really buy. I can't remember the last time I made a cake, and I used to be able to just whip out a bûche d'noel. I can't imagine anyone "whipping out" a bûche d'noel! But I used to! Busy hands are happy hands, you know. Why did you decide to write a book about food when you don't cook anymore? When I first began writing I did a lot of reportorial pieces, all using my tape recorder. I wanted to do essay work, but I couldn't describe anything very well. I couldn't describe nature, even though I'd gone hiking with my husband and children, because I was always too much in the moment, making sure that Sarah didn't fall down. I thought that the one thing I could describe was growing a garden. I know every little thing about it. And cooking. I can write about a vegetable that I'm really interested in, and make a story with a beet or a potato. I also wanted to have sensuous activity, and -- as you can see from my adultery piece -- well, I don't know how in the world I could write about sex. I did try writing about sex, and I still don't think I could accurately describe a penis so you could find it if you were the police. At the time, you aren't thinking, "Aha -- it looks like this or it looks like that and I'll describe it like this." You just don't ever think when you're screwing, "I'm going write about this." How is cooking different from that? When you cook, one of the glorious moments is to sit at the table and watch everyone eat it. It's like going out and seeing someone reading your story in the newspaper. It's very thrilling. You see their mouths move, the spinach between their teeth, and you hear the sounds they make. That was all ground that I knew. Feeding people and their responses to it. How people are at a supper table together, and their biological responses. I have really, really paid attention because when you're a housewife and you cook, your life depends on how well you do that. It's everything about who you are. How you cook, how you keep house, are your curtains clean, does your dog have fleas. You really know that ground, and so that's where I got started writing.
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I actually have terrible panic attacks when I cook. I never cook much
anymore. I cook when the children come. It's an exercise in nostalgia
because they'll say, "Mom, I really loved it when you used to make this,
will you teach me to make it?"
