Food Poetry: Recipe. A Cento, by Karen Resta

Published by Wednesday, September 11, 2013 Permalink 0

 

Karen Resta Profile Photo, for The Rambling Epicure, editor Jonell GallowayFood Poetry: Recipe. A Cento*, by Karen Resta

after Billy Collins

You are the soup and the fish,
the buttered crumpet and the tea.
You are the cook at the brothel’s stove
and the bubbling beans in the pot.
You are the great eater of the beef,
and the lobster trembling for life.
However, you are not the cheese of the poet,
the hell of the spinach,
or the apples of Eve.
And you are certainly not the Quangle Wangle’s tree.
There is just no way that you are the Quangle Wangle’s tree.
It is possible that you are the sauce to dress the goose,
maybe even the restaurant in Baudelaire’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the grape of Beulah at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the fat of the child-pig
nor the past alive as madeleine.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the corn who’s better than sex.
I also happen to be the hencod’s roe,
the small green face of the freshly shelled green pea,
and the hunger for fried fish in the open air.
I am also the parsley that is gharsley
and the goblin’s cry of fruits.
But don’t worry, I’m not the soup and the fish.
You are still the soup and the fish.

*Lines from Sydney Smith, J.C. Masterman, Polly Adler, Martial’s Epigrams, William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, G.K. Chesterton, E.B. White, Lord Byron, Edward Lear, Alice B.Toklas, Baudelaire, Mae West, Charles Lamb, Proust, E.S. Gaskell, Garson Keillor, James Joyce, William Wallace Irwin, Mark Twain, Ogden Nash, Rosetti.

This poem was previously published in Best American Poetry.

_________________________

Karen Resta has had an interesting career history, one part as Executive Chef for Partners Dining at Goldman Sachs in NYC, and another as VP for Goldman Sachs NYC. Her writing can be found at eGullet, The Culinary Media Network, Serious Eats, Book of Rai, Christian Science Monitor, One Million Stories and Rose Red Review.

 

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Food Poetry: Carciofi, by Grace Cavalieri

Published by Tuesday, September 3, 2013 Permalink 0


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Grace Cavalieri

for Raffael Cavalieri

One by one things fall away,
everything but the sweet earth itself.
Already this year he has watched the nest’s
careful brush of twigs lose a summer song.

He leans his bicycle against the tree.
Tuscany never changes, they say, but the mountains
seem smaller, each season, as he goes north

toward Pietrasanta. Only carciofi remain the same, clustered
to the earth. Year after year, this time, the tough fruit
is left for the last of those who want it.

My grandfather picks them here, although he
is not a farmer, he knows where on the stem
to reach. A scholar who saw the world as
a work of art, he holds them like this,

carries them back to his small apartment
past the piazza, behind the University wall.
Pisa. Can you see the dirt on his hands, as he
cups them close, their hard skins,
dusty particles beneath his nails.

What moved him to hunger, and when, that night
we can’t know, but that he ate carciofi, the diary
reveals; a plant flavored with olive oil.
Maybe after the lamp was lit, a tiny flask

of oil was brought out, pressings
from a vat near Granoia. Adding
salt from a bowl, the mineral
makes a fragrance rise, enough to move him to
open the small window and, by luck, hear a nightingale.

Later he will lean over his drawings. But right now he
puts the finished leaves in a bowl. This is the man who
imagined the gas-driven tractor which would
someday ride the fields of uneven ground.

Tonight there is only the vision of a vehicle
in his head, for he feels refreshed after dining.
How strange to rest, brushing his hand across the
linen, smudging it, without thought.
ll paese della meraviglia. He will
visit the farmer again, take from his fields,

But for now the mind feasts on what the eye has
seen, villas with ochre walls, pink terra cotta roofs,
factories with old doors, the ride out of town
pedaling past olive groves, apple trees pinned against

fences, pruned grape vines ready to burst,
covers pulled taut over seeded ground, the sun
to the sea, peaceful snow on the mountains.
Everywhere he looks, the land ready for a new way to harvest.

————————————————————————–

This poem was originally published in Water on the Sun.

This poem was originally published in Ocho #8 (goss 183:: Casa Menendez) and Sounds Like Something I Would Say (Casa Menendez).

Grace Cavalieri is the author of several books, and produced plays. Grace edited, along with translator Sabine Pascarelli, The Poet’sCookbook; Recipes from Tuscany (Bordighera Press, 2009,) and The Poet’s Cookbook: Recipes from Germany (Forest Woods & Goethe Institut, 2010). Her new books are Navy Wife and Sounds Like Something I Would Say (Goss 183::Casa Menendez, 2010.) Previously published is Anna Nicole: Poems, winner of  the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. She’ produces “The Poet and the Poem,” now beginning its 34th consecutive year on public radio. Her new play for children, ”Lena’s Quilt,” premiered in NYC libraries and museums, 2010 and is now running in the 2011 Harlem Renaissance Production in New York City.
 
Photo of artichokes courtesy of Xedos 4.
 
 
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Food Poetry: Blackberry Dumplings, by Gayle Black

Published by Monday, August 26, 2013 Permalink 0


Food Poetry: Blackberry Dumplings, by Gayle Black

Blackberry Dumplings

by Gayle Black

Blackberry cobbler in Trinidad
jinxmcc / Foter / CC BY-ND

 

Descending the hillside,
After days of drizzle
The weeds trampled down in preparation
Drying out between the bramble
I arrive to gather the bounty
Blackberries, true gems of deep purple
And shining red in promise of another raid
Tomorrow, for now the sun is gentled in July
By the soft wind and departed rain,
Woven into new clouds above me
As I weave along the hillside, remembering
My mother’s nimble fingers
Filling a metal bucket so quickly on other hillsides.
For this task alone she donned men’s work pants,
Which fitted her awkwardly around her belly
That had carried six of us into the world
While she gathered in the fruit she would sometimes remember
Beaux from long ago and an early marriage ended by untimely death.
“He treated me like a woman.,” she would always say
And I would sigh in regret because I knew it meant
My own father just took her long toil and good heart for granted.
And perhaps so did I as a child, but now remembering
Her blackberry dumplings, I feel that she was even more than a woman
Nearly a  goddess I was lucky enough to have been granted the privilege to call mother.
Blackberries which ripen in July, her birth month always will be her token to me.
And I  pluck them and eat them and sometimes make jam for cake at Christmas
All in memory of her immeasurable bounty that continues though she left all toil behind long years ago.
And the little toil I expend gathering the fruit is simply a little line to her great work ended yet unending forever.

 

 

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Wendell Berry Food and Farming Quotes

Published by Sunday, August 4, 2013 Permalink 0

Wendell Berry Food and Farming Quotes

“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.” (What Are People For?)

“Eating is an agricultural act.” (What Are People for Essays By Wendell Berry)

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” “A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us… What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.” (pg. 85, “Think Little“) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

Bem no sul deste País
Eduardo Amorim / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. (pg. 88, “Think Little”) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

“…the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

“The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer…the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; …” (The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982)

“If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man’s only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place – a much humbler place than we have been taught to think – in the order of creation. (pg.89, “Think Little”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

“He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.”

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. (pg. 27, “A Native Hill”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

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About Jonell Galloway

Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on a book, What to Eat in Venice

 

  • Wendell Berry: No technological fix to climate change
  • Wendell Berry – The Real Work
  • A Poem For Sunday
  • A Poem For Saturday
  • Composer of Wendell Berry songs is interviewed
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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, July 24, 2013

Published by Wednesday, July 24, 2013 Permalink 0


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Simon de Swaan, Simon Says, The Rambling Epicure, SwitzerlandSimon Says: Daily Food Quote, July 24, 2013

by Simon de Swaan

When our souls are happy, they talk about food.–Charles Simic

Dušan “Charles” Simić  is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of The Paris Review. He is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today, and his work has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his prose poem “The World Doesn’t End:”

I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.

The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

He also received the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate.

___________________

Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.

 

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Food Poetry: Organic Fruit, by Diane Lockward

Published by Wednesday, May 15, 2013 Permalink 0

Organic Fruit

I want to sing

a song worthy of

the avocado, renegade

fruit, strict individualist, pear

gone crazy. Praise to its skin

like an armadillo’s, the refusal

to adulate beauty. Schmoo-shaped

and always face forward, it is what it

is. Kudos to its courage, its inherent love

of democracy. Hosannas for its motley coat,

neither black, brown, nor green, but purple-hued,

like a bruise. Unlike the obstreperous coconut, the

avocado yields to the knife, surrenders its hide of leather,

blade sliding under the skin and stripping the fruit. Praise

to its nakedness posed before me, homely, yellow-green,

and slippery, bottom-heavy like a woman in a Renoir, her

flesh soft velvet. I cup the fruit in my palm, slice and hold,

slice and hold, down to the stone at the core, firm fist at the

center. Pale peridot crescents slip out, like slivers of  moon.

Exquisite moment of ripeness! a dash of salt, the first bite

squishes between tongue and palate, eases down my

throat, oozes vitamins and oil. Could anything be more

delicious, more digestible? Plaudits to its versatility,

yummy in Cobb salad, saucy in guacamole, boldly

stuffed with crabmeat. My avocado dangles from

a tree, lifts its puckered face to the sun, pulls

all that light inside. Praise it for being small,

misshapen, and durable. Praise it for

the largeness of its heart.

Continue Reading…

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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, May 10, 2013

Published by Friday, May 10, 2013 Permalink 0

Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, May 10, 2013

by Simón de Swaan

A good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger’s end.–Walter Savage Landor

Walter Savage Landor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walter Savage Landor was an English writer and poet who lived from 1775–1864. He wrote in both English and Latin, but much preferred Latin, which put him at a disadvantage in terms of readership. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, “five volumes of imaginary conversations between personalities of classical Greece and Rome: poets and authors; statesmen and women; and fortunate and unfortunate individuals” (Wikipedia), and the poem “Rose Aylmer,” but the critical acclaim he received from poets and reviewers such as John Milton, T.S. Eliot, and John Butler Yeats was not matched by public popularity.

 

 

 

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Food Poetry: Ancient Mexican Wisdom on Land, Plants and Self Development

Published by Monday, April 1, 2013 Permalink 0

Poem in English and Spanish

by Adriana Pérez de Legaspi

Care for things of the earth; cut some firewood, cultivate the earth, plant prickly pears, plant yucas.
You will have to drink, eat, get dressed.
Thereafter you will be standing, you will be your true self, you will walk on your own two feet.
Thereafter you will be well spoken of, you will be praised.
Thereafter you will be known.

Ten cuidado de las cosas de la tierra; haz algo corta leña, labra la tierra, planta nopales, planta magueyes.
Tendrás que beber, que comer, que vestir.
Con eso estarás en pie, serás verdadero, con eso andarás.
Con eso se hablará de ti, se te alabará.
Con eso te darás a conocer.

 

 

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Food Poetry: A Food for Everything, by T. A. Ramesh

Published by Friday, February 22, 2013 Permalink 0

A FOOD FOR EVERYTHING!

by T.A. Ramesh

Meals are the food for the body;
Knowledge is the food for the mind;
Meditation is the food for the spirit;
Music is the food for the love of heart;
Dreams are the food for the consciousness;
Prayer is the food for the Almighty;
Love is the food for the living heart;
Thoughts are the food for the brain;
Colourful ink is the food for the pen;
Ideas are the food for the stories;
Truth is the food for the will;
Sun’s energy is the food for the plants;
Plants are the food for the living beings;
But one man’s food is another man’s poison!

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Food Poetry: Fame is a Fickle Food, by Emily Dickinson

Published by Sunday, February 17, 2013 Permalink 0

Fame is a Fickle Food

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die

 

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1886. The Poetry Foundation describes her as “A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints.” Read more of Emily Dickinson’s biography on Poetry Foundation.

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