A feast in Brooklyn
I wrote a book this year that I’d pitched, somewhat vaguely, as profiles about interesting women “through the lens of feasting.” It got more specific in the writing (as these things tend to do), but not too much more specific — it’s not a “food book” really so much as a book where cooking, eating, and gathering around a table is a way to understand part of each woman’s long-last impact.
And it was a very weird year to be writing such a book. I’d spent the fall of 2019 refining the proposal, and sent it in right before I left for Sundance in January 2020. I signed the contract in May. So a lot happened in the interim, and a lot of what happened had to do with, well, cooking, eating, and gathering around a table.
By February, I’d already been buying extra food (not much, but enough to keep us for a couple weeks) and putting it in a large box in a corner; other people were starting to do the same. Then the food media started running stories on what to do with all of those beans and tinned fish. (I was grateful to already be fluent in that kind of cooking.)
And we couldn’t eat at restaurants. And we chose not to go inside each other’s houses, trying to keep one another safe. And we watched our plans for gathering around tables drop away. And we made do with whatever food was available in the grocery store, which could, at times, be erratic. And we ate a lot of comfort food.
Some of this shows up in the book, because how could it not? I was writing about feasting during a time when feasting was more or less impossible. Yes, anything can be a feast; the first chapter I wrote (which is not the first chapter in the book), on Hannah Arendt, includes a recipe for a tiny feast for one: a good martini and some anchovy fillets on potato chips, exactly the kind of thing you can easily make with random stuff on the shelf or the pantry or stuffed in the back of the cabinet.
We had a few feasts that year. At the time, we still had a roommate, and for several birthdays we did what we could to be festive. For Tom’s, in June, once take-out had become a regular thing for every restaurant, we ordered a huge seafood boil from a place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, and it arrived in an enormous, thick plastic bag, all buttery and spicy. For Thanksgiving, we had one friend over very carefully, and I roasted a duck, though not without some panic. Like everyone, we started perfecting the art of the park picnic party.
But we had been people who often throw parties, and it’s strange to say that until recently we really hadn’t had more than one or two people over at a time.
All that to say this: My birthday was this week. Normally some combination of fall schedules, weird weather, exhaustion, and (often) a major looming election have made my birthday weird and hard to celebrate much, which is fine.
But this year it fell on a fairly normal Thursday, so I took the day off, and spent the morning just relaxing. I went to the lower east side for lunch at a random Aussie place I’d never been to before (extremely good) and then Tom met me to see a movie at Metrograph, a beloved spot that’s only recently reopened. (It was John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, from 1977, which neither of us had seen and which turns out to be about women and aging! Serendipity/oops!)
And then he’d made a reservation at my favorite restaurant in all of New York, but it wasn’t for an hour, so we had a drink nearby and then went over to the restaurant. And when we got there, there was a table, with dear friends whom Tom had secretly invited, and a beautiful menu he’d secretly arranged, served family style, and the friendly owners who welcomed us once again, and more delicious food than we could all eat, ribollita and anchovies on buttered toast and salad and prosciutto and several kinds of pastas and roasted fish and osso bucco and beautiful little desserts. (Some of it is in my refrigerator awaiting lunch today.) I had chilled red wine and an amaro that was substantially older than anyone at the table. Friends I’d long wanted to introduce to one another finally met. The mirrors across from us on the walls reflected joy.
I haven’t been surprised for my birthday since I turned 16 in 1999. It was all feast, all love embodied: the food, the drink, the conversation, the sweetly lit restaurant housed in an old apothecary shop, and the people I missed, most of all, together.
Been writing
I have some fun stuff coming next week, but in the meantime you can enjoy my newly-published list of 14 absolute bangers you can watch in theaters or stream at home this month.
Been reading and watching
I finished Nella Larsen’s Passing last night, which is as tremendous as everyone says. (Larsen was, among other things, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most influential writers and the first Black woman to win a Guggenheim.) It was first published in 1929, and this Wednesday Rebecca Hall’s tremendous film adaptation premieres on Netflix, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. I’d seen the movie a couple times but wanted to read the book, which is very short, and I’m so glad that I did.
I also read Mrs. March in a big gulp last weekend and it was exactly what I wanted. Delicious, weird, creepy, reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith. And good prose, which is, of course, most important.
Aside from the aforementioned Cassavetes film, I rewatched C’mon C’mon (out November 19) and it’s just so good! I can’t wait for people to see it!
We’ve been watching Evil, for the first time, and finished the first season last night. It’s perfect.
Odds and ends
I have ribollita on the brain because of Thursday’s feast (and because it’s among the leftovers in my refrigerator) so here is a recipe! A perfect meal if it’s getting cool where you are, and you can swap and sub to your heart’s content.