What people really want in life, Laurie Colwin once wrote, is “an enormous return on a small investment. Almost the only situation in which this is possible is cooking.”
Colwin, a committed New Yorker for her entire adulthood, started learning how to churn out gourmet meals in her twenties, but she didn’t begin writing food essays for a decade. She wanted to be a novelist, and published her first short story in this magazine, in 1969, when she was twenty-five years old. Her fiction tends to be about well-off, well-educated white Manhattanites, who, despite leading mostly charming, puff-pastry lives, are filled with dread that their luck could one day disappear.
Nowhere is this disjuncture more evident than in love and marriage. Colwin, who married the book editor Juris Jurjevics when she was thirty-nine , and stayed married until her death, could not stop writing about adultery. Her characters have stylish, cosmopolitan affairs, meeting for clandestine walks through art museums. But infidelity, in her work, is almost never a life-ruining or cataclysmic event.
Is there any enduring consolation? What people really want in life, Colwin writes in “Home Cooking,” is “an enormous return on a small investment. Almost the only situation in which this is possible is cooking.” In the kitchen, she discovered—and hoped her readers would, too—that recipes didn’t simply have to be followed; they could be invented. If romantic experiments could provide eventual insight, culinary ones yielded instant results.
Colwin’s gospel was simple, sumptuous food done well: potato salad, crusty bread, beef-and-barley soup, shepherd’s pie, chocolate wafers, zucchini fritters. She wasn’t particular about process. “If you are civilized,” she wrote in one recipe, “you can arrange the vegetables on a plate and put the egg on top. If you are not, you can eat it right out of the pot.
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