Discover the Unexpected Joy and Secrets Hidden Within Tanya Bush’s Year of Baking
If “cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest,” as Laurie Colwin wrote in her classic Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, the act of cooking, whether for oneself or for others, offers a whole world of character revelation.
In writing, as in life, food gestures towards longing and emotion. Yet I’m sometimes surprised in creative writing when characters never eat, never prepare food, never so much as reach for a cup of coffee. Where are their appetites? I wonder. Where are their bodies? All too often I’m left to guess what characters hunger for when they hunger, and the manner in which they consume it when they finally get what they want. I know that I can’t always expect characters to eat or cook their way out of their problems, but I do sometimes wonder why food, literary shorthand for almost anything in the realm of human longing, isn’t used more.
