Laurie Colwin — The Writer Who Made Cooking Home
What it is
Laurie Colwin (1944-1992) is the writer who established the domestic kitchen as a serious literary space — who made the act of cooking for people you love as worthy of literary attention as any other form of human expression.
The source work
Home Cooking (1988) and More Home Cooking (1993, published posthumously). Colwin wrote novels and short stories throughout her career, but the home cooking essays — originally published in Gourmet magazine — are her most enduring contribution.
Colwin's voice is unlike any other in food writing: warm, self-deprecating, practical, funny, and genuinely, un-ironically domestic. Where Fisher's food writing is elegant and slightly formal, Colwin's is the voice of someone standing at the stove talking to you while something delicious bubbles on the burner. Her essays are about making food for friends, for family, for comfort — the ordinary daily act of cooking and feeding without pretension or performance.
The specific memory-and-food quality in Colwin is different from Proust's: it is prospective rather than retrospective. Colwin writes about making food that will become the memories of the people she loves. She is conscious that a meal she makes today will be the taste of home for a child for decades. This is the exact inverse of the Proustian structure: rather than food triggering memory, Colwin's food is the deliberate creation of future memory. She makes food knowing it will be remembered.
Her recipe for gingerbread, her method for roast chicken, her opinions on the proper frying of potatoes — all of these are specific culinary positions described in prose that makes them simultaneously practical instruction and emotional argument.
Real-world basis
Colwin's most enduring culinary specific is her treatment of the roast chicken — she writes about it in Home Cooking with a clarity and directness that reads almost as a manifesto: the roast chicken is the most important dish in home cooking, the dish that reveals a cook's values more completely than any other, the dish that a person will spend a lifetime perfecting and that will never be entirely finished. This argument has been repeated by food writers ever since, and the roast chicken has become, in food writing, a specific symbol of domestic mastery.
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