Photographs by Kelly Marshall, copyright © 2024.

Mama always began calling as early as Christmas, letting us know that her February birthday was approaching. “I got a birthday coming up,” she’d say. I was sometimes annoyed by the frequency of her reminders, but I’d laugh and say, “I know, Mama.” This was our routine for all of my adult years on until the end of hers.

Each time I’d ask her what she wanted for a gift, she’d answer with glee, as if she were a child. Chocolate cherry cordials. A new dress for church. A blue sweatsuit with pockets. Chili. A pretty bedspread. A watch. A bar of chocolate. An amethyst birthstone ring. Pickled bologna. A mess of fish. Pickled eggs. She’d name one thing or a dozen things she wanted and then she’d say, “Oh, I don’t want nothing. I just wanted you to know my birthday’s coming up.” She did this every year.

Black people where we’re from didn’t celebrate birthdays much. We weren’t a time-conscious people back then. We kept time by the sun and the moon and when work needed doing, even after the Industrial Revolution brought watches and clocks to nearly every home. It has been only a few generations since our enslaved ancestors weren’t allowed to know their birthdays or even keep track of their ages to perpetuate the idea that they were property, not people, so maybe this birthday celebration idea needed time to catch on.

By the time I came along, my grandparents still weren’t accustomed to marking birthdays. They’d raised their children as they worked alongside them in the fields. The workday and the tasks ahead for survival were more important than any solitary day or any solitary person. They worked as a cooperative unit, and the only days celebrated were holy ones. But still, through the years, there was an occasional card, a favored dish cooked, and a quiet-spoken “Happy Birthday.”

By contrast to the old ways, I grew up in a time of little white children with pointy party hats and fancy cakes on television and in magazines. My white friends from school had slumber parties and cakes with candles and finger foods in their honor. They were showered with presents wrapped up like Christmas gifts, but we didn’t do that in our house.

*

Mama was born in 1939 into a family that would include seven siblings. Children were considered economic assets more than they were emotional assets, though I know my grandparents loved all of their offspring. When I asked Aunt Lo what she remembers about birthdays, she said it was just like any other day. I’m sure my mother’s childhood was the same, but as an adult, Mama reveled in being celebrated, if only for one day. She liked a big fuss made with candles and store-bought cakes and dinners out to restaurants in her honor, and now that she’s gone, I wish we’d made a big fuss about her birthday a little more.

*

I had one childhood birthday party when I was twelve, likely because of my whining for a party and wrapped presents like the white children. That July, my grandmother bought party hats from the dime store. She put a plastic tablecloth with balloons over the dining room table and cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on a grill right outside the kitchen door.

Though cooking food over an open fire in pots was still common during hog-killing time, this idea of grilling food outside was also something new to us. We’d seen this on television, but our people were not the kings and queens of the cookout; that was a thing in locations farther south. Cousin Loretta was the only attendee. We blew into little plastic horns that must have been included with the hats as my grandmother lit the candles on my angel food birthday cake. I blew out the candles. We clapped.

It was fun for about fifteen minutes, but I can’t recall that any of it gave me what I thought I saw in the magazines. We played badminton in the backyard, tried our hand at pin the tail on the donkey, went down to the creek to swim. We floated downstream on inflatable loungers that had taken half the day to blow up. Then the partying was over. My birthday done.

For my son Gerald’s ninth birthday, I invited eight little boys to our duplex for a sleepover. I made three gallons of red Kool-Aid in a container with a spout, and they drank from it all night as if I’d organized a keg party for rambunctious boys. I served limp pink hot dogs on cheap buns and offered a piddly squirt of yellow mustard or ketchup as they skipped, jumped, twisted toward the table. They ate on paper plates, and I let each of them dig their hands into a family-size bag of chips to complete the birthday meal. They punched each other in the arm and wrestled on the floor.

For dessert, I served a mushy slice of ice cream cake that I had bought at Dairy Queen, which became a family tradition for a few years, well past the time that his twin sisters were born and had become teenagers. I wanted my children to feel celebrated. I broke my budget on the party. Some of the boys’ mothers bought gifts for my son. I bought gifts for Gerald, too, though I can’t remember what they were.

What I remember most is the red circular stain on my carpet that blossomed underneath the Kool-Aid decanter and plate after plate of melting ice cream cake, the boys hopping over discarded plates strewn on my living room floor and in my son’s bedroom like lily pads. Late that night, when the boys should have been asleep in the sleeping bags, on the bed, on the pallets I’d made on my son’s bedroom floor, they slipped into the kitchen and got into a canister of popcorn.

The next morning there was popcorn all over my son’s bedroom as if confetti had been thrown. I never quite understood the art of children’s birthday parties, but I knew I wanted to try. I wanted them to feel celebrated.

*

Mama glowed on her birthdays. She sat in her senior citizen high-rise apartment and received cards from her neighbors and relatives like a queen. She taped a long trail of birthday cards to her door for all to see. We took her to all-you-can-eat buffets. We bought gigantic cards for her that played music or featured a pop-up scene and a saccharine message when she opened them. We bought roses, pink carnations, dresses, heart-shaped ashtrays, and bowls that declared her to be the best mother/grandmother in the world.

She bought diamonds for herself. I baked pies and cakes for her. Cooked her special dinners and some years simply sat in her company while she basked in her glory. I baked an apple spice cake for her once that was made with artificial sweeteners. She retaliated by eating a half gallon of butter pecan ice cream when she got home. It was her birthday, she told me. “I can eat what I want.”

Cousin Trish says she’s had two birthday parties in her life—one at sixteen and another at forty. Her sweet sixteen party has held firm in my memory all these years; I could have been no more than seven. It seemed a grand affair to me back then, though of course the memory blends with the imagination. Trish in her new dress, looking like a movie star.

The party was put on for her by Miss Margaret from their church. I’m not sure why Miss Margaret hosted the party and not my aunt and uncle, but me and my other little cousins were underfoot. There were tables of food like a Southern summer soirée—mounds of sandwiches on a great long table and a punch bowl filled with something cold, sweet, and tart, made, I believe, from sherbet and lemon-and-lime pop.

That day began my decades-long love affair with pimento cheese, but there was also Benedictine and chicken salad sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off and small bowls of butter mints and peanuts. There was music. It was the ’70s and everything was awash in pastels. What I remember most is Trish’s smile while she stood in the middle of that milestone that August, her future glittering in front of her as all of us bore witness, celebrated, and ate the fancy food.

*

For my twin daughters, I took a different route, having learned my lesson with their brother. I saved up for their birthday parties even though my money was tight. I rented two adjoining rooms at a cheap hotel with a pool. I stuffed a cooler with a variety of drinks no one else wanted from Big Lots’ sale table and bought pizza and bags and bags of odd clearance snacks that none of the children had ever heard of (Big Lots, again). I bought one ice cream cake with both their names written in icing on it and set their guests loose in the pool until they were so tired they fell asleep in wet piles of girl giggles across beds that smelled of chlorine.

Stained carpets, plastic palm trees, nightstands with cigarette burns in the faux wood, calling hotel security on unsavory characters lurking in the hallways, my friend Sue Bonner volunteering every year as chaperone and bouncer. My girls remember these birthdays as the times of their lives.

During a family discussion about birthdays, I tell my adult children that our ancestors didn’t celebrate their birthdays and that if you go even further back, they weren’t allowed to. “Let’s honor each other,” I tell them. Let us celebrate. Not in a way that is meant to milk our pocketbooks in the name of consumerism and capitalism, but with love. I ask them each to name a birthday meal and an accompanying dessert.

Ron, my husband, says soup beans and cornbread and chocolate cake.

Gerald, my oldest son, says pot roast (I knew he would) and a homemade ice cream cake.

Elainia, one of the twins, says meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, and pineapple upside-down cake (I knew she would).

Delainia, the other twin, says spaghetti with garlic toast and angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries.

Journey, my bonus daughter, and I share a birthdate. She says breakfast with pancakes with crispy edges and yellow cake with chocolate icing.

Isaac, my bonus son, says, “Let me think about it,” but he never gets back. He’s a college student and well… he’s a college student. I’ll ask him in a few years when he’s less distracted.

Me: Give me a good burger with potato salad, baked beans, and greens with Aunt Edith’s Hot Milk Cake.

*

Comedian KevOnStage says in a popular online video, Black people love celebrating birthdays. I don’t know about other cultures and people; I’m sure they do but Black people, we really go hard for the birthday. Let me tell you, if my birthday falls on a Wednesday you can guarantee I’m having a birthday celebration the weekend prior and one after. My birthday will have come and gone and I’m still celebrating. We’ll celebrate all month like a Roman emperor.

He goes on to mention that we will plan something every day of the week or the month to celebrate our birthdays: white parties, photo shoots, special gifts for ourselves, and he’s right. I’ll go get a spa treatment, manicure, pedicure, go to the hair salon, buy books and other gifts for myself in celebration.

I deserve it. We deserve it.

*

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass writes, “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, springtime, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.”

Douglass would later choose a birthday for himself of February 14, which also happens to be my mother’s birthday (and also my uncle Glen’s birthday). That’s not to say Mama knew this. She grew up in a time when her education lacked Black history. As smart as she was, I’m not sure she even knew of Frederick Douglass or his contributions to the lives of Black people. But she certainly knew of the importance of the celebration of the self. How important it was to mark another trip around the sun. How exhilarating and affirming it feels to be celebrated on the day of your birth.

*

Angel Food Cake

This cake has been in my dessert repertoire since high school. It is as spongy and fluffy as a cloud, and it’s fat-free. Serve it plain, simply dusted with confectioners’ sugar, or paired with berries and whipped cream. To ensure maximum lift, make sure your 10-inch tube pan is grease-free and your egg whites contain no trace of yolk.

Serves 12 to 14; makes one 10-inch cake.

1½ cups confectioners’ sugar
1 cup cake flour
12 large eggs, at room temperature
1½ teaspoons cream of tartar
1 cup granulated sugar
⅛ teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Sift the confectioners’ sugar with the cake flour onto a sheet of wax or parchment paper. Repeat two more times.

Move the center oven rack down one notch and preheat the oven to 325°F.

To separate the egg whites from their yolks, crack the eggs one at a time into a small bowl. Lift out the yolk and place it in a separate container with a little water in it (see Tip), and pour the whites, one at a time, into a 2-cup measuring cup. You need a total of 1½ cups of totally yolk-free egg whites.

Pour the egg whites into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment or a mixing bowl and use a handheld mixer. Beat on medium-low speed until frothy, then sprinkle in the cream of tartar. Beat on medium-high speed until glossy, soft peaks form.

Sift or gradually spoon small amounts of the granulated sugar into the egg whites, beating at medium-high speed as you go and maintaining the beaten peaks. Add the salt and vanilla, beating to incorporate. Remove the bowl from the mixer.

In three additions, use a flexible spatula to fold in the sifted confectioners’ sugar–cake flour mixture to create a soft batter. Do not overmix. Transfer to your tube pan, spreading the batter gently and evenly. Bake on the repositioned rack for 40 to 45 minutes, until the surface is lightly browned, with some wide cracks. Invert the cake, still in its pan, on a wire rack or with its center tube set on the long neck of a sturdy bottle to cool. Once it’s completely cooled (at least 1 hour), run a thin knife around the cake’s edges to dislodge it.

Tip: Leftover yolks from this recipe can be refrigerated with a little water in an airtight container for up to 2 days. Use them to make mayonnaise, hollandaise sauce, lemon curd, ice cream, crème brûlée, and more.

__________________________________

Reprinted with permission from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson. Copyright © 2024. Available from Clarkson Potter, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Before the defamation lawsuit, the cups of coconut sugar poured into banana smoothies, the sexual assault allegations, and the dissolution of what was once a dream, there was a man and a woman. Acne covered the woman’s face and shoulders and chest. Her gut was inflamed, a symptom of systemic candida. The man, whose father had passed from cancer, was sick of the lies. Sick of the fries. Sick of rubbing thighs or listening to MLM gurus with dollar$ in their eyes. And so the man and the woman separated good food from bad. They called the good food Raw, and the bad food they called Murder, Torture, Junk, and Harm.

The man and the woman worshipped what the earth yielded, an abundance of fruits and greens plucked ripe from their vines and stalks and trees. They ate dozens of bananas per day, and mangoes, dragonfruit, persimmons, oranges, peaches, watermelon, papaya, and more. Piles of durian crowned the man’s bed. And the woman lay on the ground in a bikini, hair spilling across her face, boxes and boxes of dates surrounding her toned body as the man looked on. The man pressed the fruit between his fingers, saying squishy, date sugar, nutrition, nutrient-dense, and neither were ashamed.

The man and the woman held the knowledge of good and evil; they could discern between the sweet flesh of a sun-ripened pineapple and plastic bags filled to the brim with animal blood. They knew that water and carbohydrates in the blood equaled beauty; fat in the blood, ugly. Pure thoughts came from drinking water. With this knowledge, the man and the woman created a website. The man and the woman painted the header with a faded image of browning bananas in the sun. They added green trim to a white background. They added an image of spotty bananas. They renamed themselves Durianrider and Freelee The Banana Girl. With that, the 30 Bananas a Day movement began.

Freelee and Durianrider invited their followers to a fruit farm in Cairns, Australia, where there was a garden and the garden was good. From the garden came tatsoi, a green with leaves like flattened lily pads; Black Russian tomatoes; a bowl of pea-sized cherry tomatoes; tall sprigs of dill; cos lettuce; and sweet leaf skimmed from the stalk. People multiplied, journeying from all around the world. They gathered around a picnic table where the garden’s bounty was arranged. Sun overhead, they ate until they were satiated.

Tanned and wiry, the people bore gifts: they whacked a cleaver against a rod of sugarcane before twisting it and twisting it, milking the juice into a bowl. They broke open the scaly green skin of a jackfruit with their fingers. They sifted, smashed, and sieved coconut until it turned to oil, and they slathered it behind their ears, on their shoulders, and into the palms of their hands. They jackhammered avocado, mango, pineapple, and banana in a large pot, poured the golden mixture into a pitcher, drank from it, and said, wow.

Durianrider, standing before the small crowd of disciples, said, “People just want to feel good.” And it was so. There, on the farm, the people slept in tents; the people woke up and ate coconuts; the people went down to the creek for a swim; the people did yoga beneath the limbs of an ancient tree; the people walked the walk and talked the talk and ate raw food and only raw food. No one snuck down the road for a hamburger.

Freelee and Durianrider posted footage of toned bodies, testimonies about healing from chronic illness, and an abundance of fruit to their site. Through raw food and raw food alone, their followers turned from flab to fab. From tragic to magic. From around the world, people watched and saw that the movement was good. Like fruit flies lured by the sweet stench of something overripe, people desperate to heal from eating disorders, to cure illnesses, to save the animals, to find community, and feel young again were drawn to 30 Bananas a Day!

I was one of them.

*

Within the biblical garden of Eden, there are two notable trees: one of life, and one that holds the knowledge of good and evil. God instructs Adam, then a nameless man, that he may “eat freely of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” God is omniscient; the man, new. Scholars, when analyzing this moment in the text, propose that this might have been a time when man—and later woman—had access to immortality. What if Eve had eaten from the tree of life and ignored the tree of good and evil? What did her curiosity cost?

I imagine Adam and Eve wandering the garden in bodies that were at once entirely natural to them and also mysterious. If thinking about them as humans, fallible and without God’s omniscience, I imagine that there must have been fear running alongside their wonder. What foods might sustain them? Why, if paradise was truly paradise, would the nectar of any fruit be off limits? So often, Eve is characterized negatively as being tempted by the fruit but, considering how Eve must have felt when the snake first whispered sweet promises in her ear, I see her want for knowledge. A curiosity about her own body and the world. Who wouldn’t want a taste? When I think about that moment in the garden, I see myself sitting before my laptop, plagued by two years’ worth of mysterious neurological symptoms whose root cause had evaded doctors, begging for something that would help me better know myself. I see all of us who, impacted by illness and exhaustion and age, might, if we could, reach for something forbidden that would teach us how best to live.

It was during my junior year of college, during a period of time when my neurological symptoms—dizziness, aphasia, lapses in memory—were at their most severe, that I spent the long afternoons alone in my room praying to Google as if it were some kind of god, asking: What is wrong with me? Do I have seizures? Will I ever be able to run again? It was then that I first found the community I thought might save me. When my browser first loaded, the 30 Bananas a Day website populated with a faded header of spotty bananas, an advertisement for “The Woodstock Fruit Festival,” and a smiling apple parachuting from the sky toward a dancing cucumber. There were people with usernames like The FruitMonster, HunnyDew Sunshine, BeeFree, and Ivegonebananas. They left comments on forums titled:

Fresh Dates! How long do they last??

VEGANS! Do you compare animal life worth to human life worth?

Ah! What am I to do??? My fiance is anti-vegan!

I’m scared to eat.

Hi, newbie questions incoming

Are meals of carrots ok?

Terribly itchy legs at night, please help :(

Fruit stops sickness?

I’ll admit, I laughed. Whether it was the unaesthetic bright green and pale yellow borders outlining forums or phrases like “high vibe community!” “30BaD Peacekeepers” and “fruit-munchers” used in earnest, the site seemed at first like something funny to share with my roommates when they got home, something that would allow me to add my voice to the chorus of their days. Two of my roommates-turned-best-friends were vegan at the time, so I was well aware of what that meant: no meat, no eggs, no animal products of any kind, honey included. They had both been vegan before moving in and were respectful, if not fervent, when they spoke about their beliefs.

I never became fully vegan in the years that I lived with them, but I was jealous of their certainty. They watched documentaries like Forks Over Knives and used the footage as fuel for the way they felt about the world. Around Thanksgiving, they ranted about the conditions in which turkeys were kept; in captivity, unable to run around, the poultry developed bodies that were too heavy for their legs. In their journey with veganism at the time, there did not seem to be room for nuance or exception; they were committed to the point where I still Google the ingredients of red food dye to see if it includes Red 40 (a petroleum byproduct which technically is fine to eat but some vigilant vegans avoid because it has been tested on animals) or ask vegan friends if they mind which brand of white sugar I use before I bake for them (in our college apartment, we only used organic white sugar from the co-op because other sugar might have been processed through animal bone char).

While I felt—and still feel—empathy for the animals, food was more complicated to me. (Even now, as I write this sentence, I hear echoes of vegans on the internet telling me that if I truly cared, it would not be complicated at all.) I enjoyed sharing meals with my roommates and was grateful to learn more about their lifestyle, but I found it difficult to hold such a hard line in my own life in determining the “right” way of eating from “wrong.” I found too much joy in a bowl of my grandma’s homemade chicken noodle soup, for example. My grandma used a recipe passed down from my great-great grandma for the egg noodles and used a knife my grandpa had been gifted after working night shifts at a chicken place while my mom was growing up. I couldn’t imagine believing something about food enough to turn down any of her cooking, so much of it steeped in history, labor, and love.

It was the same lack of certitude that had led me falling away from formal religion after a lifetime of being brought up in the church; there was just something in me that had a hard time condensing the messiness of the world into a pinprick of something tangible I could trust. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe—in fact, I very much did. I wanted to belong to something greater than myself, to lose myself to the current of what I knew was right. One of the parallels between organized religion and veganism, at least in my experience, is that a believer in either has the tendency to think that their way of life is best, on a level of morality. To not believe—in God or veganism—means that you need saving or to wake up to the harsh realities of what your life without belief is costing you. I wanted to be all in. I craved the safety of knowing, definitively, that I was “good,” but I had too many questions. How was locally raised meat bad but fruit flown all the way across the world any better, on an environmental level? What about people who couldn’t access all the substitutes and specialty ingredients that we bought at the co-op each week?

I liked the freedom of eating a mostly vegan diet in college while still leaving room for spontaneity, cravings, or special moments with family. I wasn’t against any diet, but I wasn’t for diet either, which I guess made me just curious enough. I became a sponge for rhetoric that was an echo of my own innermost thoughts. What I hoped to hear, at that time, was a way of making order from the chaos in my own life. The more time I spent on 30BaD, the more I realized it was unlike the veganism that I knew through my roommates. Their veganism included cinnamon rolls slathered in vegan cream cheese, pizza from Mellow Mushroom covered with a thick layer of half-melted Daiya shreds, and chocolate chip cookie dough made with flax eggs. 30BaD was different. It offered me answers that would lift me from my loneliness and sickness.

30BaD became a fixture of my daily routine. Sometimes I visited because the absurdity made my own reality seem more normal (like a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” posted by Freelee that suggests if you crave eating “animal poo” or your “attitude starts to suck” it means you aren’t getting enough calories from fruit). Sometimes the website was a salve for solitude, and other times a form of escape. And sometimes, it moved me in a meaningful way, one I didn’t yet have words for. From reading through forums, it seemed to me that most of the followers had suffered something significant in their past: they were trying to rid themselves of illnesses that had gone undiagnosed for years, addressing eating disorders, or resolving symptoms they no longer wanted to manage with medication. I found people who echoed my own deepest pain. I found rules that promised me what medical professionals couldn’t. Like me, people who clicked on the website seemed at a loss for other options; they had exhausted all the possibilities that made sense. But unlike me, they had found an answer. They had left their old, sick selves behind and had returned to their former radiance.

They all posted about their miraculous recoveries on a page called “Testify!” In 2012, when I was frequently visiting the site, the page’s header featured a pair of cartoon bodybuilders holding up a weightlifting bar stacked with plates. The man had a six-pack, bulging biceps, and a Speedo that showed off the strength of his quads. The woman, in a barely-there black bikini, was equally jacked. She held her hand in a thumbs-up sign while the man curled a giant brown duffel bag marked “BANANAS,” the spotty yellow ends of bananas spilling out the sides. This, the image seems to say, is who you could be if you just picked up fruit at the supermarket: an emblem of strength, smiling, part of a community. And the testimonials were equally overt in their messaging. Scrolling down the pages and pages of different people’s testimonies was like riding a carousel of fruit-filled positivity: My skin is clear! I’m rarely bloated! I was able to give up nearly all supplements! Life is beautiful! My confidence has soared! I don’t have an ounce of cellulite on my body! I’m soo hydrated and drinking so much water I can’t help but be happy! I owe Doug Graham my life! I now experience soaring energy! I know that I’ve found THE ANSWER! 

I wanted nothing more than THE ANSWER. The answer would mean I could get up out of my travel chair—in a moment as miraculous as a biblical tale—and walk around again. The answer would mean I’d have a body I’d want to flaunt. I might be able to cancel my appointment in the epilepsy monitoring unit and explain my symptoms away as some big misunderstanding, just an imbalance in my nutrition. I might be able to eradicate the toxins in me, the darkness that seemed to swell up out of nowhere. Because of my own disgust with my symptoms, my own frustration with the lack of tangible answers from doctors over the years, and the messages about how my body should look at its most desirable that had been baked in since birth, I wasn’t a difficult sell. When Freelee posted a montage video on her YouTube channel set to “beats by Danny Kirsch” that featured a series of pictures of her looking glum with phrases like “I had enough. It was time to take control of my life,” I thought, I want that too. When her body transformed in photographs—she’s flexing! Her skin is clear! She’s eating half of a watermelon, the abundance! She cycled across all of Australia! In 40 days!—to the sound of trumpets, the synthetic beat rising to a euphoric pitch, I thought, I want that too. Transform me. Set the footage of my life to the sound of exultant brass. To get the life that Freelee had, all I had to do, as she posts as a written slide in her video, was eat “the right kind of food.” Thankfully, 30BaD made it very clear what that meant.

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Excerpted from The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour by Jacqueline Alnes, available from Melville House.

“They wrote, and rallied, and rhymed, and sung, and said, and said nothing; they drank, and fought, and slept, and swore, and took snuff; they went to new plays on the first night [and] haunted the chocolate-houses.”
–Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704)
*

Grace Tosier, like many of the celebrities who came after her, had a signature look: in her case, a wide-brimmed hat and a posy of in-season flowers pinned to the top and center of her bodice. Beginning in 1714 and lasting for the rest of the century, the Georgian Era, with its expanding press, produced recognizably modern celebrities, a cultural trend from which Grace was among the first to benefit.

Her outfits were reported in publications such as Tatler and the Gentleman’s Magazine, which presented her to Londoners with descriptions that blended the informational with the aspirational. Illustrations of her by the engraver John Faber Jr. were sold to fame enthusiasts in the capital. Faber based his engravings of Grace on a portrait of her by the artist Bartholomew Dandridge, who had painted her in a now-lost original that she made available to Faber. Unlike later eighteenth-century celebrities, such as Lady Emma Hamilton, who brilliantly harnessed the craze to market her own image to pamphleteers, fashion magazines, and artists, Grace did not profit directly from her fame. She did so indirectly by using it to augment footfall to her and her husband’s business.

Then as now, a connection to royalty proved commercially beneficial, too, and, when not running their drinking house, the Chocolate Box, Grace and her husband, Thomas Tosier, had their own bedroom and workspace at Hampton Court, at the invitation of King George I, who appointed Thomas as his personal chocolatier in 1717.

A private bedroom for a servant was still a rare luxury and thus a mark of status, as was the decision to separate the Tosiers from the rest of the palace kitchens by creating two small rooms from which they could work. Far from the heat and bustle of the main kitchens, the Chocolate Kitchens, whose location was restored in 2013, thanks to the discovery of an eighteenth-century map of Hampton Court, are situated off the cloisters of William III’s Fountain Court, where it is easy to imagine Grace, in her floppy hat, walking to and from her workplace.

The chocolate served at Hampton Court in the 1710s and 1720s was drunk rather than eaten. Although it had been known to Europeans for more than two centuries, chocolate’s popularity there proved slow burning. Flavored with vanilla or chili, it had been an elite Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec delicacy. The Spanish conquistadors initially mistook it for an aphrodisiac. Some of Charles II’s courtiers had regarded it as a hangover cure.

The teetotal Quakers promoted it as a social beverage in lieu of alcohol, while the women of the French aristocracy—most famously Louis XIV’s glamorous mistress Athénaïs de Montespan—helped turn it into a fashionable drink, a trend mimicked by the British court. Charles’s household receipts show that he began spending more on chocolate in 1669–70, around the time of his sister Minette’s extended visit. That the culture of drinking chocolate in England was still nascent is indicated by the eventual recruitment from abroad of the European Solomon de la Faya to serve as Charles II’s official chocolatier in 1682.

Solomon was probably, but not certainly, a member of the Jewish de la Faya family mentioned as living in Amsterdam in the late 1630s, where they are referred to in legal documents as Portuguese merchants. However, their ancestors, like all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity, had been expelled from Portugal in the 1490s.

We know frustratingly little about de la Faya, except to say with some confidence that he must have been very talented, first to be hired by Charles II and then to remain in post throughout the dynastic roulette that followed. He was still serving the Stuarts when Chocolate Kitchens were installed for the first time at Hampton Court, designed by Sir Christopher Wren per the request of William III and Mary II; the latter died before they were completed, while the former was known to enjoy a cup of drinking chocolate at breakfast with the Earl of Portland, another chocolate enthusiast.

From the court, the fashion for hot drinks spread to British cities, towns, and later villages. It was in this environment that Grace and Thomas first started in their profession, at a time when the hot drinks trade was a nascent, lucrative, yet controversial line of work. As the popularity of hot drinks expanded, coffee shops became almost as ubiquitous in late Stuart England as they are in the twenty-first century.

These establishments, sometimes called tea parlors or coffee taverns, became social hubs, particularly for supporters of radical politics; many of their meetings were held at coffeehouses, with the result that Charles II and James II both tried unsuccessfully to ban such places from trading.

When politics did not cause tension, health concerns did. Under Charles II, a pamphlet entitled The Women’s Petition Against Coffee had blamed coffee for causing impotence in London’s men, an assertion rebutted by a rival publication claiming that coffee, in fact, had many health benefits, including making “the erection more vigorous.” During James II’s reign, a physician published The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate, which reiterated the potential health advantages of these beverages, specifically that of chocolate “in a moderate quantity.”

Moderation did not win the public’s favor, though, and hot drinks continued to be a profitable trade when the Tosiers set up the Chocolate Box on a street called Chocolate Row in Greenwich, from where their fame as chocolatiers grew. Sometime after Solomon de la Faya’s death, and three years after Queen Anne’s, the post of King’s Chocolatier was awarded to the Tosiers—or, more specifically, to Thomas.

As the chocolatier in the couple, he prepared the King’s drinks, while Grace, who occasionally joined him at Hampton Court, utilized her considerable business acumen to increase the popularity and profitability of their shop. The Tosiers’ Chocolate Box expanded with an adjoining dance hall, and business boomed thanks to their association with the royal family. Grace cleverly emphasized the connections by hosting dances in honor of King George’s birthday, which, by happy coincidence, fell in the same week in May as Restoration Day, a holiday kept well into the eighteenth century to celebrate the anniversary of the monarchy’s return in 1660 and marked at court with balls and firework displays.

Grace’s soirées, hosted by “the Wife of The King’s Chocolate Maker,” were aimed at those who wished to mimic the lifestyle but did not quite make the cut to receive an invitation from the palace. The Tosiers’ parties were covered by journalists, who noted with approval how many “Persons of Quality” attended.

Both in their work at the palace and at the Chocolate Box, Grace and Thomas had to remain abreast of changing fashions when it came to refreshments. Almond milk, for instance, once mocked as something preferred by pretentious upper-class women or Catholics, was yielding precedence to dairy in chocolate and coffee. At various times, there were different fads for jasmine, mint, long pepper, orange zest, aniseed, chili, brandy, rosewater, pistachios, cardamom, cinnamon, wine, or port to be added to drinking chocolate.

Sugar was used to counteract the natural bitterness in chocolate, a factor that had contributed to its earlier unpopularity. King George’s late mother and her cousin had corresponded about the new mania for hot drinks, with the latter writing, “I can drink neither tea, nor chocolate, nor coffee; all this foreign stuff is repugnant to me: I find chocolate too sweet, coffee tastes like soot to me, and tea more like a medicine, in short, in this respect as in many others, I cannot be à la mode.”

The beans used in the Chocolate Kitchens were mostly imported from Jamaica, a former Spanish colony conquered by England during Oliver Cromwell’s rule. Chocolate was still being produced in relatively small quantities, certainly when compared with its mass production in the next century, or to sugar, some of which was also grown in Jamaica—nearly all of it harvested from plantations or settlements at which the workforce was enslaved.

Abolitionist and antislavery sentiment was active in Great Britain during the reign of George I, particularly among the Quaker congregations; it would not be until later in the century, however, that the mass mobilization of British abolitionists began. This would be due to the awareness raised by the best-selling memoir of Olaudah Equiano, a survivor of slavery who subsequently and successfully toured Britain and Ireland to promote his work, and also because the British press began to report more honestly and thoroughly on what was being done, and inflicted, in the colonies.

Revealingly, it was sugar that was then targeted by boycotts organized by antislavery activists. The fact that chocolate was not reflects both the economic power of sugar as a foundation of slavery and the small-scale production of chocolate until well into the reign of George III.

However, while broad support for abolitionism had not yet developed in Great Britain under George I, serious opposition to enslavement in Jamaica was coming to a boil; the year after George’s death, a mass antislavery uprising began, lasting for nearly a dozen years. Known later as the First Maroon War, it saw hundreds mobilize to escape their plantations to establish free communities in the Jamaican mountains. Before that war, conditions in Jamaica were almost completely undiscussed in British periodicals or journals.

Every morning, Thomas began preparing the King’s chocolate in the smaller of the two rooms. It was a stuffy place as he roasted the cacao beans over the grate. They were then taken to the table, where Thomas ground and cut the roasted beans until he had enough cacao nibs to take with him to the Chocolate Room, the larger and more comfortable of the two rooms.

There he crushed the nibs in a preheated grinder to produce enough chocolate, which was then mixed in a saucepan with whatever additives Thomas or the King had decided on for that day. All of these—the liqueurs and spices—were stored in the Chocolate Room for Thomas’s convenience. He would then decant a concoction far thicker than the modern equivalent of hot chocolate into a silver serving pot, which he placed on a tray with delicate porcelain cups. He carried it through the courtyard cloisters and upstairs to the King’s Apartments. There he served the drink to his awkward, temperamental sovereign, who spoke German better than he did English—which gave rise to the enduring yet inaccurate claim that King George could neither speak nor understand the language of his British subjects.

The expansion of the relatively free press that had helped make people like Grace Tosier famous also meant—to the shock of many tourists and visitors from elsewhere in Europe, where the presses were still typically tightly controlled by their governments—that even the royal family were not immune from “the lash of these satirical folks.”

George I, nicknamed “German George,” was also privately pilloried by his courtiers for his initial failure to grasp some of the nuances of English dining decorum. These errors were advertised when he continued the old custom of occasionally taking a meal publicly in Hampton Court’s Eating Room. The press, meanwhile, publicly guffawed at his difficulties in speaking English and went on subsequently to exaggerate them.

They also had a field day with his unorthodox private life. There was no queen for the journalists to mock or for the Tosiers to serve. Years earlier, George had imprisoned his wife, Sophia-Dorothea of Celle, after discovering her affair with a Swedish nobleman, who disappeared around the time of Sophia-Dorothea’s incarceration and whose murdered remains, so rumor claimed, had been vindictively buried beneath her floorboards on her husband’s orders. While that seems unlikely, given the stench that would have arisen as the body decomposed, we have absolutely no idea what happened to Count von Königsmarck after he vanished in 1694.

Sophia-Dorothea spent the rest of her life under house arrest for adultery, a sin that her husband had been committing throughout their marriage. In the absence of a queen, life at Hampton Court was dominated by King George’s tall and very thin mistress, Melusine von der Schulenberg, and his half sister, the Countess of Leinster and Darlington, an illegitimate daughter of the King’s late father.

Nicknamed “the Maypole and the Elephant” on account of their contrasting weights, the two women vied for dominance over the early Georgian court. The Tosiers were wise enough to keep quiet about the rival socialites, especially since one of their palace colleagues, confectioner Charles Burroughs, was fired after he was overheard repeating the rumor that the Countess of Leinster was not only George I’s half sister but also his lover, thanks to her desperate bid to outmaneuver Melusine by seducing the King. Burroughs’s claim seems to have arisen from confusion over Lady Leinster’s relationship to King George. Legally, she was the daughter of Baron von Platen, her mother’s husband, and only people close to the Hanoverian court initially knew who her biological father had been. Since her status as George I’s illegitimate half sister was not publicized widely, many were confused about her favor with the King, who made her a countess twice over, prompting the inaccurate conclusion that they were lovers. The two explanations—the truth and the mistake—subsequently merged into the falsehood of an incestuous relationship.

Both women were detested by the Prince of Wales, another George, who had never forgiven his father for the brutal abuse of his mother. It was to be one of the great heartbreaks of the younger George’s life that he never fulfilled his dream of liberating his mother from her lifelong detention in the German castle of Ahlden—she died seven months before he became monarch.

Like his father the King, Prince George was an adulterer. Throughout the 1710s, he was having an affair with Henrietta Howard, future Countess of Suffolk. Unlike his father, the Prince enjoyed a good relationship with his wife, who knew all about her husband’s liaison with one of her ladies-in-waiting. Tall, beautiful, pale, and blonde with blue eyes, Caroline, Princess of Wales, was the cleverest among the new batch of royals—which, given the competition, was not a difficult accolade to secure. In stark contrast to her father-in-law, whose relatives knew and subjects suspected “would have had a better time” living in his homeland at his beloved Herrenhausen Palace and hunting lodges rather than inheriting “all his splendour in England,” Caroline emerged as one of the most popular members of the new British royal family.

There was a sense among her contemporaries that Caroline of Ansbach was always meant to wear a crown; as a teenager, she had been betrothed to the future Hapsburg Emperor Charles VI, an engagement that she broke off after months of studying for the requisite conversion to Catholicism. It was almost unheard-of for princesses to jettison a marriage plan, especially one to an emperor, and Caroline was widely applauded for the firm politeness she had shown in rejecting the imperial crown after remaining unconvinced by Catholic theology.

She was similarly admired for her intelligence and lack of pretension about her beauty. As the Dowager Duchess of Orléans put it, “Having been ugly all my life, I never enjoyed looking at my bear-cat-monkey face in the mirror, so it is no wonder that I do not do it very often. But to be young and beautiful and yet not enjoy looking into the mirror like the Princess of Ansbach, that is unusual indeed.”

Even at the French court, which still officially supported the claims of the Catholic Stuarts, Caroline’s reputation was sterling. The Dowager Duchess, whose son was regent of France for the young Louis XV, observed, “Everything I hear about the Princess of Wales makes me esteem and like her; she has noble and beautiful sentiments, and I feel much affection for her.”

Caroline, her husband, and their children resided at Hampton Court while the King made his return visits to his native German province of Hanover, during which they adhered to traditional court etiquette. The “Prince and Princess dine [publicly] every day at Hampton Court,” according to a courtier, “and all sorts of people have free admission to see them, even of the lowest sort of rank.” The Tosiers saw less of the Princess of Wales as feuds within the royal family intensified.

The King and his son loathed each other, resulting in longer and more frequent spells during which the Waleses were not welcome at court. Thomas Tosier died in 1733, and, the next year, Grace wedded a local brewer named Samuel Vancourt; such was the prestige, and recognizability, of her surname that she kept Tosier rather than take Vancourt. She died a wealthy woman in 1753, in her late eighties, just before drinking chocolate—and Hampton Court itself—fell out of fashion.

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The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of British History at Hampton Court by Gareth Russell is available from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

If you visit a Shaoxing wine factory, you may walk past a stack of crumbly bricks made of some rough, pale, porous material. You’ll probably assume it’s debris left behind by negligent builders. But these bricks, this stuff, so unprepossessing to the eye, is one of the most important Chinese ingredients. You won’t see it in your bowl; you won’t smell or taste it directly; yet it’s an invisible presence in almost every Chinese meal. It is not merely an ingredient, but a ​­pre-​­ingredient, the progenitor of some of the most vital components of Chinese edible culture. Like a genie, it brings Chinese food and drink to life.

The bricks are made of what is known as ​­qu—which sounds like “choo,” but with a lovely ​­softness—a sort of coral reef teeming with des­­iccated microorganisms, enzymes, moulds and yeasts that will spring into action in the presence of water, ready to unleash themselves on all kinds of foods, especially those that are starchy. The Japanese, who learned about qu from China, call it koji ; it’s sometimes translated into English as “ferment.” When awakened, all these microorganisms will magically transform cooked beans, rice and other cereals, unravelling their ​­tight-​­knit starches into simple sugars, then fermenting the sugars into alcohol, meanwhile spinning off a whole aurora of intriguing flavors. It is qu that converts soybeans into soy sauce and jiang. Qu is the catalyst for fermenting alcoholic drinks from rice, millet and other cereals, as well as grain vinegars. It’s no exaggeration to say that qu is one of the keys to what makes Chinese food Chinese.

Since the Neolithic Age, people in China have been brewing alcoholic drinks from rice and millet. Transforming cereals into jiu (the general Chinese term for wines, ales and other types of liquor) presents particular challenges because, unlike grapes and other fruits, they lack accessible sugars that yeasts can devour and turn into alcohol. Before they can be fermented, the starches in the grains have to undergo saccharification, a process of hydrolysis that breaks them up into sugars that yeasts can digest. Making alcohol from grains is always a ​­multi-​­stage process, more complicated than fermenting wine from ​­grapes—which, as HT Huang says, is spontaneous and “practically unavoidable” because of the sugars in the fruit and the yeasts on their skins. Since grains, unlike grapes, have no natural enthusiasm for fermentation, they need encouragement. In northern Europe, malted grains are used to coax cereals into beer. But in China, people also worked out, very early on, how to harness the power of qu and its powerful collection of agents, including molds from the families Aspergillus, Rhizopus and Mucor.

It’s no exaggeration to say that qu is one of the keys to what makes Chinese food Chinese.

The qu used to brew Chinese wines and vinegars is made from ground grains, pulses or a mixture of both, raw or cooked, and often mixed with aromatic herbs whose flavors will linger in the final product. The mixture is moistened, shaped into blocks and kept in dark, humid conditions that foster the growth of great colonies of molds and yeasts. When the blocks are suitably moldy, they can be dried out and kept for ages. There are many types of qu. You can probably find at least one in your local Chinese supermarket: pale, chalky balls or tablets that can be used to make your own ​­sour-​­sweet rice wine. The qu used to ferment Shaoxing’s famous golden rice wine is made from ground wheat, while Sichuan’s Baoning vinegar is catalyzed by qu made from millet, wheat and sweet potatoes and infused with some twenty medicinal herbs. Other types of qu grow directly on the surface of foods that are the main ingredient of a fermented product: for example, broad beans are blanched, dusted with wheat flour and left to mold as part of the manufacture of Sichuan chilli bean paste, while cooked, ​­flour-​­shaken soybeans are left to grow a coat of qu during the process of making soy sauce, jiang and fermented black beans.

How the Chinese discovered the wonders of qu and its role in making wine remains a mystery, but historical and archaeological evidence suggests this happened more than four thousand years ago and possibly much earlier. HT Huang surmises that the earliest rice and millet wines made in China, which date back to the Neolithic period, were probably saccharified by the enzymes in sprouted grains, much as beer is made today (sprouted grains are no longer used in China to make wines, but are still employed there to turn starchy cereals into malt sugar, as they have been for thousands of years). Some time later, he suggests, people must have noticed that wines made with cooked grains that had been contaminated with mould turned out especially fragrant, and then realized they could dry and store such moldy grains without any loss of potency.

In any case, by the sixth century the first detailed recipes for cultivating qu appeared, in Jia Sixie’s agricultural treatise Essential Skills for the Common People (qimin yaoshu). Four chapters explained methods for making nine types of qu, which could then be used to manufacture ​­thirty-​­seven kinds of alcoholic brew. Only one kind of qu was made from millet, the rest from wheat in various proportions of raw and cooked grains, all ground up and mixed with water. The grainy pastes, sometimes infused with herbs, were shaped into cakes and fermented in special sheds with scrupulous attention to hygiene and ambient conditions. The transformational qualities of qu were acknowledged in the magical aspects of Jia’s recipes, one of which involves sacrificial incantations and prostrations before the spirits. One superior type of ferment was even called shen qu, “miraculous qu .” Jia’s ferments were not only used in the manufacture of alcoholic drinks and fermented soy products, but also fermented meat and fish pastes.

There is no aspect of Chinese food culture that fails to fascinate me, but I have barely opened the door on the subject of jiu, a vast field concerned with the fermentation and appreciation of mellow rice wines, searing sorghum liquors and other alcoholic beverages. Chinese friends and acquaintances have often lambasted me for my lack of interest in wine: “We call it food and drink culture, yinshi wenhua, the two are completely intertwined, how can you be so obsessed with Chinese food and yet ignore jiu  ?” There are two reasons for my avoidance of matters of jiu. The first is intellectual: Chinese food is a subject so rich and voluminous that it will keep me occupied until the day I die; I don’t have room in my head to explore the equally bottomless topic of alcohol. The second is practical: I cannot think deeply about food, discuss it with dining companions and take prolific notes when drunk.

As anyone Chinese or any foreigner who has lived in China will know, it’s hard to drink moderately while feasting in China. Once you have participated in a first round of toasting, usually with fiery baijiu (distilled grain liquor), toast will follow toast, unavoidably and inexorably, until you are lost. It is generally considered impolite at a Chinese dinner party to sip alcohol at one’s own pace. As a woman, however, I have one major advantage, which is that there is still less social pressure on women to drink than on men, and if I say at the beginning of a banquet that I’m teetotal, I can usually get away with it. One exception was during a trip a few years ago to Shandong, where the toasting was more ​­gung-​­ho, ritualistic and irresistible than anywhere else I’ve known, and I was forced into inebriation at almost every meal. The chaotic state of my notebooks from that trip, the handwriting sliding and crashing across the page, is a permanent reminder of those riotous days and nights.

But alcohol also has its culinary aspects. Strong liquors are used to inhibit bacterial growth when pickling: every Sichuanese granny will add a dash of baijiu to her pickle jar. Baijiu is occasionally also used in cooking, as in the Shanghainese favorite of ​stir-​­fried burr medic leaves “with the fragrance of wine” (jiu xiang caotou). More commonly in many parts of China, a bottle of milder cooking wine, liaojiu, is a kitchen ​­staple—like the basic Shaoxing wines you can find in every Chinese supermarket. Such wines, which have a similar alcoholic potency to sherry, are routinely used to dispel the “off-​­tastes” in fishy and meaty ingredients that Yi Yin talked about thousands of years ago, and which my teachers at the Sichuan cooking school mentioned in every class. Rice wine, along with salt, ginger and spring onions, shows up in marinades for fish, meat and poultry, and is used especially generously with ingredients such as red meats, kidneys and other offal where these unsavory notes are more pronounced. A dash of Shaoxing wine really does seem to refine the flavor of a steamed fish and to harmonize the flavors of a pork stock or stew. It is seldom added to vegetable dishes.

Another kind of jiu lends its delicate fragrance to sweet dishes across China, and can easily be made at home: fermented sticky rice wine, known as laozao in Sichuan, sweet jiu in Hunan and jiuniang in the Jiangnan region. Brewing your own laozao is one way to ­experience the magic of qu. All you need do is soak and then steam some sticky rice, mix it, while still faintly warm, with some powdered qu (buy a ball of wine yeast and pulverize it with a pestle and mortar), place it in a deep, spotlessly clean pot, make a well in the centre of the rice, cover the bowl and leave it in a warm place for a few days. During its seclusion, a miracle occurs: the microbes in the qu energetically digest the rice, transforming the pale starch into an array of sugars, lactic acid, amino acids, alcohol and aromatic molecules with a corresponding range of flavors, leaving behind what the food and science expert Harold McGee describes as the ‘ghosts’ of the rice, pappy grains floating in a fragrant liquid. This wine is sometimes used in steaming fish or marinating pork, but is most often found in the soupy desserts that the Chinese adore. One speciality of the Jiangnan region is jiuniang yuanzi, a sweet, faintly boozy soup in which sticky riceballs float among wisps of egg and tiny, golden osmanthus flowers. Women in Sichuan are nourished with a similar dish, with poached eggs added, after childbirth. (Unstrained or cloudy wines like this have been drunk in China for thousands of years; one, supposedly enjoyed by the concubine of the Tang Dynasty emperor Xuanzong, Yang Guifei, is offered by restaurants in the old Tang capital, Xi’an.)

While rice wine is used in cooking across China, it is in the Jiangnan region that it comes into its own, not merely as a corrective for undesirably fleshy flavors or a seasoning for sweet dishes, but as a significant flavoring in its own right. And as you might expect, there are few better places to explore the culinary uses of jiu than Shaoxing, the City of Yellow Wine, which has been a Chinese center of wine production for more than two millennia.

During a visit to Shaoxing a few years ago, I was shown around the Tang Song wine factory by a member of its staff, Han Jianrong. He explained how Shaoxing wine was the product of a particular terroir, its ingredients sticky rice, a mixture of well water and water from the nearby Jian Lake that was rich in minerals and, of course, the magical qu. Every year, he said, at the start of the winter production season, they made sacrifices to the spirit of the “Immortal of Wine,” the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai, renowned for his infatuation with drinking. To make the wine, they soaked the rice for fifteen days, steamed it (“in the past, over a wood fire”), spread it out to dry on bamboo mats, fermented the grains with qu, then pressed them to extract the liquid, which was pasteurized before decanting into handmade clay jars to mature for up to thirty years. One great storage room in the factory was stacked with these clay tanzi, their outsides striped with streaks of cleansing lime, their mouths sealed with lotus and bamboo leaves and rice husks mixed with clay. “The earthenware jars are essential,” said Han.”They add a certain fragrance, like the clay pots used to brew tea.”

The finished wines have a color that ranges from amber to garnet red, which is why they are known as “yellow wines” (huangjiu). After our tour of the factory, Han invited us to a tasting. “Shaoxing wine is similar to Japanese sake in its balance of sweetness, sourness and alcoholic strength, as well as its complex umami flavors, derived from the many amino acids generated by the fermentation,” he said. There are four main classes of Shaoxing wine, ranging from dry to sweet. Interestingly, they may be blended together at table to taste, with a little sweet wine, for example, added to a dry wine for guests with a sweet tooth. Those that are ​­medium-​­dry have the most harmonious balance of sour, sweet, bitter, pungent, spicy and astringent tastes, said Han, so they are the usual style for drinking, and for cooking certain classic dishes. “To make drunken crabs,” he said, “I’d recommend an ​­eight-​­year-​­old Huadiao.”

The Chinese have always viewed alcohol as a medicine that revitalizes the blood, and the factory also makes tonic wines infused with herbs and other traditional remedies. But rice wine also has medicinal functions in everyday eating. It’s an essential accompaniment to hairy crabs, for example, because, according to traditional dietetics, its “warming” qualities are thought to combat the crabs’ potentially dangerous froideur. Grain alcohols of any sort are rarely drunk with staple foods: people say the combination of booze and cereals can encourage an unhealthy fermentation in the stomach. This is why, at Chinese banquets, grain foods are never served until the end of the meal, when all the toasts have been drunk and the cai, the dishes, enjoyed. If you accept an offer of rice or noodles towards the conclusion of a formal Chinese dinner, this will be interpreted as a signal that you have had enough to drink.

Shaoxing is one of the few cities in Jiangnan whose old ​­canal-​­town atmosphere has survived the ravages of several decades of reckless urban development and excessive tourism. You can stroll down a street of ​­grey-​­tiled, whitewashed houses, with narrow alleys leading down to the bank of a canal where stone steps disappear into the water. ​­Old-​­fashioned shops sell medicinal herbs from wooden drawers or dispense Shaoxing wine and pickles. In a courtyard, someone has spread out on a bamboo mat a whole shoal of tiny, silvery fish that are drying in the bright sunlight. An old man sells goose eggs stewed with spices, crackled like old marble, and ​­deep-​­fried fish to nibble. Down by the canal, residents sit on shady, waterfront terraces, surrounded by potted plants: tomatoes, aubergines and brightly colored flowers. In the shade of a ​­tile-​­roofed colonnade along the water, a street vendor makes wafers in a blackened iron over a charcoal grill, stuffing them with nuts and sugar before they harden as they cool. Opposite, a man washes his clothes in a basin.

Locals say that Shaoxing has a “three-​­crock culture,” so central to its life and livelihood are the clay urns used to mature wine, soy sauce and dyes for the textile trade. The old streets are haunted by the scents of fermentation, especially the heady aroma of meigancai, a local preserve made by salting and then ​­sun-​­drying mustard greens. Shops sell meigancai of different types and vintages, dried fish and fermented tofu. There are clay jars of Shaoxing wine in their woven bamboo cradles; some are brightly painted with auspicious symbols. In Shaoxing, lives used to be measured in wine. “Haircut wine” (ti tou jiu) was quaffed to mark the first haircut of a newborn baby when it was one month old. Jars were laid down upon the birth of a daughter, to be drunk at her future wedding (some Shaoxing wine is still called “daughter in red,” nu’er hong, red being the festive color of weddings and other celebrations).

Even the touristy center of the old town, where gaggles of schoolchildren troop round the former home of Lu Xun, China’s acclaimed modernist writer, retains some of its old-fashioned charm. A calligrapher paints lines of poetry on fans to order. Local sampans with woven bamboo awnings, all painted black, drift by on a stretch of canal. A low building in the traditional style with an open front has a great sign that says “Universal Prosperity Tavern (xianheng jiujia).” Here, you can sit at a wooden table, sipping Shaoxing wine and nibbling chewy broad beans infused with the scent of star anise (huixiang dou) and lacquered sparrows’ wings, the local equivalents of crisps and pork scratchings in an English pub. The tavern is fiction made real: it was inspired by one of the same name in Lu Xun’s tale of a scorned, impoverished scholar, Kong Yiji.

It is not merely an ingredient, but a ​­pre-​­ingredient, the progenitor of some of the most vital components of Chinese edible culture.

The first time I visited Shaoxing, the executive chef of the Universal Prosperity Tavern invited my friends and me for lunch. Mao Tianyao, a modest, understated man, is one of the foremost custodians of Shaoxing culinary culture. He has written an entire book about meigancai, the adored local pickle, and has a contagious passion for the food of his hometown. Before we began to eat, we drank some Shaoxing wine poured from a xihu, an ​­old-​­fashioned tin carafe with fish decorations and a pointy spout like a teapot.

The dishes Mao served us that day were unlike anything I’d tasted in more than fifteen years of Chinese culinary adventures, and kindled in me an enduring love and fascination for Shaoxing flavors. Aside from the ​­anise-​­perfumed beans, given iconic status by their appearance in Lu Xun’s tale, we ate cubes of belly pork steamed with dark meigancai, which gave the meat an almost Marmitey intensity of taste, and chunks of braised pork bound in bamboo leaves that were served cool with their jellied juices. There were quivering fish balls, soft as custard, in a soup with bamboo shoots and ham, and punchy fermented relishes.

Several dishes had been made with Shaoxing wine. ​­Smoky-​­black jujubes, soused in wine, had a flavor like an alcoholic Lapsang Souchong tea, while a similar steeping gave dried fish its own “drunken” perfume. Another seasoning I’d not come across before was Shaoxing wine lees, jiuzao, the brown mulch of exhausted grains left behind after the fermentation of the wine. Dried out, it can be layered with salt fish, to which it lends its bewitching aroma; the mulch can also be boiled up with water, salt and other seasonings and then strained to make zaolu, a golden elixir with a floral fragrance and an umami intensity reminiscent of fish sauce, in which cooked ingredients such as offal, seafood and fresh vegetables can be steeped. On this occasion, Mao presented us with zao ji, strips of ​­yellow-​­skinned chicken that had been poached and then steeped in a salty wine-lees brine; it was served in a clay jar, its flesh cold, taut and aromatic. “An essential New Year’s dish,” he said. “Once the chicken was made this way to preserve it for a week or so; now we do it for the flavor.”

The fragrance of Shaoxing wine is also employed in more oblique and imaginative ways, both in Jiangnan and beyond. Wine lees are mixed into the wet clay used to coat a roasted “beggar’s chicken,” where their particular scent combines deliciously with the perfume of the lotus leaves in which the bird is wrapped. Just as old oak wine casks may be used to lend flavor to maturing grape wines, a pottery jar, emptied of its Shaoxing wine, is the essential vessel for cooking the Fujianese banquet dish “Monk jumps over a wall,” fo tiao qiang: the scent of this opulent stew of dried abalone, shark’s fin, sea cucumbers and other luxuries, drifting over a temple wall, is said to be so irresistible that it will induce a monk to abandon his vow of vegetarianism. And of course, Shaoxing wine, used in lavish quantities, is key to what makes Dongpo pork so sublime.

Sometime before the Yuan Dynasty, a new kind of qu was cultivated. This was “red qu ,” created when, in certain conditions, red Monascus fungi flourish amid the moldy microbial cultures that grow on grains of rice. It was to become a speciality of southeastern Fujian Province, where it adds a rosy hue to some local wines and to stewed meats and other dishes prepared with the ruddy, mashy residue from ​­wine-​­making. “Red qu ” is also added to the brine used to cure a type of fermented tofu (known as “southern milk,” nan ru), giving the cubes a deep pink color. It is also a traditional food coloring, stamped on to sweet pastries and dumplings in dots and auspicious patterns. Most Chinese supermarkets in the west stock packets of dried “red qu rice,” in which the dried rice grains are covered in a purplish layer of mould that turns magenta when soaked in water.

Rice wine and all its associated dishes are, in my besotted view, only the start of the gastronomic attractions of Shaoxing. Local people’s penchant for fermented and preserved foods spins off in unconventional directions, in particular into a whole genre of what they call “stinky and rotten” (chou mei) delicacies. Stinky tofu, made by steeping slabs of plain white tofu in a brine made from fermented vegetables, is found across the Jiangnan region, but in Shaoxing this process is just the first step in some strangely compelling flavor adventures. People here make their stinky brine by harvesting woody, overgrown amaranth stalks, cutting them into ​­inch-​­long sections and allowing them to decompose in a clay jar until they smell as disgusting as a blocked drain. The stems themselves acquire a heady aroma that is both disturbing and compelling; locals steam them on a bed of silken tofu or a minced pork patty, to which they lend their funky flavor; the tubular stems can then be sucked dry of their vestiges of skin and pulp. Their fermentation brine is used for steeping not only tofu, but other ingredients such as green vegetables and chunks of pumpkin, which it infuses with a thrilling, ​­fair-​­foul aroma, as seductive as the scent of a ripe Camembert. These stinky foods, along with preserved vegetables and dried fish, strike a distinctive chord with the mellowness of Shaoxing wine, one that is found in no other Chinese cuisine.

Similar to chicken steeped in wine lees is “drunken chicken,” soaked in a salty brine based on Shaoxing wine, which is properly served in an earthenware pot and one of a whole family of “drunken” dishes. In some, the ingredients are more literally intoxicated. In the late 1990s, a friend in Shanghai gave me my first taste of drunken crab, made by sousing live freshwater crabs first in strong baijiu liquor and then, for a day or two, in Shaoxing wine flavored with soy sauce and sugar and laced with aromatics. Traditionally, the sozzled crabs, by now expired, are eaten ​­raw—a local exception to the general rule that the Chinese shun uncooked foods (with the excuse that alcohol is said to inhibit dangerous bacteria and the ingredients are transformed from their raw state by a kind of pickling). That drunken crab initiation will be impressed on my tongue for ever. ​­Ice-​­cold and vividly slimy, with a scintillating kick of liquor, the flesh and ovaries of the crab made me shiver with pleasure. They were as creamily voluptuous as foie gras, yet simultaneously as brisk and arresting as a raw oyster. Of all the delicious things I have eaten in my life, I would place raw drunken crabs near the peak of gastronomic pleasure.

Recently, when raw drunken crabs were banned by the Shanghai local authorities on health grounds, I discovered that they, like other raw freshwater creatures, can carry nasty parasites such as liver ​­fluke—a reminder of why human beings might try to avoid “drinking blood and eating feathers.” These days, ​­law-​­abiding Shanghai restaurants only serve drunken crabs after steaming: while still delicious, they lack that visceral twang of ecstasy. Raw drunken crabs have become an illicit pleasure, exciting and risky, available only by special order in private dining rooms. Here, Shanghainese sophisticates can still suck at the wet, briny ovaries of a raw crab and walk on the wild side, the side that still strains at the leash of civilization and yearns to run naked through the forest. As for myself, while I generally avoid the drunkenness of baijiu, I embrace the intoxicating pleasures of drunken dishes, especially crabs. So far (touch wood), I’ve been spared the liver flukes and other unwelcome visitors. Like the ​­seventeenth-​­century writer Li Yu, I dream of crabs, and I dream of them drunken.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop. Copyright © 2023. First published in 2023 in Great Britain by Penguin UK.  Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

He lays a hand on my arm. He looks me in the eyes, and then, resignedly, he looks off toward the mountains. Then at me again. “I killed a man, Witold, do you understand?” Again he looks away, at the sky; clearly, talking to me is not bringing him the kind of relief he might have been hoping for. “He was standing next to me, roughly as far away as my brother is now.” And he points at his brother, who is sitting quite close by. “And I shot him dead, you see?”

Then he waits for me to say something.

I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know how to enter into the mood of this conversation. It’s 2009 and in the place we’re sitting, just a year earlier, the Russian invasion of Georgia was under way. I’m wondering how to get myself out of this pickle. I’m on my own, drunk, among some Georgians the size of oak trees; we’re surrounded by mountains I can’t name. A while ago they told me they’re descended from princes—as I already know, here in the Caucasus there’s often someone claiming to be royalty.

But then they started telling me that their great-uncle was Stalin’s brother—that’s an advance on the usual story, because although everyone in Georgia is proud of Stalin, I’ve never met any of his cousins before.

Especially since I know that Stalin’s brothers died as soon as they were born.

But now they’re telling me about the Russian soldiers they killed during the recent war between Russia and Georgia. Four big, beefy guys, with necks like tree trunks.

It’s all too much for me. I’m trying to devise an escape plan.

But before I can make a move, one of the men lunges at me. He pins me down. And holds on.

*

He couldn’t stand cooking. When he was a child, his mother had various jobs. One of them was as a cook. Supposedly that was why for the rest of his life Joseph Stalin hated the smell of food being cooked, and had all the kitchens serving his dachas and houses built at a distance—which was true of the dacha in New Athos that I visited in Abkhazia.

When he and his comrades were exiled to Siberia by the tsar, they agreed that they would share all the duties equally—the cooking, the cleaning, and the procurement of food. But it soon became clear that Stalin had no intention of cooking or cleaning. He just went hunting and fishing.

Yakov Sverdlov, who was in exile with Stalin, was particularly angry with him. “We were meant to cook the dinners ourselves,” recalled Stalin years later. “At the time I had a dog, and I named him Yashka, which naturally displeased Sverdlov, because he too was Yashka [the diminutive of Yakov]. After dinner Sverdlov always washed the spoons and plates, but I never did. I ate my food, put my plates on the floor, the dog licked them, and everything was clean.”

Toward the end of their exile, when they were living with a third communist, Lev Kamenev, whenever it was time to wash the dishes, Stalin would flee the house.

After the revolution he ate with his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, at the Kremlin canteen, which in those days had the reputation of being one of the worst in Moscow.

The French writer and communist Henri Barbusse visited Stalin shortly after Alliluyeva’s suicide and said of his living conditions: “The bedrooms are as simply furnished as those of a respectable second-class hotel. The dining room is oval in shape; the meal has been sent in from a neighboring restaurant. In a capitalist country a junior office clerk would turn up his nose at the bedrooms and complain about the fare.”

According to Vyacheslav Molotov, who headed the Soviet diplomatic corps, Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins.

*

Let’s go back to my meeting in the mountains.

It all started innocently enough. I was in Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, in the beautiful mountains of central Georgia. I was driving around the picturesque neighboring villages to find the local wine producers that used to supply the Kremlin cellars—the only wine Stalin drank was Georgian.

“Wine producers” sounds very grand. In fact, every self-respecting farmer in Georgia has some vines and reliably makes fantastic wine, as well as a sort of brandy, often 70 percent proof, known as chacha. It was a cottage industry of this kind that I was looking for.

The Georgians’ boundless hospitality made my work impossible—because how can you get any work done when everyone you visit brings out the wine and the chacha and has to treat you before they’ll answer your questions? After half an hour you’re too well oiled, and besides, the day is still young, the nature is beautiful, your host is friendly, so why on earth do any work? And then once we’d had a drink, every single host told me that a plane used to fly from Moscow just to fetch Stalin’s wine. What’s more, every other host swore he had documents to prove it, and two of them even showed them to me, though first of all, they were in Georgian, and second, I was too tipsy to understand them or remember anything about them.

So I’d been having a jolly time driving around Gori for several days when I encountered the first of the Tarkanishvili brothers. He was in his off-road vehicle, just leaving the allotment he’d inherited. He had a bit of a paunch, and he was wearing a cap with the logo of an American basketball team. When he heard what I was looking for, he told me, in broken Russian, to call him that evening.

“You won’t regret it,” he said. “My family has a better story about Stalin than anyone else. In all of Gori.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

*

The following evening the brothers drove me into the mountains. They tossed into the back of their pickup truck a sheep that they’d butchered for shashliks. On the way all four of them started talking over one another:

“As a true son of our land, Stalin created a ‘little Georgia’ for himself in Russia. And did what he could to be surrounded by Georgians. Best of all, family.”

“Your family won’t betray you because they know that if they did, they’d have nowhere to come home to.”

“That’s why he kept all his sidekicks, those Molotovs and Khrushchevs, on a short leash. They knew that one false move and blam! You’re gone, grand Mr. People’s Commissar. Only the Georgians had peace.”

And so our journey flew by. On the way the gentlemen told me about their sports successes: one was a wrestling trainer, another trained weight lifters. They managed competitors at the international level.

By the time we reached the mountains, we were very well acquainted and fairly well canned, and the brothers finally decided to tell me about Stalin.

“For many years it was a secret—our father told us the story of Uncle Sasha, but he always stressed that we weren’t to repeat it to anyone…”

“Which was pointless, because in Georgia everyone knew anyway…”

“Our great-uncle Alexander, or Sasha, was Stalin’s brother. Don’t look at me like that! He was his brother. Boys, he doesn’t believe us…”

“He will soon. Listen, Witold. Stalin’s mother worked for our great-grandfather as a cook. And once or twice he and she…well, you know, they did what guys and gals do. When he found out she was pregnant, he married her off to the illiterate cobbler Vissarion.”

“Vissarion knew how to write! But he drank like a fish.”

“I heard he couldn’t count to three. Whatever the case, he had no idea what was going on. And when he realized, he took to beating the kid badly—really badly.”

“Little Stalin was always running away to spend time with our great-uncle Sasha, who was the same age as him, and who was also the son of our great-grandfather. They became friends, and many years later Great-uncle Sasha became Stalin’s cook and food taster at the Kremlin. Well, look at that—he still doesn’t believe us.”

It’s true. I didn’t believe a single word.

*

For many years Stalin, following Lenin’s example, didn’t attach much importance to food—those men of the revolution were sustained by something else. Just like Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva was clueless about cooking. Whereas Stalin himself knew how to make pretty good shashliks—he’d learned that at home in Georgia.

But when Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932—some say she couldn’t take it when she realized her husband had deliberately starved Ukraine—Stalin wanted nothing to do with shashliks or any other food. He became withdrawn and sank into a depression. Like others in the government he ate at the Kremlin, in the canteen. For the children who remained with him, the state hired a cook, apparently a rather average one.

Many years later Vyacheslav Molotov recalled that the food cooked for Stalin “was very simple and unpretentious.” In the winter he was always served meat soup with sauerkraut, and in the summer, fresh cabbage soup. For a second course there was buckwheat with butter and a slice of beef. For dessert, if there was any, cranberry jelly or dried fruit compote. “It was the same as during an ordinary Soviet summer vacation, but throughout the year.”

The brothers went on to tell me several stories about their great-uncle, and then about the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. The oldest one, Rati, really did lunge at me. But it turned out he just wanted to hug me and raise a toast to Poland’s president, Lech Kaczyński—the Georgians adore him because he defended their country against Russian aggression. For them, the brothers told me, Kaczyński is as great a hero as Stalin.

The next morning, once we had sobered up enough for one of them to be able to drive, they drove me back to Gori. We said goodbye with less enthusiasm, as you do when you have a hangover, but we promised one another we’d be friends for the rest of our lives. And although I haven’t seen them since, I remember our meeting with great fondness. But for many years I filed away the story about the great-uncle who cooked for Stalin along with the myths and fairy tales that people sometimes tell me on my travels.

I was very much mistaken. Great-uncle Sasha really did exist. More than that, he genuinely revolutionized Stalin’s eating habits; he got him out of the depressing Kremlin canteen and reminded him of the wonders and vitality of Georgian cuisine, as well as the virtues of the Georgian feast with friends. Stalin made use of these lessons to the end of his days.

Was he really the great-uncle of the four brothers who treated me to lamb shashliks that night? That I don’t know and am likely never to find out—I have tried to find them again, to no avail.

__________________________________

Excerpted from What’s Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork by Witold Szabłowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Copyright © 2023. Available from Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Onions remained predominantly a wild plant in the Americas much longer than in Europe and Asia.

The French explorer Jacques Marquette, traveling the shore of what is now Lake Michigan in 1674, relied for nourishment on an onion that the Indigenous locals called cigaga-wunj, which means “onion place” and is the origin of the name Chicago. In more recent times it has come to be known as the Canada onion, Allium canadense, and it grows wild in much of North America from New Brunswick to Florida and west to the Rocky Mountains. It is fairly easy to spot because it has a very strong onion scent and it flowers spectacularly in great globes of little pink or white blossoms. Today it is favored as an ornamental plant.

But some historians and naturalists insist that the wild onion that gave Chicago its name was actually the nodding wild onion, Allium cernuum. It is called nodding because it does not stand erect and, unusual for onions, is bent over even when flowering. It announces itself with white or deep pink or rose flowers with a strong scent of onion. According to a description from the 1890s, these onions look “bright on the whole since the reddish hues prevail. They are often in such quantities and grow so thickly that little else is noticeable where they stand.”

Such bright wild patches are a very rare sight today, even in their native habitat such as the Chicago area, though they are also found in Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

*

There are seventy species of wild onion native to North America. Native American Indians harvested them and sometimes ate them raw, but also used them to flavor cooked dishes or would eat them as a cooked vegetable. Onions were also used in syrups and in dyeing. Roasted wild onions and honey were used by Native Americans to treat snakebites.

There does not appear to have been much cultivation of alliums by Native North Americans, with the notable exception of the Aztecs. But Europeans could not imagine life without cultivated onions and so brought them with them.

Christopher Columbus, apparently finding no onions on his first voyage to the Caribbean, which was a voyage of exploration, brought along onion seeds, cattle, horses, and sheep on his second voyage, which was a voyage of colonization. In 1494 his crew planted onions in what is now the Dominican Republic.

But Mexicans may have already cultivated alliums. Hernán Cortés, in his march of conquest from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, found that the local people cooked onions, leeks, and garlic. According to Cortés, they ate an onion called xonacatl. This is a word in Nahuatl, the original Aztec language that is still in use. Today it means “onion,” but what kind of onion the original xonacatl was is not certain. In Mayan the word is kukut. Francisco Hernández, a physician to Philip II of Spain, was sent to Mexico from 1570 to 1577 to report on the flora. According to Hernández, xonacatl was an onion with a “split roof,” which probably meant a split bulb, more like a shallot.

Pre-Spanish cooking, much of which is still in practice, does not use a great deal of alliums. The rich sauces called moles involved dozens of ground-up ingredients but rarely an onion. The famous mole from Puebla, mole poblana, uses some five different chili peppers, chocolate, ground tortilla, seeds, and a dozen other ingredients including garlic, but no onions. Mole manchamanteles does include both boiled onions and garlic on its long ingredient list. Mole de olla also uses both onions and garlic.

It is far easier to trace pre-Spanish Mexican cooking than Sumerian, because the Spanish recorded what they found and the Indigenous people still have their culture and are continuing to cook the dishes they made before the Spanish arrived. Some modern inventions have crept in. City tortillas now are made by machine, but the people in Indigenous villages think this is a disgrace and tortillas there are still made by hand, exclusively by women. Recipes still call for xonacatl, but today cooks usually use the onion the Spanish brought. This is historian Heriberto García Rivas’s recipe for xonacatl in his cookbook Cocina prehispánica mexicana:

In a little hot chia oil, fry three onions finely chopped. Add three ripe zucchini squash, peeled and  quartered, a tablespoon of yucca or sweet potato flour, stir with a wooden spoon, mix in six large peeled and seeded tomatoes, maguey or corn syrup, salt, pepper, herbs, cook slowly.

*

It is not certain that the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest ate the bulbs of wild onions, but it is known that, like ancient Europeans, they ate other bulbs. They were particularly fond of camas, Camassia quamash, which, like onions, used to be thought of as a lily variety. More recent botanists have decided it is in the family of the agave.

White pioneers learned to eat camas in desperate times, noting that it was similar to but sweeter than an onion. But there is another camas that is deadly poisonous, known as “the death camas,” which grows among the edible camas and creates understandable reluctance among newcomers to harvest these bulbs. After the Nez Perce gave some good camas to Lewis and Clark, Lewis described it as “a tunicated bulb, much the consistence, shape and appearance of the onion; glutinous or somewhat slymy when chewed.” He thought lilies and hyacinths tasted better.

As in Europe, Native Americans were extremely fond of the wild onion called ramps, or ramson, a strong-smelling species. They cooked ramps as a vegetable sautéed in acorn oil. These alliums are among the first green vegetables to come up in the spring when little else is available and so were greatly valued, even used in religious rites by some tribes, including Chippewa, Cherokee, Ojibwa, Menominee, and Iroquois.

Early European colonists considered eating ramps to be a desperate move, and their smell was associated with extreme poverty, but they learned from Native Americans and these wild vegetables became an important resource for starving settlers. Native Americans continue to value these wild plants, but because of overharvesting and destruction of wild lands, they are becoming hard to find. They often grow undisturbed on the lands of national parks, but the reason they are undisturbed is that picking wild plants from national parks is illegal.

Native groups have tried to be granted an exception, but that is a difficult fight. Cherokee were charged in 2009 with illegally harvesting ramps from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, despite the park being situated on their traditional plantgathering lands. This is an ongoing fight for a number of Native American groups.

Europeans preferred cultivated onions because that was what they were used to. One hundred and fifty years after Columbus, there were still few onions cultivated in the Caribbean or North America. When Richard Ligon, escaping the English Civil War, moved to Barbados in 1647, he carried with him not only seeds for sage, tarragon, parsley, and marjoram, but also onion seeds, and thus began Barbados’s onion cultivation.

The first Pilgrims brought onions with them on the Mayflower. Onions were planted in Massachusetts in 1629 and in Virginia in 1648. The founding father known to be a great onion eater, George Washington, seemed passionate about them, and ordered onions to be planted at Mount Vernon, according to a 1798 report. Thomas Jefferson left detailed accounts that show that onions were a staple crop on his Virginia estate, Monticello, before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, and even on land he owned before construction began on the estate in 1769. He seemed to have favored white Spanish onions, but Madeira and tree onions were also planted. Amelia Simmons, author of the first cookbook published in independent America, in Hartford in 1796, recommended Madeira white onions if you prefer a “softer” flavor and “not too fiery.” But, like Pliny, she also recommended red onions.

By 1806 the new Americans were raising six varieties of onions, and by the time of the Civil War, there were fourteen popular varieties.

*

The Easterners who went west in the mid-nineteenth century found few onions under cultivation. They greatly missed them, even though they liked to call them “skunk eggs” because of their strong smell. Because of their ability to store well, onions later became a basic provision for migrating pioneers on the wagons that went west. An 1860 issue of Hutchings’ California Magazine listed onions as one of the “necessities” for an eight-day journey into the mountains.

Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the widow of the infamous George Armstrong Custer, did not write of his racism and genocide, but she did write about onions while camping in the west with Custer, saying that they were “as rare out there, and more appreciated than pomegranates are in New York.”

Custer and his younger brother Tom, who also died on the Little Bighorn, were zealous cepaphiles. But apparently, in a rare criticism, Elizabeth was not fond of her husband’s onion breath. In an 1873 letter to his wife while on an expedition to the Yellowstone River, Custer wrote that he was filling up on onions now that he was away from her. “I supped on RAW ONIONS; I will probably breakfast, lunch and dine on them tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after ad libitum ad infinitum . . . Go it old fellow! Make the most of your liberties! . . . If you intend to eat raw onions now is your only time for ‘missus is comin.’ ”

Custer seems to have taken onions as he found them, but some Americans wanted more—they wanted them bigger, smaller, stronger, milder, sweeter. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries onions were to become big business.

 __________________________________

From The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food – Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes by Mark Kurlansky, on sale November 7th from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 2023. All rights reserved.

I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet.

I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal. I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. “A bottle of vermouth,” he said, “you should just open it and look at it.” Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand. When I do add vermouth I apply Hemingway’s formula, 15:1, in honor of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who liked gin to outnumber vermouth in the same ratio he wanted to outnumber opponents in battle. The toast I make, with whoever is present, is usually the one I learned from the late Caroline Herron, a former editor at the Times Book Review: “To the confusion of our enemies.” The toast Jack Nicholson makes in Easy Rider—“To old D. H. Lawrence”—isn’t bad, either.

“The world and its martinis are mine!” Patricia Highsmith exclaimed in her diaries. Martinis inspire this sort of enthusiasm. Frederick Seidel, in his poem “At Gracie Mansion,” refers to an ice-cold martini as a “see-through on a stem.” The poet Richard Wilbur liked to add “fennel juice and foliage” to his. I’d like to be like Eloise, in the children’s book by Kay Thompson, and keep a bottle of gin in my bedroom. If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.

Occasionally I’ll mix a vodka martini, recalling that Langston Hughes appeared in a Smirnoff advertisement. Vodka martinis flush out the snobs, who don’t consider them martinis at all. Roger Angell, whose New Yorker essay “Dry Martini” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, admitted that he and his wife moved from gin to vodka because vodka was “less argumentative.” The best paean to the vodka martini appears in Lawrence Osborne’s amazing book The Wet and the Dry, which is about trying to get a drink in countries where to do so is against the law. Osborne decides that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster.”

Don’t get all excited, as did Kenneth Tynan, and try to take your vodka martini rectally. Tynan had read, in Alan Watts’s autobiography, that this was a good idea. Tynan had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.

I make my first drink on the late side because I like it too much. I also want to prolong the anticipation. Alcohol is, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, constant proof that God loves us. I drink more than most people but less than some. I don’t have an especially big tank; my tolerance is not Homeric. But almost nightly I drink two martinis and, with dinner, a glass or two of wine, without negative effects in the morning. If I have that third glass of wine, my morning at the desk becomes an afternoon at the desk.

Drinking alone doesn’t depress me, the way it does some people. Franklin didn’t recommend it. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone,” he wrote. But Christopher Hitchens said that solo drinks “can be the happiest glasses you ever drain,” and Norman Mailer, in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, praised what he called “that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking.” When alone, I’ll put on good loud music, of the sort my wife, Cree, does not especially like (jazz or Hüsker Dü) and read magazines and eat cheese until I get tiddly and head for bed. But I prefer companions. When I learn that someone new is coming over, I mentally ask the same questions Kingsley Amis did: “Does he drink? Is he jolly?” Alcohol can bring out the poetry in a person’s soul.

In 2006, Gary Shteyngart, the irrepressible author of novels such as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story, gave an interview to the Denver-based magazine Modern Drunkard. It’s one of the great interviews of the new century and some enterprising young editor should print it as a chapbook. In the meantime, find it online and send the link to your friends. James Baldwin may have said, “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink,” but that was a long time ago. Shteyngart’s complaint is that writers don’t belly up to the bar with the enthusiasm they once did. “We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone.” He added, “It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.” I’ve tried my best to keep Gary, from my own apartment, company.

“Why didn’t everyone drink?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in Book Four of My Struggle. “Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”

Dawn Powell made a similar point in her diaries. “A person is like blank paper with secret writing,” she wrote, “sometimes never brought out, other times brought out by odd chemicals.” In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq wrote, “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.” Amis—a copy of his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis should be in every home—put it this way: “The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”

America’s founders understood all this. Barbara Holland, in her book The Joy of Drinking, reminded her readers that in 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Fifty-five delegates consumed fifty-four bottles of Madeira? Which founder let the side down?

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Excerpted from The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Dwight Garner. All rights reserved

I’d finished writing, I thought, when I sent the essay to my editor, but my editor had other ideas. Questions came back for which I had no answers. Suggestions came back with which I did not agree. The clock was ticking, I knew, and in New York the clock ticks faster than it ticks here in Tennessee. I went to the woods anyway.

People often ask how long it takes me to write an essay, and I wish I knew how to answer. When I start, I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know what wandering route I must take to get there. The whole thing is an exercise in faith. It begins with an image, a feeling, a vague sense of why something matters to me. It never begins with a plan. I just start writing and trust the words to keep coming. I need the words themselves to guide me, to tell me where to go and why. When I lead workshops, I tell young writers to write. That is my whole pedagogy: Just write. Trust the words to come. If they don’t come, go for a walk.

Always I find more answers in a forest than I find in my own hot attic of a mind. Scientists have made studies of the walking brain, and the results are dumbfounding. Given a test that measures creativity, college students sitting at a table produced unremarkable results. But when scientists put them on a treadmill, or sent them for a walk around campus, their brains lit up like the night sky. The students who walked produced 60 percent more original ideas than the students who were seated.

The study measured only the cognitive effects of a body in motion, walking on a treadmill or along a familiar route. I would like to see an fMRI image of a mind in a forest, even one as carefully managed as my local park, where the trails are mulched with donated Christmas trees. A forest so small that the cars on nearby roads are audible from every place on the trail.

It was raining the day I was on deadline, and I like the woods best in rain. There are fewer people on the path. The dampness softens the ground and muffles the sound of my own footsteps. The heat-dulled leaves of the canopy grow visibly greener. The understory goes greener still.

Best of all, in a wet world deadfall and soil erupt into fungi. Delicate whorls of polypores make a bouquet of fallen pines. Bright elf cups are scattered across the leaf litter as though a parade has passed by. Glowing angel wing mushrooms fruit on the hemlock like a bridal veil trailing along the path. Chicken of the woods make yellow and orange ruffles fit for a square dancer’s skirt. Oh, their marvelous fungi names! Firerug inkcap, turkey tail, witch’s hat, stinkhorn, jelly fungus, shaggy scarlet cup!

These are flowers of the shady forest, the silent scavengers of deadwood and rotting leaves. In living trees, they can form a symbiosis, colonizing roots and helping trees absorb nutrients, creating vast underground networks that allow trees to communicate with one another and even share resources. In dead trees, fungi soften wood, making it hospitable for insects, a place that can be carved out by birds in need of a nesting site, or animals in need of a hiding place or shelter from the cold. Fungi, too, can turn death into life.

I rely on apps and field guides to identify mushrooms, but their color variations seem to be endless, and I have no idea if I’m right. I would never eat a mushroom that grows wild in the woods. There are too many ways to be dead wrong, an adjective I choose deliberately, and too many purposes for fungi when they remain in the woods. I squat, I admire, I take pictures, I move on.

In one fallen tree, the transformation has been unfolding for so long that a little cave has opened up where a branch once joined the living oak. Over years, dead leaves collected in the cavity and turned into soil. In the shelter of that death-opened place, new green life has sprung up: moss and clover and some sort of trailing vine I can’t identify. In the center, as carefully arranged as if a florist had planned it for a centerpiece, rises one woodland violet. Every time I see it, I remind myself to come back in springtime to see it in bloom.

By the time I reached the violet that day, I had already stayed out too long, but suddenly I understood how to fix the problem in my essay. I texted my editor to tell him I was on my way back to my desk. As an apology for my tardiness, I included a photo of the secret terrarium in the fallen oak.

“Like a little tree womb,” he wrote back.

And that’s exactly what it is. It’s what all trees are when we leave them alone.

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Excerpted from The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl. Used with permission of the publisher, Spiegel & Grau. Copyright © by Margaret Renkl.

I used to be a chef. Some might say “once a chef, always a chef—.” I don’t. I cooked through college to pay the rent, and some of my bosses were cool enough to let me experiment because I was curious, wanted to learn more about how things are the way they are. I came to understand this as art-energy. It was raw tongue and fire-proof hands and swollen feet in 120-degree heat.

Food haunts me like music does. Sometimes a flavor reveals itself in color, other times the sound of butter crackling in a hot pan is a sign from the universe—I must walk off the line to play drums or jump into the ocean, exchange sweat-salt for sea salt. There is magic in food. Yet I dreamed of wriggling my way out to become a writer, which my body understood but my brain had been convinced was an unattainable dream.

I co-owned a restaurant in Puerto Rico for nearly ten years. I was born with salmon on my tongue, but my family comes from the tops of extinct volcanoes rising from the desert in Dinétah in Arizona and New Mexico. When I missed home I ordered fresh Anaheim chiles to roast, skin, and freeze, and I had beans and hominy shipped in for brunch, that most-hated shift of our brood. We made our own bacon with heritage pork bellies, baked biscuits, made our own sausage. Everyone raved about the duck confit hash, crisped in smoking duck fat, topped with a poached egg and hollandaise.

I ate a lot of fish down there: blackfin, skipjack, yellowfin. I cut dorado so fresh, their muscles twitched as if tickled by my fingers in their open bellies. Braised lamb shank was another favorite—braised anything, really, because it’s the process that matters most, the slow build, the long simmer in a low-temp bath. One of my favorite things to prepare was duck. The ones we got slid out of a waxy cardboard box naked and headless. The breasts I cured and smoked. I would confit the legs in their own juicy juices, and roast the rest of the carcass for stock.

Processes are a series of moments in passing. We get better, more efficient, at the peel, fry and smash of tostones from a branch of platanos a farmer drops off ten minutes before service. I was determined to be defined not by my final product, but how I drove up the hills in Rincón in search of green papayas to yank from their milky stems in order to make that famous salad. More than the customers’ preferences, I was interested in the communities we built, in part by sourcing locally: we had potion-makers, brewers, distillers; I chose fishermen based on how burnt beyond red they were—crisp—and because their rates were fair, and they bled the tuna well.

I wouldn’t let my cooks call me ‘chef,’ kind of like how later I only half-believed myself if I introduced myself as a poet or writer. For a second there I thought I may have been one of the nicest chefs I’d ever worked for, but it didn’t take too long for me to resemble the kind I hated, the red-nosed and puffy-eyed cynic, mean and conceded, the pride of a tidbitting cock a shining display of red waddles, combs, and giblets. Maybe I wasn’t cocky, though I did start to feel rage, and frequent panic attacks. Chefs rarely mean anything personal when they scream at you through the server window; we’ll always drink Medalla and whiskey after the shift, blasting Motörhead or Madonna if that last table ever gets up.

Kitchen work gets you down, burns you out. Maybe you’ve heard it’s tribal, too. My first kitchen job, I recognized kin in those clowns preparing delicious, precise, and consistent food at a frantic pace, and I admired them. Between the age of 18 and 34, I worked in restaurants in Flagstaff, Santa Cruz, Portland, Olympia, Fairbanks, New York, Chicago, Rincón. No matter where I went, there they were: fellow misfits and migrants and mentally ill, vagabonds and artists, a wild tribe where I felt comfortable, but didn’t belong, necessarily. I was smart (i.e., anxious) and ambitious and ever-expanding. I out-grew it long before I had a chance to call myself a proper chef. I was, after all, still just a sensitive poet-fish out of water.

What I didn’t realize until later was that chef-life was part of my training as a writer: I was absorbing a sensory vocabulary, inventing new language. I saw flavors before I tasted them. I could smell how three items on a plate bloomed in front of a customer before I even poached the pears or braised the pork belly or reduced the balsamic. The texture of crispy duck begged for the dark red sweet of roasted cherry tomato. I don’t recall if I was synesthetic before, or if it’s something one can cultivate, but it effects our very nature of perception, which became a source of power for my novel.

I made a living as my own boss at a popular fancy restaurant on the beach in Puerto Rico, which sounds like a dream, but I became someone I didn’t recognize anymore. Eventually, as I felt myself fade away from cooking and the industry altogether, I made an active decision to leave in order to change, transmute. It’s a life I could have made work, but at great sacrifice. I wasn’t bored so much as exhausted. If I didn’t write my way out, chances are I would have died under a palm tree with a swollen belly and leathery neck.

What is this about—that longing? It feels like a quest for transmutation, acceptance of constant growth and change. Less about the search for compatibility than it is about recognition: to be seen versus to be on the margins. Will I forever feel like the outsider, the duality of Navajo woman and white man, the bi-polar, simultaneously creative and logical crazybrain?

The answer is always: pizza. And sushi. Not at the same time, though it does sound like something I’d try make work.

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Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

To write about food means always occupying the realm of the ordinary. We can be reporting on deforestation for palm oil production, the destruction of mangroves for shrimp harvests, or the atrocious working and animal welfare conditions in industrial meat-processing, but, for the reader, it will all come back to the grocery store, the kitchen, and the menu they’re faced with at a restaurant. How do we navigate this thorny terrain—which includes labor rights, climate change, loss of biodiversity, corporate greed, colonialism—without overwhelming but instead empowering, entertaining, and encouraging that reader?

For me, as an essayist and cultural critic who’s nonetheless a food writer—meaning, at the end of the day, that I am trying to entice my reader to consider what they eat and occasionally instructing them precisely on how to cook a dish—it requires that I implicate and insert myself into this human dilemma. After all, I have to eat too. How do I do it?

I write in the introduction to my book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating that in order to trust someone on the subject of food, I need to know about their personal eating history and appetites. This isn’t because I want to measure my own appetite against theirs to ensure we line up, but because it provides significant context: What purpose does food serve in your life? I want to know, so that I can understand why you’re choosing to take it as a focus, whether in a writing career or just one essay. It’s a uniquely parasocial genre, for good reason: We’re entrusting each other not just with words, but with our bodies, our tastes, and our time at the cutting board.

I’m a vegetarian, former vegan, and one-time vegan bakery owner who’s worked at Starbucks, Panera Bread, and an East Village wine bar. I met my husband while he was a bartender and I was a writer on assignment. I grew up on Long Island, spent years in Brooklyn, and now live in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My upbringing consisted of all the Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Greek food one might imagine a kid just outside New York City would eat, plus Puerto Rican food influenced by my paternal grandmother’s heritage. In my family, we make a kransekake at Christmas not because we’re Norwegian, but because a Bay Ridge-dwelling ancestor was taken by the sight of this cookie tree when walking through Little Norway during the holiday season. I spent over a decade eating vegan food in New York and anywhere else in the world I found myself, chronicling and documenting the emergence of plant-based food as a cuisine.

My eating biography, while without specific allegiances, includes a lot of experience—as eater, as server, as cook—and a commitment to what tastes good. All of this is useful knowledge for my perspective, and it’s why there is a touch of memoir threaded throughout what is ostensibly a cultural history: If I could grow up eating everything, how did I end up with all these ethical concerns and commitments around the food system?

I take the ordinary, the everyday, the ancestral, and the political with me when I write about how we eat today, how vegetarians and vegans in the U.S. have eaten for the past 50 years, and how we could eat in the future if we were to remove meat from the center of our plates. How do I eat and what do I cook when I feel the weight of all this on my shoulders? How have I not allowed it to crush me? Let me tell you.

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No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy is available now via Beacon Press.