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| At Home in the Kitchen |
| by Sarah Karnasiewicz |
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Being an editor at a food magazine is not all fun and foie gras, but one of the great perks of this job is that every week a pile of new cookbooks lands on my desk. The humble and the high gloss, the great and the horrid—I see them all. Ironically, though, while browsing their pages invariably makes me want to eat, only the exceptional volume actually inspires me to cook. In fact, by now I've narrowed the field of keepers down to a few categories: those focused on bacon, pies, or booze—and anything written by John Thorne.
With his stocky frame, bristly beard, and wire-rimmed glasses, Thorne doesn't look the part of a culinary superhero, but don't let appearances fool you. Beneath that mild-mannered, shy exterior lurks an incorrigibly curious cook, an adventurer capable of transforming every trip to Stop & Shop into inspired prose and every bowl of baked beans into an opportunity for scholarship. In the two and a half decades since he began producing the homemade-food newsletter Simple Cooking (which, in the language of the day, would have been dubbed a 'zine, had it been authored by a purple-haired 19-year-old and not a bespectacled 40-year old), Thorne, along with his wife and coauthor, Matt Lewis Thorne, have authored five books, won numerous awards, and acquired a fiercely loyal readership. Reading their latest collection of essays, Mouth Wide Open (North Point Press, 2007), I was reminded once again of why, when I'm yearning for the satisfactions of the kitchen—not just a romp through the latest, shiny, coffee table cookbook—and feeling playful or peckish or peevish, it is always Thorne's essays to which I return. It's not just their uncanny ability to reveal the hidden anthropological meanings behind the Campbell's soup shelf at the local supermarket (see the essay "Pepper Pot Hot") or his poetic musings on the pleasures of marrow that lure me back. No; it is the generous, genial approach that Thorne himself calls "a lively conversation—a friendly argument between two cooks". Ever the iconoclast, Thorne is not so much interested in perfecting a set of recipes for someone else to follow as he is in inviting a companionable reader to come along as he fumbles through his own kitchen epiphanies. Luckily for readers everywhere, even his disasters are delightful.
One morning this winter, after he'd finished his breakfast, SAVEUR spoke with Thorne by phone from his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, about his unlikely career, his affection for the food of New England, and why he's never going to eat acorns again.
When you started writing you had ambitions to be a novelist. How did you end up focusing on food?
It was really just a comfortable fit. I noticed that when I went to a party, everybody else gravitated to the living room and I gravitated to the kitchen. But I was also inspired by a writer for the alternative paper in Boston, who was the first food writer I'd encountered who sounded like someone I could hang out with. Suddenly it dawned on me that you didn't have to wear a three-piece suit or be a schoolteacher in order to produce food writing.
You mean it wasn't just about home economics and restaurant reviews?
Exactly. At first I started producing little pamphlets on single subjects like olive oil and garlic, and from there I moved on to the newsletter Simple Cooking, which I'm still doing 26 years later.
What was the subject of your first pamphlet?
Onion soup. At the time, I'd been unemployed for about six months and needed to come up with an idea for an inexpensive Christmas present I could send out to friends. All I knew was that I had two things: a big electric typewriter and a folder full of onion soup recipes. I'm the sort of person who clips and files away the same recipe over and over again; clearly it was a subject I was drawn to, and I found a great deal of pleasure in writing it. But earning a living doing it did not even cross my mind.
You've been putting together Simple Cooking for more than two decades. Is your idea of what "simple cooking" means the same now as it was when you began?
It has changed a little, but more than that, I think the world has changed. Today you go into the supermarket, and you're faced with a barrage of different foods. Everything is possible, and you have to figure out, from the dizzying amount of stuff that comes pouring over you, what you will use. It's almost the reverse of what I think of as simple cooking.
I learned to cook in two extreme situations. As a young man, I spent my summers alone at a family cottage in Maine. I had very little money and no cooking experience. I just had to figure out what to do. But one day, it occurred to me that I was surrounded by food: I just had to go out and get it and figure out how to cook it. I started digging clams and picking blueberries and gathering wild salad—and as I did that my interest in that grew, and I became better at feeding myself.
Later on, I dropped out of college and went to live on the Lower East Side of New York City. I was paying 60 dollars a month for an apartment and making 120 dollars a month working in a mailroom. New York was very, very different from Maine, though I did once go up to Central Park because I'd read that acorns were edible. That was a one-time experience.
Did you eat them?
The thing about acorns is that in order to make them edible, you have to boil them for a day and a half. By the time I finished, my apartment just reeked with this acidic smell and I couldn't bear the idea of swallowing them. I gave them to somebody else to eat, but I believe they threw up afterwards. That was it for me and acorns.
Still, the point is that in both situations, I had to teach myself how to cook using very little money and with the ingredients that were around me. Back then, the Lower East Side was full of treasures. One store sold butter in big chunks, another sold day-old bread, and another sold every green you can imagine. I'm a very shy person, but gradually I started venturing out listening to what other people were ordering and how they were using it. For instance, the tenements just reeked of cabbage, so I figured that cabbage must be edible, despite my suspicions to the contrary.
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