022: Comfort Cooking

Bryan Ford, Laurie Colwin, M.F.K. Fisher, Nigella Lawson, Sophie Dahl & more

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

Laurie Colwin

Once upon a time, in a pretty little valley not far north of New York City, I taught English literature at a school for very wealthy children. It was my second to last year of teaching, and I was getting a bit lackluster in my technique. The thing that kept me from actual dereliction of duty was another teacher with whom I shared a basement office that almost certainly had been a janitor’s closet. This colleague, whom I’ll call Suzanne, was a revelation. She was (and is) a brilliant teacher—PhD trained, quick-witted, and well-read—somehow managing to bring all of that brainpower into her classroom, even for students who were more privileged than they were studious. She was relentless. She gave a reading quiz every morning to her students and made sure that it was both too specific…