I am not a food writer. While I was working on my last book, one of my best friends, who IS a food writer and a chef, took one look at the scenes in which I’d written about the most delicious meal of my life (at a lakeside trattoria called Locanda La Tirlandana in Northern Italy) and crossed out my boring descriptions of the exquisite pasta. “You need to write about food like you write about everything else,” she said.
She is right of course. Because food is identity, family (for better or worse), memory, love, longing, desire, anxiety, pleasure. It is also grief.
Since then, I’ve tried to write about food a little more. This month I wrote about not wanting to fall in love and then falling in love anyway, in no small part because of salmon dip. This week’s prompts (below) should also help you use your senses and taste memories to wrestle with what’s meaningful to you.
But first…
I have a brand new shop in which you can buy classes for yourself or give the gift of a class to a friend or loved one. January 25th (Next Thursday!) is a Writing Through Loss workshop, February 15th is an Introduction to Memoir course, and on February 29th Dr. Alyssa Burgart and I are offering another Op-Ed and Personal Essay course for healthcare professionals. CME is available for all of these opportunities and recordings are available after the sessions in case you can’t attend in person.
As always we are also offering Writing Medicine sessions the first and third Saturdays of every month for healthcare professionals and their loved ones.
These prompts are meant to inspire you— not limit or intimidate you. To that end, put your phone in airplane mode if you can and set a timer for 7 minutes. You can always write (or think) for longer if you so choose, but I find 7 minutes to be kind of magical. Second, tell yourself that you are already an excellent writer—if only for 7 minutes (you have the rest of your life to criticize yourself). Third, whenever you get stuck, choose a sensation to describe (a sound, sight, smell, noise, flavor etc). Let me know how it goes! If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments section or on Instagram by tagging @laurel_braitman.
Make a list of every (very specific) taste you never want to forget. Number the list. Do not edit as you go. Just keep writing. Include as many details per taste as you can.
Describe a moment in which a smell or taste of a dish brought you back to another time or place. Write it as a scene. Include dialogue if you can.
Write a recipe for a dish that does not exist but should. It can be a recipe for peace in a place marked by war, it could be a recipe to treat your own longing for a person or time you would go back to but can’t, or a recipe for joy when you need it. What are the ingredients? The amounts? What are the directions? Do you need any specific equipment?
Describe a meal that changed you. Who was there? What did the air feel like? What did you hear? Use every detail you can to make it as real as possible.
If you’d like, you can post your response(s) in the comments section or on Instagram by tagging @laurel_braitman and I’ll find them and respond! You can also email them to me at info@laurelbraitman.com.
My friend, the amazing comic and writer Negin Farsad published a great piece about going on a healing (mushroom) retreat that surprised her. One of my favorite TED talks is now online, Dr. Diana Greene Foster on her groundbreaking work looking at the health outcomes of women with and without access to abortions. Watch it here. It was a busy fall, as such—you might have missed this story about the incredible woman who used her death from ovarian cancer to cancel 60 million dollars worth of others’ medical debt. Listen here.
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Tomorrow I will be leading a low-cost virtual writing workshop that’s open to healthcare professionals and their loved ones. This week’s theme is asking better questions to get better answers.
Thanks for this prompt! I loved this memory.
Blackberry Jam
2024-01-21
Julie Miley Schlegel
I have a flash memory of picking blackberries in the backyard garden with my maternal grandfather, Poppy. I remember his thick olive-colored hands reaching into the crosshairs of the thick green bush to show me where they grew, clumped together like families.
My view was that of a child, looking up at his profile, looking into the bush, blue sky behind his head. “Then you pick them off just like this,” he said, pulling one from the vine. The lobulated fruit, somewhere between black and purple, rested in his hand. I took it and the tart juice filled my mouth as my teeth worked out the crunch of the seeds.
Coming in from the backyard, the house smelled like a bakery as my grandmother, Baba, made her homemade rolls. My sisters and I would help her roll out the dough, and she would sneak us little bites of raw dough to eat as we helped her make them, kitchen chairs pulled up to the counter so we could reach. The dough would rise on the countertop all afternoon.
Hours later, we sat at the dining room table. The 1970s floral tablecloth provided the foundation for the meals on our annual visit to their home in East Texas. “What a beautiful meal,” Poppy would say. “Did you ever see anything like it?”
My two sisters and I lined up like a staircase on one side of the table, my parents on the other. “Would you look at those three girls?” I remember him asking my grandmother, Baba. “Have you ever seen anything so sweet in your life?”
We could’ve passed anything around the table after the family prayer. Maybe it was vegetables. There could’ve been chicken or ham. Perhaps there was a salad. I don’t remember anything but the rolls and the blackberry jam.
I remember Baba’s hand as it passed her prized possession — the dinner rolls she had made from scratch. Her wedding ring on the fourth finger. Her nails always painted. I never once saw her naked nails.
Sitting down together, we were family. My sisters and I were still children, only seedlings of the people we would become over the next thirty years.
The fresh blackberries picked by Poppy’s hands became blackberry jam, homemade and canned by Baba’s hands. Though the house was simple, the blackberry jam was always passed around the table in a small crystal bowl, as if we were fancy.
We weren’t fancy. We were just us. And now, looking back, I know that we were enough. I just wish we had more time. There were so many questions I didn’t get to ask — about the blackberries and the rolls. And so much more.
Fantastic prompts, Laurel! I really enjoyed this. Thanks. I'd love to share what the one I chose produced:
He grinned, hand hovering over the linen napkin. It was the first time I’d seen him shy, awaiting my lead. But I’d never cracked crab legs open either, had little idea what the doll’s fork and engraved silver Nutcracker were meant for. I held his gaze across plates of oversized sea insects, the fertile dewiness of melted butter sliding seductively up our nostrils. When I quipped that we’d figure out how to get to the meat together, relief brushed the boyish gleam back into to his hazel eyes.
His mug of beer clinked against my short-stemmed Chardonnay glass. I sipped and shuddered, my mouth still learning to appreciate the brightness cracking at the back of my jaw.
“I’m alive,” he teased, making a claw open and shut in my direction. And we cascaded in laughter, followed by a second waterfall when we noticed stiff glances from fellow patrons, who weren't dropping half a month’s food budget on a single night.
The improvement of our methods of rescuing sweet meat from shells broken like smashed ceramic matched the glistening of our fingers and chins. "Here," he'd say, triumphant when a leg came out mostly intact. I'd plop the sultry plumpness on my tongue and close my eyes in pleasure.
He wasn’t my first boyfriend. But he was the first I'd considered spending my life with. And he was the first person I listened to when he asked, gingerly, maybe a year and a half after the crab dinner, swallowing hard and then raising his head to meet my gaze, Did I think, maybe, I had more in common with the man who would eventually become my husband?