The best advice I can come up with is this: Keep your living expenses LOW. The smaller you live (materially-speaking), the bigger you can live (creatively-speaking). This way the stakes aren’t so high…you aren’t demanding of your passion that it keeps you living a rich life. Then you can stretch and grow with the most possible freedom. This was my strategy in my 20’s, and it’s the reason I worked really hard to avoid all debts, and to keep my lifestyle really manageable. If I’d been saddled with a big life, I don’t think I ever could have found my way forward to the freedom I have now.
In honor of National Culinarians Day, take a look back at Elizabeth Gilbert’s discussion with John Hodgman about her newly published cookbook, At Home on the Range, originally written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. Considered far ahead of its time, Potter espoused the importance of farmer’s markets and ethnic food, derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts, and generally celebrated a devotion to epicurean adventures. Click here for more.
CALF’S BRAINS WITH BLACK BUTTER “Allow 1 set of brains—or more, for true addicts—for each serving. Soak the brains in cold water for 1 hour or so and drain. Add 1 sliced onion, a bit of chopped parsley and celery, 1 tablespoon of salt, and 1/2 cup of vinegar to enough boiling water to cover the brains, and simmer them gently for 1/2 hour. Drain and when cool tenderly remove the skin and any bits of bone the butcher may have left clinging to their surface. For each 2 sets of brains melt 1/2 cup of butter (or as much more as can be spared) in a shallow pan and allow it to brown slightly….”
—From At Home on the Range
“Hesitation Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton, the father of Jazz, who passed away on July 10, 1941.
Elizabeth Gilbert, who came to LIVE along with John Hodgman in May, requested Jelly Roll Morton as the house music during the show. She might have wanted to elicit the charm and liveliness of eating with her family, since she came to talk about her great-grandmother’s cook book, which she ushered into its second printing.
You can watch/listen to the fantastic and warm conversation here…
There’s a wonderfulness in stubbornness, about simply refusing to let even the facts sometimes interfere with your insistence of your worldview of a place of goodness and decency and hope and that it’s worth it—it’s worth it to take risks, and to try to make things even if people mock them and it’s worth it to choose a partner and stick with them even if it makes no sense to anybody else and it’s worth it to use the talcum powder and just hold your ground.
…she was an archaeologist of the foodways of greater Pennsylvania and coastal Delaware. That’s all she had access to, but my God, what she found! She found fishermen on the Eastern Shore who taught her how to cook eels, and she went deep into the Amish country and found people who taught her how to pickle pigs’ feet. If she’d had a range that was more than 100 miles, I can’t imagine what she would have done with it.
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Elizabeth Gilbert on her great-grandmother and her cookbook, which Gilbert ushered into another modern-day printing. She’ll be discussing the book, At Home on the Range, with John Hodgman on the 22nd. Learn more here… And read the rest of the Bon Appétite interview here…
“I believe that creative ideas are living things that are animated with life and they are in your presence for a while alive and if you neglect them, they go dry or they leave you and they go find somebody else to make them manifest because they want to live, and if you’re not going to pay attention to them, they’ll go to Barbara Kingsolver’s house and she’ll write that book, and you’ll open up the New York Times and discover that your book got written by somebody else.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, who will be at LIVE with John Hodgman on May 22!
Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful TED Talk about the trope of artistic depression and the freeing notion of genius as a being channeled through a human host willing to wield the pen.
“Calf’s Head a la Vinaigrette”
A menu from Tuesday, February 26, 1901 at The Royal Palm Hotel. This is from the What’s on the Menu? project started by NYPL Labs to help make our collection digitally searchable. The public (that means everyone!) is invited to help identify what’s on the menu (literally) through this interface.
From the food side of things, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love re-discovered a first edition cookbook by her great grandmother called At Home on the Range, which is full of recipes for dishes like the above (boiled sheep head, anyone?), and has added her insights to its, now, second printing. She’ll be discussing it on stage on May 15.
“I found myself quite moved by chapter 12, where Gima lists recipes that are good for sick friends who are stuck in the hospital. (These range from cinnamon buns or simple deviled eggs to — on the happy night before the patient’s release — a smuggled-in bottle of Champagne and a celebratory tin of caviar.) Ask yourself if you have ever seen a gourmet cookbook in which recipes for hospitalized friends are included. And it goes beyond mere food! If the patient is a child, my great-grandmother further suggests, be sure to bring him a little goldfish in a glass bowl, or one of those tiny turtles you can buy at any pet store; this will go far in easing a sick child’s boredom and loneliness.”
—excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert’s upcoming book, At Home on the Range, which is the second printing of her great-grandmother’s cookbook, which Gilbert found when unpacking her things in her new home. Gilbert writes the preface, and brings her great-grandmother back to life, relaying stories that tie into the recipes. Read more here…
There’s also a Tumblr for the book, which is mostly authored by Gilbert’s cousin, Alexa Potter, who essentially inherited all of Gima’s kitchen.
