An Essay that Provoked Emotion

Mother's Day gets people going

Jun 01, 2023

My mother and me at my 6th birthday party. I adored that dress.

Seven years ago I wrote an essay for the Washington Post about my dad and his cooking, for Father’s Day. Then I thought, “I should write about my mother and how I connected with her through her cooking next.” Well. It took me seven years of procrastinating to write the piece for Food & Wine magazine that ran on May 13, Mother’s Day. Because my mother was difficult, to put it mildly.

The first draft came easily, even though it was a hard subject. I had thought about it for so long. At the start, I was more comfortable writing about my mother than myself. But a personal essay is about the writer, so I had to edit myself into the copy. Also, I didn’t want to write a laundry list of all the terrible things my mother said to me, because that’s a list, not a story.

After I wrote a draft and included an Iraqi-Jewish recipe for Kubba Hamoth, I sent a query to Chandra Ram, associate editorial director, food, at Food & Wine magazine. I had interviewed her for this newsletter about how to get published in Food & Wine.

She accepted the essay and recipe right away. The recipe went straight to the test kitchen, because there wasn’t much time. As for Chandra, I couldn’t ask for a better editor. She was sensitive and asked lots of clarifying questions, versus charging in and editing the hell out of it because she was on deadline (which I have done sometimes).We went back and forth several times, right up until the day before.

As for the recipe editor, other than removing the articles (“Taste stew” versus “Taste the stew”), I didn’t see much that changed, except that I don’t like semi colons. Actually, I feel quite self-conscious about developing recipes. An editor at Sunset magazine once told me, early in my food writing career, that she’d give me a B instead of an A in recipe development. The person who got an A was a professional recipe developer, whereas I was a journalist. I decided right then that recipe writing was not my path (LOL). Former student Jennifer Eremeeva tested my recipe twice and gave me good feedback.

I was not prepared for what happened when my piece came out. Many people who are traumatized by Mother’s Day contacted me: a cousin whose grandbaby was stillborn, a colleague whose daughter died at 38, friends, clients and strangers who also had troubled mothers, and even a stranger who texted me over Messenger and wanted to talk. Right now, for example, there are over 100 comments on Facebook! (Okay, many people also wrote to say they liked the essay.)

I felt proud to represent all the people who feel distraught on Mother’s Day. My therapist said it’s a national day of trauma for her clients. And I’m thrilled to have this essay out in the world. Maybe you will pitch Chandra on an essay of your own?

What I’m Eating:

Food writing coach

Food writing coach on Instagram: “Dim sum parade of desserts at Peony Seafood Restaurant in Oakland, CA: 1. Hot coconut milk soup with bird’s nest and young coconut 2. Birthday piggies 3. Mochi pears filled with custard 4. My favorite sesame balls stuffed with red bean paste. What a feast!”

May 19, 2023

By now you must know how much I love dim sum. Here are four fancy desserts from a recent feast at Peony Seafood Restaurant in Oakland, CA. Click on the image to see the post and then on the arrows to view the desserts.

Classes and Consults

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What I'm Reading:

It’s awards season for cookbooks! The Art of Eating chose Gullah Geechee Home Cooking for its 2023 prize. (Here’s the 2023 Short List). Here are the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2023, a fascinating look at the best of world cookbooks, magazines and more. Then there are the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Nominees 2023. Winners will be announced June 3. And here are Fortnum & Mason 2023 winners in the UK. (Awards by the International Association of Culinary Professionals and The Guild of Food Writers Awards will be announced in September.)
These Are The 16 Best Cookbooks Of 2023 So Far, from Tasting Table. Not to be confused with The best Cookbooks of 2023 So Far, from Delicious magazine.
Why Do American Diners Have Such a Limited Palate for Textures? Ligaya Michan tackles this subject in a New York Times unlocked article.
A bit of news: The Food Section, a Substack newsletter by Hannah Raskin, garnered two award nominations from the James Beard Foundation, the only Substack newsletter to do so. Congrats, Hannah!
Roy Finamore, James Beard Award–Winning Author and Editor, Dies at 70. He was a cookbook author for Clarkson Potter and had published and co-authored many more.
How I Survive as Writer Through Public Speaking. If you need to promote your book, or want to make money speaking, there are good tips.
On Recipe Writing, as personal narrative — and as a food writing trap. Alicia Kennedy imagines what it would be like if we took recipe writing seriously.
Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter. An entertaining read about this profession. Not about food writing, obviously, but about craftsmanship
How to stop thinking and start writing. Cookbook author Yasmin Khan details how she gets her writing work done.
ChatGPT - Use with Care. Among other points in this article: you could be sued for copyright infringement if you use copy you generate from ChatGPT!
Know someone working in the American South to nominate who could benefit from The John Edgerton Prize?
Stephen Satterfield Puts Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History. A terrific profile of the publisher of Whetstone magazine, which The New Yorker gets to late in the story. He’s a man of many talents. The author quotes food writers Adrian Smith, Michael Twitty, and Osayi Endolyn.
Writing, Podcasting and Other Doings. Liz Williams wrote an engrossing essay about how a recipe for gumbo got misinterpreted in France.

News About Clients and Students

Northwest Asian Weekly profiled former student Pranee Khruasanit Halvorsen.
Former student Carrie Havranek has started Edible Lehigh Valley, its first Edible Communities publication.
Jodi Koenig, who took my Jumpstart Your Cookbook Proposal class, has started a Substack newsletter called Beautiful Things. I advised her to do so!
The Best American Food Writing 2023 selected Amy Loeffler’s essay about salt, love and romance. Her piece appeared in Whetstone magazine #10. (I coached her on a book proposal on this subject.)