Spoon Fed by Kim Severson

Author:Kim Severson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

I stepped into the hot spring sun and walked to the back door, past a little cottage where her housekeeper or a family friend sometimes stayed. Suddenly, I felt optimistic. Certain moments in Northern California will do that to you. Your head will be all jangly and then you look up and catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean or notice a scrub oak bathed in the dreamy afternoon light that only California can produce and everything feels better. I looked at her yard, full of golden-green mustard plants. Someone rode a horse down a path nearby. I knocked on the door of her low-slung ranch house.

“Well, hello, dear,” Marion said. She was seventy-seven then. Her blond hair had grayed, but it was in the same ponytail she had worn for years. She was tall and still fit, with hands that felt as strong and soft as walnut shells. I followed her down the long hallway to the kitchen, making fast mental notes of the snapshots that hung crooked and dusty in a long series of cheap frames. Marion and Ruth Reichl. Marion and Danny Kaye. Marion and Alice Waters. Marion and Edna Lewis. Marion and James Beard.

I am so screwed, I thought.

Just across her kitchen counter was a long wooden table where she held court. I sat down, and she offered me a sugar cookie from a pile on a plate. They were the simplest things. Just a pure expression of flour, butter, vanilla, sugar and egg. The coffee was plain and not too strong, made in an inexpensive white automatic drip machine on her cramped kitchen counter. The rest of the kitchen was as functional and plain as the coffeepot. Save for a copper-bottomed pan and a bottle or two of fancy olive oil ( gifts from an admiring food pilgrim, no doubt), there was nothing at all remarkable in that kitchen. The electric range. The cheap paper towels. The store-brand dish soap. This was the same woman who liked to drive the Jaguar she’d bought with book royalties to the local Safeway every day and peer into other people’s baskets just to keep up with how the folks who weren’t eating at the fancy restaurants she went to every week fed themselves.

“Now what are you going to do with that?” she’d ask, staring down at a pork roast or bunch of kale. The astonished shopper sometimes recognized her, or if they didn’t they’d treat her like a kindly aunt. You couldn’t help but warm to her.

As the sun softened across the kitchen table, we talked about her deep concern for the poor souls who want to cook but can’t.

“It’s very tempting when we are old to become a missionary, to see the world as lacking,” she said. “I really don’t want to be guilty of that. I don’t want to be preachy. But I wish there were a national law that made everyone cook steadily for two months. Then, if they don’t like it, they can quit.”

I scribbled this in my notebook, thinking she was absolutely right.

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