February 12, 2009
Thursday

Recipes are strange things. The power of great food resides in the fact that, like music, its meaning is beyond words.
           — Robert Girardi, b. 1961
                American writer

On August 30, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, dined with her companion, Dodi Fayed, at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. She had scrambled eggs with asparagus followed by sauteéd sole. Just after midnight on August 31, she and Fayed, along with a driver and a bodyguard, left the hotel. In an effort to elude paparazzi, the driver sped along the streets of Paris. He lost control of the car as he entered the Pont de l’Alma tunnel and crashed head-on into a stone pillar. The princess died some hours later of massive internal injuries.

For reasons I cannot explain, the detail of the scrambled eggs and asparagus has fascinated me. I never see a display of asparagus without thinking of Diana, never see the security camera image of her pushing through the revolving door as she leaves the hotel without imagining her still carrying the enjoyment of that meal with her.

There is an eating scene, or at least a reference to food, in every piece of fiction I write. I do not consciously plan for this. That is, I don’t start crafting a piece and choose in the first stages the spot at which I will insert the food. It happens as I write. The novel I am working on began in my imagination with the image of the full moon hanging over my car. I have always known that that was the end, the moment I was writing toward. The text, however, begins with a reference to a bread starter, and the second scene involves a woman who is baking  bread.

The novelist Thomas Wolfe observed that there was no more beautiful sight than that of a woman cooking dinner for someone she loves. I have written two stories in which a man comes to understand how much he loves a woman while he watches her cook. This was pointed out to me by a man who had read both stories and who was watching me cook.

Preparing food for me is an act of love, and sharing it with someone can be an act of intimacy. When I first met Ron he mentioned, probably casually, that he liked apple pie and brownies. The first month I knew him I made four different kinds of apple pie and six variations on brownies. I have two little books by Gunilla Norris on the spirituality of homemaking, and often, before I prepare a special meal or begin some bread creation, I will draw one down and make the whole process an act of prayer.

I am in an intense period of productivity in my fiction work. On Tuesday I didn’t leave the house. I wrote steadily, and in the late afternoon I had to wonder for a moment what the sensation was that was beginning to distract me. It was hunger. I had not eaten all day. 

But my characters did. I was writing a breakup scene. A man finds himself no longer able to sustain the relationship he has been in for several years. The woman has family obligations that were not present when they first met, and she cannot or will not abandon them to make a life with him. He decides to end things, and he chooses breakfast at a luxury hotel as the occasion when he will tell her. This breakfast follows a weekend they have spent together. (He says he’d hoped he could find a way to keep on with her if they had one more lovely time together. Yeah, right.) The woman chooses scrambled eggs with asparagus and Camembert, an unusual breakfast dish, something she would never make for herself. She is still savoring the surprising deliciousness when he reaches across the table, takes her hand, and changes her life, again.

I spent an aggregate of about fifteen hours with these characters and this scene, work that yielded about seven pages of material. I made what I call the fall into fiction. I wasn’t writing about these people, I became them, even the caddish man who just wants what he wants. I was by turns angry, sad, embittered, hurt, ashamed, even excited. (The scene begins in the early morning as she watches him get up from the bed and walk across the room to take a shower.)

And tonight, as something of a celebration of this amazing creative energy that is driving me, I made myself a plate of scrambled eggs with asparagus and Camembert. I reveled in the texture of the paper the Camembert comes wrapped in, in the way the little wheel yields to the cheese knife, the precision movements needed to pare off the thin rind. I watched the grayish asparagus pop into emerald as it bubbled in the butter.

It was delicious, and as I ate it I thought about whether or not my character should keep the ring. I haven’t decided yet, but I know where my next scene starts.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
To comment or to be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent