This week includes a classical concert in Titusville, a wine dinner in Cocoa Village, a bar bicycle tour in Cocoa Beach and theater across the Space Coast
The Atlantic
On recipes, spontaneity, and time: Your weekly guide to the best in books
Naz Deravian, the author of the cookbook
Bottom of the Pot, grew up in a family that shunned recipes in favor of spontaneous cooking an attitude that initially impeded her effort to write a cookbook. However, as she wrote in an article for
The Atlantic, the specificity and certainty of following a recipe eventually became a source of comfort for her, especially as she grappled with national and personal stressors.
Even for those who are not facing such upheaval, recipes can be reassuring safety nets. Spontaneity has become a glamorous ideal in the food world (see, for example, the editor Sam Sifton’s recent work
Sages, Saints, and Surprises: Some Writing That Shaped America
Since the 18th century, the printed word has influenced the course of American history.
From the founding of the United States, its literacy rates were higher than the countries of Europe. In his article “The Spread of Education Before Compulsion,” Edwin West of the Foundation for Economic Education writes that by 1800, literacy among white American males had reached almost 90 percent. In 1828, the United States sported 50 universities and 600 newspapers and journals. As West tells us, one writer reported that year, “With us a newspaper is the fare of almost every meal in almost every family.”
This article was published online on March 14, 2021.
Last spring, early in the pandemic, the host of a radio food program called to ask whether I thought the lockdown would catapult women back to the 1950s. That sure looked likely: Families were home demanding three meals a day, and most of that food was coming from their own kitchens. I started wondering whether the pandemic would succeed where years of cajoling on the part of cookbook writers had failed. Maybe we really had been launched into a new era of cooking from scratch, and would see people joyfully plying their families with homemade grain bowls long after the return of recognizable daily life.