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Porridge is somehow famous in literature. The Three Bears minced no words with Goldilocks—she ruined their breakfast by tasting everyone’s porridge, judging it too hot, too cold, or just right. Oliver Twist gets into trouble for asking for more. Mr. Woodhouse of Jane Austen’s Emma believes that a basin of porridge is just the thing (he calls it gruel). And porridge was the thing in the Old World � oats boiled hard and eaten hot.

In the New World, aka America, colonial porridge was quickly replaced with cornmeal mush, a food that indigenous folks had eaten for centuries. (And we’re still eating it today as polenta, grits, and cornbread.) Colonial settlers called it samp, and settlers traveling often took Johnny cake (cornbread) because it was easy to make over a fire.

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Shad, Chocolate, and Gingerbread: Spider in a Tree by Susan Stinson

It’s the summer of 1741. The Rev. Mr. Jonathan Edwards, a fourth-generation English settler, calls Leah, a woman kidnapped from Africa and currently enslaved in his household, into his study. Leah comes in carrying a cup of chocolate and a piece of gingerbread.

They are in Northampton, Massachusetts, where I live now. This is a scene from my novel, Spider in a Tree. Jonathan is recently back from preaching his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God� in Connecticut. Leah, who has just been preparing a barrel of shad to be preserved for the winter, is soon to be married to Saul, a man enslaved in the household.

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Fattening the Birds



The fragrance of freshly milled wheat berries has a depth and liveliness unlike anything else, flowery, sweet, beery, faintly green and earthy. As the grain shatters beneath the grating stones and the new flour empties from the mill, an aromatic dust cloud wafts up speaking of a symbiotic relationship between human and grain that reaches back thousands of years. Peter Sanguedolce, who eats too much because he loves food too much, who eats too much to escape the sorrows that engulf him, who eats too much simply to eat too much, finds himself in Mending What Is Broken bewitched by the complicated, painstaking process of baking whole grain sourdough bread: nursing the starter into life, invigorating the preferment over several days, mixing flour and water and waiting through the autolyse period for the flour to hydrate, incorporating the flour and preferment and performing a series of stretches and folds to tease out the gluten. Then hours of bulk fermentation and shaping—Peter mimics the experts� floury hands in the photographs in the numerous bread-baking texts he’s bought—and the long overnight snooze in the rattan baskets in the refrigerator to encourage the flavors to deepen and complexify, before the morning’s bake at five hundred degrees—all the while praying to Fornax, goddess of the oven, that his doughs will rise burnished and crusty and make proper loaves, that is, loaves in the shape of parsons� hats.

Which they sometimes do, and sometimes perversely do not do...

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My debut novel, Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace, set in a small town in the early 1950s, features Mrs. Minerva Place, a prickly widow who would prefer to be left alone. Completely. But even the most disagreeable people have to eat.

Minerva isn’t much of a cook. She’ll make a pumpkin pie if she gets invited somewhere for Thanksgiving (which, she assuredly would prefer to avoid), but she keeps her meals on the simple side. She’ll boil cabbage and fry a pork chop for dinner or let a small roast slow-cook with potatoes and carrots. The local grocery store, Myrick’s, offers the best meat in town, and, even if it’s a little on the expensive side, she’s willing to wait in line to get the cuts she prefers.

One of her favorite meals is...

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At home nowhere and everywhere, I’ve made it my business to explore wherever I land. Vernaculars, stories, main streets—such are my haunts; I am your ghost. (Hi, there. Rest easy, you did turn off the stove before leaving the house.) While I usually prefer to observe, quietly in my corner, my relationship with local cuisines is much more active. After all, food is such a fulfilling way to consume regional energy. A pretty plate is the truest feast for the senses: sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste. From an early age, I’ve been an indiscriminate collector of culinary experiences. Every bite can be a history lesson; every morsel, a message. An intercultural communication.

Even the hard times proved instructive. Contrasting with my grateful experiencing of many different nations� foods in my childhood and teens, my college years were�

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Roaming the exhibits at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, our unnamed diarist is captivated by the Veiled Lady, a marble masterpiece by Italian sculptor Raffaelo Monti. Monti creates the illusion of fabric, a veil clinging to the face of the virgin and allowing her delicate features to peek through.

Our diarist can’t stop thinking about the sculpture. She drifts into the museum café, where the barista recommends an Italian treat...

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Imagine walking into your favorite café. The bell chimes, and instantly the aroma of coffee and pastries tickle your taste buds. Stacks of books line the walls, and you’re surrounded by patrons sipping espressos, typing dutifully on their laptops. That’s the moment you spot the group of women seated at a corner table, leaning closely to one another, their voices low. So, you pull up a stool and order a latte and a slice of your favorite pie or maybe a croissant. The women gathered are giddy with laughter, their eyes bright as they set forth to tell their favorite stories, the dim lighting providing the perfect ambiance. Each woman eagerly awaiting their turn, hoping to startle readers with their most terrifying tales.

This is what it is like in the Café Macabre.

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My debut novel, Stony Kill, was released in October 2005. It is a personal story, not unlike many writers� first novels. It seems most of us who are dedicated to scratching out tales of humanity in all its forms, must get their own poignant tale out into the world before they can move on to wider topics and more encompassing tales.

In Stony Kill, the protagonist tells the readers her tale of growing up in a wildly dysfunctional family. But like most troubled families, there remain pieces that work, influences that ground children to productive lives. In my story, it was food and its preparations. I came from a family of chefs and caterers. At ten years old, I had learned to prepare dinner for a family of six. At eighteen I was a personal chef, ironically for a publisher and his family.

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If you were a young boy of twelve, ignored by your parents and loved by the gang you hung out with, what would you like to eat? What if you’d built a secret hide-out inside of your home � a place you would monitor the household from hidden cameras and microphones, and scare your brother half to death with noises that seemed to appear from nowhere? What food would you stash in there? Salads, frogs legs, and caviar? No, not Michael. He liked junk food. And while on the topic of food, what about the inevitable outcome of eating?

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I’ve written several bioterrorism thrillers where the best thing there is to eat is a Meal Ready to Eat (MRE). MREs are vacuum sealed, cooked meals that have a shelf life of 5 years. In Viable Threat, the first book in my Outbreak Task Force series, the main characters are in a crisis situation, a city is locked down, and the only food available are MREs. MREs are used usually by the military, but can be purchased by anyone for camping trips, and like in Viable Threat, in emergencies.

It feels like every week is its own emergency these days...

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