It’s hard to remember a time when food memoirs were not part of the general landscape, but when I was writing Tender at the Bone, the genre did not exist. As I was trying to think about telling my story through food, it occurred to me that the recipes could function the way photographs did in other people’s books. I wanted readers to get to know the characters through the food they cooked and ate, to be able to taste the time. I might not be able to include a recipe for Mom’s Everything Stew, but it seemed to me that if you made her Corned Beef Ham, you might begin to understand the way her mind worked. So I took down the big, messy folder that contained the recipes Mom had torn out of magazines, the handwritten file cards that Alice once gave me, and the scraps of paper on which my own favorite recipes were scrawled and discovered that each one was an instant passport to the past.
Over time I’ve heard from many readers who have cooked the recipes, and they’ve all said how much these dishes have enhanced their enjoyment of the book. But almost all of them have added, “I wish there were photographs as well.”
That sent me to a shelf filled with a motley collection of photo albums. I bought most of them at thrift stores, and their covers are torn, the pages so loose that each time I pick one up photos go tumbling to the floor. The pictures have been thrown in at random, so I’ll often find people who never met each other staring out from the same page. It always makes me happy to spend time among those I’ve loved best, and each time I go through the albums I discover something new. Here’s my mother looking glamorous, Aunt Birdie even tinier than I remember, Doug and me with a group of friends looking into the camera as if our whole lives are still ahead of us. Which, of course, they were.
This picture of my parents was taken at a cocktail party in the late forties a couple of years before I was born. Mom saved her clothes, and I remember this dress well; it was black with gray chiffon sleeves. Note the size of the martinis and the fact that the cigarette Mom is holding is unfiltered.
To my distress I could not find a single photograph of either Alice or Mrs. Peavey. What I did turn up is this wonderful woodblock print that Hortense Ansorge, Dad’s first wife, made of Alice sometime during the forties.
Hortense herself, holding a portfolio.
Scenes from Maison Heureuse: my “equipe” (Nikili, the terror, is center front).
Danielle on the beach.
Counselors having a drink in the café at Boyardville (I’m in the back, wearing sunglasses because I thought they made me look mysterious).
This is the only photo I have from the trip that Serafina and I took to North Africa. The handsome man on the left is Dris. On the back it says, “This is a photo that we took together in the street. It was a surprise photo. A little souvenir from Dris. Love.”
Doug and me flanking Aunt Birdie at our wedding. Pat made my dress: It had a rainbow skirt and a cummerbund with a road running right up the middle, symbolizing Route 7, the road on which we were married.
The wedding, on the road.
Wedding, surrounded by my parents and various friends.
Milton, with a neighbor, in Crete.
Washing dishes at Paradise Loft.
Doug, me, and friends just down the street from Paradise Loft, 1971.
Cooking pancakes on hot glass at The Pilichuck Glass Workshop, 1972.
The house on Channing Way.
Me cooking, Thanksgiving 1975, Channing Way.
Doug relaxing in a piece he did at the University Art Museum in Berkeley.
Doug with his wind harp, Artpark, 1977.
Marion Cunningham.
A lunch at Fournou’s Ovens at the Stanford Court, the year I met James Beard (1978?).