{Admittedly, I cook.}
Since around the wee years when it seemed the only lubricant to ease the chafings of my parents' marriage and the family unit was cooking together. Admittedly, I write about food. And cooking. And read many culinary books I have been collecting. My friends even present me with food books from their travels. It is not uncommon and quite becoming a custom for friends to call with used book sightings in garbage cans, sidewalk recycling collections or the typical yard sale. If possible, I am there to collect. I cannot keep everything, so the key is to get lost in the hunt. And be very discerning.
{Family stories about my maternal great-grandmother set the stage for this project.}
Its inception has been a long time coming. My Grandma Mangold grew up in an Alsatian community outside San Antonio, Texas. In Castroville, she was known for helping the Hispanic ladies make tamales. These short and stout packages feature a smooth and thin, finger-length tube of dough made from masa, a corn flour. Traditionally, pork appears inside, though chicken and beef can be used. (I shudder when biting into anything else, and I have: beans, spinach, and yes, tofu.) They are then wrapped with the washed husks from ears of corn, steamed until soft but slighty firm, and ready to unpack and utterly consume. This is best done by the dozen. A good recipe from a passionate tamale devotee is here.
Anyway, according to family lore, Grandma Mangold was quite the cook, assisting any number of home cooks who were the purveyors of traditional Nortenos foods, the forerunner of some of today's Tex-Mex standards. They sold their food from homes, cars, pick-up trucks--whatever and wherever they could.
The legends of Grandma Mangold laboring intensively with other ladies making the tamales rings true with my other relatives, though, technically, we have no proof. No pictures. No journals. No hand-written recipe cards. You will have to take my word. Relying only on a family's collective memory and fragments of stories, like shards of a Grecian urn from some archaeological dig, remain all I have to piece together narratives to suggest what her life, and the lives of the others, could have been.
{That is history. And my point of departure.}
Here one can find a mixture of books, people, film, and literature animated by their association to food and cooking. Keeping food or wine-related stories alive and open-ended retains the sense of play and pleasure one can derive from a meal cooked for one, or two days of prepping for an outdoor meal for 75. Either way, in the kitchen, in the company of our books, stories, and histories are the imprints of so many who have come before.