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12/09/2015 08:00 AMPriscilla Martel ran across an old picture the other day. It was of her brother, sitting on Santa’s lap, sometime in the 1960s. It brought back a rush of memories.
“Not only did the formality of the Santa say something about the time, to see my kid brother like that in short pants, when he towers over me today, brought back memories. that reminded me, at a glance, how powerful those memories can be this time of year,” she said.
Martel, a chef, writer, and author of several cookbooks, says the holidays are a perfect time for people to think about their family traditions past and present, particularly those centered around food, and then record them for their children, grandchildren, and generations to come. Martel, who lives in Chester, is in an ideal position to give advice on how to do this, because she will be teaching a food writing course beginning in January at Gateway Community College in New Haven. The 15-week course, on Tuesday evenings, is open to anyone. But for those who want to get started before that, now is the time, Martel says.
“Food speaks to us in such emotionally strong ways that recapturing those holiday traditions around food can help us make sense of the whole family dynamic and history. That has been borne out time and again by what my students presented in class,” she said. “We’re all interested in stories, and, in particularly, the human side of the story. We’re all our own best subject. We have innate stories and they often center around food.”
Take it in two steps
Martel recommends doing this in two steps. First, figure out what you want to write about and how to make the story interesting. Second, make sure you record the recipe correctly so you can convey it clearly.
Another tip, Martel says, is to read great food writing. She recommends in particular the book she will be using to teach her class, Dianne Jacobs’ Will Write for Food. Martel also recommends reading anything by David “Mas” Masumoto, an organic peach and grape farmer who is also the author of nine books.
Martel said people should remember that food writing is really a pretext for writing about any one of a thousand things, including family, adventure, travel, science, social history, and even politics and broader societal issues.
Her food writing classes, Martel says, provide people with an opportunity to hone their skills while getting feedback. She said the course generally attracts interesting people who are naturally curious about food, and the issues that surround food and eating. She said it was great fun talking with people about their memories and traditions. And then the work of writing would begin.
“That’s the thing. It’s a writing class and that’s the deal. We need to get those words out on the computer screen. These family traditions and recipes are something we’re going to lose if we don’t preserve the ability to write a narrative,” she said.
Capturing Holiday Food Traditions
When it comes to capturing holiday food traditions and recording them for generations to come, author and food expert Priscilla Martel of Chester provides these tips:
• Pay attention to what people say, and how they react to things, yourself included. This means paying attention to dialogue. If you pay attention to dialogue and expressions, your story will come alive. "We had a Jamaican woman in class who was very quiet. But she had a wicked sense of humor that didn't come out until she started writing. She had a great knack for recording internal dialogue, when she was reacting to her demanding relatives. Her observations really made a difference in the story," Martel says.
• Ask yourself how the story makes you feel. "We are always looking for the human side of the story," she says. "How does something make you feel, and why do you feel that way about it? Asking yourself that may allow you to go from the specifics of your story to the universal that will allow others to relate to it."
• Look for something that's timely. For this time of year, of course, that would be holiday-themed stories, traditions, and recipes. It's what people are thinking about, and so what they likely will want to talk about. Martel says Susan Stamberg's cranberry relish story/recipe is a great example of this. Since 1971, Stamberg, a news reporter for National Public Radio, has been writing and telling stories about Mama Stamberg's relish, which includes cranberries, horseradish, and sour cream, making it a Pepto Bismal pink. Now the infamous side dish is famous, and it generates new stories every year.This year, she wrote about a group of expats in Afghanistan who made it for Thanksgiving one year.
• Ask the traditional reporter's questions, who, what, where, when, how, and why. But, when you get to the how and why, slow down your observations and thinking. "We're all like these gerbils on treadmills these days. So slowing it down and looking at a small piece of it can help your story. Why is something good? The how and the why are particularly key."
Capturing Holiday Food Traditions: Now, About That Recipe
We all have those scraps of paper, annotated with scribbles, and splotched with ingredients from years past stuffed into cookbooks, drawers, and sometimes even boxes. Food expert and author Priscilla Martel says most of those so-called recipes likely will fall short for someone who's never made that dish before. And that's because most of us take our family cooking techniques and traditions for granted. If we do it this way, everyone must do it this way, we assume.
That just isn't so, and so, to make a food story transcend most of what is out there, particular care is required when it comes to conveying the recipe, Martel says.
In terms of actually developing a recipe, have a thick pad of paper on hand and write down everything," she says. "Everything. I could say that four times." Everything. Everything.
As someone who helps develop recipes for a living, Martel says it can be easy to miss some of the important details. "It's cool if someone has that original recipe card," she says. "But, as I like to say, a recipe can be lost in the time it takes for the cake to cool."
Here are some tips to help you with the process of recording the recipe.
• Measure, measure, and measure again. "If you know your mother used the blue tea cup with the chip, that's fine, write it down. But go back after and measure it" with a standard measure that is exact, she says.
• Pay attention to the tools that are used, and record that, along with their dimensions. This is true particularly for baking. "You have to be able to reproduce the thing. So, was it in a loaf pan? If so, what size? How deep? Was it a skillet? An aluminum skillet? What kind of bowl was used?" Martel recalls recently trying make a recipe out of a published cookbook that called for a very specific weight of flour, 62 grams. But then the recipe called for a medium-sized loaf pan. "What's that?" she says. "What's medium? That's the kind of thing that makes me crazy."
• After you have the recipe, and you've recorded it, read it again a few days later, and make sure you haven't missed anything. "There may be something in your peripheral memory that you maybe did not write down," she said.
• If you don't like using pen and paper, consider using an iPad or other computer notebook. Martel said that can sometimes be easier than trying to keep track of pieces of paper. Once she made a great stollen yeast bread, and stuck the paper in a book where she was reviewing some concepts. "It took me four days, but I finally found it" she said. When she works on her iPad, she doesn't have that problem.
Food Writing: To Find out More
To find out more about author and food expert Priscilla Martel's class at Gateway Community College in New Haven, visit her website at priscillamartel.com. To sign up, rather than doing it online, she recommends contacting Stephen Fries, coordinator of Hospitality Management Programs at Gateway. Call 203-285-2175 or email Stephen directly at sfries@gatewaycc.edu. The class is $547 for three credits and it is open to the public. The 15-week course, which will meet Tuesday evenings starting Jan. 26, will cover the personal food essay, restaurant reviewing, recipe writing, food blogging, and more.
Here are some additional resources:
• Writer's Digest: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Writing About Food by Judith Newton
"I always begin a piece on food by asking what did this cooking or dining experience mean to me? Why did I think it important? Everything follows from that answer. A second question that I pose when I am writing about a moment of cooking or dining is what larger story is this a part of. A third question I pose has to do with connection. What personal relations has this experience of cooking or dining involved? A fourth question is how I can bring the reader to the table, engage her in a sensuous apprehension of the food and its surroundings. A fifth question is how do I bring the sensuous apprehension of food together with its emotional meanings and my reflections upon both?"
(Read more: www.writersdigest.com online-editor/5-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-writing-about-food)
• Forbes: Want to Be a Food Writer? Here's How. by Victoria von Biel
"Ask a ton of questions. Learn to listen for the thoughts behind the answers. Dig deep." "Get off your couch and go out into the world and learn to smell, taste, hear, and touch. Touch a star-fruit to see what the skin is like, smell the clementine, listen to the talkers on the train, watch the sunrise again and again. Food writing is all about the senses and the more you hone yours, the stronger your work will be." "Read as much as you can. Read every genre and read like it is going out of style. It will all help towards becoming a stronger writer."
• The Tim Ferriss Experiment: How to Become a Great (Food) Writer: The Big Secret by Tim Ferriss
"Take notes. These events led directly to the publication of the first article of my food writing career. More recently I used specifics such as these in many chapters of my memoir, Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer. If you want to be a writer whose work is lit up and energized by the telling detail and the palpable freshness of the moment, get yourself a nice, little easy-to-carry notebook. And don't leave home without it." "Oh, and read as much excellent food writing as you can find...In other words, great food writing is...great writing. Simple as that."
(Read more: www.fourhourworkweek.com/2012/12/01/how-to-become-a-food-writer/)
Martel says story tellers also can take a cue from National Public Radio's StoryCorps project, which has been collecting, broadcasting, and archiving stories on a wide variety of subjects from everyday people since 2003. A national initiative, it recently launched a StoryCorps App for mobile devices.
Providence Public Library in Rhode Island recently conducted a StoryCorps campaign, and Leah Lubman, branch manager of Providence's Washington Park Library said that specific campaign has ended but that sometimes the mobile booth visits Providence while on tour. She also recommended that aspiring storytellers check out tips posted by StoryCorps at storycorps.org/great-questions/.
"From observing interviews, I'd say the most important thing is to create a quiet space and to set aside time for listening; that's when great stories blossom," Lubman said.