Tag: food history

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Conversations in the Margins (Part 2): Communicating across time and space with MFK Fisher and Catherine Plagemann

On the flyleaf of MFK Fisher’s annotated edition of Catherine Plagemann I wrote “I’m really excited about annotating this copy: Like being in conversation across space and time with both authors.”

I jumped into the book, then, with some high expectations. I find few things as thrilling as a robust conversation in the margin notes (part of the reason I like buying used textbooks is so I can write responses and revelations connected to the previous owner’s notes), so a chance to have a marginalia-based interaction with one of my favorite food writers, about a new-to-me food preserving book? That is a peak life experience right there.

I adored this book. I adored the conversation the authors had in its pages (even though Plagemann of course wrote the book without realizing it would become this annotated volume decades later). I’ve talked before about the interaction between text and reader, and how a book is not just a static object but a site for meaning-making between both author and reader (who both might have very different interpretations of the same thing).

A cookbook presents a different version of this, because we’re not working with philosophical texts or other works that we traditionally consider being more open to interpretation. Cookbooks are considered by some, in some contexts to be didactic instruction manuals more than interpretation-heavy texts (sorry, I love nuance too much to make a broad and inaccurate sweeping statement here). And so the interaction between text and reader is in some cases fundamentally different than a reader’s experience of purely narrative text.

Leaving the many nuanced and context-driven rabbit holes we could go down exploring examples of and exceptions to the above, what I loved about this particular book was that we got to see those interactions made explicit, and in this case, they aren’t just about the instructions themselves: They meander across memory, local food systems, and a range of other subjects (I talked a bit more about this last week). 

MFK Fisher’s writing is in my experience both conversational and authoritative, and I found I initially approached her margin notes the same way. With deference, almost, to this much more known and experienced writer of food. 

However, as I went through, I asked myself to challenge that tendency, instead approaching the marginalia as a conversation, rather than taking the margin notes as the be all and end all of how one might experience these recipes. 

What if I added my own thoughts, and gave them the same weight as the marginalia already on the page? 

I do know a thing or two about food preserving, though as with anything there’s always more to learn.

And so, thrusting myself into the book as a conversation partner rather than a passive absorber of information, I added my own rather substantial layer of notes. 

Sometimes, these focused on specific recipes. Sometimes, my experience with similar types of foods. 

I played around with whose words I read first: I found it didn’t make a huge difference to my understanding or experience of the book if I read Fisher’s notes or Plagemann’s original text first, but it felt more like a conversation building on itself when I started with the original text and went forward from there. 

I was surprised which recipes Fisher annotated and which she didn’t, since only about half the recipes in the book have margin notes from her. Some, like her favorite recipes, or ones she was skeptical of (like banana jam), have notes saying such. But others that I assumed she would have something to say about (like the cucumber ketchup I mentioned last week) have no margin notes at all. It was interesting, then, for me to add in notes on pages where the conversation became just between myself and Plagemann’s original text, a return to how I often annotate books, without an additional voice between myself and the original author to consider. Both also cite some additional books, briefly, like voices dropped into the conversation then just as quickly disappearing again, which adds another layer of exploration for me to dig around with. 

Here are a few favorite recipes/annotations from the book: What annotations would you add to continue our conversation in the margins?

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Margin Notes: MFK Fisher’s Annotated Edition of Catherine Plagemann

I love when serendipity brings a new book into my life. While digging around online for home repair stuff, I somehow, completely by chance, came across a copy of MFK Fisher’s reprint of Catherine Plagemann’s Fine Preserving.

Published in 1986 by Aris Books (Berkeley, CA), this particular volume is interesting because it comes to you, the reader, as a glossed text. That is, the original text is presented alongside margin notes that were added in by a different reader (MFK Fisher), giving you a couple layers of text to experience and explore.

Next week I’ll talk about the experience of becoming part of that larger decades-long conversation through the margin notes of the book. 

But this week I want to talk about the book itself, and the recipes inside (scroll down for a couple of my favorite recipes from this text, if you’re curious). 

There are several layers of conversation happening in this text: There is the original text itself: Plagemann’s original 1967 Fine Preserving, a copy of which Fisher owned, and which sparked the publication of this annotated volume. 

Fisher was, according to the preface, in conversation with friends about lost masterpieces, and said without hesitation that if she could revive any book it would be Plagemann’s. The book’s publisher happened to also be at the table and the rest, as they say, is history. 

It was decided not just to reprint Plagemann’s book as-is, but to include the annotations Fisher made in her personal copy to produce a new version of the text. 

The annotations go beyond “this is good” or “I don’t like this”, though those are present too: What struck me was that Fisher’s conversational tone also pops up in her annotations, particularly when writing out a specific food memory in the margins. It leads me to wonder if her original annotations were taken as-is or edited a bit for the published text (one assumes the latter), but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn Fisher’s margin notes read exactly as they do here in the original version.

Sometimes, this is accompanied by a recipe: And in the case of orange marmalade, she notes that she prefers her mother’s recipe, then offers it, as an extra treat of sorts, on the adjoining page. The annotations, then, are not just Fisher’s experiences, but an opportunity for us as readers to recreate those experiences in some limited way. To try Plagemann’s recipes, and some of Fisher’s family recipes, and bring the authors into our own kitchens. 

There’s a temporal and geographic element to it as well: Fisher and Plagemann both note what ingredients they have in abundance where they live (e.g. Fisher, in California, talks about working with grapes and citrus in abundance). But the kinds of foods they serve the preserves with also speak to a way of eating that is very meat-heavy: The recipe notes for just about every fruit preserve say that it’s good alongside meat (a tendency that asked me to think more broadly about how I use fruit preserves, as someone who rarely eats meat, with fruit or otherwise). It feels, to me, like the cooking of a generation or two before my time, which it is, though Plagemann may also have been heavily influenced by German cooking, where in my experience this is more common.

And Fisher clearly tells us her favorites from this book: pickled seedless grapes and chermoula (scroll down to see).

Most of the recipes are for sweet preserves and pickles, with a few surprises, like cucumber ketchup (though readers familiar with Our Fermented Lives will probably remember that this has historical precedent: people make ketchups out of just about anything).

From a food preserving standpoint, many of the recipes hold up to my experience of what makes a good-tasting preserve, though I will say there are a lot more jellies in this book than I typically make (MFK Fisher, I learned, shares my lack of interest in making jellies, and we both find them overly finicky and prefer to make other preserves instead). 

From a modern-day food safety standpoint, some of the practices are not ones I would personally share in a book (like sealing jars with paraffin rather than safely canning them). But also, I recognize that these processes were a part of food preserving’s history, and thus the book makes sense for the time in which it was written. The recipes I’ve made from this book so far are ones that work well as preserves kept in the fridge (I may, at some point, can some of them, but have not done so yet). 

If you want to make your own, here are a couple to try, including Fisher’s favorites, and that cucumber ketchup:

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Mugwort: Magical and Mundane

I love building lifelong connections with plants, in part because they offer me a pathway to experience joy and connection in unexpected places.

Mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) is used in Asia and Europe for both practical and magical purposes, and one thing that brings me a lot of joy about it is that I’m always learning new things about them. It’s like spending time with a friend you’ve had since childhood, and them suddenly revealing that they have a whole skill set or identity you knew nothing about. It offers you a chance to learn about, and fall in love with, them all over again.

Recently, I watched the documentary The Last of the Sea Women, about Haenyeo, women divers off Jeju Island in South Korea. The documentary itself is a compelling watch, and taught me about one aspect of the world I knew nothing about. But as I watched I also caught a few glimpses of an old friend: Mugwort. 

The divers put sprigs of fresh Mugwort in their masks before going into the water, though the documentary doesn’t touch on why, and mugwort’s appearance is fleeting at best. I was curious and, knowing mugwort’s long history as a protective charm, wondered if that might be part of it, but the reason is much more pragmatic: Divers rub Ssuk (Mugwort) on the insides of their masks before going in the water, which coats the mask and prevents it from fogging. 

The on-screen Mugwort encounter drew my mind back across our long friendship. 15 years ago, appearing in a dream, then later in life, offering me lessons and a chance to connect to ancestral places and to myself in ways I otherwise could not. 

Popping up in small places, between the cracks of the sidewalk just in one part of my garden, almost as a protective barrier between my home and the rest of the world. In my garden itself, Mugwort lives in one small area, without me even trying to contain or control their spread. Save for one single plant, which lives under my bedroom window. Like a protective sentinel there to guard my dreams (Mugwort, for those who’ve worked with the plant before, is often worked with for dreaming).

Mugwort is often in the corners of my awareness when moving through my days in this way. Both practical and magical, Mugwort flavors my food and drinks and the tincture supports my moon cycles and my dreams. In Ireland, I often wear a necklace my mom gave me with a piece of dried Mugwort from my Atlanta garden tucked inside. 

The latter leads me to my most recent Mugwort encounter, via the Moxa sticks used by my acupuncturist, on a day recently when I needed a lot of support and care. When I stepped into her studio in Cork, she burned the bundle of dried mugwort I made and brought to her the first time we met, a full circle moment of collective and individual care.

I work with Mugwort often and, no surprise, Mugwort ends up as a regular player in some of my newsletter writing + recipes. If you want to dive down into this particular rabbit hole, here are the newsletter issues that talk about Mugwort:

Medicinal and healing vinegars (also here)

fermentation and magic/spellcraft

the history + modern collaborative practice of mead making

Flowerkraut, tea krauts, and color-changing kraut

In this recipe for wound healing salve 

The foraging origins of booze

These bitters inspired by Stephen Crane’s poem, In The Desert

Mugwort as a bitter food

My experience cooking with synesthesia 

If you want to learn more about Mugwort, I highly recommend joining Herbaria, an online herbal community run by herbalist Sarah Bobodzhanov-Corbett who wrote a well-researched and comprehensive guide to Mugwort (among many other plants).

I also appreciate that she asks us English-speaking herbalists to look beyond Western herbalism: I learn so much from her!

You can join Herbaria here, if you feel so called (you can also watch the recording of my class on place-based fermentation with Sarah here).

Edited to add:

Occasionally, there’s discourse on social media about Mugwort being dangerous. Yesterday, another round of mugwort fear mongering reared its head online, and is a reminder that our relationships to plants is and should be nuanced and personal.

Mugwort is safe for many people but not everyone (e.g. folks who are pregnant and nursing). While Mugwort contains thujone, it would need to be ingested in pretty high levels to have an effect. As always, trust your own senses and body, ask your medical care team questions, and use common sense. But there’s no need to be afraid of Mugwort, who’s been safely worked with, particularly in Asia and in some parts of Europe, for millennia. If you’re worried, just work with Mugwort externally (e.g. in salves or smoke cleansing sticks).

One thing I loved about yesterday’s rounds of discussion were how many people jumped to Mugwort’s defense, and how many people shared their own nuanced relationships to the plant. One that stuck out to me was a Japanese woman who learned to eat Mugwort in Spring and make external preparations in Fall, when the thujone levels in the leaves are higher (I can’t seem to find her post now, if you do, please let me know so I can add it in here). There’s a beauty and intuitive connection evident across many people’s relationships with Mugwort. It’s a reminder to me that our relationships to plants are deeply personal, but many people often develop similar affinities with specific plants.

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When the Excess is the Point: On Food Waste

In my article in the most recent issue of Eaten, on feasts, I talk about repurposing food waste in Early Modern English households. Repurposing waste was something done as a matter of course (and in many households and many places still is), utilizing simple techniques like making stock out of scraps. 

But there were other more ingenious, creative repurposing efforts happening too: A personal favorite (for its creativity, not necessarily the product itself) is lids made out of hog bladders. Essentially, hog bladders are stretched across containers while still soft, and they dry to become taut like a drum.

I talk about these in the Eaten article, and talk at length in Our Fermented Lives about my own experiments fermenting food in period-appropriate containers using hog bladders. Tl;dr: The flavor was…memorable.

But while I wrote about the excess being put to use, I also jumped down a rabbit hole wherein the excess itself is the central purpose of the feast. We see that in grand meals across time, where the food becomes a centerpiece for showing off one’s wealth and status via access to expensive ingredients and ability to hire skilled workers to make things like ornate sugar sculptures or towers of meat stacked like nesting dolls. 

Sometimes, the waste was the point, as noted by historian Anna Zeide: Who in one interview described the Gilded Age as “a very widespread celebration of overabundance.” Industrial robber barons hosted long tables of guests, with dozens of plates of food (and specialty silverware for each type of food, particularly in the US where social mobility was perceived to be higher and performing wealth was paramount). “For them, like that over consumption of food was a sign of wealth,” notes Zeide, “and of course, most Americans weren’t participating in it, but they were aspiring to it. And in some ways, not needing to use up every piece of food you had was a sign of having made it.”

Our modern sensibilities about food waste are interesting to me because we at once recognize the value of reducing waste not just for individual cost savings and food security, but for urgent and visible ecological reasons as well. And yet how much are we still influenced by food as status? In particular, in wasted elements that can’t be eaten, or are just added to the table for the sake of it.

This called to mind a recent evening where I was watching Downton Abbey in the background while cleaning, and was struck by a scene where two characters are decanting wine for the table, with a different wine for each course. One wonders at how the entire family isn’t falling down drunk by the end of dinner, but another reassures him that “they hardly drink any of it at all.”

These are fine wines, carefully selected by the head butler, decanted at the perfect interval before dinner to breathe properly, and poured with care and precision, to mostly languish in a glass before presumably being tossed down the drain (the show’s writers leave this last element a mystery).

Perhaps few of us engage in this exact kind of decadent waste, but as people in wealthy countries who, to varying extents, can afford a variety of foods, can we say that decadent waste is completely absent from our lives? 

It also makes me wonder at the subjectivity of what “decadence” means: The way I live now feels pretty simple and streamlined to me, but would be positively decadent to me 20 years ago. And both might be decadent to someone living in circumstances without, say, indoor plumbing. 

In terms of food waste, how can we use excess as a benchmark? I don’t have answers, but I wonder if thinking of “the excess is the point” versus waste as a by-product (and one we try to repurpose to varying extents), is a useful avenue for inquiry in our own lives and world. Not that we should never have big meals or show off our skills, but that those are placed within the context of our larger lives and worlds.

The Great Depression and World Wars by necessity, moderated some of these practices in the 20th century. But the aspiration to giant feasts remains, evidenced by everything from holiday feasts to dozen course menus: A desire to showcase our wealth and to prepare more than we need simply because we can, or because we want to experience luxury. Or want to share that experience with others. 

While our relationship to food has shifted and distanced us from our meals’ sources, and shifted the context in which we experience certain low waste foods (like pie) or removed some practices (like using bladders as lids) altogether, perhaps we’ll come up with our own, new, low waste practices, that historians will look at centuries from now, placing us in our lived context through the ways we stored and repurposed the bits and bobs of our daily meals.

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Reading list: Small wonders and falling back in love with writing 

Joy and ease are the order of the day for me this month. It flies in the face of everything around us to proactively seek ways to feel either, but I feel we can’t get past the helplessness and stalemate of the moment without them.

Joy, and ease, invite in possibilities we might otherwise miss. They invite us to view and review ourselves and the world around us through a light that’s realistic, yet hopeful and optimistic too.

Where can we choose to focus our attention to build a future that’s more joyful? Where can we find small ways to invite in some ease, and some joy, now?

Here are some readings I’ve been enjoying in connection with joy and ease, in the kitchen and beyond:

Chandra Ram’s midwinter experiment using citrus to infuse joy into an otherwise bleak season

Meg (of Joy of Cooking fame) writes about cooking lasagne as an antidote to doomscrolling. 

I talk about digital boundaries often with my holistic creativity coaching clients and this approach, of replacing doomscrolling with something else that’s more joyful, is something that works well for a lot of folks (if you try it, let me know in the comments, will you?)

In my TBR pile: This report on early microbial life, Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End (currently in preorder).

SPEAKING OF PREORDERS, my next book, all 493 pages of it, is available for you to preorder: Grab a copy at Bookshop.org (or Bookshop UK). It comes out mid-May (June 4 in Europe).

In my TBD pile: Continuing to apply for grants (I apply for 3-5 grants/month). I started this practice 4 months ago and, while the fruits of my labors haven’t paid off, yet, grant funding is in part a clarity of messaging game and in part a numbers game, so I know that my efforts will pay off. Even when I don’t get grants, the opportunity to put down what I’m doing in clear language, and to dreamweave about how I can continue to grow that work with additional resources, is priceless.

I apply for small business grants, since I’m a business owner, but also creative grants. Some grants ride the line between both, and I apply for those too, since being a professional writer is, in fact, a business. 

I find grants through government portals and local small business resources, and through grants newsletters (there are tons of newsletters out there with awards, grants, etc., and it can be useful to poke around and find ones specific to your interests (like this). 

And finally, the below was recently posted by chef Jacques Pepin on Facebook. I remember reading Levi-Strauss in undergrad in Psychology, and this inspires me to dive back in with the eyes of a food writer to see what new gems emerge:

“Brillat-Savarin said in one of his aphorisms, “You are what you eat. I believe that for many people “I am what I cook,” because I have been defined by my cooking most of my life. Claude Levi Strauss, a French anthropologist, describes the process of cooking in his seminal book, The Science of Mythology, as the process by which nature is transformed into culture. Well, going back as far as my memory can take me I see a kitchen in my vision of my mother, my aunts, my cousins, and I visualize that process in a specific dish for each of them.  

Be well. -JP”

Where I’ve appeared in the media recently:

This article on adding sauerkraut to your Thanksgiving menu

Late last year, my Culinary Curiosity School classes were featured in The Guardian. It’s great to see that aspect of my work both recognized and placed within the larger conversation of experiential gifts (rather than gifting people clutter they don’t want or need). 

As a reminder, paid subscribers get 30% off all those classes, always. Find the discount code in last week’s email or email me if you’d like a reminder. 

I was also recently interviewed by Food & Wine about (surprise!) pickles.

And, I’m pleased that my work here in Ireland is starting to take root, including mentions in local media for my recent fire cider class (co-taught with Aleesha Wiegandt) and the ‘Get Published!’ panel I was part of in January.

Things I’ve published recently and other news:

I wrote this roundup/guide for building simple, daily rituals into your 2026 for The Guardian

For Produce Parties, I wrote a piece on the last words my mother told me along with reflections on how being raised in a strict evangelical church shaped my relationship to food. You can order a copy here. 

I’m also in the next issue of Eaten, a longtime bucket list publication for me, with a piece on food waste and feasts. You can order the issue, on feasting, here. 

A reshare of this piece on gardening and climate change, written originally for Gravy and republished in Rough Draft Atlanta. 

Last year, I helped with the bibliography and some of the behind-the-scenes work on this book (yes, I do some book indexing, fact checking, formatting, etc. as I have space in my schedule), and it’s great to see it out in the world: The book is part memoir, part study on ableism in religious spaces, and blends both beautifully. It’s by far one of my favorite projects I’ve helped with in this way.

The book is: Healing Ableism: Stories about Disability and Religious Life by Darla Schumm

I rarely write poetry, and even more rarely share poetry I write…but I felt called to share this one about falling (back) in love with writing:

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Want to take my new food preserving class? Open this newsletter for access

The newsletter has moved over to WordPress. There are still stumbling blocks but, we are here! If you were a paid subscriber in Substack, your payments there have been paused, and you’ll need to upgrade your subscription by clicking below to access paywalled content here. 

It’s $3/month: Which is $2/month cheaper than Substack or Patreon so, a win-win all around. 

To thank you for your patience as I made the switch, I’m offering folks who stick with me as paid subscribers a free class, plus 30% off live coaching calls, to be used for anything from book proposal coaching to building a writing routine, to fermentation questions or energy work (I know, I’ve got range). 

Details on all of that below!

Here are the classes I’m offering for free to paid subscribers (and to $5/month+ Patreon subscribers, if you want to go that route):

Here’s how to get your free class, plus your link for 30% off private coaching with me (which can be used whenever):

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