preserving - Root

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?

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:

Tag: preserving

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

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

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