Bon Appétit: How Food Writing Fed My Fiction

Once upon a time—about ten years ago—I believed I could eke out a living writing fiction, book reviews, and essays about life and literature. And perhaps, in the world of ten years ago, that might almost have been possible.

Fast-forward to the age of the iPad. These days, it seems harder than ever to sell a book to a major publisher if yours isn’t a household name. Literary journals are folding or moving online, which means they don’t even pay in contributor copies anymore. Many newspapers and magazines have reduced or eliminated their book review sections, thus ceding the role of book critic to the reader comments on sites like Amazon and Goodreads.

It became increasingly clear to me that I ought to consider branching out into some new markets. With that in mind, I signed up for a class in food writing at New York University. I’ve always loved food—eating it, cooking it, and reading about it—so I thought that once I mastered the basics of the genre, I could easily make the transition from fiction writing to food writing. 

I quickly learned that I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Being a serious, full-time food writer is a career in its own right, which requires not only a way with words but also a masterful knowledge of gastronomy. 

Yet my exploration of food writing was not for naught. In fact, trying my hand at a new genre taught me a few lessons about the one I’d been practicing for years. 

Lesson 1: A teaspoon of magic goes a long way. 
On the first day of class, our instructor, chef and cookbook author Corinne Trang, gave what I thought was a fairly straightforward assignment: Pick a fruit or vegetable and describe it. One student chose a peach. Another went for an eggplant. I decided on a lemon.

A lemon: bright yellow, oval-shaped fruit with waxy skin. Easy enough, right?

“Look again,” said Corinne. “Is the color of the skin uniform or does it change at the tip where it was attached to the tree? Think about the texture, the weight of it in your hand. Is the skin smooth or rough? Does it have bumps? Is it gummy or taut? Are there any bruises on it? If I slice it open, what’s it like inside? Don’t just tell me it smells good or tastes good. Is it sour, sweet? Faintly floral? Does the flavor have layers to it on your tongue? And how did that fruit or vegetable get into your palm? How did it grow? Was it picked or did it fall off the tree? Is it fresh? How can I tell if it’s ripe? And how might I use it in a recipe?” 

I felt as if I were being whisked back to Creative Writing 101, except that in the fiction workshops I’d taken, we’d talked mostly about character, plot, and maybe a bit about setting. If we talked about objects—casually referred to as “telling details”—we did so mostly in terms of scenery. Rarely had we examined objects with such intensity. Never, as far as I could recall, had we thought of an object as a process, with a life in its own right whose properties evolve over time. 

For homework we had to buy a piece of the fruit we’d chosen, sit with it, and then redo our description. As I sat at my kitchen table with my lemon, squeezed it, smelled it, cut it in half and ran my finger across the surface, I felt gloriously inspired. It was as if I had never seen a lemon before, never appreciated its radiant glory. And so I eagerly composed three gushing paragraphs about my lemon, which I described as “bright golden yellow, with a dimple of pale orange on one side, and flecks of green at the tip where it had been picked.” I mentioned the feel of the fruit in my hand, the fragrant shavings of zest that would fall to the counter after I ran a Microplane rasp over the skin. I sliced the fruit in half and claimed that it smelled like “honey-scented soap.” 

As I worked I experienced a renewed sense of magic in the writing process, the power of black ink marks to shape themselves into lemons, peaches, or any object I could see, smell, hear, taste, or touch. I couldn’t wait to turn back to my fiction and pad it with lush descriptions, in which the life of each object would be fully explored. 

In class, Corinne slashed and burned my lyrical lemon ode to a single paragraph:

“A lemon is a small oblong citrus fruit that fits neatly in the palm of my hand. Its waxy, slightly bumpy and bright yellow skin has flecks of green on the stem end. Underneath the zesty skin is the pith, a white bitter membrane surrounding the pulpy center. I like to split the fruit in half crosswise, revealing two bright yellow wheels of tangy, juicy flesh.”

“No one has time to read three paragraphs about a lemon,” she said. “Get to the point. It’s just a lemon.”

Corinne’s straight talk and focus on the audience rather than the artist was a shock to me and many of us in the class, who felt a deep aesthetic attachment to their odes to peaches, eggplants, and apples. But for Corinne, our brilliance wasn’t the point. The integrity of our subject and the needs of our audience were. We served the audience, not the other way around.

Lesson 2: It’s your fault if a reader misunderstands your recipe!
I hoped to do better on our next assignment: writing a recipe using our base ingredient. I created a recipe for limoncello cupcakes, iced with a lemon–cream cheese frosting and filled with limoncello-flavored custard. I even made a batch of the cupcakes for the other students to sample as we edited the recipe in class, which was three pages long and had a list of twenty-four ingredients, as well as eleven steps to follow.

“Good cupcake,” said Corinne as I passed out copies of my work. 

I smiled, then proudly began reading the directions aloud.

“Stop, stop, stop!” Corinne yelled. “You’re making my head ache. No one is going to do all this, ever! You’ve got twenty-four ingredients. For one recipe! Can’t any of them be combined? Like, why do you use cake flour and regular flour? Who has cake flour at home? Where do you even find cake flour in the supermarket? And superfine sugar? Can’t you just use the regular kind? It’s annoying to buy an ingredient that you use for just one
recipe. And what’s this? Make the lemon curd a day in advance and allow it to set in your refrigerator…oh, please. Like if I want to make cupcakes, I want to make cupcakes now, damn it. I don’t feel like waiting overnight.”

In addition to larding up my recipe with single-use ingredients, I had also neglected to begin the recipe by calling for the type and size of vessel needed (i.e., “In the large bowl of a mixer”). I had listed the ingredients at random, rather than in the order they were used in the recipe. Another sin was calling for sugar in the ingredients, but failing to specify that some of it would go in the cake while some would go in the frosting. And when exactly did I plan to warn my readers that they would need to preheat their ovens?

Once again I was experiencing culture shock. I came from the world of literary fiction, where what I wrote was my world, created by me, me, me. Let readers be damned if they couldn’t or wouldn’t follow what I was saying. It was the reader’s fault, not mine, if I was being difficult. 

But in food writing, there was the reverse side of artistic freedom to consider. Yes, I had the freedom to write any way I wanted, but I also had to account for the freedom of my readers to read and even misread my work any way that they wanted, and perhaps write a nasty letter to my editor complaining that my recipe “didn’t work.” 

As I rewrote my recipe, I thought about my fiction and wondered where my poetic turns of phrase might lead readers astray. Maybe my sentences were beautiful, but were they in the right order? And even if my details were carefully chosen, were all of them necessary? Were they included to help my reader make sense of the world I was describing or simply to show off my own virtuosity like my three-page, eleven-step, twenty-four-ingredient cupcake?

Lesson 3: It takes more than food to make a meal. 
Our final assignment was a restaurant review. Together, our class visited a Pan-Asian restaurant in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. As the food came out, we traded bites of various dishes and chatted about what we liked and didn’t like and why. Most of our conversation then and afterward focused on what we were eating. So did our reviews.

When we came to class to edit our reviews, Corinne whipped out a black dry-erase marker and wrote on the white board: WHERE?

“Start with the neighborhood,” she said. “What kind of vibe does it have? Even before you get into the restaurant, what was happening on the sidewalk outside? Who was walking there? How visible was the outside inside? How did it feel to come inside from the outside? What was the first thing you noticed when you walked in the door? Who greeted us there? And who served us? Let’s get some characters in here. Who was making the food? What did you hear? How did the food look on the plate? Was it in a bowl or on a dish? Was there a garnish? What about the banana leaf those dumplings were served on? How did it feel? Slick or rough? Damp or dry or tacky?”

In addition to adding experiential detail, Corinne encouraged us to do research in order to add context to our meal. “You’re writing about Pad Thai. Okay, so what are the origins of Pad Thai? It’s a street food from Thailand using a sauce consisting of three main ingredients, one of which is tamarind, which is difficult to find in America, so people tend to substitute ketchup here, which is why in so many restaurants Pad Thai is pink when it should be brown. What I’m saying is, you have to know what your dish is supposed to be like in order to judge how well it’s been prepared.”

By the end of the lesson, we’d put enough details on the board to write an entire book, but we were limited to two hundred words. After all that hard work of seeing, we were only allowed to use a few of the fruits of our labors. 

That was where the artistry came in.

It’s true that food writing, because much of it is service oriented, is fundamentally different from fiction in both its particulars and generalities. For example, Corinne once taught us that you don’t write recipes for bad food, while some of the most memorable passages in fiction have been about that very topic. On a more general level, in fiction the writer is ultimately the absolute monarch of the terrain, not the reader.

Still, like good food writers, good fiction writers are omnipotent about their subject, but they don’t include everything they know in their finished product. Rather, the expertise they develop through careful, patient looking and studying allows them to sift through the details they’ve collected until they stumble upon just the right bit that suggests the whole. That hard-won sense of expertise suffuses every word they write, suggesting larger truths through small, precise insights, without lecturing, or worse, boring the reader. 

Since studying with Corinne, I haven’t gotten rich from my career as a food writer, though I have published a few food articles, and written a dessert blog, as well as a food-inspired short story. I’ve also used my recipe-writing skills in a new side gig as a baking teacher at my local Whole Foods. But I have definitely become enriched by my new understanding of the creative process, how to see more deeply, and how to be judicious in replicating that experience for a reader. And that has revived my passion and interest in not only the fiction I write, but also the living, breathing, complicated world from which I draw inspiration. 

Limoncello Cupcakes
Yield: 18 cupcakes

These velvety, lemony cupcakes with a tart, gooey surprise in the center get an added kick from limoncello, an Italian lemon-based liqueur. The cupcakes are also delicious and kid-friendly when you omit the alcohol. TIP: Depending on the temperature of your ingredients, the cupcake batter may appear curdled when eggs are added. The curdling will disappear as you add flour to the recipe.

For the cupcakes:

2 large eggs, room temp.

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

½ tablespoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1 ½ tablespoons cornstarch

½ cup buttermilk, room temp.

1 tablespoon lemon zest

1 tablespoon limoncello 

1 stick unsalted butter, room temp. 

1 cup sugar

For the filling:

½ cup lemon curd (homemade or
store bought)

¾ tablespoon limoncello

For the frosting (about 1 cup):

½ stick unsalted butter, room temp.

½ cup cream cheese, room temp.

½ tablespoon limoncello, or more
to taste

juice of half a lemon, strained

3 to 3 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, about 20 minutes. Grease two standard-sized cupcake pans and fill with cupcake liners. 

2. In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and cornstarch. In a large mixing cup, measure out the buttermilk, then add lemon zest and limoncello. Set aside.

3. In the large bowl of a mixer, using the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy, pausing to scrape down the sides as needed, 7 to 10 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix just enough to combine. Next, stir in ¹⁄³ of the flour and ½ of the buttermilk mixture, repeat, then finish with the remaining ¹⁄³ of the flour. Mix ingredients until just incorporated.

4. Using an ice cream scoop, fill each cupcake liner with ¼ cup of batter (about ½ full). Place in oven and bake until cupcakes are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 15 to 20 minutes.

5. Allow cupcakes to rest in pan for five minutes, then transfer each cupcake to a cooling rack and allow to cool to room temperature. Insert a paring knife at an angle into the surface of each cupcake and cut out a cone-shaped cavity. Mix the lemon curd with the limoncello, then use about a heaping teaspoon of the mixture to fill each cupcake. Take care not to overfill cupcake cavities.

6. Make the frosting. In a medium bowl, with an electric mixer, beat the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add the limoncello and lemon juice, then gradually add confectioners’ sugar until light and fluffy. Fill a pastry bag and pipe the frosting onto the surface of cupcakes. Decorate with dots of limoncello curd, lemon zest, yellow sanding sugar, or small yellow lemon-flavored candies. 

AN INVITATION
If you live in the New York City area, join us on May 2 at the Bowery Culinary Center in Manhattan, where the author will prepare his delectable limoncello cupcakes and discuss the art of food writing. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit at.pw.org/lemoncupcakes.

Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection, The View From Stalin’s Head (Random House, 2004), winner of the Rome Prize, and a novel, Faith for Beginners (Random House, 2005). He currently teaches at the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.