A Talk with Kim Severson About Spoon Fed

• Author Kim Severson gives a book reading this Monday, April 26, at 7 p.m. at the University Bookstore.

Kim Severson (Photo: Soo-Jeong Kang)

I’ve started to grow a little weary of food memoirs. Publishers seem to be churning out the life stories of culinary neophytes at warp speed, each with an increasingly dubious premise, and an ever-younger author.

Needless to say, I was delighted to receive Spoon Fed, New York Times food writer Kim Severson’s honest-to-goodness culinary memoir, a book that chronicles Severson’s growth, away from alcoholism and towards a happier existence, but also delivers eight chapters of dishy profiles of cooks like Alice Waters and Rachael Ray, and even Severson’s own mother. Severson is a veteran journalist, a great writer and a woman with stories worth reading (and recipes worth cooking).

The narrative of Severson’s own evolution ties the book together, but it is in her individual portraits of other cooks that Severson really shines. She renders her subjects in a light both candid and forgiving, such that a reader could never doubt her journalistic creed to always tell the truth. When she writes about Rachael Ray, a woman reviled by many "serious" cooks, she praises Rachael Ray’s work ethic and success, Ray’s sheer ability to get people to actually cook something, without glossing over her culinary shortcomings.

In writing about Alice Waters, Severson is able to capture and explain what is so aggravating and yet vital about the mistress of Chez Panisse. She writes: "The power and madness of Alice is that she operates outside the reality-based system most of us use. She has a way of demanding things that seemingly can’t be done...because it is simply the best way to do it." (When I lived in New York, I went to a lecture in which Alice Waters told us that we should be taking our compost to the Union Square Greenmarket. Yes, that’s right, she was proposing that we take our garbage with us on the subway--but on the subject of composting, she was right.)

Severson also takes the time to write about people like Leah Chase and Edna Lewis, enormously important but largely unknown cooks. Both Southern women, Leah Chase is the owner of Dooky Chase, a restaurant in New Orleans where she makes her famous Gumbo Z’Herbes. Edna Lewis is the author of several cookbooks* and is largely regarded as the Grande Dame of the Southern cooking. I asked Severson about her decision to include these women: "I wanted people to know these women who never had a TV show and aren’t great pop culture figures but had a great influence on how the nation cooks."

Retracing our culinary influences is an interesting theme with Severson. In a favorite New York Times piece from 2007 (a piece that reemerges somewhat in Spoon Fed) Severson goes to Italy on what she terms "the red sauce trail" to try and unearth the roots of her mother’s red sauce. It’s a piece that combines Severson’s own culinary roots and her own cooking passions with journalistic research. It’s some of her best writing. In Spoon Fed she chooses to write about the women who directly exert influence on the way we cook, cookbook authors, teachers and of course, her own mother. It’s a decisive turn away from restaurants and flashy chefs towards the sphere of home, family and personal life.

At times, the thread of Severson’s own story seems to get lost, delivered as asides to the stories she’s telling about others. I asked Severson how it was, switching modes from journalist to memoirist, and she was candid as always: "It’s easier in some ways to be one’s own source material, but I don’t really like writing about myself. It’s even worse to talk about writing about myself. It brings on such an uncomfortable feeling for me (even though I am a complete ham most of the time). The process of memoir writing is deceptive. You start telling one story and before you know it you’ve headed down a road that leads to more revelation that you intended. At least, if you want to get down to the truth, that’s what happens. My editor kept saying, 'But how did you feel?' In my day job at the New York Times, how I feel is irrelevant."

In this memoir, Kim Severson does tell her own story, she does reveal herself, but she remains a journalist at heart; Spoon Fed is most satisfying when Severson is rendering portraits of other people--something she does with acute perceptiveness, honesty and compassion.

*The Taste of Country Cooking is probably Lewis’ most famous book; it is widely available in used bookstores and worth having if only to read the menus before bed. The most eye-popping of these menus is probably the "Sunday Revival Dinner," a meal which includes: Baked Virginia Ham, Southern Fried Chicken, Braised Leg of Mutton, Sweet Potato Casserole, Corn Pudding, Green Beans with Pork, Sliced Tomatoes with Special Dressing, Spiced Seckel Pears, Cucumber Pickles, Yeast Rolls, Biscuits, Sweet Potato Pie, Summer Apple Pie, Tyler Pie, Caramel Layer Cake, Lemonade, Iced Tea.