Libby Dulski Reading Response #1

Libby Dulski

Reading Response #1

“The Reporter’s Kitchen,” Jane Kramer
Secret Ingredients

“The Reporter’s Kitchen” by Jane Kramer captures my attention in the first paragraph. In her “way too small, nowhere to put anything unless the stove goes” (159) kitchen, Kramer immediately illustrates how her two worlds of cooking and reporting collide. She describes the kitchen as a place where “soup… never tastes the same as it did the day before, and feeds the voice that, for better or worse is me writing, and not some woman from another kitchen” (159). It is clear that cooking inspires her to write.

This reading has a pleasant uninterrupted feeling of flow as the reader follows Kramer’s experiences with cooking and cooking’s connection to her writing. I thought that Kramer’s reference to her beginnings with food like her mother’s “spinach soufflé… [and] overcooked turkey” (159) was a nice way to introduce the reader to Kramer’s first memorable experience with food. These little details about her first encounters with food made the piece endearing as the reader has insight to Kramer’s experience with food. Throughout Kramer’s piece, the reader glimpses memorable encounters with food such as Kramer’s experience with her father, housekeeper, and brother’s most memorable cooking experiences. Every detail the reader receives about Kramer’s cooking experience shows how these events lead her to eventually write about food and love cooking.

Everyone has their own first self-cooked meal locked away in their memory. For Kramer, it was a tuna curry dish. For me, it was my mother’s chili recipe (which was not half-bad). Kramer “started cooking when [she] started writing” (160). After making her tuna curry dish, cooking and writing were forever connected. While making that dish, she realized that “while whatever [she] did say wasn’t going to be the last word on the poetics of domestic violence, it would be [her] word” (160). Cooking sealed the deal on her writing.

I enjoyed Kramer’s connection to madeleine cookies throughout her piece. It showed that as she grew as a writer, and consequently a cook, her love for madeleine cookies had diminished. “Dream cookies” also seemed to play a large role in her life as she made them at different stages of her life. Certain foods seem to follow Kramer throughout different parts of her life: This is intriguing because certain patterns arise in all lives, for Kramer, the patter is cookies and cooking.

As the piece progresses, Kramer shows that cooking is her own sort of muse. Everyone has certain traditions or muses that help them write. For me, I find that listening to dubstep helps clear my head and allows me to write. For Kramer, slow cooking “the kind of cooking where you take control of your ingredients …Cooking like that- nudging my discorded thoughts into … a good risotto simmering slowly in a homemade broth- gives me confidence and at least the illusion of clarity” (163).  Her connection with food with writing inspires me to find a better muse that dubstep music to help inspire my own writing.

Kramer’s connection to different pieces of her writing to food towards the end of the reading was a delightful part to read. Her connections to making a chicken tagine when she is writing about French politics, or when she talks about making choucroute whenever she writes a piece related to music, and even cooking rabbit when writing about art. Making these little connections between the piece of work and what she enjoys to cook is clever and beautiful.

This reading showed a connection between cooking and writing for Kramer. Although she talked about her own experiences with food and writing, I couldn’t help but feel inspired to cook myself. And perhaps write about my own experience with failed chili.