A Story Behind the Story with Food and Stanley Tucci

Jonathan Taylor on Unsplash

This is a story of writing reality. It's not a story many writers will want to hear.

I wrote a humor piece called My Dinner With Stanley Tucci back in 2022 after watching his CNN series, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which dealt with food and culture. Italy isn't a major interest for me, but food and culture, yes. For people who aren't into Italy or food and culture, let me tell you that this was a popular series, as CNN series go. I believe it had two seasons.  

Why did I find something amusing regarding this show? Well, as it turns out, I have a few not-very-serious chronic health issues that are greatly improved if I limit what I eat. As much as I enjoyed Tucci's show, I can't eat most of what he talked about, at least as he talked about it.

It's the incongruity theory of humor, people. Watching all those shows about food I can't eat.

A Bit of a Timeline

I wrote the humor piece and submitted it to McSweeney's back in 2022. I used to make jokes about how the McSweeney's humor editor and I were on a first-name basis, because I'd submitted there and been rejected so many times. No, you're right. It's not that funny.

Then I submitted it to a Medium humor site, which also rejected it. 

By that point, Tucci's Searching for Italy show was getting too far in the past for a humor piece to work. Without it being in the news, as it had been while it was on, only fans would recognize the reference.  So I decided to wait for a new season before making more submissions. Then I learned that CNN was canceling the show, because they were going to do less original programming. Though it later ran Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico, which sounds like the same show to me, except for the part about Eva Longoria hosting it and it being in Mexico. Now, I like Eva Longoria, but, come on. They had Stanley Tucci who is a known food person!

Anyway, the cancelling of the show made my humor piece seem even less of a go. 

Then, Stanley got a new show! Tucci in Italy! 

With a few edits to bring the piece up to date, I was ready to submit again. Another rejection, but then it  found a home  with Muddy 'Um.

Except for the creepy child piece published at Frazzled, which was new material and has done well, I haven't been making a giant effort to write anything original for Medium publications. Readership is way down there for many people, myself included. I was never a big draw there, but over time there was a possibility that I would eventually draw more followers who would actually read what I wrote. Because of whatever has happened there, that seems unlikely, which has motivated me to write things to submit elsewhere. As a result, I've mainly been submitting revisions of blog posts to Medium pubs. (In fact, I have a revision almost ready to submit now.) 

But My Dinner With Stanley Tucci was already written and just needed to be brought up to date. Of course, I did some other tinkering, because I'm always tinkering. But I wasn't starting from scratch. Since I didn't need to put a lot of time and effort into it, and it was probably time sensitive just as the original piece had been, I believed it was worthwhile to submit to Medium. Whatever I get for readership and income will be fine, and it will fill a gap in my publication timeline. I don't like a lot of gaps.

So there you go. That's what happened here.

The Heritage Month Project: "The Cooking Gene" By Michael W. Twitty

I know it's Women's History Month, but I had to finish my last read for Black History Month! It was a good book. Pretty amazing, in fact.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty is another book I've owned for some time but didn't read. I was attracted, I'm sure, by the culinary history aspect. But now that my body is shot and I'm limited in what I eat, reading about food, itself, doesn't interest me as much as it used to. I've started following gluten free Facebook pages to give you an idea how my mind runs these days.  

This book, though, isn't just about food.

Twitty is a food writer, culinary historian, independent historian, and historical interpreter. I'm not sure if he's a cook/chef, though he does cook as part of his work as a historical interpreter, demonstrating food cooked as slaves would have done it in the south. For my last unsold book, I did research on independent historians for one of the characters, and I am delighted to be able to point to The Cooking Gene as an example of the kind of work that historians who are not connected to an academic institution can produce. 

And as a food writer, Twitty does very fine work, too. If he cooks a third as well as he writes, he must be very good with that, too.

What Twitty is doing with The Cooking Gene is using his family history to connect with the history of slaves in this country and tying it together with food. We get genealogy with this book, just as we did with Pearl's Secret, though Twitty has the benefit of DNA testing, which Neil Henry didn't have when he was doing his family research. Twitty did more than one DNA test and got dramatically more information than I got with the one Ancestry.com test I was willing to pay for. He also had a personal genealogist. Here's something you never hear: "If I win the lottery, I'm hiring a personal genealogist!" Just so you know, I'm saying it now.

Twitty travels to different parts of the south where his ancestors lived and writes about the different foods that were common there, as well as historical issues for each area. Once again, I'm supposed to know a little history. When I thought of crops in the old south, I thought of cotton. But it wasn't just cotton. It was tobacco (which I sort of knew about) and rice (which I didn't). As nasty crops to work with go, rice sounds the worst.

Twitty makes an interesting point about cotton: We think of cotton as having a huge impact on the enslavement of Blacks, but it did more. It had an impact on immigration in the north, because of all the cotton fabric mills that employed them. Evidently the so-called "Americans" who didn't want to work in the fields in the south, meaning we needed unpaid slaves, also didn't want to work in the mills in the north, so we needed underpaid immigrants. Which raises the question, what did "Americans" want to do?

The issue of immigration in the north connects with my people, because French Canadians came into this country in the nineteenth century to work in those mills Twitty mentions. But that's a story for another month. 

While I was reading this book, I was acutely aware that Twitty was raised knowing a great deal more about Black cooking than I was raised knowing about French Canadian or even Franco American. But, again, that's for another piece of writing.

This was a great book to finish my Black History Month reading, since it relates to two of the other three books I read. As I said, it does some of what Neil Henry does in Pearl's Secret. But it also covers  grim material like The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It's grimmer, in fact, because when Twitty writes about auction blocks and Black men and women being stripped so white shoppers can check them out, that was real. Readers can reassure themselves that The Underground Railroad is fiction. The Cooking Gene isn't. 

I've had a good month of reading. Time to move on to Women's History.

A Bizarre Experience Related To Eating And Tim Ferris

I ate this.

For years I've been interested in doing some short-form writing about eating. I'm not talking about food writing, because you need to know something to do that and it tends to be about kinds of food my people don't eat. I've been interested in writing about eating, the kind of eating my people do versus the kind of eating Food Network people and New York Times reading people do.

Eating had a significant role in my very first book, My Life Among the Aliens, and its follow-up, Club Earth. Eating and its connection to social class makes an appearance in The Hero of Ticonderoga. I've done a couple of real eating articles for a publication at Medium, Enough and Mac and Me, both in Kitchen Tales. And then there are some eating adjacent pieces, such as Blackened Pans at The Bigger Picture, which touches upon my time working in a professional, though not restaurant, kitchen.

So the whole eating writing business is a thing for me.

Enough Of The Eating. What About This Tim Ferris Person?

I've been thinking about writing about bread baking for a long time. Last week, while looking for one of my old blog posts to use in a new blog post, I came upon one about bread that I thought I could rework for a submission to one of the Medium publications. That led me to go looking around on my hard drive for bread material that I'd started. And that led me to a link I had kept to How to Become a Great (Food) Writer: The Big Secret even though, as I've already said, I'm not interested in being a food writer, great or otherwise, just an eating writer. 

I will admit I have not yet read every word in this article, because it's interesting and has links I want to follow. It looks good. I need some time. I also got distracted.

I got distracted because of the splendor of the website it was on, which belongs to the Tim Ferris you've been waiting for me to get to. It is difficult for me to be able to say who or what Tim Ferris is, because he's done and does a lot. He appears to be a productivity writer/speaker/podcaster/blogger/what have you, with his productivity interests spread over many things, like cooking, and his productivity ideas, perhaps, evolving. I was overwhelmed by his post on creating a viral book trailer. I was intimidated by his description of marketing for his book The 4 Hour Chef, which appears to be about more than cooking.

So What? There Is A So What, Right?

I have not done much about time management here for quite a while. I use "time management" as an umbrella term for all kinds of things that can impact time. That may be what I'll find at Tim Ferris's site. If so, I may be fired up about time management again.

In the meantime, I have to do some managing and find time to finishing reading his post on how to be a great (food) writer. 

A Personal Essay With A Childlit Connection From Yours Truly

My most recent short form publication is Blackened Pans, published at The Bigger Picture on the Medium platform. This is not humor but a light, memoirish personal essay. To some extent it deals with
food and eating, something I would like to write more about. And it has a connection to some classic children's books.

Over the two years or so that I've been publishing at Medium, I've tried doing different things there. Self-publishing humor directly myself. Writing about Medium, which often goes over well there. Reworking material from this blog's Time Management Tuesday feature. Publishing a review of a time management book I discussed extensively here last year. 

With Blackened Pans what I did differently was add a bio at the end of the essay with a link to Saving the Planet & Stuff.  

I have another piece out for consideration at a Medium humor publication and will be probably submitting to another later today.

And then some work on the never ending YA novel. Because it's not all short form work here all the time. 

I Read It For The Bread

You know those books about women going to Europe on their own and having some kind of meaningful life improvement thing happen there? Yeah, I haven't read any of those, but I imagine All You Knead Is Love by Tanya Guerrero may be a middle grade version of those. 

Twelve-year-old Alba is sent off to Barcelona from New York to live with her Spanish grandmother who she doesn't know well, because her well-to-do father in America is physically abusive. The abuse primarily involves her mother, and mom gets Alba out of this mess by sending her off to her own mother. Alba isn't crazy about this plan, and she's angry with both her parents--her father for being what he is and her mother for putting up with it. But Alba is won over by life in Barcelona, because her grandmother is a lovely woman, there's a male mild romantic interest, a girl best friend, and an old friend of Mom's who runs a bakery specializing in bread.

Some Basics About The Book

I don't think I've read many middle grade books that begin with an escape from abuse or that include mom being on the receiving end to this extent. I found that interesting. I would have liked more of that. I wanted to see evil Dad, see mom standing up to him, and see Alba respond to that situation. There was also an issue with Alba's appearance--she likes to wear her hair very short and wear boyish clothes. This ticks Dad off. I thought we were going to see some kind of gender situation here, but it never came to that.

Some Favorite Parts

I have never been that interested in Spain, but Guerrero makes Barcelona sound fantastic. The book isn't enough to get me onto a plane, but I certainly would watch a  movie or TV series set in Barcelona, or even Spain, after reading it. 

And then there is the bread. I sought out this book because  the the word "knead" is in the title and there are loaves of bread on the cover.

I Was The Bread Person

I have been baking bread, and bread-like things, since I was a teenager. All this stuff about yeast shortages during the pandemic, because people who had never baked bread were taking it up while they were stuck at home? That set me off. Those Johnny-come-latelies were taking my yeast. And I'm somebody who buys it by the bottle and usually am one bottle ahead.

Back in the day, I made bread in the shape of Christmas trees, braids with white, whole wheat, and something else strands, braids stuffed with pastes made of walnuts or almonds, Easter braids with colored eggs. Sadly, I do not have pictorial evidence of any of that. You'll have to take my word for it. I cut back on the fancy stuff, because I'm surrounded by Philistines who prefer brown-and-serve rolls, which I will not have in my house. I'm not even sure what they are.

A friend up the street once said, "Whenever it rains, I know that Joan is making cookies, and Gail is making bread." I was famous for bread, people. Famous, I tell you.

So you can see why I had to read All You Knead Is Love. 

Sadly, the bread making in All You Knead Is Love is way, way beyond my clearance level. However, I loved that the bakery in the book expanded to making gluten-free breads, since I'm doing that, too, now. After several years, I'm just tinkering with a recipe I really like. I have no pictures of that, either.

All You Knead Is Love is more than a travel and food book, but it should be a nice introduction to those types of reads.