Emily Gould stood in an Upper West Side kitchen on a Saturday evening and gazed into a crumb-encrusted pan full of creamed spinach. “It kind of suffered on the subway a little bit,” she said.
It was a moment that might have appeared in an essay by the food writer Laurie Colwin, whose recipes were on the menu that night. Ms. Gould is a writer whose first novel will come out this summer, and the apartment belongs to her friend Sadie Stein, a contributing editor for The Paris Review. Both hang out with a young, literary, food-obsessed crowd, and they had met up with two friends to eat baked mustard chicken and that creamed spinach, debating and paying tribute to a writer whose work overflows with stove-centered gatherings just like this one.
Ms. Colwin was an author, self-described “refined slob” and passionate, idiosyncratic home cook who died in 1992, when the members of this salon were still in grade school. During her life, she gained a reputation first and foremost as a novelist and a composer of delicately calibrated short stories. But in the years since her death, at the age of 48, her following has only grown, and her highly personal food writing, collected in the books “Home Cooking” and “More Home Cooking,” has attracted a new, cultishly devoted generation of readers. Her musings, anecdotes and quirkily imprecise, not-altogether-reliable recipes show up with regularity on food blogs. Which only makes sense, because even though Ms. Colwin expressed wariness about technology and cranked out her essays (most of them for Gourmet magazine) on a mint-green Hermes Rocket typewriter, there is something about her voice, conveyed in conversational prose, that comes across as a harbinger of the blog boom that would follow.
“I think of her as kind of a proto-blogger,” said Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, which in 2012 inducted Ms. Colwin into its cookbook hall of fame. “I would say she’s a transitional figure between M. F. K. Fisher and Julie Powell.”
Ruth Reichl, the writer, editor and former New York Times restaurant critic, said: “You want to be in the kitchen with her — that is her secret. She is the best friend we all want. She never talks down to you.”
In turn, friendships have formed around her work. Ms. Stein, 32, first picked up “Home Cooking” when she was 9 or 10; her parents had it around the house in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. “I quietly commandeered the book for my own use,” Ms. Stein recalled. Years later, a shared passion for the Colwinesque view of food and life brought her together for those dinners with Ms. Gould; Ruth Curry, who works in publishing; and Lukas Volger, a cookbook author and entrepreneur.
Acolytes like Ms. Stein and Ms. Gould don’t merely read Laurie Colwin. They revisit her passages over and over again, and develop a guardian-angel-style attachment to her. When Ms. Reichl arrived at Gourmet as editor in chief, in 1999, she discovered in her office a cache of about 400 letters from mourning fans who had written to the magazine after Ms. Colwin’s death. Ms. Reichl’s “very first act” as editor, she said, was to have the letters messengered over to Colwin’s husband, Juris Jurjevics, a founder of the Soho Press publishing company who lives these days in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Most professional food writers can only dream of connecting with an audience in that way. “When I first went to Gourmet, every writer that came in said that he or she wanted to be the next Laurie Colwin,” Ms. Reichl said.
To Ms. Colwin’s partisans, her essays stand out as an antidote to glowy, glossy magazine photos in which carefree, beautiful people savor a spread of gastronomic wonder around picnic tables on some farm in Umbria, with shafts of Spielbergian sunlight illuminating the scene. By contrast, Ms. Colwin’s world is one of hangover cures, dinner parties gone awry, an apartment so minuscule that its inhabitant has to clean dishes in the bathtub, and the appeal of simple, unstylish grub like boiled beef, black beans, lentil soup and potato salad.
“She’s like the anti-Martha Stewart,” Ms. Reichl said. “It’s not about perfection.”
It would be easy to describe Ms. Colwin’s recipes as American comfort food, but that categorization doesn’t get at their essence. They’re more like an eccentric form of autobiography. As you approach them, Ms. Stein said, “you have to know her tastes are weird.”
Among those who did know her, Ms. Colwin was a catalytic force. Vibrant and vigilantly observant, she drove fast, despised elevators, collected colanders, specialized in spot-on mimicry and had what might be called a Proustian enthusiasm for domestic splendor.
“She was a great cook, but the fiascos were kind of fabulous,” Mr. Jurjevics recalled. “She cooked haggis once that was like the advertisement for ‘Alien,’ with the cracked egg.”
She held strong opinions — about crockery, English food, romantic protocol, the lovers of her friends — and she didn’t hesitate to express them. “She did not approve of writers who were self-dramatizing,” said Scott Spencer, a novelist and friend of Ms. Colwin’s. “And she did not approve of difficult, inhospitable, challenging, overly fancy kinds of food. It was a culinary philosophy that may have been born of necessity, since her fridge was the size of a suitcase and her stove had four small burners and a balky oven — and the oven was mainly used for storage.”
When Mr. Spencer met her, Ms. Colwin lived alone on Bethune Street, in the West Village, in an apartment that became known, in her essays, as the Lilliputian place where she explored the gastronomy of the hot plate. Somehow she gave parties, “perching us here and there throughout her room as if we were pieces of human scrimshaw with which she decorated her cozy quarters,” Mr. Spencer recalled in an email.
Her friend Willard Spiegelman, now a professor of English at Southern Methodist University, recalled her parties as feeling “almost entirely improvisatory,” with Ms. Colwin dashing out at the last minute to find some flowers, watercress, a chicken. “Laurie’s primary interest was never in food per se,” he said. “It was food as a way of gathering people together.”
Later on, Ms. Colwin and Mr. Jurjevics moved into an apartment on West 20th Street. (They married in 1983.) “She was not somebody who went out a great deal,” recalled her friend Alice Quinn, now the executive director of the Poetry Society of America. “But she loved, loved, loved having people over to her home.” The food she served was “always very simple,” Ms. Quinn said. Guests might have found flank steak, watercress salad, chocolate cake.
That lack of pretension continues to endear her to readers. (Open Road Integrated Media recently signed a deal to release all of her works as e-books.) As Nozlee Samadzadeh put it: “You can’t be a snob when you’re cooking on a hot plate. But you can eat very well.”
Ms. Samadzadeh, a 26-year-old programmer and editor behind a blog called Needs More Salt, encountered Ms. Colwin after falling in love with a recipe for tomato-and-corn pie that was published on the blog Smitten Kitchen. (Deb Perelman, the creator of Smitten Kitchen, said that Ms. Colwin’s work is “so relatable that you feel like it could have been written five minutes ago.”) Before long, Ms. Samadzadeh found herself gorging on Ms. Colwin’s books, trying out the scattershot recipes and silently asking herself a question at one life juncture after another: “What would Laurie Colwin do?”
Rosa Jurjevics asks herself the same question. Now nearing 30, Ms. Colwin’s daughter, also a writer, rents an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant where she holds onto her mother’s favorite French mug, serving bowls, photos, recipe binders.
Ms. Jurjevics was only 8 when her mother died, overnight, of a heart attack. For fans of Ms. Colwin’s essays, she is a pivotal figure: the girl who made “spider webs with the fancy chicken-trussing strings, which I do remember doing,” she said. She was there to witness the process of her mother’s experiment with the legendary “black cake,” a Caribbean dessert whose ingredients steep in their own fruit-dense flavors for months.
In some ways, Ms. Colwin prefigured a lot of what the food world is obsessed with now: organic eggs, broccoli rabe, beets and homemade bread, yogurt and jam. “She was so ahead of her time with the organic stuff,” Ms. Jurjevics said. “That was so hard growing up, I’ve got to say. I was the kid with the weird lunch.”
On the other hand, the surge in food media might have befuddled her. “I wonder what she would have made of so many things,” Ms. Jurjevics mused. “Would she have a computer? Would she email people? She was so particular about everything. Would she blog? I wonder, would she compulsively Google herself?”
Ms. Jurjevics can’t always relate to the predominantly heterosexual, comfortably upper-middle-class demimonde captured in her mother’s fiction, but she picks up her mother’s voice, her phrasing, her opinions, her way of looking at the world, on every page of “Home Cooking” and “More Home Cooking.”
She has gone back to those books countless times. The novels, she said, “may be wonderful, but they’re not what I’m looking for. I just want more of her.”
Recipes: Gingerbread | Creamed Spinach With Jalapeño Peppers | Baked Mustard Chicken
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