Liz Hickok - Cooking Up Stories: A collection of 18 short stories

Cooking Up Stories

A collection of 18 short stories

Edited by

Liz Hickok and Heather Johnson

Bay Area Library ePublishers

Sunnyvale

Published by

Bay Area Library ePublishers

Sunnyvale Public Library

665 West Olive Avenue

P.O. Box 3714

Sunnyvale, CA 94088

Copyright 2017 by Sunnyvale Public Library

All rights reserved.

First edition.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Individual stories and poems were reproduced with permission from the following authors: Joyce Kiefer (2017). Copyright 2017. Ann Davison (2017). Copyright 2017. Pam Wong (2017). Copyright 2017. Heather Fong (2017). Copyright 2017. Patricia Collins (2017). Copyright 2017. Lianne Card (2017). Copyright 2017. Nancy LaRonda Johnson (2017). Copyright 2017. Pooja Kale (2017). Copyright 2017. Allen R. Rosenberg (2017). Copyright 2017. Lisa Scott (2017). Copyright 2017. Cindy Sakihara (2017). Copyright 2017. Shiela Scobba Banning (2017). Copyright 2017. Cathy Broderick (2017). Copyright 2017. Elisabeth Forsyth (2017). Copyright 2017. Gauri Khanolkar (2017). Copyright 2017. Susan Lange (2017). Copyright 2017. Nisha Malani (2017). Copyright 2017. Krithika Yegneswaran (2017). Copyright 2017.

Editors: Liz Hickok and Heather Johnson

Friends of the Sunnyvale Public Library

This project was supported in whole or in part by the Friends of the Sunnyvale Public Library.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Supplied by Sunnyvale Public Library

Cooking up stories / edited by Liz Hickok and Heather Johnson. First edition.

Includes a collection of 18 short stories in which food or cooking is featured prominently.

ISBN 978-0-9961724-2-4 (electronic book)

1. Food writing. 2. Cooking Fiction. 3. Short stories. 4. Electronic books. I. Hickok, Liz, editor. II Johnson, Heather, editor. III. Title.

813.0108 dc23

Table of Contents

Introduction

For its second publication, the Bay Area Library ePublishers selected a theme which would demonstrate the great diversity of unique voices within our creative communities. That theme ultimately became a call for manuscripts of food writing, a subject that appeals across localities, cultures, and generations.

Cooking Up Stories contains 18 short stories related to food in unique and timeless ways. Fictional tales of mystery are served with a side dish of murder. Nonfiction stories of travel, adventure, and family promise to fill you with delight and warmth. Whatever your appetite demands, the short stories cooked up by these authors have something to appeal to anyones literary taste buds.

We think youll agree that this years anthology achieved a universal appeal while simultaneously continuing BALEs mission to provide a middle road between traditional publishing and the self-publishing phenomenon for its writers. Many of the stories selected are from writers who are new to the publishing world, while others are more seasoned. With your support as a reader of this cornucopia of stories you, too, participate and support BALEs mission to re-imagine how libraries connect with local writers and how writers in turn strengthen their bond with their local communities.

Liz Hickok
Heather Johnson
Sunnyvale Public Library, 2017

Life Through Cookery

By Joyce Kiefer

Cookbooks tell my story.

I realize this as I clean the shelves of my kitchen bookcase. Theyre filled with cookbooks Ive bought and product booklets like Jell-O that Ive sent for over the years. Some, like the ones for appliances I no longer have, beg to be tossed. But I realize, as I review my collection, that four cookbooks reveal the basic ingredients of my life.

I carefully open the 100-year-old My Cookery Book that my grandfather, Donaciano Verdugo, picked up in Australia on a voyage of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. He was the ships cook. In Melbourne, he picked up the newly published My Cookery Book by one Flora Pell, who had taught cooking classes in schools through the state of Victoria and produced the book from notes and recipes she gave her students. He must have had my mother in mind. In 1916, she was entering her teens and, as she told me, liked to help my grandmother cook for their large family in San Francisco. The book had diagrams of meat cuts and basic information on nutrition. It offered an educational slice of Aussie tastes with such dishes as treacle and fricassee sheep tongues. It also made my mother curious to see more of the world. Eventually she did.

When I was little, my mother would dig into the back of her recipe drawer to let me examine her fathers gift, but I had to be careful with the brittle pages. Now I carefully remove this small book from a plastic bag. I thumb through the pages to find the soup section. There it is, Ox Tail Soup. It was Miss Pells suggestion for a substitute tail that still gets me: Note Kangaroo tail may be used the same way.

She didnt say what to do with the rest of the kangaroo.

Theres more. On the opposite page is a recipe for mock turtle soup. I figure Miss Pell had in mind the student who found herself in the Outback with neither oxen nor turtles. As a kid who was a squeamish and picky eater, I would gasp with delicious horror as I read the recipe, which starts with the substitute for the turtle, half of a calfs head. The method part gets right to it. (1) Wash head, remove brains, blanch head. After boiling and adding vegetables, Step (8) says, Remove all meat and tongue from head and cut in pretty shapes.

My mother never fed me a single dish from our Cookery Book, but the recipes feed my imagination to this day.

When she was a young bride, she bought her own cooking bible The Modern Priscilla Standard Cook Book: Methods and Recipes, 1929 edition. In line with the Great Depression, the recipes were simple and used few ingredients. I loved the black and white art deco swirls on Priscillas cover and best of all, its recipe for Baked Eggplant.

Most people would gag at the color and texture of this casserole gray-green and spongy. The recipe goes like this: One eggplant, peeled, cubed and boiled until tender. Then add a beaten egg, a chopped onion, butter, and that staple of Depression dishes bread crumbs. Mom would mash the eggplant like potatoes, the way I liked it. The dish was great the next day and the day after that. Dad wouldnt eat it. Years later, my own family would refuse it as well.

Pricillas Baked Eggplant was a secret taste shared between my mother and me.

I started cooking when I was around ten, so a family friend gave me Fun with Cooking. It features a ten-year-old girl in a pinafore who demonstrates in photos how to do such basic things as make peanut butter cookies, frost chocolate cupcakes, and best of all make Butterscotch Squares. Various spots dot the pages, which cling precariously to the binding.

Fun with Cooking has an un-PC dedication by its author, May Blacker Freeman: What are little girls made of? To my niece Marilyn, who may want to know what else can be made of sugar and spice and everything nice.