Arlyn Osborne - The Emily Dickinson Cookbook: Recipes from Emilys Table Alongside the Poems That Inspire Them

RECIPES FROM EMILYS TABLE ALONGSIDE THE POEMS THAT INSPIRE THEM

Arlyn Osborne

Contents

Introduction

EMILY DICKINSON is considered one of the greatest American poets today. But while she lived, Emily, a nineteenth-century rebel spinster, was known as an accomplished cook. This was her love language. Shed package a piece of cake or a recipe with her letters. Her father refused all bread but hers. And she was a competitive baker at the annual Amherst Cattle Show, where she took home second place for her Rye and Indian Loaf ().

The kitchen was probably Emilys favorite room in the Dickinson Homestead. She spent hours inside its soft apple-green walls and baked regularly with Maggie, her cherished maid. The poet would often scribble on scraps of kitchen papers from shopping lists, to dinner invitations, to torn parchment. She once wrote a poem on the back of a French chocolate wrapper and wrote a recipe on the back of a poem. She used kitchen twine to bind her rhymes into booklets and was always happy to swipe a cookie when Maggie wasnt looking to sneak to children. The kitchen was where Emily felt most at home.

Food was an inspiration for the poet in all forms. Emily kept a watchful eye on the orchards and vegetable gardens and tended carefully to her beloved herbs.

Before becoming the notorious all-white-wearing recluse, Emily was a vivacious and witty woman, active in the community. She was part of a poetry club, a reading club, a sewing society, and a Shakespeare club. As she sunk deeper and deeper into the tide of agoraphobia, the poet held on to her love of cooking. She felt joy in the joy it gave others. With a rope, Emily would cautiously lower Cream Puffs () from her second-story window, hiding because she couldnt bear to be seen. She wasnt crazy. She was just an eccentric in need of some modern mental health awareness.

Emily mentioned food in many of her cryptic poems and often used hunger, starvation, and thirst as metaphors for emotional needs. The Belle of Amherst had been hungry all the years.

This collection of fifty recipes is guided by a variety of components. First, Emily wrote some of her own recipes and those are adapted here for the modern cook. Some recipes are interpretations of foods mentioned in letters or inspired by her poems. Others highlight popular dishes in Victorian America that Emily would have likely eaten.

Just like the popular television series, Dickinson, I wanted to bridge the modern with the past. I did this not just by including modern equipment, but also by incorporating dishes popular today that Emily may not have necessarily see. Like Emily, Im using food as a metaphor.

I also wanted to use the recipes as a way to tell Emilys story, because food, like poetry, was so incredibly meaningful to her. In many ways, food was her lifeline, an act of self-care and an expression of love, even in the depths of her seclusion. Despite everything we know about Emily, parts of her life will forever remain a mystery.

I hope the recipes in this book inspire you to be creative in the kitchen and to share it with those closest to you, just like Emily did.

Egg-in-a-Basket with Chives

BREAKFAST was a special time for the Dickinson household. The tight-knit family ate the most important meal of the day together often and Maggie, the cook, knew everyones favorites. In a letter to her cousins, Emily describes a happy egg and toast provided by Maggie.