“Food is important,” says Kate Christensen. It ushers us through all the events of our lives. It is also what comes back, as this PEN Award recipient trains her eye on her past in her latest book, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. Food colors all manners of being in this memoir: as a child, Christensen remembers enjoying “chicken pot pies, those magical things that […] were put into the oven in their individual little aluminum pie pans to turn golden brown on top and bubbling and savory inside, with chunks of peas, carrots, and chicken suspended in hot, salty, ambrosial glue.” As an adult, reeling from a divorce, she remembers cooking, “one broiled chicken thigh, or even two, with a baked sweet potato and side of garlicky red chard.” At the end of her search for contentment, somewhat older but definitely happy, she remembers the food her lover cooked: “roast leg of lamb with green pepper-apple-onion curry, arborio rice, and mango chutney.”
Falling somewhere between M.F.K Fisher and Joan Didion, Christensen’s memoir covers a span of forty years — from childhood, to college, marriage, divorce, to true love. And threading it all together is Christensen’s nearly religious fervor for food (with actual recipes!).
The storytelling style is all her own. Christensen tends to back into her stories, and things are often revealed backwards, without fanfare — to an alarming effect. Christensen writes: “When I was a kid, on what passed for chilly mornings in Berkeley, my mother used to make my sisters and me soft-boiled eggs with pieces of buttered toast broken into them.” She goes on to describe the tablescape of one such morning, the littler of plates and eggshells and toast crumbs, but also the sun coming through the windows. Next, as Christensen’s father is about to go out the door, her mother calls him back, asking for a bit of help. Maybe it’s the normalcy of what she says — “Please stay and help me, Ralph. I just need some help. Don’t leave yet,” — that makes the following absolutely chilling:
“My father paused in the kitchen doorway, looking back at us all at the table. Something seemed to snap in his head. Instead of either walking out or staying to help my mother, he leaped at her and began punching her in a silent knot of rage. It went on for a while.”
