Miriam Ungerer, Jean Stafford, (un)distinguished lives, that quirk of imagination
“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.” ― M.F.K. Fisher
Fitting, really, I should meet Miriam Ungerer under the roof of Big Chicken Barn Books, a relic of Maine’s poultry industry turned secondhand bookshop. Her book, Good Cheap Food, spoke to an enduring interest of mine and while the cover’s hand-drawn illustration of a chicken and eggs charmed me, it was Miriam’s commanding, refined voice that compelled me to plunk down several dollars on an old hardback.
Those exponents of plain cooking who insist that, for instance, a good piece of fish “doesn’t need anything” are only half right. The cooking of almost anything needs touch, control and that quirk of imagination that makes an ordinary dish special and memorable. Even the greatest fish, sparkling fresh from the sea, cannot be just hurled onto the broiler time after time after time. If man did not forever hare after variety, the art of cookery as well as some other pursuits would have ended in stasis some centuries ago.
Emphasis mine; wink all Miriam.
Miriam’s five cookbooks, published from the 1960s through the ‘80s, are imperiously chatty and long on opinions, their yellowed pages still lively and full of moxie. They are the kind of cookbook one reads for companionship and possibility. Why don’t I pull out the soup pot and poker chips on a rainy summer day? Why not invite a pal over for lunch of tuna with cannellini beans? Will I make Marion’s fish rillettes? Absolutely not. But the recipes are almost beside the point. When life is a lark and a gas, we renounce drudgery and recommence fun, if only for as long as we’re propped in bed with an old book. Arguably, it’s some of my favorite art, the kind that’s also magic.
So I found it strange and disconcerting that every trail of research dead-ended at a man. I read obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post for two of her husbands. Wilfred Sheed, “writer of gentle wit;” Tomi Ungerer, “puckish,” “brash illustrator” of international renown (apparently). (Even Miriam’s first and least famous husband has an entry on the American Air Museum in Britain website.) In each, the occupation of wife, Miriam, went unmentioned.
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