Product: Maya Angelou - "Great Food, All Day Long"
For Maya Angelou, the holidays bring family and friends to the table to eat, to laugh. and to one-up each other.
“This is a time when people get to ‘show out,’ as my grandmother used to say,” says Angelou, poet, memoirist and civil rights icon. “Moe is going to try to out cook Joe. It becomes amusing and delightful.”
Angelou, whose second cookbook, “Great Food, All Day Long” (Random House, 2010), features holiday-worthy dishes such as crown roast and prime rib, helped a generation understand why caged birds sing. But what about how to make prefect veal chops?
“I’m a cook, a serious cook,” she says. “I plan meals not only for their nutritional value but for their beauty. I plan them around who’s going to eat them and when. It’s ceremonial, for jubilation or commiserating over something.”
“You have to examine and be familiar with every element,” she says. “So you should know a red pepper, what it will do in a skillet with a tablespoon of olive oil, how it will look. How if you give more heat what will happen to it. You know the materials well.”
Cooking can be a gateway to creativity of all kinds, Angelou says, if you pay careful attention to the craft. “I ask folks to read poetry, to read it aloud, so they can hear the music, the melody of it,” she says. “I would encourage a person who wants to cook to buy cookbooks.”
Angelou estimates her own cookbook collection at somewhere around 300 volumes.
And at this time of year, she says, cooking for others takes on a deeper meaning. “When a person cooks for me, I like to think of the cooking itself as a gift,” she says. “I’m always glad and really so grateful to anyone who cooks for me. And I love to cook for others.”
Angelou cooks for her friends, Hall of Fame songwriters Ashford and Simpson, every Christmas, when she is their guest. As per tradition, she creates the dessert, sometimes a trifle, sometimes a chocolate cake, but always something festive. Her other tradition involves people she has never met, and likely will never meet again.
“I like to spend one day during the holidays either serving food at a shelter or preparing food to be given to one,” she says. “We’re told in the Judeo-Christian bible that it’s more blessed to give than to receive. And sometimes we just receive.”
Now “82 plus,” as she says, the Pulitzer winner has seen Christmas changes over the decades. And though like many people she is concerned about the commercialism of the holiday, she says she still loves the other sentiments it inspires.
“I like that families still try to come together,” she says. “Quite often when we go to homes, to give, we find a lot of young people, black and white, washing dishes, trying to seriously be part of the community and to justify the space they occupy.”
Source
Original Article
