simple, spicy

When I moved into my first apartment, back in my early twenties, I owned one cookbook. It was the More-with-Less Cookbook, a spiral-bound Mennonite production, first published in the same year I was born. The cover featured the symbol of Mennonite Central Committee, half cross, half dove of peace, outlined with a handful of black-eyed peas and barley and a fragment of Swiss cheese. It was subtitled (and still is): suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources. I grew up eating from this cookbook, and the recipes in it were for the food I knew best.

That first year on my own, More-with-Less really suited my lifestyle. I made it a goal not to spend more than twenty-five dollars a week on food, twenty if I could help it. I didn’t buy spices, olive oil, or any dairy product that cost more than, say, $2.50. Garlic was too posh for me. I remember that I cooked a lot of lentils and that I baked bread. Cheap spaghetti. I remember cooking rice one time and burning the bottom of the pot. I didn’t cook rice for months after that, because I didn’t own a pot scrubber. Most days I could smell the sumptuous meals of my Pakistani, Indian and Chinese neighbors, sometimes so fragrant they seemed to seep through the walls. I had a recipe for lentil curry, flavored with ½ teaspoon grocery store curry powder. I may have considered the curry powder an acceptable extravagance. More-with-Less calls for miniscule amounts of any ingredient that could conceivably impart flavor.

That year, I ate to live. I didn’t take pleasure in eating, but I did take pleasure in the righteousness of my frugality. I ate so low on the food chain I was dangling by my finger. This was in part because I didn’t have much money to spend, of course. But I also loved the idea of this austerity. I loved the idea of feeding myself from one simple cookbook.

I've changed. These days I’m a little flabbergasted that More-with-Less remains such a standby. It was radical for its time, the same way Diet for a Small Planet was radical for its time. And like Diet for a Small Planet, its messages about consuming fewer planetary resources and processed foods are as pithy and relevant as ever, though a lot of the content is dated. But I’d rather read Michael Pollan, or Barbara Kingsolver, or Ruth Reichl, or Mark Bittman, people who deliver this message without religious dogma and with a sexy passion for good food that is far more infectious, to me, than the sanctimony of poor old More-with-Less.

More-with-Less has become a symbol for all the ambivalence I feel about Mennonite notions of simplicity. I can’t just diss it for being bland and self-congratulatory, though I do find it to be both those things, just as I find those qualities rampant in so much of Mennonite culture. I was raised on the values in More-with-Less, so much so that I take them granted, forgetting that in 1976, a cookbook that suggested people eat less meat and make meal preparation easier by sharing housework rather than dumping all responsibility on women was a pretty feisty piece of business. I tend to dwell on the sweeping exhortation against alcohol, the knocking of “multicolor cookbooks,” the subtle preaching against getting too much pleasure out of eating, of turning it into a “superexperience.” And then, to make sure no overly sensual or lurid “superexperiences” cloud our devotion to Christ and good works, a battalion of recipes for thoroughly unstimulating food.

But of course, I live in this locavorous farmer’s market-supporting artisanal international post-Alice Waters culture, where pleasure and ethical eating have managed to find each other again and make sweet love with alarming frequency on the front tables of Borders. This was not the landscape in 1976. I know this. And if the reactionary, let-us-not-be-tainted-by-the-excesses-of-the-world tone of More-with-Less irks me, I’m irked in full awareness that were I my parents’ age in the seventies, it would probably be the best and most international thing on my cookbook shelf.

Still, it’s 2009, and we keep More-with-Less around more or less as a relic. It sits on a pile with the two successive Mennonite community cookbooks, Extending the Table and Simply in Season, both of which are better than their predecessor, if not go-to favorites or anything. Next to those are seven or eight multicolor, glossy, visually appealing, world-embracing, mostly international cookbooks, loaded with real flavor.* They are an investment made over the course of years, each one carefully considered, all of them far more costly than the Mennonite books. These books are the means by which I finally learned to cook. On our kitchen bookshelf, you get what you pay for. We still shop frugally and eat low on the food chain. But as one of us says to the other at least once a week, damn, we eat well. (ETA: Just reread this. My God. How self-congratulatory was that?)

The joy that I take in cooking and eating great food is the engine behind my political passion for sustainability and change in the world food system. Every human being deserves to eat this way. While I credit More-with-Less with awakening my conscience, I need passion and variety to sustain me, both as an eater and as a political animal. I need cookbooks that aren’t written by missionaries.

Every now and then, though, when we’re trying to think of something to make, we remember a recipe in More-with-Less, something we can use as a template. With any More-with-Less recipe, our rule is to double the spices. Or even triple the spices. And then add some more spices. Somewhere in there is a metaphor.



*In case you’re interested, our core cooking library is made up of all six books by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, who deserve all the praise that has been heaped upon them. Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is the Bible. And after renewing the library copy of that hot babe Marcus Samuelsson’s book on African cooking, The Soul of a New Cuisine a few times, we bought it. Gaggy title. Amazing food.