More than once I have spent an afternoon cooking one of my character's favorite foods.
For "Kneading Mother," I baked a batch of German kuchens.
For "Doors," it was angel food cake. I hand-whipped one dozen egg whites to stiff peaks, baked the batter in an ungreased tube pan that I found at a garage sale, placed it upside down on a glass coke bottle to cool, and cried when it fell, the result of baking on a rainy, humid August afternoon. I stared into the bowl of one dozen yolks, wondering how to keep them from going to waste. I would not have known any of this without putting my hands to work.
My newest character is Tatum Birdnest Summerfield. Her name comes from cities I found on a map of Texas. Her middle name used to be Beatrice but when the kids at school start calling her Birdnest, she decides to adopt it for herself. On her 13th birthday, her parents allow her to legally change her name. She likes cooking with wildflowers and plants that she finds in the woods behind her house. She has found some abandoned bird eggs and is going to try to hatch them herself.
In the creative writing workshop I teach to middle school students, we made paper dolls of our characters.
You can see from the photo that Tatum is a bit of a wild thing. What I didn't realize, until some friends pointed it out, is how much Tatum resembles me. Here is a self-portrait I took to compare.
This is the first photo I have shared with my gray Crone look. But back to the topic of food.
This afternoon, my young writers and I are baking dandelion bread, something Tatum makes from flowers she collects on her walks. I want to show them how we can bring characters to life with our hands and allow us to write about them more authentically.
I am trying to find ways to learn more about Sophia's life, beyond copying pages of her husband's manucript. I discovered that the Tolstoy's grandson operates a cafe at their former estate, now a museum. He serves Sophia's most-loved recipes: Anke pie (a lemon pie with a crumble crust named after a friend of the family) apple dumplings, mushroom stew, and potato pudding. The Museum launched an app that allows users to access to Sophia's recipes. The app is available only in Russian but an English version should be released later this year.
Yulya Vronskaya, head of international projects at Leo Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana Museum Estate, says the Tolstoy's diet "may have been slightly plainer and and more modest than that of other noble families of the same status, because the Tolstoy family wasn't inclined to serve luxurious feasts." When Leo adopted a vegetarian diet, his wife accomodated him but did not become a vegetarian herself. She ordered two meal options each day: meatless dishes for Leo and their daughters, meat for her sons and herself. I find this a curious family alignment, the way the sons stood by their mother and the daughters flocked to their father's side. From what I have read, this division extended beyond the dinner table.
I have not decided which recipes I most want to try from the Tolstoy's family cookbook. I'm leaning toward macaroni and cheese; I wonder if my kids will notice the turnips. I may even re-enact an entire meal, sons and mom at one end of the table, my husband and our daughters at the other. I'll let you know if they will play along.
For now, I'm off to pick dandelions.
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