Episode 7 Show Notes - Crying in H Mart
Where we welcome the New Year with conversations about how books, music, art and food all create bridges to our emotional worlds and how grief can be worked through by cooking and YouTube!
Welcome back to Something to Eat and Something to Read, and happy new year!
We got together last week - in person! - to record episode seven and had such a lovely time covering everything from comfort and discomfort foods, writing about and cooking through grief, and how food connects us to our identity and memories.
The book responsible for bringing up all these ideas and themes is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. We so hope you enjoy our chat about it.
Crying in H Mart is a memoir written by Michelle Zauner, a Korean-American musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast. It's a beautifully written and often heartbreakingly sad memoir about her sometimes fraught relationship with her mother, her mother’s illness and death from cancer in 2014. It's about the role that food plays in figuring out our identity in the world, for caring and loving and grieving.
Michelle is a gifted writer and we both found this book very moving and beautifully written.
Links and show notes
We kicked off with a chat about summer reading; both having read and loved The Paper Palace. Mostly we wondered about the ending (promise no spoiler alerts) and how authors and readers can interpret these differently sometimes. We both got it “wrong”! As the author Miranda Cowley Heller said in an interview, it doesn’t matter what ending was intended by the author, what’s more interesting (I would argue, fascinating) are the phantasies the reader brings to creating their ending. This is what bibliotherapy is about, what the reader emotionally gains from the text and how it unlocks their internal worlds. Germaine.
Zauner's mother's final understanding of "I've just never met someone like you," bought up this quote by Andrew Soloman (who wrote the fabulous book Far From the Tree), "Even though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us". Germaine.
When a family friend comes to help out, during the first chemo treatments, she brings vegetable seeds for them to plant and water every day, watching for growth. There's such hope in this planting and nurturing. It made me think of an article I came across recently about printed seed catalogues having a renaissance during lockdown. Sophie.
We loved Michelle's description of some comfort food being "the kind you would order on death row". Just after her mother dies and her father is struggling with grief and addiction, she talks of how she began to cook her way through grief 'mostly the kind of food you could crawl into and that required sleeping off.' This food helped some, but what helped most of all was the pine nut porridge, Jatjuk she wanted to cook for her mum when she was ill, that she finally learnt via her youtube guardian angel Maangchi - this plain porridge was the first dish to make her feel full. Sophie.
Michelle says in an interview with Gretchen Rubin, that writing music creates more freedom for the listener to make their own sense of it; it's "impressionistic" while writing a book allows you to guide your reader and give them the context. This idea really interested us - what do we bring of ourselves to all art forms and when there is less context - such as with music or art, how do we fill the gaps differently than we do with literature? Deborah Levy spoke recently on Desert Island Discs about Phillip Glass's music and how his formal structure and repetition, the way his music rises and falls allows thoughts of her own to come in; to rise and fall. Germaine.
In his novel, The Humans, Matt Haig wrote "humans are lost. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are". Perhaps all art and culture acts as a key to unlocking our emotions and our inner worlds. Germaine.
Listener letter…
Dear Sophie and Germaine, I would love a recommendation for some bibliotherapy for myself. I am a nurse working at a medical practice for asylum seekers and refugees. We have been very busy this year as you can imagine with covid related anxieties, vaccine clinics and far too many swabs up people's noses!
My main role though is seeing new arrivals and with the Taliban invasion of Kabul I have seen a large number of distressed, displaced Afghani people over the last few months. It has been inspiring in many ways but also difficult and exhausting. Some days it is hard to see the positives in the world and hard to know what words can possibly console...there really aren't any. Most of my consults are also done using a telephone interpreter which with a mask and face shield on is very disconnecting.
I do understand that you receive many emails but I just thought I would ask if you had a suggestion that may be something that would change my frame of mind at the end of a challenging year.
Thank you
Germaine’s Book Prescription
I'm struck by this letter writer wanting to change her "frame of mind" as it shows her understanding that she isn’t trying to escape from reality, but rather work out a way to live between these polarities of finding both inspiration and heartbreak in her work and reset herself for the year ahead.
This reminds me of William Blake's beautiful lines from his poem Auguries of Innocence,
Man was made for Joy and Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the world we safely go.
So, how to find solace about this in reading? Who better to explore this co-existance of joy and woe than a very skilled 90-something-year-old author who has been there and seen it all before!
I am prescribing Hilma Wolitzer's short story collection which has one of the best titles I have ever read: Today a Woman Went Mad In the Supermarket.
This collection was only published last year and contains stories she wrote in the 1960s, 70s and 80s for magazines and ends with one she wrote in 2020 at the age of 93 after the death of her husband from COVID.
Elizabeth Strout has written the forward and talks about Wolitzer's characters living the daily existence with all the turbulence of the unexpected. As Wolitzer herself says,
"There's no such thing as ordinary life. I think all life is extraordinary."
I hope her writing brings our letter writer comfort, reminding her that life is inspiring, exhausting, wonderful, sad, devastating, hilarious and everything in between. I'm going to use Elizabeth Strout's words here to describe what I mean;
"There is wisdom as well. In the story 'Mother' a woman thinks: 'the very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but its nakedness, and the naked witness of others.’ Wolitzer allows us to be that witness, but with an empathy that rises up quietly from the pages. It does not frighten us, it envelops us… it will make you understand that you are not alone in the world. This is what literature does for us; it breaks down these barriers for a moment within which we all live."
And finally, I think Hilma’s metaphor for life will also resonate for our letter writer. In an interview, she talks about going to dinner parties in the 1970s, frequently "crowned by elaborate Jell-O molds and Jell-O appears in several of my stories. After a while I realised it made a better metaphor – colourful, translucent, layered and trembling – than a dessert."
With this book I wish our letter writer a colourful, translucent, layered and trembling year ahead!
Kristy’s Comfort Read
Our wonderful producer Kristy Reading and avid reader (of course she is - with that surname!) recommended The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku.
Sophie’s recipe recommendation
My suggestion is a fruit cobbler, a recipe that is just as comforting and lovely to make as it is to share and eat. I have made a version of this recipe a few times this month alone and it’s always done me good. Because making and sharing something this delicious and homely is just good for the heart and mind.
Summer fruit cobbler
Serves 6
Prep time 30 mins (plus 30mins chilling time)
Cook time 30 mins
For the cobbler biscuits
270g plain or wholemeal flour
1/2 tsp sweet mixed spice (I love this mix from Herbies)
75g caster sugar
3 tsp baking powder
Pinch of sea salt (or to taste)
75g unsalted butter, cold and cut into small cubes (about 2-3cm)
2 cups cold cream
For the egg wash
2 egg yolks
3 tbsp cream
¼ cup sugar and ½ tsp sweet spices mixed, for sprinkling
For the fruit
2 apricots (halved), 2 peaches (halved), and a cup of raspberries, or whatever fruit you prefer
2 tsp vanilla paste
1/4 cup caster sugar
Juice of two lemons
Combine dry ingredients in a bowl for the biscuits and use a fork or whisk to mix them together. Add the butter and work into dry ingredients with your fingers, then add the cold cream and bring together into a shaggy dough. Tip this out onto your work surface, and, using the heel of your hand, smoosh together until the butter looks like pea-sized clumps in amongst the dry ingredient and you have a rough dough.
We want to under rather than overwork the dough to keep the biscuits lovely and fluffy - this is also why we aren’t using a rolling pin for the next bit; it’s just a bit heavy. Our hands are a better option!
Lightly dust both sides of the dough and, using your fingers, roll out until you have a square-ish shape about 20 x 20cm or thereabouts.
Cut into four equal small squares, then stack them on top of each other, gently push this out to a rectangular shape about 3cm thick.
Using a round biscuit or scone cutter (or a sharp knife), cut out rounds (or squares). Then chill these in the freezer for at least half an hour or a few weeks, until needed really.
One of the lovely things about this recipe is that you can make the biscuits well in advance then cook from frozen either as part of the cobbler or just bake as biscuits to enjoy with jam and cream.
But I digress.
So, your biscuits are chilling. And now, this is a good time to macerate the fruit.
Place your apricots, peaches, and berries in a baking dish (mine is a round ceramic one, about 20cm diameter), then add the vanilla, sugar, and lemon juice.
Toss with your hands to mix. The whole situation should feel lovely and smell amazing.
Set fruit aside to macerate for at least half an hour.
When ready to cook, preheat the oven to 200C and make the egg wash by whisking the yolks and cream together in a small bowl. Take your chilled/frozen biscuits and arrange them on top of the fruit. Brush well with the egg wash and sprinkle generously with the spiced sugar.
Bake for 30 minutes or until biscuits have risen and turned golden brown with that crust of sugar on top.
Serve warm with ice cream or cream.
Write to us and we’ll send you wine!
If you would like a book and recipe recommendation to help navigate life’s twists and turns, please write to us. Each episode we choose a letter to read out (anonymously) and then prescribe something to eat and something to read that we think might help.
Thanks to Single Vineyards we have been able to gift a case of Highgate wine to each episode’s letter writer.
And it gets better! Single Vineyards have created a special offer for anyone (in Australia) who is subscribed to this newsletter. So, using the code STESTR20 you’ll receive a 20% discount on any wine purchase you make! So great hey!
Very handy for upcoming Christmas feasting and summertime reading! Click here to find out more about their wines on offer.
Email your letters to either Sophie at sophie_hansen@me.com or Germaine at newchaptersbibliotherapy@gmail.com
We would love to hear from you!
We acknowledge that the land on which we work and live is the traditional land of the Wiradjuri Nation and Wallumedegal people. These people are the Traditional Custodians of this land and form part of the wider Aboriginal nation known as the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect to all First Nations people.