A FEW SUNDAYS ago, my partner Greg and I made a pot of chili for our community’s weekly dinner. The New York Times recipe said to add orange juice to the chili, letting it simmer and froth among the chopped onion, garlic, and butter. Then we mixed in the thick, tangy sauce from adobo chili peppers with black beans and sweet potatoes and corn, zipped with lime juice. It was rich, spicy, generous—brightened with the sun.
Lately I’ve had fun trying to write about food, playing with how I’d describe a certain taste, smell, or texture. I’ve been inspired by reading M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote essays about food starting in the late 1930s. She wrote gorgeous prose embedded with care for the human heart, for its loneliness and sadness and hope. In her 1937 essay “Borderland,” she writes about how each of us has our own private food pleasure—hers was warming sections of a tangerine on a radiator in the winter, which she describes while watching soldiers in Strasbourg march along the Rhine, the horrors of war closing in.
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