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Though I didn’t know the word for it, I became a pescatarian at age 16, the same year that I got interested in cooking. It was 1994, and my parents, a doctor and a fitness trainer who both loved to cook, had recently added to our kitchen a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf for their collection of cookbooks. When I decided to give up meat, the shelf had little to offer me, but that was easy to remedy. At the local bookstore, Katzen was the name they recommended, and we bought the whole trilogy—the extent of her oeuvre at the time—which included The Moosewood Cookbook, Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and Still Life With Menu.
If you’ve seen the The Moosewood Cookbook even once—which you probably have, since it’s been in print for 45 years—you can still picture Katzen’s squat, companionable print and her pen-and-ink illustrations of jaunty mushrooms, winged fruits, a pair of oven mitts shaking mitts, and multiple angels holding aloft multiple cheesecakes. Mollie Katzen’s books broke many molds, uniting form and function and the feeling of having a true friend in the kitchen.
But out of the three books, I especially remember the hours, pleasant hours, I spent thumbing through Katzen’s 1988 book, Still Life With Menu. Organized into menus, it was the first of Mollie Katzen’s books to be typeset instead of hand-lettered, giving it a less quirky and more polished look, and it swapped her pen-and-ink drawings for full-color pastel still lifes that Katzen says took three weeks each to complete.
I’d never seen a cookbook organized by menu, and reading it made me feel precocious, sophisticated, and mature at last. Would anyone but a real grown-up think of cooking a menu? The first recipe I tried was Autumn Vegetable Soup. Butternut squash seemed new then, and I remember watching it cook in the simmering broth, its color changing from circus peanut orange to marigold. I’d never seen red Swiss chard before, or any Swiss chard for that matter, and I gawped at its hot pink stems.
I pored over page 127, a menu of Chilaquile Casserole, Southwest Salad With Black Beans and Corn, Winter Fruit Salad, and Chocolate Chip-Mint Cookies, the last recipe featuring a headnote in which Katzen confides, “This is the only recipe in which I have ever used peppermint extract, but these cookies are worth the price of several bottles.” I’d never bought groceries with my own money, but I understood: This was an orientation toward living.
In Still Life, I saw myself—not as the teenager I was, but the adult I hoped to be. I wanted to be someone who would, say, serve Light Tomato Soup, Jeweled Rice Salad, and Yogurt Scones as a late-summer lunch. An entire adulthood took shape in my imagination as I read the menu composed of Simplest Miso Broth, Scattered Sushi Rice Salad, Marinated Nigari Tofu, and Fresh Cantaloupe with Lime, of which Katzen writes, “With this light but thorough meal, you can actually feel well fed and celestial at the same time.” The accompanying painting is a riot of color and texture—a deep orange background against which floats a square of fabric striped in blue and yellow and, atop that, a pink floral-patterned textile, on which rest a cook’s array: a polished wood ladle and chopsticks, a knuckle of ginger root, a teal Fiestaware teapot, and what might be a bottle of Maggi seasoning.
Though perhaps the least commercially successful of the trilogy and now out of print, Still Life With Menu had for me the bottomless absorptive quality of literature, and the story I read into it was of the life I wanted to have, in which everyday living could be art.
“My love for art and for cooking spring from the same source,” writes Mollie Katzen in the preface. “For me, the boundary between these two creative channels is a soft one, sometimes disappearing altogether.”
There’s a hazy sort of scene that comes to mind each time I pick up Still Life. This vision hasn’t changed since I was 16. In it, I’m a professor living in Berkeley, or maybe rural Western Mass, my hair gone white as lightning and my house twice as old as I am and filled with pottery and quilts I’ve made myself. I’ve got so many books, they sag the shelves. In the mornings I drink hot coffee, black and very strong, and then go to my study to write, its redwood walls and ceiling darkly burnished as a bay horse in summer. My spouse and I are good cooks but not showily so; we invite our friends to dinner and everyone feels at ease and has interesting things to say. I cook a menu I’ve made so many times, there’s no need for a recipe. But you know as well as I do: It came from Mollie Katzen.
