There’s the animal and its flesh.
At times interchangeable, but not quite the same.
Anglo-Saxon named the beasts, French their meat
At death do they part:
Beef from cow;
Venison from deer; pork from pig;
Mutton, sheep and Poultry, chicken.
At what point does man become spouse?
Poussin is a young chicken, fowl good enough
To feed two young lovers, on not much money,
Due to be wed in a few months;
Not fully committed to a fully grown bird.
Poisson is fish, salmon we buy every other week
Whenever we have extra cash or need a breather from the chicken’s–
Butterflied in Ziploc bags– rotten egg smell:
“Throw it out and order a pizza” is her solution to these odors of married life.
Pullet is a young hen.
“Pull it, and cut the wing off,” I insist.
Even in my mood– as our love grows old and the butter, brown–
I’m reminded of when I first loved her in the Tenderloin,
Nested near the San Francisco Bay,
When the thought of being only hers first crossed my mind.
Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. Having grown up in a diverse urban environment, Jose has always been interested in the people and places around him, and the stories that each of these has to share; those that often go untold.
His work has been featured in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Rigorous, Sky Island Journal, Jelly Bucket, OTHER. Magazine, TOE GOOD, The Scene & Heard Journal, Zimbell House Publishing, and Authorship by The National Writers Association.
Sweet Brötchen, swathed in dishcloth-
layered baskets, the call of your brethren
is deafening. In every bakery they coo
with the fragrance of burnt butter
neatly touching, plumping for purchase
in ardent display of crusty cleavage.
Sweet Brötchen, had it instead
been two loaves and five fish, had you
spread your recipes down the Jordan.
To every god who demands your offering,
to every pilgrim who starves in believing,
you who appear in the prophet’s dreams.
Sweet Brötchen, oh why is the bakery closed
on Sunday, but every other day, every other day,
we gather you, with hams and cheese,
for delicious breakfast food. And sweet
sweet Brötchen I confess – I never lie,
my stomach cries, (in fact) it was all good.
Hazel Lin is a grad student currently based in Germany.
Just before I was married, my aunt Melanie gave me a pink three-ring plastic binder filled with the culinary history of my family. It’s essentially a cookbook, filled with recipes from the women on my mom and dad’s sides, and a few from my newly acquired family. Some of the recipes are typed; some are scanned copies of handwritten instructions; some are pages of other cookbooks with notes scribbled around the margins- temperatures crossed out, proportions adjusted. There are a few photos of the finished products on card tables and Christmas buffets. The recipes are attributed, at the bottom, to the family member who created or appropriated them in a little yellow box. Underneath the attributions are field notes: acknowledgments, serving suggestions, words of encouragement, family secrets and folklore.
I tend to read cookbooks with as much an editor’s or historian’s eye as I do a cook’s. Recipes shape-shift and rearrange themselves as they are passed from person to person, becoming something new while still attached to something old. My own writing process has always mimicked my style of cooking: a panicked session of hard-eyed study of a text. Reading, rereading, re-re-reading, researching techniques, ingredients, burying myself in the history of a reference until a plan emerges and inspiration finally rises up from my gut to my hands.
I try to make focaccia for the first time, but it’s too humid in my apartment and it doesn’t rise. The crust bakes a beautiful, golden brown like hay, but it’s hard as a brick and almost chips my tooth. Grudgingly, I make a giant pot of brothy stew so it won’t go to waste. My husband happily chews and swipes the bread through his stew, chattering lovingly, grateful just to be fed, but I know the difference and I sulk.
My own writing process has always mimicked my style of cooking.
The next day, my downstairs neighbor knocks on my door as I am writing a really heartbreaking story that makes me sweat and feel slightly feverish. He is a brewer who brews his own beer in the basement of our building and holds big, festive cookouts in the summer, grilling up Pat LaFreida steaks and corn and baked potatoes. I am up to my elbows in words when he knocks and not just a little annoyed to be interrupted. I open the door and he is holding a loaf of bread. “I had a bunch of spent grain, so I made some sourdough, and way too much of it.” He hands me the loaf, still warm. “How did your focaccia turn out?”
I mutter something about the humidity and yeast. He offers me some of his sourdough starter. “I’ve had it for a few years now. You just have to feed it every few months, but it’s pretty reliable.” I accept his offer and thank him. He’s a really nice guy. I close the door behind him, sit down, and write four more pages in a frenzy, tearing off hunks of warm, tangy bread and devouring them. I eat the whole loaf. It is maddening and perfect.
Only one of my maternal grandmother’s recipes exists in the cookbook. She did not write recipes down. She was the first of ten children, tobacco sharecroppers in Colquitt County,Georgia. Her mother, Leola, worked alongside her husband, planting and reaping whenever she was not pregnant with more free laborers. As the eldest child and her surrogate, my grandmother was responsible for waking up before everyone else and making the huge breakfast that sustained her family’s laboring. Everyone else rose hours later, after the biscuits had been kneaded and baked, the hardtack laid out and the black coffee percolated. She made them pots of greens laced with fatty ham hocks and skillet cornbread. She made all of these things from memory, from improvisation in fallow years, from what her mother or aunts showed her when she was old enough to understand and be taught. Some years later, one of her grandchildren pleaded that she write down her recipe for apple pie. When I try to follow the recipe, I’m bewildered. There are no cook times, only “until bubbling and browned,” no specifics on the thickness of apple slices – the implication being that you should know. This is knowledge we women possess.
This is knowledge we women possess.
After college, my mother had dreamed of becoming a journalist. However, my father’s infidelities became incontrovertible and at 23 years old she found herself heartbroken, divorced while pregnant, with a daughter to raise alone. Her life, as my grandmother’s, would be spent caring for others instead of writing about them. Like my grandmother, she did not complain about providing (or if she did it never reached our ears). She became an English teacher. She worked and fed and taught. I wonder what she could have written if she hadn’t devoted herself to the shaping of young minds, applying heat and fermenting ideas and allowing them to bubble up, golden.
It is impossible for me, when writing, not to consider these women and the things they wrote down and the things they did not write down. I think about a note added to a pound cake by a cousin of my other grandmother’s from Detroit in the ‘40s, the daughter of a marine merchant: “After the cake is in the oven, leave in for 45 minutes and walk softly upon the kitchen floor.” I think about my neighbor and his stupid perfect loaf of bread. I get annoyed and then I get to work. I am much older than I thought I would be when finally able to devote myself to writing. I am not as good as a lot of others much younger and better educated than me. I am not making airy pound cakes or fluffy focaccia. I’m making the dense, short biscuits my grandmother made. I am using all of the butter that is called for and drizzling them with honey.
Rachel Knox is a writer and student at The New School in New York City. She is originally from St. Petersburg, Florida and writes both fiction and nonfiction. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?” I don’t know about that, but most afternoons, you’ll find me at Chipotle, commenting on poems. Something about the ambience and the familiarity of a burrito bowl focuses me.
Right now, I think Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Fame is a fickle food (1702),” is the best food poem. It’s also about fame. To write a poem to be famous is, of course, ludicrous. I always say, “I just want readers,” and one of my professors once asked whether I’d rather have a thousand ambivalent ones or ten who get it, and I think I’d rather have the latter. Dickinson’s bite-sized-but-endlessly-fulfilling poem reminds us that, in the end, we all die.
Kevin Young wrote, “One of the things I think [poets] enjoy about a great meal is that it goes away….” I think one of the things about a finished, published poem is that, once it’s out in the world, it takes on its own life within and among the lives of its readers. I find this endlessly comforting and freeing. Language is inherently unstable and its meaning shifts depending on the time, place, and experience of its consumers. The transaction that occurs between poet and reader by means of the poem is one of fluidity and flux. It’s probably naive to think poetry or dinner can save the world. When I’m tired, though, or hungry, just one more line or the next bite can feel that way. Writing poetry, like finding a place to eat, for me, is an intuitive practice. My best lines come from the minutes between sleeping and waking, and as they accumulate, those can become the first draft of a poem. Likewise, where to eat, what I’m hungry for, is a daily decision that just seems to happen. Another thing I always say is, “A writer is always writing.” I’m always observing and rolling potential lines through my mind. I’m also always hungry for actual food.
After moving to New York City, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown reinvigorated food for me, where to go in this endless city, and I began to hunt for the best Thai, the best Chinese, the best out-of-the-way hole. Bourdain is an eclectic eater, happy in both a Bellagio suite and a street-food stand in Hue. I’m like that, or I’d like to be like that. He revels in tripe and hoofs and lips and heads. I’d like to be like that.
Charles Baudelaire is quoted saying, “Any healthy man can go without food for two days—but not without poetry.” I don’t know about that, but once you’re moved by a poem, you crave the taste of the sublime that it provides. For what it’s worth, I absolutely could not go two days without food, but maybe that just means I’m not healthy.
Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.
Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.
Each member of my family eats a different dinner at a different time. This is how it has been since I was old enough to use an oven on my own at 12. I was oblivious to how families spent mealtimes together. The way we ate was practical. With our conflicting busy schedules, different tastes and preferences I just can’t imagine how we could have all eaten the same thing at the same time. So we ate separately.
When I was 14, everything about my parents’ eating routines bothered me. My father, when told at age 40 that he was irresponsibly overweight and his heart in poor health, immediately and fully committed to a vegan lifestyle. He still eats one meal a day around 4:30 PM. Before 4:30, all he consumes is coffee. Two or three large lattes with soy milk (not almond and definitely not oat or coconut) in a mug, not a paper cup, while he works. My mother begins every single day by making coffee with her prized possession, a Keurig machine, which requires no time and even less work to brew a cup of coffee.
When I was younger, I knew my parents’ food-related preferences, quirks, and schedules by heart and questioned them. Why were they so dedicated to their identical cup of coffee every single morning? If they were so committed to their coffee schedules, why couldn’t they commit to eating with their children like every other family? I grew resentful of my parents. I felt as though they were depriving me of something, although I wasn’t quite sure what. Normalcy? Food? Love?
I was proud to be less picky than my parents.
I started drinking coffee when I was 16, in order to show the coffee drinkers at school that I was one of them. Gradually, I grew to like the taste. As I got older, I started to care less about my lack of a family mealtime, though I still rolled my eyes when my dad would complain when there wasn’t soy milk at a coffee shop or when my mom refused to use a coffee machine other than her Keurig. For the rest of high school, I drank one or more cups of coffee a day, with any type of milk and from any type of bean or coffee maker. I was proud to be less picky than my parents.
When I was 18, I decided to go to college across the country in New York City. When I moved, my dad came along to help, even though I insisted I could do it on my own. I have always prided myself on my emotional resilience, so I was shocked to find that the beginning of college was hard for me. Once I had moved into the dorms, something inside of me changed, and I found myself terrified, and, alas, crying. My dad was surprised by my reaction, but had an idea for what to do.
Every morning for my first week of college, in accordance with his routine, my father sat at The Bean on the corner of Ninth and First, drinking his soy latte, responding to emails, reading, and working from 7 AM until 10 AM. On my move-in day, he gently suggested that I leave my dorm early and join him for coffee the next morning. He said it could be for five minutes or an hour, whatever felt right. Initially, I was skeptical, but he kept repeating that if I changed my mind, I could find him at The Bean, seated across from an empty chair.
The next day, I woke up early and quietly got out of bed. I made the short trek and as promised, my dad was sitting at a corner table, across from an empty chair. I bought a small black hot coffee with room for milk and sat with him for 10 minutes. I told him about the painter I had befriended at my first hall meeting; I complained about the weather; I asked his opinion on my outfit; and we discussed our thoughts on A Ghost Story, a film we had both just seen and liked very much. It was pleasant and casual and not at all like I had just moved across the country, afraid and uncertain of the future. So I found myself at that exact coffee shop at that exact time for the entirety of his stay in the city.
They loved their coffee the way they did because they loved the routine.
My parents’ strange behavior became unambiguous to me. They loved their coffee the way they did because they loved the routine. They loved the schedule. They loved the dependability. I, too, had developed a habit of drinking coffee each day, and without realizing, was drinking it for the same reasons as my parents. Once I understood that dependence on coffee was something we all shared – not a dependence on the caffeine or the sugar, but on the habit – I understood coffee as something that could bring us closer, that could give us what I always thought we lacked without a family mealtime.
Now, my mom and I bond over a shared dream of one day upgrading to a Nespresso machine. We buy each other silly and sentimental mugs. When I am home in California, in the early hours of the morning, we make ourselves coffee and read her stack of cooking magazines, ogling the recipes we will never make. When my dad leaves the house for his lattes, I tag along without uttering a single complaint when he refuses to try a coffee shop that does not have soy milk. And in New York, every morning, on my way to class, I stop at The Bean for a small black coffee with room for milk. It‘s The Bean on the corner of Twelfth and Broadway, but it gets the job done, because it always tastes the same.
Lily Majteles is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City. She is a student at The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.
Under leaf and footfall, in the alley’s
otherwise quiet, Rat smelled the divine
sweat-reek of a corner-bistro bag.
[Rat wrote the book on gourmet
dumpster-diving for rodents,
and after each meal, by his last bite,
he’d know whether he’d write
about it—on his blog—
for days or not.]
And now, here, tearing in,
he found, below the bread,
moistened by a bitter juice-mix of the house red
and negroni drops, the tenderest rabbit,
braised in Oregon pinot gris and rosemary
over gorgonzola polenta. What a treat!
He ate—savored the waste—searched for words…
Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.
Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.
It’s two in the afternoon on a Thursday and Luis Mota, the owner of La Contenta Oeste, asks me if I want to do a wine tasting. Ignoring the better part of my judgment, I say yes and we spend the next two hours chatting and drinking delicious Mexican wine. Luis discusses which wines are most popular in Mexico (L.A Cetto, a Nebbiolo grape) and describes the different areas of Mexico the wines came from, how some of them come from areas close to the ocean, giving the wine a slightly salty taste. He believes that the way wine tastes is extremely personal.
One of his goals in opening La Contenta is to introduce New Yorkers to Mexican wine. “Mexican wine doesn’t have the history,” he laments. Unlike at a typical wine tasting, our sommelier pours us healthy portions.
Next, we eat. La Contenta’s enchiladas have a mouth-watering layer of a tomatillo sauce on top and tender, melt-in-your-mouth chicken inside. Luis explains that all five senses should be utilized when enjoying food, including touch. He demonstrates the best way to hold a taco, insisting that tacos should never, under any circumstances, be eaten with a knife and fork.
Felicity LuHill
Luis Mota grew up in Mazatlan, Mexico. Originally, he thought he would have a career in the army. “I wanted to be a hero,” he says, recalling Rambo as his source of inspiration. But after three years of burning down marijuana and opium poppy fields—a major preoccupation of the Mexican army at the time—he decided life in the army wasn’t for him. When he looks back at this time, he laughs at the irony of how marijuana is now legal in many parts of the US. “I almost died over there in the mountains trying to destroy the marijuana,” he recalls. While in the army, he met his wife, a New Yorker, who was on vacation in Mexico and happened to stop by his hometown. After traveling around Mexico for several months, the two decided to get married and live together in New York. It was here that his journey as a cook and restaurateur began.
Luis started out as a dishwasher at Carmine’s in Times Square, choosing the job so he could be fed and be around other Spanish speakers. “It was just a necessity, something to survive,” he claims. But after spending enough time in the kitchen and learning to do prep, he wanted to take cooking on seriously. He saw a magazine ad for Le Cordon Bleu and decided to take a 12-week course in Paris, and even spent time cooking in bistros for free after the course ended. During this time, he learned a lot about classic French cuisine and about the importance of conserving resources, from ingredients to water to electricity, an ideology he strives to pass on in the United States. “It’s the way you appreciate what you have,” he says.
Still, after returning from his training in Paris, he was only ever planning on being a cook. After working steadily as a cook for a private club on Park Avenue for some time, a manager approached him with an idea for starting a restaurant. “I didn’t have this ambition to open a restaurant, it was just destiny,” he remembers. The rent in the West Village was high but they went for it. “We had a lot of energy, so we decided we’d risk it,” he says. And so Luis’s first restaurant, Café Condesa opened in 2005, utilizing all of his knowledge of cooking up until then, Mexican, French and even Asian influences, to create a “New York Style.”
Lisa Kaplowitz
Later, in 2009, it was Luis’s turn to spearhead the opening of Ofrenda, a more traditional style Mexican restaurant—one with a menu that did not include guacamole. “That was my idea, ‘Mexican cuisine is not about guacamole only,’” he remembers, laughing at himself back then. “It was a really bad idea, because in the end, eighty percent of people order guacamole.” Luis reflects on the many lessons he’s learned through the course of his career, and how he’s still learning today with La Contenta Oeste.
As it turns out, even in downtown Manhattan, New Yorkers have very different preferences. While patrons of the original La Contenta on the Lower East Side love the flavors of the modern Mexican dishes, West Villagers visiting La Contenta Oeste seem to have trouble with the heat. “Mexican food is all about the use of peppers,” Luis explains, describing how different peppers make different dishes distinct. Today, he still strives to find the balance between making a more sensitive palate happy while sticking to his Mexican roots.
But La Contenta is about more than its modern take on Mexican food. One of Luis’s biggest goals is for his restaurant to feel connected through all of its moving parts. When he first started cooking, there was always tension between “the front of the house” and “the back of the house,” the waiters and the cooks. During his experience as a pastry chef for Union Square Café, he learned how it could be different. There, everyone was friendly with one another because, as he learned, everyone in the restaurant was a team working towards one goal: to make the customer happy. “We work for the people,” Luis reflects. “We try to create an experience, to create something you can enjoy the moment you are in the door.” To make this happen, it’s important that everyone in the restaurant is comfortable with one another and working together. La Contenta’s logo is based on this idea of bridging the divide between the different parts of the houses. In the logo, the back of the house, the front of the house and the bar are represented as a cook, a maitre d and a bartender, coming together in one being.
Lisa Kaplowitz
The team mentality is very apparent as we chat. Even as he talks, he consistently checks up on guests, waiters, the bartender, the hostess. He greets the employees that are starting their shift and teases the waiters. He talks about how for family meal, he makes sure that everyone’s needs are accounted for. A waiter named Victor prefers egg whites, so he makes sure he gets egg whites. After seeing him interact with his employees, it’s not surprising to learn that Luis participated in the “Day Without Immigrants” last year by closing La Contenta for a day in support of his immigrant employees.
In addition to standing in support with his staff, Luis also supports local elementary schools by hosting cooking classes for the kids from PS41 across the street and students coming down from the Bronx, teaching them how to make tortillas, chocolate, and churros by hand. This, he says has been one of his most gratifying experiences as a restaurant owner, “because it’s the most honest,” he says.
From @lacontentanyc on Instagram
So what’s next for Luis and La Contenta? “What I really want to do is go to another country,” Luis says. Now, he’s looking toward international destinations to open his next restaurant, places like Berlin or Dubai. By the end of our conversation, I’m pickled and full of food. When I ask for the check, Luis says not to worry about paying, yet another example of his generosity.
Felicity LuHill
Learn more about Luis and La Contenta here. Follow their gorgeous photos on Instagram.
Featured image by Lisa Kaplowitz.
Felicity is a Second Year Creative Writing MFA Candidate at The New School. She is also the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. Along with The Inquisitive Eater and The New School Creative Writing Blog, her writing has been published with Barbershop Books, Healthy Materials Lab, and Enchantress Magazine, where she was also an editor. Felicity enjoys writing in all forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic
I bought a Zinger at that bodega
over there, and I swore, still swear, after
I thanked him, the salesman said, “I love you.”
Mid-turn, I stopped, whipped back, and considered
his eyes, wet with wasted days. I
swallowed down hard my “I love you, too” and left.
Could it be, I thought, as I downed my cream-
filled center, that I’d found, in the least, my
soulmate there? He wouldn’t dare, and I should
certainly not presume, but lingering
on, at least till the next day, that snack cake
had a specific zing, I’m telling you.
Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.
Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.
Blurring the boundaries between traditional modes of painting Jiaranai Apaipak transforms still-life objects into sprawling landscapes. Jiaranai creates a world from food, candy, and desserts that are colored by her rich cultural background. While her relationship with color is directly a result of her early years living in India with its vibrant colors, her compositions draw from influences ranging from the old masters, abstract expressionism to Japanese Animation.
Born in Thailand, Jiaranai grew up in India, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. She received her BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2013 before moving to Toronto, Ontario to work as an art teacher and manager of a small art school. During her time in Canada, Jiaranai has also worked as a freelance portrait artist. She graduated with an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2017. Her paintings and sculptures are in private collections in Thailand, Canada, and the United States. Jiaranai has been a part of several group exhibitions in Nova Scotia and New York. She lives in New York and works in Jersey City. Website: www.jiaranaiapaipak.com Instagram: @Wookiepuff
Sebastian’s
garlic sour-pickle muse
floats down
in little hours, when he’s mute
with doze,
babbles inner-ear, his ill-mate
of wicked dreams,
demon songs, hints a mite
or louse,
might just, with pinch-mandibles, bite
him to death-
by-a-thousand-cuts, his bile
rising like fire
or Harley motor-bike
climbing
Pike’s Peak, bed-crumbs the sun’ll bake
in a human heat,
claiming nothing jake,
fool’s bane,
third-eye cuke spins joke after joke.
Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.
Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.
Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. Having grown up in a diverse urban environment, Jose has always been interested in the people and places around him, and the stories that each of these has to share; those that often go untold. 
Rachel Knox is a writer and student at The New School in New York City. She is originally from St. Petersburg, Florida and writes both fiction and nonfiction. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.
Lily Majteles is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City. She is a student at The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.
Born in Thailand, Jiaranai grew up in India, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. She received her BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2013 before moving to Toronto, Ontario to work as an art teacher and manager of a small art school. During her time in Canada, Jiaranai has also worked as a freelance portrait artist. She graduated with an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2017. Her paintings and sculptures are in private collections in Thailand, Canada, and the United States. Jiaranai has been a part of several group exhibitions in Nova Scotia and New York. She lives in New York and works in Jersey City. Website: 
