Evan Hanczor is the founder of Tables of Contents, a reading/tasting series that pairs short selections of prose with small plates inspired by the writing. In 2021, the TOC team put out Tables of Contents Community Cookbook, a cookbook that compiles recipes by former readers and was named one of the best cookbooks of the year by the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Hanczor is also the owner and chef of Little Egg, the new reincarnation of Williamsburg’s beloved Egg restaurant, which closed in 2020.
The Inquisitive Eater paid a visit to the most recent TOC reading, which featured Megan Fernandes, Tess Gunty, and Gina Chung (a New School MFA grad!). Hanczor prepared “rabbit food,” aka a carrot puree uni dish and a grazing salad; Tanya Bush of Cake Zine fame made a chocolate layer cake with thick, creamy peanut butter mocha frosting. After the readings and the food, Hanczor led the authors in a panel discussion, talking about their allergies — both culinary and literary.
We got to sit down with Hanczor to discuss the inspiration for TOC, sustainability in food writing, and the most important thing in the world (tomatoes). Here’s a transcript of our conversation.
I read in your fantastic piece for Lit Hub that the first inklings of what eventually became Table of Contents came to you while reading The Sun Also Rises. Can you talk to me a little bit about how that reading influenced you?
I was at Tulane, and I was taking this class called Last Call, which was taught by a professor named Dale Edmonds and was the last class he was going to teach at Tulane after 30 years of teaching. I snuck into the class — I had heard about this professor, and I wanted to catch him before he left the school. It was just him teaching his favorite books. Someone teaching a book with that certain kind of passion, particularly their last hurrah — he did it well. And I was also in college, and had this romantic literary tendency. So I was reading The Sun Also Rises in my friend’s backyard, drinking a bottle of red wine, and just thinking, “Man, I wanna live in this book.” I wanted to eat the meals and experience the senses of the book. But I wasn’t a cook. I cooked for my friends, but I wasn’t a cook.
That initial feeling or desire came back when we had some friends who were holding this book festival called Food Book Fair around the corner from Egg in Williamsburg, and they asked us to do the closing dinner for it. George Weld, who was my partner at Egg, is also a writer — a poet-turned-cook. So we had a very similar trajectory, and similar interests. I was like, why don’t we try to do a literary meal? It’s a food/book thing, that would make sense.
So we did this dinner inspired by The Sun Also Rises, which was five courses, each course inspired by a specific scene, just like the reading series is now. There’s a scene where some of the characters eat at this restaurant, Madame Lecomte’s, in Paris. And they eat this roast chicken with green beans and potatoes, so we turned that into a salad. There’s obviously iconic bullfighting happening in the book. So we did kind of a bullfight dish, with mushroom powder all over the plate and beet juice splattered like blood and a roast steak.
I think the scene that kind of hit me the most when I was reading the book, which still is one of my favorite dishes, is when two characters, Jake and Bill, are on the Spain-France border, fishing. And they’re chilling their bottles of white wine in the stream where they’re fishing, and they catch a fish, and they wrap the fish in ferns and put it under a tree to stay cool, and that just felt like a dish sort of writing itself. So we did trout wrapped in dandelion greens, with a wine sauce. As we were putting that meal together, it made me feel like there was some real creatively-satisfying spark there, and unlimited potential for that to repeat itself over and over again — with any other number of books.
You’ve also written that “nearly every great book has moments of food in it.” Why would you say that is, in your opinion?
We’ve gotten a lot of answers about that from authors at the reading series. Sometimes, when we reach out to authors to take part in the series, they’ll say, “This sounds great, but there’s no food in my book, so I might not be a great fit.” And I always ask ’em to send a copy, because there just is always food. I don’t think we’ve ever encountered a book with zero food. Some, you know, have been a little bit sparse, but actually, when that’s the case, usually the moments where food shows up are particularly powerful.
The question we ask is, why do you deploy food in your work? What does food do for you as a tool that some other subject or focal point couldn’t quite get across? For me, food reveals so much about a person, about a place. It’s one of the most intimate things that we have and hold onto in our lives. If you move somewhere, one of the things you might bring with you is your food memories. You carry that as a deep part of your identity. And then, of course, there’s what food says about class and status. It just touches on everything.
Actually, one of the things that brought me to cooking is that I realized ultimately that through food, I could engage with or touch on in the real world a lot of the topics I was hoping to write about. So I think that’s why it then finds its way back into fiction, into stories; because it is this powerful subject that people have reference points for and have an emotional connection to, and therefore can allow for something to happen in the story in a particular way.
You went to school for English. Do you still identify as a writer? What kind of writing do you do?
Only in my most generous and aspirational moments! I still write. I mostly wrote poetry when I was in college, and so foolishly thought that would be my career. I continue to aspire to be more of a writer than I am, and I feel so lucky that I’m able to engage with writers that I admire. I have half-joked that food has been the back door into the literary community that my writing might not have gotten me into. And also, sometimes I’m a little suspicious of it — I’m like, “Is all this sort of time spent with other people’s work scratching some literary itch that I should be scratching myself?”
So I always hope to set aside more time for some of my own work. And I think there’s room in my mind in the future development of Tables of Contents for that to happen. You know, we did the cookbook during COVID as a fundraiser, and that was more of an editorial project — I was editing and curating those selections. It definitely lit me up in a way that made me feel like doing some other publishing work, including something where I’m writing more, is on the horizon.
When you do write, do you write about food?
Sometimes, yes. It’s funny, when I started cooking, I was noticing food making its way into my writing in a way that really upset me. I was so frustrated by it. I was like, “Get these tomatoes out of my poem! I want to write about big things, like life and death and sex and love.” And then, you know, eventually, I realized tomatoes are one of the most important things in the world to me now.
The tomatoes are the sex and the love.
Yeah. Especially a good one. Nothing sexier than a dripping tomato on a thickly mayoed piece of bread, you know?
Amen to that.
I think what I probably end up doing in relation to writing and food is I’ll start writing about food in some way — food is the map that I’m writing on — but I’m using it to get to something else, whether that’s some interpersonal dynamic that I’ve observed, or something simply personal. I like writing about food, but I think my internal sensor sits up a little bit. It’s like, don’t just write about food, ’cause you already do all these other things with food. Write about other things! So I guess: yes, I write about food, reluctantly and hopefully more than that.
Since you’re coming in contact with all these varied types of food writing, do you have a definition of what good food writing looks like to you?
No, I don’t think so. My preference is writing that feels confident — actually, I think, similar to my cooking preferences. I’m attracted to a sort of writing that you can tell that under the surface, there’s a lot of practice, there’s a lot of mastery, there’s been a lot of thought, and that it’s chosen intentionally. There’s a big difference between that and writing that tries to appear confident, which often, to me, comes off like bravado. You see the cracks in it, and there’s a shell of perhaps also skillfulness there, but it’s doesn’t go as deep. I like to feel like there’s writing with roots, even if that’s not shown on the page — something that you can feel below it.
You’ve touched on this a little bit already, but when you find an author and you want them to read at Tables of Contents, how do you decide which dish they describe is worth trying to cook?
With authors for the reading series, we ask them to send us a couple options that come to mind, and that can be a really helpful starting point. And sometimes, especially if it’s an author that maybe tends to think and write more about food, they’ve already put some thought into that. But just as often, we’ll pick something that they didn’t recommend, that you might not even think of as a food moment.
One example is we had Carmen Maria Machado come for her second book, and there’s some food in it, but there’s also this particular description about the softness of a baby’s fontanelle, on their skull. And I don’t know if she mentions gnocchi later in the passage or not, but we made these gnocchi that suggested that softness. That’s definitely not a food scene, but it was the thing that felt most interesting, or exciting to translate into food. You would not expect to engage with this descriptive moment in an edible way, right? That’s one of the cool things about the series, is that the food itself has all this emotional gravity to it. And then sometimes you can really go off the rails of what you would expect to see in terms of food translated from the page to the plate, which for me has always been one of the most exciting parts about it.
Running a restaurant is amazing in lots of ways, but your main goal in a restaurant is to basically provide a sense of comfort and deliciousness so that people want to come back — purely tap into the pleasure centers of the brain. But one of the things I love about fiction is you can do other things. You can tap into lots of other emotions — darker, more complicated. I don’t always have that opportunity with food.
So cool. I love the idea of this baby’s head.
It’s so dark.
So dark. And I will say that one of my favorite things about the experience of being at Tables of Contents and listening to the passage being read was that the strangers at the table with me turned to each other at the end of each reading, and we were like, “What do you think the dish will be? I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be cake for this one…”
Yeah, I like that too — the surprise and the unknown. Particularly when there are maybe a couple of candidates mentioned in the passage, and you don’t really know how it’s gonna come out, or it’s really unclear where anything edible might come from.
I really want to talk about sustainability at the intersection of food and writing, because I know that that’s something you care about, and it seems like it’s a huge part of your focus at Little Egg. Does sustainability factor at all into how you’ve designed Tables of Contents?
We try to apply the same sort of sourcing practices that apply to the restaurant to Tables of Contents, but sometimes those things do come up against a specific departure from the book. I think it was for a Catherine Lacey or Kathleen Alcott reading a long time ago, there was some bologna sandwich we were doing. But I didn’t want to buy factory-farmed pork, Oscar Mayer bologna. So I got Vermont mortadella, and I was really conflicted about it, because there’s something very distinctive about the flavor and the experience and the reference point of bologna that is not at all the same as mortadella.
It was interesting to explore that — how with storytelling, you can choose subject matters without a real-world impact. You could mention bologna, and you’re not necessarily putting money into the systems that raise animals in horrific conditions. (Although you could argue about what you promote in fiction and the positions you take, and that’s a much bigger conversation.) But with food, it’s not theoretical. It has an impact on the ground somewhere. So that’s one area where sometimes there’s an interesting friction for me, thinking about how to honor the text in a way that I really feel committed to doing in this series, and also honor the values of food that I’m working with.
In every case where we can make a choice that feels aligned with the values that we’d normally work with for sourcing, we’ll do that. But there are still some times where if it says Wonder Bread, it’s gotta be Wonder Bread, you know? You’re just not gonna get the texture and flavor of that experience without it, and it’s not gonna hit or resonate in the same way. It’s an interesting sort of push-pull.
I also read about the regenerative residency that you guys are starting up, which seems tied to all three of these tenets — sustainability, food, and writing. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to carve out that space and why?
There’s this farm called Glynwood in Cold Spring, New York. It’s an incredibly magical place, and I first stumbled upon it eight or more years ago. I was taking part in this policy and advocacy training course that was being started by the James Beard Foundation, for chefs to develop more skills around really direct policy and advocacy action, around issues that are important to us. Over the years I have become very close with Sarah and Kathleen, the folks who ran it at the time. They do really amazing industry-focused work on regenerative agriculture, on promoting and sustaining local agriculture in the Hudson Valley — and beyond, but with a focus on the valley. It’s this beautiful property and they have several buildings on the property that I thought would be an incredible place for an artist’s residency.
So two years ago, I spoke with Glynwood and asked if they’d be willing to let us produce an artist’s residency on their property — just give us access to one of the cottages for a few weeks, and we try to take care of all the logistics. And they said yes. Giada Scodellaro was our first resident, and she was the perfect person for it.
The idea was exactly as you said, to tie together more directly the sustainability, food, and agriculture work that I do with Tables of Contents, and see what interesting work or space could be created by bringing them together.
We hosted Giada last year, and this year we’re going to have two residents in the spring, and hopefully, this will be the last of our trial years. We’re lucky to have access to the space from late fall to early spring, so there’s potential for quite a number of residencies if we could figure out logistics and funding. And we want to create an application process that’s more open, to bring a wider range of folks into the potential resident realm. It’s one of those ridiculous ideas where we don’t have any money, we don’t have a plan for this, but we’ve been offered this space to use, and we’re just gonna try it and figure it out and go from there. So hopefully we can keep it going, but it was an amazing first run, at the very least.
Hannah Berman is the Fiction Editor for The Inquisitive Eater, and a Brooklyn-based journalist covering food and culture news. Her fiction has been featured in anthologies published by Allegory Ridge, Thirty West, and Wanderlust Journal; you can also read her writing in the Sad Girl Diaries, Talk Vomit, and On the Run Fiction, among other places. Read more at hannah-berman.com.
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