Free Best Food Writing 2014 by Holly Hughes

that the pursuit of pleasure at the table is a political act. But as for gays breaking out in American restaurant kitchens, expressing a queer point of view in their cooking—well, apart from a few mavericks like Elizabeth Falkner, that hasn’t really happened. Pastry—like the cold line I was relegated to back in my day—remains a safe space for gays in the kitchen. In a lot of ways we’re still on the fringes, even if queer food writers fundamentally changed the way we think about food in this country.
    I don’t recall the last time Lou made a Roquefort burger for me, but it couldn’t have been long after 1970. When I was in junior high, Pat suffered a heart attack and died—his mother and sisters came outfrom St. Louis and took the body back with them; Lou was not invited to the funeral. Pat’s mother and sisters took everything with them: the clothes, the cocktail rings. The irises under the oaks got patchy. Lou drank a lot. He found another boyfriend, a short Canadian who drove a purple AMC Gremlin and who nobody liked, not even my mom (she thought he was “too gay”). I lost track of Lou when I went away to college—my mom said he sold the house and was living in a mobile-home park near the ocean. She hardly ever went to visit.
    After college, I moved to San Francisco and got my own boyfriend. He continued my food education. We read passages from Olney’s Simple French Food out loud, and cooked, and studied each other’s pleasure like scholars.

D EBTS OF P LEASURE
    By John T. Edge
    From the Oxford American

    John T. Edge wears a lot of hats—director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, food columnist for the New York Times, Garden & Gun , and the Oxford American, and all-around promoter of Southern food. Which sometimes means reminding us who really cooked that food. . . .
    O n a summer day in 1949, ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, novelist Donald Windham, painter Buffie Johnson, playwright Tennessee Williams, and writer-provocateur Gore Vidal gathered at Café Nicholson, a bohemian supper club set in the back courtyard of an antique store on New York City’s Upper East Side. It was a heady moment. Williams had won a Pulitzer Prize the year before. Vidal had just published The City and the Pillar . Beneath the shade trees in proprietor Johnny Nicholson’s garden, they ate and drank. They smoked and gossiped. They posed and preened, fully aware that photographer Karl Bissinger was there to capture their idyll for posterity.
    In those postwar days, the café, decorated in what Nicholson described as a “fin de siècle Caribbean of Cuba style,” served as a canteen for the creative class and a backdrop for fashion shoots. (Before it finally closed in 2000, the café also served as an occasional movie set; Woody Allen filmed scenes from Bullets Over Broadway there.) Paul Robeson was a regular. So was Truman Capote, who sometimes came bursting into the kitchen looking for biscuits.
    Nicholson was the Barnum of their social set, presiding with a parrot named Lolita on his shoulder. Bissinger, who served the cafeas an early business partner and a sometimes gardener and host, made a living curating social tableaus for magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. During the postwar years he captured everyone from a languorous Henry Miller, lighting a cigarette, to a faunal Capote, reclining in a wicker chaise. But the photograph he shot that afternoon at Café Nicholson has proved his most famous. In a New York Times obituary of Bissinger, William Grimes called the scene a “class picture of the young and the talented in the American arts, more than ready for their close-ups.”
    I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left unnamed. Because I knew a bit about the history of Café Nicholson and the role that Edna Lewis, the African-American cookery