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It all started with an e-mail from the lovely Vicki Smith aka CalGal.  The body of the e contained a link; the subject head read “you need this,” and within an hour I had lost my virginity.

If you are scratching your head because you were pretty sure there was a husband in the picture here, you are not mistaken.  The virginity in question was the one I gave up to eBay.  “I don’t do eBay.  I know myself too well to even start with that,” I used to say in a tone of voice that was 50% smugness, 50% fear, the same voice I would use to explain why I never did cocaine when I had the chance, mostly because I knew better than to do that to my bank account, but also because I was afraid I’d be one of those poor bastards whose heart would explode on the first toot, like Len Bias.  I don’t do eBay, I said for the past 5+ years, and then all of a sudden, I did.  Four hours after receiving that first e from Vicki, I had looked through hundreds of pages of vintage cookware and cookbooks.  “Please tell me to stop,” I said to Lloyd in my best wheedling-junkie voice.

Vicki was right, though.  I needed them, I bid on them, I won them, and today I got them in the mail.  These are perfect for me, not only because I am still embroiled on the Big Egg Adventure, but also because I am a cartoon nerd, specifically a Warner Brothers cartoon nerd.  Looking at the picture, I thought of the 1944 Frank Tashlin cartoon “Booby Hatched,” in which a mother duck hatches out her eggs on a freezing winter night.  One of the eggs doesn’t hatch completely and wanders blindly into the forest, where he is kidnapped by a wolf with evil designs.  Momma Duck tracks the egg into the woods, calling his name plaintively; finds the wolf’s lair and beats the stuffing out of the wolf.  She rescues her baby egg from a boiling cauldron, just in time for him to hatch out, complain “Aw, Ma!  Just when I was getting warm!” and jump merrily back into the water.

It is in homage to this cartoon that when I opened the package tonight, I brandished my new salt and pepper shakers at Lloyd and cried out, “Robespierre!” (This was the name of the little almost-hatched duckling.) Ladies and gentlemen...Robespierre!

But that’s it for me and eBay. Just Robespierre.  Or just Robespierre and the vintage Ovaltine shaky-cup mixer, which I bought for Lloyd, who is a veritable poster boy for Ovaltine.  (All together now, Young Frankenstein fans:  “OVALTINE!") Or just Robespierre and the Ovaltine shaky-cup mixer and the chrome citrus juicer, over which I got into a surprising and protracted bidding war and on which I managed to place the winning bid ten seconds before the end of the auction.

And that’s it, really.

As soon as I finish checking out the cookbooks.

If you are a regular visitor to this spot, you know that I drop Laurie Colwin’s name like pick-up sticks.  I do not exaggerate when I say she is one of my ultimate food heroes; there are dozens of reasons for this, but one of them is that through her work, I was introduced to other cooks and writers I now consider my heroes, including the woman I consider the finest food writer in the English language, Jane Grigson.

Next March will mark the 15th anniversary of Jane Grigson’s death, an anniversary that fills me with shock and sadness:  15 years without Jane!  According to her daughter Sophie, a celebrated cookery writer in her own right, Mrs. Grigson decided shortly before her 60th birthday to “retire,” to work only on projects that interested her, nothing that she felt merely a sense of obligation to do.  She would have less than two years to do her heart’s work before losing her life to cancer.  In a just universe, she would not only still be with us, feeding her boundless scholarly curiosity and enthusiasm, she would be making money hand over fist, bucketloads of money.  She wrote some of my favorite cookbooks, including Good Things, Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, The Mushroom Feast, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery and the wonderful English Food, from which I quote below (hoping once again that I’m not grossly abusing the idea of fair use).  If you live in the UK, I recommend heading down to your bookshop and snapping this book up.  If you live in the U.S. or elsewhere, it is a slightly more complicated and expensive task to snap this up, but I still encourage you to do it.  Those of us who love English food, the food of the “domestic tradition” of which Mrs. Grigson writes, have become used to a certain amount of ribbing from people whose exposure to English food came from pubs and “family” restaurants serving watery, indifferent or outright nasty food, or from cafes and pizza places in tourist-trap neighborhoods serving bowdlerized versions of Continental food and charging through the nose for it.  If you have eaten food like this, and you wonder “what in God’s name would make a person eat English food?”, Mrs. Grigson’s recipes will come as a pleasant surprise:  comfrey-leaf fritters, sorrel with eggs, Welsh onion and potato cake, roast turkey with parsley and lemon stuffing and giblet gravy, granary bread with walnuts, damson sauce, apricot pie.  The recipe for brown bread ice cream is a marvel; I have fed it to people who turn their noses up at the idea of ice cream with whole-wheat bread crumbs, until they taste it, at which point they finish the whole bowl in happy silence.

The quote below is a long one, but I’m reprinting it here because it encapsulates some of the most deeply-held feelings I have about cooking and baking.  There is a bit of head-butting in food circles about whether it’s better to emphasize ingredients (i.e. buy the best ingredients you can and do as little as possible to them) or technique (i.e. truly great cookery comes more from what you do to the food than to the food itself).  Mrs. Grigson thought that both were crucial, and she worried that we were losing our grip on both.  I bought the 1992 hardcover edition of English Food, published by Ebury Press, about two years after it was published.  When I read Mrs. Grigson’s introduction, I felt something I had never felt from a cookbook before, and have very rarely felt since:  the feeling that good food was worth fussing about, and that fussing about it didn’t make you some cranky old relic, pining for a time and place that never existed; rather, it made you one of a shrinking but passionate population that realized there was glory in those beautiful, grand, ancient domestic dishes, glory worth celebrating and appreciating and studying and just plain considering.  She would have made an astonishing teacher.  Actually, to me at least, she was. 

Since finishing the first edition of this book in 1974, I have come to understand the weakness of the domestic tradition that was once our glory, and to a certain extent—in some homes—still is.

And these crimes against good food are encouraged by domestic science teachers who think it is fine to teach pupils to make pies with pastry-mix and ready-prepared pie fillings.  When criticized, they answer, ‘We have no time; anyway, they enable us to teach children “the manipulative skills”.’ What skills?  The skill to turn on the tap and mix the mix to a dough?  The skill to operate a tin-opener?  The skill to turn on the oven, a foolproof oven, to the correct temperature?  Such ‘manipulative skills’ are usually mastered at home before school begins...The development of taste and true knowledge should be the business of secondary school home economics teachers.  And if they are not able to do this through bad organization of the curriculum, they should be seeking to change the system, not conniving in it and excusing themselves.

One: Check out that beautiful smile on our receptionista, who kicked off her brilliant radio career this weekend on Public Radio Weekend.  At last, the Tale of Magic Bed, revealed!

Two: Who knew he would grow up so nicely?  We all did, that’s who.  My not-so-little brother, who has grown up into quite a nice, principled young man, has just passed the third and final part of his CFA exam.  I look forward to many happy years of borrowing money from him.  (Dude, I kid, I kid.  Really.  You don’t have to run away.)

Three: I finally got my act together and put up another photo album full of pretty things from Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Welcome to the Crescent.

Those of you who are regular visitors to this page know how I feel about My Life in the Factory of Boxes, my future there, or lack thereof, but because I don’t want to be unfair, I should at least acknowledge that while Funky Little Company (a division of LuthorCorp) and I may not have a future, we do have a past, and I can’t say I’m not grateful for it.

To those of you who read last night’s mini-rant and wondered, 11 years in packaging?  why, Jen, why?, the answer is pretty banal.  Once upon a time I had a job in publishing, at a startup children’s nonfiction house.  I worked as the sales assistant and events coordinator, trying to get our books into schools and libraries that had no interest in talking to us.  My boss insisted that within five years we would be as big as Random House; to this day, I regret not asking him just how long he thought it took for Random House to become Random House.  I went into this job thinking that I had finally found my entry point into the work I wanted to do for the rest of my life; I left after four months, fed up with the chaos that comes from no one having the slightest idea what they were doing.  The week before I gave my notice, I signed up with a temp agency.  The Monday after my last day at the publishing company, I was sitting in the lobby of my agency, a standby temp, waiting for an assignment.  I sat there for a week, then was assigned to a three-week position as a receptionist at a Red Cross-run emergency shelter for homeless families, located in what I would still argue is the most dangerous neighborhood in New York City.  I sat at that ugly green desk in that ugly green building every day, my mind reeling at the circumstances in which these families found themselves.  At the end of that assignment, I found myself in a series of faceless midtown offices, doing mindless data entry, bored senseless but thankful to not have to work the Red Cross switchboard anymore.  One day, I went into the agency for standby, and was asked if I wanted to go work in the purchasing department at a cosmetics company for a week. The week turned into two weeks, which turned into three months, which turned into a permanent position that lasted for five years, when I left to go to culinary school.  I thought that would be the last I would see of the packaging industry, but within three months of graduation I was back, having discovered that entry-level restaurant work would not begin to cover the rent, not even with Lloyd’s salary.  I was hired by Funky Little Company, a supplier of Cosmetics Company, as the executive assistant to the vice president of sales, who, before his promotion, used to sell cartons to me and my boss at Cosmetics Company.  This sales vp is now my current boss’s boss, and I know that it is partly thanks to him that I was able to go study eggs in Arkansas for a month.  I am thankful that I was lucky enough to work for this guy for as long as I have, and I will be forever grateful to him for helping me when I was in a tough spot, but it is still time for me to quit cutting bait and start fishing.

For as long as we have been alive, both apart and together, Lloyd and I have been writers, poor and unpublished writers, but writers nonetheless.  This meant that as part of our established courtship rituals (which is a coy way of saying we shacked up within weeks of meeting each other), we would go to work all day, then come home and write, side by side.  We still do this, but the nature of the work has changed a lot.  Lloyd and I met at work.  In 1990, we went to work at Now-Defunct Book Division of Now-Ailing West-Coast-Based Record Store Chain.  In the summer of 1991, I moved from Book Division’s New York store to the new store they were opening in Philadelphia, on South Street, where I would be the children’s book buyer as well as a floor supervisor and the store manager’s administrative assistant.  In the spring of 1992, Lloyd moved from Book Division’s Bellevue, Washington store to the Philadelphia store to take over shipping and receiving.  Lloyd had a plan:  he had worked in fulfillment at a small publishing company in Seattle, followed by a wholesaler outside of the city.  He wanted to sell books, first for Book Division, then, eventually, hopefully, for his own store.  Now, of course, the bookselling landscape has changed:  Book Division is gone, the independent landscape is shrinking, starting up a new shop is expensive, going to work in someone else’s shop probably won’t pay enough to keep you in rent.  Now Lloyd works in a completely different industry, one into which he fell via temping, where he fights the good fight, comes home and rants for a bit, then settles down with quiet good cheer to write.  Given the choice, I know he’d rather be selling books, but I also know that he appreciates the regular paycheck, too, and that he doesn’t miss the panic we used to feel about whether we could make our expenses in a given month. 

Unlike Lloyd, I didn’t have a plan.  Or rather, I did, but somehow the plan stood dazed and dumb by the side of the road while Circumstance blew by it, much in the way that Wile E. Coyote looks discombobulated when the Roadrunner passes him.  Once I figured out that the glamorous life of a freelance writer would not pay enough to keep me in boxed macaroni and cheese, I decided that I would take the path of thousands of wiggy bookworms who preceded me, and would head directly to grad school, where I would get my masters by the time I was 22, my Ph.D. by the time I was 25, and I would spend the rest of my career either molding eager young minds at a small school like the one from which I graduated (and from which I would receive a wage only slightly better than that of a McDonald’s cashier), or attempting to mold apathetic young minds who were only taking my class because they were stuck with me at a big faceless state school.  Too bad that I was so keen on not venturing too far from home, because Princeton (which I knew would be a stretch), NYU, Fordham, Tulane and UVA all said thanks but no thanks.  I decided to work for a year after college, and try again.  I ended up at the newspaper in the town where I grew up, a newspaper of which I made cruel and relentless fun while I was growing up, a newspaper that paid me back for my smart mouth by sending me to county commissioners’ meetings and township supervisors’ meetings and craft fairs and Chamber of Commerce dinners and donkey basketball games and the Wayne County Fair, where I took pictures of award-winning pickles and pigs so big you would swear that they were weaned on Miracle Gro.  I lasted for about a year, until I became one of the 15 people on this little paper fired by the editor-in-chief, who would be fired himself the following year.  Because I had to prove I was looking for work to collect unemployment, I would go through the New York Times’ Help Wanted section and send letters for the most fascinating, unlikely jobs I could find.  I know my dad’s heart nearly stopped when I told him that the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama was looking for researchers.

“Aren’t these the people who fight the Klan?” said Dad.

“Dad, they do good work for the betterment of society.”

“Well, sure,” he said.  “Can you do good work for the betterment of society without worrying about your office being bombed?”

I promised him I would try to find work where the odds of bombing would be fairly low.  I ended up in the special sales department of Viking Penguin in the summer of 1989, nearly five months after Viking published The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, four months after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa on Rushdie.  Sorry, Dad.

I’m not a fool.  Well, maybe I am a fool, but on the subject of earning a living, I try not to be.  I make a decent living at a job that demands little of me but patience and stamina.  I know the economy is not in good shape.  I know that New York City alone has lost 100,000 jobs since the 9/11/01 attacks.  I know that not everyone who needs a job has one; that there are people holding two or three jobs to meet their expenses; that there are jobs in the world which are demeaning and dangerous and humiliating and will not keep you alive.  If you’ve read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, or The Processed World Anthology, or any of the dozens of sociological studies of restaurant work, from Hey, Waitress! to Kitchen Confidential, then you know what I mean.  I think of an essay I read once, but can’t remember where—on Salon, maybe?  or Plastic?, in which the author was having drinks with an Irish colleague, and he was ranting about how boring and bourgeois and unfulfilling his job was, and how he hadn’t planned on doing this with his life, and his colleague answered, guardedly but nicely, that in Ireland unemployment had been so high for so long that everyone who had a job just felt lucky to have it.  Writer realizes, chastened, that he has been behaving like a whiny asshole, and he thanks his Irish friend for not giving him the lashing that he deserved.

I am not a fool about any of this, and yet I know my days at LuthorCorp are numbered.  They are not numbered because I’m in any danger of being laid off, or fired, or seeing my department wiped away in a tragic act of restructuring; no, they are numbered because if I spend one more year in this industry, spinning my wheels in the service of producing a product that will be wastebasket-bound as soon as the customer takes it home, I will die at my desk.  It will be a Six Feet Under moment:  I will be at my desk, fingers on keyboard.  The phone will ring.  I will pick it up.  It will be the woman I talk to on a thrice-weekly basis.  “We’ve had to shut our line down,” she’ll say, “because your plant sent us the wrong cartons *again*.” At that moment, my blood will get thicker and thicker and thicker until it just stops flowing.  My head will rock forward.  I will continue to receive e-mail, a steady bwip, bwip, bwip emitting from the speaker.

Call me a drama queen—hell, I won’t deny it—but I finally succumbed to the “spooky local news story” syndrome, the same one that I’m so cruel about when I see it in other people.  “Could a common household item pose a choking death to your children?  The story you can’t afford to miss, tonight at 11!” I fancy myself as being savvier than that, and yet last week I found myself watching a story about the effect of stress on health on NY1.  The reporter interviewed a 39-year-old computer technician at the station; he eats well and exercises regularly, and yet he has had three heart surgeries, and his cardiologist lays the blame on stress-induced depression.

This morning I think of that tech as I go to another day at LuthorCorp.  One of my colleagues has just given her notice.  She and her husband have bought a business; she has found a day job that looks fulfilling; they have bought a better and cheaper house than the one in which they have been living here in the city; she will be living a short drive from where she grew up, and where her family lives.  Even with the agita she will have to endure during her last few days at LuthorCorp, she looks bright and happy.

I come home, answer three phone calls from telemarketers with increasing levels of annoyance in my voice.  On the fourth call, I don’t bother to mask the irritation—and I discover it’s my mom, who I haven’t spoken to in over a week.  Normally we don’t let more than a couple of days elapse between calls unless one of us is on vacation, but lately I have been such a pill when I get home from work.  I’m afraid that I am the Typhoid Mary of the existentialism virus, that my terrible attitude will catch.  Silly me.  It is impossible for me to be existential in my mom’s company.  As we talk, I realize that I’ve been working in packaging, an industry that I pretty much fell into by accident, for 11 years, the major portion of my adult life.

Dear friends, I am tired of cutting bait.  It’s time to go fishing.