What the fuck is this?
Guilt, grief, and processed cheese
This is a website-newsletter thing about American food, and about America. There will be recipes and stories from a blah blah blah, with all the prerequisite sentimentality and navel-gazing we now expect from all our cookbooks and food writing. (Hoo boy, am I gonna gaze into my navel, like a hairy abyss!) I’ll be sharing dishes I grew up with. I’ll also be sharing thoughts I usually keep to myself – not because they’re weird or controversial, but just because I don’t have anywhere else to share them, and I’m tired of them swirling around in my brain like a storm brewing over the prairie. It’s time that rain cloud burst.
There will be recipes for cookies, cakes, pasta, pies, and dips made with powdered soup packets. But they will be accompanied by barely-coherent word-vomiting about American male rage, nostalgia, obesity, and Catholicism, or semi-fictional vignettes from a half-remembered childhood entangled with memories of sitcoms I used to watch. This is a vocalisation emanating directly from the cheesehead lizard brain, a soul growl, a cry for help, the noise I make when I cough up some of the grief and anger and love and bits of Oreos and Pringles that get caught in my throat. It’s a rage against the machine, a rage against the dying of the light, a corn-fed brainfire stoked by ultra-processed food and an undying love for somewhere that might already be dead. This is one American’s struggle to parse what America even is. And it’s also a scrapbook of heartwarming dishes from America’s Dairyland: real comfort from an imaginary place.
It also might end before it even begins. I’m writing this on November 6th, 2024 – the morning after a sleepless night; a day that will live in infamy. I am sad, angry, and fearful and I don’t know what to do. So I’m doing the only things I know: eating, cooking, writing. In time, maybe this anguish will subside, or I’ll get bored, or nobody will read, and I won’t feel like writing anymore. But for now I just need to get my thoughts out of my brain, because that feels as close to catharsis as I can get right now.
By the way: you can pay to subscribe to this, but it won’t get you anything extra. I’m going to give all the subscription moneys away to charities and organisations I believe in, so by all means pay me if you want to support them. But don’t expect anything special… at least not for now. We’ll see what happens.
This thing is going to be very loosely structured, updated only sporadically, and the recipes may not be written in the usual way. I’ll explain more about that when I get to them, but for now I’ll just say that writing recipes is tedious work, and I have a suspicion that things that are tedious to write are probably tedious to read, too.
To kick things off, here is a recipe for “Mom’s Dill Dip.” It is lifted verbatim from the family recipe book my mom made. It is simple, entirely non-tedious, and delicious.
1 8-ounce container sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
1 teaspoon seasoned salt
1 tablespoon (or more) dill weed (fresh dill is much better)
2 tablespoons finely chopped onionMix and serve with raw veggies.