EAT MY MEMOIR is an ongoing series about family and food. It gives me great pleasure to remember and then try to recreate these family dishes. Along with the recreations are layers of familial memories that I had almost forgotten. The recipes have been tested two or three times, until they taste pretty damn good to me. But of course you may want to introduce your own tweaks, or scold me for going about things all wrong. Be my guest. —Ann Landi
“ ‘Eat My Memoir’ is simply delicious. It’s like being invited to a family dinner where old stories are told and secrets revealed, amid a clatter of cutlery and plenty of laughter. And, oh yes, the food. I defy you to resist making Ann’s Devils on Horseback after reading about the Coogans’ cocktail parties and Mrs. Coogan’s ‘hollow leg.’ Enjoy, eat up, and get ready to giggle.”
—Mary Gabriel, author of “Ninth Street Women,” “Love and Capital,” and “Notorious Victoria”
1. Swiss Steak and Terrible Secrets
When I was a little girl, my brother and I flew every summer to visit my mother’s parents, Nanny and Bompa, at their semi-rural home in Farmington, Michigan. A flight back then was thrilling, an occasion for dress-up, and we […]
2. Peach Schnapps, Parliaments, and Devils on Horseback
I spent my first ten years in a suburban paradise called Mountain Lakes, NJ, a 45-minute train ride from Penn Station in Manhattan. The daddies went to work every day; the mommies stayed home and picked up their spouses at […]
3. Ob Talk and Mary Coogan’s Chocolate Soufflé
Dede Coogan and I were friends for much of grade school, spending long hours in her third-floor bedroom with the cozy slanted ceiling and biking to classes together while I still lived across the street. We nurtured a private language […]
4. Dune Pigging and 24-Hour Fruit Salad
In our tidy suburban world, mommies stayed home and took care of the house, the pets, the children, the husbands. This was a few years before The Feminine Mystique, and nobody seemed to chafe at their roles or talked about […]
5. High Tea with Jane Dickerman
There are many places I have lived that I revisit in dreams—my parents’ sprawling Upper West Side apartment, their tiny summer house in Montauk, my first apartment with my ex-husband, and a house we owned briefly in Harvard, MA. But […]
Eat My Memoir" is an ongoing series about family and food by Ann Landi, a journalist with more than 25 years' experience reporting on the art world for ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, and other publications. Landi is the owner and editor-in-chief of Vasari21.com, a community of artists.
