Joe Dolce: Cookbooks for Poets

Cookbooks for Poets

Ann Rogers’ Poor Poets’ Cookbook—
a nickel dinner, fresh roll,
real butter, and a glass of wine,
Onion Pie, Black Beans and Rum.
Inspired by Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife, 1824—
curry of catfish, barbecued shoat & beaten biscuits,
fried calf’s feet, pheasant à-la-daube,
tansy pudding, pickled nasturtiums, walnut catsup,
vinegar of the four thieves.
The food and customs of the antebellum South.
A culinary pantheon that included Alice B. Toklas,
Fannie Farmer and M.F.K. Fisher’s
How to Cook a Wolf, 1942—
the latter, written to inspire courage,
in those daunted by wartime shortages.
W.H. Auden, of Fisher, remarked:
I do not know of anyone in the United States
who writes better prose.
John Updike added:
Poet of the appetites.

Joe Dolce