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Marty Martindale
My mother, Virginia Sanborn- Burleigh, was a school teacher, and when she had youngster-me in her kitchen, she became a cooking teacher. Any time we wondered about a food item, we turned to the “Fo...view moreMy mother, Virginia Sanborn- Burleigh, was a school teacher, and when she had youngster-me in her kitchen, she became a cooking teacher. Any time we wondered about a food item, we turned to the “Food Goddess” of the time, Fanny Merritt Farmer, founder of the Boston Cooking School. She kept it local; I was born in New Hampshire and we lived in the Providence-Boston area, a land of baked beans, clams with bellies and maple syrup.
Mom was also an early believer in the fact we are very much what we eat and dragged me frequently to her Nature Food Store when there were no others around. From about the age of eleven, plus 4H Cooking Club, I started cooking and was quite certain everyone else could cook. I later learned life is not that simple for too many.
Our family didn’t hand down recipes. If we liked a dish, we looked the recipe up ourselves. It was not until quite recently I realized my grandmother and her maid cooked a lot of Thomas Jefferson’s favorites.
I left Rhode Island on my wedding day for an Air Force wife’s life in Waco, Texas, and I loved the homemade pimento cheese, pinto beans with Cheddar, chopped pecans in tuna salad and my first tastes of Mexican food the southwest offered me. A year later, Uncle Sam sent us to New Mexico for ten years, and I learned to cook everything Mexican we liked from a little New Mexico Extension Service cookbook. Poaching whipped egg whites for Natillas and smoking-hot deep fat for sopapillas were my largest challenges.
Next, it was ten more Air Force years in Biloxi, Mississippi, where fresh shrimp was cheap and the romantic foodways of New Orleans were only an hour away. Here we learned very late evening meals were a nice way of life, so were gumbo, red beans on Mondays and huge muffalettas for return trips from The Big Easy.
We retired in Tampa Bay with our almost-grown kids, JoAnn and Brad. Our eating fare changed to beans which were black, Latin American foods, grouper and stone crabs.
Up until this time I worked mostly in radio as a copywriter and broadcaster, owned a small print shop and did a stint in hotel marketing and banquet planning. It was a very late time for me to plan higher education for myself. I did, however, and ended up in Gainesville FL, the University of Florida, and a cultural anthropology major. I had published a few articles, but it was time to “educate it.”
Once back in Tampa Bay I wrote business articles regularly and soon I was taking exotic trips to the Caribbean which moved me into travel writing. This was a land of sugar apples, pumpkin soup, coo-coo fish and warm cucumber dishes. Two short trips to Brazil introduced manioc crepes, feijoada and acaraje. When one mixes anthropology with a lot of travel one soon sees how very major food is to all peoples, rich as well as poor, how celebratory it is, how labor-intensive, how meager for some and how varied according to regional natural sources. I then found myself writing more about food -- food’s history, evolution, sheer fun, travels, versatility, acquisition, recipe adaptation, preparation, marketing and its many, many incarnations.
And now, I have written my first book, SHORT ORDERS, short-short stories, because I am an articles and copywriter.
Marty Martindaleview less