Pat Conroy, The Cookbook: Recipes and Stories (2004).
Another title read in anticipation of visiting Charleston, South Carolina. Like K-Paul Prudhomme’s and Diane Kennedy’s cookbooks it is as much an insight into the people and places as the food and recipes. While K-Paul and Kennedy are each rooted to one place, NOLA for him and Mexico for her, Conroy’s book is also travelogue, recounting experiences from his travels as an aspiring and then successful writer.
It has the features of all of the Conroy books I have read: a wry humour, self-deprecating, modesty, a sharp eye for detail, well-turned phrases that lift the mundane to a higher level, and, of course, the burning fires of his dad-hatred. Give that last a rest, Pat!
The travels are domestic as well as international. There are stories from markets and restaurants in France and Italy, as well as such exotic places as Atlanta.
In the course of these travels, at one point Conroy said this, and I almost forgave him for his Oedipus complex. He knows whereof he writes because he was a school teacher for a time.
‘Because their impact cannot be measured, the teachers of the world drift through their praiseless days unaware of the impact and majesty of their influence. I want to fall on my knees in gratitude whenever I conjure the faces of the men and women who spent their finest days coaxing and urging me to discover the best part of myself in the pure sunshine of learning. Because the country dishonors its teachers and humiliates them with lousy pay and a mortifying deficiency of prestige among other professions, they do not receive the gifts of gratitude that brims over in men and women like me when we remember their patient, generous shaping of us into ourselves’ (p. 77).
Amen, brother.
Allow me to add that the humiliation is not limited to money but also to the easy social opprobrium that falls on school teachers. For example, ‘those who can’t, teach‘ and the assumption that the work begins when the students arrive and ends when they leave. Even we jumped up school teachers in universities cop this, too. Long ago I gave up resisting these lazy stereotypes from those satisfied with lazy stereotypes.