“Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers,” Edie Clark
Posted November 19th, 2007 by Antonia Malchik
In her new book, New England writer Edie Clark proves that you don’t have to go through a big publishing company to produce something great. Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers is the second book she’s self-published and marketed, and it follows on the success of The View from Mary’s Farm, a self-published collection of her popular regular column in Yankee magazine. Those essays, based on her experiences living on a New England farm and slowly rebuilding its farmhouse, have made Clark a landmark New England writer.
In Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers Clark mixes memoir with a love of food and place. The book is categorized by decade, which, perhaps unintentionally, gives it one of its most charming traits: the development of the writer’s growing relationship with New England, starting with visits to an aunt residing in Massachusetts in the sixties. Her memories of the New England states sent me unexpectedly into nostalgia of my own, reminding me of my childhood in Montana, when ski resorts featured only slow two-seated chairlifts and chilly lodges serving instant hot chocolate and burned coffee, cars were clunky, houses drafty, and excellent food could be found in the most unlikely places (in my case a coffee shop run quietly by Glenn Close’s sister in a neighboring town, but that’s another story).
It is Clark’s appreciation for place and the beauty and slowness of nature that gives her writing such strength. I have to admit a slight lack of objectivity here: I once took a travel writing class from Edie Clark, and it was from her that I learned that literary travel writing didn’t have to consist only of hair-raising adventures in far-flung lands, or of throwing oneself into life-threatening positions, or of stories about the unreliability of bodily functions. (In other words, I told myself silently, travel writing doesn’t have to be defined only by men with excessive amounts of … energy.) Clark writes what she teaches: with a talent for observing the details of the life around you, wherever you are, and writing about every aspect that makes a place live.
Clark, a New Jersey native, has made New England her place. Her writing lives and breathes the mountains and forests and waters of a place that is still wild and beautiful. In this book, she brings to life its past and its present, and the people who make up its eclectic communities. And the food they eat. It is a deeply personal book, dealing with personal loss and a growing love of landscape, community, and nurturing sustenance. Clark is one of those writers who proves a counterpoint to depressing news for world travelers of climate disasters and disappearing landscapes — a sense that we can still find beauty and rhythm in the world.
You can order Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers direct from Edie Clark’s website, where you can also read several of her most popular articles from Yankee magazine, ranging from the spread of Lyme disease in the US to an Erik Brokovich-type battle of one cancer-riddled community against polluters of its water, as well as order the classic The View from Mary’s Farm.
