Posted by The New York Times on July 13, 2010 at 15:05:44:
What’s Been for Dinner? She Could Look It Up
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Before there were food blogs, before there were thrice-daily Twitter posts about meals, before there were Web sites devoted to pictures of every morsel consumed over the course of the day, there was Jenny Rosenstrach’s dinner diary.
Jenny Rosenstrach has a diary listing every dinner she has made since 1998. “Dinner is something tangible,” she said.
A small notebook with a faded botanical print on the cover, the diary lived, for five years, in the corner of a kitchen counter in Brooklyn Heights, then moved, with its chronicler, to a house in Westchester County, where it now rests on a high shelf far from the reaches of doodling little hands. Occasionally, if the notebook happens to be out on the counter, a guest casually glances through the pages crammed with years of notes and dates, then looks up, a wild look in the eye, to ask, “What exactly is this?”
Since 1998, Ms. Rosenstrach, a 39-year-old writer, editor and mother of two, has been writing down every meal she has had for dinner. On July 12, 1999, for example, she sat down to a dinner of sour chicken stir fry. A year later, to the day, it was curried chicken with apples. Over time, one gleans hints of culinary trends coming and going: in the early years, there was heavy use of Balsamic vinegar (as in Jan. 11, 2000, Balsamic glazed chicken breast); later, the meals feature less meat, more lentils — cultural history dashed off in ballpoint pen.
The diary didn’t start out as a feat of endurance. It was an organizational tool, the kind espoused in the pages of magazines like Real Simple, where Ms. Rosenstrach was an editor for six years.
“In the beginning, it was mostly about logistics,” said Ms. Rosenstrach, who first used the notebook to map out, on Sunday nights, the meals that she and her boyfriend (now husband) looked forward to preparing in the coming week. Now it’s no longer a work of anticipation, but a recollection of the recent past.
It’s still a reference tool, she said, “but that’s not as important as the actual act of recording the details of the day — about having the book in my hand and seeing the evidence of all the dinners I’ve produced and enjoyed for my family over the course of 12 years.”
For the most part, the entries are remarkably unembellished. On 9/11, the meal Ms. Rosenstrach had planned to have — chicken with arugula and wild rice — is simply crossed out. Unable to get home, she had slept at her brother’s instead. It’s the handwriting that betrays hints of life changes, morphing from a luxurious script to the slightly messier print of someone pressed for time.
In addition to the public diary that his performances represented, Spalding Gray kept a more mundane journal, one of “fact and action,” he wrote in the prelude to his book “Sex and Death to Age 14.” “This report became like a Christmas tree,” he wrote, “the structure upon which I could later hang my feelings, like ornaments.”
Ms. Rosenstrach, an inveterate saver of date books and diaries going back to first grade, says the dinner diary functions as an emotional jog, but it also represents a collection of gold stars — testament to the good work, the sometimes drudge work, she has done, in regularly feeding her family and trying to feed them well.
“Sometimes as a mother, you can spend a whole day running around dealing with these little things that are intangible, and you feel like you have nothing to show for it,” she said at home on a recent evening. “Dinner is something tangible. So I focus on that.”
When Cookie magazine, where Ms. Rosenstrach worked as features director, folded, she found the ultimate use for a diary she kept for reasons sometimes inscrutable even to herself. Its contents are often inspiration for the blog she started last March — Dinner: A Love Story.
It’s an effort to inspire other parents — with recipes, insights, rituals — to do that same hard but rewarding work of feeding their families with care.
As advocacy for the family table has become something close to a political movement, Ms. Rosenstrach feels validated, even relieved.
“I no longer feel as though I’m letting my feminist forebearers down,” she said. “Being in the kitchen, with Dad too, is no longer being trapped; it’s quite the opposite.”
It’s the eyes, rather than the mouth, that should water at the thought of those well-documented 12 years of work, the thousands of onions that needed chopping, all that breading and sautéing and boiling. Yet flipping through the pages of the dinner diary, and reading between the lines, one only senses, in all that attention to detail, a mindfulness that is as much about a way to live as it is a way to eat.
Leaving No Chance of a Forgotten Moment
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Jenny Rosenstrach, the food blogger behind the family-dinner-inspiring Web site Dinner: A Love Story, is not just obsessive about chronicling her family’s dinners, as I wrote about in my Big City column on Tuesday. She’s also a careful chronicler of the other details of her life, and has been since she was a child, sometimes for nostalgia’s sake, sometimes for goal-setting.
Before she had an electronic datebook, every time she went for a run it was notated in her datebook with a big circled R, so she could look over the past few months and see with satisfaction how many Rs she’d accumulated. She’s kept every diary and journal since first grade; when she recently decamped from her kitchen to seek those journals out, she instead came back with a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of restaurant matchbooks. On the inside flap of each one that opened, she’d noted the names of her dining companions.
She also kept a journal of her emotional life while in college, but also kept another, strictly factual one that listed nothing more than what she’d done that day, or worn, or listened to on the radio (“Today Mom sent me a Gatorade bottle; I am wearing all Gap except my shoes”).
“The long reflective entries in my conventional diary are of course enlightening, but the other one is so much more hilarious — it rounds out the picture in a way that my memory never could,” Ms. Rosenstrach said.
Now that she has daughters of her own, Ms. Rosenstrach is particularly glad she held on to all those journals all these years. Her older daughter is just now old enough that the journals Ms. Rosenstrach wrote at the same age actually have some telling emotional content.
“How else would I possibly know what she’s thinking about or what’s important to her?” Ms. Rosenstrach said.
That daughter may have caught her mother’s compulsion: Every morning, she writes down on a calendar hanging on her door exactly what she has lined up for the day, whether it’s a pool party or a dentist appointment. With two keepers and chroniclers, the family had better have a big basement.
As for those charming child-delivered one-liners that every parent wishes he or she could remember, Ms. Rosenstrach sees the benefits of space-saving technology. She created, for each daughter, an e-mail account, and emails them the insights and questions they had that she thinks they’ll like seeing when they’re old enough for nostalgia about their youth.
What do you keep track of? Do you hold on to it, and ever find unexpected uses for it?
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