Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2007

Thesis Director

Daiva Markelis

Thesis Committee Member

Letitia Moffitt

Thesis Committee Member

David Radavich

Abstract

Comfort Food is a work of culinary-themed creative nonfiction based on my personal and professional cooking experiences. My purposes in writing these memoirs, to preserve my family's gastronomic history and intimate my cooking experiences, are ultimately infused with a single desire: to encourage others to view food in terms of nourishment, of comfort, and not simply sustenance.

The work is divided into eight chapters; the first two focus on my family's history and my childhood on a farm in Wisconsin. The third through seventh chapters are a chronologically-organized account of each of the places I've worked: a bakery, café, supper club and casual-upscale restaurant. The final chapter is family-based and reflective.

Although each chapter functions effectively as an individual essay, linking them into one work reflects the journey of learning the art of cooking. Often food writers, Anthony Bourdain and M.F.K. Fisher for example, begin the tale of that journey at its origins - the family's kitchen table - and so I have elected to record the familial foundations of my own culinary education. A cook acquires a set of skills in one kitchen and builds on them through traveling from place to place and working with different chefs and methods; these memoirs are arranged chronologically to embody the process that culminates in field-based, region specific culinary knowledge.

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