“Live!” exclaimed actress Rosalind Russell, famously, as the character Auntie Mame. “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”
Crescent sets the table for life’s banquet in her three very different ways in her three occasional blogs.
These are Deep Feast (food), Nothing is Wasted on the Writer (creativity), and Fall Down Nine Times, Get Up Ten (cultivating resilience).
Deep Feast: CD’s blog on cooking, eating, & entertaining
Here’s the most obvious connection with the Auntie Mame quote above.
What keeps us alive physically, often while giving us pleasure and connection?
Eating, of course… which means cooking (or being cooked for, by others). This is an area of delight and obsession for CD, the James Beard Award-winning author of eight much-loved cookbooks which have sold altogether just under two million copies. Of course you’ll find recipes here at Deep Feast (however, if you want just recipes, please see our Recipe Index.)
But, as you’d expect from someone who’s written about food for Fine Cooking, Relish, Bon Appetit, Food Forum, and many other publications, you’ll also find in-depth article-type blog posts that include but go beyond recipes.
Some, like I Feed This Guinnesss Stour Chocolate Layer Cake to My Father Only in my Dreams, are memoir-based. Others explore the intersection of seasonality and food, like Tomato Meditation, at Summer’s End, or the nature of friendship, food, and comfort, as in Coffee and Sympathy.
CD also looks, occasionally, at hard socio-economic, ethical, and political questions as seen through the lens of food, like The Great Hunger: What Can the Irish Potato Famine Tell us about our Present Crisis, written in the midst of Covid.
Crescent relishes the small, daily tasks of cooking, as well as the sometimes spectacular adventures our own kitchens can provide.She remains fascinated by and engaged with the countless questions food and ingredients ask us:
* What’s for dinner tonight, and how do I make it? 
* How we provision our kitchens? With what? From where?
* How do we balance pleasure and health, quick-and-easy-but delish with delectably indulgent but time-consuming?
* How do we set a table as a big as the world?
* How do we work so that as many as possible can be seated and fed?
* What do I fix for the holidays -Thanksgiving and otherwise? – when the guests include vegetarians, vegans, meatists, and gluten-free?
In Deep Feast, you’ll join CD in her kitchen, with recipes and menus for both every-day cooking and holidays feasts, whether you are setting the table for family, friends, or just yourself.
With her, you’ll visit glorious small home dinner parties (she believes that these, comprising no more than 6 to 8 carefully selected compatible guests, are among the highest forms of self-generated civilized entertainment).
You’ll find inspiration for nourishment and indulgence (like the best-ever New Year’s Day brunch menu, with recipes).
You’ll adventure with her into food’s realms and rituals: shopping at the farmer’s market, hunting truffles in Emilia-Romagna or oyster mushrooms in her Ozark neighborhood.
Occasionally, you’ll join her in putting up stuff for the cold time (like her extraordinary Green Tomato Mincemeat, which happens to be meatless). Traditions, eating out, travel, reviews of good cookbooks and cookbook-memoirs: in this blog, all are bound together with CD’s kindness, research, memory, expertise, and humor.
So, pull up a chair and let her fix you a bowl of soup!
Descriptions of the next two blogs are on the way!
Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer: CD’s creativity and writing-related blog
Fall Down Nine Times, Get Up Ten: CD’s blog on fearless living, cultivating resilience in the face of grief, and living an integrated life
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Crescent, I have several of your cookbooks, bought mostly, I will confess, due to your name! (Well, the first one was, but the cornbread book was fully due to a love of cornbread!) But, as an introvert who doesn’t like or at least never developed a taste for entertaining (and we do exist, lonesome as it may be on occasion), and a (fairly) recent widow (a word I really don’t like, and try, pretty successfully, to avoid), have you ever done recipes for one, sole person who also needs to eat? Or maybe recipes for two, where the second serving will do nicely as left overs? I will also add that I read the widowhood wednesdays, and todays reading, oh dear….and Ron and I never did make a big deal of holidays. Still, this one r…well it’s bloody painful sometimes. And I am very grateful that the birds, and the cat, get me up in the morning to feed them.
Crescent: Just a note to say how much I ADORE your Blog and missives, and as a fellow widow (3 years now) even the Widow missives, after first falling in love with your foods. I have most of your cookbooks, and have also sent the books to my son (54). At any rate, keep on keeping on, whilst I go make a batch of Open Sesame cookies! Thank you so much for all you do!
Danna Uyehara
(Kingman, AZ, hoping to get moved back to Arkansas before I am 80…)
Honeychile, you are so welcome. I feel suchj a connection with my fellow members of “the club no one wants to join.” Let me know when and if you get moved back here! I still love this state deeply, despite its present appalling politics. xo
I’m making THE salad tonight! Thanks for all your inspiration and cooking creativity, I’m in your fan club!
Oh, hooray! I’ve been making that salad for decades — it still and ever pleases me!
My friend…alright already!!!You managed to shame me into it…No, I’m not signing up for the class, but I promise to force myself to once again attempt to make some writing a regular habit! Practically every day for many years, I was faithful. Then my darlin’ got sick and I fell off the wagon with a thud. His death was a perfect excuse to let my lazy self continue to look at the computer with something like hatred. Many years ago, I’m ashamed to remember, I was terribly critical of a good friend who had the same rotten thing happen to her. She lost her husband to a serious illness and promptly stopped writing. Oh, I complained bitterly to all of our professional associates! What a waste of talent! Why didn’t she get off her posterior and work through it!!! And then it happened to me…Suffice it to say, that after a great writing career, I’ve spent the last several years nursing my wounds. However…Dairy Hollow was there for me when I needed it (before all my troubles started) and Crescent Dragonwagon has turned into a daily inspiration currently.
Thank you for being my friend in need and I promise to try again. I’ll keep you posted…fingers crossed!
I am happy to be your friend, Betty. And happy that Dairy Hollow House was at one time “there for you.” I am so NOT happy that you lost your sweet darlin… as you probably know, I think grief over the death of a long time partner, close friend, in some cases parent is
THE
HARDEST
thing
to go through
in this life.
I think you will find Practice helps. It becomes something that you want to do, get to do — not have to do. Stick to it for 30 days and see what happens. And that “promise”? Make it to yourself, not to me. And if you start and stop and then get back to it again, treat that as data and instead of saying meanb things to yourself, notice how it felt on days you did and didn’t practice.
I’m rooting for you.