Again, an incredible discovery. Cooking with D. H. Lawrence is a post from the Paris Review’s “Eat Your Words” blog series, the idea being to find recipes in literature. This blog has been going on since 2017, starting with Gogol and poppy-seed piroshki, from Emile Zola to Shirley Jackson, and even sixteenth-century fairy tales. Every post is a real story, singling out the food and recipes in the author’s work and the whole context around the author. The post pointed out here, as mentioned, is about D. H. Lawrence, his life, his food. I learned that he did all the cooking for his wife Frieda and himself and so many other elements of his life, like understanding better “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (that I still have to read). Valerie Stivers commits to doing these recipes. For D. H. Lawrence, she went all the way to building an outdoor oven to bake bread. In the end, recipes from D. H. Lawrence’s were bread, pork chops with mushrooms, and a simple summer cake with fruit. I will have to read the other posts of this series.
“Lawrence believed the sexual relationship between a man and a woman was the central thing in human life; without sex, Connie’s body is “disappointed of its real womanhood,” “flattening and going a little harsh.” She falls in love with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her estate, who, unlike her husband, can give her “a bit of cunt and tenderness” and wants people to “fuck with warm hearts.” It is very, very important to the narration that Connie let Mellors take the lead in this fucking, that she be submissive to him, and that she do nothing to “get a grip on her own satisfaction.” Supposedly, this just-lie-there approach—described as being a “passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave”—leads to the most dazzling sexual fulfillment. At this point the young feminist throws the book across the room.”