In late December, I finally took the plunge and bought a Short Stack Edition. I’ve been intrigued for a while, every time I see them at the Strand — their covers are eye-catching and some of my favorite food people (Molly Yeh, Dorie Greenspan, and Alison Roman, for example) have written for them. On my girlfriend’s suggestion, I picked up Honey, and then it occurred to me that it would be fun to try to cook my way through as much of a book as I could each month of 2019.
Since buying Honey, I’ve become a little obsessed with its author, Rebekah Peppler. I bought her book Apéritif a couple weeks ago, enchanted by the idea of being someone who makes and drinks her own cocktails at home (like my dad — I really feel like I take after him far more than I could ever have expected, but that’s for another post). One of the things I like a lot about Apéritif is that, as Peppler writes at the end, it exists in a world without cishet white men.
This is dreamy at the best of cultural moments, but particularly lately. Last week my girlfriend and I went to see King Princess at the Warsaw. It was a great show, partly for the artist herself, partly because the crowd was a solid 99% LGBTQ. We weren’t the only visibly queer couple there, and we were seeing an artist who affirms that. Of course, after the show, we were trying to find food and went into a nearby German restaurant/bar. We decided not to stay, and on the way out, as my girlfriend was saying a cheery farewell to the bouncer and I was following her out, he touched my elbow and said something like, “Night, cutie.”
Look, we are both femme; look, we live in a society that assumes everyone is straight. But we’d just been at a show surrounded by other queer people. Two days before, Flare had published an essay I’m very proud of discussing the importance of lesbian visibility. I have been on more than one date with a woman wherein one of us (or both!) was hit on by a man. I’m used to it, but it still bothers me. I think what bothered me most about this is that he touched me. I’m a New Yorker. No one is supposed to do that. And between Flare, King Princess, and Apéritif, I’d been cocooned in a world without cishet men (white or otherwise). It was nice. I’m grateful for having had that, for just a little bit, before reality intruded and then retreated again.
Anyway, I named this blog post after Kehlani’s lovely song “Honey.” It didn’t occur to me until midway through writing this that there’s some significance to it being a love song to another woman, that in a piece of writing where I talk about lesbian invisibility, there’s some pointedness here.
Book: Honey, Rebekah Peppler (Short Stack Editions)
Recipes made: 10/25