Cross Creek: Food

Cross Creek was written as a semi-autobiographical account of the inhabitants of a small hammock community in the middle of Florida referred to as "the Creek." Flavored by Rawlings's imagination and poetic descriptive language, Cross Creek embodies the life and culture of a seemingly simple community, while embracing the complexities and ideals of families whose lives are nothing near being easy and trouble-free. Though, at times, the style and aesthetic value of her narrative may seem as basic as the lives of the small-town country people who know the difficulties of rural life, Rawlings peers into the depths of human consciousness and the magnitude of communal relations. She intends to keep her narrative language simple so as not to obscure the message that she is attempting to give to the reader. In accounts of confrontation, charity, and everyday life, Rawlings addresses the importance of working together as a community, not just as a way to preserve collective life, but as a way to nourish the heart of the individual.

Food is an essential topic in Cross Creek that addresses both communal preservation and the nurturing of the individual psyche. To Rawlings, food and cooking bring people together as a community, which, in turn, brings peace of mind to the individual soul. Rawlings expresses in both Cross Creek and in her cookbook, Cross Creek Cookery, her belief in the importance of food to the human psyche. She focuses on the passion one encounters when cooking food, the blessing that food imparts on individual bodies and minds, and the ties that food forms in communities that bring people and communities together.

Rawlings came to the Creek with little cooking experience, but she soon felt a passion for cooking and eating food. She had not previously been taught to cook, because cooking was not considered an art or even a notable accomplishment in the environment in which she was raised (Cross Creek 206). However, after cooking a meal for her mother-in-law, who deemed that every dish except the salad was "inedible," Rawlings realized that knowing how to cook was, at least, important. Luckily, her mother-in-law sent her a copy of the Boston Cook Book shortly after returning home from Cross Creek (Cross Creek 206).

Rawlings later found cooking to be very rewarding. In fact, she happily offered herself as a hostess to many guests and strangers who desired her distinguished and delightful dishes. In time, because she was passionate about feeding people good food, Rawlings published the Cross Creek Cookery to satisfy the hungry mouths that could not make it to her own dinner table. Rawlings saw providing food for the "hungry" world as her duty to humankind. Her passion for food radiates in both of her Cross Creek books. She claims in Cross Creek that heredity and instinct are not necessarily factors that lead to the makings of a good meal. However, the passion that radiates in the narrative of both books proves that cooking is surely instinctive to Rawlings's character.

In Cross Creek Cookery, in the chapter, "To Our Bodies' Good," Rawlings delves into the benefits of food to the body and mind of the individual. She opens the book with the testimonies of a cadet and a corporal, who both write about the "agonies of frustration" that the references to food in Cross Creek trigger while they were in the military (Cross Creek Cookery 1). In comparison to the food they are eating in the camps, the dishes in Cross Creek sound so delicious to the soldiers that the mere thought of the homemade food makes their mouths water and leaves them yearning for a meal so appetizing. A letter by the aviation cadet claims that Cross Creek has been banned anywhere near any encampment to avoid the wreckage of company morale as a "result of matter over mind" (Cross Creek Cookery 1). The "peace and plenty," for which many of the soldiers "were all homesick,"explain the agony that the troops feel as they try to survive away from their families' home-cooked meals (Cross Creek Cookery 2). Apparently, reading Rawlings's descriptions of food causes more torture than the soldiers can handle. This is only one instance in which Rawlings portrays food as more than just caloric intake; but the idea that food is more important to the nourishment of the mind and spirit than to the body is one that emanates throughout Cross Creek.

As seen in chapter four, "The Pound Party," Rawlings depicts food and cooking in a communal sense, alluding to the idea of the "gathering together of folk of good will" to benefit not only human relationships but the community as a whole (Cross Creek Cookery 2). Despite the hoax that the Townsend family is pulling on her, Rawlings enjoys the Pound Party. She claims that if they invite her again in the future, she will gladly attend (Cross Creek 44). She finds satisfaction in the company, even though there is no real meal. Her fervent description of the family's hungry eyes feasting upon mere crackers and peanut butter further displays that the passion she associates with food does not exist solely on menu selections. Furthermore, Rawlings discerns that gathering together to eat food is a very powerful method by which individuals can create community in a contemporary world in which community, as she experiences it in Cross Creek, has almost ceased to exist.

Although Rawlings sometimes questions the eating of certain animals that are too close to the heart and acknowledges that some people will not eat certain animals because they are viewed as unclean; she certainly displays a true love for the way food nourishes the heart, soul, and mind. As Rawlings sees it, food ingested in bad company and in unpleasant situations does not benefit the body. But, in the right circumstances, food provides a sense of nurturance and a connection to humankind. As Carolyn Jones states in "Nature, Spirituality, and Homemaking in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek," Rawlings creates in Cross Creek "an intimacy with nature, neighbor, and self that establishes a physical as well as a spiritual home" (243). She gives the modern world a needed recipe for making and keeping communal ties.

--Victoria Mosher

Works Cited

• Jones, Carolyn. "Nature, Spirituality, and Homemaking in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek. In Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, ed. Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes. New York: Garland, 1996.
• Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. Cross Creek. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
• -------. Cross Creek Cookery. New York: Scribner's, 1970.