I’ve begun the spring semester teaching my food-writing course, Setting a Fine Table. This week we read the wonderful Jane Kramer essay “The Reporter’s Kitchen.” I’m mainly drawn to this essay for the way Kramer discusses her relationship with the subjects she writes about, how in the midst of cooking she gains perspective on what she’s learned in her research—what constitutes her memory—and then integrates her new knowledge into her own voice, which changes everything. Here’s that idea in her own words:

The memory I ‘see’ is a kind of kitchen, where the thoughts and characters I bring home go straight into a stockpot on my big stove, reducing old flavors, distilling new ones, making a soup that never tastes the same as it did the day before, and feed the voice that, for better or worse, is me writing, and not some woman from another kitchen.