Quick Takes With: Marjory Sweet
When I first read through Marjory Sweet’s book, [ ] is a breakfast food (over breakfast), reader, I actually teared up. As much poetry book as recipe book, filled with lyrical odes to and photographic snapshots of to the day’s earliest meal, it’s just a beautiful physical object. It’s true, I’ve come to realize, of most everything everything Marjory creates: recipe books, rental houses, pastries.
Marjory is “a farmer, cook, and writer”—in that order.”I was born and grew up on the coast of Maine,” she tells us. “After a brief stint working for artists in New York and a transformative year-plus-some in Italy, I lived in New Mexico for 11 years managing small organic vegetable farms. I got into cooking—and writing about cooking—as an extension of the farm work. If you mush all of that experience into one bite you get to where I am now: back in Maine, cooking food at Cafe Grazie, which I co-own and run with my biz partner, Marcy Taubes.”
Today Marjory writes in with her ideal house (“I’ve been a Judd freak for a long time,” she says), kitchen pet peeve, the color she thinks is “sneakily neutral,” and also some photos of really delicious-looking summer cakes.
You’re invited to dinner. What’s your go-to gift?
Candles! Danica (which produce a veritable rainbow of colors and sizes) are a local fave here in midcoast Maine, but my friend Kate (also local) hand-dips these delicate, FRAGRANT, twisty guys, which are the just the perfect little offering along with some fresh flowers.
What’s on your bedside table?
Several pairs of Ursa Major earrings I’ve remembered to pluck out just before drifting off to sleep, my 64-oz water bottle that I can’t ever be without, and a stack of books I’m reading and “reading”: Circe (nearly finished!), The Magic Mountain (technically actively reading, but I’m seriously trudging) and Lucia Berlin’s short stories (one of my favorites, which I am re-reading intermittently alongside the other two.) Also, this morning’s coffee cup that I abandoned after the last sip—a vintage Snoopy mug that says “at times life is pure joy!”
