Writing about food: Happy Birthday Barbara Holland.
Picnics, from "Wasn't the Grass Greener?"
"Certain foods came to be sacred to picnics, like deviled eggs, rarely served indoors and, being fragile and slippery, always a challenge to transport safely. Eggs were hand-boiled, cooled, and carefully sliced in half lengthwise. The yolks were popped out, mashed up with mustard, mayonnaise, and creative touches like chopped pickles or Worcestershire sauce, and replaced in the whites. Dedicated picnic packers stuffed the yolk mixture into fluted pastry tubes so it came out in curlicues. The final touch was a sprinkling of paprika, a red cosmetic powder widely used to brighten colorless foods. ... They were eaten in the hand, messily. For the respectable middle class accustomed to more than one fork at meals, half the joy of the picnic was eating with their fingers. They tore apart cold chicken and barbecued spareribs and chewed the bones; they picked up the strawberries by the tasseled end. ... Picnickers plunged their faces into watermelon and broke off chunks of cake. Peach juices dribbled down their chins. Bones and apple cores were winged into the bushes. Probably they talked with their mouths full. It was a glad cathartic orgy of unthinkable manners, sanctified by the outdoors.
"My grandparents, long ago in Colorado, often climbed the hills to a likely-looking stream and built a fire, buried potatoes in the coals, heated the skillet and then, when it was hot, caught and gutted a trout to throw in it fresh and sizzling. I don't know what they did afterwards. ... Innocence was an essential ingredient in picnics. Picnics provided a temporary rebirth into a sinless state; wherever we spread our blanket and opened our basket was a pre-apple Eden. ... In all those Impressionist picnic paintings, clothing could be doffed without prurience; indoor nakedness was suggestive, nakedness on the grass was a celebration. Where lunch was spread out under the sky, sin hadn't yet uncoiled its head. An enthusiasm for picnics required a belief in the possibility of innocence. We may have stopped believing."
