Since she wrote her charming food memoir, “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life,” Kim Severson has relocated to Atlanta, become the Atlanta bureau chief for The New York Times and moved from food to the national beat, which put her back on the road.
Severson, 49, who will speak today at Outwrite Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Midtown, finds the Atlanta climate pleasant but the traffic formidable: “Get me out of this car.”
“Spoon Fed,” which comes out in paperback this month, is structured around her mini-portraits of eight cooks who influenced her life, including California food writer Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, celebrity New York food critic Ruth Reichl, the late Edna Lewis and Severson’s own mother.
Along the way, Severson discusses coming to terms with her alcoholism, her homosexuality and her feelings of self-doubt. All are delivered with plentiful humor and recipes.
During a late-morning cappuccino at Parish on Highland Avenue, Severson chats about the path that brought her to Atlanta with her partner and their daughter.
But first she carefully scrapes the cinnamon off the top of her frothy beverage (sprinkled by an unwitting barista), making fun of her picky-picky taste as she does it. “Yes, I’m one of those people,” she says, with a half-smile, half-grimace. “But I think if you’re going to pay $5 for a cup of warm milk, you ought to get it the way you like it.”
Q: What are the challenges of moving from food to news?
A: I'm going from a beat in which I think I had the best Rolodex in the country to one in which I'm walking in new. It's a challenge. Plus people don't kiss your [rear end] as much in this job.
Q: Will you miss writing about food?
A: My interest in which chef was making the next hot lamb slider was diminishing.
Q: Your comments about [New York Times food writer] Ruth Reichl make her seem more like a bad example than a mentor, with what you describe as her penchant for inventing dialogue.
A: Her books are incredibly readable books. She says, "I'm telling you the essence of a story and I'm being a storyteller." Her stories are probably more readable than mine. But I don't work that way.
Q: [Atlanta chef] Scott Peacock and [Southern food diva] Edna Lewis, who lived together, made an odd couple — an elderly black woman and a young gay man. What did you learn from them?
A: When you're gay, you look around at the hetero structure of life, and you're constantly trying to fit in. But [I learned] I can make a family wherever I make it.
Q: You say that the lesson you learned from Rachael Ray is "be who you are," but it seems to me that you really admire her capacity for hard work. Is that right?
A: It's a piece of authenticity there. She is what she is. But there are 3,000 people whose livelihoods depend on her being Rachael Ray. She thinks if you don't keep working, everything will fall apart.
Q: I liked the story about your mom hitting your brother in the head with the frozen fish for smarting off.
A: I've told that story forever, and it was always a trout. But the brother pointed out that it was a bass. That's how memory works.
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