Recipes

These recipes reflect food that was mentioned in The Bluest Eye

... try these for your book club's discussion 

Rosemary Villanucci, our next door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 

1939 Buick eating bread and butter.

Frieda brought her four graham crackers on a saucer and 

some milk in a blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup.

The house smelled of Fels-Naphtha and 

the sharp odor of mustard greens cooking.

She climbs four wooden steps to the door of Yacobowski's Fresh Veg. Meat and Sundries Store.  A bell tinkles as she opens it.  Standing before the counter, she looks at the array of candies.  All Mary Janes, she decides.  Three for a penny.  The resistant sweetness that breaks open at last to deliver peanut butter - the oil and salt which complement the sweet pull of caramel.  A peal of anticipation unsettles her stomach.

... Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it.  A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom  the candy is named.  Smiling white face.  Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort.  The eyes are petulant, mischievous.  To Pecola they are simply pretty.  She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good.  To eat the candy is to somehow eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane.  Love Mary Jane.  Be Mary Jane.

Three pennies had bought her nine lovely orgasms with Mary Jane.  Lovely Mary Jane, for whom a candy is named.

... every Saturday we'd get a case of beer and fry up some fish.  We'd fry in meal and egg batter, you know, and when it was all brown and crisp   - not hard though - 
we'd break open that cold beer ...  

Marie sat shelling peanuts and popping them into her mouth.

She never had to search for anybody to eat with in the cafeteria - they flocked to the table of her choice, where she opened fastidious lunches, shaming our jelly-stained bread with egg-salad sandwiches cut into four dainty squares, pink-frosted cupcakes, stocks of celery and carrots, proud dark apples.  
She even bought and liked white milk.

The girls came out.  Pecola with two dips of orange-pineapple, Maureen with black raspberry.  .... "Don't eat down to the tip of the cone," she advised Pecola.

"Why?"

"Because there's a fly in there."

"How you know?"

"Oh, not really.  A girl told me she found one in the bottom of hers once, and ever since then she throws that part away."

The acrid smell of simmering turnips filled our cheeks with sour saliva. 

"I don't want ice cream.  I want potato chips."

They look at her hands and know what she will do with biscuit dough; they smell the coffee and the fried ham, smoky grits with a dollop of butter on top.

One such girl from Mobile, or Meridian, or Aiken who did not sweat in her armpits nor between her thighs, who smelled of wood and vanilla, who had made souffles in the Home Economics Department, moved with her husband Louis, to Lorain, Ohio.

On the counter near the stove in a silvery pan was a deep-dish berry cobbler.                      The purple juice bursting here and there through crust.

Anyway, I sat in that show with my hair done up that way and had a good time.  I thought I'd see it through to the end again, and I got up to get me some candy.  I was sitting back in my seat, and I taken a big bite of that candy, and it pulled a tooth right out of my mouth.  I could have cried.  I had good teeth, not a rotten one in my head.  I don't believe I ever did get over that.  There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow,               and a front tooth gone.

Together the old man and the boy sat on the grass ad shared the heart of the watermelon.  The nasty-sweet guts of the earth.

On a wet Saturday night, before Aunt Jimmy felt strong enough to get out of bed, Essie Foster brought her a peach cobbler.  The old lady ate a piece, and the next morning when Cholly went to empty the slop jar, she was dead.

Some people had gone back for more helpings of food - potato pie, ribs.

With a longing that almost split him open, he thought of her handing him a bit of smoked hock out of her dish.  He remembered how she held it - clumsy-like, in three fingers, but with so much affection.  No words, just picking up a bit of meat and holding it out to him.  And then, the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under his chin.

Running away from home for a Georgia black boy was not a great problem ... you just ate from the ground and brought root beer and licorice in little country stores.

In the houses of people who knew us we were asked to come in and sit given cold water or lemonade; and while we sat there being refreshed, the people continued their conversations or went about their chores.