Homer was right: beauty is lifesaving (or life-creating as in Dante’s title La vita nuova, or life-altering as in Rilke’s imperative “You must change your life”). And Homer was right: beauty incites deliberation, the search for precedents…Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.
_Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
Sunday, July 20, 2025. The eve of Cancer season.
In central Virginia there is a lovely cottage-dwelling Libra who spends their days making magic. Though dutifully devoted, if the offer is right, she can be convinced to leave her abode for a hangout every now and then. Recently inspired by the life of Edna Lewis, this past Juneteenth weekend (which I always take off because that’s my independence day) we met up at The Roosevelt to kiki and vibe. Carrington wrote beautifully about their dinner experience here. She picked up on subtleties that I had not because I arrived late, harried, and sweating to our meet-up that had been my own idea.
The reason for my delay was that I underestimated how much time it would take me to get from one side of Richmond (RVA) to the other, having first stopped at Minglewood Bakeshop out of curiosity after having heard rave reviews and with a desire to surprise Carrington with scones for her and her family to enjoy later as well. While the bakeshop’s vibes were top tier, I found out the next day over breakfast that the scones I had purchased were dry, as in, they had been kissed by the Sahara. But ultimately, my visit to Minglewood was aligned because while perusing around I happened upon a stack of used books that were on sale. So untouched was that corner of the shop that when I asked the shop attendant how much the book was selling for she looked at me perplexed and said “I don’t know, no one has ever asked about buying one of those books before.” As the bakeshop attendant recruited another peer to figure out pricing, we got to chatting for a bit and I ended up plugging the bookclub I host because it turned out that the attendant and their partner are avid romance readers who often spend weekends in Northern VA visiting friends in Old Town Alexandria which is where I happen to host Sapphic Sunday Bookclub at Friends to Lovers Bookstore.
I left pleased with my purchased Sahara scones (unbeknownst to me in the moment of course) and a well-loved copy of Vegan With a Vengeance! by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I say that this roundabout was aligned because just a few weeks prior, I had added that title to my ever expanding deck of cookbook titles after having recently reread and obsessively annotated Alicia Kennedy’s No Meat Required where she refers often to Moskowitz’s influence over her own development as an epicure. While I continue to eat as an omnivore, Kennedy’s newsletter and book have been seminal in my presently spending a lot of time reconsidering and subsequently appreciating the abundance of experiences that arise from refusal. An abundance of refusal as in, how the refusal to center meat has led me to experiencing a brand new world of gustatory pleasure and how the splendid surprises from that pleasure have been leading me to consider abundance in other areas of my life where I had once misperceived difference as scarcity.
After finally arriving and settling in at the Roosevelt, everything was right with the world. It is important to note that neither Carrington nor I had been aware of each other’s existence until I walked into a yoga class they were teaching one autumn evening back in 2021. Now, they are one of my favorite people. Over dinner, we both yapped to our heart’s content while sharing the fried green tomato starter and then enjoying our separate orders of the salt roasted sweet potatoes.
The thing about the starter was that its lightness snuck up on me. “Light” is not a word typically associated with fried green tomatoes, but something about the batter fried pieces was damn near delicate in the most delightful way. The tomatoes arrived plated upon a sumptuous nettle pesto, balanced with a scoop of whipped avocado atop the fried green tomatoes and pieces of pickled celery. Each bite hit different in the best way and went down smoothly.
Tucked away inside my brain there is a memory file titled Tubers. In that file the most stand-out memory is as follows: February 2020, another world. I was living in Sevilla and was in my first few weeks of class when one of my professors casually mentioned that in the mid-16th century, Spanish colonizing envoys brought back potatoes from what we now call Peru. The first recorded encounter with potatoes between the “Old” and “New” worlds was a violent one, the context being a village raid. Encountered in violence and re-planted an ocean away in ignorance. During the early days of their presence on the Iberian peninsula potatoes were used as decorative plants. At one point, the flowering body of what we today most commonly see as a foodstuff, lined all of the riverbank of el Guadalquivir not for nourishment but for vibes. The absurdity of it all made me laugh then, it still does. It is one of my favorite potato-related memories and, until this past June it was my number one potato-related memory. Then, I ate the salt roasted sweet potatoes from Chef Leah Branch’s kitchen.
This dish tenderly kissed my brain and would not let my neurons go. Peanut curry, red rice, tahini, and fried greens were woven throughout the dish alongside the potatoes. An arrangement which made for a visually engaging dish that delivered on its promise of being texturally engaging in mouthfeel as well. I do not know what kind of salt was used, but it was something special because I am still wondering about it. The salt actually opened the dish in just the right way, it acted like a sensorial invitation to the rest of the plate and accented the potatoes just right. The SWEET POTATOES! The.Sweet.Potatoes. They were hearty, smoky, tender and beautiful. The flavor profile of the sweet potatoes popped on the tongue in combination with the spice of the peanut curry. It was all a joy to eat.
For dessert, Carrington enjoyed the Cheerwine cake while I slowly drank a glass of Channing Daughters Vervino’s Vermouth. It was my first time trying this Vermouth and I felt like a nymph in Pan’s garden of delights with every sip. The memory of fragrant honeysuckle notes in that drink will forever do to me what Proust’s madeleine did to him.
The Descent
My first visit to Richmond this summer was a bright spot sandwiched between an otherwise challenging time. Earlier, as May became June, my days increasingly took on a haziness and heaviness that I had not experienced in almost three years.
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