OF THE MANY TYPES OF WRITERS there are, among my favorite groups of people to talk to is food writers. They are also among my favorite to read. And how to be a food writer is a topic that I also love to discuss, since every time I’ve interviewed one, while I get differing answers to their backgrounds and influences, their core advice remains constant: Do not imitate anyone else. David Leite imitates no one. Let’s give him an exit interview as he moves on from being my QWERTY co-host, and see what other advice he has on how to be a food writer.
Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).
Marion: Today, my guest is my dear friend David Leite. He’s the author of the fine memoir, Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love and Manic Depression and the author of the award winning The New Portuguese Table. He’s the founder and talent behind the great website, Leite’s Culinaria. He’s a podcaster, one of my favorite YouTube personalities for his videos, frequently co-starring with his partner of many years who all of us know as The One. He’s currently working on a novel, and he was until recently my cohost on QWERTY but he needed to move on to make room for his other obligations. So, we are considering this his exit interview.
Hi, David.
David: Hi, Marion. Do you know in my whole life I’ve never had an exit interview? This is the first one.
Marion: You mean you always left before…
David: I always quit, yeah. I was crazy, so I quit.
Marion: Well, that’s not what happened here.
David: No.
Marion: You got, wow, new offers and I’m so thrilled. But I will always be grateful to you for inviting me to start this podcast and I will shoulder on.
David: You will.
Marion: I had to stop and think and realized I first read you in Martha Stewart.
David: Yes.
Marion: But I’ve also –I made a list — I’ve also read you in Parade, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, of course, Bon Appétit, Saveur … I always get that wrong, Saveur … Food and Wine, Gourmet, Food Arts, Men’s Health, it just goes on and on. You’ve been in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, I think, the Washington Post. It’s wonderful. So I think of you as having this astonishing range, but let’s talk about the practical aspects of writing first.
David: Sure.
Marion: So how much time do you spend in the kitchen, how much time do you spend writing, and how much time do you spend lying on the couch wishing you had gone to law school?
David: They change and they vary daily. When I’m working on getting a recipe to be put on the site or some other, like the Washington Post was the most recent publication that I wrote for, I’m in the kitchen a lot more. Then when that recipe or the food that I’m working with, I’ve really gotten under control, then it’s going to the keyboard and of course writing the recipe up, making sure it works, getting it tested by the recipe testers on my website and then digging into the article or the post or the opinion piece, whatever it is that goes along with the recipe. So it does vary. Lying on the couch, wondered if I should’ve been a lawyer, happens probably weekly.
Marion: Well then you’re doing really well as far as I’m concerned.
David: I think so.
Marion: Yeah, it’s when you wonder if you should be doing something else that we get a little bit-
David: You don’t think you’re doing a good job.
Marion: Yeah.
David: That’s what I think. Because that’s when it gets hard, you know? That’s when you want to walk away from it, and when it’s getting hard is when you know you’re onto something.
Marion: I agree. I agree. If this was easy, every brain surgeon would do it. You know what I’m saying?
David: Do not trust people who say, “I love to write. Oh, I write all day long. I have a wonderful time just writing. I write, write, write, write.” And I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s not me.” If I get 500 words a day that I like, it’s a good day.
Marion: It’s a good day. And that’s a terrific reminder and I think of all of us writers as being part of a system. In other words, the big ones, Emily Dickinson and Chaucer and Shakespeare are the rivers and we’re tributaries. We trickle in, we contribute, we absolutely are all contributing to this great big, very nourishing water works of writing. But when I think about food writers in particular, I think of a sort of a long taxonomy that I have. I can remember my very first food writer I ever read was Calvin Trillin, reading American Fried as part of a journalism course in college. I literally went nuts after that and dove into … and I remember the order: A. J. Liebling, MFK Fisher, Nora Ephron, and Madhur Jaffrey later on. I mean there’s sort of this one led to the other, maybe one mentioned the other … but I wonder, who are yours? What’s your sort of skimming stones across the top of the water of food writers or who were your first and then subsequent influences?
David: Well, some of the first, Calvin Trillin was one of the earliest for me. Jeffrey Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything was one of his books.
Marion: I love that book.
David: I think he is such a magnificently eloquent and funny and arch writer and I met him several times. He is very meticulous with what he does. He is very careful and I appreciate that. MFK Fisher, of course I’ve read. Laurie Colwin, I’ve read. You know, although he’s not a food writer, he’s done some food writing, is David Sedaris. And so of course I just, I cackle when I read David Sedaris. There were so many others that through time, I pick up and then I drop it and I pick up again. Ruth Reichl, some of her earlier memoirs I thought were wonderful. Tender at the Bone, I think, is really a beautiful, beautiful book.
Marion: It is.
David: Those are some of the major influences or the major people that I turned to early on in my career.
Marion: God, you reminded me, Jeffrey Steingarten. There’s a tiny chapter in there about getting on a plane at LaGuardia in New York with a bowl of bread starter in his lap. He flies to Albany and then drives to, I believe it’s Saratoga Springs, to have his bread starter tested by this breadmaker in upstate New York. Now, I haven’t read that chapter in 25 years, right?
David: Yeah, but it stays with you.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And Laurie Colwin. Yes, everything she ever wrote. She died so tragically young. What a terrible loss.
David: Yes, absolutely.
Marion: So you jumped on the online world, despite being a writer and knowing what you wanted to do, you jumped on the online world the minute it seems like the internet was available to be populated and you made a space for yourself. And I love that. I love that you have this long history and it shows in your website, it’s just so textured and layered. Do you think there’s still space online for today’s emerging writers, food writers specifically?
David: That’s a great question. I think there is, but what’s happening, the thing that I see which I find very sad, is everyone’s mimicking everyone else. Even photographic styles are looking like everyone else’s and the writing style is like everyone else’s. Everyone has become, forgive me, a lot of these writers I know online are becoming Google’s bitch, if you will, because what happens is Google will want all these different things with the algorithms so everyone jumps on these bandwagons. I’ve done it too to a degree, but I think some of the things that Google requires, like they want to have, people are peppering their articles or their posts with all these questions, these headers that have questions in them. Or they’re repeating all these SEOs over and over again that it’s basically destroying great food writing. I find that sad. So is there space-
Marion: I agree with you.
David: Right? Isn’t it sad?
Marion: Yes, and it’s true for writing … it’s true in writing prompts, it’s true in anything that has to do with learning how to do something. They’re just, I think the SEO bitch or Google’s bitch is a really great phrase.
David: And I think-
Marion: “I’m not Google’s bitch” would make a nice t-shirt.
David: Oh, that would be a great one. I think there’s a place if a writer is first of all talented and dedicated to his or her craft, has something to say and says it their way, in time they will find an audience. I really do believe that. Now, it will take longer now because there’s so much static out there and there are so many other people doing it, but you cannot replace voice and you cannot replace individuality. If people stop mimicking or if a writer stops mimicking others, I think he or she will find their own place. They’ll find their own tribe, if you will.
Marion: Well, I agree with you. It’s about brand. I don’t know if you’ve read your Wikipedia listing, but it refers to you as a humorist, which made me incredibly happy. It goes on to say that you “bring a skewed and funny sensibility to the world of food.”
David: That’s nice.
Marion: I would’ve preferred it if they’d said “skewered” because I think it would be more on brand. But you just made a very good point. How much of your brand is humor, do you think?
David: I think it’s a lot of it. Because for me, humor is … our mission is to educate … to entertain and educate and in that order, for the website. It really is important for me to entertain because I think when you are entertaining, messages get across, information gets across. You have a little bit more wiggle room and there’s more of a buffer. If you’re talking about more difficult subjects, you can get awake. When I talked about mental illness and bipolar, by using humor, it made people more willing to read it. It wasn’t this heavy piece and the book isn’t, you know, there’s a lot of … as you know, you helped me with it as my coach, that there’s a lot of very heavy parts to the book but there’s a lot of humor and it balances it. So I feel, for me, humor is something that’s just so innate in my personality, as it is in yours, that I would be remiss if I didn’t have it there. If there wasn’t this skewed sensibility, the Wikipedia thing, if there isn’t that kind of like weird perspective on things, it wouldn’t be me.
One of the greatest compliments I hear from writers … excuse me, from readers and also some friends of mine say, “When I read your work, I can hear you talking.” That is something that I work very, very, very hard on. It’s not just writing conversationally, but it’s writing rhythmically, it’s writing syntactically, it’s writing with longer or shorter sentences. Where do you use rhyming or any kind of clanging or alliteration? Those kinds of things are important to me because I want to be able to get something across and I want to slip it in, sort of like stealthily slipping maybe a message about something.
Marion: I love that. When I look at your career and I think about the milestones and there are milestones here, and I know you don’t read your own reviews. I know you didn’t even use to listen to our episodes-
David: Our podcast, no. I’ve not listened to one of them.
Marion: You’re too funny. So I know you didn’t read your Wikipedia entry because I just know you, but I figured I had to set that question up. But I also know how hard it’s been for you to get to the work because we’ve talked about it. Your first, your book, The New Portuguese Table won the 2010 First Book/Julia Child Award and it’s an amazing achievement. But in your case, it’s an even bigger achievement than most people know because there’s a remarkable story about how you came into yourself when you came home to your cooking.
It’s one that you’ve chronicled in several places but … so let’s talk about how you do that. You’ve got this amazing backstory, first of all. You know, in just a few sentences, the background that I remember so well is you went on this trip to Portugal where you literally go to the home of your ancestors. You ask to … you knock on the door, they open the door and they realize who you are. One of the many things you ask is to be shown a wall oven that your family had told you about. And until that time, you had kind of been unhappy and searching and you had tried acting, you had tried waiting tables, you had worked in marketing and more, and then this. But what I find so wonderful about this story is that it’s so about how you got really to your true home. It’s like Dorothy and her red shoes. You know, you had it on you all the time, but you’ve got to this cooking person. But what’s fascinating to me also is I’ve read it from different points of view in various places. So how did you do that? What’s the secret to having this one totemic moment in life and using it? You used it in your memoir, a little bit. You used it elsewhere. How do you do that? How do you have one story that you can use in several different ways?
David: Wow. Another great question. This is why you are so much better at this podcast than I ever was. These are great questions, really. I think part of it is for me, I didn’t know it was totemic when I was experiencing it. I just know that I was feeling. It was in the years after that, of processing it and then witnessing behavioral change and not really understanding where it was coming from. For instance, what I mean by by behavioral change was I always eschewed Portuguese cooking. As you know, growing up, I always wanted to be the blonde hair, blue eyed adopted child of Darrin and Samantha Stephens on Bewitched.
Marion: You wanted to be the son that the Bewitched couple had.
David: Exactly. I noticed that after this trip, because my grandmother had passed on and she was a very important person in my life, my mother’s mother. I noticed that after that trip, I started cooking Portuguese cuisine. I started cooking a lot more Portuguese food. I was more interested in traveling to Portugal. I had never traveled. I traveled once before that trip, but no other time. I wrote a piece in Bon Appétit about Lisbon. Then other places I wrote about too. Some of those did precede that, but it was noticing what was appearing on the table. I thought, what loosened inside? What was that thing that loosened in me that I now want to embrace my heritage? And it was after that trip. I think that the ultimate action that I took was I became a Portuguese citizen. I have dual citizenship. I wanted to embrace the country.
David: It connected me that time going to my father’s house where he grew up and seeing that wall oven that I’d heard about so much of all the food that came out of there, connected me to history and connected me to … it related me to my relatives.
Marion: Yes, it did.
David: I always wanted to be above and better than and different from and aside of my Portuguese heritage and my Portuguese relatives. Then I realized there was such nobility in these people and there was such courage in doing what they did, of leaving this country with nothing, because they were very poor, and starting a new as adults.
Marion: And I would argue that because it’s so totemic and you didn’t really know it at the time, it allows for five or six different pieces to be written from that moment-
David: I agree.
Marion: … but that each argue something else, that each point out a different important life awareness moment, literally argues something else. Because that’s, I think people think once you, you tell it once you go, “Oh, but I don’t want to use it up in an essay because I want to save it for my book.” No, argue it one way in the essay, and I’m not saying to change your mind like sometimes before it or against it, that’s not it. But I mean present it to us as a story about one thing in one publication and a story about something else in another. That story has so many refracting sides. It’s like a crystal and it’s so beautiful.
David: It’s interesting you say that because I think a totemic moment, which just came to me, it’s like a marriage. A marriage over the course of many years becomes many different things.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David: With this totemic moment, when I was in the moment, it meant one thing, connecting to what I had heard. And then later became about heritage and roots, and then later became something else, and then later it became something even more. If something is totemic, it is so layered, like a marriage, that it means many different things at many different times. That’s why we can return to it again and again. Some of the greatest writers have always returned. William Kennedy, we talked about recently when we had that podcast with him, we returned to Albany over and over again.
Marion: Over and over.
David: Who would think Albany would have nine books in it, you know? But it does with William.
Marion: Absolutely.
David: Because it means so much to him.
Marion: Yes. Yes. I love that. I think that’s so interesting and I, think you’re such a good example of that, that wonderful story not only allowed for the life that you lead now, but has allowed for several different takes on it. I try to make that point with people and I hope people will go read you widely and see what I mean by that.
Speaking of reading widely, you and I interviewed Zoë François a couple of months ago.
David: We did.
Marion: That would be Zoë François who’s the author of the books that total … what did she say? Gee, it slips my mind … 800,000 copies and prints?
David: Close to, yeah. Probably a million now, the way it sells.
Marion: Yeah, not that we hate her. I mean, we tried but it’s impossible. She’s thoroughly gorgeous inside and out. She’s generous,, she’s delightful and damn her five-minute bread really works.
David: It does.
Marion: So let’s just talk about those food writing superstars. We touched a little bit on that online for the newbies, but what’s the recipe for that kind of superstardom? I mean you and I know in common several of these people. What makes somebody rise to the top like that? Do you think it is the brand? I mean we talked about humor, we talked about brand, but what do you think it is that keeps Zoë … I mean, obviously she had a brilliant idea in the five-minute bread which she told us all about, but how about the other ones that David Lebovitz is the whomever? What is it?
David: Well, you look at Zoë François, you look at Madhur Jaffrey, you look at David Lebovitz, you look at Ruth Reichl, you look at … I’m just trying to think some other … just tons of them who had been around for a very long time. I think what keeps them there is they’re genuine. They are who they are to their audience. They’re not trying to, again, mimic other people. Zoë is Zoë. There’s a bubbliness, a vivaciousness, there’s a great lust for life, and finds so much humor in what she does. She just really enjoys life. When we shot a video with her, you can see that. With David, there’s a deep, deep, deep curiosity about France and he also … and Paris and he also holds Paris at a bit of a distance. He finds, he sees the humor in some of the absurdity that we all experience wherever we live.
David: And Madhur Jaffrey of course, Jaffrey, just, there’s such a deep well of knowledge there and she brings so much understanding and so much class and so much culture to what she does. But they’re all just continuing to do what they do. They don’t wobble. They’re not weebles that wobble and fall over. They’re not that. They stay the line. They toe the line through thick and thin. There are times … look, poor Zoë, think about the whole keto thing that’s going on. People don’t want to have carbs, they don’t want to have sugar. Everything she does is desserts, yet she still is very popular because of who she is.
Marion: She told us all about her relationship to sugar in the first questions that she …
David: Yes, she did.
Marion: And she’s not wavering from that. So just to take this one step further as we, because we’ve talked now about giving really good advice to young writers. Your website, Leite’s Culinaria, it’s just a smorgasbord of language and cooking advice and recipes. And I love the column, Never Cook Naked, by the way, which I sent to my husband recently when I watched him putting soap in our cast iron pan for the 400th time.
David: Ayayay.
Marion: Is what I said to him. Enough with the soap already.
David: Exactly.
Marion: But in other words, you know, with pages like Never Cook Naked, this is not your mother’s cooking site. So how and with what sense of oneself should a young cooking writer approach getting to know herself? I mean, how do we best interpret ourselves and give the audience that sense. Zoë does that, she’s bubbly. Even her curls are bubbly.
David: I know.
Marion: You’re funny, right? But are we going to try stuff and fail? You’ve said don’t imitate. Okay, we’ve got that. But how do we say to ourselves as cooking writers, who am I in this world?
David: Well, you’ve raised a very good point. Yes, don’t imitate. Meaning don’t simply start going out there and trying to be me or trying to be Dorie Greenspan or try to be Zoë. But there’s nothing wrong in your exploration to do that. I used to do this exercise where I would take the first paragraph of Jeffrey Steingarten’s, any of his articles, then I would take one of A. J. Liebling. I would take one of all these different food writers and I would read it and then I would immediately start writing, trying to write in their voice, whatever it was that came to me. Just so I could start going, okay, what really works for me? Where do I like going? And you know, MFK Fisher’s an incredible writer. I can’t do that stuff.
Marion: No.
David: That’s not what I do.
Marion: No.
David: I find myself being very drawn to Jeffrey, being very drawn to David Sedaris. That’s the area that I found myself going toward. I realized, you know, humor is such a part of who I am and I like to do that. So I think there’s nothing wrong in experimenting and imitating others to really get yourself. Even, you think about the old way, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of years ago how a young painter would learn to paint. They would work with a master. They would apprentice with a master, they would do a lot of the, sometimes the initial work and the master would come along and then take it from there. But they were learning to do it in that style. Even an art school, when I was an an art major, we would sometimes copy masters. Not painting, I didn’t do painting fine arts, but I was doing communication, but we would sometimes just kind of loosen our muscles that way just to kind of get into the kind of the artistic history of it. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, but then once you find where the weight of your talent lies, that’s where you start putting roots down.
Marion: Find where the weight of your talent lies. That’s a lovely phrase. I love the word weight in there, and you can feel it. I wrote a piece on my blog not long ago about voice, about finding your own voice.
David: Yes. Very good piece.
Marion: And after, a very smart friend of mine said the following thing to me, “We’re only dishonest when we’re afraid.”
David: Yes.
Marion: I just felt my whole being settle down when she said that to me and I thought, that’s the lesson about voice, isn’t it?
David: It is.
Marion: It’s not being … I mean, we’re not dishonest in the bad sense when we imitate, when we walk on the coattails, when we try to sing the song the way it’s sung by William Kennedy. We’re not dishonest. We’re trying to get to a gracious place. But at some point, you’ll feel the weight of your own self and that’s the way to follow. That’s just a very good thing to contemplate, I think, as we go forward.
Marion: So as you go forward, you’re changing. You’re doing new things. I know because talking to you, I hear about these and I watched these videos you’re making. So can you just tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now that’s new so people can follow along and understand this ever expanding platform that is David Leite?
David: Sure. Well, I am working on a novel, but I think I’m not a normal … or maybe I am a normal person, a writer. It comes and it goes, it ebbs and it flows. I hate it and I put it away then I bring it back out again. You know, when you have a memoir, you can hate the process of putting it down, but you know the plot. It’s kind of hard not to know the plot of your own memoir. But with a novel, you know, sometimes I go, “I know exactly what it’s going to be,” and then I go, “God no, I don’t.” That’s the plot to, you know, Oedipus or something. Then you kind of go, “Okay, I’m putting it away.” So I am going back and forth on that.
David: Moving into 2020, we’re going to be doing a lot more video on the site because I think that, well first of all it’s one of those Google bitches things that we need to do.
Marion: Yeah.
David: But people have been asking for it a lot more. People have always taken to the one in myself in words and in stories. I was very delighted by that. I didn’t think it was the right thing to do at first. I thought maybe they’d have a problem with, you know, me talking about my partner who’s a man. And no one did. Then when we started doing videos, I was very surprised at how much it hit. So we’re doing more videos.
I am, I’ve been threatening this now for I don’t know how many years, I’m going to resurrect our podcast Talking With My Mouthful with my editor-in-chief, Renee Schettler Rossi. There is ideas being tossed around of possibly doing a cookbook. So that’s kind of that. And also there’s, you know, there is some family issues with my dad and I am taking some time to really spend time with my family …
Marion: Good.
David: … and to do some, I guess you could say wrapping up with my dad because my dad is very, very ill. There’s a lot of emotion that has to be dealt with and there’s a lot of, there’s going to be stories I’m sure that will come out of that and I’m sure with some writing. Because you really always taught me, you never really know what you feel until you’re right about it.
Marion: Well and that and take notes. Just take notes.
David: Yeah. And so I wanted to be able to kind of move in certain directions but also protect a part of my life in a way that I can take care of myself and be with my parents. That’s important to me. So that’s really like the next year for myself.
Marion: Well, good. Well, and I appreciate that and we wish you just the very best with it because everything you teach us enriches our lives. So before I let you go, I want to bring up probably the most important question I can ask you and that’s like, let’s talk roasted applesauce please before we leave. Because, damn. And I never thought to roast the apples, she said between clenched teeth, until I read your recent post about doing so. So let’s just give the readers, just please give us a visual to exit with. What is food inspiration look like? Like, do you suddenly wake up at 4:00 AM and shout, “Candied ginger in the roasted apples!” and run around in your pajamas? Like, where did this come from?
David: You know, I’m going to tell you, I am never cleaner than when I’m trying to come up with ideas. I get them in the shower.
Marion: Oy. There’s a visual.
David: Right?
Marion: Okay, now we have that visual. I was hoping for sort of running around in your pajamas, but okay, so you … do you run out of the shower, do you stay in the shower? How does this work for you?
David: I stay in the shower and as a matter of fact, my old assistant, Annie, when she was working with me gave me as a gift a pad that you would put, it was waterproof pad that you put in your shower stall so you could take notes.
Marion: Fabulous. Crazy, but fabulous.
David: I really do get ideas when I take a bath or I’m taking a shower or you know, also with you, you say you’ll walk the dog. It’s when your mind is not trying to come up with an idea that something crowds in. There’s something I find when your mind, when you relax the muscle of your mind, you’re making space for things to come in. because I do believe that the mind is always trying to find something. There’s always this .. you know, nature abhors a vacuum. So it’s when I’m not trying to come up with an idea, not trying to figure something out is when I figure it out.
Marion: Well, this is why I have a notebook tied to the gearshift in my car because for me-
David: Which cranks me up.
Marion: … it’s terrible, but when I’m driving, when I’m fully engaged in not killing myself or others, of course I start writing ledes in my head.
David: Right.
Marion: You know, I think that’s exactly what does happen. The same thing happens when I have my sharpest knife and I’m chopping vegetables. Sometimes I’ll actually say to my students, just go down, chop some vegetables with the most dangerous knife in your drawer and trust me, that lead will come to you. So I just love that idea that we can have this picture of you in the shower writing candied ginger and roasted applesauce. Yeah.
David: There you go.
Marion: That’s where you get it. Well …
David: There you go.
Marion: Thank you. I could talk to you all day and on occasion-
David: As I could.
Marion: … I have been lucky enough to do so but it’s time you went back to work, young man, and I went back to work and stopped all this frivolity but not before I say thank you.
David: Thank you, my friend, also. And I have a message for your listeners. I just want to let you know, all of you, you are in extraordinarily good hands. I’ve known Marion for several years now. She was so instrumental in helping me get my book out. She challenged me, she helped me, she educated me, and she became a friend and she will to all of you. Anyone who’s interested in writing, you’re in the right place with the right person.
Marion: Thank you. David Leite can be found online at Leite’s Culinaria and in the bookstore with his new Portuguese cooking and his fabulous memoir, Notes on a Banana. Get those wherever books are sold. Want more? I run full transcripts of all episodes on my website, which is where you can also learn about the many online classes I teach on how to write memoir. Meet me there.
And don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to us wherever you go. Until next time, thank you for listening. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey, and this podcast was produced and recorded by Overit Studios. Reach them at overitstudios dot com.
