Creative cooking and living in the fertile Salinas Valley, east of Eden, along California's central coast
“He was not alone in his preoccupation with the future. The whole valley, the whole west was that way. It was a time when the past had lost its sweetness and its sap.”
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
I’ve baked my way to November! Finally, it’s almost election day here in the United States. It has been a wild ride. Soon we’ll be obsessed with the outcome. I’m fairly certain I’ll just keep baking as my personal stress relief.
“You can scrape the carrots, her mother said. Is that water hot? Just coming to a boil.”
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
We put in a small vegetable garden this spring. Yes, in the midst of this monumental California drought, a little garden grew. What an adventure, to see what flourishes and what languishes. My sporadic care and watering was part of spring and summer and now fall. Tomatoes are always dismal, but I never give up trying. The surprise was the mammoth sunflowers and these carrots! I was cutting down the rest of the sunflowers and inadvertently uncovered a huge carrot, and then pulled up lots more. I had no idea they were doing so well or why the carrots grew and beets and potatoes were failures. We had this recipe to celebrate my little harvest.
“You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be–more rich and meaningful the further back it was.”
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
East of Eden is a work of fiction that also includes real Steinbeck family history. Which makes for a very fascinating story. While John’s family history in the Salinas Valley unfolds the biblical parable of Cain and Abel is told with (mostly) fictional characters. John Steinbeck includes his mother’s, Olive Hamilton, family members as main characters in the novel. Olive’s parents, Samuel and Liza Hamilton are featured prominently in the novel. He wrote very little about his father’s family, the Steinbeck’s. I visited the San Benito County Historical Society to learn more of John Steinbeck’s paternal family history.