And foisting my own taste onto others: One editor now owns three ceramic devilled eggs; another, a chicken pocketbook. My next-door neighbor complained that the pottery peanuts I gave her broke her husband’s tooth. For my agent—who, through 13 years of literary lunches, has always ordered French Fries—I picked a birthday bouquet of fake pommes frites, which came wrapped in a real fast-food paper cone.
Almost every visitor to my kitchen asks the same question: Does anyone else collect this stuff? Not that I know, I answer. For years, I nourished a modest pride in my uniqueness—until a dinner with my magician cousin. The performer and sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay was seated nearby. “What do you collect?” he asked. A question so startling, so original, so utterly the opposite of the usual Cambridge where-did-you-go-to-school, that my heart swelled. “Fake food,” I replied. “Oh,” he said. “You need to take a trip to Baltimore—John Waters collects the same stuff.” The deflation was only momentary; then I became intrigued. Waters declined to give an interview, but a little googling confirmed that he does indeed have quite a stockpile (what I wouldn’t give to know where he got that incredible-looking cream puff).
Though nothing, collection-wise, equals that trip to Japan, my sources are many: my neighborhood trinket emporium, whose owners call me up when anything faddishly foodish appears in their inventory; flea markets; catalogues; white elephant sales; Google. And yet I couldn’t find the one thing I wanted this year: a chicken potpie. The family in my new novel runs a chicken potpie business (Pollock’s Potpies). What better way, I decided, to celebrate finishing a novel than by buying a faux chicken-potpie homage? And what would be easier to find, I assumed, than this iconic American dish.
I was wrong. I checked all my sources. I went online. No luck. I spent hours. How ironic that something served in every diner in America, stuffed into every frozen food case in every national grocery chain, should be as rare as—forgive me—hen’s teeth among my own faux-iana. And what did it mean for the success of my book that I couldn’t find the one object necessary to give the novel closure?
I told my husband; I told my friends; they were condescendingly kind, but I could sense that my problem didn’t amount to a hill of chicken nuggets in their worldview. But the irony, I repeated. Me with all this stuff and the only thing missing is a simple potpie.
I telephoned my sister in New York. She wasn’t sympathetic, either. She didn’t volunteer to scour the Bowery or Chinatown—even when I reminded her that I had handed over a black silk top she coveted, one I never got to wear. You have no room for a chicken potpie, she scolded. Ignoring my pleas, she changed the subject to how to cook our mother’s honest-to-goodness butternut squash casserole.
A week later, she called back. For your birthday, she announced, you have a choice: a sororal trip to a spa in Mexico…
I waited.
…Or a chicken potpie custom-made by a set-designer friend.
Though my decision stunned and horrified my sister, I have no regrets. The chicken potpie, four times the size of the real thing, is the jewel in the crown of my collection. Just where the crust is sliced away, you can see, spilling out among the carrots and peas lumped together in their totally realistic gravy, a surprise ingredient: miniature copies of my book. The pie is too big for the kitchen table, but it looks swell taking up half the huge planked refectory in the dining room. And what’s more, there’s still room for something new, serendipitous, and eternally delicious.
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