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  • The Paris Review

    Cooking with Zora Neale Hurston

    by Valerie Stivers Nov 10, 2017 5 minutes

    This is the fourth installment of Valerie Stiver’s Eat Your Words column. 

    In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel on black Southern womanhood by Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), people eat soda crackers with cheese, drink lemonade or sweeten their water with ribbon cane syrup, and serve whole barbecued hogs with sweet-potato pone. A man on a spree offers fried chicken and macaroni for all, and Janie, the heroine, leaves her first husband after frying him a hoe-cake to go with his coffee.

    “She dumped the dough on the skillet and smoothed it over with her hand. She wasn’t even angry,” Hurston writes.

    Instead of a loveless marriage, Janie insists on having the sweet things in life. Her second husband buys her “the best things the butcher had, like apples and a glass lantern full of candies.” And her great love is a handsome man 15 years her junior whom everyone calls

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