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The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with food writer Jolene Handy

Mar 31, 2025

Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond.

Jolene Handy

writes about food, memory and history in her newsletter,

Time Travel Kitchen

, which was inspired by cooking in a 100-year-old kitchen in her former apartment. A native New Yorker, she relocated to Chicago in 2016. Jolene graduated with a BA in English from St. Michael’s College, an MA from New York University in Applied Psychology, and a Culinary Diploma from Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School, (now Institute of Culinary Education). She has worked in both the food service and non-profit sectors, including as a baker at Sarabeth’s Restaurant in Manhattan and as Sous-Chef in the Executive Dining Room of GourmetMagazine.

What are you reading now?

I’ve got three books going at the moment and the first is The Long Winded Lady, by Maeve Brennan. The book is a compilation of all of her “Talk of the Town” columns for The New Yorker in the Fifties and Sixties. “The Long Winded Lady” was her pen name and it’s such a kick to hear her talking about places like Schrafft’s and Longchamps, places I remember visiting as a kid. Maeve stopped writing in the 1970s and as her biographer Angela Bourke has written in Homesick at the New Yorker, “her rise to genius was as extreme as her collapse.” The Long Winded Lady reminds us of her genius.

The second book is Praisesong For The Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks, by author and Kentucky’s poet laureate (2021-2023), Crystal Wilkinson. Ms. Wilkinson is a fantastic writer and the book explores the legacy of Black Appalachians through storytelling and cooking. One of my favorite chapters is “Birthdays Must Be Celebrated.” The entire book is powerful and poignant and stays with you. The food, photographs and recipes are beautiful and are woven into the storytelling.

And, finally, Caroline Eden’s Cold Kitchen is a memoir where her kitchen in Edinburgh acts as a portal to places she’s travelled, people she’s met and food she’s eaten along the way from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Eden has a way of making you feel like you’re with her in her basement kitchen with her beagle, Darwin, sitting with you – and the next thing you know you are on the road with her. She’s an amazing writer and I’m going to try the recipe for blueberry jam first.

What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

It was the other way around! I was snooping around my mother’s top dresser drawer where she kept her jewelry – I liked to try on her clip-on earrings – and there it was – a copy of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. I was eleven or twelve. I skulked out of the room with a new appreciation of my mother.

The only “racy” thing in the pages of my book collection at the time was Nancy Drew’s blue roadster. I also loved Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time – Meg Murry was a fantastic character and hero. And I’ve had a lifelong obsession with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner is a great book if you want to fall down all the rabbit holes in the book with explanations from a Carroll scholar.

What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I was born in Brooklyn and I think you are automatically a Walt Whitman fan at birth, it’s part of the deal. Leaves of Grass is a collection I go back to again and again, particularly the poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. It’s such a connection to all of our fellow travellers, past, present and future. I am especially moved and comforted by these lines during dark times:

“I am with you, men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d…”

Another book I found comfort in literally has the word “comfort” in the title. I took the brilliant writer

emily nunn

’s memoir The Comfort Food Diaries with me to the hospital when I had surgery a couple of years ago. It is touching, funny, candid, heartbreaking and hopeful. It’s also got great recipes and Emily’s signature humor comes through – for example, don’t miss making her “Ezra Pound Cake.” It’s delicious and the book is wonderful.

And when I want to enjoy the romantic fantasy that I’m in Paris in the 1920s, I always return to A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. His descriptions of cold white wine and oysters that taste of the sea and all the other food in the book tell me he would’ve been a great food writer.

What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

It’s actually not any article of clothing, but two accessories: I’ve worn red lipstick and gold hoop earrings for decades, no matter what I’m wearing. As far as clothes, I do wear black trousers a lot.

What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

“Right, not rushed.” This wisdom comes from literary agent Sally Ekus who wrote in her newsletter recently what an important document a book proposal is in not only securing an agent, but getting the best book deal. It’s also good advice for a lot of other things.

Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

My rescue cat, Tillie! I got her from the wonderful Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago. She was six when I got her, she’s 14 now and a real pal. Sweetest disposition, very affectionate, but also can be sassy. She sits in a chair right next to me when I’m writing and watches me – absolutely love her.

What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Moving to Chicago. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would work out when I came here (my brother and sister-in-law were opening a restaurant) but after 40 years in Manhattan I needed a change. And it’s here in Chicago that I started writing, inspired by a 100-year-old kitchen – The Time Travel Kitchen– in one of the apartments I lived in.

When I moved from that apartment, I asked the landlords if I could remove the built in century-old cutting board and take it with me. They agreed and now it sits on my counter, a reminder and inspiration for my newsletter. Just touching it, where 100-years of other hands worked, connects me immediately to the past and, as with Caroline Eden’s book, acts as a portal to food and memory.

Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

The shower is more of a “think tank” and I get a workout baking and cooking in my kitchen – often with music – but it’s more of a “bop while I bake.” I grew up on Long Island near the ocean and I love to swim. There’s a pool I go to a couple of times a week, and I also do some morning yoga “sun salutations.” And Chicago, like New York, is a great walking city. Besides walking on the streets, there are paths all along gorgeous Lake Michigan, and in the summer I can go to the beach just a few blocks from my apartment.

What are your hopes for yourself?

I turned 70 last year and do not take for granted what a gift it is to get to be this age. I’ve thought about how I want to live, what I want to do, how I want to be in the world at this later stage of life.

Toni Morrison, whose work I revere, answered a question posed by Juan Williams at The Connecticut Forum she was part of with Frank McCourt in May of 2001. The question to her and to Frank was “How do you survive whole in a world where we are all victims of something?” You can find the entire interview online, and it’s really worth looking for.

At the end of her extraordinary answer, Toni Morrison said this:

“We are already born. We are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in-between.”

So that’s my hope for myself. To continue to do something interesting that I respect.

I’ve come to writing late in the game, but I’m still in the game and want to continue to be. And as Frank McCourt, another writer I admire said about himself and writing: “I’m a late bloomer.” Angela’s Ashes was published when he was 65 years old, and that inspires me.

What’s a kindness that changed your life?

There are so many kindnesses that have accumulated over the course of my life and brought me to where I am now, I truly couldn’t narrow it to one event. I’m lucky to have a supportive family and a handful of lifelong friends that always have my back.