You're reading the web version of Colvett Underground, an email newsletter by Mags Colvett. Subscribe free to get future editions in your inbox.

I have seen the face of strawberry god

Your strawberry scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could

I don’t really bake or cook because a person can only have so many interests on a weeknight, but if I have to bring a homemade good to something, my one trick is having a pizzelle iron. Pizzelles are a signature Colvett family thing to bring to things. (In correct Italian, the plural would be 🤌 peet-ZELL-eh 🤌, but they came to me from the old world via west Texas, so here they’re “pizzelles,” like “pizzle sticks”.) They’re great because they’re just showy enough but simple to make — put on a podcast, dollop a little batter into the iron, keep going until the batter runs out — and forgiving of baking errors, since a batch is one or two cookies apiece and you can feel out adjustments on the fly. If you want to feel like a master 🤌 pasticciere 🤌, you can mold them into little cannoli tube shapes while they’re warm, but you can also just lay ’em flat and let ’em cool for a satisfactory effort.

Still, my roommates and I are hosting a Halloween party this weekend, and as the least homey roommate by far, I wondered if I should try to step up my contribution to the snack table. I had a notion that the stained-glass-doily pattern on a typical pizzelle might take to being decorated like a spiderweb, so I searched up some pizzelle inspo to see if anyone had the same idea. This is how Pizzelle Shells with Strawberry Salsa came into my life.

Just seeing the photo, I thought: cute! Buttery Italian sugar cookies shaped like taco bowls, with I guess some kind of dessert-y chutney that kind of looks like salsa. Clever! Festive! Then I read down the ingredients list — store-bought vanilla pizzelle cookies, cool; diced fresh strawberries, got it; chopped cilantro, huh; minced jalapeno, huh; fresh lime juice, okay we’re back in plausible cookie filling territory but I have no idea what to expect next; olive oil, hmm; salt, sure, pepper, oh boy; diced avocado, I guess; feta, fine, sure, fine — and realized something much more experimental was going on. Then I got to the instructions, which have you steam store-bought, pre-baked cookies in a strainer over boiling water until pliable enough to be formed into taco shells, and knew I was in the presence of a visionary.

Pizzelle Shells with Strawberry Salsa are a presentation of the California Strawberry Commission, which “represents more than 400 strawberry growers, shippers, and processors, proudly working together to advance strawberry farming for the future of our land and people” according to its LinkedIn, where I tried and failed to figure out who is developing these recipes. There are a lot of them, with the most ambitious to be found under “Strawberry Snacks and Appetizers” and “Strawberry Main Dish,” and some are attributed to other bloggers and chefs but most just sprung up unaccountably on the domain as far as I can tell.

And look, I’m not a closed-minded eater. I don’t fear a sweet/savory combo. Good strawberries are tart and complex and not even that sweet on their own, with sugar content per 100 grams much closer to tomatoes than, say, apples. I’m open to pico de gallo de fresa being a revelation in the right season. If mango is a nice bright punch in a spring roll, strawberry in a spring roll isn’t such a leap. Balsamic and Parmesan Strawberry Bites are giving vintage cookbook illustration a little bit but nothing wrong with those flavors at a party together. Strawberry gazpacho sounds great, actually, and in a spirit of disclosure, my family also makes something called strawberry soup and serves it out of goblets on special occasions, and I could house a couple goblets right now but it definitely looks much worse on the table and much, much, much worse in pictures than most of these.

There are a few, like the strawberry salsa pizzelle tacos or Strawberries and Cheese Stuffed Jalapenos, that look a little more like a dare or an Ambien fugue project, and I should probably note here that strawlsa pizzacos were posted in June of 2020 and should maybe be looked at as less of a garden party suggestion and more like if the King’s Hand guy had day job access to the M&M's website CMS. But as the pages go on, it becomes less about any one entry and more about sheer scale of ambition.

Strawberries are a well-established, popular food, with many applications within the bounds of how people conventionally serve fruit. California Strawberries could have filled out a robust recipes section with aguas frescas and spiced jams and so on. But they aren’t satisfied with that. Like prophets and revolutionaries, they follow a star not yet seen by others, an inner or possibly divine voice that cuts through the chatter of the familiar to whisper, “Strawberry Shrimp Ceviche.”

I understand now: strawberries are breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They are seafood. They are bruschetta topping. They are grilled cheese. They are corn pasta salad. They are on a bagel, with radishes. It’s a little like a look into an alternative timeline where US ag policy favored massive overproduction of strawberries instead of corn and now strawberries and strawberry products are what’s in all our food, and a little like one of those elaborate outsider art universes crafted over a lifetime and then discovered in someone’s apartment when they die, like if Henry Darger had been obsessed with strawberries instead of little girls with penises.

I spent maybe an hour on California Strawberries and left changed, and inspired. Here are my contributions to the burgeoning experimental strawberry recipe movement.

Bone-In Strawberry Surprise
Coat pretzel sticks in white chocolate and let set. Meanwhile, wash fresh strawberries and slice off the tops about 1/3 of the way down the strawberry; save these. When coated pretzel sticks are ready, spear one into the center of each strawberry, almost but not quite all the way through, leaving a little pretzel exposed at the top. Reattach the top of each strawberry, using the exposed pretzel end to secure. Serve without informing or indicating to anyone what you did to the strawberries.

Pikes-On Strawberry Threat
Construct an imposing cake or gingerbread fortress. Using a fine-tipped knife, carve little anguished faces into several strawberries (do not wash juice or gore from strawberries). Stand the rest of your pretzel sticks up outside your fortress and display the strawberry heads by the gate. Oh no! No strawberry is safe!

Stranch
Who let raspberry vinaigrette have all the fun? This is strawberry soup with powdered ranch mix in it.

I thought I was on to something with my idea for deviled strawberries (split like deviled eggs, scoop a hollow in each half with a tiny melon baller, refill with creamy strawberry mix, finish with Tajin probably), but turned out they beat me to it.

Poem: “Your Other Heart” by Natalie Shapero

Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red:
            why do they say your other head

                         and not your other heart?

The snack cakes of Smut Wonderland
turn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,
nude in the folds of so much baby blue.

            To think, they called this lesser art.

I ate mostly orders then, and you—
you were thinking with your other heart [...]

→ Continue reading at Poetry Foundation

The Rest

• I saw Stop Making Sense b/w a David Byrne Q&A at the beautifully over-the-top old Jaffe Art Theater in the East Village a couple of weeks ago, and holy shit, what a perfect night. Crowd vibes absolutely ideal: big age range; generally polite but enthusiastic and down to party; hooted appreciatively for Tina Weymouth in the opening credits and hollered and cheered throughout like they were at a live show; formed a spontaneous dance floor partway through "Girlfriend Is Better" that lasted the rest of the movie, people just peeling off from various corners of the audience and hustling down those steep, steep stairs to join in. I did Rocky Horror at the same venue for a friend's birthday last summer and the vibes were actually pretty similar. If A24 is listening, I'm down to keep SMS in theaters as an interactive cult thing, and I bet a bunch of these genial freaks are, too. (Big Suit maybe not the best theatergoing apparel, but my brother did do a great one for Halloween a couple of years ago, and it'd be cool to get a few more wears.)

• I also meant to see Faye Webster in Philly this weekend, but due to unforeseen circumstances (venue had a strict bags policy and I couldn't find anywhere to stow my bag in time) I ended up having a picaresque night wandering around Philly and getting into situations instead. I sent a deeply personal letter from a public terrace while a bunch of people in white wigs went by. I joined some Free Palestine demonstrators (a smaller group breaking off from a larger protest, I think, but banners out and on the march). My train got delayed to like 2 a.m. so I tried to go to Killers of the Flower Moon since I had the time but got there like 10 minutes late and they wouldn't let me in and also said there were no tickets for any movies the whole rest of the night, which seemed kind of suspect since there were a bunch of upcoming showtimes and the place was extremely unbusy, but what was I going to do about it. I joined a random block party where someone was projecting the Phillies game on a building. I got locked in a CVS. I almost lost, but thankfully rescued, my favorite hat. I rebooked my return train at a normal hour and saw the garbage train (!!!!) on the subway home from Penn Station. The city of Philadelphia: I have never really had a normal time there.

• I've been thinking about something John Hodgman said at a reading after 9/11: “I have heard a lot recently about the role of writing, song, music, and painting in the tragic blank space in our souls that this event has left behind. Of course [...] if pig farmers had as much currency with NPR as literary novelists, we would be hearing just as much about the healing power of bacon.” Poets can get to talking like that about the healing power (or political efficacy) of poetry, and to tell you the truth, I find it a little distasteful sometimes — to me, it can come across like using tragedy as a news hook to argue for the relevance of your particular art form, and I don't know, man, maybe it's not the moment. Of course, it's complicated, since everything people do together — certainly including how we talk to one another, which certainly includes art — has to do with how we see and shape and deal with being in the world. Without planning on it, I read two poetry meditations/analyses back-to-back the other day that felt timely on that, one recent and one older: Devin Kelly on Solmaz Sharif's "He, Too" in his terrific newsletter Ordinary Plots; Elisa Gabbert on W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" (worth opening on desktop for the really clever interactive page design).

• More recommended reading: * Garth Greenwell on Louise Glück, characteristically reverent, incisive, and judiciously dishy all at once * Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (give me any novel about a weird woman making thrillingly weird decisions, Luster or Nothing to See Here or Stay Up with Hugo Best or a hundredth reread of Housekeeping and I am set for the week) * Hey, kid, want to donate a kidney? * Who killed the fudge king of the Jersey Shore????

• Soundtrack of the fall has been Bitter by Meshell Ndegeocello when I'm feeling moody, Yard by Slow Pulp when I'm only feeling a little moody, and "Good Girls" (John Carpenter Remix) by CHVRCHES when I'm going over the Roosevelt Island Tramway at night and want to feel cool as hell. A promise and a warning, though, that the release of 1989 (Taylor's Version) in a few days is going to hit my whole personality like a sleeper agent activation phrase.

I'm still figuring out what I want to do with this newsletter, but if you want, you can set up a monthly tip in the amount of your choosing here, or make a one-time tip through my Venmo.

I'm reading: Agents and Books | Anxiety Shark | Ask a Fuck Up | Bitches Gotta Eat | The Breakside | Bring Me Giants | Channel 6 | Craft Talk | Defector | The Ed’s Up | Garbage Day | Hell Gate | ¡Hola Papi! | Hung Up | Life Is a Sacred Text | The Lost Songs Project | Making It | The Melt | Ordinary Plots | Pome | Rax King | SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE | The Small Bow | Something New | Starting Out | To a Green Thought | Unsnackable | Walk It Off | Welcome to Hell World

Mags Colvett is a writer and editor mostly raised in east Tennessee and currently living in Queens. You can find them on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe free for more where this came from.