Zine: Put A Egg On It! #2

Put A Egg On It! (yes, with the grammatical error) is a highly recommended food zine of personal essays, with clean layout (entirely full color!), great writing and editing, and empathetic stories.

PAEOI! has a non-snobby approach to food, combining personal experiences with comestibles (eating, preparing, etc.) in thoughtful prose.

Elizabeth Pearce writes about heartbreak, depressions, and not cooking in “Spoon Feeding”. She was deeply in (food-centric) love and then it ended: “For two days, I lived on iced coffee. Then, I graduated to cottage cheese, peanut butter and egg salad, each eaten with a spoon while sitting on the sofa watching bad TV.” She knows that one day she’ll want to tear up the kitchen again, just not now. But, scrapping hummus into a bowl and cutting up some vegetables for a group meeting is a promising start.

In “Anti-Depressant Stew”, Max Blagg provides an unstructured recipe for a root vegetable and chorizo one pot wonder to help you survive that bleak time between Thanksgiving and Xmas. (As someone who always suffers from the holiday blahs, I will start this some Saturday afternoon, and tuck into it as the sun sets at 4:30PM.

Paul Gerard’s “Tattoo Cook” looks back at NYC kitchens of the early ‘80s, in the same vein as Kitchen Confidential. These were they years when you started off as a dishwasher and if you were smart, lucky, and kept your damn mouth shut, could eventually work up the ranks in the kitchen: “This was not for the weak. had I told one of my chefs that I had a passion for local seasonal ingredients he’d look at me like I was a complete moron, ask me “What the fuck else would you use, dildo”, and make me clean the grease trap for clogging his brain with bullshit.”

The photos in PAEOI are not fancy, posed, studio shots, but instead of real people enjoying meals together (often consuming food mentioned in the essays), food trucks, and regional food oddities (including a loving paean to the Taylor Pork Roll). Helpful cooking tips fill the nooks.

With more food zines shifting completely to the web to be more timely, or just disappearing completely (Peko Peko), it’s great to find a new print food zine with so much promise. You want to read this if you’re a foodie or not.

You should read Put A Egg On It! simply because you have to eat.

Available from the Put A Egg On It store. (Note: Yes, it is a bit pricey for the size, but it is entirely full color, offset printing, and heavy paper.)