Family Happiness is Laurie Colwin’s comic tale about an Eastside Manhattan Jewish housewife, finds who finds happiness at home and on a picnic in bed with her lover. On the way to her first affair, Polly Demarest stops for a smoked salmon sandwich. Alone and excited, they kiss; he asks for the salmon and then makes love.
Preferring bed to outdoor dining is another of Colwin’s bugaboos. Among her most humorous essays in “How to Avoid Grilling “is her hyperbolic shout against eating alfresco— “I do not like to eat al fresco. No sane person does, I feel. When it is nice enough for people to eat outdoors, it is also nice enough for mosquitoes, horse and deer flies, as well as wasps and yellowjacks. I don’t much like sand in my food, and thus, while I endure a beach picnic, I never look forward to them.” Woof!
Colwin changed (for the better) with age and became more tolerant and mellow. Faced with the prospect of not eating or packing picnic lunches on the isolated beaches of Minorca, It also dawned on her that picnics weren’t so awful after all, mosquitoes and flies to the contrary. With the guidance of a friend who understood the joys of alfresco dining, Colwin realized picnics were great, especially when you are in love, on vacation, and hungry. “The idea was (and still is),” she explains, “that a picnic can be anything. It can resemble the Mad Hatter’s tea party if you want it to. Its heart and soul is breeziness, invention, and enough to eat for people made ravenous by fresh air.”
Among Colwin’s favorites is a sandwich of hard salami and cream cheese. But in Minorca, she bought dozens of whole-wheat baguettes, split them, sprinkled them with olive oil, and loaded them with Màhon cheese, sweet onion, and tomato. (Smoked salmon sandwiches do not make her list.)
See Laurie Colwin. Family Happiness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982; Laurie Colwin. “How to Avoid Grilling.” In Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988