A couple of well-meaning readers have recently inquired into the foundations of my relationship with food, or, more succinctly, the origins of this thing I call Orangette.
As the following amply demonstrates, such seemingly harmless questions
can be downright dangerous when combined with an afternoon of digging in the archives,
both online and off. What follows comes to you straight from a
tattered, sun-bleached sketchbook that holds my teenage writing—or, at
least, the snippets of it that aren’t stashed in my parents’ freezer,
which I once...
