• Juris Jurjevics
  • Rosa Jurjevics and Laurie Colwin ca. 1990

To her devoted readers—and there are many—the writer Laurie Colwin’s tastes and habits are nearly as familiar as their own. Colwin was a traditionalist. She cooked with utensils she picked up in flea markets; served meals, particularly old-fashioned English tea and nursery food, on mismatched antique china; and, even in the age before Whole Foods, went to great pains to find organic food instead of processed supermarket products. She didn’t own a TV. She wrote on a typewriter. Her novels and short stories are all set in a timeless Manhattan that could be any time from the end of World War II until the late 80s when computers became ubiquitous. She was concerned less with pop culture than with human interactions and social behavior. As a cook, she liked, in her words, “dishes that are easy, savory, and frequently cook themselves.” Her ten books, the first of which came out in 1974, have never gone out of print.

  • Rosa Jurjevics
  • Latvian birthday cake made by Rosa Jurjevics

“They helped me hang onto memories,” she says. “She wrote it as it was. I don’t like to cook, but baking I really enjoy. I don’t use gadgets. It helps me focus. I have a muscle memory of baking with her. Last year I made the Latvian cake [from Home Cooking] for my birthday. It turned out really well. I was amazed.”

“She embraced imperfection,” Jurjevics says. “She wrote about imperfect people who were apologetic and unapologetic about their imperfections. They know their choices may hurt someone else, but life is not as easy as right and wrong or good and bad or success and failure. Right now, I feel like there’s this kindergarten to Harvard situation where everyone is pressured to be right and perfect. That’s not realistic. You can’t expect it, or you’ll go insane. [Colwin] embraced her own imperfections and uncomfortability. She humanized it in a way that made it OK. She wrote about embarrassing herself at a party and having a raging hangover the next day, but there was always a redeeming moment. Her friend came over with a bag of groceries, and they had the best meal of their lives.”