In February I spent a week at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, which is in the small, picturesque town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Eureka Springs is beautiful and astonishing and much hillier than I was expecting, and I got a ton of writing done.
The Writers’ Colony is in an old farmhouse just a few minutes’ walk—a very steep walk—from the famous Crescent Hotel. On the other side of the hill, just below the hotel, is St. Elizabeth’s, a tiny jewel of a church that you enter through the belltower.
It doesn’t say this on the website anywhere, but the Writers’ Colony was founded by Crescent Dragonwagon. (That’s her real name, and yes, she thinks it’s silly, too.) Dragonwagon is probably best known as a cookbook writer, though she also writes children’s books.
When I got back to Chicago, I was curious to find out more about Dragonwagon (née Ellen Zolotow). I really wanted a copy of her first book, The Commune Cookbook (Simon and Schuster, 1972), published when she was still a teenager. UChicago’s library did not have it. The Chicago Public Library did not have it. There was a copy on eBay, but it cost almost $200.
Have I mentioned how much I love Interlibrary Loan?
A battered paperback soon arrived from the Cornell University Library.
In the introduction, Dragonwagon explains that she fell in love with a guy named Crispin, who wanted to move into a commune. “A dumb idea,” Dragonwagon thought, until she saw the house: “A four-story brownstone in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, with big rooms, high, ornate ceilings, parquet floors, chandeliers.” And no working bathrooms. Rent was $350 a month (about $3,000 today).
At the time, Dragonwagon was 16 and a high-school dropout. The oldest person in the commune was 30.
“Obviously you have to eat every day, but we manage not to get uptight about it at all. In fact we really dig it,” Dragonwagon writes in the next chapter, titled “The Philosophy of Healthy Food.” Someone different cooked every night. Someone else did the dishes. They figured out the cooking rota, and talked through bills and any problems, during the weekly Sunday meeting.
The Commune Cookbook is a fascinating snapshot of a moment in time. The desserts chapter, for example, includes recipes for wheat germ brownies (“my very favorite”), carob brownies, tahini cookies, carob macaroon puffs. Carob powder is powdered tamarind, I learned. I had only known it as a thoroughly unsatisfactory substitute for chocolate.
There’s a chapter on organ meats, which Dragonwagon basically forced herself to like. She starts by trying to cook heart, then sweetbreads, then brains, which “need to be combined with something crisp, like water chestnuts or celery, to contrast with their soft, limp insides.” This description—visceral, quite literally—made me want to turn immediately to the chapter on vegetable entrées.
Toward the end, after the collections of recipes, there’s a chapter on living without very much money, in which Dragonwagon suggests “one thing to do is liberate stuff you need, or even sometimes, stuff you don’t.” (Other words for “liberate,” she explains, include “stealing, lifting, or ripping off.”)
Before engaging in liberation, however, Dragonwagon emphasizes that you should think closely about your moral views: “I honestly believe that if I need to have something it should be mine, or my family’s, and that I shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
I have no further comment, other than to point out that it was the late 1960s, and she was 16.
The final chapter, “Further,” contains an incredible plot twist.
The book had been written over the last eight months, and “things have changed a lot.” Dragonwagon lists the people who have moved in and out of the commune and why, then notes that she and Crispin are leaving, too.
“With the money from this book”—meta—“Crispin and I bought a farm. It’s in the Ozarks and it’s a beautiful farm … Open to people who want to build a new way of life, set up an example of how things will maybe be after the revolution … ”
Well, from the perspective of 2024, it seems like the revolution never arrived, but that’s how and why Dragonwagon ended up in Arkansas, where she still lives today.
I’ve had The Commune Cookbook so long, it’s overdue, and my borrowing privileges have been temporarily suspended. Tomorrow I will take it back to UChicago’s library so it can be returned to Cornell.
I really would like to own this book. But I am not 16. I will not liberate it.
Carrie Golus 