Botany, Ballet & Dinner from Scratch
This charming memoir with culinary and gardening additions is written by Leda Meredith, a dancer who combined her childhood fascinations with nature and dance with teaching and choreography. I remember Leda as a young girl studying at San Francisco Dance Theatre, her mother's school, on the second floor of a San Francisco Van Ness Avenue store, the ground level serving as a US Postal Service sub-station before a separate building was erected.
The paperback's modest size belies its stimulating contents, whether Leda is writing about her unusual childhood, evocative memories of her Greek culinary heritage, childhood impressions of Greece, or the discovery of foraging for edibles in San Francisco and New York City. Her resourceful recipes for concocting wine vinegar, sauerkraut, delicious recipes for moussaka, chicken, lamb or pickled beans with comments about the properties of burdock, managing farm-house style food preparation within tiny urban domestic footage are captivating, side by side with the dancer's typical resourcefulness on tour. Alice Waters could recognize a kindred spirit.
Even as a child Leda, whose legs stretch on for ever, her torso a tad high-waisted, displayed a sensitivity this memoir finally has been able to explain adequately. She moved to New York City at 16, joining ABT II at 17 but never managed to acquire Mikhail Baryshnikov's approval. She did, however, dance a lot, much of it on foreign tours, eventually moving into the modern sphere of choreographer Jennifer Muller. She now teaches dance at Adelphi University, choreographs, writes articles related to the plant world and also teaches at both the New York and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Her writing has appeared in Pointe Magazine as well as The Herb Companion.
I purchased Botany, Ballet & Dinner from Scratch from Leda's proud step-father, former arts administrator turned pianist, Kelly Johnson. The memoir can be purchased through Amazon, and I would hope, soon, through other perspicacious literary outlets. Her obvious knowledge and Slow Nation-type practices should find a response amongst ballet.co's health and nature-minded readers.