A Brief History of Anna Carter
Part I
I learned to cook when I was very young. Cooking was how you showed you cared for someone, how you showed you could contribute. Cooking was a ritual of love directed inwards. Cooking was self-discovery. Making food was making do, making the best of it, making ends meet, making something out of nothing. Alchemy, magic, witchcraft, ritual.
Sometimes when you grow up in a small-ish Southern town, you wonder, “What if I never leave this small-ish Southern town? What if this is the rest of my life?” Because for some people, that’s what they want because they have their Piccadilly and their favorite Publix…what else would you need? However, there are some people who - despite loving their small-ish Southern town very much - are filled with a great need to explore and grow and learn that they know that they do need more.
The people I grew up around were scared of everything because they didn’t know what it was. I thought, how can people be afraid of food? It’s just food!
Because it isn’t just food. That forkful that you meticulously curated to have “a little bit of everything” in a single bite holds history and pride and context and personal skill and love and maybe even anger as the recipe has developed and crops have been modified for the terrain. That’s a lot to take in if you’ve never left the same 25mi radius.
“Know where your food comes from,” is more than a call to “shop locally.” It is an imperative: Food gives us life because food comes from life! Don’t forget! Don’t let it go! Farmers and migrant labor and grandmothers who taught us everything they knew and servers who are undertipped and stocking grocery shelves and colonialism and slavery and making do with what you have because it’s all you have. If we don’t remember them, we have lost.
Part II
Nancy Drew.
That’s where my reading habit started. I’ve read over fifty Nancy Drew books. The copies that I still own sit on my bookshelf, the rest were consumed on the floor of my school library. She was so cool – confident, brave, beautiful, loving, friendly, smart – I wanted to be her when I grew up. I still do.
The habit was vital. The reading habit expanded into a writing habit. Reading wasn’t an escape, reading was an exploration. Much like cooking or eating, books intimated – there’s other things out there, it’s exciting, isn’t it? Even if you’re afraid, fear isn’t the end! Fear is an instigator. Fear is an exclamation! – Explore! Embrace! Seek!
Writing was my whole life. The details had yet to be sorted out: What kind? How? Where? When? How will I make enough money to remain clothed and housed and insured?
I graduated with my English degree. I would have to figure something out eventually, but in the mean time I settled into the service industry.
Part III
I could baste, sauté, fry, brown, sear, whisk, fold. I knew the difference between a chiffonade, quenelle, and mirepoix. But I also knew the money was in ‘front of house.’ With my friend’s help, I started my first stage (pronounced: STAH-j).
A stage is like a restaurant internship. They happen in kitchens and for servers and sommeliers as well. They’re regimen in fine dining, but common in any restaurant that requires specific, niche knowledge. Part of the stage is auditioning for them; part of it is scoping them out to see if you’d want to keep working there. The first night of my stage went amazing. I answered everything perfectly, knew everything about wine and all the dishes and everyone loved me.
Just kidding. I broke two full trays of wine glasses. Everyone liked me though! Skills can be learned, knowledge can be accrued, but the greatest of these is charm.
Working there felt right. Something clicked. I walked around every shift absorbing everything. Dishes on the menu would change weekly, sometimes daily – ingredients on the dish would change in the middle of service. I was always asking questions – What is sous vide? What’s the difference between mezcal and tequila? Why do you see people smelling the empty glass before they put anything in it? Does squeezing the orange peel over the cocktail do anything? (Yes. Take me to dinner, and you’ll find out why…)
People there were passionate about a bottle of wine or a cut of beef or a kind of rice or a type of whiskey not because of the price or status, but because it was good. And you know something is good when you taste it and the only thing you say is, “…that’s good…” or “fuck.” The better something tastes, the stupider you sound when you react to tasting it for the first or fourth time. Sometimes good things are expensive, but sometimes they’re not.
These days, one of my favorite red wines is a $11 Rioja (medium-bodied, Spanish red wine.) Oven-roasting in-season vegetables with the perfect amount of olive oil and kosher salt until they just turn crisp at the edges feels like heaven. And everyone knows that the best boiled peanuts you will ever have will be from an old man in a straw hat under a tent at a 4-way stop in the middle of nowhere in an UGA football folding chair.
I hopped around to a few other restaurants. Eventually I craved a little more stability. I’m a creature of routine, and the restaurant grind can be brutal. I worked in advertising and copywriting mostly. It almost felt like I was a writer. So close.
Part IV
I mostly read fiction, I tend to write non-fiction. Personal stuff, personal-adjacent, personal-Anna – a person with many compartments.
I write to understand. As Flannery O’Connor said, I write to discover what I know. The world is immense and complicated because each person that inhabits it is a complex tangle of thoughts and experiences. Writing is me untangling my own knot. It reminds me of untangling a necklace. Sitting on the edge of my bed, cursing at myself for not being thoughtless in the moment and making life harder for future me. My hands cramp, my eyes strain at the thin chain, this is going to make me late. The more impatient I am, the worse it gets. It is only when I pause and slow down that I can examine the problem. Patience unravels the knot.
Writing is discovering myself by patiently unraveling the knot of your life.
To patiently examine your own life, one must thoughtfully and patiently observe others. We are the main character of our own life, but merely a visitor in someone else’s.
To me, there is no better way to get to know someone than to eat with them. Food is fun and sensual and luxurious. Food requires life because food gives life. Eating with someone invites touching and laughing and sharing. Oysters aren’t an aphrodisiac when they’re consumed silently on opposite sides of the restaurant. Food is an aphrodisiac when you attempt to feed me a bite of the celery ceviche I made us order at The Betty (It sounds crazy, but it’s good! And different!) and it falls off your fork and into my lap and rather than be embarrassed, we can’t stop laughing which causes me to accidentally knock over my glass of red wine (we might be a little tipsy) so we decide “it’s time to go” and we’re barely out the door of the restaurant before your hands are in my hair and I’m pressed against you and I don’t even know if we’ll make it home.
Life is stranger than fiction, isn’t it? A couple of hours ago, you were a stranger. For several reasons, some might think of me as a strange woman. Homonyms. Different word, same word. Different meaning, same meaning.
“Strange” comes from the Latin word extrāneus meaning “that which is on the outside.” But the word has similar roots in Old French, High German, and Old English. The word exists in nearly every language. A common definition of strange is “foreign, weird, peculiar, different.” But the same word can have different definitions or a different connotation depending on how you use it or how you feel that day. My favorite definition of strange is “not yet part of one’s experience.” There is no judgment, no fear. Certain foods are strange because they are not yet apart of my experience. You are a stranger because I have not held you in my arms.
Don’t be a stranger.
Hi! I’m Anna Carter, a GFE escort in Manhattan, NYC. I’m originally from Atlanta, GA.