Nina Katz’ Squelch: a deliciously written, emotionally rich debut memoir

Memories rely heavily on our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste – both as a way to record these moments, and as conduits for recollection. Food and eating is an engagement with each of these senses as well. We eat with our eyes, are drawn in by delicious smells, and are summoned by the sounds of food sizzling and crackling, until texture and taste finally conjoin on the tongue.

Photo courtesy of Nina Katz

Some of the most painful memories can be as sour as an unripe kiwi, and the fondest as sweet as strawberry shortcake. In their debut memoir, Squelch, food writer Nina Katz observes their personal story of the intersection of food and memory – using meals whose scents have stayed wafted in their nose, whose taste stays lingering on their tongue to recollect the bittersweet memories of a past relationship.

Katz's emergence into food writing began in high school, creating zines about serving suggestions on the sides of cracker boxes, salad dressing, food justice, and their collection of grocery lists. Their collection grew from a zine into a substack, where Katz posts the hundreds of grocery lists they’ve collected (although none belong to Katz themselves – ironically, they don’t use grocery lists).

Katz has written for Serious Eats, Table Magazine, and Digest Magazine. Squelch, their debut memoir, delves into the significance of food in relationships, and how food and love are inextricably intertwined. The book releases on July 9, but readers can preorder on Combos Press.

When did food become more than simply necessary nourishment for you? When did it become something greater – a passion, a lifeforce?

"I always really identified with food as a way to express myself. My parents are huge food people and food is a big part of my family history. Somewhat of a coincidence, my dad is a food writer himself. Whether I knew it was happening at the time, I think I was being influenced. There’s so much of a story behind the food we eat and the meaning it has in our lives."

Your debut memoir Squelch is about how people in the context of a relationship are tied to food. But in your free time, you also investigate individuals' food habits through collecting grocery lists. What can you tell about somebody from their grocery list?

"There’s like this hidden language in the lists and you can learn so much about people's habits. Sometimes they’re written on cool pieces of paper or the handwriting is interesting and you can be like, 'This person is totally an artist,' or 'This person is a punk rock musician,' or 'This person is a rock climber who eats nutritional yeast.' One of my favorite things to see in the list is how people abbreviate things."

You’ve written about queerness tied with food – in your article '10 Recipes Perfect for Your Next Queer Potluck,' soon to be in Queer Earth Food, and now in Squelch. How do you believe food and the queer identity are intertwined?

"They’re both things that are essential to being yourself. In the same ways that we are able to find the words for who we are through how we identify as queer people, we’re able to find the foods for who we are. In my life, as a queer person, those two things are pretty inextricable."

In looking at your past works on queerness and food, you wrote an article about the queer nature of potlucks. What dish are you making for your Queer Potluck?

"To lean into the Squelch metaphor, I do think there’s something about stew that feels particularly queer. There’s something about the mixing of things and the ability to add to it. The diversity of stew cannot be overstated; I’d like to think there are all kinds of stews I’ve not met."

In addition to queerness, what other factors of identity and character do you believe food can shed a light on?

"I think that food is really one of our greatest teachers; we can learn so much from food. I’m a Jewish person and feel very strongly about looking to the situation [in Palestine] with food being weaponized as a way to understand the ongoing violence that’s being committed against Palestine. I connect so much of my Jewishness to food and right now some of those foods, they don’t taste as good as they normally do because I’ve become so much more conscious of Zionism and what’s happening in Palestine. And that tells me something! When something tastes bad, you learn something about your preferences. Your aversion to something tells you about what you value and don’t value."

In the book, the way you describe the act of cooking with or for someone is deeply intimate, almost sensual. Can you elaborate on the connection people have or can potentially have through cooking together?

"Cooking is this somatic experience, and there’s something really awesome about being in a flow state with another person, which obviously is something you can get from doing other things with someone you’re close with. I also think it’s really hot to know how to cook and I think I’m a really good cook. I love cooking for other people and sometimes I step into this version of myself that I think is the hottest version of myself when I’m cooking for somebody that I have a crush on."

Now looking at the more emotional rather than physical side of a relationship, what do you believe the act of eating with or cooking for someone inspires?

"In a lot of ways, I think food is a salve to awkwardness in a relationship. It’s like when you go to Thanksgiving and you don’t really want to see that one uncle, but it’s fine because you’re all eating a really delicious plate of food. There were often times when the relationship I discuss in the book was really hard for me for a variety of reasons that was not necessarily either of our faults, but I did always turn to food as a way of bridging some of that awkwardness. If something felt bad, I could make them something that they love and it’s gonna fix everything – which, to be honest, it did not. But I think the food we made and make for each other will outlive that part of our relationship. There’s just foods that will always make me think of them."

Squelch intertwines personal essays with hand-crafted recipes. When figuring out organization for the book, what did you lead with – specific meals you remembered and the context built around them, or specific time periods and a certain meal within that time?

“It was definitely meals first. I used to tell the story [featured in the book] about when I was having this really, really passionate night of having sex with this person and they really needed a snack, and out of all things they brought back a bowl of yogurt and applesauce. And it was really funny, but then from there it also went to how it was funny that they were eating the toppings I bought for Hanukkah but they weren’t using it quite right and then it went to how this relationship wasn’t quite right. There’s just so many stories I have about food with this person that aren’t even in this book. 

Most of the recipes in the book are ones that I originally wrote down for this person. It sort of happened that all the recipes I was picking had a “squelchiness” to them like stew, oatmeal, pudding, and braised tomatoes – things that are squishy.”

Was that the inspiration for the title?

"The title actually came from a different project I was working on about a different person I had dated. I was writing about food and our relationship and I used the word 'squelch' to describe something we were eating and I was just like, 'Ooh, that is a great word!' It was a totally different relationship and different piece that had similar themes. It just made so much sense because the thing I’m going for in the book is to show how there was this level of discomfort that was always under the surface. I really cling to the metaphor of fruit rotting and the ripeness of something being really precarious. The ripeness of this relationship was always really hard for me to tell."

Your use of second person throughout Squelch makes it deeply intimate, but the specificity of detail points towards what could only be a specific person. It’s obviously a painful story, how did it feel writing it?

"Writing this has brought me a lot of closure that I was not finding elsewhere. I wrote the book in a period of time when we weren’t talking to each other and I had said to myself, 'Don’t think about this person, you need to move on.' And then I just found myself writing about our relationship and it really helped me process a lot of the embarrassment I felt when we were together. I wasn’t giving myself a lot of grace and through writing this book, it allowed for me to like myself a little more and say, 'This was a really intense experience for you, but that’s what makes us who we are and there’s nothing wrong with that.'"

Do you anticipate that the person this is speaking to will or have already read this – do they know about it?

"They do know about it! They responded with such enthusiasm when I first told them about it. There was a moment where I was like, 'Oh my god I really don’t want them to read it, this was a bad idea!' but now I don’t care. I don’t know if they’ll read it, but I feel fine if they read it because it is a bit of a time capsule."

What are your expectations for release?

"I’m not sure what to expect, but I’m excited that there is, in general, energy with people making connections between their queerness and the foods they eat. There’s this tsunami of queer food mention in pop culture. This year I was able to go to the first Queer Food Conference, I just saw a really awesome pitch call from Orion Magazine about queer food, Eater has a whole package on queer food, and there’s just so many incredible queer food writers. I hope that the genre continues to grow and that we get more and more recognition of food being used as a tool for understanding our queer selves."