Selma Miriam and Noel Fourley, as they put it in 1972 when they met at a gathering of women's organisations in Connecticut, were unfortunate housewives. He soon divorced his husband and came out as a lesbian, creating a place for women to gather.
Miriam is a talented and adventurous chef, initially hosting dinner at her home and charging $8 for her weekly buffet of lush vegetarian dishes. This is a cooking choice my friend made because he pointed out that feminist food companies should not contribute to animal suffering.
In 1977 they opened a feminist restaurant and bookstore shoved into an industrial building on the dead-end streets of Bridgeport. They had no waiters, no printed menus or cash registers, and they did not advertise. Contrary to the odds, the business flourished.
“The people who need us find us,” Miriam always said.
Selma Miriam passed away on February 6th at his home in Westport, Connecticut. She was 89 years old.
The cause was pneumonia, her longtime partner, Carolanne Curry, said.
“We don't want a piece of pie, we want a whole new recipe,” Miriam declared in a feature-length documentary about restaurants in “The Story of Bloodroot.” (Another documentary, “Bloodroot,” was released in 2019.)
She decided to live her values, as she put it, and Bradroot was the embodiment of those values: a place for good conversation, activism, and a great food. It was also a non-hierarchical effort. The customer served himself and cleared his table.
At first, Bloodroot was run as a collective, but the early members eventually went on. Over the last few decades, it has been two groups: Miriam and Fury. (They dated very briefly decades ago, and they remained fast friends.)
Avid gardener, Miriam has appointed a restaurant of native plants that begins to blossom in early spring, spreading through the root system that grows underground, and forms a new colony. “Independent but Connection” was the phalang she wanted. She also liked the toughness of her name.
With the help of her parents, she, along with $19,000, left Squirrel from a 75-cent job as a landscaper and a nasty mortgage from the only bank, among the many banks lending to Connecticut women in the 1970s, bought it for $80,000 in a working class neighborhood in Bridgeport. It was a funky space, but there was space behind for the garden, overlooking the sounds of Long Island.
She and her colleagues filled the place with thrift store furniture, political posters, vintage photographs and women's paintings. Over the years, clients have contributed photographs of their mothers and grandmothers. “Women's Wall,” Miriam and Fuley called it.
The space had a cozy corner for armchairs, and the bookstore was filled with feminist canons and was filled with handwritten notes from fans, including authors Andrea Dowegwerk, Adrian Rich and Audre Lorde. The cat in the house is named after feminist heroes such as Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem.
To create her ever-changing menu, Miriam portrayed vegetarian culinary traditions from around the world, using food sourced locally and grown in the restaurant garden. The women who added her to the kitchen in the kitchen, including immigrants from Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Honduras and Jamaica, served national cuisine. One of the Jamaican women, Carol Graham came up with a recipe for the jerk “chicken” made with tofu and seitan.
The main focus was a Cambodian kanji-like soup with rice, potatoes and cashews. In recent years, Miriam has begun experimenting with vegan cheeses made from cultured nut milk. New York Times restaurant critic Tejarulao, who visited in 2017 just before the restaurant's 40th birthday, wrote that it was biased towards “a deep-flavored cheddar-like figure,” “named after author Willa Cather.”
Bloodroot was considered a women-only community, but men also gathered. Their customers were captivated by the homey atmosphere and evolving menu, and remained loyal for decades.
“When we started,” Fury said in an interview, “it felt like we were jumping off a cliff.” In honor of that spirit, a framed photo of the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, another pair of women who became cheated, hangs in the open kitchen of Bloodroot.
“Some people come in with a three-year-old and say, 'I came here when I was three, and now I'm back with my kids.' I think it's amazing that even the Washington Post had an impact in 2017.”
Selma Miriam Davidson was born in the Bronx on February 25, 1935 and grew up in Bridgeport. She was the only child of Faye and Elias Davidson. He opened Davidson fabric, a fabric store, on Main Street in Bridgeport in the year he was born.
She graduated from the Fi Beta Kappa at Jackson College at Tufts University's Girls' School in Massachusetts in 1956 (she majored in biology and psychology, but said that the best thing she learned in college was how to knit continental style. When they divorced in 1976, she began using her middle name as her last name.
Miriam was open about her history. She spoke about the 15-year-old illegal abortion with the help of her parents who don't want to drop out of school. She talked about getting pregnant in college. This is the result of an inappropriate diaphragm that suppressed her desire to pursue a PhD. In biology.
She was pretty tough. During the week that was open, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctors removed the lump in an outpatient procedure, but told her that if she hadn't undergone a radical mastectomy, she would die within three years. She refused because she didn't want to miss her job.
“I was the only one who could cook,” she pointed out.
The cancer never recurred, and she remained suspicious of the medical profession and preferred to treat herself with homeopathic therapy. For most of her life, she had no health insurance.
In addition to Curry, Miriam was survived by her children, Sabrina and Carrie Banks. Curry said he met Miriam one day in 1988 when he came for lunch.
“There's no reason to do this, we didn't make it work in many ways,” Miriam said of the restaurant in the “Cooking Uprising,” saying Bloodroot is not necessarily a money maker. “But we had a life.”
