Feminist Restaurant Dies on Selma Mirium, 89

Selma Mirium and Noel Ferry were unhappy housewives, as they said, when they met at a national organization for women in 1972 in Connecticut. Soon after, he divorced his husbands, came out as homosexuals and determined to create a place for women.

Ms. Marium was a talented and courageous cook, and at first she organized a dinner at her home, which fee $ 8 for a weekly buffet of vegetarian vegetarian cuisine – a Pak option he made because a friend said that a feminist food enterprise should not contribute to animal pain.

In 1977, he tuned a blurrot, a feminist restaurant and a bookstore in an industrial building on a dead-end street in Bridgeport. They had no waiter, no printed menu and no cash register, and they did not advertise. Against obstacles, business flourished.

Ms. Mirium always said, “Those who need us find us,” Ms. Mirium always said.

Selma Mirium died on 6 February at her home in Westport, Con. She was 89 years old.

The reason for this was pneumonia, his long -time partner, Carols Curry said.

“We don’t just want a piece of pie, we want a new recipe,” Ms. Mirium declared a feature-length 2024 documentary about the restaurant in “A Pak Rebellion: The Story of Bloodrot”. (Another documentary, “Bloodrot,” came out in 2019.)

He was firm to live his values, as he placed it, and the blurrot was an incarnation of those values: a place for good interaction, activeness and terrible food. It was also a non-dominated effort; Customers served themselves and cleaned their own table.

First, the bloodruight was run as a collective, although the initial members eventually proceeded. In recent decades, it has been a collective of two: Ms. Mirium and Ms. Fari. (He said very briefly several decades ago, and he remained fast friends.)

A fond gardener, Ms. Mirium, named the restaurant for the native plant, which begins to flourish in the early spring and spreads through a root system that grows underground, making new colonies of flowers. “Separate but connected” was the metaphor he was later. He also liked the cruelty of the name.

With the help of her parents, with $ 19,000, she went away from her 75-sent-one hour work as a landowner and contacted several banks from the same bank as the same hostage, which would give loans to a woman in connecticut in the 1970s, she bought a former machine shop in the neighborhood of a working class in the bridges. It was a cowardly place, but it had space for a garden in the back, and ignored the long island sound.

He and his colleagues filled the place with thrift-shop furniture, political posters and vintage photos and women’s paintings. Over the years, customers contributed photographs of their mothers and grandmother. “Women’s walls,” Ms. Mirium and Ms. Fari called it.

The space had a comfortable nook for the armchair, and the book shop was filled with feminist canon, as well as handwritten notes from fans, including writers Andrea Dwarkin, Adrien Rich and Audrey Lord, many of which gave readings there. Home cats were named for feminist heroes such as Bela Abzug and Gloria Steinum.

To create her ever changing menu, Ms. Miriam attracted her on vegetarian culinary traditions around the world, using food locally became sour and increased in the restaurant garden. Women who included them in the kitchen – migrants in Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Honduras and other countries of Jamaica contributed to their national cuisine. One of the women, Carol Graham, who is Jamaica, came with a recipe for his shock “chicken” made with Tofu and Sitan, one of the best vendors of the blurdrot for a long time.

Soup like Cambodian Kanji with rice, potatoes and cashews was a mainstay. In recent years, Ms. Mirium began using vegetarian things made from cultured walnut milk. Tejal Rao, a critic of the New York Times restaurant, who visited in 2017, just before the 40th birthday of the restaurant wrote that he was partial with a ripe, soft intoxicated aroma with a “deep-tasted cakes-like number, named after the author Villa Cather.”

Bloodroots were imagined as a female-keval community, but also attracted men. Customers imprisoned by home environment and developed menu remained loyal for decades, which maintained the place in a lean time.

“When we started,” Ms. Farri said in an interview, “It felt as if we were jumping from a rock.” Paying a tribute to that feeling, a frameed photo of the 1991 film “Thhalma and Lewis”, about another pair of women about another pair, who became a crook, hangs in the open kitchen of blood -crumous.

“There are people who come with their 3 -year -old child and say, ‘When I was 3 years old, I came here, and now I am back with my child,’ and I think in 2017 Washington Post said that it was also surprising that it had an effect.”

Selma Mirium Davidson was born on 25 February 1935 in Bronx, and grew up in Bridgeport. She was the only child of Faye and Elias Davidson, who opened Davidson’s clothes, a fabric store on the main street in the Bridgeport, the year she was born.

She received the degree of women’s school at Tufts University at Massachusetts in 1956, then from Jackson College. (He studied in biology and psychology, but he said that the best thing in college was how to weave the continental style.) She met her husband, Abe Bunk, who would become a lawyer while she was in college. When he divorced in 1976, he started using his middle name as his surname.

Ms. Mirium was clear about her history. She spoke of illegal abortion at the age of 15 with the help of her parents, who did not want her only child to be out of school. He talked about getting pregnant in college, the result of a sick-fitting diaphragm, which Ph.D. In biology.

He was anteriorly difficult. The week where the blurdrot opened, he came to know about breast cancer. Her doctor removed the knot in an outpatient process, but told her that if she does not have a radical mastectomy, she would die within three years. She refused because she did not want to miss the work.

“I was alone who could cook,” he told.

Cancer never recurred, and she doubted the medical profession, who preferred to treat herself with homeopathic treatment. For most of his life, he did not have health insurance.

In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Mirium is left from her children, Sabrina and Kerry Bunk. Ms. Carry said she met Ms. Mirium when she came for lunch in 1988 – and she stayed for dinner for 37 Everes years.

“There is no reason we should have done this work, and in many ways we did not work,” Ms. Mirium said about the restaurant in a “Pak Rebellion”, given that bloodroot was not always a moneymaker. “But we have a life.”