Retro Classic Cooking Show: The French Chef

I want to jump into this old food photograph in The New York Times. The scene is a church picnic in Georgia in 1951. People are bowing their heads giving thanks for the food they are about to receive at a potluck feast. No sheet cake from Costco with a mile long list of ingredients (many you can't pronounce) in sight. The author lamented how little home baking there is for bake sales anymore. Interestingly, she notes,

"I have witnessed....the more upscale the community for the bake sale, the fancier the store-bought cookies. (Sprinkles Cupcakes may be the single biggest supplier of bake-sale goods in West Los Angeles.) Lower-income parents, especially first-generation immigrants, often turn up at school parties with the best-tasting homemade treats."

My own lack of cooking has weighed on my mind a lot lately. For someone who once dreamed of culinary school, I now don't cook at all, I simply reheat. Due to personal events I've documented as of late (moving limbo, dog passing away, family illness), I simply can't cope and just do what too many Americans do: throw something mindless in the microwave or stovetop. When we are in our new home and settled, which we hope is really soon, a goal is to cook much more, even if that means frozen food sales at my local Trader Joe's will plummet. Sorry Trader Joe's.

I love having a closet full of clothes, hats, bags (almost all of it secondhand) to play dress-up if I want to be inspired by everyone from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ginger Rogers to Peggy Olson. But I also want to cook prairie foods like Ma would have made, and great French meals. On my pile to go to the new home: The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Classic Stories, which I asked for from my mother as a birthday gift in November and haven't made anything from yet, and my mom's copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which I suddenly coveted after rewatching one of my favorite food films, Julie and Julia (my others are Babette's Feast and Ratatouille). The "Julie" part follows Julie Powell, a food-obsessed, bored cubicle worker wondering what's more who starts a blog (can't relate to that at all, ahem), and cooks her way through MTAFC in a year, while the "Julia" portion comes from the fantastic memoir Child penned with Alex Prudhomme, My Life in France. I still remember the scene when Julie whips up a raspberry Bavarian cream, and says braised cucumbers are a revelation. I want to do that at home!

While I had a like-hate relationship with Julie Powell's book (the hate from the excessive unneeded cursing and oversharing of her friends' bedroom exploits), I loved this passage the most which she had written from her blog:

"Wealthy Victorians served Strawberries Romanaff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving dewy organic berries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they're doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn't have to work for a living.

But Julia Child isn't about that. Julia Child wants you - that's right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end middle management job and nothing but a Stop and Shop for miles around - to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright. She wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life."

Eating the amount of canned bean soup and frozen vegetable burritos I have been, even if they are organic, is not really eating well and enjoying life. I recently discovered the cooking show the Jazzy Vegetarian on public television. Really, Laura Theodore's Quick Lasagna Rolls are more my speed than much of Julia Child's fare. Still, I was curious about The French Chef, which aired on public television from 1963 to 1973, and had never seen. Netflix, the library and Youtube are all good options for your Julia fix.

In her show about potatoes, which she gives some interesting food history, she also noted her surprise that people think potatoes are unhealthy since they are only about 70 calories for a cup, but then goes on to use liberal amounts of butter and cheese. This is the same woman who quipped the key to weight management is to choose your grandparents wisely, although there may be some part truth there.

Just the name "Julia Child" invokes fear in many people's heart. Some are intimidated by her recipes, but more often it's the fear of butter. I considered what Child said about our fear relationship with food,

"That's a very dangerous situation that we're in, very dangerous for the state of gastronomy, because people keep being afraid of food and they're not taking food as a pleasure part of civilized life but of medicine...

I think it's been useful that we're much more conscious of sensible eating. It all gets back to moderation and great variety of food and the main thing is knowing what you're doing.

I hope it will steer itself toward good sense and the realization how important food and dining are in our lives because it's the simple pleasures as also being the most nourishing pleasures. I hope we come into a new era of great food and good sense."

Talking point: How many people do I know, especially women, think they are making a "good" food choice by heating up a factory farmed animal and pesticide laden veggies nuked in plastic (with the chemicals from the plastic seeping into the food) cooked in a dirty microwave simply because the package says "Lean Cuisine" or "Weight Watchers." How about bottled water? The public doesn't think much about drinking something that's been lingering in plastic. Isn't it all about fear? Should we believe something is healthy just because a corporation trying to sell us something says it is? This time of year many people begin to fixate on their physical appearance with swimsuit season coming up. Considering factory farms, pesticides and the plastics that seep into our food supply and clutter our landfills, the state of our thighs seem pretty irrelevant. I don't fear Julia's butter. I fear an unquestioning society.



While I can't eat a great deal of what's in Child's cookbooks since I don't eat meat, and don't subscribe to everything she says, I appreciate the doors she broke down for women professional chefs. My boyfriend is part of a French chef's association and it's very much filled with mostly white, older men, but I look around at the young chefs at the culinary program they are involved in and it's a sea of diversity.

I also think dining should be a more civilized affair. At a recent dinner at a restaurant, the younger generation all had their devices in their laps and they were rudely typing away. It clearly sent a message the conversation was unappealing to them and they needed to be entertained elsewhere.

"For me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from my daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked." – Katy Kontent in Amor Towels novel Rules of Civility set in New York City in 1938.

Did you watch the French Chef? Have any memories of you or your loved ones cooking anything from MTAFC?

February Storytellers: A Month of Books

In my first book of the month, a children's book, there was an inscription to the recipient, "May books always be a vital part of your life." I found it an estate sale, and looking around the house, books were a vital part of the entire family's life. Books provide a soul to a house, I think.

This is just the way my February went: I only read two books, and my March - it's taken me nearly to mid-month to write about them. I've had a lot on my mind, like the family dog Scotty's declining health and departure and living in our frustrating limbo housing situation as we wait anxiously for our overdue mortgage to arrive to move into our new two family house. So I've been reading and blogging less. I hope spring brings rejuvenation on all fronts. Here's what I did read.

Mandy, by Julie Andrews Edwards, $2, an estate sale.

Part of why it's so appealing to go to estate sales and thrift shops is that things come into my life that I never would have been exposed to otherwise. I had no idea Julie Andrews, star of one of my favorite musicals, The Sound of Music, was a children's book author and such a popular one at that. An online reviewer said they could just hear her soothing voice narrating this book, and that's how I imagined it. Mandy is an enchanting tale about a young girl from an orphanage who discovers a secret cottage on her walks in the woods and steals away each day to lovingly restore the garden and house.

Andrews says on her site,

"In the summer of 1968, my husband and I were making a film on an old estate in Ireland. The great manor house was enclosed within thick walls and had its own stables, kennels, dairy, cemetery, vegetable gardens, and bird sanctuary, plus a lake with a weir and glorious beech woods with abundant wildlife. There were also several small cottages on the property, including one decorated entirely with seashells. The moment I saw it, the seed of a story lodged in my mind. Sometime later, I was playing a game with our children. I lost and had to pay a forfeit to our eldest daughter, Jennifer. What should my forfeit be? 'Easy! Write me a story,' Jenny replied. I thought to dash off a couple of paragraphs – but the image of that shell cottage came back to haunt me, and thus "Mandy" began. Two years later it became my first published work."

This book came into my life at just the right time, when I long for a garden and home of my own the way Mandy did. I've been an apartment dweller for more than a decade and we're in a very cramped two-family house. I can't wait to be in our new house and see my laundry hang drying on a line in the sun, bring out the coffee grinds to compost, plant a garden, maybe get a book on bird watching to identify the visitors in our yard that looks out to woods. I'm so excited to have a nice kitchen and dust off my cookbooks, take a nap in our lavender colored bedroom and do some writing in a room I hope to decorate with Southwestern decor with such happy memories of my trip there. I happened upon one of those hanging planters made of seashells that the homeowner was going to discard. I rescued it from a sad fate in a landfill, and will always think of Mandy's shell cottage.

I often wonder, "Whatever happened to just being a kid and not a consumer-in-training?" when I see all these young (really young) kids clutching phones and even "designer" handbags (both made in China). Even at restaurants, gadgets are replacing the simple joy of a crayon and paper. What will happen if children stop having creative outlets, and don't explore the natural world like Mandy did?

"She was looking at a whole new world: hundreds of trees stretching as far as the eye could see - most of them with that soft, silvery-green trunk and fine-textured bark that make the beech tree so easily recognizable. Sunlight filtered through the leaves in bright patches. The woods were open and clear - not dense at all. It looked wonderfully inviting and explorable."

Mandy is a recommended read for readers of all ages, and will make you want to go into the woods for your own adventure, and plant a packet of seeds and watch it grow.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, $3, Cinema Verite thrift shop, New York City.
I'm not sure why New York City keeps calling to me this year in literature. There was an article in the New York Times about how reading on a tablet can be distracting because of the temptation to look things up online. If I read Rules of Civility, set over the course of a year in 1938, on a tablet, I'd be looking things up all the time, whether it's the restaurant Katey Kontent dines in La Belle Epoque, now shuttered, to the Agatha Christie novels Katey starts reading (I can't believe I haven't read any Agatha Christie!)

This book very much reminded me of Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, but we're not following a real-life Hadley Hemingway looking back on her life, we're with Katey looking back on her own, with her friend Eve and the well-to-do Tinker who the women meet on New Year's Eve. I thought the major plot twist was a little underwhelming, but the language of this book was so beautiful.

I love the witty writing, like after hearing a story, one character remarks, "That's a Grand Canyon of a tale!" to after eating a iceberg salad with bleu cheese so divine, Katy remarks, "If I was a country, it would be my flag," to more contemplative passages, like this,

"Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades."

At my tea party at Alice's Tea Cup, one of my dining companions brought up the stunning beauty of language found in the letters of Civil War era, which had been recently on my mind. Ken Burn's Civil War soundtrack came into my life at Cinema Verite thrift shop and a letter had been read on it from a soldier who died. Even if we did write letters to our loved ones, I don't think our ability to express ourselves in that written forms exists. A mother of two teenagers bemoaned that her kids are talking like they text. More than just a threat to book stores, books, and civility (how uncivilized society seems since these handheld phones appeared), our language faces the greatest threat of all.

I get e-mails where people abbreviate anything and everything, and I hate when people call me "C." There's no abbreviations in Towles' book, only a love of the written word, and of books, which Katey devours and the author references so often, everything from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Thoreau's Walden.

Mandy loved books too. "She exchanged books at the local library at least once a week. The wonders of Robinson Crusoe and Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels were very real to her...

On Saturday morning, she helped out at the local grocery store. She was given a small sum of money, and she used it as she pleased. Most of her money was spent on her precious books and some paints, crayons and paper for painting and drawing."

I hope you love books too, and are reading something wonderful, creating something magical or are going to enjoy something in the natural world. Maybe it's just taking a moment to listen to the birds chatter or observing animals, plants and even people slowly start to awaken from their winter slumber, although old man winter has been pretty tame in 2012. Now if you will excuse me, I'm off to France, at least for some literary arm-traveling.

The Artist: More than Just a Valentine to Old Hollywood

Leave it to the French to pen a beautiful cinematic love letter to black and white silent films in The Artist. Have you seen it yet? I've seen it twice, and I have the soundtrack in regular rotation. I'd go see it a third time. I left the theater feeling infinitely better than I did before. For two glorious hours, I forgot about my troubles and stress.



The Artist is set between 1929 and 1932 and the Stock Market crash occurs during the film, yet people still flock in droves to the movies as escapism. I'm in the midst of Amor Towles' debut novel Rules of Civility, set in 1938 in New York City, and something he said in an interview struck a chord with me as I've been very drawn to old Hollywood films in the past year.

"It was a tough time for the country, we all understand that, but one of the interesting things about the thirties was as that was playing out - in that decade - was all of the Fed Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies...If you look at the seven most important Marks Brothers movies, Night at the Opera, and Duck Soup and Day at the Races, they were all from that decade. And swing music. So here's this period where people were losing their wealth and dispossessed and unemployed - very tumultuous timing - yet some of the most glamour sort of happy go lucky aspects of American culture history were happening simultaneously. It turns out there was a great appetite for getting lost in glamour at that time and the artistic community responded in kind. It was very different in Germany where you get German expressionism came out of that crisis and you know they were in crisis. Where we came from outerspace, you'd listen to swing music and you wouldn't guess this was a tough time for the country."

It's interesting to reflect now how the artistic community is responding to the economic turbulence. Hollywood is in a sentimental mood. Michelle Williams' brilliant turn as Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris which wistfully remembers the artistic creativity of Paris in the 1920s with Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald among its players. Even Meryl Streep's role as Margaret Thatcher, who like her politics or not, broke down barriers.

Overall, though, I don't understand our tabloid reality television culture and why amidst the economic woes we've gone down that road. I'll take the glamour highway over reality road myself. How much is shock value disguised as "art?" If aliens landed from outerspace in 2012, what would our culture say about us?

Like Owen Wilson's character in Midnight in Paris, Gil who was a writer who so longed to be in the midst of a thriving arts culture, George Valentin, the silent film actor in The Artist, is overwhelmed, and often depressed, by the fast moving world around him, which is so different than the one he knew and loved. It was a world he took for granted until it so rapidly altered. I think that's why I related to it so much. When he saw what "talkies" were going to look like, he wanted no part of it. If that's the future, you can have it, he told his manager.

When I look around in our new intrusive world of socially rude and addictive behavior with handheld phones with internet, the slow death of real books and book stores, Facebook (sorry, I go with my sister's name for it: Stalkerbook!), I feel the same way: if that's the future, you can have it. I miss going out for a nice meal without everyone having a device by their glass of wine or ignoring the person they went to the movie with. When Borders existed. When having "friends" wasn't a numbers game. A friend and fellow writer said to me, "I don't like the way our society is going." I don't like it either sometimes.

Thank goodness I have films like The Artist to escape to.