balmagowry

Yes! Why on earth do they think that you will ever, EVER want their product again? Same thing happened when I was a kid; fortunately in our case the foreign object was comparatively benign - a large lump of powdered red pepper lurking in a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup. Not something one expects to find - but on the other hand not gross enough to prevent one enjoying - and taking full advantage of - the "reward." As I remember, they didn't bother with coupons; a case of the actual CofM soup was delivered to our door. Useful stuff, and we never found pepper in another can. My mother was kind of a legend at this sort of thing, the Campbell's Soup caper being only the least of her achievements. There was the can of cat food which contained no foreign objects, indeed no objects whatever, having been sealed without ever being filled; ironically it ended up feeding the felines of the household for many weeks. Don't remember the details of the others, but there was one infuriating correspondence (with Macy's? I think) which culminated in her taking a form which they had impersonally cautioned her "not to fold, spindle or mutilate," folding it repeatedly, stabbing it viciously with a skewer, and running it several times through the sewing machine. It worked - at any rate, it got a response from an actual human being, for the first time in the whole series of transactions. (And I'm sure it ultimately netted her some sort of valuable compensation for whatever injury she was protesting - nothing more precious, however, than the sense of victory over the system.)

Yeah, OK - I got a little carried away there, I grant you - and of course the memoir-ish style of writing doesn't lend itself quite as well to an area like restaurant criticism where you have a certain number of hard topical facts that must be put across. But I can't quite buy your argument about relevance. Sure, not everything in the more personal kind of food writing will resonate the same way with everyone, but does that really mean you're not going to read it, or enjoy it, if it doesn't speak directly to your own experience? That seems rather a limited perspective. The thing I find most enthralling about a memoir, foody or otherwise, is that it introduces me to scenes and perspectives that are *not* familiar to me, that I could never have achieved on my own. One food writer I admire (OK, OK, I'm talking Carter again in this case, but she's a good example, what can I say) grew up on a farm in the midwest, and much of what first attracted her to food writing is what she learned there as a child; about cooking, from her grandmother and her mother; about fresh ingredients, about harvesting, about milking, about storing, about the social uses and rituals pertaining to food in that kind of community. All this informs her writing and her point of view - sometimes overtly, sometimes subliminally. Culturally, most of it is entirely foreign to me; I can learn from it, and I find it fascinating. And the farther removed it gets from my own experience. or my own century, the more fascinating I find it. Seems to me that the whole point of reading other people's writing is to broaden one's knowledge and understanding; conversely, much of the point of writing is to entertain as well as inform. Of course there is an onus on the writer to tell the story skilfully, and to make it relevant to the matter at hand, if such matter there be; that's the whole point. But there's a reason that writers - even writers at a comparable level of skill - are not interchangeable.

Hardly! I'd say your remarks are very much to the point. Couldn't agree with you more about the hazards of editing. Actually, I've been incredibly lucky in that regard - have managed to win all the battles that mattered most to me, which ultimately is what really counts, I guess - but the blood runneth cold at the thought of certain suggested edits that clearly betrayed the copy-readers' inexperience. (When did that function get relegated to the underpaid and undereducated apprentice level, I wonder. Maybe I don't want to know.) And I realize full well that one reason I've gotten off easy is that I've only written for formats with relatively slow turnaround. Uncle who was writing for a daily at the time tells nightmare tale of a music review wherein his editor carefully changed his mention of a "Savile Row suit" to "Seville Row suit" - without talking to him about it, of course (who has time for such niceties on a daily?), until after the fact. Editor confronts him with printed edition, shows him the "correction" and says something like "you're just lucky I caught this in time and kept you from embarrassing yourself." With support like that, who needs enemies?

Busted! That'll larn me to shoot off my mouth every time a smart-ass answer comes into my head. (Actually - nah, it probably won't, at that.) Just at the moment, I guess the answer is "remains to be seen." WWNorton has first refusal on my next book, but that and a coupla bucks'll get you on the subway. More to the point, there's no knowing whether or not they'll go for it (much has changed since the last one, both for them and for me) until I get my act together to finish the proposal and sell it, is there. Meanwhile, I write the occasional whimsically foody piece for Tin House; have one coming out in the next (spring) issue, but by the time we finished re-casting it to suit the theme for the issue it ended up being only loosely food-related. At least the title ("Dinner with the Borgias") still harks back to its earlier gastronomic intent.... In galleys now; not sure when it actually hits the stands - next month, I guess.

<simper> Modesty forbids.

And this from Bach, who was himself the music of the spheres! (Don't argue, just read Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Explains it all.) Chefs, I dunno, though I assume so. Certainly there are *cooks* of whom it is true. And cooks of whom it ain't. With cooking as with music (uh-oh, she's getting on her hobby-horse): there are those who have a fabulous ear, there are those who have perfect pitch, there are those who are reasonably competent but not scintillating; there are those who are tone-deaf. Oh gosh, we *are* getting a bit OT here... sorry. But it's like what we were saying over on the Jar Opening thread - at one end of the spectrum there are those to whom it comes naturally and from whom it flows felicitously; at the other, those who will *never* feel at home with it no matter how hard they work at it. (I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be somewhere in the first category.) And then there's everyone in-between.

GG and Pan, thank you both - I love catching a compliment I've fished for. Yeah, Jenny's a hot number and she knows it.

I know - I vas dere, Cholly. But though he practiced diligently and put enormous thought and energy into musical interpretation, there was still an element of the idiot-savant there, in the sense that the physical intricacies of the instrument came so naturally to him that he couldn't quite connect with the idea that other people didn't, *couldn't*, have the same facility. He didn't have to *worry* about being able to play the fiddle; but he could lose sleep over a ping-pong match.

What indeed - at any rate, that's exactly how he felt about it. Was always a bit puzzled by all the fuss, always more interested in working at things like carpentry or ping-pong which actually held a challenge for him. Re food writing in newspapers, I'd like to put in a good word for some of the people doing the job at our local paper, Newsday. While I certainly concur with what's been said about the declining quality of newspaper writing in general (not to mention the teeth-gnashingly infuriating lack of intelligent or even competent copy-editing), there are a few bright stars in the local firmament, and Newsday's food editor Sylvia Carter is among them. (Yes, she's a friend, but I admired her writing for years before we met.) OK, so what makes her stuff (and that of the other admirable writers mentioned above) so good? Not unlike a good stew, it has all the requisite ingredients and comes out greater than the sum of its parts. Start with fundamental competence in writing - no problems at the building-block levels of grammar and syntax. Next level up: a graceful turn of phrase, an ear for the rhythm of words and sentences, a sense of structure and direction. A sense of humor is also pretty crucial, as is a feel for nuance and irony. Next level up: knowledge of the subject - not necessarily encyclopedic, but intelligent and well-researched where necessary. Next level up: a great instinct for what constitutes A Story. Sylvia's case is a good example because, as editor for the section, she isn't limited to any particular form (i.e. restaurant criticism, etc.); she has free rein and she knows how to use it, and every week her short feature is a little personal think-piece, or a sense-memory, or a story about some marvelous character, some off-the-beaten-track discovery that has caught her fancy - and whatever it is, the subject itself is always engaging or indeed compelling; the treatment ranging between the down-home and the poetic. (Last week's was about the self-perpetuaing collection of plastic containers - is there anyone here who doesn't feel a little thrill of recognition at that topic? She's writing about ME, I always think.) Overall, it's freedom, knowledge, passion and humor, layered over a solid technical foundation, and that is true of every truly readable [food] writer I can think of, from Brillat-Savarin to Dumas to MFK Fisher to Elizabeth David to Ruth Reichl to... better stop there or I might run into chapters. But for some reason I'm reminded of Elizabeth Zimmermann calling herself The Opnionated Knitter; and indeed she was to knitting - and to writing about it - what some of the above are to food: passionate and whimsical and confident and utterly convincing. And those qualities, I think, are the difference between good [food] writing and really great, compelling [food] writing. (The word "food" being in brackets there because of course, as others have already remarked, there's nothing here that doesn't apply equally to any other discipline.) It occurs to me that there is one thing that may set food writing apart from other areas. I'm talking through my hat here - haven't thought this through and am interested in doing so and testing it - but it seems to me that food writing lends itself more than most other categories to a use of the writer's personal thoughts and feelings and experience. Why? Maybe because food is so universal; there's no one who isn't touched by it, there's no one who doesn't have important and visceral memories and feelings connected to it; no one can be truly indifferent to it. Food writing doesn't *require* the personal element, but as I think about it I find that the writers who charm and engage me most (partial list in previous graf...) are those who do inject something of themselves into their work. Who *give* of themselves; great food writing is, above all, generous. I love to feel that I'm comparing notes with them about something that affects us both, or that I'm being given a glimpse of someone else's life, an insight into a memory that really matters to someone. Food writing is - or at any rate can be - more *intimate* than most other forms. And to do it that way requires a special kind of openness and courage on the part of the writer. At what point does one draw the boundary line between food writing and memoir? Maybe one doesn't.

Thanks - not that I had much choice...! Does she remember it? It's an awfully long time ago, and I haven't mentioned it to her in quite some time - nor, oddly enough, has she raised the subject - so I don't know. I'm quite sure she doesn't remember anything after that first mouthful of soused fruit. Ain't it always the way - I'm the one who was abruptly sobered up that night. She certainly is not a big drinker now, though one of her more amusing off-the-record rants as a wine columnist is about the taboo on mentioning the buzz factor of any given wine. She writes an amusing, anti-pretentious column - it appears weekly in the Rocky Mountain News and can be read online at Wine and Rosen. (If you go there, do admire her headshot - I took it.)

Oh - Passover, of course. Age about 7. None of your Man-o-Manischewitz, though - not that I'd have known this at the time, but knowing my family it has to have been a pretty decent burgundy. I don't imagine I really had much of it; but at that age it doesn't take much to, um, make you feel kinda funny.... Actually, they tell me that at 2or 3 I was fond of guzzling from a grandparent's beer glass if opportunity arose. Hmmmmm - funny, I don't seem to remember anything about it. Then once you got to be 13, you were allowed to join in "The Game" on New Year's Eve, which meant you had access to the Bola. A powerful but innocuous-tasting punch, not sweet, based on fruit which had been macerated in brandy for several days (during which process you could get a nice buzz just from taking a whiff). I, having been warned, got off fairly easy with this stuff, but my cousin was not so lucky; she wasn't crazy about the drink but she *loved* the fruit, and kept going back for more of it. No one noticed until she keeled over. She ended up staying the night. Most of it in my bathtub, as I kept having to haul her in there and clean her up. So maybe I didn't get off so easy after all. She is now a wine writer.

Mmmmmmm.... steak and kidney pud...!

This is sort of a lateral outgrowth from the Other People's Kitchen thread. We all have these - kitchen habits that may have made sense once upon a time, but that now bear no special relation to rhyme or reason. But we keep doing them the same way because they're part of our rhythm, and if something thwarts us it throws us into a tailspin, even though there are plenty of sensible alternatives. These things constitute part of our cooking vocabulary - in fact, sometimes they're literally part of a language that outsiders can't follow. With me (embarrassingly enough, now that I've raised this I suddenly can't think of anything I do that's really wildly idiosyncratic) it's using certain pots/utensils/knives for certain tasks, and I guess also the way I organize storage and the containers I use for certain types of ingredients and leftovers. There is ONE POT that I always use to cook rice; if it happens to be unavailable I throw up my hands and mutter dire imprecations and feel thrown off my stride. This is silly, because I have five other pots that would be perfectly appropriate... but they aren't My Rice Pot. And I've been known to declare "but you CAN'T put that into that square container - it's WRONG!" when of course there's no earthly reason NOT to use said container, because it fits the whatever perfectly - it just happens not to be the one I've always used for the purpose. OK, here's a dumb example. I grew up putting away glasses and mugs upside-down in a cupboard, because that's what I was taught and it seemed the logical thing to do. In my present house, however, there is one exception: the cupboard where the mugs live, in which I always place them right-side-up. This came about because when we moved into the house certain parts of it (even after an industrial-strength professional cleaning) still carried unpleasant odors left by the previous owner; that cupboard in particular had something nasty about it, and even though I had scrubbed it out myself I still wasn't comfortable thinking about the business end of my coffee cup coming in contact with its inside surface. But that was TWELVE YEARS AGO. All trace of the taint disappeared long ago... and still my mugs face up and I refuse to let them do otherwise. Go figure. There's also a system of shorthand names for things and processes, developed over the years between me and my mother. Much of this has evolved from long you-had-to-be-there anecdotes into absolute nonsense, but if I find a package with a cryptic notation in her handwriting I always know exactly what it contains and why she wrote it the way she did. "CI ch. br." or "br. cr. H" or "1 BIG lencho" or - well, you get the idea. Like decoding someone's Private Freezer Cypher. Anyone else? Habits you cling to? Where'd they come from? Make sense? Did they ever? Why?

I call it my pusher. Where is my pusher?! I yell from the kitchen. Great name. Unfortunately I can't use it because it belongs to something else: the little silver rake thing that I had when I was a baby just learning to eat at table; used to shove things like peas into the matching spoon. Talk about nostalgia - hardly anyone uses those any more, either. (The good thing is, if I give one as a baby present I can generally be pretty sure it won't be competing with half-a-dozen similar gifts!)

Fair enough. Does individual mileage vary more in anything than in cooking? I doubt it, somehow. That's the thing about cooking in other people's kitchens: if they care at all about cooking they have their working environments set up to suit all their own little quirks and habits. Walk into someone else's kitchen with your own set of quirks and habits, and no wonder you feel like you're on the wrong planet. Creatures of habit we really are, and not all of them make any sense at all - some of them probably never did. But we cling to them and feel uncomfortable without them; they are part of us. As it happens I don't consider my weakness for wooden spatulas to be particularly irrational, given the application, but I know a lot of the other things I do probably are. But it doesn't matter: they're what makes me comfortable in the kitchen. and they work for me. Which is precisely what makes one's own kitchen such a deeply personal environment, no? And that's also why you feel that delighted little thrill of recognition when you spot, in a new acquaintance's kitchen, that same unusual and indispensable whatsis that you have in yours but have never seen anywhere else. With my above-mentioned close friend it was the Colony Cup, another of those brilliant gadgets that far surpass anything on the market now and that therefore inevitably are long gone, discontinued, unavailable. I treasure mine, and hers is the *only* other one I have ever seen, so the discovery sparked one of those "Aha!" moments. I figured, clearly there's something very *right* happening here. And there was.

Thank you! Yes, the best time imaginable - we were the most perfect of colleagues and collaborators. There were quite a lot of adventures like that, and every now and then we had to look at each other and stop laughing long enough to gasp, "Can you believe they're actyually *paying* us to have this much fun?" Ain't it the truth - and not just for dark roux. I really don't understand how people make béchamel or velouté or gravy or - well, anything thickened like that - without them. I mean, obviously they do it, and obviously I too must have done it on occasion (though I've blocked the traumatic memory), but... talk about wanting to have the right tool for the right job! nothing else feels right in my hand. What creatures of habit we are.

I thought the same - and then found I couldn't get them any more! If you know where they're to be had, please tell. I want to stock up. Broke one in half once - kept the pieces, though I don't really think it can be fixed. Alas. Maybe I could make them - shouldn't be too hard. I got lucky at a garage sale a couple of years ago, scoring three or four of them. But when I go to look for them in shops I've only found that poor approximation, the paddle end too big, bent, not angled enough. Most disturbing. Whose law is it that only the best things are guaranteed to become unavailable just when you learn you can't live without them?

Lucky me, I have no trouble at all cooking in my mother's kitchen; it's where I learned to cook, and feels as natural to me as my own, perhaps even more so. Both are eccentric in roughly the same way. My closest friend and my closest cousin both have huge kitchens compared to mine, each overflowing with implements - unexpectedly ill-supplied for my tastes, however, though I must admit I do covet my cousin's huge gleaming prep table. (As well I might, my own kitchen being far too small to hold anything like it.) I kind of enjoy the challenge of improvising, though. The two things I miss most - and really ought to start bringing with me - are my tiny tiny paring knife and my wooden spatulas (that's probably not the right term, but you know what I mean, they're flat paddle-ish things with an angled tip - I adore them and use them for stirring/scraping just about anything as it cooks). The knife was a present from my mother when she bought her own (so there's one in her kitchen, making me feel right at home), and I think that was shortly before they went out of production. You can't get 'em any more - I haven't seen one like it in, oh, about 25 years. My husband calls it "Dr. Paring's Prototype," and he clearly understands that it is simply off-limits to him. It has a 1-1/2-inch blade and just the right curve in the handle, and I always feel a bit lost if I have to peel an onion with anything else. Once it accidentally went into the garbage, and I spent an interesting hour in the basement of the apartment building, rooting through the garbage compactor. Found it, of course - they'd have had to demolish the building around me before I'd have given up the search. My mother's vanished too, for several months, and she went into intense mourning; eventually it turned up in the compost, unscathed if a bit smelly, oh happy day. But what this thread really reminds me of is the occasion when my mother and I were invited to give a lecture and tasting at the San Diego Maritime Museum. Since that's on the opposite coast, of course all arrangements had to be made by proxy. The museum director, a good friend, had written to ask me what "special equipment" we would need for our preparations - big pots, serving dishes, utensils, etc. - and I had sent back a comprehensive list and was pleased to hear that everything on it would be available and ready to hand. What I hadn't realized, however, was that the one item they didn't have for us was... a kitchen! It turned out that the whole operation was to be conducted aboard the paddle-steamer Berkeley (permanently docked on San Diego Bay, it forms the main part of the museum), and our "prep area," for lack of a better term, was the afterdeck of the steamer itself. The museum had borrowed a couple of those huge propane camping stoves - four powerful burners - and there *was* a small faucet nearby (cold only); and they had borrowed everything on our list from the hotel across the street. But of course it had never occurred to me to specify any of the ordinary everyday stuff that you just assume will be available in even the worst of kitchens: spoons, knives, bowls, little dishes, whisks, cutting boards, measuring cups, doodads, odds and ends to improvise with. Nothing! The blessed docent came to our rescue - scurried off to her own house and brought back a large bouquet of miscellaneous kitchen utensils - and in the event we managed very well. One of the funniest pictures I've ever taken of my mother is of her improvising a mortar and pestle out of two odd-sized pan lids, giggling uncontrollably the while. We had another near-panic when an adventurous gull tried to steal a bag of cubed ham from where it was thawing on the deck - this crisis too was averted in the nick of time, the two of us flapping dementedly at the bird until it dropped the tasty morsel and retreated. Whew. And the event was a huge success. Can you tell that this theme chimes with something I'm working on? A piece not only about cooking in other people's kitchens but also about the kind of people with whom it's possible to share a kitchen. I haven't met very many of them, but there are a few out there, and it's wonderful to meet a new one and to know instantly and mutually (this happened to me a few weeks ago and it really was kind of like love at first sight) that you won't have to explain anything, that you'll just fall into each other's rhythm and tastes and know instinctively where to look for the Tellicherry pepper.

Just looked on eBay. A couple of bucks, did I say? Sheesh - there's one going for over $22. There's another, though - *not* labeled Gilhoolie but clearly the same thing, at $1.99. Oh, and I also spotted a couple of the other kind, the one I prefer: turns out it's made by Edlund, and at least two listings that I saw indicate same in the title. Going rate seems to be 5 bucks or so - well worth it, I think.

It does seem a bit much, though - especially at the price. There used to be a marvelous gadget called a Gilhoolie - hard to describe, but it had a double handle and adjustable jaws which you could clamp sort of like a vise-grip - worked brilliantly. Torque, don't you know. Don't think they've been made for, oh 40 years or so, but every now and then I spot one selling for a couple of bucks on eBay; over the past couple of years this has resulted in unusual house-presents for several of my friends. I have another marvelous old mechanical jar-opener, which actually I like even better; again, adjustable jaws, and a T-shaped handle above that makes for a really solid grip. That and a good wide rubber band around the jar itself - I always find with the reallyseriously stuck ones that the worst of the job is gripping the jar so it doesn't turn with the top. Not that either of these would be any use with those huge Costco jars.... For those I too use a 6' tall photographer (and former wrestling coach, which is probably the real critical factor).

Coming a little late to this party, I'd like to range myself with Marie-Antoine Carême on this subject. He it was who wrote that the fine arts are five in number, the fifth being architecture, of which pastry is a branch (sorry, that's paraphrased, but it's pretty close). He also called it perilous and heroic - look at his pastry designs and you can't argue. More generally, though, I think cuisine can be both art and craft, and that the demarcation between the two can vary infinitely according to context. But I think the decisive factor, as in any other art form, is inspiration. You can cook as a job, you can cook by rote, you can cook as a chore; but if you enjoy cooking and have any instinct for the process, for how flavors and textures can come together and harmonize, then you transcend the purely functional and you create something wonderful, something that communicates and resonates with everyone who tastes and smells it, so that they *have* to exclaim about it. That's inspiration; that's art. And it doesn't have to be anything complicated. It can be an elegant soufflé or it can be a humble tomato sandwich. If it strikes the chord - it's art.