"Cooking for Mr. Latte" by Amanda Hesser

[mags]

It's interesting that you bring up Laurie Colwin, Ruth, because I was thinking about her food-books as I was reading Amanda Hesser's, and trying to lay my finger on why I so love the one and am somewhat put off by the other. Off the top of my head (and this isn't quite fair, because I'm currently reading the Hesser book, and haven't re-read Laurie Colwin for a good few years), what I don't see in Colwin's books is either A) any sense of wanting/needing to control other people's food experiences, or B) any sense that the writer's preferences are inherently the Right ones, and that those who have other preferences are wrong. And it's those two aspects of Hesser's book that bug me.

In fact, Laurie Colwin did a fair amount of mocking her own preferences - talking about her passion for weird-ass eggplant dishes, for example, or her deep-rooted conviction that hamburgers are "restaurant food." And she was good at noting that food serves different functions for different people at different times -- there's a story about her making a lovely potato salad for a visiting foreign friend, only to find that what he really craves is the kind of sweet, gloppy potato salad that can be found in diners across the country, because that, for him, is the taste of America.

Ultimately, what I find in Colwin's books is a sense that food -- cooking it, eating it, sharing it -- is about joy. And what I find in Hesser's book is a sense that food is about perfection and fear -- that through the perfection of one's food (the food one makes or buys or orders) one can stave off the otherwise persistent fear of somehow not being up to snuff. Laurie Colwin has an essay about what she calls "The Cuisine of the Refined Slob," in which she talks about letting go of the quest for perfection, about the pleasures to be found in roasting an untrussed chicken, surrounded perhaps with chunks of whatever vegetables are hanging out in the vegetable bin. I can't imagine Amanda Hesser embracing the Cuisine of the Refined Slob, and I think that's too bad. Life is full of enough occasions for judgment -- by other people and, even more insidiously, by the critical voices in our own heads. Laurie Colwin, to my mind, presents the kitchen and the dinner table as a refuge from all that agida. For Amanda Hesser, they seem to be -- mostly -- yet another arena in which failure, anything other than perfection, means getting eaten by lions.

You make a good point in noting that Colwin wrote very definitely from the position of a young mother. In fact, the whole Cuisine of the Refined Slob thing, she says, was a necessary outgrowth of her realization that her kid had used the expensive trussing string to tie the kitchen chairs together. I think Amanda Hesser writes equally definitely from a position of young, hyper-competitive urban anxiety. Within the context of autobiography, writers can only write from their own experiences, and it's entirely natural -- hey, we're all narcissists -- to assume that one's current status (young mom, striving single, whatever) stands in for the crowd. As it happens, neither one of those crowds really includes me (though I'm probably closer to Hesser than to Colwin). But if I had to CHOOSE a crowd to belong to, choose a way of relating to food, I know which one I'd opt for.

[dahlsk]

I just finished "Mr. Latte" as well as her earlier book "The Cook and the Gardener". I think she does mellow out by the end of 'Latte', she even gives him his real name in the book (Tad) and drinks beer! Ooh, what a rebel But, I overall enjoyed both books, in spite of her attitude at the beginning. I would also recommend "The Cook and the Gardener" even more than "Mr. Latte" because it really gives the reader a picture of living and cooking for a year in rural France.

Cheers, dahlsk

[formerly grueldelux]

certainly when in Rome it would be almost uncivilized to not learn and pretty much follow local customs.

I'm not even sure I agree with this, though I'm of two minds about it. Amanda's stated reason for getting peeved at her grandmother for eating hearty breakfasts while on a trip to Rome is that Granny should experience the rhythm and structure of a traditional ROman lunch, which she is unable to do if she's full from breakfast. But I don't entirely buy that, nor do I completely buy into the notion that one *should* follow all local customs when visiting.

I was actually speaking only on the subject of coffee customs, not food customs in general, but I realize using the phrase "when in Rome" confused things. What I mean about the latte question is simply that we should learn as much as we can from countries with more developed coffee cultures, but once we learn to appreciate a fine espresso, for example, we are free to develop our own culture around it. A perfect espresso is great after dinner, but so is warm espresso-spiked milk. Take your pick. Just because Italians do things a certain way doesn't mean we need to at home, provided we treat the coffee itself with the repect that they do. Amanda Hesser, at least in the Mr. Latte pieces, seems to think it's bad form to have a latte after dinner yet she's the one showing bad form for caring. It's the overreaching kid from the sticks coming to Capital City and trying too hard to be wised-up. If the book ends with a bit of realization along these lines, then great, I take it all back.

So on that issue, she's just wrong, in my book. The other stuff is more complicated. I'd certainly be bothered if someone I brought to Italy wouldn't at least attempt to resist the hotel buffet.

"Uncivilized" is a bit of an exaggeration, but I do think you should try to roll with the local customs as much as possible. But when you wake up in Rome powerfully hungover and desperate for coffee but late for lunch with friends at a restaurant and with no time to get a coffee at the hotel or on the way to the restaurant, and the waiter jokingly but seriously refuses to give you an espresso until after lunch, stupid american, feel free to pelt him with antipasti. And ask for ketchup and coke.

[Jinmyo]

However, some feel her to be winsome.

[mongo_jones]

clearly "sex and the city" has even more to answer for than i'd thought.

[Bux]

Off the top of my head (and this isn't quite fair, because I'm currently reading the Hesser book, and haven't re-read Laurie Colwin for a good few years), what I don't see in Colwin's books is either A) any sense of wanting/needing to control other people's food experiences, or B) any sense that the writer's preferences are inherently the Right ones, and that those who have other preferences are wrong. And it's those two aspects of Hesser's book that bug me.

When you speak of "any sense that the writer's preferences are inherently the Right ones," I think you also hit on the reason I've not liked her restaurant reviews. My sense has been that they are too much about her taste. I had a similar problem with much of her earliest writing in the Times. She made assumptions about, or ignored, the facts of culinary life before her time, as if her position at the Times allowed her to dictate custom, etiquette and history. A kind of "narcissism" may be the common fault. I've always held her editors responsible to some degree. There should have been a mentor there for her.

[mags]

I've always held her editors responsible to some degree. There should have been a mentor there for her.

I haven't written for the Times for a number of years, but my sense is that they, like an awful lot of newspapers and magazines, are kind of desperately in search of an audience. With that in mind, I suspect that Amanda Hesser's articles have tended to do exactly what the panjandrums at the Times would like them to do -- speak directly to a specific audience that has money and is therefore appealing to advertisers. Unfortunately, the specific audience I think she's speaking to is made up of the Young and the Anxious, permanently petrified that they will somehow put a foot wrong, order "incorrectly," speak admiringly of yesterday's hot chef, fail to recognize the critical, essential difference between Brittany and Hawaiian sea salt. That's not the audience I'd most like the Times to speak to, but for some unaccountable reason, they have failed to ask my opinion. And frankly, I don't see them making choices that are any dumber than what's going on throughout the publishing biz. Everybody's running scared, and panic doesn't tend to make for solid analytical thinking.

All of which is to say that I bet she does have plenty o'mentors, and they're happy as hell with what she writes.

[Bux]

I had a more old fashioned definition of mentor in mind. I suppose I had a more old fashioned notion of career goals as well. You're right about a lot of awful newspapers and magazines who have a ready audience with cash in hand.

[Fat Guy]

It certainly seems to me that all the defects in Amanda Hesser's writings, noted here and elsewhere, boil down to one thing: insecurity. And the combination of insecurity and power is rarely a pleasant one. Which is kind of sad, because she has no reason to be insecure: she's smart, an excellent writer, knowledgeable, healthy, young, pretty, thin, successful, prosperous, married . . . I'm not exactly sure what more she's going to need in order to bury this unfortunate bad-attitude bitchy-insecure streak of hers.

[maggiethecat]

Terrific, thought-provoking post, mags.

I haven't read The Cook and the Gardener, nor the collected Mr. Latte pieces, but I'll help write the dissenting opinion with Ruth. I thoroughly enjoyed the Tad and Amanda pieces when they ran in the Times mag, I thought the drawings were sweet and yes, winsome, and I cared not a whit that the writer hung out all her insecurities to dry on a great big clothesline. So Amanda isn't yet up there with St. Laurie and St. Mary Frances as a confessional food writer, or just plain writer -- she's young yet.

(Note: I too, in a tiny way, know what it's like to get hammered by people who don't like your writing because they think you're weird, sick or silly. Oh dear, the emails I got from absolute strangers after the Breastfeeding piece ran on TDG. )

[balmagowry]

(Note:  I too, in a tiny way, know what it's like to get hammered by people who don't like your writing because they think you're weird, sick or silly.  Oh dear, the emails I got from absolute strangers after the Breastfeeding piece ran on TDG. )

WHAT??? Where are they, the Philistines? Don't they know smart, daring and self-deprecating when they see it? Lemme at 'em and I'll whump 'em for you!

[mags]

Maggie -- You now, I certainly don't remember reacting badly to Amanda's pieces when I originally read them in the Times. It may be that by reading them as a collection, in book-form, I was just hit with overload, in the same way that a friend who tearfully confesses some long-hidden insecurity is endearingly vulnerable...but the same friend, making similar confessions night after night on long, snuffly phone calls is a pain in the ass.

Ruth -- in re-reading your post ( I am DESPERATELY trying to avoid working on my taxes), I was struck by one sentence: "And why shouldn't she be frustrated when her attempts to share something with her grandmother were thwarted?" What interested me about that was the extent to which it plays into past threads here, about a guest's obligations vs. those of a host. And actually, what really interested me was the extent to which it plays into some larger ideas I've been playing with for a while, about the various ways in which food is used -- and, specifically, the way it is sometimes used as a mechanism for control.

Major thread-hijack here, I guess. What I mean is that I think there are a couple of models for the relationship between a guest and a host (ok, there are probably zillions, but just two come to mind right now). The first is the "hospitality" model, according to which the host's job, as I see it, is to make the guest as happy as possible. According to that model, a meal is a gift, and the purpose of a gift is to please the recipient, to provide something that will make THEM happy, even if it doesn't meet the giver's tastes. We've all heard stories about the husband who gives his wife a power-drill for her birthday, buying something he would like rather than asking what would please her. To my mind, that's the antithesis of hospitality, not unlike making pork chops for a friend who keeps Kosher.

The other model is the "artistic" model, according to which the host's job, as artist, is to make the most wonderful meal he/she can dream up, with 'wonderful' being defined exclusively in terms of the host's presumably elevated sensibilities. Within the context of this model, the guest's tastes really don't enter at all into the equation; his/her job is essentially to be the audience, the passive appreciator of the host's art.

These two models, and the wide grey space between them, have been discussed over and over on these boards, in the context of both restaurant and home-cooked meals. As I see it, the issue comes down to the question of Who Gets to Control the Meal? In the hospitality model, the guest's tastes define and control the menu -- and the pace of the meal, the size, etc. In the artistic model, the host is entirely in control, and a guest who attempts to assert any control, to state needs or preferences, is being a Bad Guest.

So, getting back to the sentence of yours that I left WAAAAYY behind, somewhere around the turnoff to I-95, if you are "sharing" an experience with someone...does that mean their job is to remain entirely passive, allowing you to orchestrate the experience according to what you regard as the ideal? IMO, that's not really sharing, it's.....controlling. For me, sharing implies a certain mutuality, an experience in which both parties participate.

This is really off-base, but I'm reminded of a concert I went to more than 20 years ago. Laurie Anderson was playing her fiddle and doing her thang in Boston, and it just irritated the hell out of me. And on reflection, I thought that what irritated me was the sense that the audience didn't exist for her; it was an entirely one-way experience. Her artistry completely defined the experience, and if we had all gotten up and left, it wouldn't have mattered a whit -- with the small exceptions of applause and the box-office take. I really hate that feeling, of being completely disregarded, and it's that sense of disregard that I'm reacting to in Hesser's book and in your sentence about sharing.

I don't at all believe that a guest's tastes should entirely determine the experience -- that because I hate mushrooms, garlic, fish, dairy products and any plates that aren't white, you should be obliged to create a meal that conforms entirely to my tastes. In that instance, you're not a host, you're hired help (possibly even without the hire), and that isn't "sharing," either, in my book. But basically, I believe that if your guest is hungry first thing in the morning, and you get peeved because you want her instead to be hungry for lunch, you're not sharing, you're trying to control her food, her appetite, her experience. And that leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth.

[maggiethecat]

You now, I certainly don't remember reacting badly to Amanda's pieces when I originally read them in the Times. It may be that by reading them as a collection, in book-form, I was just hit with overload, in the same way that a friend who tearfully confesses some long-hidden insecurity is endearingly vulnerable...but the same friend, making similar confessions night after night on long, snuffly phone calls is a pain in the ass.

This occurred to me an hour or so ago; when I came back to post , I found that you'd beaten me to it. I'm not sure at all that I'd enjoy the Mr. Latte pieces as a collection, and your objections make much more sense to me from that perspective. For example, I adored "Ab/Fab" when I watched a half-hour episode once every seven days. This winter I took out a video compilation to cheer me up on a gloomy February Saturday, and found that it was, yes, overload -- Patsy and Eddie began to grate.

(Oh, I am so with you about Laurie Anderson!)

[balmagowry]

I shall now sin in several ways. I shall commit the sin of digression, by picking up on a semi-OT tangent and running with it; I shall compound that with the sin of redundancy, by doing so without first hunting down previous threads that have already covered the subject; worse yet, I shall commit the sin of irrelevance, by taking the tangent farther afield than it has yet reached.

Or maybe not, because ultimately we may really be talking about the same thing: good-will and generosity of spirit are central to this thread, after all. Anyway, mags's post about hospitality has struck a chord near to my heart, so I hope I can be forgiven for a few remarks on that subject.

Yes, there are "zillions" of models for the relationship between a guest and a host; many of them are very interesting and quite a few of them are workable, but in real life there is only one that I give a fig about. I think the ideal consists of an informal mutual courtesy in which each party defers to the other, but not to the point of making the other uncomfortable. The onus is slightly greater on the host, but the guest's role is perhaps a little more difficult. The host's job is to set the guest entirely at ease and to accommodate the guest's needs and preferences to the degree possible; the guest's, to accept such treatment graciously and to know (when applicable) where to draw the line between offering to help and getting in the way. There's no magic formula for getting it right - the dynamic has to be negotiated anew in every host/guest juxtaposition - but mutual and equal good will, accompanied by a certain flexibility, are really all it takes, I think.

I do buy into the notion that "the host's job... is to make the guest as happy as possible"; but if the host is doing that job then the guest bears an equal responsibility to be as happy as possible! Also, making one's guest happy should not be at all incompatible with making oneself happy. If I make dinner for someone, how much am I motivated by a desire to please that person, how much by a desire to show off something I'm proud of? Don't know exactly, but I think it's probably roughly 50/50, and I think that's as it should be. As MFKF has said (and I've seen it cited in at least two sigs around here), the sharing of a meal is a pretty intimate business. If it isn't an act of genuine friendship (or doesn't convincingly simulate one), there's little point in it. (Yes, I know, business lunches; occasions of state; but they're not exempt - greater formality, and less sincerity in the good will, is all.)

I can't pretend to have read St. Augustine (one of these days...); this passage and its rough translation come to me courtesy of Robertson Davies, whom I love.

Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros dulciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari.

Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.

It's a good model for conducting a friendship, a tutorial, a love affair, a marriage; and - except for the reading of books, which would of course be rude at table - it's not a bad model for the contractual relationship between host and guest.

Here's another - Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey:

We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time.

End of that digression. I shall now go forth and sin no more. (And if you believe that, can I interest you in a nice little suspension bridge...?)

[ruthcooks]

I just dug out my "Mr. Latte" and re-read the grandmother-in-Rome chapter. Still, I get only Amanda's sense of loss and sorrow at not being able to share a new food experience with her grandmother, and get no sense of her trying to be in control. (Perhaps I was so predisposed toward her writing before I picked up the book, that I just can't see it.) Was not part of the reason for the trip to experience the food?

As to her criticisms of Tad's latte--and other food--habits and preferences, I felt Amanda's rather wistful-to-perhaps-desperate hope that they would be compatible in an area which meant so much to her. Would that I had been so foresighted. I spent over 30 years married to a man who had a limited interest in food and an even more limited list of foods he would eat. What a damper that put on my lifetime joy of food and cooking. And perhaps his refusal to try asparagus and twenty other vegetables had a lot to do with trying to control me in a way he knew would hurt.

Making my food preferences known does not necessarily mean I'm trying to control others. If my dining partner thinks my beef stew needs more salt and I disagree, so what? But if I refuse to produce the salt shaker because I know that my seasoning is perfect, THEN it becomes a controlling issue.

As for fear and insecurity showing up in Amanda's writing, no wonder. Here she is at a young age, held up as a food authority by none other than the lofty, pretentious and know-it-all NYT. Thousands or hundreds of thousands are just waiting for her to misstep or misspeak, especially those sour grapes food writers who covet her job.

I do understand how you can become irritated with a writer who harps on the same theme all the time. There are several who irritate me also, for varying reasons.

[balmagowry]

As to her criticisms of Tad's latte--and other food--habits and preferences, I felt Amanda's rather wistful-to-perhaps-desperate hope that they would be compatible in an area which meant so much to her.  Would that I had been so foresighted.  I spent over 30 years married to a man who had a limited interest in food and an even more limited list of foods he would eat.  What a damper that put on my lifetime joy of food and cooking.  And perhaps his refusal to try asparagus and twenty other vegetables had a lot to do with trying to control me in a way he knew would hurt.

Ooooh - that one hits close to home. I can count myself lucky that in my case it was only (only!) 15 years. Although, to be fair, taste in food wasn't really his arena - but he more than made up for that by his self-imposed dishwashing and kitchen-cleaning martyrdom. Definitely had a lot to do with "trying to control me in a way he knew would hurt." (Not just trying, either.) Another nasty kitchen tactic: he didn't have any particular aptitude for cooking, but every once in a while he would persuade me to teach him how to make something he particularly liked; from then on he would become terribly offended if I made it myself because in his view it was now "his."

Cooking as a mechanism for personal control. Creepy.

I keep having these troubling little flashes of my main man Careme calling cuisine "the spearhead of French diplomacy," but of course then I remember that's a whole different gig. That's not control, it's geopolitical influence, in which all's fair.

[mags]

Ohhh yeesh, when it comes to food as control....<shuddering>. I remember my crazy Swedish roomate (no offense to Swedes, he just happened to be both crazy and Swedish) making me feel horrible for buying decadent, expensive stuff like meat, when if I had any true sense of solidarity with the downtrodden, I would be...I dunno, sucking rocks. He used to make what he called "Cambodian coffee" (recipe: allow roomate to make decent coffee; sneer at her for her repulsively bougie tastes; use roomate's coffee grounds to make a new pot of pale beige coffee). Once when I made chicken stock and then thrifitly picked the meat off the bones to make chicken salad, he fished the bones out of the garbage -- he did, I will admit, wash off the ashtray-dumpings and eggshells with which they had gotten covered -- and used them to make what he called "chicken stew," which involved chicken bones, bananas, and a large quantity of ketchup. He was deeply into the whole "food is fuel" mentality, and used my interest in good food to make me feel A) fat and B) insufficiently left-wing. Horrible.

And his sister used to get up at 4 in the morning to scrub the kitchen baseboards with a toothbrush, but that's another story.

[John Whiting]

And the combination of insecurity and power is rarely a pleasant one.

Stop and allow that to reverberate for a while . . .

[Mabelline]

Paranoia makes for a strange requisite if one is judging the works of others, no?

[Verjuice]

Hm.

I thought the book delivered exactly what it promised to.

It had a pink gingham dust jacket, but so what?

I thought Amanda's book was quality lunchtime reading. It improved my spirits and my appetite, which is all that I hoped for.

And I appreciated her walking the tightrope between introspective self-deprecation and her high and mighty culinary soapbox. I found it rather charming, actually. I'm tired of all the moderate writing out there. Amanda was feisty and spunky and shameless enough for it to endear her to me, regardless of whether or not I agreed with her. Granted this might not have been the case if she were twice her age, but whatever. I still think she's special.

Didn't anyone else think she was being tongue-in-cheek? She even admits to be a snob- bravo.

Or maybe I just have a hard time taking the book seriously in the first place because the cover is so outrageously frivolous

[maggiethecat]

Or maybe I just have a hard time taking the book seriously in the first place because the cover is so outrageously frivolous

Food writing and dustjackets need a healthy jolt of frivolity! If Hesser was writing for anyone but the Times I doubt that most readers would be anything but charmed.

[redfox]

I am pretty sure I would be anything but charmed, regardless of where the pieces had been published -- the main factor that being published in the Times has played in my dislike of the Mr. Latte articles is that this way I was exposed to them, while otherwise I might not have been. I certainly remember finding them incredibly irritating when they first ran.

But I will say that somewhere in her columns, she provided a recipe for pasta with drained yogurt and caramelized onions that remains a favorite of mine, and for that I will be always grateful.

[Comfort Me]

And the combination of insecurity and power is rarely a pleasant one.

Stop and allow that to reverberate for a while . . .

I think I may have finally -- after all these years of therapy -- figured out my mother.

So much makes sense now.

Oh -- it was David Leites' interview with Missus Latte that led me to eGullet in the first place.

Must go think about that whole "Mom...insecurity...power thing some more. Hmm. If I was able to quit therapy, I could save enough for that Daycor stove I've been eyeing lacciviously!

[John Whiting]

Food writing and dustjackets need a healthy jolt of frivolity! 

Food writing's guilty secret is its intellectual poverty. John Thorne

[sassybat]

i also really enjoyed "cooking for mr. latte." i just picked it up at the bookstore and read it before i even knew these were pieces from the new york times. i liked how the book told stories of her experiences with people and food and included recipes that she liked.

i agree with ruthcooks about feeling amanda's sense of loss at her inability to share her desire to dine, roman-style, with the rest of her family. a big part of amanda's excitement to go to italy was to dine the way italians do, and to eat true italian food, but if everyone else with her on the trip didn't want to dine roman-style, and didn't share her enthusiasm for dining, then that also affected her own pleasure during the trip.

i thought it was charming, and i thought she addressed her snobbishness and ignorance about matters (the indian guy's visit comes to mind) with humor. the book seemed like a journey for her to come to terms with her perfection issues and love of food, as well as her attempts to share her love of food with others, particularly mr. latte.