gastropoda

I have to admit it’s kinda hard to focus on food silliness when the bat guano insanity is out of control these days (is an institution best known for using little boys as birth control  really trying to take women back 50 years?) Thank allah, again, that Julia left such amazing letters proving the Republicans were just as whacked when she was struggling to create MTAOFC. Clearly, they’ve never recovered from cassoulet moving in on “real American” casserole.

Also, too, I keep thinking how bizarre it is that no one would ever have considered Julia for an op-ed gig — she was just a “chef.” But when you read her collected letters to Avis  DeVoto, all you can do is marvel at her hyper-informed, agile, open mind and her often poisonous pen. In real life, even at her peak, though, what marked her was modesty. If someone had thought to ask her to solve all the world’s problems through food, I suspect she would have had the good sense to STFU. If you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, you also can’t pivot from fat to fear with credibility.

Even acknowledging this probably only encourages the willfully stupid, but a certain heritage hire who will never learn that a Nobel prizewinner won for a reason decided to take him on, yet again, for his smart post saying kitchens really are not the space-age transformations we might have once expected — many more advances were made from 1900 to 1950 than from 1950 till today. Ms. Idjit of the Himalayan Pink Salt, being younger and of course smarter, begs to differ. She owns a 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook, you see, and the recipes therein prove no one had a blender or a mixer or whatever back then. Even aluminum foil was unknown! Start with the Googleable fact that stand mixers were not rarities in American kitchens 60 years ago — you can find models from before 1954 on eBay today. (My dirt-poor mom taught me to bake using hers.) Blenders? More than a million sold by 1954. And crappy cookware pre-All-Clad? Our dirt-poor family did fine with cast iron. Ms. Born Yesterday really needs to get in more. I cook in a 1929 kitchen, only moderately altered: I can stand at the stove and reach the refrigerator and the sink — the cabinets she cannot imagine holding up are doing fine; a stove older than I am, and in better shape, kicks the BTUs out of anything you can buy now. The design abides. What’s saddest is that one of the leaders of the Food Coven hyped this horseshit, just after touting the Julia letters compilation in which Mme. Child and her Cambridge correspondent endlessly document how advanced kitchens and appliances (and ingredients) were even in 1953/4. They even talk about foil . . .

My consort laughs at me for wandering into the cesspool that is the WSJournal’s opinion pages, but many times it pays off. You need to know the enemy to see what’s ahead — ugly so quickly accelerates. Take the letter to the editor after a rational column advocating calming the fuck down about butter, cream and bacon. Rather than attacking the writer or the science, the Astroturfer went after a dead icon, noting that Julia Child had breast cancer at 51 and asserting that she had “chronic weight problems.” (Call this anus the jerque who mistook a 6-foot woman for Paul Prudhomme.) “Child Wasn’t a Good Health Model” is a helluva hed when you consider she lived to 91 (they could look it up) and kept her bile well contained. I’m assuming the Murdoch health insurance plan comes with very good drugs.

I’m way behind on my book readin’, but a couple of enticing reviews of the new Mastering the Art of Lost Correspondence did finally entice me to pick up my copy. Flipping through quickly, intending to go back and revel at leisure, I was amazed at what first caught my eye. One caption had “traveling in Province,” and another mentioned Curonsky. With so many trained wordsmiths out there, desperate for work for any fee, why would the publisher not run this past one last set of cheap eyes? Or, given the cult of the Child, solicit volunteers?

But the one letter I randomly read almost compensated — Julia ranting in 1953 about our hometown paper: “Such a horrible report of a priest’s speech, supporting McCarthy. The way they say it’s only the left-wingers who are against him. I really read those things and scream from the stomach.” Which sorta describes how the sane feel these days plowing through gushing coverage of today’s wingnuts who think tea comes only in a bag. So to speak.

Something must have been lost in translation in the hometown paper’s piece on how the French are receiving the “Julie & Julia” juggernaut. Personally, I am unaware of the “cliché of beef, baguette and canard farci,” although I would love to see a Willy Ronis shot of a Parisian kid rushing home with duck in hand. I have no idea how shellfish oil could replace mayonnaise in a crab cake. And WTF is “Julia Child with real fish”? Don’t even get me started on the description of Guy Savoy as merely “owner of the restaurant that bears his name in Paris.” Earth to Eighth Avenue: He’s now as American as Las Vegas.

Meantime I’ve started wondering if everyone might be confusing Julia Child with Dinty Moore. WTF is up with all the beef stew in hottest August? Did the poor woman codify no other recipe? Or is everyone just needing to hit the Burgundy right now? Plus, did I actually spot someone Tweeting about getting out the pressure cooker to make it? Sole a la microwave would make more sense.

So much for Michael Pollan’s cred. Food & Wine has just declared this the year of the home cook, even as he is swearing cobwebs are covering American stoves. Hmm Balzer notwithstanding, someone is buying an awful lot of groceries these days. Then again, there’s a whole cookbook coming out on ways to doctor up pre-fab cookie dough — with no ways to take shit out, of course, only to add it back in. Leave it to the Guardian, though, to really put all this in perspective with a story on how “Meryl Streep film starts debate on loss of cooking skills.” Yes, Sophie the Prada-Wearing Devil did it. Apparently the paper is outsourcing its headline-writing to Lahore.

And since even I am obviously incapable of resisting the celluloid meth of the summer, I have to add that I’m a big admirer of Madeleine Kamman’s recipes; her roasted duck legs changed the way we eat. But I like a catfight as much as anyone else and so appreciated the dredging up of the old rivalry with Mme Child. It’s yet another gauge of character that the nastiness was kept buried until she was. Could you imagine that today? I Feel Bad About My Dreck should consider making a sequel: “No Reservations, Rachael.” Targeted at two such disparate audiences, it would be a blockbuster.

Can “I Feel Bad About My Dreck” hustle that movie any harder? Or should the question be: Will there be anyone left to pay to see the thing once the free screenings are exhausted? Countless food bloggers have already been thoroughly co-opted, and food writers with bit parts are doing their swooning part in promoting it, too. But I find it rather amusing that formerly arboreal and other so-called legit media are apparently being asked to keep their reactions to themselves until the official opening (if you can believe one annoyed reporter on the other coast). And I wonder if that all started once the New Yorker got a whiff of turkey.

I guess I have to say something about the postmortem outing of Julia, so here goes: You know that idiot son of an asshole sullying the White House? He’s a lying war criminal. Read the papers, the blogs, anything; listen to the teevee and the radio. It’s no secret. As her biography and obits disclosed way back when, America’s kitchen sweetheart worked for the OSS, which was very clearly defined as the predecessor of the CIA. What does the CIA do? Funny, though, how everyone wants to trumpet her having been a spy while still insisting Valerie Plame was just a glamour girl. News at 11: Bourdain did drugs!

Whatever you do, do not click on any link breathlessly “reporting” on anything related to the Julia mashup being filmed by someone who really should feel bad about her dreck. You’re guaranteed to feel like a contestant on that new “Hurl” reality show. This gives new meaning to the term circle-jerk. Or the Barney theme song for old people. What most amazes me is that when I worked at the Paper of Highest Integrity, reporters were not even allowed to slap political bumper stickers on their cars for fear of being perceived as biased. Yet culture critics can just take roles — however ridiculous or small — in movies that will be covered in their sections. Breathlessly, I might add. And if you want to start taking bets on the suckability quotient of this project, just consider this: When in the history of tortillas has anyone gone shopping for salsa at the temple of elitism? You know all those earthquakes shaking Reno? It’s a 6-foot-tall icon thrashing in her grave.