gastropoda

My mom had a million maxims, one of which was that you only entrap yourself in a tangled web of deceit. (She always quoted the original, of course.) And I’m hoping that will be the case with the butter-golden girl of the most tarnished hog business. And with those who just promoted the book in the pages of what presents itself as an august publication, of the highest integrity. I’m so old I remember when you wouldn’t review a cookbook without actually cooking from it. Let alone shill a promotional brochure without pulling back the chicharron to acknowledge what lies beneath.

This weekend I clicked on the old-style link — the button on the radio in our bathroom — just in time to hear an impassioned argument for resurrecting at least the reputation of the hometown paper’s original food editor/restaurant critic. The Southern speakah made a great case. It’s just too bad the interviewer wouldn’t dance anywhere close to the reason why that ain’t gonna happen. The food world is surprisingly closed-minded, as I’ve known for years; trenches in wartime are more accepting of the “differently orientated.” Lie down with Daddy, wake up with infamy. Fleas would have a better shot at rehabilitation.

I lost a little of the iota of innocence I retain when I Tweeted about book blurbs, after hearing one for an apparently terrible cooking memoir was written by someone who apparently hates the writer. Jeebus. Has everyone’s phone been hacked? If you can’t tell the truth, can’t you take a pass? And I’m not going to surrender my last wisp of innocence and believe people are actually blurbing without reading. Next you’re going to tell me the Kwanzaa cake wasn’t created by the governor’s arm candy.

The food world is gearing up for its annual orgy of self-congratulation, but I guess I’m about as likely to find a Peeps shelter as refuge from the endless dithering about restaurants/books/chefs whose names don’t even ring a dinner bell for me. So I’ll volunteer that changing the location of the announcement of your nominees makes about as much sense as dancing about charcuterie. And that another list of nominees should never have gone out with so many misspellings at a time when copy editors and proofreaders and better are in huger supply than busboys. Coleman? Daries? McMeel? Randon House? Pilgramage? All that spewed, though, I will admit that the idea of a People’s Choice award is smart. It would save the stupid Oscars. And it could be a baby step toward Dancing With the Chefs’ Ghostwriters.

I actually roused myself from my Twitter-facing Aeron to go take in a panel on “post-gender food writing” and am only glad I had the good sense to check out the revivifying bar at Fedora afterward (it’s transporting). Otherwise, this was one of the dumbest  “debates” I think I’ve ever sat through. The concept was confused, given how many men who have written authoritatively on food through the decades were never mentioned besides A.J. Liebling (for starters: Roy Andries de Groot, Richard Olney, John Hess, Evan Jones, James Villas, Seymour Britchky, even Johnny Rotten) or how many are having such an impact right now (can you say Michael Pollan, or that other guy who ate everything?) Bloggers were (not surprisingly, given the moderator) dissed as “girlie-girls” when the most readable ones I read all have literal cojones. But mostly I was amazed at how many cheap jokes were made at the easy expense of Panchito. I’m the last one to defend that Chimp enabler. But the next forum should be on “post-S.O. food writing” for sure.

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 . . .

Not to trivialize the latest WikiLeaks dump, but I’ll admit to entertaining myself imagining what similar dispatches from the old Food Coven would reveal. At the same time the smiling faces were cranking out cooking-is-love smarm, you know they had to be backbiting like nobody’s business.

One of the too-many-to-count reasons Twitter is addictive is that it lets you rant and get an amen. Like about why a quote whore gets quoted in every fucking story about restaurant trends. Seems to me that someone who’s consulted on something more recent (and, uh, successful) than Sign of the Dove might have a bit more to say. Even funnier, when I checked for a status update I saw the blog-mocker is now . . . blogging. The thing’s a bit dusty, of course, but what’s being mocked on this new blog? Bloggers. Don’t just stand there. Go consult.

As for the week in reviews, Ms. Prune’s was everything the Twits all said, smart and evocative and well-reasoned. Halfway through, I was so impressed I thought some savvy editor should lasso her to replace the glib shallowness usually provided by one of the leading dims of the old food coven. Then I sobered up. There’s a big difference between a one-off gig and rounding up a shitload of books, just the way there is between a mega-dinner party and running a restaurant kitchen night in and night out. Apparently the first thing to go is the diligence; if you can cook through two recipes you’re doing twice what most do. And read, did you say? Besides, the trouble with print is that there’s a limit — the space is constrained and both phrases and ideas are sacrificed. Mostly, though, sustainability is not just an issue with food.

And while I was challenged for challenging Time for breaking the old “friends don’t get friends to review them” rule, it was amusing to see how successive takes on the food memoir of Mr. Miller were not quite as enthusiastic. When you have to judge a book by its words and not its author, it’s funny how the flaws are exposed.

Given that the food world so often feels like seventh grade, it was rather entertaining if not reassuring to see the whole world acting like the food world. The Big O wins the equivalent of 30 stars from Michelin and everyone reacts as if the Schnorrer did the honor? The race is definitely not to the swift.

The hometown paper must have realized it blew the Lukins obit big time, complete with the most ludicrous hed in recent history, but the Week in Review followup only made the crime more indefensible. I guess Sheila should be flattered she got the Cronkite treatment at least, with errors of both fact and omission in her life story. But the cluelessness on who she was and the extent of her impact — on everything from food to publishing — was jaw-dropping. A sportswriter could do a better job finishing off Jancis Robinson. And then they had to go on to run that beyond ridiculous piece on home entertaining. Who’s this “we” of which you speak? If the same paper and “Good Times” were running pasta primavera recipes in 1985, I kinda doubt it was over by the time people were enthralled with chicken Marbella. Calling pasta with pesto “as dated as shoulder pads” was also laughable — what was on the menu at the last party I went to, and on ours last night?  At least she didn’t quote the usual quote whore, who managed to insult the dead (“got no respect”? WTF?) And she got Rosso’s name right, unlike a certain expert I heard on radio who was also, like the obit writer, nowhere near informed enough for prime time. But even our dining room table wonders on what planet the perpetrator spends most of her time.

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.

Occasionally I hear some editor is mortally wounded by some snide thing I’ve typed and I’m always amazed. It’s not personal. Peccadillos are for pecking, aren’t they? And I’m resigned to what a friend noted eons ago when I first started freelancing: No one said you have to die solvent. But I sometimes still have to stop and wonder why cranks get ostracized and crazies stay on good terms. Which most recently came to mind when I saw the judges for a certain contest and remembered the wild story I heard about a  press trip in France: Booze in prodigious quantities, underwear out the window, chocolate up the wazoo. And this is your ambassador? Sticks and stones are messy. Words must really hurt.

I understand there was some discussion elsewhere about how expense accounts have also skewed food coverage at a certain outlet since the heyday of the most legendary manly women’s editor. And I was half-sorry to have missed that forum, to the point that I was tempted by a followup a couple of nights later. Which I was very glad to have missed when this report was filed in my email: One panelist “delivered hagiographic memories,” another “slightly less saccharine memories.” But “That asshole David Kamp came absolutely primed with chipper observations about how Claiborne helped prepare a land of oafs to become a nation of people discerning enough to . . . well, to sit at the feet of the David Kamps.” And people call me bitchy? I would have redacted the offending name to forestall a repeat of an unpleasantness my poor consort had to witness, but unfortunately the brand matters. Somewhere John and Karen Hess are chortling. . . .

Only two Maroons would go to Cuba and complain that the food wasn’t cutting edge. For Che’s sake, can you say embargo? And poor people? But then as a travel writer friend noted, they were clearly just going through the payback motions for the trip. I blame the Food Coven’s honcho for “printing” their drivel; he does seem to take a hands-off approach with his old pals. One just did a trite ode to a “storied gem” of a trattoria that mentions a tart “in the photo above” when all that’s on display is fruit. But at least what he’s not doing is working. I check in just to see the latest brain wreck.