My Life in France by Julia Child
I spent the summer of 1987 in Paris, studying beginning French at the Sorbonne and staying at the Cité Universitaire, in a program geared toward older students. Some of them wanted to take a cooking class, and the Sorbonne organized it for them. They needed one more student to make it go, and I was browbeaten into filling the empty space.
Understand, I was raised on the five Alaskan staples of Spam, Bisquik, Velveeta, pilot bread and Carnation Instant Milk. If we didn't get our moose that year we didn't eat meat, except on my birthday, when I got pork chops no matter what. We got all the salmon and king crab we could eat for free. The salmon was mostly fried. The crab was mostly boiled. The first fresh milk I ever drank was in college. The first real cheese, same. Remember those Kraft Cracker Barrel packages of four logs of four different kinds? Until then I thought I hated cheese.
So at the time I went to this cooking school, my most complicated prepared meal was a hamburger. Claudine, our chef, went around the class, asking where we were from, and when I said Alaska her eyes lit up. "Alaska," she said, "sauvage..." and made up a roux for wild game on the spot just for me.
I've been playing catchup in the kitchen ever since. I can't believe it's taken me this long to discover Julia Child.
This book is the story of her life in France, from the first oyster in Rouen to the last pot roast at La Pitchoune in Provence. It's a love story, of her marriage with Paul Child, who is about the most intelligent, charming man I've ever met between the covers of a book. It's a voyage of discovery into French cuisine, into the science of cooking, into collaborating on and writing a cookbook, or any book for that matter. And it's a mesmerizing walk through Paris looking over Julia's shoulder. The first year she says
By now I knew that French food was it for me. I couldn't get over how absolutely delicious it was. Yet my friends, both French and American, considered me some kind of a nut: cooking was far from being a middle-class hobby, and they did not understand how I could possibly enjoy doing all the shopping and cooking and serving by myself. Well, I did! And Paul encouraged me to ignore them and pursue my passion.
(You'll remember what I said about Paul being intelligent and charming.)
The how-to portion of this book is fascinating. French ingredients are different from American ingredients and the French learn cooking by watching, not reading recipes, so Julia would take the recipes of her French collaborators and translate them and the ingredients and the measurements of the ingredients into something an American cook could, first, buy the ingredients for in America, and second, understand and recreate. And then she'd test them and test them and test them and test them again, and she and Paul would eat them and eat them and eat them and eat them again until it was foolproof enough to unleash upon American cooks. "No one is born a great cook," she says, "one learns by doing."
In between they'd drive around France and eat in great restaurants. In a more perfect world I would have been their child.
She concludes with a remembrance of that first, marvelous meal in Rouen
...the sole meuniere I ate at La Couronne on my first day in France, in November 1948. It was an epiphany.
In all the years since that succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite -- toujours bon appetit!"
I gotta say, I got a little teary at the end of this book. And I just ordered my first ever copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Both volumes.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80ZrUI7RNfI?list=PL26EE48981A093CA0&hl=en_US&w=640&h=360]
# Permanent link to Bon appetit!
[from the Stabenow.com archives, January 25, 2010]
It’s not often you find a good historian occupying the same body as a good writer -- think of any history text you were force-fed in high school -- but Barbara Tuchman was a stellar exception. I’m still mad at her for dying before she wrote more books. Try a A Distant Mirror, a look at the effect on society of the Black Death of 1348-1350, which killed a third of the population between India and Iceland. In the foreward, Tuchman describes this time as a “violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disentegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant.”
Sound familiar? The more things change.
My favorite Tuchman book is The March of Folly. With the almost parental exasperation that characterizes so much of her writing, Tuchman posits the existance of folly, which she defines as the pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest. To qualify for the definition of folly, Tuchman writes, the policy must meet three criteria. One, it must have been perceived as being wrong in its own time. Two, a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. And three, the policy had to have been that of a group, not an individual, and had to persist beyond one lifetime.
Her template is the Trojans taking the Greek horse inside the city walls. Next, the Renaissance popes provoke the Reformation by selling indulgences, elevating illiterate drunks to the pulpit and hosting orgies in the Vatican. The third folly is the British losing America, in which Dr. Samuel Johnson is memorably quoted as saying that Americans were “a race of convicts and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”
Hard to believe we rebelled, isn’t it?
The fourth folly, and I think the one that inspired Tuchman’s conception of folly and the writing of this book, is America in Vietnam.
And then, if you want to understand the beginnings of America in Vietnam, read Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, in which you learn that Americans screwing up in Southeast Asia wasn't exactly a new experience.A delightfully acerbic prose style, sort of on the order of “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”, combined with an exhaustive but nonetheless easily accessible scholarship and a you-are-there sense of time and place, the Tuchman historical oeuvre makes for seriously good reading, and you'll learn a thing or two along the way.
# Permanent link to Barbara Tuchman
Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard
An American woman falls in love with a Frenchman and moves to Paris. Some great recipes (the chocolate souffle is really easy and pretty tasty, and I'm trying the tagine at the first opportunity) and some interesting observations on French life from an American perspective, as in:
She wonders how her soon-to-be mother-in-law stays so slim. Answer: The French eat at the table, not on the couch, they don't snack, they cook just enough for one serving per person, and they don't go back for seconds even if there are leftovers.
Her fiance is reluctant to pursue a career in film because they just don't do things that way in France. "You will never understand," says Gwendal [the fiance]. "You come from a place where everything is possible." Later, he adds, If you want to do something different, if your head sticks up just a little, they cut it off. It's been like that since the Revolution. You know the saying, Liberte, egalite, fraternite. Egalite, equality, is right in the middle. Everyone has got to be the same."
Encouraged by Bard, he goes to LA and takes meetings and comes home full of enthusiasm, which he then shares over dinner with a French couple. Who are startled and alarmed at his presumption, and whom they never see socially again.
On her mother's attempt to buy a pate pan in which to make cheesecake. In the States, a salesperson would sell you his left foot if you wanted it, and probably gift-wrap it to boot, writes Bard, but the French salesman says, "This is for pate, madame, not gateau...Why do you want to buy somesing when you do not know what it is for?"...In France, the customer isn't always right. On the contrary, the customer is often deeply wrong, and the person behind the counter will not hesitate to tell you so.
There is an eye-opening passage on living through 9/11 overseas, too.
# Permanent link to “If your head sticks up just a little, they cut it off.”
As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda by Gail Collins
As Texas goes, says Collins, so goes the nation, and there are some revelatory and I must admit pretty horrifying details about how the state of Texas has led the way in banking laws, education (especially sex education, or embargo of), textbooks, global warming, immigration and voters' rights, written with that lighthearted acerbity we enjoy so much in her NYT opinion column. In the prologue she writes
Texas banking laws set the stage for the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s. The 2008 economic meltdown was the product of a financial deregulation that was the work of/Texas senator Phil Gramm. Our energy policy is the way it is in large part because Texas politicians and Texas special interests like it that way...Schools from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, have been remade, reorganized, and sometimes totally upended under a federal law based on Texas education reform. For several generations, our kids have been reading textbooks written with an eye to Texas sensibilities. Texas presidents have the led the country into every land war the United States has been involved in since Vietnam.
This wasn't really a book, it was a 200-page column with a bunch of appendices supporting her points. I wonder if she wasn't perhaps rushing to print before her premise became dated, because I found at least two gaping holes in her logic.
1. She doesn't talk near enough about the Hispanic population of Texas, which in number is rapidly overtaking the Anglo population of Texas. Anglo Texans are largely Republican. Hispanic Texans are largely Democrat. Texas is on the brink of going blue in a big way. I wish she'd spent more time with guys like San Antonio mayor Julian Castro. There is the future of Texas.
2. She also makes no reference to e-books, which is on its own cusp, that of revolutionizing textbooks. I speak from personal experience here: Changing the text of an ebook is so easy compared to changing the text of a print book. So what if Texas wants to axe the New Deal or evolution or global warming or separation of church and state out of its textbooks? Let 'em. In ebooks, the rest of the states can add all those subjects right back in with relatively few labor costs. And there is the future of textbooks.
This is a book worth reading, but it might have been more accurate to have called it "As Texas Went."
# Permanent link to As Texas Went
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The great thing about going to book conferences is that there you are, penned up with a bunch of other people who all love books. This time it was the Poisoned Pen Con in Phoenix, a small, intimate gathering with single-track paneling where you have time to visit with other readers and hobnob with your favorite authors.
One of my favorite authors is Francine Matthews (aka Stephanie Barron) and she and I and Barbara Peters were talking about our favorite Golden Age mysteries. They were as one in declaring The Tiger in the Smoke to be one of their favorites.
I'd read a couple of the Albert Campion novels way back when, didn't like them much and moved on, but if Francine and Barbara say it it must be so, I picked up a copy.
London, 1950. Beautiful couturier Meg Elginbrodde lost her husband in World War II and after mourning him for five years has become engaged to Geoffrey Levett. Unfortunately, as soon as they announce their wedding photos of her previously deceased husband begin appearing in the society journals, and she calls in Campion for help.
There is some lovely description here, especially of the oppressive London fog, "a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water" and "[the fog] oozed in ungenially, to smear sooty fingers over the two elegant young people who sat inside" and "greasy drapery." Yeesh.
But what I love most about this book is the character descriptions. Take Campion's associate, Divisional Detective Chief Inspector Charles Luke:
Charlie Luke in his spiv civilians looked at best like a heavyweight champion in training...His pile-driver personality...It made him an alarming enemy for someone.
When he is detailing a subordinate to accompany an unwilling Canon Avril, Luke says, "He's my senior assistant, a quiet, discreet sort of man," he added firmly, eying the sergeant with open menace." You'd develop quiet discretion, too, if Luke looked at you that way.
Of Canon Avril, Meg's father, Allingham writes:
He believed in miracles and frequently observed them, and nothing astonished him. His imagination was as wild as a small boy's and his faith ultimate. In ordinary life he was, quite frankly, hardly safe out.
(As is made manifestly obvious when he nearly gets his daughter killed, for which Allingham never brings him to judgement, the only thing that irritates me here.)
There are lots of fun throwaway lines and phrases everywhere. Of one of the minor characters Allingham writes, "Her voice was gentle, placatory, and never-ending." At one point Levett says, "Values are so relative...Hitler wanted the modern world. Well, I mean to say, Campion, look at the modern world!"
Francine and Barbara recommended the next two books in the Campion series, too, The Beckoning Lady, which I've already started, and Hide My Eyes, which is on my to-read shelf.
# Permanent link to Time Traveling Back to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
What if FDR sent a twenty-one year old JFK to Europe on the very eve of World War II itself in order to find out if and how Hitler was smuggling money into the US to influence the next election?
"I've been turning it over in my mind, Jack--this trip of yours," the President was saying. "To the Nazis, you're just the American ambassador's son. But to me, you're a perfect spy. My independent thinker. Arriving in London with a fresh outlook and an unclouded mind. As far as the Nazis are concerned, you're clean as the driven snow. They know your dad and I don't always agree. They'll never expect you to be my man in Europe."
Jack, who is as ill with some undiagnosable disease as he can be and not be dead, finds this proposal flattering and irresistible. If he's going to die at any moment any way, why not die being FDR's man in Europe?
So in Jack 1939 he boards the Queen Mary for England and nearly all the European capitals, closely pursued by the White Spider, a Nazi SS agent who is very quick with a very sharp knife, closely cultivated by German intelligence agent Willi Dobler, and intensely damned by every American ambassador in every European capital for the trouble he causes them, not excluding his own father. There is a beautiful older woman, Diana Playfair, another amateur spy with whom Jack has a passionate affair, whose ending will break your heart as painfully as it breaks Jack's.
One of the most enjoyable things in this book are all the walk-on parts by real people, beginning with Jack's family (Joes Sr. and Jr. don't come off all that well, and Rose, my god, Jack would have been better off with Dracula's bride as his mother) and including just about everyone else in the World War II Almanac.
Oh yes, J. Edgar Hoover is here, too, and up to his usual Machiavellian shennanigans. Fear not, FDR's got his number, and unbeknownst to Hoover, he's got Jack, too. A fun read.
# Permanent link to JFK, Spy
I tend to read in subjects, and lately it’s been Shakespeare, specifically A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff and Shakespeare:The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.
Shapiro’s book takes 1599 as his text, the year William Shakespeare wrote Henry the Fifth, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and the rough draft of Hamlet. It was the year, Shapiro says, that Shakespeare, at age thirty-five, “went from being an exceptionally talented writer to one of the greatest who ever lived.” This book is a word picture of Elizabethan London so vivid that you’ll smell the Thames at low tide as you read.
Three centuries later across the pond, New Yorkers rioted over the relative merits of Macbeth as played by a British actor and an American one. The National Guard was called out, people actually died, and the British actor had to be hustled out of the country for his own safety. America had embraced Shakespeare as one of their own, and he was read so extensively and so intensively that audiences from rural Kentucky to California gold mines could shout out the correct line when an actor in performance stumbled over it. Author Cliff concludes, “Once a voice carried a people across a continent and helped forge a brave new world. No other writer has been so powerful, and no one ever will be again.” This book includes a survey of 19th century American history, a history of Western theatre, is peopled with great characters and you-are-there settings, and has a quotable phrase on nearly every page.
# Permanent link to Shakespeare, explained. Again.
Bill Bryson brings his trademark witty style to his biography of the bard, but my absolute favorite chapter is the last one, wherein Bryson annihilates the notion that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. From eccentric Delia Bacon, a Francis Bacon adherent and wannabe relation, to the trio of alleged scholars rejoicing in the names of Looney, Silliman, and Battey arguing for the Earl of Oxford, to the theory that Christopher Marlowe was the real author of the plays (“He was the right age,” Bryson writes, “had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.”), Bryson really enjoys himself, and, believe me, so will you.
Free land, my ass. According to this novel no one ever worked harder or suffered more disappointment than the original farmers who bought into the federal "giveaway" of Midwestern acreage provided by 1862's Homestead Act.
David and Mary Beaton nearly starve in their efforts to bust sod and plant wheat and make a living in Rose Wilder Lane's Free Land, in the teeth of rampant land speculators (that's who wound up with most of the Homestead Act land), winter-long blizzards, summer-long droughts, greedy store owners, outrageous freight costs, outlaws and not so hostile Indians. The story about the stolen papoose corpse is genius -- a better description of the clash of pioneer culture with Indian culture I never read. While the story is told from David's perspective, Wilder doesn't demonize anyone.
Another wonderful (and painful) scene is when they're harvesting fifteen acres of turnips and Mary's hands are bleeding and David wants her to stop and she won't because she hasn't been able to help him in any other way or earn any money the way she would have if they'd stayed in New York (butter, eggs). The sheer physical, mental, emotional and spiritual stress feels overwhelming to the reader, never mind the characters.
Rose Wilder Lane is of course the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and from what I can google this book is meant to be a fictionalization of Laura's parents' early years together, and fans of the series will recognize certain scenes. Free Land reads like non-fiction in its detail and its immediacy. There is a lot of romanticizing of this period of history elsewhere. By contrast, this book reads like the plain unvarnished truth. Well worth reading.
# Permanent link to Laura’s Daughter’s Take on Little House on the Prairie
They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.
# Permanent link to A Fishy Fairy Tale
On six occasions, his enemies had tried shooting him; twice, they'd attempted poison (once using a samosa laced with arsenic); and during the Case of the Pundit with Twelve Toes, a hired thug had tried to force Puri's car over the edge of a hairpin bend on the road to Gulmarg.
# Permanent link to “Saala, maaderchod!”*
The most ingenious attempt had been orchestrated by a cunning murderer (a naturalist by profession) working in Assam's Kaziranga Park, who had secretly sprayed Puri's clothes with a pheromone that attracted one-horned rhinos.
The closest anyone had come (not including the three rhinos, who could move surprisingly quickly) had been a criminal hijra who had pushed a pile of bricks off the top of a building into an alley in Varanasi where Puri had been walking.