Cooking with Julia and Pollan
One of the great things about loaning books to people of like interests is that one often gets a bonus in return. I have no idea how this will work when we’re all reading on a Kindle or an iPad.
A few months ago I loaned Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” to the chef at my residence in hopes that he might come to understand why some of us prefer to eat less meat. He returned it along with a printout of a piece Pollan wrote for The New York Times last August titled “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch.” Nice.
The gist of the article is that cooking no longer takes place in the kitchen. It is now on our flat screen TVs at almost any hour of the day or night thanks to the cable Food Network. Poaching, frying, baking, slicing and dicing (often in slo-mo) have become a spectator sport for couch potatoes munching chips.
Julia Child was the first to cook on camera with “The French Chef” in 1963, but in those days, we still prepared our own meals in our own kitchens. I remember her loud whoops when she dropped raw fowl on the floor or missed the catch of a flipped crepe. And taking frequent nips of sherry.
Pollan remembers her with obvious fondness. I missed the first few years of her show owing to dodgy television reception and deficit cash flow for necessary and costly ingredients. When discretionary income increased, I bought her book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and mastered boeuf bourguignon, just as Julie Powell did in Nora Ephron’s comedy, “Julie & Julia.”
So attached was I to those French recipes that I hauled the tome to Montana, where I have little need for it. It looks well loved and much used with splatters of ratatouille, gratin and quiche on the appropriate pages and a sagging spine (which I just had repaired).
Pollan writes of the popularity of Food Network shows but says he’s baffled. “How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves?” But the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence “has coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.”
He reminds us that, curiously, the year Julia Child went on air was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” which taught American women to regard cooking as drudgery and a form of oppression.
My mother subscribed to this idea. She didn’t cook, ever. We joked that if it weren’t for Stauffer’s, she would have starved to death. My older sister relied on Nate and Al’s deli. But I was always the one clattering around in the kitchen, mixing up stuff from scratch.
When I was a little kid we had a German cook. One night during the war she, and her husband, disappeared and were never seen again. I remember coming into the kitchen in late morning to find my mother in her lacey peignoir and satin mules holding an egg in one hand and the Fanny Farmer cookbook in the other. She looked glamorously flummoxed. I said in my little girl’s voice, would you like me to cook that for you? She looked at me like I was an alien, then asked if I knew how. Of course, I said. Would you like it poached, scrambled or sunny side up?
With a sigh of relief, she said, “Any way at all, just cooked.” I chose poached because the egg poacher was my favorite pan, along with the double boiler, and I had watched the cook use it many times. The result was perfect and I became, briefly, but for the very first time, a hero. A psychiatrist would probably say that’s why I like cooking but it’s more likely because I love to eat.
Pollan notes that Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map, once said, “People don’t watch television to learn things.” She then proceeded to shift the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat. And the ratings soared.
After reading this piece, I picked up a copy of Pollan’s latest book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.” It’s perfect for those who haven’t time to watch cooking shows, much less cook. As the title implies, it’s a terse little compilation of its heftier predecessors that includes 64 rules to help one eat mindfully and healthfully. For instance, Rule 57: Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does. “Gas stations have become processed corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you. Don’t eat here.”
As always, Pollan champions real food over what he calls “edible food-like substances.”
My favorite is Rule 19: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”
Read it, and then lend it to someone. No telling what you might get in return.