Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Martha Stewart
In September 1965, Martha Stewart quit her modeling career after the birth of her daughter Alexis. She was 24. She would eventually find other work. The homemaking doyenne appears five times in A Book of Ages.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Julia
The new Julia Child movie opens this weekend. The shelves are full of books about her and by her, by people who remember her, and by people who want to be like her or at least want to cook like her. Her kitchen is in the Smithsonian. Her voice is in our heads whenever we cook, although it might be the voice of Dan Ackroyd. No wonder. She is our modern domestic goddess, never mind Martha Stewart and Alice Waters. (All three women have several anecdotes each in A Book of Ages.)
What surprises me is that Nora Ephron didn't think Julia had enough back story for a movie of her own, that she needed to share the screen with a young woman blogging about her recipes. What can you say? Today's TV obsession with chefs and kitchens has more to do with egos and speed and extravagance, with concept, less to do with the down-to-earth creation of good food and eating it. This young wife, played by Amy Adams, promises to cook every recipe from The Art of French Cooking in one year. Hilarity ensues. But which life are we more interested in? Who do we identify with?
That's the point, I guess. Julia works for the spy agency called the O.S.S. during WWII, travels to India and China, marries an urbane diplomat, moves to Paris, enrolls at the Cordon Bleu to learn French cooking (she didn't know how to cook at all until her mid-30s), she writes a cookbook (which her publisher turns down), then goes on public TV and becomes a star. Every life has an arc, and Julia's is interesting and full of surprises. She appears six times in A Book of Ages.
My book is about how famous lives reflect our own, so it's the private, domestic details I find most interesting. Freud and Henry Ford collecting antiques, Steve Martin collecting art, Churchill learning to paint, Jack Kerouac and Edward Elgar learning to drive, Hitler becoming a vegetarian. So I include Julia Child's first meal on her first trip to France––she was 36. The most vivid detail I discovered was the hotplate in her D.C. apartment, where she didn't cook very much or very well.
What surprises me is that Nora Ephron didn't think Julia had enough back story for a movie of her own, that she needed to share the screen with a young woman blogging about her recipes. What can you say? Today's TV obsession with chefs and kitchens has more to do with egos and speed and extravagance, with concept, less to do with the down-to-earth creation of good food and eating it. This young wife, played by Amy Adams, promises to cook every recipe from The Art of French Cooking in one year. Hilarity ensues. But which life are we more interested in? Who do we identify with?
That's the point, I guess. Julia works for the spy agency called the O.S.S. during WWII, travels to India and China, marries an urbane diplomat, moves to Paris, enrolls at the Cordon Bleu to learn French cooking (she didn't know how to cook at all until her mid-30s), she writes a cookbook (which her publisher turns down), then goes on public TV and becomes a star. Every life has an arc, and Julia's is interesting and full of surprises. She appears six times in A Book of Ages.
My book is about how famous lives reflect our own, so it's the private, domestic details I find most interesting. Freud and Henry Ford collecting antiques, Steve Martin collecting art, Churchill learning to paint, Jack Kerouac and Edward Elgar learning to drive, Hitler becoming a vegetarian. So I include Julia Child's first meal on her first trip to France––she was 36. The most vivid detail I discovered was the hotplate in her D.C. apartment, where she didn't cook very much or very well.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Alice and Julia
Alice Waters was born on this day in 1944. She was 27 when she opened her famous Berkeley California restaurant, Chez Panisse. On that first night they served a set menu: paté en croute followed by duck with olives, salad, and almond tart; $3.95. But they ran out of silverware.
When I'm reading a life story I am always looking for signposts, points along the way where the person chooses this road instead of that one, where they meet someone or learn something that changes their life. When Alice Waters was 19 she transferred from the University of California at Santa Barbara to Berkeley. Would she have become the same person if she hadn't moved to Berkeley? Could Chez Panisse have started a food revolution anywhere else?
Alice Waters was 21 when she visited France for the first time. France, too, has a habit of changing people in profound ways. In A Book of Ages I note the Paris arrivals of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Giacomo Casanova, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, J. D. Salinger, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert M. Parker, Frederic Chopin and Adolf Hitler.
Julia Child was 36 the first time she saw Paris. She'd never cooked before. Up to this point she'd been employed as an American spy. But she would learn to cook in the French manner, and so would we.
When I'm reading a life story I am always looking for signposts, points along the way where the person chooses this road instead of that one, where they meet someone or learn something that changes their life. When Alice Waters was 19 she transferred from the University of California at Santa Barbara to Berkeley. Would she have become the same person if she hadn't moved to Berkeley? Could Chez Panisse have started a food revolution anywhere else?
Alice Waters was 21 when she visited France for the first time. France, too, has a habit of changing people in profound ways. In A Book of Ages I note the Paris arrivals of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Giacomo Casanova, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, J. D. Salinger, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert M. Parker, Frederic Chopin and Adolf Hitler.
Julia Child was 36 the first time she saw Paris. She'd never cooked before. Up to this point she'd been employed as an American spy. But she would learn to cook in the French manner, and so would we.
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