Yes, I am back in Geneva and yes, I have been cooking like mad in between (a) unpacking and (b) trying to do some professional writing and (c) various supportive partner Seneca Falls women's rights type things involving the National Women's Hall of Fame. I have made very slow cooked scrambled eggs and a pea tendril salad. I have made rasam (and truly enjoyed it). I have made a steak salad skewed toward the Vietnamese. I made (well, we made, a pizza involving duck confit and greens and pea tendrils and basil and home made tomato sauce, and . . .
And I have made more. Indeed, I am enjoying the kitchen. I can see outside into the lush Finger Lakes. I can see Seneca Lake and I can see cats and hear birds and I do not even worry.
But I have also been reading some things -- including re-reading an old issue of the New Yorker on food. Dated November 22, 2010, I have no idea if I read it before. I think that is one of the mixed blessings of getting older; I can re-read something and it feels like reading it for the very first time. And, I will never know, in cases where I have not underlined or made marginal comments, if I ever read it before. Hurrah> A very inexpensive sort of recycling?
So, on to the content:
- An article entitled Eleanor Roosevelt's Inedible Cuisine pointed to Eleanor getting revenge on FDR for his marital infidelities by supporting a truly awful cook as the White House cook. While represented sometimes as all about the matter of cheap nutrition during the depression and thereafter, Laura Shapiro (author of the piece and of several books at least one of which I read at some point in the past) seems to think the notion of near inedibility and utter grayness was revenge (served best cold?). I admit to having a bit of an Eleanor phase these days in terms of reading books (mostly fiction) that include her in cameo appearances. While the notion of the lousy food appears in those novels and of revenge, tying the two together -- not so much. Hmmm.
- Fermenting Revolution is by Burchard Bilger. But what makes me find it most intriguing, besides it being a terrific romp, is the way the current guru of fermentation, Sandor Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation, appears in the article. It felt a bit like "well, this person who I treated like an out of the blue figure on my culinary universe has been there all along" -- nostalgic vertigo?
- The same thing happened in a piece on the Burger Queen, which is really about chef April Bloomfield, whose book I now own. Amazingly nostalgic vertigo? Or, we now know that people appear first in the New Yorker?
- In both cases #2 and #2 the articles are, but the way, terrific.
- An Immigrant Thanksgiving and a piece entitled "Root-Vegetable Romance" (by Jane Kramer) also made me happily hungry
I ought to say something more substantive I suppose. But, to be honest, I do not want to. I enjoyed the reading and the slowness of the words drifting past my eyes and the thought of how much these articles spoke to me.
You might enjoy the issue. You might not. I did. Here's the link to the November 22, 2010 issue of the New Yorker.
