Excerpt: LUNCH IN PARIS: A LOVE STORY, WITH RECIPES

I'm only about a third of the way through Elizabeth Bard's LUNCH IN PARIS: A LOVE STORY, WITH RECIPES, but I'm already hooked.  I'm such a Francophile, even when it's of the rose-colored glasses, in-the-middle-of-a-love-affair sort of variety.  Bard has an approachable way of writing that makes me want to hang out with her.  And, luckily, the food writing is unpretentious and entertaining.

I was sitting at Guy and Gallard this morning, reading this book.  For those of you who don't know, Guy and Gallard is a small-ish chain here in NYC.  They definitely aren't the best quality, but the coffee isn't all that bad and I just can't resist the darling way they wrap my muffin in this parchment/tissue-type paper that crinkles.  Having the joy of unwrapping my lemon poppyseed muffin makes the muffin itself just a little more palatable.

It was while going through all this that I read this passage:

Where croissants are concerned, I've found two principal schools of thought.  Some prefer a brioche-like model, with a golden hue, a little spring, and an eggy chew.  Not I.  I like a flake, a croissant with an outer layer so fine and brittle that you get crumbs all over yourself from the very first bite. When you pull it apart there should be some empty space, pockets of air between the buttery layers of dough.  When you finally do rip off a hunk to dip in your coffee, it stretches a little before it breaks.  More crumbs, but utterly, completely worth the mess.

And then I giggled as it was followed by this passage:

My first trips to the boulangerie are not all ogling.  I have to keep my head about me as I place my order.  First there is the gender issue; every French noun is assigned a sex, masculine or feminine.  Personally, I think my croissant is a woman, as tender and fragile as a Brontë heroine.  But apparently, the Académie Française, the guys who make the dictionary, have decided that "croissant" is masculine, un croissant.  I have been outvoted.

The good news is that I just adored these passages.  The croissant just become a tangible thing for which I longed, and I loved the simile of a croissant being as feminine as a Brontë heroine.  Lastly, the idea of a flaky croissant being worth the mess is some sort of metaphor for life, peut-être?

The bad news?

All this talk about airy croissants put me off my leaden, dry lemon poppyseed muffin completely.

Eat, drink, and c'est la vie.

Speaking of food writing...

...Remember yesterday I talked about exceptional food writing?

Today, I have an example of...to put it kindly...not good food writing:

When stewed in a cauldron, the big, tough-looking leaf becomes wonderful and delicious, tender and emotional. [referring to collard greens]

This appeared in my latest issue of Saveur in the article "Green Goddess."

I don't want to be mean.  I don't.  But this sort of writing brings out the mean in me.  I love Saveur and I certainly won't cancel my subscription over this (because the photography alone is worth the price of admission, for me).  But this writing is so affected and overwrought.  "Emotional" collard greens?!  No.  Just...no.  "Wonderful and delicious"?!  No.  It's one thing for an inexperienced blogger such as myself, but you're Saveur.  For goodness sake.

On the upside, "emotional" has become a catch-phrase in our house.  Adam and I enjoyed a late-night snack of burrata on toast this weekend and we absolutely declared it to be tender and emotional.  It really was so good - with some lemon zest, flake salt, and fresh pepper - that I wanted to cry.

Eat, drink, and emote.



Note: Another upside is that the Collard Greens, Cornmeal, and Sausage Soup looks really amazing. 

Excerpt: BLOOD, BONES, AND BUTTER by Gabrielle Hamilton

Oh, you guys.  Wow.  I was incredibly lucky recently to score a galley of BLOOD, BONES, AND BUTTER by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House, March 2011).  When I heard that Anthony Bourdain had called it "the best food memoir by a chef ever. EVER" and that Mario Batali said that he would "apply for the dishwasher job at Prune to learn from my new queen", I knew I had to read it.  So here's a spoiler:

It really is that good.

I loved it.  I savored every word.  I won't do a full "review", as it's still five months out from publication.  But here is an excerpt of a section that particularly spoke to me:

I want to do the cooking.  It is what grounds me, gives me pleasure, and is the best way for me to communicate with the Italian-speaking family and to make a contribution.  But it can also make me feel like the hired help.  While Michel babysits the kids at the pool for the day, dozing in and out of naps and reading the newspaper and having fluid conversations with people in his native tongue I am nagged by an emptiness while I am neatening and organizing the drawers and shelves in all the cabinets, and it continues as I move up and down each aisle in the grocery store, and interferes still while I am chopping each onion at the newly created cooking island in front of the kitchen stove.  By the time I check out at the grocery store and I've put this grocery bill on my personal card, sauted the onions with the potatoes, and wiped down the counter, I feel precariously poised exactly between totally perfect, as if I am exactly where I should be, and totally fucked-up, as if I were bankrolling my own martyrdom. [quoted from advanced reader's edition]

Oh my god.  Yes.

Is this the "best" passage I could have shared?  Perhaps not.  But this section summed up so many of my own conflicted feelings about cooking for my family and friends: I love cooking...but...god, I'm so not the caterer, dudes.  I am not the Alice to your Brady Bunch.  And the best food writing, in my mind, is that which reflects back to us our own experiences, our own passions, our own humanity.  Which BLOOD, BONES, AND BUTTER accomplishes.  In spades.  I most certainly wasn't doing coke lines and living on my own at 16 years old...but somehow, some way, Gabrielle Hamilton's experiences still end up being my own.  And don't even get me started on her passage about women in restaurants: I'm not a chef in a restaurant but Hamilton still manages to mirror my own feelings about being a woman in a professional environment.  It's brilliant.

To keep myself from going on and on, I just want to end by saying this: buy it.  Mark it, pre-order it, schedule it on your Outlook.  This is the second coming of M.F.K Fisher.  And I do not say this lightly.

Eat, drink, and jump on the Gabrielle Hamilton bandwagon.