Great Gourmands

Dear Avis:

Just a short note, to acknowledge yours which came in this morning.  I'm about to rush out to do my marketing, and then settle down to my soups.  I can't tell you my emotions of love and gratitude for all your interest and hard work in the behalf of our book; you display the true marks of a Great Gourmande...which always includes the warmest and most generous of natures...and is why people who love to eat are always the best people.*

* Excerpt from As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).  Italics and boldface type are my own.

Avis DeVoto: A Seaside Lunch

You guys!  What took me so long to read AS ALWAYS, JULIA: THE LETTERS OF JULIA CHILD & AVIS DEVOTO?!  I bought it on a whim yesterday and, in the first 20 pages alone, I have dog-eared four pages, marked a recipe, and circled numerous parts that I've loved.  This book is heaven, absolutely heaven.

So on this dreary NYC day where winter is still hanging on (though I take comfort in the fact that it will eventually lose), I offer up this quote from Avis DeVoto (which is also a sort of recipe):

Cape Ann also provides what I stubbornly maintain are the world's best lobsters.  I also stubbornly maintain that the only real way to cook lobsters is in three to four inches of sea water, in a covered kettle, for about twelve minutes (pound and a quarter lobsters being the ideal size).  You then drape these dazzling creatures over the rocks until they cool off a bit, tear them apart with the bare hands, dip each piece in melted butter, and guzzle.  There should from two to six lobsters per person [!].  While the lobsters cook and cool off, two dry Martinis a la DeVoto should be served.  Nothing whatever else should be served - we are eating all the lobster we want, we are not fooling around with salad or strawberry shortcake or even coffee.  All you need are the martinis, plenty of lobsters, millions of paper napkins, and a view.

Emphasis and exclamation point are my own, of course.  Can you believe this?!  Ye gads.

Eat, drink, and add seaside lobster-and-martini lunch to my Life To-Do List.

Lots of Food, Part II

I went to a panel discussion at the New School last week on Julia Child, and it was fascinating, inspiring stuff. Check out the line-up: Joan Reardon, Judith Jones, Laura Shapiro, and Molly O’Neill. And if you don’t know who these people are, I urge you to do some Googling. Each speaker was engaging and interesting, full to the brim with funny stories and anecdotes about Julia Child.

One of the many things I appreciated was that Molly O’Neill shared that Julia’s public persona was not an act – Julia was funny and brassy and a complete “goofball”. Molly also mentioned how lucky Julia was to have an editor that encouraged her to be “real”; to which Judith Jones replied that Julia was incredibly humble and Judith absolutely had to encourage Julia to let her personality show.

Additionally, I believe it was Laura who talked about Julia’s “conversion experience” in France. Likewise, Alice Waters and MFK Fisher had experiences of their own in France. Laura described it as that moment when a person is turned on to and discovers a whole new way of eating, cooking, and enjoying food. To the point when your whole life changes in reaction to your experience. This experience gives you a new gold standard by which all other food is measured. Hearing this was like a bell going off in my head. I had a “conversion experience.” My best friend had a “conversion experience.” I daresay that all the people I know who are deeply passionate and excited about food had such an experience. I want to sit in a room with 20 people and share our conversion experiences because each one would be so different, informed by such diverse backgrounds. But I love the idea of something clicking in one’s head as they take that first delectable bite…and you’ll never be the same again.

Lastly, one thing that Molly said struck me (because Molly was a hilarious and interesting speaker): Julia, for better or for worse, made cooking a white-collar experience, whereas it was once a blue-collar industry. I don't enough about the history of cooking and restaurants to comment on Molly's statement; nevertheless, I do find that an interesting point and it has inspired me to do more research to find out when that change took place. Because Molly is right: certainly in America, cooking is, to some degree, a white-collar activity. I guess that this is in large part, particularly in recent months, because of the price of "good" food. But how does Julia Child fit into this? I don't know yet...but I'm reading more to find out...