chefs

Julie and Julia: An overly long and very late review

maki — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:42:42 +0200

Last night I finally got to see Julie and Julia, the much-talked-about movie based on the books Julia and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously and My Life In France. Julia and Julia is a blog-turned-into-book that recounts how Julie Powell, an office cubicle worker who hates her job and is having an identity crisis, cooks her way through Julia Child’s first masterpiece Mastering The Art Of French Cooking (Volume 1) as a project to bring meaning to her life. My Life In France is the autobiography of Julia Child, a legendary American cookbook author and TV chef. I thought I would put in both descriptions here, since contrary to what American may think, Julia Child is not universally known. In fact, as Anna Picard wrote on The Guardian’s World of Mouth blog, internet savvy non-USens are more likely to know about Julie Powell, Famous Blogger Who Became Bestselling Author, rather than Julia Child, an odd-looking woman who had some cooking gig on the telly years ago.

I pondered these things as made our way to a movie theater in Lyon, France, for a pre-premiere, or sneak preview (the movie officially opens here in France on the 16th). Julia Child may be credited with introducing fine French cooking techniques to American housewives, but she is not a household name in the country that inspired her by any means, even if she did receive a Legion d’Honneur from the French government. I was even wondering if anyone else besides us would be there for the show. As it happens, the theatre (one of the smaller ones at the multiplex) was about 80% full, and as far as I could eavesdrop on, mostly by French people, not expats like me.

Perhaps because I viewed the movie in a place where Julia Child is not a culinary diety and pop-culture icon, I was able to watch the movie in a different way I think than most Americans. I think that this really is a movie about Julie, not Julia. The Julia parts are there to enlighten us about this legendary Julia figure, and why someone would give up a year of her life, more or less, to immersing herself in the Cult of Julia. Parallels are drawn between the lives of the two women, to be sure, but I think they are there to give weight and credence to Julie’s experience.

Like most people who have written about this movie, I did yearn for more Julia, a whole movie about Julia. The scenes of France and Paris in the late ’40s onwards are gorgeous, and the acting of Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and everyone else in the Julia segments are just wonderful. I wonder if there is enough footage there to cobble together an only-Julia Director’s Cut version (I doubt it, but it would be nice). But that’s another movie entirely. In this movie, Julia is perfect because she’s a mythical figure. She’s the Julia that Julie worships and idolizes, and the Julia that is actually a reality in Julie’s world, the one who tells a reporter that she dislikes whatever it is that Julie is doing (though it’s not specified in the movie or in reports about the real-life incident exactly what she objected to) is not really the same person.

Compared to the perfect Julia, Julie is going to come off worse by default. How can a depressed almost-30something woman stuck in a boring job, living somewhere she can’t stand, compete with a woman who seems to be on an extended honeymoon in a dreamlike city? More to the point, she’s just a blogger. If you have been blogging for any length of time, you may know by now that the world at large, the part that only use the internets for email and looking at cute cat pictures, not to mention more than a few “professional” journalists and writers, tend to sneer at bloggers. They regard them - us - as self-centered twits who gaze too intently at our navels, then have the nerve to expose our navel lint to the general public. Amy Adams made her about as appealing as possible probably, but she had an impossible task to begin with.

Nevertheless, Julie is the one who most people are closer to in reality. We can dream about and aspire to becoming like Julia. But when we blog, in some way we are being Julie; using our writing to express ourselves, as an outlet for our thoughts or our stunted creativity, to find an audience out there who just might appreciate us. There are thousands, if not millions, of Julies out there. I’m one of them.

When I started Just Hungry in late 2003, I was at a pretty low point mentally. I had recently finished writing a book about web tech things, which ended up being something very different from what I set it out to be. I had a personal blog already, but somehow could not get myself out of the rut of writing about web-design this or CSS-that. Not that there is anything wrong with those subjects, but I felt like writing for my blog was like taking a busman’s holiday - I could never get away from the day job. So I started a little blog about one of my lifelong obsessions, food. My blog did not grow as fast as it should have perhaps - I was very unfocused, and I even stopped blogging for no good reason during 2004. And my writing at the start was pretty blah. (Derail: I got a chuckle out of this post on Tigers and Strawberries that I stumbled on when I was looking up links for this article. Apparently, my blog “iwasjustreallyveryhungry.com” (which was never the actual URL, though my blog’s name used to be I Was Just Really Very Hungry) was dissed by a food anthology editor way back then.) Still, it brought a different kind of focus to my life.

I almost clapped my hands at the little things in the movie that only a blogger could appreciate - when Julie gets her first comment; when her husband tells her she has the no. 3 blog on Salon.com. (I never got hot sauce in the mail from a reader though. That part is sort of zeitgeist I guess. If it really happened, it was ok in 2003 perhaps, but 2009, I think we are wary of random strangers knowing our real addresses, let alone sending us food in the mail!) I’ve had those little “You Like Me, You Really Like Me!” moments too - when Just Hungry was a Featured Blog on Typepad, its original home; when I got my first email from a mainstream media reporter asking for an interview; when I got a heartfelt email from someone saying how my bento recipes were being used as inspiration by a group of women with eating disorders, to get them back into eating small portions of real food. Being quoted several times over in a feature article in the New York Times this week was another highlight. And if getting a book contract is supposed to be the measure of a blogger’s success, I have one actually, and am in the throes of working frantically on the first draft. (Details to come.)

I can also relate very well to the struggle of trying to cook in an inadequate kitchen. I’ve been doing that for most of this year, as we move around from holiday home to holiday home, waiting for the Final Word to come on whether we can purchase the house we want or not. (I’ve been technically homeless since March. It’s really getting old.) The desire to cook something delicious that uplifts the soul and fills the belly can overcome a tiny two-burner stove that slopes towards the center so that you can only cook in a pan straddling the two burners, and the limitations of a kitchen sink placed at such an odd angle that you bang your head on a hard corner cupboard every time you try to rinse some vegetables.

So despite her foibles and the comparative smallness of her vision, I loved the Julie parts as much as I loved the larger-than-life portrayal of the larger-than-life Julia Child.

One other thing: I think that this is a movie about writing, as much as it is about food. It’s about the power of writing to inspire and change lives. Julia’s life is transformed first by falling in love with French food, but it’s really changed by her book. Julie’s life is changed mostly by her blog, and her book - the cooking thing was mostly a hook to hang her writer’s hat onto.

In any case, I think that Julie and Julia is a wonderful movie, that should be appreciated on its own merit, rather than trying to twist it into something that it is not.

Notes

Julia Child. I didn’t want to interject my own feelings about the real-life people involved in the movie in the above review. I really wanted to see the characters just as they are portrayed in the movie, and I think I succeeded. I do happen to love the real Julia Child - she’s one of my major inspirations, and she wrote my favorite English-language cookbook of all time. I have My Life In France in three formats - as a hardcover, as an audiobook, and as an ebook. I re-read it all the time. If you have not read it yet, please, go and get it!
Julie Powell. On the other hand, I was never a fan of Julie Powell the blogger and writer. I read her blog quite some time after she stopped updating it - as a matter of fact, I only found it when Julia Child passed away. I was looking around to see what other people’s reactions were, and I found her heartfelt post about it. I then started going back through her Julie/Julia blog, but stopped after a few entries - it was just so, I don’t know, messy. Maybe I shouldn’t have - maybe her writing improved too with practice, as I like to think mine has. But anyway, for this reason I was very surprised by how much I liked the Julie in the movie, and I am tempted to buy the book after all.

What’s holding me back is the real Julie Powell’s annoying post-movie comments that have appeared all over the place about how the movie Julie is different from her, please don’t hate her because of that Julie, et al. Ugh, please shut up about that. Also, I can’t get away from the niggling feeling that any theme would have done as a hook to get herself a writing project. It could have been ‘build 365 Lego projects in a year’ or ‘knit 52 hats in a year’ or something. For Julie Powell I really think it was the writing first, food/cooking second. Which may explain why she doesn’t seem to think of herself as a food blogger and distances herself from food bloggers, unless it’s convenient for her to do otherwise. But as she likes to repeat, the movie Julie is not the same as the real-life Julie Powell, and I do like the movie Julie a lot.
Nora Ephron. The director Nora Ephron used to be a writer/journalist (interestingly she lists her books before her movies in her Huffington Post bio). She has written a lot about food - for example Scribble Scribble (out of print but you can find it used), which is a collection of essays she wrote for Esquire Magazine about the media, she has a very funny critique of Bon Appetit magazine, and ends another essay about the New York Post with her recipe for borscht, which is really quite good. And her autobiographical novel Heartburn (which was turned into a movie starring - Meryl Streep!) is peppered with some great comfort food recipes. I try to avoid reading it when I’m hungry, otherwise before I know it I’m in the kitchen toasting some almonds in butter or whipping up a bowl of mashed potatoes or something. So this script really was a good fit for her, and I think it shows - it’s the best movie she’s made in my opinion, right up there with When Harry Met Sally.
Julia Child’s impact on American women. The best account I’ve read of the huge impact Julia Child and Mastering The Art Of French Cooking had on a generation of American women, appears in a wonderful book called Feast Here Awhile by Jo Brans, who is listed on the dust jacket as a journalist and writer. It’s out of print, but you can get it used for a bargain price. If you’re interested in what impact certain chefs, cookbooks and so on had on American society from the late ’50s up to the early ’90s, this is a must read. I wish there were more books like this out there. What would be cool is if the writers of Mad Men managed to get a reference to Mastering in there somewhere - maybe have Betty Draper discover an outlet for her ongoing frustration? Well, maybe not…she may gain weight or something.
Julia and France. In the movie, Julia is portrayed as being enamored of Paris, and only Paris, when it comes to France. But in the book she fell in love with Marseille and adored the food of Provence. Later in her life she and Paul built a house called La Pitchoune in Provence, on land owned by Simone (Simca) Beck, where they and many of their friends (among them James Beard) spent a lot of time. (The house is now a cooking school for well-heeled tourists.) I guess this dissing of Marseille was done for the sake of expediency, but it reinforced, yet again, that notion held by so many Americans and others that Paris=France=Paris and there’s nothing else. (OK, a lot of Parisiens think like that too.) As someone who has fallen in love with this corner of France, it does grate on me. But hey, there are enough tourists here from the Netherlands and Belgium and Germany and the UK here in the summer so, maybe it’s a good thing there aren’t more Americans! Also note that she falls in love for the first time with French cooking at the restaurant La Couronne in Rouen, in Normandy, not in Paris. (On the other hand, Julia really did hate Bonn it seems…) Anyway, if you wonder whether really friendly market vendors like those that Julia interacted with still exist in France, yes they do - in the provinces mostly, but even in Paris - but you need to become a regular, and speaking a bit of French and above all, being friendly yourself does help. (My mother does not speak a word of French but manages to charm market vendors everywhere by her sheer enthusiasm.)
Queens. Just in case you get the impression that the NYC borough of Queens is a food desert, Robyn will disabuse you of such nonsense. I lived for a year in Flushing, and while I hated my apartment and the long commute to work, I loved the neighborhood for its wide variety of delicious food.
Watching Julie and Julia with a French audience. It was a lot of fun. They laughed heartily at Julia, and gasped audibly at the gorgeous food porn, starting with that sole meunière in Rouen. They laughed the loudest when Meryl Streep/Julia uttered a throwaway phrase or word in French.
Sole meunière in the movies, again. Sole meunière also features prominently in the movie that is still my favorite food-theme movie, Tampopo.
Other interesting food personalities to make movies about. Perhaps another Julia Child movie will not be made soon, but how about James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Escoffier, Elizabeth David (ok a TV movie of sorts was made about her)? All larger than life fascinating characters. An M.F.K. Fisher movie could be really interesting - that lady had a very complicated life, to say the least. And she was beautiful too.
Bloggers liking Julie. Finally, a couple of prominent non-food bloggers had a similar take on the Julie part of Julie and Julia: Matt Haughey, who relates his early experiences with Metafilter, and Tom and Lorenzo of the site formerly known as Project Rungay.

Heston Blumethal's wacky Christmas

maki — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:56:14 +0100

(Before we commence, a final reminder that the Menu For Hope charity event ends tomorrow! If you have not donated yet, you still have time! Think of all the chocolate!)

If you missed Heston’s Perfect Christmas Dinner, which aired on BBC Two last night, you just have to catch a rerun, or otherwise (!) try to see it. It was the craziest ‘food’ show I have ever seen, bar none, and I have seen lots of them from all over the world. Despite the rather somber mood around here these days, we were laughing out loud several times as we watched it.

The second season (series) of Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, which ended on Tuesday (season/series 1 reviewed here) was a bit disappointing to me - I felt as though he was sort of stretching things a bit too much sometimes. But the Christmas show was just astonishing, and so much fun.

Among other things:

The guests were greeted with what looked like Christmas balls, which were actually filled with salmon mousse
Heston went to Amman to get real frankincense and myrrh, and turned it and gold leaf into a ‘Gifts from the Three Magi’ themed sort of soup
He made a special feed for the goose he was going to use for the dinner, mixing in some pine tree essence and sage and onion stuffing in the feed to pre-flavor the goose with Christmas flavors (Actually his assistant had to mix up the feed, in a cement mixer. I wonder if that was in his job description.)
He went up to Siberia to feast on reindeer (and bring some home, from a farm though)
At one point, he put a tampon in his mouth, for scientific purposes. (Note: he repeated this recently when he was on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, but he put the tampon in Jonathan’s mouth. Apparently it’s very absorbent and really affects the taste of things.)
And a lot, lot more.

The guests, which included Terry Wogan and Richard E. Grant (who is a lot of fun to watch with food since he has this strange habit of putting his face almost IN his food to sniff at it) were like children in their astonishment, which made it even more fun to watch. Here they are seated for dinner…in a sort of winter wonderland setting, to which they all exclaimed as they stepped in, “Narnia!”

It was like a combination of science, food and a Harry Potter movie.

Here are the re-airing times on the BBC:

December 21 at 3:25AM GMT / 4:25AM CET on BBC One with signing
December 23 at 2:45PM GMT/ 3:45PM CET on BBC Two

Saturday thoughts: Donna Hay, Just Bento, food blogging events

maki — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:50:32 +0100

The sister site to Just Hungry got discovered by several sites overnight (while I was not at the computer, as always happens in such cases) and the traffic went up about 100 x, mainly thanks to it being on the del.icio.us popular page for a while. I haven’t even ‘officially’ launched it in my mind, since I am occasionally breaking it by fiddling with the engine (Drupal, for the technically inclined) in the background, but it’s very gratifying to know that people are interested in the subject. I think it must be timely.

While Just Bento is still in its infancy, bento fans should be sure to check out two great English language bento sites, Cooking Cute, which is on hiatus right now but has lots of great information in the archives, and Lunch In A Box, which among other things has lots of great information on making kid-friendly bento lunches. Both are in my favorite food blogs list.

I had a bit of a headache this morning due to a late night, and so plonked myself in front of the TV to watch Saturday Kitchen on the BBC, a breezy weekly food programme hosted by James Martin. One of his guests was Donna Hay, a cookbook author and food stylist who has fans all over the world. There’s even a food blogging event in her honor called Hay Hay It’s Donna Day (the latest round news is here). I love her food styling as much as everyone, but her appearance in the Saturday Kitchen was a bit of a let down - mainly because she declared in the Omelette Challenge (where two guests square off with each other to make a 3-egg omelette) that she doesn’t like eggs! In my slightly groggy state I was bowled over by this statement. How can you like food and not like eggs? (She was also wearing a sort of party outfit complete with cute and impractical shoes, and flirting quite a bit with the host James Martin, but that’s sort of beside the point. Needless to say, she lost the omelette challenge by a wide margin to chef Atul Kochhar, who I really admire - his book Simple Indian is so great that it’s surpassed my Madhur Jaffrey collection to become my favorite go-to Indian cookbook. I bet he doesn’t make a lot of omelettes being an Indian chef but he didn’t complain!) I felt a similar sort of disappointment when Tom Colicchio said earlier this year that he did not like okra, though he could be excused for that since okra is one of those love/hate kinds of foods. But…eggs!

Speaking of food blogging events - I feel rather bad about this but I am giving them a pass for the forseeable future. Even the one I started, Food Destinations, is on hiatus. What with starting another blog and other issues I just can’t find the time for them. I really appreciate getting invites to various events but…something has to give, unless I can magically increase the number of hours in a day, or figure out how to get by on 2 hours of sleep per 24 hour cycle. (Sometimes I get it down to 3, but it makes me cranky.)

I'm rather tired of the cult of the celebrity chef

maki — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:13:55 +0200

Celebrity chefs have been around for some time now, but they seem to have exploded all over the place in the last decade, mainly through food related TV shows.

The restaurant food world is becoming similar to the world of fashion. There are the actual restaurants, most of which are too expensive for the majority of the population - people without generous expense accounts or oodles of money - other than for a rare treat. These are the couture studios (as in real couture, not ‘couture’ as it’s used to describe anything that’s not a plain t-shirt these days) of the food world. Then you have all the merchandising, from cookbooks to dodgy cookware to frozen dinners bearing a chef’s name. Those are the perfumes and bags and H & M special-designer label lines of the food world.

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, a lot of the time the supermarket products bearing those star chefs’ brands are pale shadows of the ‘couture’ level food at the restaurants. The Gordon Ramsay chocolates I got last year at Waitrose in England were vile. The Jamie Oliver ‘herb mixes’ that are even sold here in Switzerland come in useless self-grinding plastic bottles and are laughably overpriced. And there’s that horrible cement mortar and pestle bearing his name. The various chef-endorsed prepared foods I’ve tried are nothing special in any way. But as people become more exposed to the Celebrity Chef, the sale of such items will probably keep growing.

Oiling the whole machine and providing Publicity and Exposure are food reality shows and the like. I used to enjoy these shows quite a bit, and they formed a large part of my TV watching schedule. But now, I’m getting tired of them. I understand that chefs these days are supposed to be rock stars or something…but you know, a lot of them are just boring (or worse…plain annoying), aside from their cooking skills. For many of them I just want them to limit themselves to the ghost written cookbook and be done with it. But I suppose even a poorly rated TV show gets more eyes than a book.

I feel over-exposed to all these Celebrity Chefs, to the extent that I want them all to go away, for a while anyway. I’m inclined to seek out the un-celebrity chef who quietly produces great food. Or just stick to my own cooking.

Everyone's favorite steakhouse is at the Penthouse Executive Club?

maki — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:04:14 +0100

Frank Bruni gives the steakhouse at the Penthouse Executive Club a pretty entertaining one star review. “Hmm, where have I heard of this place before” I thought, and rummaged through my stacks of recorded food shows. Ah, celebrated don’t-call-it-molecular-gastronomy chef Heston Blumenthal paid it a special visit on his TV show last year, to show his drooling mostly British viewers er, great looking meat. I mean the aged sides of beef, of course.

Anthony Bourdain, guesting again on Michael Ruhlman’s blog, think it was a purposeful slam at Jeffrey Chodorow of Kobe Club, another Manhattan steak house, which was given a really bad no-star review, to which Mr. Chodorow protested via a full page ad in the Times . (Tempest, teapot.) I have this yet to be expressed publicly (or at least not on this blog) disdain of Americans and others who like to show off by serving up huge hunks of wagyuu/Matsuzakagyuu/Kobe beef (usually all meaning the same thing), which was meant to be served in delicate thin slices. But anyway, I must say I’m much intrigued by the Penthouse steak. If only they could screen off the fleshpots. I may be 75% vegetarian, but great, aged steak, something I have on the average about once every 2 years, is one of those things that make me not want to go all-veg.

TV: Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection

maki — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:23:58 +0100

Heston Blumenthal makes aerated chocolate with a vacuum cleaner, among other things

Just by coincidence, the day that we visited The Fat Duck, its chef/owner Heston Blumenthal's new series on BBC Two premiered. Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection is an idiosyncratic 30 minute show that showcases his quirky personality and cooking style perfectly.

The purported aim of the show is to recreate some classic British dishes. At the start of each episode he declares that he disagrees with people who call his style of cooking "molecular gastronomy". He says it's just "good old-fashioned cooking". Well, if using liquid nitrogen for instant-freezing ice cream, using elaborate scientific equipment at a university laboratory to analyze the makeup of the flavors of golden syrup, and making aerated chocolate using a whipped cream bottle (the kind you insert CO2 capsules into), a Space Saver Bag and a Dyson vacuum cleaner is old-fashioned cooking, I guess he lives about 200 years in the future. Or on another planet. He doesn't really look like a scientist, but rather like a nerdy kid with square glasses who likes to experiment with his chemistry kit, and who never quite grew up. He has a quiet sense of joy in what he does that's really fun to watch.

His assertions about all the recipes being recipes that he 'wants you to attempt at home' aside (we roll on the floor, or in my case the sofa since I'm suffering from a streaming cold at the moment, whenever he says this), the show is really entertaining, and I think does give some insight into how the molecular-gastronomy approach to fine cooking works. In the second episode which aired last night, he went about de-constructing what makes a Black Forest gateau, and then re-constructing it step by step: chocolate layers in two different textures, kirsch-flavored cream, sour cherries. The final touch, he said, was to spray the air just before eating the gateau with some kirsch. It may all seem a bit ridiculous, but it does make sense: we don't just eat with our mouths, we eat with our eyes and our noses too.

Black Forest gateau, Heston Blumenthal-style, on a chocolate-wood-grained base, with spray atomizer of kirsch

It's also about obtaining the finest ingredients possible - something that home cooks may aspire to, but not always be able to achieve. In the first episode, he puts together 'bangers and mash' (a classic British dish of sausages with onion gravy and mashed potatoes). He finds the finest pork from an old fashioned kind of pig whose meat tastes like apples. Though, I have the say the one thing about those bangers that had all my friends who had watched the episode chortling in disbelief was the toast water. (He makes some toast, then soaks it in water to obtain 'toast water', which is added to the sausage meat. The toast is then discarded, and he adds rusks, which are sort of like dry toast anyway, as filler.)

Anyway, if you're in the UK or have access to BBC Two (in Switzerland it is in the Digital package offered by love/hated Cablecom), be sure not to miss the rest of the episodes. Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection airs on Tuesdays at 8pm British/9pm Central European time. If you live elsewhere be sure to look out for this on your local BBC outlet. The web site has some clips from the show, and there is a companion book out in both the U.S. and the UK.

TV: Fear of Fanny - resurrecting Fanny Cradock

maki — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:24:30 +0200

Mark Gatiss as Johnnie and Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock on Fear of Fanny

Fear of Fanny is the second in a series of biopics being aired by BBC Four this month. This time, the subject is Fanny Cradock, who ruled as a TV chef in the U.K. in the '60s to the '70s.

I've had a long standing fascination with Fanny Cradock, so I was really looking forward to this portrayal of her. All in all, it didn't disappoint - Julia Davis (the star of Nighty Night) seemed to capture Fanny's bossiness and brittleness very well. The makeup people did a pretty good job too. Below on the left is Julia Davis as Fanny, and the real Fanny, who was an early advocate of cosmetic surgery.

What I liked the most about Fear of Fanny was the way in which Johnnie Cradock was portrayed. He was the stooge and henpecked husband on the TV shows, and I'd even assumed, wrongly, that he just played the part of Fanny's husband. Despite the fact that they couldn't get married since her first husband was still alive (and she wouldn't/couldn't divorce him), Johnnie was really her husband in the truest sense, and supported and helped her throughout their 50 + years together. He must have really loved her, because she must have been a fairly impossible woman to live with.

The important events of Fanny's television career are faithfully reproduced, such as an interview on the Michael Parkinson show (with some clever splicing in of a young Parky with Julia as Fanny), an infamous show where a BBC journalist visits their house for dinner and is served an assiette de fruits de mer (a seafood platter, mostly of shellfish), some of which was still sort of alive and moving, and her very first cooking show for the BBC with the producers commenting on what makes her so compelling to watch. Most of all, it portrays the one TV appearance that was to be her downfall, where she totally humiliated a woman who had won a competition to prepare a banquet. Fanny expressed such horror at the poor woman's menu, and put her down so horribly, that the public turned on her, and her career as a television cook was abruptly over. (She did continue to write after that.) Julia Davis' version is not as nasty perhaps as the original, but it captures the horror of the moment very well.

The bonus materials

The best part of this 'season of famous women in food' on the BBC for me is not the dramas themselves, but all the extra programming that's been on around that theme. There has been a programme hosted by "Fat Lady" Clarissa Dickson-Wright about Hannah Glasse, a best-selling cookbook author from the 18th Century, and an interview with Marguerite Patten, the first TV cook. They are also showing the 2002 documentary series, "The Way We Cooked", which profiles six TV chefs who were, or are, hugely influential at that time in Britain - Delia Smith, Keith Floyd, Fanny Cradock, Graham Kerr, Gary Rhodes and Jamie Oliver. (I first saw the Fanny/Graham episode a couple of years ago when Margaret very kindly send me a video tape of it. I've treasured that tape every since but it's great to finally have a digital version of it for my archives.) The Fanny/Graham episode has a clip from the original Fanny-disses-poor-woman-and-English-cooking incident and it's interesting to compare it with the version in Fear of Fanny.

And, for Fanny fans, a great bonus is that they are showing two of her original shows, in all their glory (the second one is airing tonight). I don't actually remember watching Fanny on TV since her heyday was before my time, so it's fascinating to see the real version of her. She's like a very authoritative, slightly scary teacher, with a twinkle in her eye and an outrageous sense of style - her face is pulled tight, eyebrows halfway up her forehead, caked in heavy makeup, her hair carefully coiffed, topped off with with a huge ribbon. She's more out there than many drag queens. (She also named her dog Mademoiselle Lolita Saltina Cradock.)

Her sense of style, or arguably the lack of it, extended to her food. She loved color and making a splash. She was really I suppose reflecting her times - the '60s and '70s were after all a very splashy, colorful period in design and everything else. Why not colorful food?

These are the kinds of foods associated with Fanny in peoples' memories, even though she gave lots of advice and recipes for much less outrageous looking food:

Piped cream colored with green vegetable coloring. (She also went in big for blues and pinks, like blue-dyed deviled eggs.)

A chocolate gateau, almost smothered with brightly colored edible flowers made from marzipan or fondant. Matches her dress!

Some of her colorful ideas are sort of usable today though, such as this 'chequerboard' of toasty bits covered in caviar and smoked salmon.

She was really presenting food for her audience in a sense - the'60s and '70s, and even the '80s, were big on formal home entertaining, and inviting the boss over for a big Dinner Party. So she was teaching the anxious housewife how to make food that would impress. I think we do far, far less of that kind of dinner-to-impress kind of thing these days, but back then it was pretty big. I remember my own mother doing it in England and New York (it was different once we moved back to Japan, but that's another story). One time, my parents invited over the Big Boss (the president of the parent company) for dinner when he was visiting England. My mother put out such an elaborate spread that when it was all done and the Boss had left, we found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, totally exhausted.

I have several Fanny Cradock books, and while she did indeed present a lot of outrageous food, and was firmly and often hilariously Franco-centric (in her world, Escoffier was God, period), she was also very aware of the budgetary and time restraints of her audience. I keep on saying that I will write more about her recipes and I will, I will. At the very least, she is still a fascinating creature to behold, and I'm glad that Fear of Fanny has brought her out into the limelight again.

Fear of Fanny is re-airing at these times:

October 29, 10pm BST / 11pm CET, BBC Four
October 30, 12:45am BST/ 1:45am CET, BBC Four
November 2, 9pm BST/ 10pm CET, BBC HD
November 2, 10:20pm BST/11:20pm CET, BBC HD

Isabella Beeton, Fanny Cradock, and Elizabeth David on the BBC

maki — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:32:09 +0200

Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock in Fear of Fanny

The BBC is broadcasting biographical dramas based on the lives of three of the most famous women in food and cooking this month. First up is The Secret Life of Mrs.Beeton (Monday October 16th, BBC Four). Isabella Beeton was a truly remarkable woman, who produced a bestselling book on cooking and household management and gave birth to four children, before her death at the age of 28. She's still probably the most influential cookbook author in Britain to this day - her books, albeit heavily 'revised', are still in print today

Next up is perhaps the woman I'm most fascinated with, Fanny Cradock. Fear of Fanny (October 23, BBC Four) is a dramatization of the life of the woman who was the Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith of the 1950s through the '70s. She wrote cookbooks, a newspaper food column, and was the host of her own tv cooking show, together with Johnny Cradock, who played her henpecked husband. (They only actually married much later.) She was hugely influential in her heyday, but has since become almost forgotten except for her preposterous appearance and imperious attitude. I am not sure if this new drama is going to revive her reputation or bury her in the 'kook' category even further, but I'm looking forward to it anyway. I've written about Fanny Cradock briefly before; since that post, I've collected several of her cookbooks, including the 96-part magazine series that accompanied one of her TV shows. Someday I hope to find the time to compile more about her.

Lastly, there is a rebroadcast of Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes (October 30th, BBC Four). I saw this some months ago - it was okay, though not great, and seemed to put a lot of emphasis on her love life and very little on why she was such a best selling and influential food writer. It's interesting to see how she has fared in recent times compared to Fanny Cradock though: while Fanny Cradock is little more than a historical footnote, and as far as I know none of her books are still in print, Elizabeth David is revered by current influential food writers and personalities like Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters and Nigel Slater as being a pioneer. Ironic, since both of them were at the end of the day doing the same thing, more or less - re-introducing post-war Britain to good (meaning, European with a heavy leaning on French) food. Maybe if Fanny hadn't had so much plastic surgery, or appeared on TV, she's be a food icon too. And granted, Elizabeth David was a better writer. (And yes, the differences go much further.)

In any case, if you are interested in food and British history these three dramas should make for fascinating watching.

Why Hell's Kitchen is not a real food show

maki — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:42:16 +0200

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon (mainly because I'm avoiding the task of Defrosting the Freezer...more about that later) and I'm sitting here contemplating TV Reality Cooking Shows.

Someone who had read my rather detailed reviews of Top Chef, as well as my adventures following the BBC Masterchef challenges, asked me recently why I didn't do similar reviews of Hell's Kitchen.

Hell's Kitchen is yet another reality competition show that is ostensibly about cooking. Star chef Gordon Ramsay pits two teams together in the kitchens of a mockup restaurant, where the contestants must learn to be able to serve the diners with food that's up to Chef Ramsay's standards. It originated in the U.K. on Channel 4, before Fox took Ramsay and the show concept over to the U.S. (There was a second season of Hell's Kitchen on Channel 4 with two 'celebrity' chefs replacing one Ramsay, but it was unmentionably awful so let's forget it ever happened.)

One reason I don't talk about Hell's Kitchen is simple - I can't legally view new episodes here while I'm in Switzerland. I'd have it get it via nefarious means (you know what they are, and if you don't, don't bother). I did catch a couple of episodes when I was in New York in July, and they also showed the first season on ITV, which I can get via satellite.

But the main reason I don't talk about Hell's Kitchen is that to me it's not a real food show. The only food part about it is the restaurant setting.

In Top Chef, the preparation and creation of restaurant quality food was at the center of the show, despite the reality show trappings. That's what made it interesting for me. The other aspects like the inter-dynamics of the personalities and things were fun to watch and talk about too, but above all, the demonstrated ability of the chef-contestants is what made it worth watching from a foodie point of view. The same attraction holds true for Project Runway: although the personality clashes and Jeffrey being mean to Angela's mom and things make for good drama, the highlight of the shows are when Tim Gunn is walking around critiquing the designers in-progress work, and then seeing their final creations go down the runway. It's thrilling in a way to see how Michael can turn a piece of plastic into an elegant looking shrug, just as it was fun to gawk at, and discuss the merits of, Stephen's artsy platings.

What Hell's Kitchen is about is mostly Gordon Ramsay's outrageous personality. Then, there are the often silly little human dramas that go on as on any reality show. There are glimpses of the contestants' creativity or lack thereof, but too few of them to really count. I can't remember any of the food invented by the Hell's Kitchen contestants; the only food I do recall from the show are a couple of ones that they had to serve in the mock restaurant (that the chef wannabes keep on screwing up), such as Ramsay's famous Beef Wellington. But we know already that Gordon Ramsay is a world class chef with several successful restaurants, so of course any dish he's specified has to be good. No drama there.

So what we are left with is mainly is the sight of the mostly hapless chef wannabes-contestants running around like frightened chickens while Gordon Ramsay hurling a stream of abuse at them. It's fun to an extent, but not really enlightening or anything. Hell's Kitchen may draw a bigger audience than Top Chef (I don't know if it does, but it is a network show while Top Chef is on a cable channel), but that doesn't mean it's worth watching from a foodie point of view.

Incidentally, Ramsay has two other U.K. produced food shows: Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and The F-Word. The F-Word is some sort of talk show/cooking/variety thing which I can't stand watching, but Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, where the Big F*er goes around the country trying to fix failing restaurants, is really entertaining and thought provoking. It is shown sometimes on BBC America in the U.S., so try to catch it if you can...or use those mysterious nefarious measures. I don't think they could bring the Kitchen Nightmares format to the U.S. though...Gordon Ramsay would probably get shot by someone at one of those restaurants-to-be-made-over people in the first 30 minutes. (Update: If you are reading this you probably know that the format was imported to the U.S. Aside from the frequently awful fakey editing and the highly annoying narration, it's basically the same as the original.)

(P.S. We finally settled on a new refrigerator, and should get it delivered this week. Thus the need to Defrost...not one of the fun tasks to do in the kitchen...)

[Update:] Here is a link to a news story about Gordon Ramsay winning a libel suit against a U.K. newspaper that ran an article claiming the production crew of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares had faked an episode of the program.

Craft and 'wichcraft: two sides of Tom Colicchio

maki — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 22:34:01 +0200

Yes, I admit it - my intensive viewing of the Top Chef reality show gave me a renewed interest in Tom Colicchio. I have been to Gramercy Tavern, but I'd never had a chance to go to Craft, which presumably is his more personal vision of what American cuisine should be. I'd also never made it to 'wichcraft, his growing mini-chain of take-out sandwich joints.

Yesterday I ended up having a Tom Colicchio Appreciation Day. We already had dinner reservations for Craft, and we happened to pass by Bryant Park around lunchtime.

'wiches and more

Bryant Park, which is behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, used to be a really nasty place, but has been totally transformed in the last decade or so. It's now arguably the most attractive small park in the city, and a true oasis in this noisy and hectic part of the city. 'wichcraft has 4 small booths at the Sixth Avenue end; one dedicated to sandwiches, one to coffee and pastries, one to ice cream, and one to soups and salads. There are plenty of chairs and tables around at which to enjoy the goodies.

Since it is after all called 'wichcraft, we headed straight for the sandwich booth. The booth itself, shaded by big trees, is one of the prettiest food booths I've ever seen.

The sandwich selection is not huge - about 12 in all, some cold and some warm. (Their menu is on their web site.) I decided to go for the onion fritatta on a ciabatta roll, and my lunch buddy went for the pastrami on rye bread; this one was basically a pastrami panini (a grilled/pressed sandwich). These sandwiches are pictured in the photo at the top of this article. The verdict was mixed - we both loved the frittata sandwich, though it was just a trifle greasy. The pastrami, while tasty, was a bit too greasy, and also quite small. It didn't really compare favorably with the myriad of good pastrami sandwiches available around the city. The lunch buddy was still hungry after devouring that plus a big bite of my frittata sandwich, and went to order a second sandwich, the grilled gruyère & caramelized onions on rye bread.

This was was quite tasty - maybe even more so than the frittata, though it was close. It was a bit heavy on the onion and light on the cheese.

Instead of another sandwich, I decided to have a chocolate cupcake. It came in this adorable plastic container - which is basically an upside down plastic cup container, but putting the logo sticker on the bottom and presenting it so is a neat idea.

The cupcake itself, a glorified version of a Hostess cupcake, was dense, moist and delicious.

I think the biggest problem with 'wichcraft in New York is that this is a city that simply abounds with good to great delis and sandwich places. 'wichcraft to me seems just a tad too pricey in that context. The sandwiches are very good though, and the concept of standardized, freshly made sandwiches, salads and related items that are several cuts above your average fast food, should be a successful formula. The packaging of the product is very attractive - and you can't discount the power of attractive design...just look at Starbuck's. I can imagine a 'wichcraft in upscale shopping malls all over the country. They already have a mall location in their Las Vegas branch (you do know that the Las Vegas Strip is one big mall, with some casinos) and their San Francisco store is going to be in a mall too.

Incidentally, Top Chef fans may remember the sandwich challenge in Episode 7, won by Harold. [Edit: As Kymm points out in the comments, it was Miguel who came up with the deconstructed falafel sandwich idea.] The "chopped chickpea" sandwich on the current New York menu sounds a bit like that the falafel sandwich. Otherwise though the menu is a bit thin on really vegetarian options, though there are a couple of cheese based sandwiches.

Crafting American cuisine

I just love the atmosphere of Craft. The dining room is not too large, nor is it over-decorated in the way some other restaurants in the city are. It was pretty full when we got there, and quite lively, but the noise level is not so high that you have to shout at your dining partners. The piped in jazzy-swingy music adds to the convival atmosphere. The lighting is also quite dark but not so dark that you have to peer at your food to see what you were eating. It's a very adult place, but still young.

I also love the whole concept of fairly small portions of food, each dish served on its own plate, that you are encouraged to share. Whenever I eat out I share anyway, but it's a bit more relaxing when the restaurant says it's a good thing to do so.

The menu itself, printed on a single sheet of landscape mode paper, is divided into four columns: the first column is first courses, the second is main dishes, and the last two columns are side dishes. As someone who usually likes and remembers the side dishes more than the main meat or fish, this made me smile too. At our very friendly (yet not over-friendly, important that) waitress's suggestion, we ordered a first course each, a main each, and two side dishes. This was just the right amount, even though we were starving since got there at 9:30. (We had an earlier reservation, but there was a flash rainstorm in the evening yesterday that drenched us from head to toe.) The wine list was fairly reasonably priced, extensive and interesting. We had a very nice, dry rosé from North Fork, Long Island, by the way, which fitted very well.

Okay, so what about the food? Well, it was very good. It's quite obvious the chef is using fresh, in-season ingredients. The highlights for me were the beet salad, a colorful melange of red, yellow, white and spiral-colored chiogga beets, and the fava bean side dish which had macadamia nuts in it. We also had an artichoke salad with duck ham and cheese, scallops, sweetbread, and salt cod and eggplant risotto. For dessert, we had an assortment of ice creams and sorbets, and a sour cherry almond tart. A very nice touch was the blueberry muffins we received as a going-home gift of sorts. They were delicious for breakfast.

It was all excellent, really - but did it reach orgasmic heights? Well, no. There was an unfortunate tendency to give just about every dish a sort of sweetish-sour flavor for one thing - I suspect an overuse of balsamic vinegar and maybe ponzu. I can understand that with the salads, and possibly with the sweetbreads, but the salt cod and eggplant risotto, the only dish that was actually bit of a disappointment, also had that flavor. There was a bit too much sameness to everything. I think that may be why the fava beans stood out for me, because they didn't have that flavoring. If I were a Michelin critic (one that's not overly biased towards French cuisine, mind you) I think I would give the place one star, or maybe make it a provisional one star worth revisiting next year.

Still, I would go back there again in a heartbeat. If you have overseas guests and you want to take them to a really good restaurant that serves top notch American cuisine, you can't go wrong with Craft.

So, all in all my Tom Colicchio day was pretty successful, and tasty. It's very interesting to see how a chef's vision is being played out from different vantage points and price ranges.

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