Bitchy Blood, Bones and Butter

Reading Gabrielle Hamilton's autobiography, Blood, Bones and Butter, reminds me about how much I prefer to find a life story about someone I don't know and who I am glad to have discovered. Gabrielle is not a nice person: for all practical purposes, left to grow up on her own from age 13 and falling into all sorts of temptations -- cocaine, grand theft auto, skimming profits from NYC restaurant where she was working underage. Ignored and cast off as a result of her parents divorce, Gabrielle flounders, attending free-form colleges and taking off for an around the world jaunt with no money, deciding she's lesbian. What's to like. She refuses to see her mother for twenty years, blaming her diabetes for her distance from her children and husband.

Yet Gabrielle can be her mother in her verbal chiding of her staff when she opens her restaurant in the City, Prune, her childhood nickname. She too eventually suffers from sugar highs and lows, lashing out at her husband, an Italian doctor who seems to have married her in a green card charade. GH idolized her parents growing up as the youngest of five in a ruin of a house on the Delaware River. Her mother pampered her and took her to all the local farms to purchase milk, fruit and vegetables; taught her how to forage for Chanterelles; always had her by her side in the kitchen where she made all things French. Her seminal memory is of lamb roasts in the back yard when her father entertained dozens and wine was cooled in the creek. Despite the hint that her father was the adulterous party, Gabrielle attributes their divorce to her mother, simply because she was the one to announce it to the children.

When she finally visits her 70 year old mother living in remote Vermont, Gabrielle vets all her pent up frustration, anger and guilt, about how niggardly her mother has become, wearing Payless shoes and holding up her socks with rubber bands. It seems she cannot write more nastily when she has an insight: "When you have some style and taste, but you don't have the cash, you brag about your "finds" from the thrift store. You sit in your chair with great satisfaction when you pull off a delicious dinner for ten people for only forty bucks, the same way my mother fed a family of seven on tails and carcasses and marrow bones. But seeing her now and how uncannily similar we are, I fear that it won't be long before I, too, am so obsessed with thrift ... How far down the path am I already if I make Prune's dishwashers nest the bowls properly ... and if I stop a cook from throwing away the onion tops ... How can it be, after all the concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?"

And again: "... most people (in her childhood home town) ate frozen fish sticks .. macaroni and cheese ... and bologna, but we ate coq au vin ... and le puy lentils for less money than the store=bought stuff. Other people had rec rooms and television, but we were forced to entertain ourselves outdoors ... Other kids got ... Snack Pack puddings, but we got ratatouille sandwiches on homemade bread in oily brown paper lunch bags. And we were taught by her to see ourselves as infinitely better for our dedication to high culture. I have been trying for twenty years to rid myself of this Gallic snobbism. When I now see my ... mom pour herself a tumbler of wine cooler, the oppressive heavy wet blanket of snow slides off the roof of my soul in one giant thawing chunk and suddenly I feel clear, light and permissive."

And so she becomes emotionally reconciled to this old woman, and thereby likeable for a page or two, until the focus shifts to her own marriage. Gabrielle has visited her husband's mother's villa in July for five or six years, fantasizing about how much more lovable his mother is than hers. She lugs her two boys with her and during the last trip over as they head to the airport: "Michele and I can and do spend the entire year isolated from and unknown to each other, but as soon as we get in the car on the way to the airport, we smile at each other with a kind of bond, and we are unified, however briefly, by a nostalgia for the moment about to come July in Italy ... I don't look at him but I am fully attentive, expectant. It never ever ends how I wish it would, how I fantasize it will ... Ever since I understood that I was actually married, I have hoped for it to be everything I think a real marriage should be, an intimacy of the highest order ... I have readied myself ... for the luminous pearls of his inner life, some word from his heart, some revelation of what he thinks about or fears or loves or agonizes over, which never arrives."

When Michele reveals what he was going to say -- buying a new cell phone -- Gabrielle like her intolerant mother, shuts herself off emotionally from him for half of the vacation. It is the beginning of the end, despite her fulfilled wish of finally being able to cook for his extended family.

The book is brutally honest, revealing soul buried secrets that women only divulge to best friends after bottles of wine. Her bitchiness, her complete devotion to her career, her confused dismay of understanding generations and partners, is what makes her so unlikeable, so known, so every woman.

Food As Metaphor - Balzac's Omelette

I am not knowledgeable enough to validate whether Anka Muhlstein's premise that Honore Balzac was the first novelist to write about food as a prime theme in his stories. What about Fielding's Tom Jones? What about other nations' literature? Yes, Balzac predates Zola's Belly of Paris and Proust's madelaines, but is he obviously and solely the first? I can't say.

Maybe because Muhlstein's literary analysis encompasses all of the Human Comedy, it seems impossible to put one's intellectual arms around. Characters are introduced for their relationship not so much with the taste of food but its presentation. Muhlstein gives enough of Balzac's early life -- the first four years with a wet nurse, shipped off to a boarding school where the food was awful and scarce -- to suggest that his upbringing lacked both the comfort of a family meal around a happy table and no introduction to the mystery of kitchen chemistry. These deficits cannot be overcome in fully developed scenes of comfort and warmth associated with a cook who teaches you how to make something out of nothing or something special out of the best or with a mother whose love is expressed through meals.

His characters' fates are colored along a continuum from the near-starvation of young students to prosperous old men's death by gluttony. Women starved for sexual satisfaction waste away from anorexia. Unfortunately in her presentation any chronology or clear linking of one HC novel's characters to another is lost. Clearly Muhlstein notes Balzac's differentiation between Parisians and provincials and she does overlay this with the evolution of restaurants in early 1800s France, but there does not seem to be any larger perspective as the cultural attitude towards dining evolves.

She notes Balzac equates gluttony with larger character flaws and a righteous demise. She also niches Balzac from his successors, Zola and Flaubert, who are more apt to describe a delicious meal as foreplay. To Balzac, food is an indication of caste and not a vehicle of seduction.

With the sweet pen and pencil drawings inside the covers, laden with oyster shells, skimpy frilly panties nigh to the snails and Camembert, evening slippers that appear to have be used for sipping Champagne, I had hoped the treatise would be more of a 19th Century French version of Allende's Aphrodite. Instead, feasts turn into bouts of drunkenness, ne'er orgies. Alas, this book was no segue from gluttony to lust.

Darkness and LIght for Months

Sometimes it takes me months to read a book: currently, I am reading Corelli's Mandolin and it is such a treasure, so lyrically written, that I approach it reverently, taking it in small morsels, and wanting to own it instead of renewing it repeatedly from the library. Other books languish on my nightstand, only finished out of a sense of obligation, not interest. The latter case applies to Darkness and Light by John Harvey. This was a book I started reading this August when I had a short day and a half vacation with my son up at a lake in the Adirondacks. Our gracious hosts accommodated John in their basement pool room and me in the second floor under the rafters of their comfortable camp. Retiring early, I borrowed a book, said Darkness and Light. It began well enough but a day of fresh air cruising on the lake but me swiftly to sleep. I brought it home to finish and to pass on to someone else.

There are so few British mysteries that engage me. Is it because I overdosed on Brit Lit in college or is it my visceral animosity to all things English based on personalities? I love American mysteries, the faster the pace, the more I enjoy them. The more violent the crime and the more eccentric the detective/good guy, the deeper I fall into the plot and the faster I read the book. John Harvey's plot moves slowly. His retired investigator, Elder, has the now typical family problems and as a consultant, has the experience but not the respect (boy does that also hit home).

The story line like the recent fad of Scandinavian best sellers has an obvious focus on crimes against women and even minor characters or secondary suspects all are actively hostile, if not criminal, when it comes to their relationships with women. This is not the angle I want to pursue vis a vis the last month of the lust list.

There are two or three others in this series but Elder does not call to me, nor does Harvey. I must tiptoe back to Corelli, cherishing the writing quite similarly to my switching the car radio to listen to classical music and fell myself decompress a couple of times a week instead of hyping myself up on Southern rock.

Backcounty Delta

Another instance to reaffirm my pledge not to read any same-year released fiction reviewed in the New York Times. Rick Gavin is a first time murder mystery writer with the release this year of his murder mystery Ranchero. Set in impoverished Mississippi delta country, Gavin captures the dialect of the region but his portrayal of the Blacks, crooked cops, and meth-brewing good ol' boys are way too stereotypical. The motivation of the "good guy" to go after his landlady's dead husband's restored Ranchero is shallow and much ado about nothing. Not one I'd recommend, but then I am in a pre-holiday funk anyway.

Learn by Their Mistakes: Blueprints for Building Better Girls

I'm making my first New Year's resolution for 2012: I will not read a book published in 2012 based on a review from the New York Times magazine. Two times I did such a thing in 2011, for the Julian Barnes Man Booker award novel and now for Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls, I have been on the whole disappointed ... although I do find Barnes' theme butting into my mind as I read other books. I have no such qualms about Schappell's stories recurring in my mind.

This is a small collection of eight short stories about girls behaving badly, seemingly without recourse or comeuppance. The two longest ones are the ones that are the most dark and for that dire portrayal of girls way in over their heads the are tales of morality, by the lack thereof. It struck me when I finished that with its lipstick red cover with a black cherry on it (a cherry that also looks somewhat like a bomb) that Schappell wanted the book to be used in high school advanced English classes as yet another one of those contemporary stories of dysfunctional families and children who act out badly. I can just hear the teacher saying, "now class, would you be friends in college with Bender?" Or "is Jane just a girl torn between two men or just a tease?"

In addition to these two dark tales of teenage wild children, Schappell writes about bored mothers and empty marriages, and nothing about lustful love. Her only other book, which was nominated for the PEN Faulkner, is titled Use Me, and here I thought I might find a lusty book for December's chilly nights. Nah, the summary sounds again to be about two self-obsessed women. Between Schappell and Barnes, one might come to think that there no longer is any love between the sexes.

Also upon turning the last page, I thanked my lucky stars that I have sons and decided not to mention this collection in Tuesday night's upcoming book club meeting lest those poor women with daughters will lose their minds with worry.

Bundling a Wiki Search: Choice Cuts

What an appropriate day -- Thanksgiving -- on which to review Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. This is the last of a bunch of Kurlansky's books I read, none really measuring up to his history of Salt and Cod: 1968, Oyster and now Choice Cuts are all really grade B. CC is such an amalgamation that it reads as disjointedly as if it were prepared by a student who search Wiki for "food" and copied down snippets of every primary, secondary and tertiary hit he got. Until Oyster, CC is not overloaded with repetitious recipes. It is more like an all you can eat buffet, sometimes showing the quality of the cheese grater hotel in Montreal, but more often like the Golden Corral.

I have a closet full of cookbooks on shelves next to the kitchen, some are old reliables, some more souvenirs of other times or places. I subscribe to Food and Wine and probably have too many old Gourmets in the basement, magazines I thought my sons might clip for history or geography of Europe projects in school that never materialized. Like my recent review of why I, or anyone, assemble jigsaw puzzles, I refer to the last entry in Kurlansky's book, by MFK Fisher on why she writes about food: "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other."

I have been working in the kitchen today since 6:30 AM, putting together a meal that will make memories for my son, attest to my willingness to adapt the menu to his favorite foods, and express my creativity and signal love and appreciation. I cannot put together a Thanksgiving menu without recalling my mother's or the ones I cooked for her first in my apartment and then this old house. There always was an homage as well as a tease: always a side of Brussel sprouts which she detested. Dessert must be a pie, often sweet potato instead of pumpkin, and more recently chocolate pecan, a pie John would sell his soul for. Very infrequently a turkey, more often a goose when there were enough of us around the table to do it justice, and this year a duck for the three of us. (A duck that will always remind me of setting the oven on fire in my apartment and dowsing it with the glass of beer I happened to have in my hand when I opened the stove.) Always seasonal vegetables, this year replacing the dreaded sprouts, maybe never to be served on holidays again since my mother died this summer, are roasted kohlrabi with butternut squash. Stuffing more like hers, with sausage, since no one here likes chestnuts, and John won't eat oysters ... sorry Kurlansky.

Proust was right ... and a neuroscientist ... that certain food bring unsolicited, pleasant memories. Yet, a chef, as I fancy myself, is also conscientiously intentional about creating those memories. We all recall the year I decided the pilgrims must have tried lobster and we cooked an eight pounder, too big for all our pots, and beyond the reference of friends in Maine who had no idea how long to cook it. Or the year Nana drank so much champagne before dinner that several parts of it were missing or undercooked, but she didn't care at all. Bill is making his own memory today, doing a variation of mac and cheese, gnocchi with Gruyere, as a gift to his friend's parents' supper.

Strangely today on Epicurious was a quick survey about how people regard chocolate: do they share it with a spouse, a friend, or keep it for themselves. I checked off option two, and found myself in the small minority. I always have good chocolate in my desk drawer at work, and people know that and stop by asking for a taste or two. When I get my favorite Vosges chocolate at The Fresh Market, I buy enough to give my college roommate a bar when she comes trick or treating. Finger sticky chocolate is best licked off by another.

Kurlansky delves not only into home cooking but the meaning of dining out. He cites the common reaction of a diner who wants to rush home to try to replicate a meal enjoyed in a restaurant, something I inevitably want to do, with the possible exception of cooking sweetbreads. He does not give enough credence to the importance of one's fellow diners. I select a restaurant with complete regard to the person with whom I am going out to eat: certain places are marked in my mind for special friends and no one else need attend them. I scout new restaurants not only for their specialties or ambiance, but as setting for table mates.

Again, towards the conclusion of his book, Kurlansky cites Balzac on the politics of food: "Just as the first enthusiasts of abstinence were undoubtedly maladjusted, the first enthusiasts of moderation were surely people lacking in appetite ... Aristippe observed that philosophers who distrust wealth are penniless. Diogenes was broke when he was a cynic ... That is the way it is with detractors of appetite, of the tendency that is inherent in well-born men of happy constitution. It is not the first time that charlatans misguided and well spoken, have come to consider a virtue, that which is a well-organized vice." I never want to be abstinent, or even do most things in moderation. I am not a glutton, but an epicure; I am not a trollop, but a sensualist.

The World (or at least NYC) is His Oyster

I'm not sure that one of my ideas for a theme next year will work: namely, finding authors I like and then reading pretty much everything they've written. I will finish the Mark Kurlansky I am a quarter through, but The Big Oyster - History on the Half Shell, didn't engage me as much as some others of his. I loved his Salt and Cod probably because the influence of these food stuffs were depicted on a world wide stage. While Kurlansky garnishes this entree with references to other oyster beds in the southern states, Maine and Europe, he is writing about the growth of NYC and the demise of its harbors and estuaries.

Sometimes the book seemed to be an amalgamation of citations he garnered from a Wiki search. Too many recipes for the same stew, too many Guiness-like records of the hundreds of oysters guzzled on the half shell. His description of oyster cellars and the birth of Delmonico's was interesting but his linking of the entire environmental movement from the pollution of Hudson breeding grounds is a bit of a leap. And I did find one tangent to pursue: his portrait of life in Five Points spurred me to reserve The Gangs of New York at the library.

As a side note also bolstering my disappointment in finding all books by an author to be memorable -- after all, there were a few Dickens I never liked -- I also read Before She Met Me, Love Etc. and Talking It Over by Julian Barnes, this year's Man Booker award winner. The latter two read more like theatrical monologues and were interesting if a bit lengthy, especially after plowing through LE, the sequel to TIO, which over chews the adulterous relationship between a man's wife and his best friend. BSMM is the work on an immature storyteller. Enough said.