autum­nal issues

Brrr! There’s a def­i­nite chill in the Lon­don air this morn­ing. Tis the sea­son of spi­ders, at least where I live, and last week John had to be brought to the res­cue when I dis­cov­ered a web the size of Birm­ing­ham direct­ly in my path from the gar­den door to the din­ner table out­side. My shrieks brought Emi­ly and Avery in from their desul­to­ry attempts at home­work. “OMG,” Emi­ly cow­ered, “It’s the biggest spi­der I’ve ever seen.” “Maybe it’s dead, it’s not mov­ing,” Avery whim­pered, and so John got a big stick and touched the web. Imme­di­ate­ly the ginor­mous thing began fran­ti­cal­ly to work its way upward and away from him, so he car­ried the web over to a near­by pot­ted plant amid more hys­ter­i­cal wails from the girls. “Look, she’s car­ry­ing up all the extra silk to make a new web,” John point­ed out, try­ing to achieve some zoo­log­i­cal edu­ca­tion from what was so far a scream-fest.

The only thing worse than see­ing a HUGE spi­der web com­plete with Char­lotte in the cen­tre, how­ev­er, is see­ing… HALF a huge spi­der web with no spi­der to be seen, and then I begin shak­ing my head in pan­ic, inspect­ing my sweater sleeves for unwel­come guests.

I have my work cut out today. Do you, my faith­ful Amer­i­can read­ers, sub­scribe to Saveur Mag­a­zine? You must. It was begun, I think, in 1992, just as I was return­ing to New York from our first stint in Lon­don. At that time the food mag­a­zine world was very, very sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed, with Gourmet and Food and Wine and… I want to say that’s it. I’m exag­ger­at­ing, or what­ev­er the oppo­site is, but my point is, the food world was small, qui­et and rather sim­ply expressive.

Unrec­og­niz­able from today! Now Saveur is one of dozens of food mag­a­zines (some of them awful things dom­i­nat­ed by tele­vi­sion chefs, I won’t name names) but it is still, with Gourmet, one of my favorites. Thank you, Mom and Dad, and Jill and Joel, for get­ting these mag­a­zines to me all the way across the ocean every month! They are the grandes dames of the cooking/publishing indus­try, brave­ly tak­ing their old-fash­ioned, ingre­di­ent- and process- faith­ful approach into the mod­ern world of amaz­ing­ly trans-glob­al shop­ping, eat­ing and cook­ing. The recipes in these mag­a­zines work! And Saveur in par­tic­u­lar is devot­ed to the STO­RIES around food: the fam­i­ly his­to­ries of great cooks, the mem­o­ries of dish­es cooked for Hal­loween in the Mid­west, for birth­day cel­e­bra­tions in tiny vil­lages in Italy, for reli­gious meals in the streets of Lebanon. Sto­ries abound.

Because I get Saveur a bit late, I’m late to the announce­ment of a… food-writ­ing con­test. What are the 100 Best Food Things of the year? Saveur wants to know what we think. So I am play­ing with sev­er­al ideas as I type here at my din­ing room table (look­ing res­olute­ly into that drat­ted rebuilt spi­der web in the gar­den! and upward through the sky­light at a neigh­bor kit­ty walk­ing from one side of the roof to the oth­er!). The idea of the con­test is to describe your sug­gest­ed Best Food Thing, then write no more than 1000 words on why you’ve cho­sen this Thing. It’s as if some­one stuck a pen­cil through her hair at Saveur and asked her edi­tor, “What sort of a con­test could we run so Kris­ten could get her idea pub­lished in a major magazine?”

Well, I’m get­ting ahead of myself. But I’m hard at work.

I’m also think­ing (STILL!) about “Julie and Julia.” There has been a fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sion in many places about var­i­ous aspects of the sto­ry, and I’m fas­ci­nat­ing by all the lay­ers of con­tro­ver­sy spin­ning around. What is the nature of a blog, and what is avail­able to blog­gers to talk about? Was Julia Child’s book moral­ly Julie Pow­ell’s to “appro­pri­ate”, and is there any dif­fer­ence between Julie’s cook­ing her way through it and talk­ing to her friends about it, and blog­ging it? Was Julie’s cook­ing in order to save her­self from a depress­ing post-Sep­tem­ber 11th New York life any less inter­est­ing than Juli­a’s cook­ing to give her­self some­thing to do in post-WWII Paris while her hus­band took pho­tographs and was a minor diplomat?

It seems slight­ly cru­el, to me, for peo­ple to go to the film and come away say­ing how won­der­ful Julia Child was, and how for­get­table Julie Pow­ell was. No one until now has made a film of Julia Child’s life. It took Julie Pow­ell’s project (how­ev­er much I find her writ­ing to be depress­ing­ly neg­a­tive) to call enough atten­tion to what Julia Child had achieved to war­rant Nora Ephron to write a screen­play! Julia was and is won­der­ful, but the pub­lic’s aware­ness of her had waned, per­haps, in the wake of all the hype and shrill non­sense of the mod­ern food world. If Julie Pow­ell’s deter­mi­na­tion to cook her way through the book, to save her own san­i­ty, result­ed in a whole new gen­er­a­tion’s (or two! or three!) desire to GO HOME AND COOK, and go on Ama­zon and buy Juli­a’s book, all to the good!

It’s been said that Julia was upset at hav­ing her work tak­en over as a stunt, by Julie. Inter­est­ing ques­tion, that: once one pub­lish­es a book, isn’t it out there to be treat­ed (as long as it’s legal) how­ev­er the pub­lic wish­es to treat it? I pub­lished a book myself once, about art his­to­ry, and every once in awhile I see that some­one has read it (amaz­ing!) and used bits of it in an arti­cle, not always in a way I like, but legal­ly cred­it­ed, which means… I have to put up with it.

Here’s a larg­er ques­tion, and one that is as rel­e­vant for an old-fash­ioned real BOOK like Julia Child’s posthu­mous mem­oir My Life in France, as it is for my blog. How much of one’s life expe­ri­ences, con­ver­sa­tions, love affairs, belong to one? The whole thing? Did Julia have the right to recount con­ver­sa­tions with real peo­ple that took place 50 years ago, in her mem­oir? Do I have the right to recount con­ver­sa­tions with real peo­ple that took place yes­ter­day, on my blog? Did Julie have the right to go step by step through Juli­a’s recipes, on her blog and in her book? How much of one’s dai­ly expe­ri­ences belong to one, and how much to the oth­er half of the rela­tion­ship that makes it all possible?

I got in mas­sive trou­ble awhile ago for recount­ing things that hap­pened to me, here on the blog, because one per­son reck­oned that they weren’t my prop­er­ty to recount. If I had a love­ly con­ver­sa­tion with a lit­tle girl at Avery’s school, and lov­ing­ly recount­ed it, I had stolen some­thing from that lit­tle girl, my neme­sis believed. But is that true? Was Julie’s expe­ri­ence in her kitchen not entire­ly hers to tell about, because she was depen­dent on Juli­a’s cook­book in order to tell it?

I had one very testy con­ver­sa­tion with… let’s call her a “fren­e­my”… about the blog. “If you’d told us all you were a writer to begin with…” Pause. “Yes?” I said. “What then?” “Well, then we’d have KNOWN…” “Known what?”

Now that I’ve had per­mis­sion from Avery’s school to have my blog (did I need per­mis­sion? no idea), I tend to tell peo­ple I write one, just to put them on notice, I sup­pose. “Oooh, are you going to write about ME, then?” some peo­ple gush self-con­scious­ly, laugh­ing a bit. Maybe! And I tend to change names. But Julia Child did­n’t. The Ambas­sador to France is the real Ambas­sador to France, the head of the Cor­don Bleu cook­ing school is the real per­son. Was that her prop­er­ty to use, because she inter­act­ed with them?

Thorny ques­tions these. I would cer­tain­ly wel­come any­one’s views on the mine­field that is one’s own­er­ship over all the laugh­able, touch­ing, embar­rass­ing, feisty or deli­cious things that hap­pen in this life.

Good­ness, this sub­ject has cer­tain­ly brought out all my latent pro­fes­so­r­i­al instincts! Back to real life. Last night saw us at the Trafal­gar Stu­dios for a rau­cous, uneven but enjoy­able per­for­mance of “Oth­el­lo,” star­ring Lenny Hen­ry, who I may say as a mat­ter of pub­lic record, once lived in my house! With his wife, the come­di­an Dawn French.

How to describe this pro­duc­tion? Well, not being superbly well versed in Shake­speare (near­ly every time I see a play onstage it’s for the first time, in my 40s, which is a bit embar­rass­ing, but at least I’m going!), I had to read up on the play. It’s the sto­ry of a rather mis­matched mar­riage between a black Moor with a sad past, and his high-born white wife Des­de­mona, who are sur­round­ed by a lot of con­niv­ing, inter­fer­ing col­leagues and “friends.” Oth­el­lo’s trust­ed col­league Iago con­vinces him that his beloved wife is cheat­ing on him with a mil­i­tary col­league, and Iago gets his own wife Emil­ia to par­tic­i­pate unknow­ing­ly in “prov­ing” Des­de­mon­a’s infi­deli­ty, so, spoil­er alert, Oth­el­lo kills her. Then he finds he was wrong and he kills him­self. End of story.

What this play needs, for one kind of suc­cess, is absolute pas­sion, qui­et con­vic­tion of devot­ed love, a slow burn toward from dis­be­lief to belief in betray­al, an epic strug­gle with­in one per­son to do a dread­ed deed, and then mind-blow­ing remorse. This ver­sion… did not have these things. I was not con­vinced that there was enough chem­istry between Oth­el­lo and Des­de­mona to war­rant belief in their over­whelm­ing love. They seemed cheer­ful­ly fond of one anoth­er, but there was no chem­istry. Hen­ry tow­ered over Jes­si­ca Har­ris, his tiny Des­de­mona, which is FINE, but there was only a broth­er­ly-sis­ter­ly hap­pi­ness in being togeth­er, not a soul-destroy­ing, obses­sive love between two peo­ple for whom the path to hap­pi­ness is strewn with oth­er peo­ple’s hatred.

Con­rad Nel­son was amaz­ing­ly evil as Iago (and he com­posed the music for the pro­duc­tion, how impres­sive). He con­veyed hatred well enough, but I nev­er could fig­ure out WHY he hat­ed Oth­el­lo enough to engi­neer the mas­sive decep­tion that brought about his down­fall. There is racism in the lan­guage of the play, but I could­n’t hear or see it clear­ly enough to feel I under­stood Iago’s position.

All this being said, it was a very stim­u­lat­ing evening! Why? In an odd way because one could nev­er quite sus­pend dis­be­lief that Lenny Hen­ry was onstage play­ing Oth­el­lo. He’s a giant com­ic tal­ent! Our neigh­bors report that when Dawn French and he lived in our house, the walls sim­ply shook with laugh­ter. He is a larg­er-than-life GOOD man, who brought to Oth­el­lo a sort of sim­ple sweet­ness, and then about face: a rather unbe­liev­able belief in hav­ing been betrayed. But we cared. More about him and his unhap­pi­ness than poor Des­de­mon­a’s fate.

The sec­ond half is much stronger than the first. He stops rush­ing his lines, Des­de­mon­a’s bewil­der­ment is believ­able, Iago gets mean­er and nas­ti­er, and by the end, how­ev­er wav­ery the moti­va­tion seemed for Oth­el­lo’s mur­der of his wife, we believe his utter mis­ery and self-loathing.

Go, do! It’s play­ing through Decem­ber. John said just what I was think­ing at the end, “I like the bows as much as the entire play!” Lenny Hen­ry was pos­i­tive­ly bounc­ing with the thrill of the play, since he had avowed his dis­com­fort with Shake­speare until he took on this project. The bows were full of pride, joy and accom­plish­ment, and he shook hands with audi­ence mem­bers and slapped his fel­low actors on the back, clown­ing and laugh­ing. It was real­ly a very enjoy­able night. But not, strict­ly speak­ing, “Oth­el­lo,” if that makes sense. I’d like to see a tru­ly trag­ic pro­duc­tion some­day. And now I know what the play is about, I can have a bet­ter atten­tion span!

Before the play we ate an ear­ly din­ner here (I know, I know, nor­mal peo­ple take the oppor­tu­ni­ty to go OUT to din­ner, but you know me). We had had sim­ply superb meat­balls stuffed with moz­zarel­la ear­li­er in the week, and I’d reserved a good por­tion of the meat­ball mix for what pur­pose, I do not know. But my bril­liant hus­band, ever attuned to grilling oppor­tu­ni­ties, said, “Let’s make burg­ers of it.” And may I say? The best burg­ers EVER.

Meat­ball Burgers
(serves 4 easily)

about 1 1/2 pounds mixed ground meats: pork, beef and lamb
2 eggs
1/2 cup home­made breadcrumbs
salt and pep­per (to taste if you don’t mind raw meat and eggs, as I don’t!)

4 hard rolls
sliced red onion
sliced tomato
sliced avocado
may­on­naise with some wasabi mixed in (if you like a kick)
ketchup
rock­et leaves

The secret to this mix­ture is in the KNEAD­ING. You have to knead it like dough. So take off your rings and get in there. Make sure the bowl is big­ger than the dough by a lot, so you can real­ly move around. At the begin­ning the mix­ture will be three sep­a­rate meats and some slip­pery egg, with the bread­crumbs float­ing around. But the more you mix, knead­ing and turn­ing the bowl around, it mys­te­ri­ous­ly mar­ries togeth­er. The slip­per­i­ness merges with the bread­crumbs and the meats all make friends. After just five or six min­utes of knead­ing, the mix­ture will be com­plete­ly smooth and rel­a­tive­ly air­less and lumpless.

Form into burg­ers, tall or flat as you like. I like tall, although they’re ulti­mate­ly a com­plete mess to eat. On a very hot grill, grill the burg­ers three or four min­utes per side, depend­ing on your atti­tude toward rareness.

To assem­ble, slice the rolls in half and tear out the insides of each, putting them aside to make bread­crumbs. Every­one adds condi­ments and veg, and bob’s your uncle.

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A cou­ple of caveats: give every­one at least two nap­kins! And if you’re cook­ing for a first date, you’ll learn a lot about him or her from the way that burg­er gets eaten!

Well, I must get to my con­test. Dead­line is Wednes­day! Wish me luck.