My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme

This book is the charming and fascinatingly told story of Julia Child and her husband living in France. What elevates this beyond the usual food/life memoir is Child's telling of the whole picture, not just the food oriented moments. Yes, the food is there. After all, we are in France, n'est-ce pas? And this is Julia Child's story. However, just as in life, the food memories wind their way through the rest of her stories which make us understand just why she adores France. A snippet to whet your appetite.

... I had come to the conclusion that I must really be French, only no one had ever informed me of this fact. I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life.

August in Paris was known as la morte-saison, "the dead season," because everybody who could possibly vacate did so as quickly as possible. A great emptying out of the city took place, as hordes migrated toward the mountains and coasts, with attendant traffic jams and accidents. Our favorite restaurants, the creamery, the meat man, the flower lady, the newspaper lady, and the cleaners all disappeared for three weeks. One afternoon I went into Nicolas, the wine shop, to buy some wine and discovered that everyone but the deliveryman had left town. He was minding the store, and in the meantime was studying voice in the hope of landing a role at the opera. Sitting next to him was an old concierge who, twenty-five years earlier, had been a seamstress for one of the great couturiers on la Place Vendome. She and the deliveryman reminisced about the golden days of Racine and Moliere and the Opera Comique. I was delighted to stumble in on these two. It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor.

The Lemon Wins

If I were forced to give up every fruit in the world but one I would have absolutely no trouble choosing. The lemon wins, hands down.

The lemon is the workhorse of the food world: dependable, versatile, and available all year round. You can preserve it in salt, as the Moroccans do, and stuff your chicken with it, or you can stick it into a suet crust surrounded by butter, as the British do. You can dice it up and put it into a salad with red onion and Italian parsley. You can make lemon cookies, lemon cake, lemon icing, lemonade (hot or cold), lemon flip, and lemon rice pudding. A drop of lemon juice and a strip of lemon peel make a chicken soup divine. A tablespoon of lemon juice in your pesto brings all the flavors together. People who find vinegar hard to take love lemon juice in their salad dressing, and people on low- or no-salt diets find lemon juice just the thing. The ascorbic acid it contains makes things taste salty.

Laurie Colwin, A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

After a long absence, I have been rereading Laurie Colwin's food writing. It is so delightful and evocative. It makes me want to cook. 

And it surprises me. Mostly because a lemon isn't categorized as a fruit that I'd have considered as an answer. I would have thought of fruit for eating — grapes, strawberries, cantaloupe, even the humble banana. But I would have been wrong.

Le Dejeuner

Le Dejeuner, Henri Le Sidaner

I want to go to there.

Preparation

Die Vorbereitung (Preparation), Edward B. Gordon

 Since today's quote was about food, let's keep that theme going!

Lagniappe

It is the food of the high places, of the foothills, pine barrens, and slow brown rivers. It is not something done by the great chefs of Atlanta or Birmingham for people who spend more on a table for four than a working class family spends on groceries for a month. It was never intended for everyone, but for people who once set a trotline, or slung a wrench, or rose from a seat in the ciety auditorium to testify during an all-night gospel singing.

Rick Bragg, The Best Cook in the World

As I've mentioned before, this is one of my favorite comfort books.

Pickles

Pickles, Joseph Bail

 Here's a type of work that I enjoy, cooking! My daughter, Hannah, and her husband really enjoy pickling and canning. It is work, but a labor of love and deliciousness.

Fajitas

 After today's quote, how can we not admire the artistry of this food and setting?

Snack with Fried Egg

Snack with Fried Eggs, Georg Flegel

Strawberries

Octav Bancila, Strawberries

Broken Egg

Duane Keiser, Broken Egg

Ketchup

Ketchup, Edward B. Gordon

Vintage

Vintage
by James Neil Hollingsworth

The world must be hungry

Eight out of ten letters about Cross Creek ask for a recipe, or pass on a recipe, or speak of suffering over my chat of Cross Creek dishes.

"Bless us," I thought, "the world must be hungry."

And so it is. Hungry for food an drink — not so much for the mouth as for the mind; not for the stomach but for the spirit.

... Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek Cookery

It really is the company that makes the meal come alive. Rawlings wrote this in 1949 so it is unsurprising she was getting so many letters about food, many of them from soldiers overseas. However, it inevitably calls to mind Proverbs 15:17, which takes it one step further "Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith."

The Importance of the Family Table

The table was the place for family business and for family quarrels as much as a place for eating. but most important, it was where we shared stories and learned lessons. I remember one night when the subject of managing money came up. Daddy took ten dimes out of his pocket and laid them out on the tablecloth. He said, "You give the first dime to the church. The second dime goes in your savings account. And you live on the rest." That, he said, was called tithing, and is how we should manage our money and our lives.

At that small white table in our hot kitchen, we learned the values and traditions that I later tried to teach — to recommend to — my own children.

Robert Khayat, quoted in A Gracious Plenty

This was my own experience too in raising our own children. The dinner table is where you catch up on everyone's day, hear about interesting things people have read or heard that you wouldn't have come across otherwise, and generally enjoy each other's company. Years later, with a grown daughter and my mother living with us, the dinner table serves the same function. It's a social time that I enjoy greatly and benefits us in ways we wouldn't otherwise experience.

Dinner at a Boarding House

A salesman who travels southern Georgia and Alabama was told of a boarding house in a small town in his territory that had great food. One day he saw some cars parked outside of a house that looked right and went in. There were about ten people sitting at a big dining table heaped with food. He took an empty chair. He was a chatty type, and so were they. They passed the platters, and he ate his fill. When he stood up and asked the lady at the head of the table how much he owed her, she said, "Oh, you don't owe anything. This is a private home. We hope you enjoyed your dinner.

Gail Greenblatt, quoted in A Gracious Plenty

This is the ultimate in gracious hospitality. I wonder what we would do if someone came walking in and sat down at the table, exuding bonhomie, and joined in as if he belonged there. I feel sure we wouldn't have handled it with the aplomb of that family.

The Grill

The Grill
painted by Karin Jurick

I love paintings showing the details of ordinary, modern life. No one did it better than Karin Jurick.

Around Here: Dickens and the Sandwich

Having revisited Dickens and Boxers yesterday made me remember another thing I love and its connection with Dickens — sandwiches. This is from 5 years ago but well worth revisiting. At least it was for me!

Sandwiches and Dickens

I was reading Barnaby Rudge and was startled by seeing a sandwich mentioned:

He was not without some refreshment during the long lonely hours; generally carrying in his pocket a sandwich of bread and meat, and a small flask of wine.

Now I know sandwiches were invented some time ago but I hadn't come across them in fiction this old, especially as a reflection of casual everyday life. And this book was set around the time of our Revolutionary War so I had 1776 firmly in mind.

Did they eat sandwiches then?

Finishing up Barnaby (not bad, not bad at all), I picked up The Pickwick Papers for a bit of light bedtime humor.

I was stunned to find ... another sandwich in Mr. Jingle's shocking but funny story:

Heads, heads — take care of your heads!... Five children — mother — tall lady, eating sandwiches — forgot the arch — crash — knock — children look round — mother's head off — sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in — head of a family off—shocking, shocking!

This made Tom look up the origin date of the sandwich which, of course, no one knows. The famous story about the Earl of Sandwich, all honor to this lazy but tidy card player (bread kept the meat grease off his hands and cards) who invented one of my favorite foods, is placed in the late 1700s.

Of course, sandwiches were around before then but they weren't called sandwiches. They were known as "meat and bread" or "bread and cheese." It is when the name "sandwich" became commonly used that is interesting. And then we have this bit of evidence:

That respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch.

Edward Gibbon, journal entry, November 24, 1762

So that's all right then, for Dickens use in Barnaby Rudge. And it turns out that Dickens had his own sandwich memories, though this one doesn't seem happy at all:

A longer time afterwards he recollected the stage-coach journey, and said in one of his published papers that never had he forgotten, through all the intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed and forwarded like game, carriage-paid. “There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to find it.”

Dickens writing of his journey when he was 10
to join his family in their new home,

Life of Charles Dickens by John Foster

I found a few more of Dickens' sandwiches when I was looking around.

Great Expectations: My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched, standing, from a sandwich-box and a pocket flask of sherry (he seemed to bully his very sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements he had made for me.

Bleak House: "My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "you have four schools this afternoon. I would recommend a hasty sandwich."

Mugby Junction: "Well!" said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils. "Take a fresh, crisp, long, crusty penny loaf made of the whitest and best flour. Cut it longwise through the middle. Insert a fair and nicely fitting slice of ham. Tie a smart piece of ribbon round the middle of the whole to bind it together. Add at one end a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which to hold it. And the universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your disgusted vision."

Uncommercial Traveller: Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed. Many of us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the neighbouring public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us had sandwiches and ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established for us in the Theatre. The sandwich--as substantial as was consistent with portability, and as cheap as possible--we hailed as one of our greatest institutions. It forced its way among us at all stages of the entertainment, and we were always delighted to see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our nature was surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our tears fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to bed.

Dickens must have enjoyed a good sandwich as much as I do. I'll have one of those universal French Refreshment sangwiches for lunch, please!

When I write of hunger...

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.

M. F. K. Fisher

Why is breakfast different from all other things?

I would very much like to know what those who have an answer to everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment, we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat noting more till the halt ... Dogs eat the first thing they come across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of food and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the day?

Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

The Path to Rome is such a wonderful book to idly read here and there in your day. It is the story of the pilgrimage Belloc made on foot to Rome in as straight a line as possible order to fulfill a vow he had made. It is a delightful travel book with all sorts of discoveries and musings, such as above!

The Frugal Meal

This is from J.R.'s Art Place where he says:

The Frugal Meal by Rose Hartwell, 1903, showing an immigrant family sitting down to a dinner of spaghetti. Note the image of St. Anthony of Padua on the wall!

It seemed the perfect accompaniment to the story about the Spaghetti Trees!