"Like Water for Chocolate" and "The Last Chinese Chef"

Twice in the past week, groups of people have been astonished that somehow I have never read Like Water for Chocolate, and also have not seen the film. The American edition of the book was published 25 years ago -- how could I have missed it, asked just about everyone at my Culinary History Reading Group on Wednesday. They were comparing it to the book under discussion: The Last Chinese Chef.

Earlier, around a week ago, at a dinner party, the same thing happened: several people insisted that I had to read Like Water for Chocolate when they heard I was reading The Last Chinese Chef -- the books just seem to go together. And in a neat coincidence, when I got home from Culinary Book Group, a package on my doorstep contained Like Water for Chocolate -- a gift from two of my guests. I've now read it thanks to my thoughtful friends.

Both of these books combine their authors' vast knowledge of food and cooking with a romantic story in an exotic setting. The Last Chinese Chef is set in present-day China. It embeds observations of foodways in a very modern love story. The author invented many quotes from a book by a fictional chef from an earlier era as a way to provide historical and sociological background. (I previously wrote about this book here.)

In contrast, Like Water for Chocolate is set in Revolutionary Mexico (around 1910 to 1917), and involves the recipes cooked by the central character, Tita, for her family. While The Last Chinese Chef depicts people and events in a fairly conventional way, Like Water for Chocolate is a work of magical realism, where the intense emotions of the characters are highlighted by mystical or magical happenings. Tita can see and exchange thoughts or speak with dead people, and her feelings have material consequences. At the very beginning, Tita's birth is premature, brought on by her loud crying from the womb; for Tita "laughter was a form of crying." (p. 7)

Food plays both a natural and an imaginative role in Tita's life. In her passionate feelings for her chosen lover, "Tita knew thorough her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour." (p. 67)

Above all, Tita excels at cooking the foods that have long been traditions in her family. She has strong relationships with the cooks in their rural kitchen, who even after death can "dictate a prehispanic recipe involving rose petals." Through cooking, Tita struggles with her oppressive and hateful mother who was a pro at "dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying, or dominating." (pp. 49 & 97)

In our Culinary History discussion, we talked about the way both books focus on the relationship of food and family: both play a significant role in their respective cultural milieus. In the case of The Last Chinese Chef, this is explicitly contrasted to the way Americans are more alienated from food, especially the way Chinese people do not feel it's right to eat alone. In Like Water for Chocolate, food and family intertwine in many ways, including magically.

Both novels combine theoretical food writing with a strong plot, which some group members like better than others do -- some would prefer to read a simple, strong essay without the fiction. As for me, I found that both authors were quite successful at combining fiction with more theoretical material, and I'm very enthusiastic about both books.

Too bad about the kippers

Herbed scrambled eggs for breakfast, from Jeanine Larmoth, Murder on the Menu, prepared by me (the cook)
served by me (the butler), consumed by me & Len (residents of our fine mansion).
No mysteries here for the moment, unless you count the question of how the stock market will do today.

Here's the recipe I used. Yes, I meant to include Kippers, which I bought yesterday. But ...

Alas, when I looked at the package, I realized that somehow  -- although I bought them yesterday --
these kippers were 6 years out-of-date. I was afraid to open them, and will take them back to Whole Foods!

Note: the scrambled eggs were very good. But I'm afraid we didn't come near to reproducing the atmosphere described by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. I'll try again to make something from one of my mystery cookbooks! 

Next step: watch more TV dramatizations of these mystery stories. I was amused at one scene that I already watched in "Hickory Dickory Dock."  Poirot (played by David Suchet) was having his usual Continental breakfast with his houseguest Inspector Japp, who says "I say Poirot, don't you have any bacon and eggs?"

Burned Porridge or Kidneys and Bacon? -- Another Dorothy Sayers Mystery

"Mr. Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat... for which he paid a pound a week. His exertions in the cause of civilization were rewarded, not by the gift of diamond rings from empresses or munificent cheques from grateful Prime Ministers, but by a modest, though sufficient, salary, drawn from the pockets of the British taxpayers. He awoke, after a long day of arduous and inconclusive labor, to the smell of burnt porridge." (Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body, Pocket Book edition, p. 65)

It's easy to see how much Parker, the plain-clothes detective, differs from the very aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey, star of the Dorothy Sayers mystery series. Lord Peter's wealth and privilege allow him to regard detecting as an amusing hobby. He enjoys life in a luxurious flat with an attentive personal servant, his valet Bunter. He can even afford to support Bunter's hobby of photographing crime scenes, buying Bunter cameras and darkroom equipment and leaving the valet's time free to develop his photos, though of course always photos of use to himself. In contrast, Parker can barely afford a decent breakfast.

While Parker is getting ready to eat his porridge -- clumsily prepared by his daily char woman Mrs. Munns -- he contemplates the "sordid absurdity of the human form." Before he gets to the porridge, though, he receives a phone call. It's Bunter with the message: "His lordship says he'd be very glad, sir, if you could make it convenient to step round to breakfast."

Sayers continues: "If the odour of kidneys and bacon had been wafted along the wire, Parker could not have experienced a more vivid sense of consolation." Parker's anticipation highlights difference between an aristocratic and a lower-middle class breakfast. Parker hurried to Lord Peter's flat, viciously saying to Mrs. Munns who was making bad tea: "You can take the porridge home for the family." On the social ladder in an English mystery story, there's always someone lower down. And when Parker arrived at Lord Peter's house, "Mr. Bunter served him with glorious food, incomparable coffee, and the Daily Mail before a blazing fire of wood and coal." (p. 65-66)

The culinary contrast between the social levels of the two detectives had come up the previous day while Parker was continuing his analysis of a complex murder and disappearance and eating "a plate of ham sandwiches and a bottle of Bass." Leaving Parker at work on the case, Lord Peter went to a restaurant named Windham's to meet a friend. I suspect that Sayers believes her readers will recognize this dining establishment; obviously I don't. The menu there clearly doesn't tend towards ham sandwiches and Bass! Lunch at Windham's, in fact, is consommé Polonais; a filet of sole; "the Montrachet '08" about which Lord Peter complains; and a salmis of game, which he declares "not bad." He also complains about a bit of cork in the wine glass. The Montrachet by the way, is from 1908 -- this mystery takes place in 1923! (p. 56-57)

Lord Peter's lifestyle, as portrayed in these small food scenes and throughout the book, might now, nearly 100 years later, be seen as immature and irresponsible. His nonchalance about work led me to suspect that he was very young -- but I now know that in Whose Body he was around 32 years old, just still without mature responsibilities! Moreover, in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (which I wrote about here) he was in his late thirties.

Food characterizes yet another random possible witness: "The Indian Colonel on the first floor was loud but unexpectedly friendly," Parker reports to Lord Peter as they are finishing breakfast. "He gave me Indian curry for supper and some very good whiskey." (p.68)

Monty Python's Cheese Shop didn't have any named cheeses either.

As Whose Body continues, Lord Peter again suffers for the sake of his detecting hobby when he has to eat in Salisbury in a dining establishment not at all up to his standards. "As he sat sadly consuming that impassive pale substance known to the English as 'cheese' unqualified (for there are cheeses which go openly by their names, as Stilton, Camembert, Gruyère, Wensleydale or Gorgonzola, but 'cheese' is cheese and everywhere the same), he inquired of the waiter [about a person of interest in his case]" (p. 80) Reminds me of the Monty Python cheese shop episode.

The most extreme example of food in relation to class concerns the missing man in Parker and Lord Peter's case: Sir Reuben Levy, a Jewish businessman. Levy is married to a woman once known to Lord Peter's mother, the Dowager Duchess. Needless to say, the wife's long-ago marriage to a Jew had caused quite a bit of objection among the antisemitic upper class to which she belonged. The Dowager Duchess speaks of this couple at some length:

"I used to know her quite well, you know, dear, ... when she was a girl. Christine Ford, she was then, and I remember so well the dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew. That was before he made his money.... she fell in love with this Mr. Levy and eloped with him. ... I'm sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I'd much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast." (p. 42-43)

Clearly Sayers, like her contemporary Agatha Christie, has a lot of casual antipathy towards Jews, based on half-truths and general prejudice -- and absolutely incorporates food stereotypes into the mix. I really wonder what she was referring to by "that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name." I looked around on the web, and this passage is often quoted but the funny kind of meat is never explained.

From the rest of Sayers' portrayal of the character of Sir Reuben Levy, I would say that the Dowager Duchess reflects the author's own attitudes towards Jews -- purportedly well-meaning, badly-informed, and carelessly prejudiced. Agatha Christie can be even worse. Quite a lot has already been written about the prejudices reflected in these two famous mystery authors, but I'll end my say-so here. I wonder, as a Jew, why I tolerate their outdated bigotry instead of finding some other mysteries to read, or instead of watching the cleaned-up TV versions!

"Stay and have a spot of tea with us" -- More English Detective Gourmandise

"I really think you are one of the nicest people I know. You don't talk rubbish about art, and you don't want your hand held, and your mind always turns on eating and drinking." -- Spoken by Miss Marjorie Phelps to Lord Peter Wimsey in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Pocket Book Edition, p. 79

Peter Wimsey definitely loved food. He used it as metaphor -- "Now my child, What's all this?" he says to a distraught wife, "You're as cold as a pêche Melba. That won't do." (p. 144)

I can't imagine why he chose this comparison! Cold as a peach? Cold as raspberry sauce? I guess he's referring to the ice cream in the dish.

Wimsey's love of food is the subject of discussion in The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook, by Elizabeth Bond Ryan and William J. Eakins. They offer recipes for several of the menus originating in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Also, Jeanine Larmoth's Murder on the Menu (which I wrote about here) devotes an entire chapter to "Lord Peter Wimsey: The Moment Wimsicale," and also mentions some of the food highlights from The Unpleasantness.... My choice of this novel, randomly chosen from our mystery shelves, is thus fairly lucky. I have read very few of Sayers's books, and none recently.

During Wimsey's often hurried detecting in The Unpleasantness ..., he constantly stops for meals, accepts a "spot of tea," or refers to meals eaten at some other time. Many dishes are French, or at least they seem to be listed in French on the menus of the restaurants where he eats them. Examples:

• Saddle of mutton at the Bellona club of which he's served the best cut.
• Sole Colbert, Apple Charlotte and "light savory to follow."
• Lobster mayonnaise, meringues and sweet champagne, remembered from a date: "her choice -- oh, lord!" Lobster and champagne evidently don't live up to Wimsey's upper-class standards.
• Moules marinières.
• Grilled kippers "at a friend's studio in the early hours" -- though evidently Wimsey doesn't often eat kippers, according to The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook.
• A perdrix aux choux (partridge with cabbage).
• Breakfast on "a chaste silver tray, containing a Queen Anne coffee-pot and milk-jug, a plate of buttered toast, a delicate china coffee-cup and a small pile of correspondence."
• Curious little stuffed buns and petits-fours at a studio reception -- recipes for these are included in Ryan and Eakins' cookbook.
• Dinner ordered for a lady at a fine restaurant: Huitres Musgrave, soup of Tortue Vraie, Filet de Sole, Faisan Rôti with Pommes Byron, a salad ("And, waiter -- be sure the salad is dry and perfectly crisp), and a Soufflé Glace to finish up with. Recipes for this entire menu appear in Ryan and Eakins, though the authors suggest using tinned turtle soup (that would be Tortue Vraie) rather than starting with an entire sea turtle. Now, 35 years on from the book's publication in 1981, the poor turtles are all protected and it would be irresponsible indeed to eat any type of turtle soup!
  
  (Unpleasantness, pp. 33, 48, 56, 72, 83, 89, 100)

The very noble Wimsey takes high-end food as an entitlement, and has high expectations of what he's served by his very proper valet Bunter (who was his orderly in the war), by his club, and at restaurants. He also has "very definite and highly developed tastes in wine, beer, and spirits" but has no taste for champagne, though when he does drink it, "it is a Pol Roger or Veuve Cliquot." (Wimsey Cookbook, p. 117)

A veteran of World War I, Wimsey is the son of a Duke, born to a family with quite a lot of wealth, taste, and even a coat-of-arms. His youth seems striking to me in this novel. I doubt if he's over 30 years old. Wimsey finds it amusing to solve a murder case, and in fact takes everything with a good deal of humor. Habits of the 1920s seem more pronounced in this work than in contemporary mysteries by Agatha Christie: for example, several of the characters in The Unpleasantness... are averse to using a telephone, considering it a new-fangled upstart.

I close with a very amusing quotation, in response to a lady's remark "Some things are so beastly." Wimsey replies:

"Oh, yes -- quite a lot of things. Birth is beastly -- and death -- and digestion, if it comes to that. Sometimes when I think of what's happening inside me to a beautiful supréme de sole, with the caviare in boats, and the croûtons and the jolly little twists of potato, and all the gadgets -- I could cry, but there it is, don't you know." (Unpleasantness, p. 171)

Why do so many English mysteries include food?

Hercule Poirot in the kitchen from the TV version titled "Hickory Dickory Dock"

Food, food, glorious English food! An English murder mystery runs on meals, especially when set in a village vicarage, aristocratic country house, exotic vacation villa, the enclosed environment of a first-class train or seaside hotel, or a mansion bought with the profits from ill-gotten gains of social upstarts.

After the war, in the early 50s, Agatha Christie had to expand her settings; for example in Hickory Dickory Death, the murder victims live in a rooming hostel for students and young professional workers, but their dynamics very much resemble that of aristocratic weekenders at a country house she might have used for a 1930s setting. An Italian cook for the hostel makes dinner of "excellent minestrone... from a big tureen. This was followed by a piping hot dish of spaghetti and meat balls." But dinner is just as much a part of the story as a breakfast in that country house. (p. 23, Pocket Book Edition, first published 1955).

Murder on the Menu by Jeanine Larmoth is a wonderful, rather snarky, study of English murder mysteries, including Christie and the other big names -- Allingham, Marsh, Sayers, Innes, and others. Larmoth creates and explores stereotypes of all the main mystery-story characters: Lords, Ladies, butlers, maids, nannies, village spinsters, cooks, amateur detectives, police inspectors, constables (as distinct from chief constables who are higher class!), ordinary policemen, and so on. Above all, Larmoth describes what they eat.

One of Larmoth's most interesting topics is the question of WHY so much food appears in these fictions. I've often wondered that while writing about food in detective fiction (click on the link for all my posts including this one). Here's what she has to say:

"Hidden within each mystery writer is a gourmet; guiding each stroke of the writer's pen is a chef of chef d'oeuvres. If mysteries contain menus and recipes for murder, happily they contain menus and recipes for meals as well Between shudders of fear and apprehension at a past or coming crime are delightful islands where the principal consideration is the next dish, and the shudders are solely pleasurable. The aroma of herbs or fresh bread rises in the air, ginger cake lurks in the larder, a pan sizzles anticipating Yorkshire pudding, a bottle of burgundy makes a sound Margery Alligham describes... as a 'ghost of a pop; ... a beautiful sound, regretful, grateful, kind.'" -- Murder on the Menu, p. 155

Yet, after all the food scenes, Larmoth continues: "one stops to wonder 'why.' Why, and wherefore, all the food?" She cites Agatha Christie for using food as a hiding place, as a trap, as a test to see if the victim has eaten what he was alleged to have eaten, and as a vehicle, of course, for poison. She lists several more practical reasons in plotting mysteries.

"Food indicates setting," as in a country weekend at a great house, for example. Food descriptions among the detective's activities show the reader "This is not ... a story being told; this is real life. In mysteries, food is, in fact, one of the few means of creating an impression of life... giving a sense of reality." (p. 157)

"The Proof of the Pudding" is the title of Larmoth's last chapter, and her conclusion is:

"When the last fork has been laid on the plate, the last crumb of a treacle tart has been eaten, the last Admirable Eccentric has daubed his mustache with a starched white napkin... the case is definitely proved. Not against the murderer. For a way of life. 

"The case for thin slices of bread and butter with tea, and drapes drawn, before rising in the morning.... The case for buttery muffins, grandmother's receipts, brandy for the fainting, meat pies for the police, curry for poisoning. For butlers serving breath-light soufflés, and solicitously bending over one's chair. ... 

"We have tasted, smelled enjoyed -- for all of these can be done with the imagination. ... The only thing we haven't done is eaten, really eaten. This, for all our authors' care, is up to us. ... There is nothing to do but to step hastily into the kitchen, and serve it forth." (p 253-255)

Published in 1972, Murder on the Menu could be a perfect description of many later TV series about English aristocracy; in fact, it was evidently written at about the same time as the production of "Upstairs Downstairs," the series that began in 1971 and helped define a TV genre.

Most chapters of this book include an impressive set of appropriate recipes -- like "Library Snacks," "The Post-Funeral Lunch," "The Tea-Trolley," or "The All Day Buffet." In reading the recipes, I wonder: exactly how wonderful was the food in those idyllic yet fatal settings? It's often very bland, and the meat recipes sometimes call for hours of simmering or boiling what might be nice cuts of pork, beef, veal, or even a chicken. The recipes given in the book are probably quite authentic, as they were written by Charlotte Turgeon (1912-2009). Note: Turgeon was the translator of the Larousse Gastronomique and other French cookbooks. A college classmate of Julia Child, she remained Child's lifelong friend.

What I've Been Cooking

Tonight, from Ottolenghi's Jerusalem: Roasted sweet potatoes with green onions, peppers, figs, and balsamic reduction.
Served with roast chicken, but could be a vegetarian main course with the optional goat cheese mentioned in the recipe.

Dessert: Pavlova with whipped cream, raspberries, strawberries.

Earlier this week: simple food --
roast turkey salad with grapes, lettuce, mayo, parsley flakes.

Pavlova Recipe

4 large egg whites (for medium eggs use 5 egg whites)

1 1/4 cups white sugar mixed with 2 tsp. cornstarch

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon lemon juice

8 oz. carton heavy cream whipped with 1/3 c. sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla OR 1 recipe of lemon curd

Fruit for garnish

1.	Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Draw a 9-inch circle on the parchment paper with pencil and turn over the paper so it won't get pencil on the cake. Sprinkle the circle lightly with corn starch to avoid sticking. NOTE: I did it once without cornstarch and it didn't stick.
2.	In mixer, beat egg whites until stiff but not dry. Gradually add in the sugar mixture, about 1 tablespoon at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat until thick and glossy. Gently fold in vanilla extract and lemon juice.
3.	Spoon mixture inside the circle drawn on the parchment paper. Working from the center, spread mixture toward the outside edge, building edge slightly. This should leave a slight depression in the center.
4.	Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a wire rack. NOTE: this recipe skips all the complicated stuff about cooling it in the oven overnight that usually is part of Pavlova instructions.
5.	Whip the cream with sugar & vanilla. Or make lemon curd with the leftover egg yolks, allow to cool. Remove the paper, and place meringue on a flat serving plate. Just before serving, fill the center of the meringue with whipped cream or lemon curd and top with fruit: kiwi, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, whatever. ADAPTED FROM http://allrecipes.com/recipe/easy-pavlova/

Mona's Mustache Disappears

Two Mona Lisa coffee mugs, one with mustache. 

Add coffee and her mustache disappears -- almost!

Mug was made by On The Wall Productions, named "Mona Goes Dada."

For comparison: with mustache, with coffee and no mustache.

Let's face it: in the USA, Mona Lisa is part of low culture. In France not so much. 

This is the third in my series about Mona's mustache. I think this will be the end. I'll try to be more serious.

Mona Lisa's Mustache Part 2

Ann Arbor News (it used to be a printed newspaper) -- 1992 quiz.

Following up yesterday's post, I searched a few of my many notebooks for Mona Lisa with a mustache. 

The cloning kit advertised above evidently allows you to put mustache genes into Mona Lisa. As usual, I didn't keep any information about where this advertisement appeared. OK, so I'm kind of DaDa.

From Detroit Monthly, no doubt politically relevant
some time in the distant past.

Minneapolis Art Museum showing Soviet Posters. 

Mystery article!

And from the web: These and many more on sale now at Zazzle!

Mona Lisa's Mustache

Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.
For my thoughts on this see:
"Me, Marcel Duchamp, and L.H.O.O.Q."

A serious scholar of Mona Lisa parodies and of the works of Marcel Duchamp recently wrote to me to inquire about the publisher of some Mona Lisa greeting cards and ads I've posted at various times. He's writing a book about Mona Lisa with a mustache. That's his specialty. I'm going to try to find them in my disorderly collections, but really -- I'm not serious! I don't collect Mona Lisa items, in the usual sense, I just assemble things that amuse me. I respect seriousness but don't share it. I understand why I can't say "it's just an ad I cut out of some magazine."

Marcel Duchamp is a good role model. He spent many years pretending to do nothing but play chess, which he evidently did very well. Meanwhile he was secretly creating a very strange and maybe profound work of art that's now in the Philadelphia museum titled: “Étant Donnés: 1. La Chute d’Eau, 2. Le Gaz d’Éclairage.” Was he really that serious? Was he serious when he signed R.Mutt to a urinal and submitted it to an art exhibit? And when he did similar things with other "readymades"?*

Towards the end of his life, Marcel Duchamp remade new editions of his original readymades, since the ones from the 19-teens had been lost. Instead of using a readymade urinal, he had a professional ceramicist make a model -- so it wasn't really readymade, but was "really" a work of art. (I guess.) He sold these for rather large amounts of money. I prefer to think of this as another joke he played on the Art Market. Actual scholars may view things differently.

What my Mona Lisa collection looks like now: in a
frenzy of decluttering, I put most of the stuff into
bankers boxes next to my ironing board.
(You know, use Mona Lisa as an Ironing Board.)

In the spirit of fun with which I've been randomly assembling and never cataloging Mona Lisa items, I ran around the web and found some mustachioed Mona Lisas. I know there are many more, this is really RANDOM! And I'll be doing a second post if I find some more in my bankers boxes full of Mona Lisa items. Meanwhile, here are my web findings, just for fun:

Random, but I own a copy.

I own this one too, even with dust jacket.

 *For a description of the Marcel Duchamp works in Philadelphia, see: "Landscape of Eros, Through the Peephole" from the New York Times archive. We have visited that museum and seen them a few times. Memorably a museum guard watching them once captured their spirit perfectly. He said "Marcel Duchamp was a piece of work."

New Food Guidelines 2015-2020 and What's Being Said About Them

Burns Park School lunch, October 1, 2015.
Our local elementary school. See this post.

"Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia M. Burwell and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack today released updated nutritional guidelines that encourage Americans to adopt a series of science-based recommendations to improve how they eat to reduce obesity and prevent chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans is the nation's trusted resource for evidence-based nutrition recommendations and serves to provide the general public, as well as policy makers and health professionals with the information they need to help the public make informed choices about their diets at home, school, work and in their communities."

Thus began a press release from the Department of Agriculture on January 7, 2016.

The most dramatic suggestion from these new guidelines is a 10% limit on the quantity of added sugar that one should consume. They could have just said "avoid drinking too many sweetened beverages," but the soda industry and others have a say-so in how they present their guidelines. They also suggested less "animal protein" for men and teenage boys. They could have said "eat less meat" but the cattle industry and others have a lot of influence. So much politics!

"Shift to healthier food and beverage choices" is one of their not particularly controversial suggestions. They did recommend conventional things like eating vegetables, fruit, whole grains. Also, "By removing dietary cholesterol as a 'nutrient of concern for overconsumption,' the guideline authors bowed to research suggesting that foods rich in the fatty substance contribute only marginally to levels of cholesterol circulating in the bloodstream." (Source: "New Dietary Guidelines," Baltimore Sun.)  

These federal guidelines are important because they become legal requirements for federally subsidized school lunch programs and other government-sponsored programs. I'm not qualified to analyze the guidelines professionally, but I have gathered some material about them from various sources --

Marion Nestle, nutrition expert, has a focus on real foods not "nutrients," which she feels doesn't help people develop good eating patterns. She suggests that the guidelines would be simpler and easier to follow if they just said to eat less processed and junk food. From her blog:

"These Dietary Guidelines, like all previous versions, recommend foods when they suggest 'eat more.' But they switch to nutrients whenever they suggest 'eat less.'

• "In the 2015 Dietary Guidelines, saturated fat is a euphemism for meat.
• "Added sugars is a euphemism for sodas and other sugar-sweetened beverages.
• "Sodium is a euphemism for processed foods and junk foods."  -- Source: "The 2015 Dietary Guidelines, at long last" by Marion Nestle. 

Michael Pollan agrees about "nutrients" vs. "foods."  In an interview anticipating the release of the guidelines, he says this:

"Don't get lost in the details. It’s very important to keep an eye on the big picture. Eating real food is the most important thing you can do if you’re concerned about your health. The precise amount of various nutrients really is not going to make a difference. Those very specific recommendations are probably most useful to institutions that need to conform their feeding programs to federal standards — like the school lunch program.

"[The recommendations] are also important to the industry, which loves nothing better than to launch another conversation around nutrients because that leads to opportunities for new health claims. For example, if this time around "added sugar" becomes a food category, which it hasn’t been in the past, it’ll be an opportunity for foodmakers to boast about how little added sugar they have in their products. But that won’t turn unhealthy food into healthy food.

"In general, any nutrient-based advice becomes another distraction from the really important project of focusing on food." -- Source: "Michael Pollan on how America got so screwed up about food" by Julia Belluz at Vox.

About the "protein" recommendation, here's some history from a Baltimore Sun Editorial:

"The dietary guidelines released yesterday by the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services mark the ninth time in a row that the meat industry has successfully suppressed scientific findings recommending reduced meat consumption ... .

"Reduced meat consumption was first recommended in 1977 by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in the 'Dietary Goals for the United States,' a precursor to the Dietary Guidelines. 

"But the meat industry forced the committee to destroy all copies of the report and to remove the offending recommendation from a new edition. 

"That wanton government sell-out to the meat industry has replayed itself with every new edition of the guidelines since then." -- Source: "Our adulterated dietary guidelines"

And from the Los Angeles Times:

"One thing lawmakers did was fund a peer-reviewed study by the National Academy of Medicine of the science behind the dietary guidelines. The added research can only improve the next recommendations, but it's likely to leave unanswered what may be the most important question about the guidelines: Why don't more people follow them?" -- Source: "Feds serve up more dietary guidelines for Americans to ignore," Editorial in the Los Angeles Times.  

Hello, Jeanie!

Finally, after years of blogging acquaintance and dozens if not hundreds of blog comments and Facebook exchanges, Jeanie from The Marmelade Gypsy blog and I have met! We are totally compatible and talked nonstop over brunch at Cafe Zola in downtown Ann Arbor. Subjects ranged from Paris (a favorite place for both of us), watching TV (loving the Great British Baking show, hating Comcast, worrying about the bandwidth auction of PBS stations, and having to work all those darn remotes), birds and cats (Jeanie's cat Lizzie thinks she is omnipotent at calling birds into her yard for Lizzie to watch from the window), and a little about politics which we agree on pretty much.

Jeanie is on her way to a cake-baking workshop at Zingerman's bakehouse. I am looking forward to what she'll be blogging about her experience there and about the cakes she'll be baking. And I'm looking forward to the next time we meet. We've both made a resolution every year that we'll finally meet in person. So good to finish a resolution on January 8, isn't it?

My spinach crepe and coffee -- Jeanie had a mushroom crepe and a pot of tea.
The photo in which we both appeared was excessively back-lit so I'm not using it.

Some Really Bad Meals

Agatha Christie's mysteries, which I've been rereading recently, are filled with references to meals. Sometimes she's specific about scones or steaks or tea sandwiches or breakfast kippers. Sometimes she just mentions that in the course of an investigation a meal is eaten at one or another of the upper-class mansions, middle-class homes, or hotel tea rooms that her characters and detectives frequent. Meals often mark the passage of time, day by day.

The Murder at the Vicarage, the mystery tale where Miss Jane Marple makes her first appearance, centers around life in the modest Vicarage occupied by the narrator, the village Vicar. Miss Marple, who lives next door to the Vicar, fits a stereotype that Christie summarizes: "There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands."(Kindle Locations 509-510).

The Vicar's wife Griselda, much younger than he, feels that she cannot afford the expense of a competent servant, so she employs Mary, a careless and inexperienced young woman. The food that Mary cooks is terrible. The second paragraph of the entire novel, for example begins with the Vicar's complaint: "I had just finished carving some boiled beef (remarkably tough by the way)..."(Locations 144-145).

Conversation at the table continues, and "Mary, who is in service at the Vicarage as a stepping-stone to better things and higher wages, merely said in a loud, businesslike voice, ‘Greens’, and thrust a cracked dish at him [a guest] in a truculent manner." And then: "Mary, setting the greens on the table with a bang, proceeded to thrust a dish of singularly moist and unpleasant dumplings under my nose. I said, ‘No, thank you,’ and she deposited the dish with a clatter on the table and left the room." (Locations 148-152)

For dessert, Mary presented "a partially cooked rice pudding. I made a mild protest, but Griselda said that the Japanese always ate half-cooked rice and had marvellous brains in consequence." (Locations 190-191). Another dessert at a later meal in the novel: "Mary’s blancmange ... is so frightfully depressing. It’s like something out of a mortuary.’ (Locations 3096-3097).

Another meal follows not long afterwards: "The menu was ambitious in conception, and Mary seemed to have taken a perverse pleasure in seeing how best she could alternate undercooking and overcooking. Some oysters which Griselda had ordered, and which would seem to be beyond the reach of incompetence, we were, unfortunately, not able to sample as we had nothing in the house to open them with – an omission which was discovered only when the moment for eating them arrived." (Locations 474-477).

Griselda continues to insist that her own efforts are futile, she can't change Mary and doesn't want to replace her explaining: "But as long as Mary can’t cook and has those awful manners – well, we’re safe, nobody else would have her.’" (Locations 1175-1176).

In contrast, the village public dining room is preferred by a potential guest; it had quite acceptable food: "The Blue Boar gives you a first-rate meal of the joint and two-vegetable type." (Location 1576).

What people expect when they think about
Agatha Christie meals: tea and sandwiches!
See "A street food feast, takeaway 
picnic hampers and a spread 
inspired by Agatha Christie"

Christie always manages to surprise readers, including of course her very clever plots and the way the the perpetrators are almost always unexpected. In The Murder at the Vicarage, she also transforms the frequent stereotype of a wife who can't manage the servants and who makes her husband unhappy with his food on a regular basis. You would think Griselda's incompetence would predict that their marriage is doomed. Not so in this case! The 20 year difference in age between the Vicar and his Griselda and her inability to manage the house doesn't have this effect at all: at the end of the book, after identification of the murderer who left a body in their study -- their marriage is stronger than ever, and she is promising to do better at household management by buying how-to books.

Most Agatha Christie food followers mention the usual delicacies: English teas, Devon cream, Sunday roasts, Christmas puddings, fine old port, or the sweets and cocoa loved by Hercule Poirot. I was delighted to find such contrasting -- and negative -- food descriptions in The Murder at the Vicarage.

To see all my posts about Agatha Christie, including my current 2016 binge, click here.

Miss Marple played by Joan Hickson

Nut Cutlet? Nut Roast?

"Two chops set before three people are productive of embarrassment," writes the narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, an Agatha Christie classic. "But Caroline is seldom daunted for long. With magnificent mendacity, she explained to Poirot that although James laughed at her for doing so, she adhered strictly to a vegetarian diet. She descanted ecstatically on the delights of nut cutlets (which I am quite sure she has never tasted) and ate a Welsh rarebit with gusto and frequent cutting remarks as to the dangers of 'flesh' foods." (p. 191)

Christie displays a tut-tut attitude towards nut cutlets and other vegetarian food. Such items were part of a health-food fad in the 1920s when this book takes place. When they want to enjoy themselves, her characters lean more towards a nice steak, such as the one at a lunch offered to a potential suitor in The Mystery of the Blue Train. And by the way, Caroline didn't fool Poirot, he could tell she was no vegetarian, but just making an excuse for the lack of an extra portion of meat for the unexpected lunch guest.

Nuts cutlets instead of veal chops? Vegetarians have been doing this for over a century. A nut cutlet recipe appears in the George Bernard Shaw Vegetarian Cookbook, based on this very famous vegetarian advocate's supposed favorite foods and published in the 1980s (adaptation here). The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook by Fania Lewando, recently translated from the original 1938 Yiddish edition, includes an entire selection of vegetarian cutlets, including nut cutlets made from ground walnuts, semolina porridge, breadcrumbs, eggs and butter. I think some of the vegan hamburger-like items in the freezer case at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's are the current equivalent of these older and less appealingly-named versions. These are the closest thing I've ever eaten to nut cutlets, I suspect.

The nut roast is currently more popular than nut cutlets, but the recipes are similar, and in my experience, both items are much more favored by the English and Australians than by Americans, even American vegans or vegetarians. Nut roasts are flavored to compliment the traditional side dishes for Sunday dinner or for Christmas dinner, allowing vegetarians or vegans, especially in England, to feel like part of the mainstream, I guess. For example, a nut roast photo appeared recently in the Christmas Dinner blog post of Johanna at Green Gourmet Giraffe from Australia; it was "served with roast potatoes, pumpkin and carrots, peas, cauliflower cheese and cranberry sauce."

My sole nut roast experience was a Sunday dinner at the Green Man restaurant in the small town of Grantchester, near Cambridge, England sometime in the 1990s (before Grantchester became a TV show). We were spending six weeks or so in Cambridge, and rode our bicycles along the Isis river to get there, remembering the famous people associated with the area such as Rupert Brooke, Bertrand Russell, and the brothers of Virginia Woolf. I quite liked the nut roast, which I think included small bits of carrot as well as cheese, so it was vegetarian, not vegan. I'd never heard of such a thing before, and I'm not that unfamiliar with American vegetarian options. It appeared on their online Christmas Dinner menu this year.

This photo from the Green Man website shows bicycles parked outside.
Unfortunately I can't find any of my own photos of Grantchester.

According to Felicity Cloake at the Guardian:

"If there's such a thing as pariah food – a recipe shunned by mainstream menus, mocked to near extinction and consigned to niche hinterlands for evermore – then the nut roast, a dish whose very name has become a watchword for sawdusty disappointment, is surely a strong contender. One of the darlings of the early vegetarian movement (particularly in its even sadder form, the cutlet), it was on the menu at John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium [sic], and has since become the default Sunday option for vegetarians – and a default source of derision for everyone else." (How to cook the perfect nut roast, December 14, 2011)

Google Images of "Nut Roast." Note frequent presence of brussels sprouts, indicating that they might be British.

Cooking with Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie in her kitchen -- from Crèmes & châtiments

Once long ago I read almost all of the Agatha Christie books that were then in print. I've decided to revisit some of them, and I began yesterday, the first day of the year, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the very first book in which Hercule Poirot appeared. The events in the book take place approximately 100 years ago, during the First World War, and the publication date is 1920. Now I'm reading The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), and plan to read more.

Amazingly, Christie's prose seems absolutely modern. Styles is a totally readable book about a grand household that reminds me of Downton Abbey (probably not a coincidence, since Christie invented a lot of the conventions for depicting this social class in popular literature). I'll be following up my Christie reading when I've read a few more.

What I want to concentrate on today is an Agatha Christie cookbook titled Crèmes & châtiments: Recettes délicieuses et criminelles d'Agatha Christie. The meaning of the title, which is a better pun in French than in English: Creams and Punishments: Recipes both delicious and Criminal from Agatha Christie by Anne Martinetti and François Rivière, first published in France in 2005. Though this book is entirely in French, every page quotes one of Christie's books. Needless to say, she's highly popular there, and all her books have long ago been translated.

My copy of the book -- the 2010 edition.

As far as I've been able to determine, this is the only actual Agatha Christie cookbook available now. I don't know of any that are out of print, though who knows if there was ever such a cookbook? Occasional recipes have appeared such as this very recent one: "Food in books: crystallised ginger from The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie." But I don't know of any other full-scale cookbooks.

This situation is totally surprising as Christie describes food at appropriate intervals throughout her vast collection of detective fiction, and food also appears in most of the film and TV treatments of her stories. The French identity of this book makes some sense, as Hercule Poirot is a partisan of French cooking. Here's an amusing example from The Blue Train: Hercule Poirot's valet suggested that he wear a particular "brown lounge suit." Poirot replied, "There is a grease spot on the waistcoat... a morceau of filet de sole à la Jeannette alighted there when I was lunching at the Ritz last Tuesday." If you have read the books or seen the films you know that Poirot was fussy about both his food and his clothing. Crèmes & châtiments doesn't have this particular dish, but does offer a few elegant-sounding fish recipes and several desserts and pastries that the detective would have enjoyed. And by the way, Poirot's excellent valet had removed the spot, enabling him to wear the suit.

"Tartines gratinées au chester" -- open-face sandwiches with cheese melted in wine.
This was the only recipe in the book for which I had the ingredients today; I improvised the salad with chutney, as many
of the recipes do call for chutney. I admit it wasn't spectacularly different from ordinary cheese toasts!

Well, it's a new year, and I'm planning lots of food reading and kitchen experiments. More pictures and recipes from Crèmes & châtiments are to come!

New Year's Eve Parties

We had a lovely New Year's Eve, beginning with our neighbors' annual Pizza and PJs party which goes "from 6 PM until bedtime." That is, the bedtime of all the little (and growing) kids who come to the party in PJs. I didn't take photos there this year, but we enjoyed seeing our neighbors including a few new faces.

Next party: Carol's annual music and food extravaganza. It's 50 miles away, so we haven't made it in the last few years, but the weather is kind this year, and the timing of the two parties dovetails nicely.

Carol and Pauline played piano 2-hands.
A violin-cello-piano trio also performed.

Music-themed names for food ... my favorite is
the pâté.

Again, Happy New Year to all!