Wednesday, September 25, 2002

I’ve always held pretty much all food writers in contempt.  There are a few geniuses, of course.  The great MFK.  Jeffrey Steingarten.  Laurie Colwin.  And of course, the great JC herself has a way with words.  But overall, it is a genre beset by twee-ness.  And I never could understand it.  “Jesus!” I’d think as I read yet another snarky paean to Fairway, another article on how to survive air travel on those harrowing flights to Italy with a few gourmet comestibles.  “Why can’t you people friggin’ write?”  I mean,  it’s food, for God’s sake!  One of the universals – food, sex, death, that’s about it. Well, exactly.  Really good writing on sex is relatively rare, too, and sex at least has the whole deep sex=death thing going for it, which lends it gravitas.  Whereas food, in our culture at least, is at base a sort of embarrassing thing.  It can be pleasurable, it can be comforting, sure, but what is it really but material for creating shit?  Plus, how many times can a girl use the word “buttery” before falling into a hopeless rut? On Sunday we had Poulet Poele a L’Estragon, Casserole-roasted Chicken with Tarragon.  The only difference between casserole-roasted and regular old roasted chicken is that you brown it all over first on the stove top, which is sort of a pain, but not nearly as much so as reaching in all the time and turning it in the oven.  You brown the chicken in the butter, turning it several times so it browns on all sides (I yet again neglected to truss the chicken – probably should have done it – it  would have made things easier.)  I put the chicken on a plate long enough to sauté some carrots, onions and tarragon in the juices, then I put the chicken back in and put it in the oven.  And that was it.  It cooked in the oven for half an hour or so, and when it was done, I made up a gravy by cooking down the juices with some chicken stock and port, and we ate it with plain old rice and plain old salad.  The chicken was comforting.  It was buttery, too.  It was nothing fancy, but after last night’s aria, I was glad of that.  And the salad – my God, a revelation!  To say I was not much of a salad girl growing up would be seriously understating the case, and even as a (sort-of) grown-up salad hasn’t been high on my list of must-haves; to much connotation of deprivation and dieting.  But after a month or more of lovely, gorgeous, gluttonous, buttery JC food, the glories of lettuce are keenly felt. I also did some cooking ahead on Sunday, which was, as always, a pleasure, and much better than that house-cleaning routine.  I made chicken stock out of a chicken, and saved the meat – for a pate?  Ho ho!  I made a tomato sauce that I’ll use later in the week for something or other.  And I prepared the celeriac, which was a particular pleasure after Saturday’s labors – no cooking at all!  Just cut it into matchsticks, a bit of a chore, that celeriac is tough, but no matter, and let them soak in lemon juice.  Then toss it with a creamy, mustardy dressing.  Piece of cake! Of course, at the end of it there’s work, again.  But at least, I felt I was preparing, and resting, and comforting myself, which is pretty much the best that a Sunday can offer. 7:20:08 AM    comment []