THE GURGLING COD

The New Yorker: Check my French?

If you can get past the preposterous and gratuitous misidentification of Streep's portrayal of Julia Child as other than criminal, there are some sort ofinteresting ideas in this NYer blog post (god that sounds weird) on the continued celebration of Child, James Beard and MFK Fisher:

Beard, Fisher, and, above all, Child continue to shape ideals of food in America, which is striking, considering how long it’s been since their prime.

and

Beard, Child, and Fisher were indeed great. No one has ever written like Fisher or explained how to cook as charmingly as Child. But our need to revere them as models of impeccable French taste after all these years is a little odd, considering that they themselves sought to puncture the spirit of snobbish reverence which infected the food writing of previous generations. 

Well, kind of. It's not clear if the post's author (Bee Wilson) is more concerned about the crippling effects of nostalgia or of Francophilia. Considering that even Wilson concedes that all three of her triumvirate backed of Gallic rigor in the kitchen as their lives unfolded, so the real issue is the time: 

“Provence 1970” is the latest book to mythologize these “iconic culinary figures.” Luke Barr is M. F. K. Fisher’s great nephew (he called her “Dote”) and a magazine editor. An enjoyable and perceptive group biography that reads as fluently as a novel, it was written with the help of a “pale green spiral notebook”—Fisher’s diary in 1970, a year when, as Barr puts it, “everyone who was anyone in the American food world” showed up in southern France. 

What's the problem? People keep writing books about things people keep reading books about. Call it the GolfingFor Cats principle. This principle works both chronologically and thematically. However, Wilson wants something else from her food writing:

Barr describes many dreamy meals that could only be French. His grandmother Norah—M.F.’s younger sister—travelled with M.F. in 1970. “Norah had the oysters, M.F. had the clams, and they shared the scallops, which they agreed were beautiful. The Pomerol was superb and so was the cheese.” Again, perfect.

Except, when you stop to think of it, three kinds of seafood followed by cheese is not exactly how most people want to eat these days. 

More seafood and cheese for the rest of us, I guess! More to the point, Wilson seems to miss that Provence 1970 is no more a cookbook than Please Kill Me is a self-help book. The analogy is overstated, but it's more interesting to read about Sid Vicious, Richard Hell, Richard Olney, et al, precisely because they lead lives that are not like our own. Speaking of nostalgia for 1970, let's ask Iggy and the lads to play us off: 

The Brooklynification of North Carolina - can it be stopped?

On occasion, we've noted in this space that Durham, NC has become the Brooklyn of the South (in a good way even, once, if memory serves). However, the less appealing aspects of this affinity are now spreading West, to the hitherto unassailed hippie stronghold of Asheville, NC. Via @phillygirl, (via @Mr. Brion), alarming reports of a "gravy flight." The perpetrator is Biscuitheads,* a new spot specializing in biscuits. (At $3 per each with nothing, they better be good.) 

If the artisanal food movement of recent years has offered one lesson, it is that taking familiar receipts and making them from scratch out of real ingredients can produce remarkable results. Sadly, the food world often suggest that the problem is too much creativity, not too little. If there is a second rule of artisanal food, it's that there are plenty of good ideas already, and you can do well executing these ideas. You can do less well with new ideas. Not surprising, folks who run restaurants get restless, and thus otherwise solid-looking breakfast spots in North Carolina put seven different gravies on their menu. And then, the temptation to put a "gravy flight" on the menu is overwhelming. Worse, at this rate, soon there will be a young man who says "gravy sommelier" when you ask him what he does for a living. 

Coco Chanel's advice about removing one accessory once you think you are ready to go out was in fact an extrapolation from her advice about opening a biscuit focused restaurant: write the menu, and then get rid of all of the gravies that are not the kind of gravy you serve with biscuits. That said, there is every reason to suppose that this place will move in the direction of being the Baskin-Robbins of gravies, because, people, and further proof that it is just another Guiteau Monday.