When I was a kid, I used to look at MtAoFC quite a lot. Partly it
was just my obsession with anything between two covers, but there was something
else, too. Because this book has the power to shock. MtAoFC is still
capable of striking deep if obscure zones of discomfort. Find the most pale,
pierced and kohl-eyed, proudly pervy hipster you can and ask her to cook Pâté
de Canard en Croûte, aided only by the helpful illustrations on pages 571
through 575. I promise you, she'll be fleeing back to Williamsburg, where no
one's going to make her bone a whole duck, faster than you can say,
"trucker hats are soooo five minutes ago."
But why? What is it about this book? It's just an old cookbook, for God's
sake. Yet vegetarians, Atkinsers, and South Beach bums flare their nostrils at
the stink of apostasy between its covers. Self-proclaimed foodies spare a smile
of fond condescension before returning to their Chez Panisse cookbooks. By all
rights, I should feel this way too. I am, after all, that ultimate synthesis of
urban flakiness and suburban self-righteousness, the New York actress.
Well, actually, I guess I can't say that, since I've never had a real acting
job. And to tell the truth - it's time I faced facts here- I never really even
tried. But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a
subway from the outer boroughs to a lower Manhattan office every morning, who
spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when
she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and
stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep.
Oh God. It really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary. When I
looked up from MtAoFC for the first time, half an hour after I opened
it, I realized that deep down, I'd been resigned to being a secretary for months
- maybe even years.
That was the bad news. The good news was that the buzzing in my head and
queasy but somehow exhilarating squeeze deep in my belly were reminding me that
I might still, after all, be something else.
Do you know Mastering the Art of French Cooking? You must, at least,
know of it - it's a cultural landmark, for Pete's sake. Even if you just think
of it as the book by that lady who looks like Dan Aykroyd and bleeds a lot, you
know of it. But do you know the book itself ? Try to get your hands on one of
the early hardback editions- they're not exactly rare. For a while there, every
American housewife who could boil water had a copy, or so I've heard.
It's not lushly illustrated; there are no shiny soft-core images of the
glossy-haired author sinking her teeth into a juicy strawberry or smiling
stonily before a perfectly rustic tart with carving knife in hand, like some
chilly blonde kitchen dominatrix. The dishes are hopelessly dated - the cooking
times outrageously long, the use of butter and cream beyond the pale, and not a
single reference to pancetta or sea salt or wasabi. This book hasn't been on the
must-have list for enterprising gourmands in decades. But as I held it in my
hands that morning, opened its cover spangled with tomato-colored fleurs-de-lys,
skimmed through its yellowed pages, I felt like I'd at last found something
important. Why? I bent again over the book's pages, searching for the cause of
this strange feeling. It wasn't the food exactly. If you looked hard enough, the
food started to feel almost beside the point. No, there was something deeper
here, some code within the words, perhaps some secret embedded in the paper
itself.
I have never looked to religion for comfort - belief is just not in my genes.
But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking - childishly simple and
dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting - I thought this was what prayer
must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want. Reading MtAoFC
was like reading pornographic Bible verses.
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