HAPPY 4^TH OF JULY!

On this year’s Independence Day, there is much to celebrate. With the waning of the pandemic, we can be out and about and gather safely with friends and family.  Particularly if we are fully vaccinated.  We have been through a bruising few years.  It is heartening to now have a president who is compassionate, committed, and balanced, qualities sadly lacking before.  

Yet, we are a deeply polarized nation—witness the thousands of people who showed up at a Trump rally last night here in the neighboring town of Sarasota.  I would like to be optimistic that the ideals on which the United States is based, freedom and equal opportunity, will prevail, but fear that we will live through more contentious times until civility returns.  Nonetheless, I remain hopeful for the future.  Let’s celebrate today and cherish what is good in our society!

ER–COMPLEX AND COURAGEOUS WOMAN

I am currently immersed in David Michaelis’s new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt entitled simply, Eleanor.  I am old enough to recall some of the news coverage when Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962.  Over the years, I’ve read a number of books about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, including one by Joseph Lash, as well as Blanche Wiesen Cook’s massive three volume biography of Eleanor.  I read good reviews of the Michaelis biography but did wonder how much new information it might contain.  A lot.  

With a decade’s research and access to new source materials, Michaelis presents an even fuller picture of Eleanor than Cook did.  Eleanor’s mother died when she was eight. Two years later her father, whom she idolized, also died.  Orphaned, she was raised by her grandmother, but always felt like an unwanted outsider and lacked self-esteem.  Belittled and berated by relatives for her height, her lack of beauty, and her stilted adult demeanor, it was several decades before Eleanor came into her own as a person of worth.  Early on she learned not to show any emotion, and this hindered how she dealt with Franklin and their five children.

Franklin and Eleanor were distant cousins, but a mismatched pair as husband and wife.  Both were needy in their own way; he always desirous of being the center of attention and more aligned with his mother Sara than his spouse.  Eleanor wanted to do something worthwhile and was frustrated by the strictures put upon her actions by her social class and the place of women in society overall.  She felt unacknowledged and unappreciated by Franklin and was devastated by the discovery of his affair with Lucy Mercer during WWI.

It is fascinating to learn how Eleanor came out of her shell, engaged with the wider world, found love, and ignored public opinion on the proper role of a First Lady. She jaunted around the country giving speeches and wrote a daily newspaper column.  She became an activist force and an ally to FDR when polio limited his mobility.

David Michaelis met Eleanor Roosevelt briefly when he was four years old, a meeting that made an indelible impression on him.  His book is engaging, candid about both ER’s and FDR’s flaws, and written in a lively, almost sprightly style.  Highly recommended!

COOKBOOK CULLING

The Chief Penguin and I own more than a hundred cookbooks.  They are titles we bought or gifts with the oldest ones from the early 1970’s (think Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking) through the 1980’s (Silver Palate) and 90’s to more recent publications.  We have several compendiums including multiple editions of Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking; Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything; The Gourmet Cookbook and Gourmet Today; the French Bible of home cooking, I Know How to Cook; the Italian equivalent, The Silver Spoon; and one of my all-time favorites, Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.  Plus, there are celebrity cookbooks by Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pepin, Nigella Lawson, Gordon Hamersley, Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame, Patricia Wells, Georges Perrier of Philadelphia’s Le Bec Fin, and Ottolenghi.  

Also, books dedicated to a particular cuisine such as Vietnamese or Chinese or a particular region of a country. We have a bunch of regional Italian cookbooks and several that focus on recipes from Paris bistros and cafes.  And last, but not least, a trove of baking books—breads, pastries, and cookies, the province of C.P.  A wealth of recipes.  What’s fun about this review is discovering notes on dishes I’ve made in the past, a trip down culinary lane.

Some years ago, Philadelphia hosted an annual Book and the Cook festival.  Chefs from restaurants around the U.S. were invited to the city and paired with a local chef.  Meals were jointly prepared by the two chefs.  It was a chance for elegant dining or casual fare with always a meet and greet with the guest chef.  You could bring or buy the featured cookbook and have it autographed.  We usually signed up for 2 or 3 events each year and often with our good friends Ellen and Bob.  

Two occasions stand out.  We four have fond memories of being warmly greeted at the dining room entrance by the statuesque Julia Child.  She later made the rounds of all the guests and inscribed her book for anyone who asked.  Although I like and make many of her recipes, Marcella Hazan was not a gracious guest chef.  She was brusque and did little in the way of schmoozing with the diners.  But these events were both notable for the food!

So, what has prompted this review of our cookbooks?  We have too many to be able to keep all of them when we ultimately move to a smaller place.  Consequently, starting with the older less used books, we are reviewing each one, marking recipes we’ve made or ones we like, and then scanning them.  

The Chief Penguin is the architect and executor of this project.  We both review the recipes, then he takes a photo on his iPhone via Scannable, and it gets sent to Evernote.  On Evernote, he’s created a folder for each cookbook with the cover image and then the recipes get filed with the book.  The beauty of this is that they are all searchable by ingredient, author/chef, and so forth.  This makes them available anywhere we have access to Evernote and will enable us to give away some of the cookbooks.  I’d love to find a local college or public library that would like them; failing that they may end up at Goodwill, my last resort.