The New York Times has named these books as leaders for the year. Before I actually spend tons of money trying to get any of them, does anyone have anything to say, positive or negative, about any of them?
You probably cannot conceive of how expensive English language books can be in Italy, unless you are also an Expat in Italy.
2 comments November 27th, 2007
Lat January I wrote a post about Iris Murdoch after reading a biography of her life as philosopher and writer. I immediately ordered every one of her novels thatr I could find at a price I could pay, and in September eg kindly carted them across the Atlantic to me.
Time passed and I didn’t read them. I genuinely thought that I would need a great deal of calm and fortitude to tackle these books by one who has been proclaimed the Dostoevsky of the 20th century. I remember Dostoevsky.
After more than two months I was faced with either beginning Murdoch or reading some violent modern books that are more noir than “Noir.” I picked up the first book of fiction she ever wrote: Under the Net. I started to read it.
It’s funny! It’s charming, the characters are as flawed as they must be and I found myself both thinking about the underlying principles of what must versus what may be lived while laughing my head off. There’s even a great dog in it. The narrator is a wastrel writer who works hardest at finding people to take care of him. It tells of a short-term adventure at a crisis period when all his balls are in the air and he constantly has to choose to do the decent thing or the convenient thing. The details of 1950s London are wonderful.
Thus armed, I picked up the next in my series, The Nice and the Good.
This is the book I needed a steady head for. Its style is more old fashioned, and because she is trying to tell us much more about good and truth and how they fit into life, there are a dozen plot lines going ahead at all times. It was, at times, heavy going. Some of the evil depicted seemed just silly to me from a viewpoint decades later, but the impulse to seek it, tolerate it, brush it off is still shocking. I think it is a book to read more than once. I found myself too taken up with the psychology of the characters and wanting to send them all to a good shrink to really understand how the theme of the nice versus the good was being played out. And it certainly was being played out, with an ending scene that is both terrifying and settling. In a way I feel the book should end there, but each character gets a final recap scene for those of you who insist on knowing what happened afterwards.
The underlying thread in both these books is that many of us value looking like we are good more than we value good. We omit, we elide, we follow rules in order to show ourselves to be good, and it makes us at best nice. It is only when we allow truth and memory and love to hurt us that we can do one good thing. And then, perhaps one more. The struggle, it seems, is daily. Murdoch makes a point that it is possible that justice is more just when offered by one person struggling for good than by adherence to the law.
Interestingly, Murdoch’s men are much more real than her women. The women seem more like expressions of ideals, each one embodying a type more than feeling like flesh and blood. In each of the two books I have read so far, the protagonist is a man, and in the first one, Under the Net, women can barely be said to exist. There are, handily, equal numbers of men and women in >
The Nice and the Good. There are also children, and really remarkable children at that. They were enormously important.
I will read these books again, because they are worth it. I will buy more of the twenty-six novels she wrote, too.
These pictured are all used and reprints. I bought them at amazon.com because the prices were better than amazon.uk, and they had all been translated into American English. That was disconcerting at times. Both vendors have used book dealers, but the postage from the UK is very high, and when ordering from secondary vendors, you can’t beef up the order to spread the postage out over more books. I struggle to get books, perhaps, more than I struggle to be good. Have to work on that.
3 comments November 19th, 2007
This is a meme requested from Jessica who is still In Search of Dessert but is also prodding people who write and looking for a venue for a not-so-secret upcoming affair. Jessica and her toyboy Jon were here making ravioli with me a few months ago, if you recall. I did not write a word while they were here, and I even refrained from embarrassing Jon with appreciative whistles. Actually, I can’t whistle.
So, I am supposed to think of five strengths I have as a writer. Hmmmm. Well.
1. I write. Even if I don’t publish anything here, I write. I have been doing it for most of my life intermittently and this go-round has endured for 34 years. I first attended and then ran fiction writers groups in Washington, DC for many years and I learned to be a damned good editor. Writing is in itself a very important strength, because if you just think about titles and plot lines as you drive, you are just a good fantasist.
2. I spel reely god.
3. I self edit in every possible way. In that I include reading stories I wrote years ago and binning them. Sentimental? Bin it. Florid? Bin it. Confusing? Take it apart, put it back together until it makes mental-map sense. Before computers I once took an entire book apart in pages all over my bedroom and then put it back together. Computers are a Godsend. I used to edit to the point where I was the only one who could understand what I wrote, but I seem to have recovered from that. Writing about cooking has helped. No one but me will ever know that I go back to posts here and edit them, even though the very essence of a blog is that people really only look at new stuff.
4. I have a fairly good vocabulary which I use also when speaking, and it comes naturally to me because I was reared that way. It bothers me that Italians say about food only that it is good, really good or exquisite. Similarly, there’s more to say about people than that they are beautiful or nice (or ugly or not nice) which is pretty much what one hears here. If there isn’t a word, I will make one up but admit that I did.
5. I care about other writers. I encourage them and don’t offer criticism unless asked. I seek them out. I buy their books. I link to them. It is a winning move for me, because they make me think beyond my small world into worlds that are far away, or richer, poorer, older, younger than mine. I want every one of them to be successful. They sometimes connect me to things that can make me more successful.
Number five is embarrassing, because having said that I like writers and read their stuff, Jessica and Sognatrice have already named ten of them! So I will name three. They are Dermott in an attempt to shame him into writing more, Corey Amaro who is extremely charming, and Cee Cee, who puts me right into her life which is entirely different from any life I have ever lived.
3 comments October 1st, 2007
When I think about putting my past years together into a cookbook, I think about what goes around the recipes. What is particular about my experience in my Italian kitchen that makes it any different to any other expatriate from any country at all who came here and cooked?
I can’t know the answer to that until I have talked to every expatriate cook, but I can figure out what’s been driving me.
First of all, I discovered that what I thought I knew about Italian cooking was mostly wrong. Even when I got halfway to right, it was still wrong. Most of the Italian meals I made for friends in the United States were comparatively complicated, heavy and depended too much on pasta. I thought finding prosciutto meant my job was done. I thought using blocks of Parmigiano Reggiano was the necessary step forward. I thought Pecorino was Pecorino. If I found and bought all the vegetables and creams and oils in the recipes, I felt like a winner.
Second, I thought making it right was difficult and that making it mine was essential.
Third, I thought fresh pasta, homemade or purchased was always superior to dried pasta.
What has happened to me is that step by step I walked into kitchens, asked questions and listened hard. That was essential for sure when I didn’t speak the language all that well. My neighbors got used to my dropping by at 12:30 and asked “What are you cooking today?” I was always invited to eat, and I always said no. I didn’t want them to quail the next time I knocked on the door. I just wanted to know what ordinary Italians really ate for their main meal of the day. I made a friend of the woman who is the best cook in the region and talked about food with her nearly all the time we spent together.
I went to culinary school to find out what was in the repertoire of kitchens that weren’t making dinner for ordinary Italians, and what techniques were used to make expensive foods practical.
I traveled to some other regions to taste their foods the way they make them on the spot.
I read histories of everyday life and what people eat, where and why. I learned to understand why a dish was considered strictly local, what made it perennial and why it got its name.
I then went into my own kitchen and with ingredients I bought from people who grew them, as much as possible, I cooked. I used, abused and experimented with one ingredient after another to see where I could take it without leaving Italy in the mind. And then I thought I was ready.
Other cooks still said, “I can’t do that!” or “My family would want cheese on that.” I pleaded that they would try the recipe as written once before throwing cheese at it. I deconstructed the recipes and divided the chores involved into the simple steps that comprise cooking. If a dish takes four hours to cook, I tried to point out ways that three and a half of those hours could be spent ignoring, or almost ignoring the cooking. After all, your oven won’t complain at being left alone, but your child, your work or the pool man might.
I’ve ended up with over one hundred recipes that make pure, clean and unfussy foods that are delicious. So am I done? Am I ready to index this thing and get it published. It seems not.
Read this and weep for me. The upshot seems to be that if you aren’t already in the public eye, there’s no market for your cookbook. Frankly, it sounds like even if you are, there may be no market. And if you have the right book, the public wants top quality pictures, but won’t pay the price for them. Maybe magazines are doing too good a job at providing wonderful pictures for a few bucks a month? (I find, however, a lot of magazine recipes are too complicated and have so many ingredients that the tastes are muddled.)
I admit to being a little discouraged, but then I read this and got a good laugh. A good laugh is sometimes all you need when life feels tough to take.
So off to Florence and back soon. Think on it.
8 comments September 22nd, 2007
Someone asked me recently if they could get all the cookery from here in a book. Right now, obviously, she can’t. But if I do the work, with modern technology I can make a book.
I’m very picky about indexing cookbooks, so I can see it would be quite a lot of work, but I’m considering it.
How about it? You can get most of it free here, but some think using the search box is too much trouble. Would you buy a book if it existed?
5 comments August 4th, 2007
When I was experimenting the other day with crusca/bran for breading meat, I remembered a recipe I had read years ago, probably in one of my antique magazines. The recipe was for Swiss steak, a dish for which I never developed much passion. The instructions, however, have much to say about kitchen history.
I can’t check it, but I believe the recipe was from between 1919 and 1939. That’s my guess because the recipe was for several to many people, used and even centered about a cheap piece of meat and yet was spicy and used tomatoes. In the United States, tomatoes weren’t very much used in family meals, and spices had more to do with desserts than entrees, except in ethnic cookery. Ethnic cookery was something you wouldn’t expect the average American magazine reader to know about or even want to do until after the Second World War. Meat didn’t center meals much during the rationing days of the war, and the numbers being fed dropped off, too, with most men and boys serving in the military.
I noticed that many recipes were for eight people in early 20th century, dropped to four quite often around wartime, and then popped back to six in the Fifties. There are many reasons why this would be true. One was that there were often household help before the war, and several children, and after the war women were encouraged to marry and have babies again, and because there was money once more, they did.
Anyway, to the recipe. The directions were to take a piece of round steak and cut it into moderate sized pieces. The pieces were then put on a cutting board, scattered with flour and then the flour was beaten into the meat with the edge of a plate. Look at the edge of a plate. It’s not a very big thing. As a matter of fact, you’d spend hours beating flour into steak for six using the edge of a plate.
Effective? I suspect it is. I am not going to try it or time it. By the time I started cooking most people had a meat hammer with various sized teeth that did the job better and faster. My mother called it a meat hammer. Hers was made of wood, and I once had a wooden one, too, but I snapped the neck of the handle being particularly vigorous one day, so all the ensuing ones have been cast aluminum. For delicate jobs, like flattening chicken or fish, I used the untoothed side of the hammer or the bottom of a wine bottle. If one wants to be showy, a wine bottle still works for slamming, banging, beating or crushing many things, but it can, of course, break.
I have my American meat hammer with me, but I also bought a battecarne which does a much slicker job of flattening delicate things than the wine bottle ever did. For tenderizing tough meat, nothing beats beating.
But every once in a while it’s interesting to me to imagine the women who came before me and how they did the same things I do. I may not make Swiss steak, but a lot of my nicest dishes start with a chunk of something that must be turned into feather-light and tender slices or slivers of something.
And then, for the Southerners, there is chicken-fried steak, and I bet that a lot of grandmothers used the edge of a plate to make that, too. The next time you turn to zap something in the microwave, think about the women who fed your grandparents and how much sheer muscle power and ingenuity it took to do it. Think about the Sunday night suppers with word games and charades or board games that were quite common, even among people who weren’t at all affluent. Those were hard times, but they were also generous times and with no mod cons at all, people had a lot of fun and ate the best they knew how to, on much less money than we spend.
I don’t propose that we go back to privation budgets or appliance-free kitchens– far from it! I do propose that we consider turning off the TV occasionally, feed our friends something cheap and filling and creatively entertain ourselves. We are losing some of the sense of home lately, because we are being convinced that entertaining needs to be elaborate or formalized or that the food should be like restaurant food. Maybe once a month it would be worth wondering what great-grandma would have done.
Some of you are doing this, and you are the ones who inspired this post. Hello, Snowpea!
2 comments March 27th, 2007
Today I received a “Box from Home” which for expats is something in the line of winning a local lottery or an all-expenses-paid week in New York. I get them often, but I have never shared them before– not because I am not excited, but because I am selfish and private.
The reason I am sharing this one is because it hit so many gongs in a row! I went through the house looking for a really American setting for it, and found this antique wedding ring quilt on the daybed. Hunh!
First, look at all those books! That represents weeks of entertainment while Spring gets a move on and the fog and rain go away. Then, the Tee shirt– the fabric below it I have had for years and now I know what to do with it, because some of the seashells match the shirt. There is a big ole silicone pastry mat that I really could have used when I made Hot Silk, too. This one has shapes and measurements on it, so you don’t have to guess when the pastry is the right size. There is Avena lip balm and Burt’s Bees tinted lip gloss. There’s a new body cream which promises to make me glow. I could use some glowing. There is mint flavored dental tape– how terrific is that?
There is also a new brain game for my Nintendo ds. Happy day!
But then there is that big sack of cocoa nibs. Just wow. Really. I love those and in small quantities I can have them on this diet! My mind is reeling with ideas for recipes once I can cook freely again. Lamb in spicy tomatoes with cocoa nibs? Butterscotch pudding with these stirred in? Oh my, oh my.
I am a very happy dame today. Thank you, eg.
5 comments February 26th, 2007
Not ketchup nor catsup, if you only knew.
When I wrote the first article on equipping a kitchen, I thought I would do one each week until I exhausted the subject. That was ridiculously optimistic. That one article took thirteen online hours to write, mostly because I wanted to provide at least one photo of each item and a possible place to buy it. In my life, one can either spend thirteen hours online looking up spatulas and frying pans, or one can spend part of them touring a frantoio, (n.b. that site is so overdesigned that I cannot open a single page) visiting friends, reading novels, cooking and eating, shopping the sales to find a great jacket, or one can spend thirteen hours writing one article. I do plan to write the rest of them, but it seems ideal to work on that when I run out of truly delicious dietetic ideas over the next six weeks.
If you get a little antsy waiting, go look at my hobby blog, which gets a new entry every single day that Blogger photo loading is working. That, unfortunately, is not everyday.
If you are feeling antsy in the kitchen, go back into the archives here and try something we made before. I sometimes forget to do that, and then rediscover something like this or that, both seasonal and still wonderful dishes to eat right now before leeks get scarce. Go ahead, impress the hell out of someone!
On the other hand, johnchow.com just published a review of what may be the most horrible idea for connecting technology with sex I can recall seeing for at least 6 months, which is an eon in the online world.
Alice Twain just published an article on Slow Travel which I found really on target. It’s about surviving the heat when traveling, but the tips are good when you aren’t traveling, too. Good job, Alice!
I was very busy yesterday running around town setting up for this year’s cooking classes. It was just a gorgeous and sunny day, but I ended it at sundown on the top of a mountain, seriously underdressed for the falling temperature and the rising wind, because I was wearing the aforementioned gorgeous jacket and a pair of lemon yellow unlined gloves. It was still a great day, despite oversalted gnocchi con gamberi at my local cafe and walking in on the making of yet more fried Carnevale sweets at my friend’s house. I booked Sunday night for the making of the oft mentioned fattening recipe and bought shrimp for it as well as rice to replace the weeviled and wrecked rice I had counted on for the quick risotto for one recipe I promised my cooking group. Yes, I did remember what I had promised, eventually.
I was given two primula plants in full bloom and a tiny bottle of organic olive oil to taste. Wow. Is it fabulous!
I always say that if I go out I spend, and it’s still true, but I also have really good times when I go out and what’s wrong with getting surprise gifts? Not a thing, as long as the gifts don’t eat or eliminate.
2 comments February 17th, 2007
It has changed me. Or perhaps I should say it has made me want to change. I finished reading Iris Murdoch, a Life a couple of days ago. I knew even before finishing it that I couldn’t be the same any more. This British book is big and heavy and not a walk in the park to read. It took me a month of nights to read it. There were times when I said “Ugh! She’s horrid! I don’t like her!” and almost put it down, but I couldn’t. Yes, she had done things I thought unethical, immoral and cruel, but I knew that in the end she was one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. Not to say that someone couldn’t be an intellectual and all those terrible things as well, but she was in the end considered the embodiment of good. She had helped define what is good through her lifelong study of philosophy. She had helped dispose of earlier philosophies which placed mankind at a level of hunger– for subsistence, for power, for victory for its own sake. So I read on.
Since I am an American, Iris Murdoch was not a name that came before the face very often. I remember that I had read one of her novels, but I cannot remember which or why I read it, not to mention what I thought of it at the time. I have a sneaking suspicion I mixed her name up with another British writer I knew and liked and was surprised to find what I did.
So I trudged on through this book, checking every once in a while the photograph on the cover, as if she might tell me something helpful, checking the photographs inside to see what the other people in her life looked like, what her house was like, what had been chosen to reveal her to us. Relief, in fact, was sought from the intensity one finds in her journals and the accounts others give of her actions and relationships. I wanted quite often to snatch her back from situations she continued and then for which she suffered and eventually from which she learned. I was saddened by the last parts of her life. I believe that no one who knew her regretted it, but how can we know?
In the end I felt a failure in some ways. I was never courageous enough to enter relationships with mage and stay in them for years. It never occurred to me to want to experiment with every possible kind of relationship one could cultivate. And so, I didn’t grow to be her. I never learned enough Latin and I learned no classical Greek at all. I did not learn German and French and Russian so that I could speak with intellectuals of those countries without barriers. In fact, compared to Iris Murdoch I am an ignoramus.
And yet, like Iris Murdoch I can change. I was left after reading this book more hopeful than ever. Iris Murdoch said that the central power in human life is Good. You can seek to be good and to do good and to reward good. She lived that life and did those things because she was open to every kind of learning that there is, and Good is what she learned. She kept journals that explored “what is it that I seek,” and as she discovered it, she wrote in them what it meant. When she understood better what Good might be, she went back to old journals and annotated them to reflect the map she was making of her path and she struck out unfair things that she had said about other people in her ignorance.
The one fault I find in this book is that a woman who was extremely influential in Murdoch’s life is not named. I presume it is because she is still living and has refused to be named if the influences are described, but since this person is of a great age by now, it seems frivolous not to admit the relationship as well as the influence.
The links in this post will take you to Amazon in the US and the UK where you can look at this book and some of the novels she wrote. I ordered a number of them today, based on the critical parts of the biography. You can buy them from Amazon, or write down the information and seek them out in local shops. I urge you, though, to try to read this book.
It’s probably too late for me to learn classical Greek, but I may go for French.
10 comments January 29th, 2007
