Alvah's Books

Julie & Julia
by Julie Powell
Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Company, 2005
307 pages
$14.99

I was planning to post this review with my regular ones and keep it in my dry, third-person style, but since it does deal with food (and I am sucker for food memoirs) I thought I would it include it in the Sunday review.

I learned of Julie Powell and her Julie/Julia project when the book was first published in 2005 and  I was reminded of her endeavor when I saw the film crews in my Park Slope neighborhood one day. For those not familiar with the story, Julie Powell in a fit of ennui from her secretarial job decided to cook every recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year’s time and record her adventures in the kitchen in a blog.

The reward to this personal challenge was national recognition, a book and movie deal, and a writing career–a dream come true for many bloggers and writers.

Because I like to cook and eat, I was very excited to read Powell’s book–thanks to Laura of the Book Tree for giving me the opportunity to win a copy.

Yet my enthusiasm soon soured after I read the first few pages, but I plodded on with the hope that Powell would get to what appealed to me–cooking and food. Although she knows how to turn a sentence, my interest wavered when she wrote at length about her childhood in Texas, the discovery of her parent’s copy of The Joy of Sex, the sex lives of her friends and so forth, these anecdotes held very little interest for me.

What I wanted to know was her relationship with food and cooking. Frankly, I was more interested in her bone marrow adventure rather than her job woes or her ovarian problems. When she stuck to cooking I kept reading, but when she meandered away from it, the book was set aside and I started reading something else.

Yet there’s more that didn’t appeal to me about the book and most of it had to do with Powell’s sarcasm and her over-the-top hysterics over cooking live lobsters, preparing aspics, and offal, her cutesy a la Rachel Ray acronym for Mastering the Art of French Cooking became tiring, and cussing out the Great Child. For the most part, much of the food that she writes about seems unappetizing, and I have to consider whether it’s my own personal bias against this Julia Child tome (her later cookbooks appeal to me more rather than this classic one.)

Although I wasn’t engaged with the fodder between the cooking, my kudos do go to Powell—an inexperienced cook—for attempting to master 524 complicated recipes in 365, and preparing meals late into the evening, night after night. That dogged determination to complete her project and not disappoint herself or her “bleaders” certainly merits a publishing and movie deal.

Until I was in grad school, I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker. I drank mostly Lipton’s tea with milk and sugar until one day the red Twinnings tin of loose English Breakfast tea caught my eye and I thought I would try it. Well, I’ve never touched Lipton’s since then.When I spent a semester abroad in France, I became very friendly with a Canadian fellow who was an avid tea drinker and enjoyed formal afternoons teas. One afternoon, we discovered a little tea shop that had a little restaurant that served “Afternoon Tea” to the British ex-pats. I always looked forward to 4:00 pm when we’d make our jaunt, settle in to have tea, and try all the assorted sandwiches and pastries. It was such a civilized way to spend the afternoon.

When I returned to the States and told my mother about my love for afternoon tea, we decided to start our own tradition and stock up on different types of tea, which included, Early Grey, Irish Breakfast, Ceylon, Jasmine, Orange Pekoe, Oolong. Every afternoon, we’d take out our good tea set and sip that day’s choice and savor the tiny sandwiches and pastries we made.

In one of my weekly forays to our local independent bookstore, I discovered Having Tea by Catherine Calvert, and I knew that I had to buy this book just by looking at the cover. I’ve had this book for 22 years now and it’s still one of my favorites.

Having Tea: Recipes & Table Settings
By Catherine Calvert, photographs by Keith Scott Morton
Clarkson. N. Potter Inc./Publishers, 1987
87 pages, $22.50

If you want to go beyond dunking a teabag in a mug and enjoy a civilized “cuppa,” Calvert’s book gives you five option on how to be civilized and a slew of recipes. And chuck away that all chipped mug, because you’ll need a proper tea service if truly want to enjoy tea.

If I had to pinpoint what I like so much about Having Tea, I’d have a hard time. As I leaf through the book, I ooh-and ahh at the tea services that have been photographed. These range from traditional white porcelain sets to 1930s Art-Deco geometric designs. Others include delicate flowered porcelain sets (we had those, my mother was partial to egg-shell thin porcelain with an ornate flower design), to Asian-inspired services.

But my oohs soon change to stomach grumblings  as I read through the recipes, I suddenly get a hankering for “Brunch in the City” which consists of the following:
• Toasted Cornmeal Muffins with Apple Butter
• Slow-Scrambled Eggs with Cream and Chives
• Pan-Fried Tomatoes with Fresh Tarragon
• Honey-Dew Melons Wedges with Lemon
• Bloody Mary’s and English Breakfast Tea.

Now that’s how you kick off a Sunday!

What if you’re in the mood for a picnic? Try “Summer Harvest Picnic” which includes:
• Honey-Glazed Chicken with Rosemary
• Red Potato Salad
• Vine-Ripened Tomatoes with Fresh Basil
• Crusty White Peasant Bread
• Old-Fashioned Peach Pie
• Fresh Peaches
• Mint Iced Orange Pekoe Tea

In addition to the recipes, Calvert includes a section on tea tasting and lists the major types of tea and their individual characteristics. Like wine, the qualities in tea reflect the region they’re cultivated, the soil, the altitude, and the climate.

Once you’ve decided what teas you like, you need to stock your tea larder. Some items you might want to consider:
• Crystallized Ginger (sweet, but with a little kick)
• Honey
• Lemon
• Preserves (stir in the preserves in your cup in the fashion of the Russians or Hungarians)
• Sugar

Short on tea sandwich ideas? Calvert offers the following:
• Stilton Cheese crumbled over pear slices on oatmeal bread
• Asparagus spears with lemon mayonnaise on wheat bread
• Smoked turkey with raspberry mayonnaise on cracked what bread

Next time, when you need a pick me up of sorts, skip the Starbucks. Instead, have a nice cuppa with a few shortbread biscuits and enjoy your tea time.

Siren’s Feast: An Edible Odyssey
by Nancy Mehagian
Cielo Press, 2008
340 pages
$22.00

Reviewed by Alice Folkart

In the Siren’s Feast, an Edible Odyssey, Nancy Mehagian serves up a plethora of delicious and exotic dishes from the fabulous spiritual, social, sensual, artistic and intellectual banquet of her young adulthood. She has landed on her feet now, more than twenty years later, and can lead us along the trail she followed through the 60′s, hungry for visions, and convinced that there was more to life than appears on the surface.

Mehagian describes her child self as ‘different.’ A first-generation Armenian-American girl with attitude, a wild mop of curly, dark hair and a body plumped up with her mother’s wonderful cooking, she is not the ideal, skinny blond of Phoenix, Arizona in the 50′s and 60′s. She gravitates to others who are different, misfits, ‘baby beatniks.’ She makes quick work of college, doing well, but dropping out, convincing her parents to send her to study in Italy, but taking off instead for Tangier with a boy friend. There, she experiences the first of several spiritual awakenings with her first Acid trip.

Her life had changed. As she puts it, “I never made the Dean’s List again.”

But, in eschewing ivy halls, she gains admittance to the University of Universal Curiosity, where learning seems to be in direct proportion to how many new experiences, people, places, feelings, ideas, dreams, tastes, and sounds she could cram into every day. Her fearlessness, and the tides of the great hippie invasion of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India and Nepal took her on an incredible, often edible, journey.

To a sound track of Crosby, Stills and Nash; Dr. John, Taj Mahal (an important man in her life then), and whatever music was ‘happening,’ Nancy moved from romance to romance, friend to friend and country to country breathlessly, joyously. Free Love and Turning On were the name of the game, and she seemed to travel a magical path. At many potentially dangerous junctures, she instinctively, some might say impulsively, ‘leaped,’ and survived. Change is the constant in her story. In India, she accomplishes an arduous pilgrimage despite no preparation, inadequate clothing and scant funds. On the Spanish island of Ibiza, without a dime in her pocket, but eager to show the world how to stop eating meat, she opens a successful vegetarian restaurant. On the eve of being ejected from Syria, she conceives, in one encounter with a gypsy violinist to whom she has never spoken, the child for whom she has begun to yearn. And finally, she is duped into running drugs into England, is caught and arrested and spends more than a year in prison. When she and her daughter emerge (yes, she is allowed to keep her baby with her), they return to the United States where she is finally sure that she knows what she has to do–finish college and find a spiritual teacher who can help her make herself useful to the world and to her child. She does it all.

Nancy Mehagian has one of the greatest gifts a person (or a cook) can have, the ability to make lemonade when all she has is lemons. She puts the most positive spin on even the direst situations. She sees her prison experience as an enforced retreat where her vision was bound to expand as her options narrowed. She continually asks herself whether what happens to her is misfortune or opportunity.

Siren’s Feast comes with a bonus, a collection of delicious-sounding recipes scattered throughout the account–some of her mother’s and grandmother’s best traditional Armenian dishes like Vosp Kufta (Armenian Red Lentil Patties), Kataif (Honeyed Shredded-dough Pastry), and her father’s recipe for home-made yogurt; and many recipes picked up throughout her travels such as Fattoush (Syrian Bread Salad), Nigerian Pepper Stew (taught her by a fellow inmate at Holloway), and the baby food she devised for the children in the prison nursery, Baby Feast.

A sad subtheme of Mehagian’s memoir is historical, the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Turks, an event so brutal and senseless, that it is incomprehensible to the author. She can only say that in her quest for meaning, in facing, “. . . a legacy so filled with violence, loss, pain and death–the survival of my race and our unique culinary heritage has the sweet liberation of revenge.”

It’s unfortunate that the author chose to do without an editor. Writers need that second set of eyes unclouded by love or friendship. A good editor would have cut the book by at least 50 pages and shown the author how to infer results without describing every event leading to them. A knowledgeable editor would have urged the author to leave some space–after all, the ‘art’ in writing is almost more about what’s left out than what’s included–we don’t need every detail. A professional would have thinned out the many digressions and non-sequiturs that stop the reader in his tracks, flagged the poor word choices and awkward phrasing that slow the narrative, and polished the book into the gem it deserves to be.

Editorial issues aside, Nancy Mehagian’s Siren’s Feast, An Edible Odyssey will surely entertain and nourish the reader looking for a light read, a little social history, and some good recipes. Such a reader’s biggest question will undoubtedly be, ‘Do I shelve it under Cookbooks, Travel, Erotica, or Memoir?’

My husband and I are have gotten in the habit of making some pretty fancy meals on Sundays. This past Sunday was roast pork loin stuffed with figs, almonds and green olives accompanied by sauteed spinach with coriander and rosemary garlic roasted new potatoes. The week before was my version of a poor man’s paella with shrimp and zucchini.

We have a nice collection of cooksbooks that we use often and I thought, maybe since we love to cook and we love adding to our cookbook collection, so why not include reviews of our favorites and upcoming cookbooks?

The plan was to announce this on Sunday or closer to the weekend, but I’m simply too excited by this new event that I wanted to announce it today. Cookbook reviews will be posted every Sunday and I’ll include a favorite recipe with an accompanying photo of my culinary creation.  

Stay tuned and I hope that I inspire you to some gastronomic adventures in your own kitchen (and don’t blame me if you gain weight!)