Manolo’s Food Blog

Yum.

That’s the watchword for the new Nora Ephron movie, Julie & Julia, in which Meryl Streep once again proves herself to be the screen actress without peer. Like the food she prepares, her performance is simply scrumptious.

“What do you like to do?” Paul asks Julia.

“Eat!” she says with her inimitable hoot. “I like to eat!”

And from this moment of insight, as simple as it is penetrating, a woman accustomed to getting things done set about to change the way Americans eat.

But how did Julie Powell swing this book deal and then this movie deal? To be portrayed by Amy Adams, and to garner Meryl Streep as your star takes moxie.

Amy Adams bubbles with her usual performance – perky and cute – with an occasional dramatic reach into pouty and cute. The angst of wanting to be a writer, however, is nowhere shown convincingly on screen.

Having taken a look at Julie Powell’s blog, however, Mr. Henry thinks perhaps Amy Adams may have been appropriately cast after all. It’s no wonder Julia dismissed Julie. Julia was a serious person, someone who wouldn’t waste her time or yours. No matter the subject, Julie writes sentences that are perky and cute spiced here and there with swear words. Like red pepper flakes on overcooked broccoli, it’s both overdone and under-imagined. The tone is breathy, squishy and, most damning, cheerful.

That Julie learned how to cook through Mastering the Art of French Cooking and took along thousands of readers along with her, however, is indeed commendable. Learning to cook enriches your life and the world around you. If you cook with what the French call intelligence, that is, practical good sense, you will perforce buy good local food which in turn promotes markets for that food.

Mr. Henry is not a jealous person but he wonders whether or not Judith Jones, famed Knopf editor, might possibly work him into her schedule. He’s thinking of which actor might portray him in the movie. Tyrone Power, Jr., perhaps?

Gwyneth Paltrow, of all unlikely persons, has a new lifestyle blog – GOOP – the name derived from her initials G and P. In the food section (“Make”) she offers practical good-sense recipes suitable for young women like herself at home with small children, recipes even more suitable for young women like herself at home with cooks and nannies and part-time bloggers.

When GOOP was attacked on the websites of both Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington, the internet’s evil step-sisters, right away Mr. Henry felt compelled to rise to poor Gwyneth’s defense. After all, isn’t she the only American screen actress ever to have delivered a convincing English accent?

As a fellow celebrity Mr. Henry appreciates Gwyneth’s conundrum. How do you spread the simple joy of being you without appearing to gloat or preen?

Is it wrong for an artist to be self referential? Back in the 17th century did not Rembrandt’s rivals accuse him of painting too many self-portraits? Who today would make that argument? (And it should be noted that Rembrandt in black leotard body-suit didn’t cut half the figure Gwyneth cuts doing leg raises for her new workout video, or rather he cut twice the figure Gwyneth cuts…….let’s not belabor the point.)

Granted, some of her recipes aren’t really recipes, the one for boiling frozen peas, for example. Instructions on how to eat an artichoke may perhaps be unnecessary for “grownies” reading her blog. Moreover, to season a roast chicken do we really need to hunt down ½ teaspoon of Mallorcan hibiscus salt? For reasons left unexplained the only other meat she discusses is turkey, mostly ground for meatballs or sausage.

Nevertheless the site is beautifully designed and the writing is replete with sunny, winning, personal asides. Her noteworthy blunder, however, comes in a discussion of what she calls detox or “Master Cleanse.”

“If your bowel movements get sluggish, you can accelerate things by drinking half a cup of castor oil or using a mild herbal laxative. Bowel elimination is paramount for correct detoxification.”

Whatever the merits of this grandmotherly advice, when earthbound mortals imagine stars nestled in their starry pantheon, thoughts of sluggish bowels have no place in the picture. A certain mystery is lost. For future posts it might be best, darling Gwyneth, to leave poop out of Goop.

Straight from the airport on her very first visit to New York City, framed by Maxfield Parrish’s panoramic Old King Cole, Kenzie took her seat in the Astor Court restaurant of the St. Regis Hotel.

At twelve years old she was the youngest lady present. Accordingly the waiter first approached her to take, with great ceremony, her drink order. Flummoxed at being caught suddenly in the spotlight, she hesitated and then responded in an endearing southern accent, “I’ll just have sweet tea.”

Her fifteen-year old sister, also dressed immaculately, could not restrain her indignation. “Oh! I can’t believe you! They don’t have sweet tea here. That’s a southern thing.”

“But,” said Kenzie plaintively, “I just w-wanted sweet tea.”

Mr. Henry couldn’t resist calling her “sweet tea” for the remainder of the weekend. Could you?

What can you do when a restaurant isn’t serving your standard? Do you allow yourself to be buffaloed by the wait staff? With sixty-five years more restaurant experience than Kenzie, Nana stands her ground. She takes her tea brewed, iced and unsweetened. Whether or not it’s on the lunch menu, brewed unsweetened iced tea is what she’s having. With the nicest of smiles she entreats the waiter to brew it specially, ”if it’s not too much trouble.”

Experienced waiters quickly accede to Nana. They spot right away that she is the kind of client who won’t hesitate to send a dish back to the kitchen….several times. Don’t let her sunny demeanor fool you. Nana is not intimidated by big city restaurants.

When Mr. Henry orders a dry martini and receives one made with vodka in lieu of gin, he resists upbraiding the hapless server or upending the cocktail tray. Instead, he seizes the moment as a teaching opportunity. After all, few enjoy the benefits of his good fortune and education. Mr. Henry appreciates that some bartenders lack the advantages of proper instruction in mixed drinks, but he maintains faith in his fellow barman. He refuses to believe anyone would willfully pour cheap vodka when tradition calls for fine gin.

Clearly more should be done in bartender education, and in the next administration, if candidates are to be believed, more WILL be done. Surely both parties can agree to make this a policy priority.

Unlike some martini drinkers, it seems, Mr. Henry can taste the difference between vodka and gin. A simple sniff is sufficient. For those of you who cannot, Mr. Henry advises choosing your drinking establishment exclusively by price.

The more difficult aspect of the waiter/patron interaction is standing your ground. Be polite but firm. You should receive what you ordered, not something nearly almost like what you ordered.

Last week Aunt Bev came barreling out of the Mountain West to help nurse Mrs. Henry and do chores with her characteristic house-elf perseverance. Now the fridge is spotless inside and out. Thanks to her deft work with a toothpick, little crevices in the door panel no longer harbor black gunk. (Who knew?)

Aunt Bev would rather clean house from top to bottom, however, than cook dinner. She is fully capable of throwing dinner together. She does it quite regularly back home. But she does not enjoy it. For her, cooking will always be drudgery.

Her sister, Mrs. Henry, is exactly the opposite. She likes nothing more than to plunge her hands in flour up to the elbows. When renovating the kitchen she designed a long, unbroken stretch of countertop so that baking would never again create congestion.

When she cooks, she leaves the kitchen a wreck. But each dish arrives perfectly hot and perfectly done at the same time. It’s a miracle of theatrical timing performed without rehearsal or stage fright.

Although Betsy hates to cook, she baked a pumpkin spice bread for Mrs. Henry’s convalescence that became the top treat of the week. If you hate to cook, it’s practical to have one whiz-bang recipe to prepare in a pinch.

When the temperature outside is in the middle 90’s, what should you fix for dinner? You want to make a dish that’s good for leftovers but you don’t want to fire the oven more than absolutely necessary.

Aunt Bev’s choice, her whiz-bang recipe, is the Bill Blass meat loaf. (Did you realize that High Wasp society considers the humble, old-fashioned meat loaf to be the ultimate in chic? At Connecticut country estate weekend parties it’s positively revered as a holy relic.)

Always a tinkerer with recipes, Mr. Henry added rolled oats in place of bread crumbs, added an extra egg, and left out the butter altogether except to grease the pan. To accompany he chose mashed potatoes, a green vegetable, and a pinot noir.

Back in the last century Mr. Henry had the great pleasure of making Bill Blass’s acquaintance. Even in a business negotiation which normally reveals the worst aspects of someone’s personality, Mr. Blass was an authentic gentleman – witty, charming and forthright.

Here is the recipe. In changing those few details, Mr. Henry hopes he has Bill’s blessing.

Not only has Mr. Henry been drinking tea in copious quantities, he has been thinking about it, too. A healing broth, tea is the drink of contemplation (and idleness?). If coffee is amplified music, tea is acoustic. Mr. Henry’s morning quart of English breakfast (with whole milk, no sugar) washes away yesterday’s misdeeds, physical and spiritual. A calm, hopeful, cerebral, and gentle infusion, tea hosts renewal.

“I often wonder who left mankind the greatest legacy, the Arabs for coffee or the Chinese for tea. I think, on balance, it was the Chinese, because one must be feeling healthy to take coffee, whereas one may take tea whether feeling sick or well.” — Charles Issawi (1916-2000).

Mohandas Ghandi drank tea, and surely he greeted his daily obligations with equanimity. Perhaps the quiet, strengthening properties of tea gave him a foundation for his remarkable stoicism, his capacity for hope in such a benighted country, his ability to fast for weeks without dying.

Running the race, in the past few months Barack Obama has suffered a loss of five pounds. Is he fasting until we accede to his demands for bi-partisanship? Please, Barack, if it didn’t work for the Mahatma, will it work for you?

For Mr. Henry, unburdened by such weighty matters, tea simply re-hydrates the body after its wrestling match with the nightly incubus. Tea reanimates his petrified vitals and permits the introduction of solid food. After a warming mug of tea, the world as reported in the New York Times looks remarkably less bleak.

At night, draining the last drops of wine from the glass, Mr. Henry sulks a bit at his self-imposed alcoholic limits and then brews a cup of mint tea (Tazo). In the night a cold glass of water with another bag of Tazo mint tossed in slakes his parched, 3:00 a.m. throat.

The Founding Fathers drank it. They even launched a revolution over it. To arms, patriots! To arms! (Perhaps one more cup before taking the streets.)

Mr. Henry is tolerant of eccentricities. He chooses to reside, after all, in New York City where long before the advent of cellphones sidewalk pedestrians talked animatedly to themselves. When running the gauntlet at Fairway, for example, he doesn’t mind receiving an occasional elbow in the kidney from a blue-haired lady. Long ago he learned what to expect when ordering a “regular coffee.” (It’s coffee with milk. Please don’t ask why.)

However much he may embrace the caprices of city living, he remains a little squeamish about the preparation of his food. He expects restaurant employees to adhere to basic standards of courtesy and, more to the point, of hygiene. Cities are where civilization is supposed to be located, no?

Two Dudes Catering, the riveting new Food Network show, features two total stoners in the kitchen. It conclusively demonstrates: 1) the Two Dudes can cook like nobody’s business, 2) as reflected by their palaver and the upkeep of their clothes and hair, they appear utterly incapable of doing anything else.

Mr. Henry finds endless fascination in the functioning idiot, the overachiever, the C-student billionaire, the clueless success story. (Is not President Bush the shining example of this quintessential American dream, namely, that ANYBODY can get ahead here in the land of opportunity?) Such stories give him more than hope; they form the backbone of his long-term financial plans.

And yet, and yet, when the Dudes’ execute lightening quick chopping skills without rousing their higher brain functions, Mr. Henry wonders whether the Duh-Duh-Duo are really taking every sanitary precaution to ensure that diners will not ingest C. difficile or some other antibiotic-resistant pathogen.

In the Iron Chef America “battle eggplant,” the Two Dudes came within one point of equaling Iron Chef Cat Cora, a surprising and noteworthy feat. Against all odds, their food really was prepared imaginatively, carefully, and beautifully.

Flash: Through secret sources deep within Food Network itself, Mr. Henry discovered that the Two Dudes pushed the TV production team to install 24-hour surveillance cameras in the kitchen, thereby recording every legendary Dude word and deed. The mind reels at the opportunity of witnessing such history. Somehow the producers failed to appreciate the trove of treasure before them, however, and elected to edit in the can.

Wow, Dudes, sorry. That was so random.

It all started with Sandra Lee, America’s semi-homemade TV food vixen. Channel surfing on a rainy vacation afternoon, Little Henry and Stinky found Sandra on the Food Network and the rest is, well, an ugly story of dependence, obsession, and addiction.

Who can resist the way her pink top matches not only the drapes but the paper napkins and the hors d’oeuvres, too? Who can resist watching her scoop the innards out of an A & P cheese cake, load it into a pastry sleeve, and “pop it” onto cute lil’ crackers? The scene recalls Shelley Duvall’s pigs in a blanket from Robert Altman’s dark masterpiece 3 Women. She’s a train wreck of Americana.

Then came Iron Chef, the high-kitch, haute cuisine smashdown that years ago Mr. Henry watched in translation on some obscure cable channel. Mr. Henry remains in awe of the remarkable inventions these masters cobble together in one hour.

Now there is Top Chef.

Night and day Padma Lakshmi’s toffee-tongued locutions ring round the Henry living room. Clipped, staccato, 22-calibur pronouncements explode up through Tom Colicchio’s shiny pate. Yes, Top Chef on Bravo TV never ceases. Should you miss an episode, just wait. The replay is coming up soon.

The secret attraction of Top Chef, Mr. Henry confesses, is the weekly drubbing the judges hand out. It is the sure promise of real humiliation that grips the audience, the sadomasochistic pleasure of seeing young, eager acolytes sent to their doom. Die, young chefs! We who are about to cook salute you!

Looking at Padma’s longshanks frame, one wonders just how much rich food she actually swallows. Mr. Henry, in fact, spends a good part of each episode examining Padma’s hypnotic physique and the clothing with which she drapes it. How can she be so thin and still have curves? Has she been surgically redesigned into a foodie fem-bot?

Will she ever reveal the secret story behind the enormous scar that runs the entire length of her upper right arm? Mr. Henry harbors a secret affection for the tall, scarred Padma’s of this world.

And Padma, too, harbors secret affections. When forced to eliminate tall, handsome guys like Sam last season or C.J. this season, her dark eyes swell with tears. Hard as he may try, Mr. Henry cannot look away.

Reports of the budding locavore movement got Mr. Henry thinking. What if ALL forms of sustenance were to become local? What if right-thinking persons such as Mr. Henry were forced by farsighted, busybody children not only to favor local growers but to go local in every other pursuit?

Mind you, Mr. Henry is all for reducing his carbon footprint, as well as for reducing his monthly expenditures and daily caloric intake. He is strictly conservative in these important domains. However, why should he exclude all foods and libations apart from sustainable ones grown within a 150-mile radius of New York City?

This sort of artificial food radius is all perfectly fine if you find yourself residing in central California surrounded by the premier fruit and vegetable fields in America. But what about the rest of us? What if Mr. Henry were forced to drink New York wine and (shudder) bourbon whiskey? (Yes, sour mash like Maker’s Mark will do if caught in a Montana rainstorm, but honestly, can you fathom an American gin?)

This month Mr. Henry has elected to pursue twin ideals: he will be not only a locavore but also a localector. He will read exclusively novels written about New York.

Cathleen Schine’s new novel The New Yorkers is an irresistible tossed salad of quirky, crunchy, local characters. Deliciously unexpected characterizations pop up mid-sentence the way an heirloom tomato surprises you with flavors of mint, citrus or papaya. Try some today.

In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the unctuous Lord Beckett offers Captain Jack Sparrow a small glass of honey-colored liquid that must surely have been Madeira, the preferred drink of 18th-century British and Americans alike. (It was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite drink.)

Least expensive of the fortified wines, Madeira bears the singular virtue of being utterly still like whiskey or eau de vie. Uniquely aged in heat rather than cool, the sweet wine oxidizes slightly and thus after opening retains its flavor even in hot climates.

Riddled with flu on his return from Italy, Mr. Henry repaired to his favorite apothecary, Nancy’s Wines for Food. Though his head was full of cotton, his reasoning was not occluded. Mr. Henry decided that the purchase of a subtly aromatic libation would be money wasted. Consequently he threw himself on the mercy of a young apprentice with shaven pate and satyric smile who recommended an $11 bottle of Rainwater that Mr. Henry dutifully drank every evening for a week.

The cure was thorough and complete. Rainwater is the cough syrup of the gods.

With newly-acquired curiosity for the mysteries of Madeira, Mr. Henry detected traces of it in a mascarpone cream dessert served by Cipriani at the McKim, Mead & White designed 55 Wall Street, one of Manhattan’s greatest rooms, former site of National City Bank, the Merchant’s Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange.

The dessert is one that itself must be very resistant to decay because the cream is principally composed of stiffly beaten egg whites with some mascarpone and a splash of Madeira. Sandwiched between pastry layers and sprinkled with shaved coconut, it was light and toothsome. (Best of all, it can be prepared without cooking!)

At his opening party, Ryo Toyonaga posed with a cake perfectly crafted in imitation of his sculpture on display at Charles Cowles Gallery.

The photo is by the celebrated downtown chronicler Roxanne Lowit. The cake is by the Leonardo of desserts Sylvia Weinstock.

As a rule, Mr. Henry does not approve of foods that cause confusion. The very mention of fusion cuisine makes him reach for his pastry gun. This cake, however, was a masterpiece of tromp l’oeil.