Thursday, September 03, 2009 - Posts
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A guest post from Slate food writer, Sara Dickerman:
I shed a few raspberry vinegar tears at the passing of the frizzy-haired food maven Sheila Lukins, who, along with her former partner in the Silver Palate franchise, Julie Rosso, was, and is, one of my cooking inspirations. Though the country is obsessed with Julia Child this summer, in the 1980s, Rosso and Lukins truly mobilized American home cooks with their Silver Palate cookbooks, which combined then-adventurous ingredients, and French-y techniques with American whimsy. First, as the owners of an Upper West Side Deli/catering mecca, they glamorized brunch and high-end deli fare. With their line of fancy mustards, chutneys, and vinegars, they goosed the specialty food market with a dash of French country chic, and with their cookbook, they got an entire country eating brie and Chicken Marbella. I’ve always argued that because of the logistical demands of feeding hundreds of people at a time, caterers make the most usable cookbooks—think Ina Garten and Martha Stewart—and Lukins and Rosso set the standard. The three cookbooks they worked on together The Silver Palate Cookbook, The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, and The New Basics were extremely approachable in technique, but never plain. In fact it was their inclination toward frivolous ornamentation that may have made food-lovers get a little tired of the silver palate aesthetic in the mid-nineties—the sun-dried tomato that broke the camel’s back. Lukins’ work after she split with Rosso—her populist Parade columns and her ever more eclectic cookbooks—didn’t quite capture the zeitgeist the way her earlier works did, but she remained a potent, more populist advocate for the pleasures of homemade food in the face of convenience food and casual-dining chains. I’ll miss her voice. - Sara Dickerman
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Glenn Beck
brandishes a Moleskine, and a thousand amateur sociologists bloom. Your responses to my request for "the most liberal product in the land" were nuanced and hilarious and often personally insulting. (Nope, I don't hate America, nor do I wet my bed.) Let's run down the list and arrive at the No. 1 liberal product!
Fifth Place
A Frisbee. I liked the simplicity of this choice, as it implies time spent on a quad at a liberal arts college picking up ideas about recycling and universal health care.
Fourth Place
Stella Artois. Allow me to quote from the submission: "The watery beer of choice amongst hipster bobos who are too genteel and refined to serve Coors."
Third Place
Chaco sandals. There was a lot of debate about what should replace the iconic Birkenstock as the obvious sign of a liberal in the wild. Keen sandals? Rawganique Vegan Hemp Shoes? I went with Chaco because multiple witnesses identified them as the shoe of choice at Obama rallies.
Second Place
Whole Foods. "Yes, the entire store." Though it's a cliché at this point, the status of W.F. as the liberal Wal-Mart cannot be overlooked. The store was the top vote-getter, second only to Volvos.
First Place
GT's Raw Organic Kombucha. The most suggested drink was organic soy milk, but I went with Kombucha. To come across someone drinking Kombucha is to be near a food co-op, a yoga studio, or a farmer's market. Even to know what Kombucha is (fungus tea) implies a dangerous familiarity with liberal culture. To actually drink Kombucha is to be very brave, as my colleague Jessica Grose informs me that it tastes like "carbonated urine."
So, Glenn Beck: Start drinking Kombucha!
Ignore the smell and savor the boost in ratings and attention!
Honorable Mention
"It's Slate, you silly ass."
Can I get an encore?
Send me your nomination for the Most Conservative Product in America, and I will write up the results after the Labor Day weekend.
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Jody, I found your description of the Taylor Swift concert at Madison Square Garden—as well as the experience of listening to her music for the past week as preparation for our discussion of Swift on the last Slate Culture Gabfest—unexpectedly moving. Top 10 hits by 19-year-old country-pop starlets aren’t usually high in my iPod rotation, so no one could be more surprised than I am that I now know several of Swift’s songs by heart. (Stephen Metcalf, the Gabfest’s host and resident curmudgeon, can be heard gagging in the background; he and Jody are currently engaged in a Taylor Swift smackdown over at the podcast’s Facebook page.)
It could be that I’m so far outside the age demographic for T-Swift fandom that I’ve circled back around and entered it again. Even before watching that clip of the 15,000-girl campfire singalong at the Garden (or getting sniffly at "The Best Day," her insidiously catchy tribute to her mother), I found that I was listening to Swift as a parent: touched by her youthful talent, worrying about how she’ll negotiate the transition from teen phenomenon to adult professional musician, and hoping to God that when my daughter is 15, she’ll be listening to something like Swift’s “Fifteen” and not whatever the equivalent of Britney Spears will be in 2019. Better yet, maybe my girl will be writing her own earnest ballads about freshman anxiety. Whether you like her music or not, it's great to think that Swift's success as a singer-songwriter (as opposed to a pneumatic lip-synching doll) could inspire the next generation of girls to pick up a guitar and learn to play.