The Elegant Sufficiency

Food in Film

You have to wonder who has time to do this. But I'm terribly impressed and grateful nonetheless. And maintain that Ang Lee's Eat, Drink, Man, Woman should be at the top of the list. Oh to have such an ability with a cleaver.

Kitchen Stories and More

I’m a list person. Lists for everything. Books I want to read. Albums I want to buy. Perfumes I’ve read about that I want to sniff. Things I have to do for the blog. Blog entries that need to be written. Things I have to do for work. Daily lists. Weekly lists. Lists of films I want to see.
I was excited when I read that the ITunes store had started a movie rental download system — until I discovered it would be some time before it was rolled out in Australia. I don’t have a video-rental store terribly close to me now and, in any case, I’ve always found something a bit ghastly about them; they make me feel like donning dark glasses in case I’m spotted. So I went looking for alternatives so I could start to excise that list of films to see.
Bigpond Movies, I discovered, offers a download rental service and a DVD delivery service, but the download service is not available to Mac users. Its DVD service — free postal delivery and return, no late fees — seemed very expensive. Then I stumbled onto Quickflix. (I’m going to start to sound like an ad here…)
I’m now a convert. For $9.95 a month (more if you want to watch more) I get three movies sent to me. When I’ve watched them, I slip them back in the envelope provided and drop it in a mailbox. Quickflix then sends me the next available DVD on my list, which I now maintain on my Quickflix account page. That list is long, and getting longer, but finally I’m starting to see films that I’ve long wanted to see and which aren’t available in your garden-variety video store.
Kitchen Stories, for example. I knew it was Norwegian, and that it was about two bachelors. I had it in my head that it was some ironic contemporary thing, replete with Scandinavian design — blond wood, chic furniture, avant-garde architecture — ruggedly handsome Nordic men, and plenty of food.
Not quite. I must have read the review that spurred me to put it on my list after a few glasses of wine. The Kitchen Stories that Quickflix sent me was something altogether different. Norwegian bachelors yes, contemporary no.

Set in the mid-’40s, it’s an initially slow-burning, ultimately engaging film about an upright Swedish researcher for the presumably fictional HRI — the Home Research Institute — and the Norwegian bachelor he is sent to observe as part of a study into the “kitchen habits of single men in Norway”.
The researcher, Folke, spends his days perched high on a wooden stand drawing diagrams, as his craggy subject, Isak, moves around below in his kitchen, and his nights in a little bubble of a lichen-green caravan parked outside Isak’s house. The men are forbidden to communicate, lest the study’s integrity be jeopardised. But, of course, eventually these two lonely men do. And it’s in their gentle, musing dialogues in which what is unsaid is more significant than what is said, that this poignant, whimsical film’s true treasures emerge.
There’s not much food but still, I love this exchange, coming after Folke has been fired:

Isak: “Maybe you could stay for Christmas.”
Folke: “That would be nice.”
I: “Since you don’t have a job anyway.”
F: “Thank you, but I don’t think that would be possible.”
I: “You probably have family to spend Christmas with.”
F: “Not exactly … except for my old aunt. The one that sends all the food. … what the hell… why not? Everything’s gone to hell anyway.”
I: What do your normally eat?
F: “Herring, of course. And Jansson’s Temptation. Pig’s feet, Christmas ham, and lutefisk. And bread and grease.”
I: “Bread and grease?”
F: “Actually, they mostly eat that up north. Not where I come from.”

I had to look up Janssons Temptation, and it’s not tempting me to rush off and eat it, but I did find myself looking at a bottle of herrings yesterday in a deli …
Meanwhile, I’ve added another film to my Quickflix list this week — The Secret of the Grain, a film about North African immigrants in the south of France. The grain of the title is couscous; the opening of a restaurant is a plank of the plot.

Around Sydney in 80 Canapes

So these are the excuses:

•    The two-year-old’s birthday party: a butterfly cake, fairy bread, watermelon, mini-quiches, a pink tutu from a proud aunt, a pink teaset from someone else, a pink music box, a pink hat and pink sunglasses from her mother. Are two-year-old girls genetically programmed to need pink, and are proud aunts genetically programmed to provide it?

•    Lovely Bell Shakespeare production of As You Like It at the Opera House. Saskia Smith’s Rosalind, Ed Wightman’s Touchstone and Philip Dodd’s Corin all wonderful… as were the crab sandwiches at the after-party, Gough and Margaret Whitlam’s stately, ageing presences and a couple of delicious wine-related lines picked up along the way:

The loyal servant Adam:
“Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty:
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood.”
Act ii. Sc. 3.
(Pity I can’t say the same… more on this later…)

Rosalind: "I pray you, do not fall in love with me,
For I am falser than vows made in wine.”
Act iii. Sc. 5

•    A bit more swanning around … the Australian Chamber Orchestra and its 2008 season opening (am I sounding like a tosser yet?) … a Haydn symphony, a Mozart piano concerto and a bit of Schubert. Very fine fresh prawns at the after-party. And Richard Tognetti is very handsome.
•    Oh, yes, then there was the David Jones fashion parade. Awful, just awful, and I'm not talking about the fashion. I couldn’t start to tell you because I wouldn’t know where to finish. But the Moet and the fresh oysters were very fine indeed.
•    Very well, if you must know, the season opening night of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Buckets of Ravel for Valentine’s Day that moved the tubby Maestro Gelmetti so greatly that, at one point, we thought it highly likely that he might fly off his conductor’s podium and hover above us in the Opera House’s concert hall in the manner of Uncle Albert and Bert in Mary Poppins’s I Love to Laugh. Nice spinach/fetta pastries at the after-party.
•    Back down to earth and a brilliant discovery (at least for someone who walks through Chinatown every morning to catch her train, and again at the end of most days, and who has lamented this city’s lack of markets and accessible fruit and vegetable merchants): can someone please, please tell me why, in all the years I have been reading about Sydney food, restaurants, shops, chefs, I have never yet once seen anyone, I repeat, anyone, mention the fact that at the back of the old Paddy's Markets (hideous souvenir-tat trap it is now) there is still a working food market. Small and unextraordinary, but a WORKING FOOD MARKET nonetheless. It can never even begin to replace Melbourne's Queen Vic Markets in my pining heart, but it is, indubitably, a food market. There’s no deli hall — merely a sad meat stall or two and a couple of fish stalls. But there was skate (and I can’t remember the last time I saw that), and good-looking rainbow trout and snapper, and the normal roll call of salmon fillets and — how’s this — a couple of bloody great conch shells with their pearly-white meat flopping out wantonly. And, in the fruit and vegetable section, there waiting for me was the best sweet corn I have had since Hong Kong, and longans, and affordable lychees, and every conceivable Asian vegetable and herb my heart could ever desire. A five-minute walk from home and open seven days and I am happy, so happy. But I have to ask: do Sydneysiders consider it beneath them to shop at such a place? And why doesn’t Lord Mayor Clover Moore take a good long look at the markets and try to imagine how they could thrive again — especially given the increasing population of city residents?

•    Another momentous find, my acupuncturist’s very savvy recommendation (lifting 17 boxes of books last year during my move was not such a great idea): my best Sydney coffee so far — at Peaberry (166 Riley Street, Darlinghurst). Cool little café with a very decent big breakfast and very little pretension. What a pleasant change.
•    Oh how I could go on about why I have been so absent. … It was a very, Very Long Engagement indeed, lying on my couch watching Amelie’s Audrey Tautou in a wonderful story full of wit and whimsy and humour — and heart-wrenching pathos. Once I felt sure that she would find her lost, war-damaged love Manech, I was able to concentrate on all the wonderful bits of food scattered across her rotund aunt’s scrubbed timber kitchen table.

Says a defiant Mathilde (Tautou), convinced Manech is still alive: “He was taken prisoner and stayed with a German girl with braids and big boobs.”
Adds her aunt: “A Breton boy eating sauerkraut, impossible…” Later, she tosses crepes in the pan for her husband, who rolls them up and dips them in jam. The couple despair over the girl's pining ways. “She must eat, she’s making herself ill,” says the aunt. “Leave her the marrow bone,” says the uncle, slurping from his soup bowl, a man who clearly recognises a treat when he sees one.

•    Oh yes, there have been other events and commitments and deadlines, but there’s really only one final vital piece of information I must leave you with today: I’m off alcohol. For five weeks. Five weeks without a crisp riesling or complex chardonnay, without an interesting little drop from the Rhône valley or a boutique Yarra Valley pinot noir. Not a cold beer after a swim in the ocean, nor a tinkling gin and tonic on a balmy evening. No, five weeks, I swear. It’s simple really. Yesterday, waiting to be served in a queue at a café, I eavesdropped on the conversation behind me. “I’m off the booze,” he said — a nice-looking man holding a little girl. “Five weeks it’s been, and I’ve lost five kilos,” he told his friend. FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE KILOS…. I can do that. Hold me to it, for God’s sake! But how am I going to manage at tonight's opening night when the canapes start circulating?

Julia, Julia, Meryl and Money

I've taken my time to catch up with this, but Variety magazine reported late last year that Meryl Streep will star as Julia Child in the film version Julia and Julia — the book that emerged from blogger Julia Powell's attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Child's classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, recording her year-long vigil on her blog. (Can't find the blog online now, maybe it's been pulled down so it doesn't cannibalise sales of the book and box office takings in the future?)
Julia Powell is the envy of the blog world over: so that's how you make money out of a blog. Smart idea+blogger in at the outset of the technology+American legend+romantic backstory (Powell is apparently trying to rekindle the dying embers of her marriage through her cooking endeavours)=commercial triumph.
Call me a cynic, call me a bitch, call me an embittered failed publisher (those who know me know that at least one of those adjectives is true...), but I'm buggered if I know what all the fuss is about. I picked the book up in a bookshop, skimmed it, struggled to find one engaging passage. Seemed just chick-lit concealed behind a semi-smart premise. Am I wrong? Has anyone read it, and found something in it?

The Rat Pack

It’s moments like these that I want my niece to grow up as quickly as possible. Damn, but she’s still a bit too infant to appreciate Pixar’s wonders. Thank heavens I’m not too old to. For any self-respecting food-obsessive, Ratatouille (Rat-a-too-ee), the latest animated wonder from a collaboration between that clever studio and Disney, will be obligatory.
The trailer alone, introducing the ambitious leading rat Remy, should give you a few minutes of amusement. To a chi-chi Sinatra-ish soundtrack and complete with cheese trolley, flying copper pans and wine snobs, the spoof-ish storyline is presented: Remy is a rat with ideas beyond his station. He wants to be a chef. In the kitchens of the five-star Parisian restaurant of his chef-hero, Auguste Gusteau, he encounters the hopelessly inept kitchen hand Linguini. When the two team up (“together we can be the greatest chef in Paris”), they turn the city’s culinary world upside down.

Says Remy’s father to his wayward son: “Stay away from the humans, it’s dangerous. Now shut up and eat your garbage.”
Says Remy in an aside to camera: “I can’t help myself, I like good food, OK, and good food is hard for a rat to find.”
Says Remy’s father, off camera: “It wouldn’t be so hard to find if you weren’t so picky”.
Says Remy to camera: “I don’t want to eat garbage Dad.”

Magnifique!

Cocktail Hours

With my very, very carefully planted geographical error in the previous post, I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention. I’m really pleased to see that the Australians among you, including my dear father, are on the ball. Of course, Albury-Wodonga is not on the border of Victoria and Queensland. (For those further afield, it’s on the border of Victoria and New South Wales.)
Mmmm, well, seriously, I have no excuses for such a silly thing – wrote that when I was sober as a judge – but hope it gave you locals a good laugh at my expense!
Heaven knows what errors you might find in this missive: despite a desperate deadline for an article due first thing tomorrow morning, I’ve had an idle day out with a great old friend that drew to a lovely close an hour or so ago with a few glasses of West Australian riesling and a wicked, wicked pasta carbonara at Balzari. (Thank heavens the trainer with whom I have a date first thing tomorrow doesn’t read my blog.)
Really though, what else could we have done but have a nice glass or two of something after seeing the stylish, hilarious, champagne-sodden new Audrey Tautou film, Priceless (Hors de prix). It has been described as a contemporary doing-over of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s story, but its arch, mischievous character and its restrained sexiness (not to mention the lush, playground-of-the-rich-and-idle Riviera location) remind me more of something Carey Grant might have done, perhaps To Catch a Thief.

If I were a film reviewer (which perhaps you’ve quickly identified I’m not), I’d make it a priority to get my facts straight about the cocktail(s) that the initially hapless Jean (Gad Elmaleh) mixed for Irene (Tautou) on their first encounter. This is, after all, a film with an anti-heroine who decorates her messy chignon with those fabulous old paper cocktail umbrellas. This is important information. Yet, do you think Google has turned up one review for me that tells me what Jean mixed? It was pinkish, topped up with champagne, and he finished it with a starfruit slice+umbrella garnish, but damn, do you think I can find out what it was?
The best thing I’m going to be able to do for you is to share a little something I’ve long adored, something cheerful for a change, which is about as sexy and easy as Irene was in her divine little slip dresses and heels. The only difference? Irene was considerably more boozy than this little number.

Delia Smith's Strawberry Granita
(From Delia Smith's Summer Collection, BBC Books 1993)
Serves 8

1lb (450g) strawberries
6oz (175g) caster sugar
1 pint (570ml) water
3tbsp lemon juice

Hull strawberries, rinse in colander, drain well and dry on kitchen towel. Put strawberries in a food processor or blender and blend until it is a smooth puree. Stop the motor and add sugar. Blend briefly again. Add water and lemon juice and blend again, before pouring the mixture through a sieve into a bowl. Pour into a freezer container. Let the granita start to freeze around the edges for a couple of hours before pulling out and breaking the ice up with a fork. Return to the freezer. Repeat twice.

Marie Antoinette, the Movie

Terribly envious of my American friends, who will have a chance to see Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette long before it arrives in Australian multiplexes. For now, I'll have to console myself with stills from the film, and reviews, especially The New York Times's review, which says of the queen (and you have to admire a woman who appreciates shoes like that):

“She is profligate and self-indulgent, yes, impetuously ordering up shoes, parties and impromptu trips to Paris. She breaks with tradition by applauding at the opera, and then appears onstage herself. She takes a lover — a dashing Swedish nobleman — and turns Petit Trianon, a royal retreat that was a gift from her husband, into a kind of Versailles V.I.P. room, where she drinks, gardens, reads Rousseau and plays shepherdess. These activities have often been mocked — and were the source of scandal and outrage in the years before the revolution — but through Ms. Coppola’s eyes they are poignant as well as a bit silly.”

But I think it’s the still here, of the cakes … I mean, look at those cakes … that has me entranced. They remind me of colour plates (see below) from an old book that my book-collecting father passed on to me – Cassel’s Dictionary of Cookery. It’s all gold-embossed leather binding, marbled end papers and entrancing preface: “The art of cookery is every day receiving increased attention: and no wonder. Life is made all the brighter by satisfactory feeding; and he is a dull philospher who despises a good dinner.” I can’t find a publication date in this treasure, although it must be at least 120 years old – just a wealth of wisdom and social history, the dinkiest recipes (“beef udder may be gently simmered in broth or water”, page 1023), and wonderful black and white engravings and colour plates.
At some point, I may be silly enough to attempt to prepare the extravagant fruit jelly at the bottom left corner of the left-hand illustration below.