Although my commute is a short one, traffic puts me in a bad mood. I’m impatient and irritated, not qualities that make for a tranquil drive. My commuter’s grumpiness was recently soothed by none other than Jacques Pepin himself, master chef, teacher, and internet star along with the beloved Julia Child and others. He didn’t actually sit next to me flipping crepes in the passenger seat, but he did write the wonderful book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
Pepin does not do the narrating on the audio book himself, and I suspect his accent may have been one of the reasons. The lack of his own voice is perhaps the only issue I have with the audiobook. The narrator speaks with just a smidge of a French accent, so he is easy to understand, but he is not a skilled reader and sometimes lets the natural drama in some of Jacques’s stories fall flat. If you’ve ever seen Jacques Pepin on one of his television cooking shows, you know he has personality, and his energy and humor would have made the audio version of a wonderful read soar. Stories of childhood summers spent on farms during World War II and then years in his mother’s restaurant followed by grueling apprenticeships in classical French restaurants often made me wish my drive home was longer.
We had just started Saturday Night Live, I was an apprentice writer, 24 years old and I felt intimidated. Chevy was hysterically funny. So was John and Danny and Gilda and Franken. And Michael O’Donoghue, well, Michael O’Donoghue simply scared the shit out of me. So I stayed pretty much to myself.
Eating alone is a trying thing for some people, writing cooking and eating off
as products of a banal bodily necessity. I love to eat and cook alone,
using the kitchen as an improvisational laboratory to experiment with
recipe ideas, flavor combinations, and cooking techniques. MFK Fisher,
a witty food writer with a fluid, deeply expressive writing style
bursting with gastronomic knowledge, shared my passion. She was one of
the best food writers out there, blurring the lines between the genres
of food anthropology, ecology, travel literature, and cooking.
sums up her point of view. “It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at
table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I
wished to be fed. I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I
could muster.” In regards to eating alone, I have taken a page from her
book, and as a result treat myself to lavish meals regularly.
Oh those personal chefs of Palm Beach – those white jacketed, croc-shod, Bluetooth-eared, clubby bunch that troll the aisles of our local supermarket! Is it simple envy that knowing they wield a knife better than I that has made me feel less than human as I wheel my cart past them? Probably. But, today there was victory! Today, There was Deliverance! Equality – nay – Superiority! (They don’t have to know I usually cut my finger when I cut a bagel – and you don’t have to tell them!)
My daughter has the kind of relationship with her grandmother that I envy. I have only one memory of my maternal grandmother; she’s lying in a hospital looking small and old offering me Schrafft’s sourballs out of their clear glass jar. At 55, after birthing 13 children, she died of breast cancer. My paternal grandmother lived with us for a year when I was a girl so I have more memories of her. In each one she is wearing black from head to toe and in all of them, clutching her rosary beads.