Eel migration and Hurricane Irene

     I love storms, rain. It's difficult to relate with negative comments about stormy weather. Of course, there can be some inconveniences - too much rain in too short a time ruined my tomatoes last year and I empathize with other's more serious losses. 

    But the excitement of a storm, the smell, watery reflections and varieties of rain, wind, snow, and skies energize me - even if it is only a local passing shower. Hemispheric scale events like Hurricane Irene, now approaching New England, do more to promote contemplation of the awesome world from which our mundane affairs distract us. 

    Irene comes with the new moon, darkest of nights, bringing wetness and flooding eels need to complete a life phase: passing back to its origins in the middle of the Atlantic, far from its sojourn to inland waterways and pools. More sensitive and tuned in to these events, eels right now are on the move. 

   Having just read Eels, An exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the worlds most mysterious fish, by James Prosek, Hurricane Irene takes on an intense shade more meaning. Part ethnology, part natural history, Prosek's book tells us a story not only of this amazing fish but also stories of eels woven through the lives of many cultures - their religions, economies, art and lore. He also points to what has been mostly forgotten in this modern rush of activity in which we are enmeshed, a decline of knowledge that mirrors the decline of the eel. He is also a gifted artist, so reading his book is doubly pleasurable for its illustrations, which reflect the respect with which he approached the native people of New Zealand, other pacific ocean cultures, as well as scientists and others whose lives the eel touches.

    I remember fishing when I was young in Wareham, by Buzzards Bay, with my uncle Donald. A sailor, in the navy before WWII,  who had the arms and attitudes that made me think of Popeye, he was a demolitions expert tasked with killing Japanese soldiers in the tunnels of Iwo Jima and had seen terrible things. Did this make this tough man more aware of every small magical, delightful detail? Perhaps; his salty stories did touch on wonderful things he'd seen 'round the world on the water. Fish featured big to him. He had built a row boat - it leaked and was as heavily built as a battleship. But we got about the pond by the cottage he and Aunt Peggy kept, catching horn pout, pickerel, bass, and sometimes eels. He encouraged me to eat eels some day, but as Peggy would not clean and cook them, we had to throw them back.

   Long years after, I ate eel in a Japanese restaurant. It was like mackerel, but sweeter, darker, and more buttery. I would have eaten eel often if caught myself - since who knows where the restaurants get them? China, most likely, as Prosek describes, mostly for the Japanese market, for which eel has a still vibrant culinary, mythical, and tremendous economic appeal. The Japanese eel has all but been fished out. Heavily funded research of ways to farm them in man made ponds has been under way for years. Now I know eels everywhere are possibly endangered, I am hoping for the success of the scientists involved in this effort, as well as for those working to protect the habitats for which the eel has surprising and profound influence.

    

Dolphin Meat

Yes, the meat is eventually labeled as whale meat from a different, more sought after, species and purchased at supermarkets, high levels of mercury notwithstanding. The animals are slaughtered in a brutal manner, at a rate of about twenty thousand individuals annually. The film, The Cove, alleges certain facts that seem to be in dispute - such as that dolphins are culled before the slaughter to meet the needs of places like Sea World and dolphin petting sites around the world, supplying them with dolphins for their purposes. Evidence is not immediately apparent and these places deny it. Yet, overall, images captured let the film speaks for itself and are not open to dispute. See the film, visit the site if you love dolphins free in the seas. 
    One comment in the film by one of the Japanese fishermen was a rationale to the effect that while in the west we eat cattle, here they eat whales, dolphins, and other creatures. A great observation, when divorced of its intent to justify the practice, since in both the west and the east it seems that socio-culinary traditions have spiraled out of control and certain acts are referred to as if historically based by those who practice what is in fact very far removed from tradition.
Rachel

Adopt a rainforest

     The enthusiasm of my friend Korbin Duley at Cuipo.org prompts me to post once again after long quiescence here at Culinary Heritage. After years of seeing signs along highways proclaiming that some fast food joint "adopted" a highway I have issues with this use of the word, adopt, even though I am glad that the process contributes to cleanup. Something temporary and too commercial about it, and I have suspected that the stretch of road could be un-adopted at will and then perhaps re-adopted by some other commercial entity - oh wait, corporations are persons now, I forgot - I mean, person.


   Here is something permanent: adopt a square meter of rainforest for five dollars. Or more! Look it up on google maps and show your kids, friends, coworkers, and employer- who may make a matching gift. It will make a permanent difference to the ecology of the earth and the five dollars will come back to you in so many good ways. Along with adoption, you merely pledge to protect this parcel of land by acting with care regarding the things you do every day. You can make up your own pledge or follow something like this:


  I will buy organic foods grown using sustainable farming.
  I will carpool to work with friends 2 days per week
  I will recycle my newspapers
  I will use reusable grocery bags instead of paper and plastic
  I will recycle plastic
  I will buy locally grown vegetables to reduce my carbon footprint

  So please, go to the Cuipo.org site, read about it, look at the stunning videos, and maybe next time you see one of those highway signs, you will remember you did something pretty cool. By the way, a Cuipo is a tree, Cavanillesia platanifolia, that is extremely large and grows in such places as Panama, and depicted in this photograph and this beautiful painting by  Ricardo Sanchez Beitia. See his other work at http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/ricardo-sanchez-beitia.html

Julie and Julia

     I finally saw this film, about a year after it came out, and am undecided wether Nora Ephron is riffing on or sucked in by the vapid celebrity chef aura that surrounds so many cooking related television shows (and best sellers) that involve egos out of control, rude behavior, and poor decision making. Going gaga over celebrities does not appear related to a commitment to the art and science of cooking, to the practice, learning and teaching of it. Julie's quest was to be, not a cook, but a writer - where "writer" is defined not so much by practice, telling a good story, writing what one knows, creativity, and other typical parameters as by being known as a writer. Possibly this is an unfortunate by-product of universities being in the business of "teaching" people how to write - only to have them end up doing it for money themselves, and even teaching it after knocking off a best seller


     Anyway, once cooking was settled on as a thing to write about, the quest then narrowed to be recognized by some (any?) food expert or celebrity, and especially Julia Child. Cooking was a means to that end rather than valued intrinsically. The chorus of blog reader's support seemed to cement the popular conceptualization - and without them, Ephron seems to hint, Julie would have hung up her electronic toque. The film's comparison of the lives of Julie and Julia is a rich vein of feminist social commentary that I never seem to be able to tell how or if Ephron intends us to parse in her films. Included is a vignette of Julia's attempting to "do something" by learning hat making before settling on cooking as her true path. Julia sincerely followed a natural progression that relied heavily on her confidence in taking chances and wish to change the world for the better. Perhaps being different in terms of height fostered her openness to be different in other ways. She also had the good sense to marry someone who saw her as an equal. It was Julia's passion for food and cooking along with frustration that French cookbooks were unavailable in English translation that sensitized her to be ready for the opportunity to share what she had found out about French food that eventually came about through Madames Beck and Bertoilles. 


     By contrast, Julie's choice of following in one year all the recipes of volume one of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and writing about it seemed to have sprung from oddly mixed motivations such as proving untrue her mom's critique that Julie never finished anything, comparing herself to someone she knew who was published, therapeutically buffering herself from the trauma of her call center job, and doing something that would obtain attention. It had the mark of a stunt, like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Interestingly, although Julie claims inheritance of Mastering from her mom and cites a memory of her mom cooking something great from it (beef burgundy), 2001 was the year that the 40th anniversary edition of the book hit the streets - a fact that cannot have been lost on real life New Yorker Julie Powell as she cast about for something to write about that might have financial traction.


    One of the many details linking writing and cooking as a contrivance came when Julie asked her husband to guess who was coming to dinner. My guess was that it would be her mom, to whom Julie (supposedly) owed part of her success acquiring blog readers by her example of cooking that very beef dish and by putting Mastering into her hands. Instead, it was a famous person she never met who happened to be Julia Child's editor. Having a good name and valuing ones career, wether humble or very elevated, is all fine and good of course, nothing against famous people here. But how embarrassing to fawn over someone just because she is Julia Child's editor! As a friend once colorfully described the silliness of a celebrity: "Does she think she shits ice cream?". I was not surprised that the invitation was declined; rather, it seemed just. 


     Of the many reviews and comments I have come across for Julie & Julia, the one that most closely agrees with my analysis but is exponentially smoother and more incisive than anything I can write is found here:http://www.troubleandstrife.org/?page_id=263 .  I shall offer no more critique and defer to this as I believe it best captures the complexities of the film.


   Yet there is an air of recursiveness about Nora Ephron's work that prompts me to look again, to find referential details and wonder about their genesis. Most interesting for me are the comments* (see below) offered by Meryl Streep and Nora Ephron on the Charlie Rose show that indicate that the character of Julia Child in the film was a patchy, significantly skewed construct of Julie's based on her limited understanding of who Julia Child was and what she did. So is this a reflection of Ephron's accurate understanding that her audience will see what they are prepared to see, like Julie, and yet a subversive and artful tactic to draw them to learn more about the real Julia, since of course the film generated widespread interest for people to read Julia's work and view her old shows? The renewed interest in cooking and in Julia Child is at least one unambiguous benefit of the film - another being, I hope, that people who ought not to may stop writing about food and cooking hoping for a similar "success" - or will this just encourage more blogging for bucks? In another facet of this recursiveness Meryl Streep once had an interaction with Julia Child when a younger Streep asked for Child's support for an organic food organization. Julia declined, but it was a mistake she would later work to correct when she realized that organic food was crucial to cooking and health. 


   As for how the film yin yang's (forgive the use as a verb) with my own life, I had to laugh out loud at the part where Julie fell asleep on the couch because once, when as a teenager I made croissants from Julia's recipe, I had a similar experience. I had begun after lunch the mixing, raising, folding, and resting to get all the laminations needed for a good baked croissant. Of course I had done other things that day but the time I expended to get it right was extensive and it was close to midnight by the time I put the fully proofed and eggwashed crescents - some plain, some with a bit of chocolate or raspberry in the center - in the oven. Just for a few minutes, or so I thought, I lay down on the couch, When I awoke, the fire alarm was blaring and my sisters, mom, and dad were rushing down the stairs in terror at the noisette smoke filling the house. I leapt to my feet, rushed the pans of charcoal croissants out to the back door, and tossed them into the rather deep snow we had at the time. A singular sound emitted from the snow on receiving the overdone, charred laminations - a sound I expect I never again will experience. Later, after being thoroughly and rightfully given what for by my family, as I was cleaning up, I snuck out and broke open some of the croissants - scientific curiosity added to maternal feelings of loss of what I had come to feel were my little children. I ate the centers, which consisted of about a jumbo cashew shaped portion, looked up into the wintery stars, and felt some sort of perverse completion
at the unique and wonderful taste. My mom reminded me recently that this was also the occasion for a bird to enter into the basement due to the back door being propped open. 
    
    Also, I work in a kitchen in which Ms. Child once taught, in roughly 1962, as she was working on The French Chef. My informant was a man, an MIT student in the early sixties, who was in a cooking class I was leading back in 2005 . He had been a student in some of these classes, and commented that the pegboard ....

had come about due to the influence of Paul Child. At the time I was astounded by the information, though it makes perfect sense given the Harvard Square location, but I am not a good researcher, else I would have got his full name and address. My excuse is that at the time I was preoccupied with fighting the special education system's bungling of my son's education. If anyone knows more, please tell me.


   Finally, I also worked at a call center as a senior agent for Federal Express whose speciality was taking calls from irate customers and those with impossible problems, the solving of whose issues earned me scores of management commendations and appreciative customer letters. Other agents would pass these off to me when faced with a demand to speak to a manager. I did not know a call center would be part of the film and it gave me flashbacks.


*
MERYL STREEP:  So it was already kind of caricatured in your head.  
And I didn’t want to -- I wanted to look at her in the idealized way that 
Julie did.  I wanted, because this is Julie’s imagined Julia, in her head 
she imagines this gal in Paris with her -- with her husband.  And I think 
because it’s in this rosy (ph) hue, I just wanted to make it as real as it 
could possibly be but I didn’t feel that I really had to adhere to every 
piece of research I’d done on Julia.  I just wanted to make a human being 
that lived.


NORA EPHRON:  Well, we don’t know.  But in -- you know, there’s no 
question that the Julia we show in the movie was Julie Powell’s idea, you 
know.  And I certainly in reading about her thought oh, I’m not like that.  
I’m just not like that.  She’s a much better human being than I will ever 
be.  And I think -- I think you share that --that feeling.


MERYL STREEP:  Yes.


CHARLIE ROSE:  You have said this before, that Nora gave you kind of 
direction that -- when she told you she needed you to embody, you said this 
earlier, Julia Powell’s idea of Julia Child.


NORA EPHRON:  Yeah.  That wasn’t me.  That was Meryl’s idea, that was 
-- that was one of the ways Meryl .


CHARLIE ROSE:  To get on to it.


MERYL STREEP:  Yeah, that’s one of the ways that I could climb on and 
not feel too guilty about it.


My favorite image of Julia