Generalising

Seriously? This book is truly excellent. I mean it. Yes, it’s slight, yes it’s yet another of those blog-turned-book-deal things, but it’s razor-sharp and poignant, hilarious and sometimes sad, but always engaging and frequently educational. It’s a treat.

The premise: thirty-year-old Julie Powell, a secretary living in the outer boroughs of NYC in apartment that her mother is convinced she’s going to die in, decides apropos of not much that in the space of one year, she is going to cook her way through the five-hundred-plus recipes in Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Of course, she blogged it – but this was in 2001, when such things weren’t quite ubiquitous – and, something I think is enormously in her favour, the book is not simply a rehash of the greatest hits of the blog but tries to tell a complete narrative, with some blog entries merely reproduced where appropriate.

And, well, it’s fabulous and compulsively readable. While she writes reams about the recipes – all of which feature tonnes and tonnes of butter – she punctuates it with tales of her own life, her work for the government agency clearing up the debris after 9/11, her long-suffering husband, her romantic-hero brother, her mother, her friends, and she brings all of them to life. She’s cheerfully rude about her Republican colleagues, at one point feeds them a cake filled with ceramic shards and antifreeze, and is relentlessly cutting about the Bush administration, in and around her adventures cooking marrowbones, calves’ brains and apples in aspic and other such horrifying delicacies. She writes very well indeed, and with a kind of intimate familiarity; in any case, in her description of herself as a foul-mouthed hysteric with misanthropic tendencies, she rang very familiar for me.

The one flaw of the book, I think, is the attempts at vignettes in the real life of Julia Child – while these aren’t bad, per se, I really think they’re unnecessary and a sign of lack of confidence in her own story, which is entirely unjustified.

In short: please look beyond the provenance and the cover, and don’t be afraid for a minute that this is going to be one of those cook-yourself-thin horrors (not only is it all butter all the time, nowhere does anyone discuss diets in this book). It’s one of the best I’ve read this year.

NB. I see after publishing this review to LibraryThing that a lot of people think Powell is boorish and swears too much, and so you shouldn’t read her book. Coincidentally, most of those people are fucking cunts.

In brief: the US House of Representatives passed the health care reform bill. It is called the Affordable Health Care For America Act and expands federal healthcare provision enormously – 36 million more people will be eligible for Medicaid, most employers will be required to provide healthcare coverage for their workers, and there will be a government-funded “public option”. Also notably, health insurers will be prevented from refusing coverage based on medical history (no more gender-based “pre-existing conditions” such as pregnancy, rape and domestic violence) and the exemption for insurance companies from antitrust legislation will be repealed.

So far, so hoopy. The Stupak Amendment, with which this Act has been passsed, is as follows:

“No funds authorised or appropriated by this Act… may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury or physical injury which would… place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed… or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.”^[1]

In other words, to get this Act passed, someone had to be the sacrificial lamb and 150 million American women were it. (Also, something else I have just spotted – the obvious women are excluded, women who want abortions for what are nauseatingly called “social” reasons, because pregnancy is not the right thing for them, but also, women who have mental illnesses which pregnancy would exacerbate are excluded, too.)

I actually have no further commentary to make on the issue, and I wondered if that were just me, but actually, I think there is nothing very profound to say about it. Institutional politics, particularly in the United States, is boring and it doesn’t yield to analysis. Feminist analysis of the narratives of privilege and oppression, that is interesting; so is sociological thinking about why people think the way they do such that amendments like this are seen as a good idea, but on the institutional level of why, in the specific instance, the House of Representatives has voted like this, I’m coming up with nothing. They voted like this because they’re misogynists, fundamentalists, or spineless; you can lobby them, but to be effective, you either run for the House of Representatives or wait for the current incumbents to die, or both. You can’t argue, you can’t write about women’s rights to their own bodies, you can’t talk about restriction of reproductive options as a form of control of women. Well, you can, but it’s a category error to think you can convince an edifice of misogyny to change their minds because that, I think, fundamentally misunderstands why they hold the opinions they do – it’s not because they arrived at them through logical argument.

(Evidence in point: thirty-nine Democrats voted against the reform bill. Twenty-one of them, besides Stupak, voted for the amendment. Institutional politics defies logical analysis.)^[2]

It will go to the Senate, but I’m not optimistic.

[2] From here. And yes, lawyers are allowed to run a defence in the alternative, but I suspect it’s not the same thing.

I can cook quite well. If you ask me to rustle up a dinner for three with salad and dessert, I can do it. But – I cannot follow recipes. At all. Everything I have ever cooked was made up on the spot, or a variation on something I’ve previously made up on the spot. In the interests of the latter, this is what I had for dinner tonight.

Ingredients:
-three large baking potatoes, elderly, sprouting;
-one red onion;
-generic tomato sauce – the kind that comes in a jar, or one tin chopped tomatoes drained well and mixed with passata;
-peppered ham (or ordinary thick ham, and add black pepper to the finished product);
-stilton;
-niceish olive oil;
-sundried tomato paste.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Centigrade. Peel and chop the potatoes into thin slices, and toss into boiling water for five or ten minutes until softened (I forgot to do this, and regretted it). Drain, and put in a flattish ovenproof dish. Pour over tomato sauce, stir until potatoes are covered, add sundried tomato paste to taste and a splash of olive oil. Stick into oven for twenty minutes.

In the meantime, chop the onion into small bits and tear up the ham roughly, mix them together. Take the dish out, and (carefully! – I burned my fingers, as usual) stir them into the mixture so they’re also covered in tomato gloop. Put in the oven for another twenty minutes, go away and do some hoovering.

Crumble enough stilton to cover the top of the dish. After the twenty minutes are up, make a layer of it on the top of the potatoes, and put it back in the oven. After five minutes or ten minutes or however long it takes for the cheese to brown and bubble and sink, you’re done. Serve with green salad, it’s nice. And freeze the rest, if you’re only cooking for one, it’s perfectly defrostable.

I like it – but next time I think maybe more sundried tomato paste, and maybe I’ll stretch to cooked bacon rather than ham.

1. I usually write about my life, to excruciating length, elsewhere, and have been doing so with assiduous regularity for nearly nine years, ye gods;

2. Not everyone is interested in what I had for breakfast;

3. (although some people are);

4. And occasionally I post things that of are interest to people who are not a) me and b) that gang of geeks I was at university with;

5. So I am experimenting with “proper” blogging, and also with incorporating the book reviews I currently only post to LibraryThing;

6. And, therefore:

7. Hello, world!