Ann Hodgman. Anyone else paying attention?

I am so slow on the uptake sometimes, it’s shocking. I mean, I’m hardly the dimmest bulb in that cabinet over my sink… so what gives?
I’ve had the flu all week. Friday I finally felt well enough that I went downtown and ran thirty errands that had needed running all week. I decided, on a whim, to pop into my friendly Public Liberry, which I love even though it frustrates me in countless ways, and while there I snagged that new book about Spy magazine, along with the Calvin Trillin book-essay about his wife, Alice. (I’d read the essay when it was originally published in The New Yorker, and was one of those saps who adored it – but since I’ve been re-reading The Tummy Trilogy, I thought… well, let's see if there’s anything in the book that isn’t in the article, which I saved. There was, a little; it’s a good book, I recommend it. But I digress.)
Today my beloved Most Ethical Man in the World has come down with what he claims is a cold but which I know is the beginning of the flu. We spent the cold, grey afternoon in our living room, Ethical Man on the couch under a blanket, me in my pink brocade chair under another blanket, the cat prowling around making noises like he was disgusted with us, which he probably was since we weren’t busy doting on him. While Ethical Man slept, I read the Trillin book and then the Spy book. At some point while reading the latter, it dawned on me that they were mentioning this woman, Ann Hodgman. I glanced up at the bookcase across from me, which holds my recently alphabetized collection of used, rare, and out of print cookbooks. (Well, it holds a fraction of said collection. I have a lot of cookbooks. I’m a dealer, man, it’s my job.) There, on the fourth shelf, was a cookbook called Beat This! , which was written by a woman named Ann Hodgman. I thought, “Well, gosh, I’ve never really thought about it, but it must be the same woman.” So I snag the book from the shelf, glance at the back, and lo, the blurbs are by Graydon Carter and Tony Hendra.
Duh.
I breeze through the rest of the Spy book because frankly now I'm much more interested in the cookbook. As soon as I closed the large coffeetable Spy book, which, frankly, I found interesting but not as much fun as I’d hoped it would be, I read the Ann Hodgman book.
Readers, if I have any, let me tell you something.
For one thing, I’m an idiot to’ve never looked at this cookbook long enough to put it together that it’s Ann Hodgman who wrote it – I mean, I must have noticed it at the time I acquired the thing, right? But then why hadn’t I read it eagerly when I bought it – which I did aeons ago? I ought to’ve realized that this was someone who I’d enjoy reading for for reading enjoyment’s sake. It’d’ve been like if Fran Lebowitz wrote a cookbook (god help us, what a concept); I’d be stockpiling copies of it because you know I’d read my first copy so many times it’d be falling apart within a year.
For another thing – and this is my more significant point – this book deserves a real following and it doesn’t seem to have one. I admit that I have not cooked a damn thing out of it; give me a chance, friend, I only finished reading it 45 minutes ago, if that. But I’ve read it and read it and read it and everything in there looks plausible if not way way better than plausible. (Some of the recipes had me really itching to get into the kitchen.)
Ann Hodgman is someone I’ve been sort of dimly, in-the-back-of-my-head, aware of for some years, mostly, I admit, because of a cookbook she did that was illustrated by Roz Chast. I don’t own it, though I’d always been tempted by it; it’s a book about feeding picky kids. I don’t have kids, let alone picky ones, so I’ve never really been able to justify buying a copy. (That will probably change now.) But Beat This!, from the very beginning, had my heart, on the basis of her set piece on brownies, which is utterly true, and which has infuriated me and made me feel guilty for years.
My kitchen touchstone, the thing that warms my heart when I feel blue (well, one of them) is Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. And I don’t want to complain about Colwin’s book, because I believe it to be a great thing and it changed my life for the better in many ways. But it is true that in this book, Colwin urges us to make Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, and they suck utterly. I mean, really bad. I’ve tried making them at least a dozen times, convinced that I was missing something, doing something wrong, and that’s why they always came out dry and boring and stupid. But no, I accept this: Katharine Hepburn’s brownies are just awful.
Ann Hodgman starts her book discussing this very fact. And I admire her for taking the bull by the horns.
I have not, obviously, prepared the recipe she offers as an excellent – nay, the best – replacement for Hepburn’s brownies, but I have read the recipe and it looks an awful lot like the recipe I use, which has my friends and loved ones swooning every time I serve it, which I do a lot, since it’s basically the only dessert I ever serve guests. I use Maida Heatter’s recipe for All-American Brownies. (It has a ridiculously small amount of flour, and you think, “This can’t be right,” but oh, it is so right.) So on the basis of proportions, I believe Ann Hodgman is at least on the right track, if not totally correct, and I laud her loudly and with vehemence for telling the truth about Katharine Hepburn’s brownies.
The other thing I really liked about Hodgman’s book was her honest discomfort with ingredients that so many people regard as basic but which are somehow creepy – at least to me. That is to say, I feel vindicated by Hodgman’s biases, since I share so many of them. I keep a very slightly kosher kitchen, which means I don’t share Hodgman’s love affair with bacon (though my goyische husband definitely does). But I do share her disgust with Crisco. I mean, just as a product, as a thing, Crisco is really quite vile. In my own case, I’d certainly heard of it, growing up, but I had no idea what it was or what it looked like until after my boyfriend (now husband) moved in with me. For some reason, he wanted to make something that called for Crisco – a piecrust, perhaps? – and so I obligingly bought a small tub of it. I had no idea what it would be like, but it was cheap enough and I was told that it was absolutely necessary.
I do not understand why a deadly white, gloppy, completely plastic looking substance is regarded as absolutely necessary to make food. I could see if it were a sort of raw form of Play-Doh (“Add your own coloring agents! Make Play-Doh that matches your kitchen wallpaper!”). But it isn’t. I’m supposed to eat this crap. Well, let me tell you. We still keep a tub in the pantry, but… it does not get used often. Fortunately, it has a half-life comparable to Twinkies, so I don’t worry about it much. But the fact that I speak of it as having a half-life… you know, that’s not exactly a good thing.
Basically, Hodgman acknowledges that food is supposed to be made of food. When she uses a canned thing, or a pre-packaged ingredient, she says, forthrightly, “Look, I know this is vile, but you’re not eating this every night and it really does make the difference with this recipe.” And you accept it because she’s being honest about being dishonest, basically. I admire that. This is how I cook, myself – I am a stickler for using ingredients that I recognize as being not too far removed from their original form. If I have to use something that has a list of chemicals on the side longer than my ruler, well, that’s not normal and everyone I feed knows it. It’s an anomaly. Oddly, today’s New York Times Magazine has an article by Michael Pollan that basically addresses the issue I’m speaking of (it’s now Sunday morning, so it’s today’s Magazine section; had I written this paragraph yesterday, it’d’ve been tomorrow’s Magazine section, which might have been confusing to the kind of readers who don’t live in the metro area*). Pollan lays down a number of rules about eating that seem like sort of basic good ideas to me. The one that sticks in my head is, Don’t eat anything that your great great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. I.e., something with a label on the side where the list of ingredients is longer than etc. etc.: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
Eminently sensible, if you ask me. I know you didn’t. I’m just saying.
Please check out Ann Hodgman’s cookbook. I am going to dig up a copy of the sequel and see if I find it equally satisfying.



*If you live within a certain radius of New York City and subscribe to the Times, you get certain sections of the Sunday paper the Saturday before. Hence, you can read Sunday’s NYT Book Review and Magazine on Saturday morning when you’re drinking your coffee and contemplating the errands you’re going to run. In my case, I read it while contemplating the 11 a.m. showing of The Big Lebowski that I knew my husband and I would be going to. It was wicked fun.