Preparing for a Seder: Two Womens' Perspectives

I recently read a small book, newly published, called Pesach for the Rest of Us by the novelist and poet Marge Piercy. I took it out of the library not because I was really that interested but because I knew I would be hosting a seder soon, and I thought, “Who knows, maybe she’s got some ideas we’d like to use.” Not likely, but you never know.
I can’t say as I’ve ever read Marge Piercy before, but my general impression of her work is that it wouldn’t appeal to me. I base this on my impression of her fans – with whom I do have some experience, after almost twenty years as a bookseller – who tend to be very, very earnest women. I don’t want to say they’re humorless, but I will say that they don’t tend to be the kind of people I’d want to drink Manhattans with. They’re more “just a glass of white wine, thanks” type people. Nice, but… that’s kind of the problem.
Still, I felt I had to read this book. I flipped through it and wasn’t too thrilled to see it had a lot of poetry in it (Edith does not enjoy poetry unless it’s the shorter work of Dorothy Parker or maybe, maybe… Philip Larkin; though, of course, I should have expected it); I was cheered to see that it had a lot of recipes. That kind of flippy-floppy reaction to the book is basically how I feel about the whole thing, in the end. It annoyed me, and it bored me, and then something struck me as charming or funny or smart. And then it annoyed me again.
Piercy has apparently hosted a seder every year for decades (in our household, this will be the 4th or 5th seder we’ve hosted, so we’re relative neophytes) and over the years has composed a Haggadah, which I gather is sort of a work-in-progress. She adds to it and takes things away as she’s moved; it’s a flexible text. (How PoMo.) Her book opens with a wide-eyed, pleading chapter on how contemporary Jews need to be reintroduced to the seder in such a way that they feel they can make it their own; she feels that too many people remember the seder as a sort of boring lecture that is endured simply to get to the food. Well, I can’t really argue with that. I don’t know that I’d call it a lecture, but I do think seders are fairly dull, and I do think it’s mostly about the food. It’s Thanksgiving dinner for Jews. Without the turkey, and, thank god, without the fucking cranberries. I think even my family’s sloppy seder is religiously moving, though – I mean, I think it has its moments – and I know I would not relish the thought of attending a seder that took itself much more seriously than we take ours. Bad Jew? Probably. So be it.
So Piercy wants us to rewrite our Haggadot to reflect our lives; she particularly wants us to rework the texts to reflect political views, preferably ones like hers. Piercy’s book dwells deeply in this area, with limited range. Has she never met a Jew who was a Republican? This was a large part of the annoyance factor in this book: over and over again, her added texts harp on subjects that, while important, I cannot be comfortable with at a seder. And she assumes that all her readers will agree with her, not allowing for debate in her lists of blessings. Her reworking of Dayenu made me want to scream. I should read about abortion rights at the seder table? I should read about the Iraq war at the seder table? No; I won’t forbid other people from doing it (not that it’d be possible to shut up some of my relatives anyhow without throwing the Cuisinart at them), but I’m not the kind of gal who’s going to encourage this kind of conversation at my table. Sorry.
So Piercy gets on my nerves… but then she writes these nice bits about her family, for example; she’s particularly affectionate when remembering her mother and grandmother. One story that amused me perhaps more than it should have was about her grandmother’s cat. “My grandmother’s gentleman cat, Blackie, always attended the seder, having a chair of his own. He did not, however, read the haggadah.” I can imagine our own gentleman cat sitting on a chair of his own at our seder; he often sits on a chair at our kitchen table anyway, looking at us and seeming to follow the conversation, wishing someone would offer him a drink, too.
In many ways, Piercy’s book is encouraging and comforting; it would be, I think, a wonderful book for someone who was preparing to do their first seder without having grown up attending seders regularly. Or, maybe, even if you had attended a seder every year, but suddenly are hosting and feel you are going to freeze up and not know what to do. The book is well-organized, and explains how to arrange everything, and talks about dietary restrictions (Ashkenazi and Sephardic, and offering many vegetarian recipes, of course); there’s nothing missing from this book, and so it is valuable. I imagine that fans of Piercy’s previous work will find this book a very welcome addition to their shelves. But you have to be willing to accept a lot of grandstanding along with the sane, reasonable, and good humored vision Piercy offers us.

On the New Joy of Cooking

[Pizza by The Most Ethical Man in the World]

A few months ago, a new edition of The Joy of Cooking was published with considerable media coverage, which I read whenever I noticed it. I, Miss Edith, already possess several editions (all available for sale) and they’re all interesting and useful in different ways. One edition on our shelves that isn’t for sale is the edition from the late ‘90s, which is owned by my husband. It is this edition that actually sees regular use. Many people in the food world had problems with Ethan Becker’s revision, and even more people across the country, home cooks, had serious problems with it. As I understand it, the problem wasn’t that the recipes didn’t work; these people felt that the 1997 Joy was too fancy in terms of style. It had changed too much from previous editions, tilting toward restaurant food and away from straight American home cooking. I suppose that this may be true, but the fact is that The Most Ethical Man in the World, who is also a very competent man around the kitchen, has turned out many fine meals for me using only this edition of Joy. So yes, Joy had changed, but we felt it was a change for the better. I know people complained about how the tuna casserole had morphed from something where you use canned soup to something where you have to make a roux… but listen: Ethical Man has made me that roux’d casserole many times, and you know what? It is really fucking good. (It is still present in the new book, but retitled Tuna-Vegetable Casserole, printed just after the Quick Tuna Casserole.) I don’t care what anyone says: I don’t like canned cream of mushroom soup (if I wanted to burn my mouth off with salt, I’d eat a bag of Smartfood, my salty junk food of choice – that or maybe Funyuns), and I’m glad that Mr. Becker and his team came up with new recipes that don’t require it. They are, to my mind, a huge improvement. The original tuna casserole is, yes, as Mrs. Rombauer said, “an excellent emergency dish,” but the point for me is, I wouldn’t cook with canned soup unless it was an emergency. (And, given that we have none in the house – we did have three cans, but they sat in the pantry for so many years that we eventually threw them out – if there were an emergency, I still wouldn’t be able to make it.) For a relaxed Saturday night supper when we don’t want something that’s a big deal but that’s really tasty and filling, that newfangled tuna-vegetable casserole is just the thing.

Last fall, when the new edition was published, I said, “Ooooh!” Got all excited. I’d ordered copies for the bookstore I used to be the buyer for, but, since quitting over the summer, I’d sort of forgotten about it. Ethical Man heard me tap-dancing around excitedly and said, “You’re not buying that. We don’t need it.” I turned to him sadly, trying to look cute, the way our cat does when he’s been bad. “NO,” he said. “We don’t need another copy of The Joy of Cooking.”

I didn’t argue.

But now: earlier this month we spent a few days on Cape Cod. Cape Cod in the off-season, everyone will tell you, is very boring, because lots of things are closed and there’s not much going on. What a lot of people won’t tell you is that if you’re not someone who likes going to the beach or going out to bars or going on nature-worshipping hikes, there isn’t much to do on Cape Cod at any time of year. If you’re a sort of urban type, who mostly likes to amble city streets to see the street life, who when not ambling the streets can otherwise be found lying around your apartment reading, then Cape Cod is mostly a place you go to catch up on the reading you gotten behind on because window shopping is so exhausting. The kind of vacation life I like – where you go downtown, walk around, have some coffee somewhere, or lunch, and go see a matinee of a dumb movie at that theatre down the street where they sell Toblerones, and then spend the afternoon wondering where to go for dinner -- you can’t get that so much on Cape Cod. But going to the Cape has its cultural benefits: I get so much reading done when we’re there, and there are a handful of genuinely nice bookstores. We spent four days and nights there, this month, and during that time I read four books, one of which was the new edition of Joy.

Our second day on the Cape, I’d already plowed through rather a lot of reading material, and thought, “What I need is a public library.” So we walked the few blocks – briskly, as it was quite cold – to the local public library. I felt somewhat renegade-y, walking to the library; no one else was walking around for the hell of it.
Anyway. I’d never been to the town’s public library before. It’s a nice place, a quaint brick and marble building, if I remember correctly, and at ten a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the place was hopping. Loud with children; crowded, with people sitting down to read, meeting with friends for a chat, whatever. It was nice. The new releases selection wasn’t too exciting, and it was absolutely tiny, but that was okay. Ethical Man browsed the shelves and finally sat down to re-read his favorite Roald Dahl book, My Uncle Oswald…but I grabbed the new Joy and started at the very beginning. My goal was to determine, one and for all, if we needed to buy the book, or if I’d be satisfied to simply borrow it from a library from time to time.

It became very clear to me, very quickly, that I’d need to own this edition. I read the short note from Julia Child and the letter from Ethan Becker and read my way through the book, skipping only the chapters on pork and meat, because I never cook pork and very seldom cook red meat. There were just so many recipes that seemed important to me – dishes I’d heard of but never seen recipes for before; combinations of things I’d never thought of that sounded great (there’s a list of sweet tea spreads that seem like they could be very useful); and, what excited me most, recipes for things that I’d sort of faked my way through, or arrived at on my own – so that reading the recipes was joyful vindication. What really sold me, in the end, were the chapters on baking; the breads and the cakes are, to my eye, significantly changed. There are so many new recipes, additions that are both culturally interesting and interesting to me as a cook, that I didn’t see how I couldn’t buy it.

A cousin had given me an Amazon.com gift certificate as a Christmas present, and I hadn’t spent it yet. I realized that the thing to do was use it to get the Joy. I said as much to Ethical Man. “We need this,” I said. “It has a recipe for Tres Leches cake, which I’ve eaten but don’t know how to make.” With promises of rich Tres Leches cake dangled in front of him – Ethical Man is always made happy by the idea of fresh cake – the argument over the new Joy ended. We would acquire a copy when we got home.

Here’s the thing about this edition: it has managed to gracefully combine many elements of previous editions with new elements that I’m glad have been introduced. There are stylish recipes alongside dowdy or down-home recipes; sometimes, there’s a dowdy item that’s been a little jazzed up. (The tea spreads are good examples of this. Orange Pecan Cream Cheese Spread strikes me as a little church-ladylike, but the Almond Ginger version looks like it’d have some real bite, and be lovely on many kinds of bread.) The international cuisine offerings have increased, and are a pleasure to see: the number of Indian recipes has increased, for example –a wonderful thing; I cook a lot of Indian food and while I own a few Indian cookbooks, I’m glad to have a new place to turn for more. Golden Glow Salad, which I have no plans to prepare, ever, is in there, and I’m actually very happy to see it. I know it’s going to make some home cook very happy. (I am acquainted with people who love gelatin salads, even if I’m not one myself.) I also like the new beverages section very much, and expect to use it frequently in months to come. The vegetable section, which has historically been one of the best parts of Joy, now includes a bit about tofu and tempeh and “other vegetable proteins”; I think it’s admirable that they added TVP to their repertoire, and moved all this information into the vegetable section. I don’t groove on TVP myself, as I explained briefly in my piece on vegan cooking, but I think it’s a valid subject and should be included in a general, all-purpose book like Joy. And having this material moved into the vegetables section seems natural to me. Its home in the previous edition (“Beans and Tofu”) struck me as a bit of a sop. I convinced Ethical Man that we needed these venison recipes (he’s always talking about how some day he wants to go hunting – uh-huh), and said, “Look! Recipes for woodcock!” Ethical Man does a great imitation of the woodcock mating call; I knew he’d think that woodcock recipes were a good idea.

We left the Cape a few days later. By this point I’d read several books (including one by Anne Lamott, which I didn’t like as much as I’d thought I might – Traveling Mercies – and one by Steve Almond, which I liked ever so much more than I thought I would, Candy Freak; I now feel very bad that I didn’t recommend Almond’s book to everyone I knew when I worked in the bookstore downtown, and I offer my sincere apologies to Mr. Almond). I was glad to be heading home. I was running out of books again.

But I forgot to order my book with my Amazon gift certificate, and we found ourselves on the Upper East Side of New York on St. Patrick’s Day. Having lunch in a very very crowded restaurant, eating exceptionally good potatoes and drinking mimosas with Ethical Man’s charming cousin J. and his other half, A., we were musing over what to do with our afternoon (besides drink). J. suggested that we amble over to a bookstore he’d discovered on Lexington. “You’d really love it, I think,” he said. “You mean Kitchen Arts and Letters?” I said. “Let’s go.”

So we made our way to Kitchen Arts and Letters, where, to my delight, Ethical Man said, “Why don’t you get a copy of the new Joy of Cooking while we’re here? You might as well give them your business.” I realized he was right. They shipped the book back to the house, and here I am, with my new Joy, happy as a clam. If anyone else is sitting on the fence about acquiring this book, thinking, “Surely I don’t need this,” I reply with all confidence, “You probably do need it.” Please acquire your own copy now because you will not be permitted to borrow mine.

Schott, Fadiman, and the New York Times Book Review

Like many people, I, Miss Edith, read Ben Schott's little essay in the New York Times Book Review about how to handle a book, and was struck immediately by what a rip-off it was of Anne Fadiman's lovely essay on the same subject, which any reader worth his/her salt oughta know is in Ex Libris. I'd always admired Schott's work, but his essay alarmed and annoyed me.
I said to the Most Ethical Man in the World, "This is bullshit," or something to that effect. Frankly, I was pissed at Schott for copying, and pissed and dismayed by the NYTBR's lack of awareness. I couldn't believe that no one had caught this problem and that the essay had actually gone to print.
Well, so, this past weekend, they printed an apology. Schott claims he didn't know a thing about Fadiman's essay -- which is possible, if depressing; I feel that any serious bookman ought to have that book basically memorized -- but what's just cosmically appalling is that no one on the NYTBR staff saw this and noticed the problem right away. The apology even says that no one on the staff was familiar with the essay.
Basically, my feeling is that for that reason alone, every person on the staff of the New York Times Book Review should be fired, or at least have their paychecks withheld until they can recite the opening sentences of each essay, from memory, when awaked at four in the morning. No coffee allowed.
Edith is disgusted, and she's not going to forget this soon.

Housekeeping? A Visit to Labyrinth; Quality Time with Nick Hornby

This is not about Marilynne Robinson, so if that’s what you’re looking for, sorry.

Recently I ambled into Labyrinth Books, its beautiful location in beautiful downtown New Haven, not looking for anything in particular, but just to peruse shelves. Nothing at the public library had tempted me, and I thought maybe if I looked at bookshelves somewhere else I’d be struck by inspiration.
I was. I suddenly remembered that last year came out a biography of Mrs. Beeton, author of the first major household manual written in English. I couldn’t remember the title or who wrote it but I knew this was a book I’d want to read. Did Labyrinth have a copy on their shelves? No; but they told me that the book would be coming out in paperback in May, so if I would be a good patient little girl, I could read it for much less money in a few months. I accepted this proposal cheerfully and went back to browse bookshelves.
I considered the new Patricia Marx novel. I’d like to read this, actually, but I’m reluctant to pay real money for the honor. I’m not sure if I’ll like it enough to justify the money, especially as my income these days is, shall we say, erratic. And it was never put me in a particularly high tax bracket anyhow. Spending $25 on a book I wasn’t sure about seemed folly. (I would have spent the money on Mrs. Beeton, though. A biography of a woman who wrote about housekeeping – I’ll pay for that.)
I moved back through their fiction section. Labyrinth’s fiction section is actually a little eccentric; it includes not only novels but books in other categories that, in other stores, would be in different sections entirely. Labyrinth doesn’t have a mystery section, for example, though they have a small selection of mysteries (tony ones, or classics; you can, of course, buy a copy of Gaudy Night there, because what academic bookstore won’t sell you a copy of Gaudy Night? A really shitty one, that’s what kind). They don’t seem to have a section for essays and letters – which frustrates me – but instead toss their occasional title in that category into fiction. Hence, it was in fiction that I stumbled on a Nick Hornby book that I’d forgotten about, a book of essays. It’s another collection of his columns from The Believer – those essays where he makes a list of “Books Bought” and compares it to his list of “Books Read” in any given month. I’d read the first one, The Polysyllabic Spree, when I was the buyer at the Bookstore That I Shan’t Name in this essay; I’d enjoyed it but not enough to buy it. I did think it was a clever conceit though. We all know that one acquires books on a regular basis (if one’s the sort of person who acquires books at all, that is) but one’s system of actually reading them is dramatically different from how one reads them. If I buy, say, three books at a bookstore in December, you can bet that by the following December I’ll have read two of them – one of them right away, the next one probably within the following six months – and the third one may never be read at all. (Not that this indicates a lack of love, affection, or interest in the third book. It’s just that life takes one’s reading interests in weird directions sometimes. Or maybe I just bought that third book for the dust jacket, anyhow, and never intended to crack it at all. I have a book I bought only for the fact of its authors’ names and its title – the book itself is crap, but I can’t get rid of it because the names and title are hilarious. It’s by a married couple named Breedlove and it’s called, as I recall, Swap Club. It’s about free love. You have to keep a book like that, it’s too good. I have occasionally considered giving it away as a wedding gift but I’ve yet to meet the right couple, perhaps because I run in fairly boring circles. Ah, well.)
Anyway, Hornby’s new collection has a title that jumped out at me. It probably doesn’t mention Mrs. Beeton at all but I felt it was an entirely justified substitute for Hughes’ biography of that grand woman: the title of Hornby’s book is Housekeeping vs. the Dirt.
Incidentally, he does discuss Marilynne Robinson, a little… but he talks about Gilead, not her first novel Housekeeping*.

*I take this back. If I’d read the whole book before I wrote this, I’d’ve seen that, in fact, on
p. 95 he has a chapter in which he talks about reading Housekeeping. So I was full of shit, but it wasn’t with malicious intent. Sorry.