Awesome

It's always gratifying when a student expresses appreciation for a class, especially if they acknowledge having been uninterested in the topic at the beginning.  My favorite this semester had been this beefy guy, Mike, in my ancient art survey, who actually shook my hand at the end and thanked me for making it "not boring"!  But I think he might have just been trumped by one of my modern survey students, Naadiya:

"Hi Professor DiMarzo,

I just remembered...that I forgot to tell you thanks at the end of the semester. I'd come into class on the first day confused as to why I had to even take Art History when my major was Human Services. But as the classes went on I realized that even if it had nothing to do with my major it was still interesting to learn. I'd heard a lot of things about Art History classes and how they were boring but I was very happy to find that they were wrong. You made class very energetic and I was always looking forward to coming there every week. 

Recently I was going through the guide on TV and came across a show that talked about the many paintings that the Louvre had and prior to your class it wouldn't have even registered in my brain. But I found myself making my whole family sit down to watch it with me and when the paintings came up that I knew I went into full blown explanations about each one. 

I realize now how much of an impact a teacher can make on a person and how they view things that are new to them. I think people don't tell others thank you enough and really take the time to express their gratitude. Thanks Mrs. DiMarzo for opening a new door and giving me another good reason to beg my parents to let me go to Paris."

ETA my response:

Hi Naadiya,

Thanks for your email; it's always wonderful to hear from students who have enjoyed an art history class, particularly when they acknowledge not having had too much interest in it at the start (I've been there--I signed up for my first AH course because it looked like the easiest way to fulfill a requirement!)  I'm thrilled that this course has inspired your desire to travel and visit museums--and how great for your family, too, to now have their own budding tour guide!

I'm not sure what your plans are beyond your associate's degree, but if you plan to transfer to another school in the future and find yourself in need of a recommendation, let me know.  In the meantime, as the Italians say, buona fortuna and buon viaggio!  :-)

Holiday Week

Today was the first day this week that we had no plans of any kind.  So, naturally, I started it off in kickboxing class at 9am with Linda, and boy, did we feel it. It was kind of ridiculous, actually; I went to kick last Monday night, and I didn't even eat that much in the intervening days, but it still felt harder than it has since the first couple of times I went.  Then I came home and gave the house a thorough cleaning (thorough meaning "even the baseboards"), so everything looks and smells lemony-fresh now.  The all-purpose cleaner recipe I got from the Green Clean book works pretty well; true, it does leave streaks on the laminated countertops, but I suppose that's what you pay for lacking in toxic fumes.

For reference (I've never written this down, I just keep using Amazon's "Look Inside" function, since it shows up on a visible page)

1 tsp borax
2 tsp washing soda
1/2 tsp castile soap
10 drops lemon essence
2 cups boiling water

Anyway, our holiday week started off on Monday night at Shane and Nicole's new house, where we were celebrating their long-anticipated engagement (Sean and I elected not to attend the World's Most Overblown Proposal in Providence on Sunday evening).  Minus Richardson, the old gang was all there, since even Iannone, who rarely shows his face during his blitzkrieg visits from Chicago, came around.

Christmas Eve is always spent with Sean's dad, first at Sean's aunt Kathy's house, with the many "characters" of the extended Gleason clan.  There were two new additions, baby Noah, who was born to Sean's first cousin Amy, and Isabella, born to Sean's, um, I guess second cousin, Samantha.  Amy is 40, and Samantha is 20 or so (it's always thrown me that Sean can have a first cousin who's 20 years older; that's because the six Gleason children, of which Sean's dad is in the middle, spanned about two decades in age).  That means that Sean's dad is a great-uncle to one baby and a great-great uncle to the other!

After Kathy's, we were spared the traditional gift-giving fest at Danny's house.  Well, Sean and I went over, but Dana was sick in bed and the girls were at their dad's house, so we exchanged gifts pretty quickly.  Danny gave me an awesome chef's knife, Dana got me another lovely scarf (the grey one she gave me last year is one of my favorites, so she's good at this), and, rather unexpectedly, I also got a tablet from Sean's dad.  Honestly, I was completely thrown when I unwrapped it because I thought it was a phone, and I was thinking "oh my god, I don't want this" before Danny pointed out it was a tablet.  Much preferable!  It works great with the Chromecast I got from Linda.  I refrained from downloading the Tumblr app or the Facebook app, though--I'm already on my computer all the time, I really don't need to have constant access in every room of the house.

Christmas was a really fun day. Alas, my major present for Sean, the refurbishment of the Buick, hasn't gone anywhere yet, but he really liked a gift that I actually picked up at a tag sale, a double clock/tide clock that has a map of New Haven and its harbor as the background.  His gift for me was awesome--we're going to take a cooking class at Sur La Table in Canton the night before our (dating) anniversary, and then stay in a bed-and-breakfast that has chickens.  And guests are welcome to gather eggs in the morning.  Yessss.  Those chickens don't know it but they're going to make a new friend on January 6.

 I went to Linda's early, since Sean was slow in getting dressed.  Gary's mother was there already, so I was able to help Linda out by holding up the conversation. Luckily, Gary's  father, Sal--who is a close talker, prone to delivering the same 1950s life advice repeatedly over the course of an evening, while holding the advisee's hand--had gone to visit a lady friend down the road.  Alice, his wife, is more of a hoot, and she loves to drink at holidays, so we had the white wine flowing at 1pm, just how I like it!  Even the later arrival of Linda's sister didn't ruin things, which is pretty impressive.

We spent the day after Christmas with my sister, and it too was (surprisngly) fun.  I showed her how to make pasta fagioli, though it had to be slightly modified upon the discovery that she lacked a blender or food processor.  In terms of cooking, Jen is where I was maybe five years ago; "cooking" to her (and to Vinny, despite his Italian background) is cracking a jar of Prego. I'm not sure I sold her on the "cooking can be fun, no really!" spiel, but hopefully I struck a balance between "inspirational" and "Jen you idiot, have you never used a knife before?"  Despite the chunkiness, the sauce turned out great, and we spent the afternoon playing games (I won at Scrabble, possibly only my third win against Sean in...9 years?) before we went to see "American Hustle".  During the previews Jen told me, quite solemnly, that I'm one of her best friends. She's done this before, and I'm always glad if I can keep my composure on and not start grinning.  I love my sister, definitely, but...I consider a best friend someone you don't (often) want to strangle (Carla and the chewing gum, Carla and the slamming of drawers in the early am...haha).

Yesterday, to bring our week to a grand finale, we went up to Newtown to see Phyllis.  It's a lovely, old-New-England type of area, with lots of gorgeous houses and hills that give you stunning views over the surrounding valleys.  We had lunch at a historic inn, which was honestly nothing special, and toured the library, which was once the home of the town's most prominent family, the Hawleys (among their treasures: a butter dish once used by George Washington, egads!).  It was an incredible public library, with an entire section devoted to art books, another to theater, another to music--a clear sign of a well-educated and well-heeled tax base.

It's always wonderful to see Phyllis.  I lived with her for four years, so her mannerisms and her way of speaking, which are all quite idiosyncratic, are as familiar to me as though I'd known her my whole life.  I told Sean afterward that it feels like meeting up with a family member (and honestly, I saw Phyllis more times in 2013 than I saw my aunts!).  You can really have a conversation with her about anything, since she's just had such an incredible range of life experiences.  Sean sometimes worries about the shape our lives will take without children to define them, but I consider her a prime example of how without children (or in her case, even without a partner), you can shape your life into something full and wonderful.  Not only are Phyllis' friends some of the most varied and seriously well-informed people I've ever met, she has one of the most active social calendars of any nearly-60-year-old women I know of.  (Actually, let's be honest, I don't know if I'll ever have the energy to live quite that fully).

After we parted ways, we drove to Bethel, a town maybe 15 minutes away, to check out the Rainy Day Paperback exchange.  We walked out with a stack of books between us, all for $34!  Highlights include a Latin copy of "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas"and a book about the history of mathematics for Sean, while I walked away with several art history books, EM Forster's Notes on the Novel Form and An Assembly Such as This, the retelling of P&P from Darcy's perspective that I learned about in Among the Janeites.  Not a bad haul.

I'm a little relieved that tomorrow's planned outing to NYC for Daniel's birthday is being cancelled because of the oncoming rain...I feel like I need another day just to unwind from all the unwinding!

Books and Food, Books on Food

Yesterday, I was trying to remember some of the books I've read over the course of 2013; I logged on to my library account hoping to see my list of check-outs, but discovered that you have to opt-in for that service, as a nod to privacy concerns. Fair enough. After a bit of brain-wracking, I discovered that with a couple of exceptions (the Pride & Prejudice mystery Death Comes to Pemberley; the two fat and thoroughly satirical volumes of Mark Twain's Roughing It), the books whose titles were actually popping to mind were mostly about food. It may be a coincidence that this was the same year that I started cooking more complicated meals, but only some of the books I read appealed on a gastronomic level; several had the opposite effect, increasing my doubt and dissatisfaction with many of the food options available to us on a regular basis.

As far as I can remember, this all started with Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which I was eager to read after listening to the author being interviewed on NPR on one of my many long drives down to Philadelphia in the winter. The book didn't disappoint; it unveiled how food companies have increasingly packed our food with chemicals that are cheaper than the ingredients they replaced, and are continually tweaking the levels of sugar, salt and fat in a given product to achieve the perfect "bliss point" of taste. It was surprising to think of some of our beloved food products, many of which been a part of our diets our whole lives, as continually in flux, but apparently companies never stop changing and testing, not only to save more money but to attract new consumers. There were some really great-slash-horrifying origin stories in the book, not least about how the Lunchable was created (and boy, am I glad now that my mom never bought them for us, not that I recall being particularly envious of those who had them). Eating processed food is like playing in a casino--the house always wins. When foods are designed to be as delicious and addictive as possible, your poor body can't help but want them, even when they contribute negligibly to actual nutrition.

Michael Pollan's short book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto described this environment as one filled with "foodlike substances" rather than actual food. He offered a number of deceptively simple suggestions for eating more whole foods: choose foods that your grandmother would recognize as food (no Go-Gurt or soy product), for example, and if you eat processed foods, choose ones that have fewer than five ingredients, and make sure you can pronounce all of them. After I read the book I spent a little time surveying the contents of our pantry, and was surprised that we still had a number of things that didn't fit the profile of "food", pure and simple. This, despite the fact that 2013 has been a banner year for us in terms of improving what and how we eat: we have less processed food and refined grains on hand, and more fruits and vegetables than ever before; we cook regularly, and make our own versions of easy items like hummus, salad dressing, and peanut butter; we try not to buy crap.

To be fair, sometimes it's a rock-and-a-hard place choice--like making our own bread. Would it be healthier to have homemade multigrain bread? Sure, as long as we could keep our hands off it, which we couldn't. Our time on the dysglycemia diet, when we were only supposed to eat a single serving of grains (ie, 1 slice) per day, made the decision to retire the breadmaker much easier. That diet, by the way, was responsible for helping us break a lot of our dependence on grains; we're no longer following it strictly, but Sean now drinks a kale, berry, and peanut-butter protein smoothie for breakfast in place of oatmeal, and I have eggs, fruit, and almonds in place of my old friend, Cheerios. I haven't eaten a granola bar since May, when I replaced them with cheese sticks. Pasta has made a return, along with the aforementioned sandwich bread, but we're much more careful about it than before. Just the other night, making pasta for the two of us, I threw in a whole cupful of dry pasta for myself, and then complained that it was too much--Sean, enjoying 1/2 a cup, laughed and pointed out that last year, we'd have split the entire box of pasta.

Another eye-opening book was The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, by Tracy McMillan. I referred to this as Nickel and Dimed: Food Edition, because that's pretty much what it was. Instead of reading about the experience of a Minute Maid in Maine, I read about what it's like to be a migrant farmer picking peaches, garlic and grapes in California; the massive food waste in Walmart's produce sections; and the "foodlike substances" that are prepackaged and reheated for your eating, um, pleasure, at chain restaurants like Applebee's. We're not chain restaurant eaters anyway, but if we were, I'd be seriously grossed out by how little actual cooking is going on in those kitchens! One of Sean's friends loves Olive Garden, despite living in New Haven, where the Italian food is fantastic. It boggles the mind--or rather, it would, until you consider that those restaurants are extensions of the food-industrial complex described in Sugar Salt Fat: those pre-made dishes are designed to hit you right in the tastebuds and keep you coming back for more. Plus, breadsticks.

My reading has taken a pleasant turn more recently, however, starting with Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr.  I was familiar with Child and Beard (the latter only because of the award named after him), but not Fisher, who was one of the first well-known American food writers, beginning in the 1930s.  Profoundly influenced by her love of France and French cuisine, she wrote essays and books that explored the sensual pleasures of the table--at a time when that concept was largely anathema to Puritan-inflected America. The author of the book is Fisher's great-nephew, and he based it on the voluminous correspondence preserved among and by the personalities in the book, as well as his aunt's meticulous journal covering the winter of 1970, when she, Child, Beard, and a raft of other American culinary lights happened all to be in Provence at the same time, sharing meals and wine together.**  He argues that 1970 represented an important moment of tension for the American food scene after decades of dominance by French haute cuisine, and among the individuals present in Provence that winter he identifies members of the various factions--the old guard and the purists (Child's stormy French collaborator, Simone Beck, and the perfectionist American ex-pat Richard Olney) vs. those ready for a breath of something new, and perhaps no longer exclusively European (Child, Fisher, Beard). 

The book managed to evoke the smells and tastes of the meals just as well as the turbulent personalities of those who created and enjoyed them, and left me with the desire to visit Provence, and to drink and taste some of what they describe. True, I'm not much interested in the snails, oysters, or sea urchins, but rabbit stew, braised slowly over low heat in a pan sealed with a piece of fabric dipped in water and flour, to form an airtight seal? Count me in. Same for sole meuniere, the fish which converted Julia Child to French cuisine upon her arrival in France--sole fillets dredged in milk and flour, fried in butter, and garnished with butter and lemon juice. (I have aspirations of making this after the holidays, as soon as I can locate sole fillets).  I should add, though, that I sensed more hidden issues of class and snobbery at play here than did Barr (who was clearly raised with money, and who is now an editor at Travel + Leisure).  For for example, I found myself rolling my eyes when Fisher mourned how crass and commercial, how American, everything in la belle France was becoming by 1970, in contrast to the pre-war halcyon days. Somehow her attitude, which was shared by Child and the others, seemed terribly selfish.  France is not for you, I kept wanting to say.  It's not some sort of Eden for wearied Americans to recharge their cultural and gastronomic batteries; it's a living culture, not an artifact displayed for your pleasure in a museum. 

At any rate, after I finished the book I read some of Fisher's own  work, starting with the rather eclectic Serve it Forth from 1937.  Julia Child's My Life in France is on my to-read (I even watched Julie and Julia, but only for the Meryl Streep parts; Amy Adams' plotline was so terrible I couldn't even bear to watch her).  I've just started another book by Michael Pollan, as well: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, and so far it's excellent.  More food reading, more food-making, and of course, more eating is to come between now and the New Year!

**Wouldn't it be great if one day, some grand-niece or grand-nephew of mine wanted to use this blog as material for a novel?  

Lost in Austen

I just finished reading Among the Janeites: a Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom.  It was a fairly quick read, but its breadth was somewhat surprising;honestly, I was just expecting some breezy commentary on the films, fanfiction, and cheesy Jane Austen tours in England, but the author managed to suss out plenty of interesting topics and colorful characters to interview.  She explores the tension between academics and non-specialist fans (guess who tends to look down on whom?); she probes the issue of what it actually means to be a "fan" of someone who's a pop-culture powerhouse as well as part of the literary canon (is it OK just to like the films?  Are you still a real fan if you've never read Persuasion or Mansfield Park, even though you love Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility?); she tries to achieve, through expensive corsetry, the Empire-waisted look at a JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) meeting.

Maybe all great literature is like a mirror held up to the reader, but it seems  Jane Austen offers more fodder than most.  For example, Yaffe interviews a clinical nurse who became convinced  that not only do many of the characters in Austen's novels display traits of borderline personality disorder (in the four types: waif, hermit, queen, witch), but that these characters reflect the actual borderline disorder suffered by Austen's mother.  Unsurprisingly, the life of this woman, Christine Shih, had been shaped by the borderline personality disorder suffered by both of her parents, and she came to see Austen's novels as a way of dealing with the emotional wreckage.  Another woman Jaffe interviews, a speech pathologist, is convinced that many of Austen's characters, like the children she treats, fall somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Chief among these is Mr. Darcy--she suggests that explains his comment to Elizabeth at Lady de Bourgh's house, about how he lacks the ability to converse with strangers.  It's an interesting thesis--they both are--but you get a sense that it's easy to become blinkered, capable of reading the novels only from your parochial perspective. (I enjoy one online commentator's point: "You know, sometimes people aren't autistic...sometimes, people are just dicks.") Or, as one academic put it, a lot of writing on Jane Austen, academic or otherwise, turns out to be "mutilated intellectual autobiography."  Burn.

 I haven't read Mansfield Park or Persuasion (I've seen an unprepossessing film version of the latter, with a young-ish Ciaran Hinds as the male protagonist), so I suppose those will have to go on my reading list.  Not that I think I qualify as an Austen fan at the level of many of the people written about in Yaffe's book; for one thing, I'm not really interested in Austen's own life and times. *shrug*  I am kind of envious of the JASNA members getting together with other people who really love a book you love, who are willing to talk about it on a deeper level than "ooh, Colin Firth is so hot!"  I miss that about college literature courses.  Over the summer I thought about joining a book club that reads classic and contemporary fiction, but they always meet in loud pubs downtown, and I'd prefer something a little more like the book club Phyllis was in, rotating among people's homes (though Phyllis' book club had its own torrid history of feuds and power-grabs, so maybe that's not a great example).  Sean pointed out that a lot of people might not have the space to host, especially if they live in apartments, which is true; god knows we couldn't fit twenty people in here.  Still, how much thoughtful conversation can you have shouting over a plate full of wings at Christy's?  The East Haven library does one classic read a month, though the next couple of months' books don't really interest me. March's book is Larch Rise to Candleford; maybe I'll join in for that one.

Snow Weekend

The anticipation of a winter storm, especially one that falls on a weekend, can be pretty fun.  I got up early on Friday morning to hit the grocery store, and we've been cooking up a storm.  Friday afternoon I made another batch of the creamy white bean and chorizo soup, mostly to freeze.  Saturday morning Sean made pignoli cookies for the cookie swap; we didn't wind up going because of the weather, so the cookies wound up divided between Hubbard, our neighbors, and Sean, since I find these cookies repulsive because of the almond paste, blech.  In the afternoon he made one huge pot of sauce, along with a small pot of pasta fagioli sauce for me. (There's a neat distinction around here that "sauce" refers only the traditional meat-based concoction that brews for four or five hours on a weekend afternoon, while all other sauce concoctions have to be given their proper names.  So where I would just say that Sean made two different sauces, everyone else would say he made pasta fagioli and Sauce).

I stocked up on books and movies at the library, though we haven't watched a single one of those I brought home.  I was particularly on the lookout for movies you can't get on Netflix, like Julie and Julia.  We went to the see The Hobbit on Friday night, which I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about in advance, but I have to admit to liking it better than the first.  I really do resent that this one children's book has been dragged out into a trilogy; maybe it was indeed Peter Jackson's "vision", but you know it had to be one gleefully encouraged by the studio suits!   I annoyed Sean by peppering him with questions in his ear during the movie ("Why are wood-elves unstable?" "Who kills Smaug in the end?") because apparently I am now That Girl (fond memories of Carla sitting down to watch half of Godfather 3 having never seen the other two...).  I can't say I was super-impressed by Smaug or Benedict Cumberbatch's voice-over. *shrug*  It's a dragon?  Yay?

Last night we watched Love Actually, which I assume I've probably watched almost every year since it first came out in 2003.  Ten years!  Unbelievable.  Honestly, I can't remember seeing it in the theater, though Sean assures me that all of us freshmen girls went together; the viewing I remember best was sophomore year, in Meredith and Popham's room that always seemed incredibly over-pink thanks to Popham's belongings and hot pink duvet.  We swooned over Rodrigo Santoro (Sean also helpfully reminded me that we nicknamed him "Pablo" for some reason), and someone eventually made Popham a huge glossy printed collage of pictures of him.  You can see the collage in the background of a photo of me and Sean that's sitting on the bookcase in our upstairs hallway.  We look really, really young--I was still flat-ironing my hair back then, and Sean was in his manorexic stage.

This morning I was Skyping with Carla and she told me about an article claiming that the movie is actually a terrible romantic film because so many bad things that happen--"Plumpy" getting hit on by the President, Emma Thompson getting cheated on, etc.  But the movie would have been completely trite if everything worked out for everyone.  People die, relationships sour, and nice girls like Laura Linney don't always get to fuck the hot guy who digs them.  I think the strongest scene in the entire film is Emma Thompson crying in her bedroom while Joni Mitchell plays in the background, before sucking it up and heading back out to get her kids to the play.  I used to cry at that scene, though I didn't this time around.  I was also struck this time by the complete lack of reality in Colin Firth's storyline, even though it remains adorable thanks to a) Colin Firth and b) the chubby sister ("Miss Dunkin Donut 2003") who may or may not remind me of Jen.  He and Aurelia don't know each other at all; they're just projecting their fantasies about the other one!  He could have been telling her how he wanted to kill and eat her, for all she knows.  Not really the best basis for a quickie marriage.

...Overall, I think Love Actually might be tied with Holiday Inn as my favorite Christmas movie. Time to track that one down!

Cookery

We've been on a soup kick the past few weeks, now that the weather has gotten colder. It started with a recipe for lentil soup with dandelion greens, finished with fresh lemon juice, that came from the Greek cookbook Kathy Schwab recommended, The Olive and the Caper (the recipes are fabulous, but the layout is just too much; lots of insets, wacky fonts, etc. Also, I don't really need a primer on the Greek gods, or Homer, in order to make tzatziki).  Then I made a split pea soup with ham hocks from a recipe on Skinnytaste, which got a thumbs-up from Sean's dad.  It was so good I ended up making it twice more; some went to our neighbors, Kari and Brady, when they got home from being in Utah for a couple of weeks (they'd previously given us some of the best beef stew I've ever tasted, so I returned their tupperware with my own offering inside) and the third go-round was chiefly to freeze.  After I'd already sauteed the vegetables, though, I realized I was out of chicken stock.  I was literally turning off the stove and trying to decide whether the Krauszer's down the street would be likely to carry stock or if I'd have to go to the store when Kari knocked to ask something.  The awesome thing about having a friendly neighbor?  She responded to my dilemma with one container of stock and a bag of chicken bouillon cubes!  The third batch was also an experiment to see if you could re-use the ham hocks, since it seemed kind of wasteful to chuck them out; doable, I learned, but it doesn't give you the same level of flavor as fresh ones. It's nice of the powers that be to call them "hocks," by the way, instead of saying "now flavor your broth with these severed pig's feet."  That might put people off.

Tonight's effort, however, was much more involved, creamy white bean and chorizo soup from Bon Appetit. It came from the stack of 2007-era magazines Linda had left behind in the closet in the basement, which I've been flipping through before recycling.  It took two hours to make, most of it active time, and more pots, pans, and utensils than I think I've ever used on a food item. I even used the blender with hot liquids inside.  Surreal.  I told Sean afterward that I had forgotten that Bon Appetit is not really designed for the J.V. cook, but I realized that that's not even really true; there weren't any special techniques required, just a lot of time management and following precise instructions.  The result, I'm happy to say, was fucking awesome, and since there was fresh rosemary and thyme in the pot, the house smelled delicious to boot. I'll be making a freezer batch on Friday, since I have enough left of everything.

The only real snafu tonight was discovering that I'd bought Spanish smoked chorizo,--the only kind I knew existed--while the recipe called for fresh, aka Mexican chorizo, that's in sausage link casings and which can be ground up easily. Slicing up slippery medallions of smoked chorizo into little bits? Actually really difficult, even with our knives newly resharpened courtesy of Gary (I learned on Top Chef that a knife's true test is whether it can easily slice through a sheet of printer paper...now ours finally can).

In a nice bit of serendipity, I started reading Provence, 1970 tonight, about a couple of months when Julia Child, James Beard, and a whole raft of American food luminaries whose names I'd never heard were gathered together wining and dining in the south of France.  It's written by one of the participants' great-nephews, who found his great aunt's meticulous diary in addition to studying the archived correspondence of the other figures, and it's really captivating.  It's making me want to try French cooking (except for snails, urchins, oysters, and things in aspic, all of which seem to be playing a big role), or go to Provence, or both.

Side note: While reading I was confused by the phrase pommes mousseline, which, I read below, means mashed potatoes.  But doesn't pomme itself mean apple, ala the Pomme d'Or?  But then how do you get pommes frites? Confusion...Googling...answer: French people call potatoes pommes de terre, "apples of the earth" (which is delightfully poetic), and then typically just shorten it to pommes.  I guess they figure no idiot is going to think you mean mashed apples...