Semi-homemade cooking grows out of the barrel of a gun

Writing is my greatest pleasure when it comes to production, but with the reign (or perhaps I should say the irresistible temptation) of the computer, it's not particularly a tactile pleasure. When it comes to sensuous productive enjoyment, it's cooking for me. Now I am a rank amateur, knowing little about chemistry and disdaining cookbooks—indeed, one of these boorish reactionaries who thinks you can cook with a free intelligence, without sullying your brain with theory! (Don't worry, I harbor no similar illusions about reading/writing.)

On weekends, I watch the Food Network. My favorite show is called something like Home Cooking with Paula Dean, a sassy white-haired fat southern lady who puts a few sticks of butter in everything.

(During the commercials was one for the army: a young man playing pool with dad, insisting that he was only joining the reserves, that they'd train him locally until they needed him, that he wanted to be part of something greater. The ad ended with text encouring parents to “help them grow.” Damn you, selfish parents! How dare you keep your children to yourselves when we need them as precious ingredients in our savory home-cooked dish of war! But yeah, they'll train him locally till they need him, then when he's scattered across a sidewalk in a city he's helping to demolish, they'll zip him into a bag and throw him away and then lie to his parents though they were so selfless, so willing to contribute him. Man, fuck all these fuckers.)

Anyway, after Paula comes Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee. Now I am not really the type to imagine violent revolution, executing people, arrests in the night, etc. My revolutionary daydreams usually involve elections that go overwhelmingly the right way.—I'm a hopeless bourgeois. But I would probably shoot Sandra Lee myself. A slim blonde, turned out so trim in her Ralph Lauren sweater, talking about how she pulls her nieces and nephews out of school to celebrate their birthdays, explaining to us the picnic-tablescape she will create in her pristine white suburban dining room (can't have a picnic outside— it's dirty!) . Every episode, she whips up some sort of cream or topping (today it's egg-yolks, which she called yellows as yolk is perhaps too much a word of the barnyard, too evocative of what the yellow thing actually is to say around the blue-eyed turtlenecked children you're cooking for) and puts it through a homemade pastry-bag (“This is fun!” she coos). And then she always whips up a cocktail or wine drink, always very colorful and pretty, for the coiffed mothers who will come to this faux picnic. Today is melon coolers in mason jars: those mason jars, so lovely, especially if you get some at the antique store; you know, our grandmothers, who didn't drink cocktails or think about their tablescapes, used them not as bourgie decorations but to put up fruits because they didn't have cavernous corporate supermarkets to drive to in their sleek suburban tanks to buy food for their well-presented semi-homemade dishes. But no matter! We want things to look nice!

Now in responding to this unutterable horror that is Sandra Lee, we might actually want to bring in Nietzsche, if only we indeed treat him descriptively (rather than prescriptively). From Beyond Good and Evil, a book I only ever dip into for fragments—I keep it by the toilet these days—but eventually I'll read the whole thing that way:

What? And this should be the end? And the breaking of woman's magic spell is at work? The “borification” of woman is slowly dawning? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal you always found most attractive; it still threatens you! Your old fable could yet become “history”—once more an immense stupidity might become master over you and carry you off. And this time no god would hide in it; no, only an “idea,” a “modern idea”!——

In Sandra Lee, we behold (without having to appeal to Nietzsche's apocalyptic pre-modern Eternal Feminine except as a metaphor for qualities that ought by right to belong to all humankind) Europa spirited off to an American flatland of cropped lawns and cocktails, clinging with quiet desperation to the horns of the modern idea that is master over all the rest—capital—her soullessness sold in its neat sweater to less fortunate women who ought to be carrying guns rather than pastry-bags.

I think of my peasant immigrant grandmother, who knew how to work a mason jar. She once said to me, “People in this country so stupid you can't believe.”

Comments

[George W.]

I like cooking too...

[Matt]

John, I thought this a hilarious post. What's with this cooking show phenom?

How ironic, that in the desperation of an unprecedentedly dismal political landscape, Americans are turning to imitate--vulgarly, competitively, (an)aesthetically, as "real world" escapists-- what Kristeva liked to call the distinctively French "gout."

L'art de vivre this is not.

[Bob Slocum]

I like Mason jars for drinks... Half-filled with Jack Daniels and some lemonade on top.

And my Grandma put up her jams and jellies in Mason jars and had her "cocktails" out of them too.

“People in this country so stupid you can't believe.”-- very nice. And the backbone of our country's culture, to the extent that it is worth very much at all, is made up of people who had this attitude.

I think that all of these people like Sandra Lee secretly HATE food as too dirty and slimy and visceral. But that is what food is, whether it's Hungarian lung stew or a tasteful salade composee or firey curry. Food is our humanity and the coiffed--to stereotype for brevity--are repulsed by it.

[............]

Actually one of the better LS Posts. Yes, girls, make your own fajitas del gato in your bomb shelter. Cooking shows, like most TV chat-manga, are meant to keep the suburban happyness going, punctuated of course with a few ironic if not sapphic hints....

Martha Stewart or Maria Shriver are certainly as guilty as Bush or Schwazenegger