Celebrating V-Day with a Pot and a Knife

Julia Child once said that all you need is a pot and a knife to be able to cook great meals.

As a person whose kitchen, utility room, and even my crawlspace is full of cooking tools and accessories, I sometimes wish I had followed that dictum. I do love my food processor and Kitchenaid mixer, though. Life is fuller and more interesting as a result of some of the convenience items I have used over my years in the kitchen. And, based on what I have seen of Julia's kitchen, which you can now view in the Smithsonian, she didn't follow it either.

I'm going to go one step further and say that maybe all you need is a pot, a knife, and a partner who cooks.

Actually, it is my husband who loves the Kitchenaid mixer. We inherited one from his mother's estate, and it has rarely gone unused for more than a week since we first got it. We even had a special storage shrine built for the mixer in our remodeled kitchen. Our carpenter found a piece of butcher block that was strong enough not to warp from the weight of the mixer and installed it on drawer gliders. The only hard part is lifting it up from the shelf to the counter. The husband makes batter breads for all occasions, and is often found baking well into the night after I have gone to bed. It's one of the ways he gives of himself to others. Just this weekend he baked loaves of bread to take to the homeless shelter at our church where he volunteers on the 3:00 - 7:00 AM shift.

That brings me to our celebration of 27 years years of marriage. To honor Valentine's Day this year, the husband outdid himself. First, he found the rare bottle of perfume that I still love -- Ombre Rose in the Lalique-style bottle. He hates to buy things on the Internet, but for me, he bit the bullet. That demonstrates true love.

Then, he carefully planned and shopped for a special meal designed to support my weight loss goals and our closer-to-the-ground food lifestyle. Finally, he decided to recreate his specialty dish that he used to sweep me off my feet when we were younger.

He made the salad that has become our go-to-under-all-occasions salad. We use spinach, red onions, and whatever fruit we have available. This time we used strawberries and mandarin oranges. You could toast some nuts to make this even more special and use any lettuce you like. We've also used Bibb lettuce and mixed baby greens. We always serve it on plain white plates that make the bright colors stand out.

The husband went to the butcher shop and bought perfect sirloin steaks; this is out of his comfort zone but we're trying to be more cognizant of where our meat comes from. He was very careful to start his steak first so that mine was still rare when he poured in the Courvoisier cognac and lit it on fire. We haven't done this in years, and it was delicious!











We closed our meal with a beautiful fruit salad. This has become a signature dessert for our family and the combination of fruit on a clear glass plate is elegant and healthy at the same time. I feel like I'm a very lucky woman. Flowers, perfume and a thoughtful meal. For those of you who want to spoil your partner, this meal was simple, relatively inexpensive, and easy to make, yet it sent the Valentine's Day message loud and clear.

Really, all you need in life is a pan, a knife, and a fire in the pot. How you make your fire is up to you.

Julia and Joann

On Monday it will be eleven years since my beloved mother-in-law passed away. Joann was a child of the Depression, raised on a farm in Ohio, and was a part of a close-knit Mennonite family. Her trajectory from a stunningly beautiful young woman at Goshen College, through her years as a respected and beloved teacher in Rye, New York, and finally to her retirement in Arizona as the "hostess with the mostest" is one to be admired. She was kind, generous, and although she was not without her mistakes, she welcomed me and my son into her family with open arms. I miss her every day. Since we inherited some of Joann's prized possessions, including her cookbook collection, I am surrounded by memories of her. This is how I came to have a 1961 copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking on my bookshelf.

At some point in her mature adult years Joann became enamored of all things "Country French." Although she and my father-in-law traveled extensively in the United States when their sons were young, they turned their sights farther afield when the boys left the nest. They traveled all over Europe and went to Russia, Egypt, and India. They were on one of the first tourist groups into China and regaled us with the stories of the "luxurious" dormitory-style accommodations those early groups encountered. She tracked down her Mennonite relatives in France and visited the ancestral farm. Joann and Art hoped to instill their love of travel in their grandchildren and took each of them on a trip of his or her choosing for a graduation present. But, Joann wasn't just cruising through these countries. Among her books are photo essays on the culture, furniture, ceramics, glassware, and art of the places she visited and wanted to visit. Joann's amazing intellectual curiosity and love of beautiful things kept her vibrant right up until her last days.

It was always France that drew her back, though. She collected French pottery and furniture, and redecorated her houses around her collections. She scoured antique stores looking for just the right piece and it seemed like she bought every piece of Quimper that she ever encountered. As I have studied Quimper faience pottery, however, I find that she did actually specialize, and it is interesting that Joann mostly bought pieces from the Henriot factory that were made in the early 1900s during war times in France. Maybe it was the relatively inexpensive price, but I'd like to think that the earthy Breton peasant people who inhabit these plates reminded Joann of her farm roots, even though she moved far away from them as an adult.

The other thing that Joann collected and educated herself about was cookbooks and cooking. She found that when she moved to suburban New York she needed to upgrade her expertise and staple recipes in order to participate appropriately in her new social circles. In her cookbook, she would write the date and a list of the guests next to the recipe that she served them so that she would not repeat it the next time, and this is something my husband and I still do today. Joann's cookbooks are a treasure trove of information about the life she and Art lived and how they entertained, and they bring back memories of meals that she cooked for us. I can remember being picked up at the airport after a trip through O'Hare and La Guardia airports with two small children at Christmas time, and arriving in Rye to find an amazing meal almost ready for us. She purchased jumbo shrimp through a seafood buyer -- they really were jumbo, that's not an oxymoron! -- and we always looked forward to her cooking.

So, that brings us back to Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There are parallels to be found between Joann and Julia. Both were women who reinvented themselves as their lives demanded. Although Julia was not blessed with children, her life-long love affair with her husband is similar to the more than fifty happy years of marriage Joann and Art enjoyed. One of the reasons that Julia learned to cook was that she needed to entertain Paul Child's business associates, and by the time Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961, Joann was also trying to be an executive wife to her upwardly mobile husband.

It is disappointing to me to find out that apparently she did not use this cookbook because it is almost pristinely clean. You can see from my photo that it still has its original dust jacket with just a small tear in it. I wonder where she got it; did she buy the cookbook herself or did someone give it to her? It is a Book Club edition; did she get it because it was the most popular cookbook of its day and it just came automatically? I wish I could ask her, but both she and Art are now gone and the minutiae of their daily lives is gone with them. Since, thanks to Joann and Art, I live with beautiful antiques all of the time, I refuse to feel guilty about using my 49 year old copy of Julia. I intend to read it, to cook from it, and that will probably include getting it dirty. We will write in it just as Joann taught us, and I can't help but think that both she and Julia would be proud. Je t'aime, Joann.