Sonali Dev’s newest book, “Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors,” is an Indian take on Jane Austen’s classic, “Pride and Prejudice.”
In the 300-room Sagar Mahal, the Ocean Palace built by her great-times-four grandfather on the Arabian Sea, 13-year-old Trisha Raje is coached by her father not to be overwhelmed by the sorrow she sees at a school for the blind but instead find a solution, so she doesn’t feel badly.
And so, she does. Before long, Trisha has created a global charity that performs eye surgeries on the needy and then becomes San Francisco’s premier neurosurgeon, a woman with immense skill but so lacking in social graces that many in her family are not talking to her, as she once inadvertently jeopardized her older brother’s fast-track political career.
But that isn’t Trisha’s only difficulty in Sonali Dev’s newest book, “Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors,” an Indian take on Jane Austen’s classic, “Pride and Prejudice.”
Dev switches up the focus between Trisha and DJ Caine, a rising-star chef whose cancer-stricken sister is a patient of Trisha’s. Trisha is a descendent of Indian Royalty, while Caine, a Rwandan/Anglo-Indian, belongs to a much lower social class — the classic Austen-style mismatch.
To paraphrase Austen, Dev writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that only in an overachieving Indian-American family can a genius daughter be considered a black sheep,” and the book reflects classic Austen, with its subtle ironic humor and the structured setting required in any well-to-do aristocratic English or Indian milieu.
Trisha has broken the three ironclad rules of her family: Never trust an outsider, never do anything to jeopardize your brother’s political aspirations and never, ever, defy your family.
Trisha must cope with falling in love with Caine, saving his sister and ensuring that she will not somehow disgrace her family again.
Dev, who is married with two teenagers and lives in Naperville, says she’s been entranced with Jane Austen’s book since watching the Indian TV adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” called “Trishna,” in the 1980s when she was a middle-schooler.
“I went straight to the library and checked out “Pride and Prejudice” and read it over and over,” she says.
As for writing, Dev says she wrote before she could even read, making up stories and characters, noting she wrote and acted in her first play when she was 8. “Writing has always been with me,” she says.
She grew up in Mumbai though the family traveled a lot as her father was in the military.
“I was always the new kid on the block with a book,” she says.
She continues to read and write at an amazing speed.
“I am in fact waiting to get the edits back for my new book,” she says, noting that writing is an escape, a way of putting yourself in the shoes of someone not like you.
“Our food choices and our image of ourselves are part of our culture.,” says Chloe Hilliard.
“I didn’t come out of the womb craving Oreos,” says comedian and journalist Chloe Hilliard, who is launching her new book,F*ck Your Diet and Other Things My Thighs Tells Me, this Monday and Tuesday at Zanies Comedy Night Club in Chicago. “Our food choices and our image of ourselves are part of our culture.”
Hilliard, who writes about Hip Hop culture and has been featured on C-Span, CNN Headline News, ABC News and Our World with Black Enterprise, has long had an adversarial relationship with food. Over 6-foot tall at the age of 12, she also wore both a size 12 dress and shoe at that time. In other words, she was different and she knew it.
“Fitting in was never an option for me,” Hilliard said in a phone interview, noting that she was the loser of the fat trilogy—someone with a slow metabolism, baby weight that didn’t go away and big bones. “Growing up, it was unfair that people said just do this or that to lose weight. But now I understand it’s about acceptance, to be comfortable and to be healthy and okay with who you are.”
It was a truth that Hilliard came to only after a long time of trying to change her body with the help of fad diets, intense workouts, starving herself and consuming diet pills. Now she looks at her body image in a different way and understands how much our culture negatively impacts the way we perceive ourselves, how corporations including the diet industry also reinforces our image of ourselves. It was enlightening and freeing. But it wasn’t easy.
“I thought the book was going to be way more lighthearted,” says Hilliard. “I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to write. But it helped me understand where I was at different times in my life.”
But being Hilliard, who made her national TV debut on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing.” the book is not only informative but laugh out loud funny as well. Afterall, she has a message for readers—you’re okay.
“I use a lot of facts and figures,” she says. “I didn’t want the book to be voyeuristic, I wanted it to be about how culture effects our relationship with food and our waistline and teaches us that we are nothing without a perfect body. I want to help people get away from that. Be healthy, be fit. It’s a new year but you don’t need to be a new you, just yourself.”
Ifyougo:
What: Chloe Hilliard is launching her new book and performing at Zanies Comedy Night Club.
When: Monday, January 6 and Tuesday, January 7 at 8 p.m.
A decade ago, out of all the food magazines published, the most famous was Gourmet, which offered a sophisticated look at culinary trends and cookery. And Ruth Reichl, who formerly had been the food critic for the New York Times, a job that entailed wearing disguises because her photo was plastered on a large number of kitchen walls in the city’s restaurants, was the editor-in-chief of the magazine. It’s a story she recounts in her latest book, Save Me the Plumst (Random House; 2019 $27). You don’t need to be a serious foodie to enjoy her take on what she calls “the golden age of magazines.”
Reichl
didn’t want the job and though she had collected Gourmet magazines starting
when she was eight, she saw it as old fashioned and stuffy and at first said no.
But the publisher wanted to take the magazine in a different direction and saw Reichl
as the person to be able to make that happened. So, she signed on to a job that
included a limousine service, first class airfare and a lavish expense account.
The selling point after turning it down the first time was that she would be
home in the evenings with her son, not critiquing restaurants.
“I
never wanted to become that person,” says Reichl about the luxuries and perks.
She recalls flying coach and seeing two of her colleagues boarding the same
flight as they were going to the same place and they looked at her in
wonderment as they headed to the first class section. She took the bus until a
limo driver shamed her into using his service on a regular basis.
Despite being the food editor and restaurant
critic at the Los Angeles Times, the experience of being Gourmet’s editor-in-chief
made Reichl quickly learned how much she didn’t know. She recalls freaking her
first day when the staff started talking about TOCs and she had to desperately
call a friend and ask what that meant as she didn’t want to look ignorant in
front of her employees.
“Table
of Contents,” she was told. How simple but it shows the type of learning curve
Reichl was encountering in her new career.
Being
Reichl, multiple James Beard-winning and bestselling author, she also includes
a few recipes in her book.
“All
of my books have recipes, so I had to have some,” she says. That includes the turkey
chili she and her staff used when the gathered in the Gourmet test kitchen on
9/11 and cooked for the first responders.
“I still love cooking and get an enormous amount
of pleasure from it,” she says. “And I like to cook for other people. Every
morning I ask my husband what he would like to eat.”
Indeed, for Reichl, food
is such a sensory experience that she often likes to eat alone so she can savor
every mouthful, letting it take her back to the source of what she’s consuming.
From
the magazine folded and everyone went home, Reichl knew she’d write a book
about her time at Gourmet and kept copious notes and saved emails. “But then my
editor had to torture me into actually writing it.”
She
wants readers to come along for the ride when reading her book.
“I
want them to get the sense of what it was like,” says Reichl. “I want them to
enjoy themselves as much as I did.”
Ifyougo:
What: Ruth Reichl in-conversation with
Louisa Chu, a Chicago based food writer.
When: Wednesday, April 24 at 6 pm
Where: 210 Design House, 210 West
Illinois, Chicago, IL
Cost: The cost of on ticket is $56
($58.95 w/service fee) and includes a copy of the book, wine, and tastes made
from Ruth’s book My Kitchen Year. 2 tickets
include one book, wine and tastes for $80 ($83.79 w/service fee). To purchase,
visit brownpapertickets.com/event/4102551
FYI: The event is sponsored by the Book Cellar.
For more information, (773) 293-2665.
Still worried about that extra Halloween candy you gobbled down? Imagine how many miles you’d have to spend on the treadmill after attending the 1450 banquet, held in England celebrating the enthronement of an archbishop where guests munched on 104 oxen, six ‘wylde bulles,’ 1,000 sheep, 400 swans and such game birds such as bustards (larger than a turkey), cranes, bitterns, curlews and herons?
“Our ancestors had gastronomic guts,” Anne Willan tells me as we chat on the phone, she in Santa Monica, California where there’s sunshine and me in the cold Great Lakes region. I find it fascinating to read old menus and descriptions of banquets and feasts and for that Willan, founder of famed French cooking school École de Cuisine la Varenne, recipient of the IACP Lifetime Achievement Award and author of 30 cookbooks, is the go to person.
Even better, after collecting cookbooks for some 50 years and amassing a collection of over 5000 tomes, last year Willan and her husband, Mark Cherniavsky immersed themselves in their antiquarian cookbook library and came out with The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes That Made the Modern Cookbook (University of California Press $50).
“Seals were eaten on fast days along with whale, dolphin, porpoise and thousands of other fish,” says Willan. Hmmm…that’s different than the macaroni and cheese and fish sticks I used to eat at the homes of my Catholic friends on Fridays.
Here we peruse four centuries of gastronomy including the heavily spiced sauces of medieval times (sometimes employed because of the rankness of the meat), the massive roasts and ragoûts of Sun King Louis XIV’s court and the elegant eighteenth-century chilled desserts. One for the interesting detail, Willan also tells the story of cookbook writing and composition from the 1500s to the early 19th century. She highlights how each of the cookbooks reflects its time, ingredients and place, the recipes adapted among the cuisines of Germany, England, France, Italy and Spain as well as tracing the history of the recipe.
Historic cookbooks can be so much different than ours, ingredients unfamiliar and instructions rather vague. For example, Willan points out the phrase “cook until” was used due to the difficulty of judging the level of heat when cooking a dish over the burning embers in an open hearth. It wasn’t until the cast-iron closed stoves of the 19th century that recipes writers begin were finally able to give firm estimates for timing.
For food historians and even those just appreciative of a good meal, the book is fascinating. For me as a food writer, I wonder about covering a dinner where birds flew out of towering pastries, seals were served and eels baked into pies and it was often wise to have a taster nearby in case someone was trying to poison you.
The following recipe is from The Cookbook Library.
Rich Seed Cake with Caraway and Cinnamon
This recipe is based on a cake in The Compleat Housewife by Eliza Smith, published in London in the 1700s. Willan, ever the purist, suggests mixing the batter by hand as it was done 300 plus year ago.
“The direct contact with the batter as it develops from a soft cream to a smooth, fluffy batter is an experience not to be missed,” she says. “If you use an electric mixer, the batter is fluffier but the cake emerges from the oven less moist and with a darker crust.”
At times, Willan needs to substitute ingredients. The original recipe listed ambergris as an option for flavoring the cake. “Ambergris,” writes Willan, “a waxy secretion from a sperm whale, was once used to perfume foods. As it is now a rare ingredient, I’ve opted for Mrs. Smith’s second suggestion, of cinnamon, which marries unexpectedly well with caraway.”
1 pound or 31⁄2 cups) flour
1 2⁄3 cups sugar
6 tablespoons caraway seeds
5 eggs
4 egg yolks
1 pound or 2 cups butter, more for the pan
11⁄2 tablespoon rose water or orange-flower water
2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Heat the oven to 325ºF. Butter a 9-inch springform pan. Sift together the flour and sugar into a medium bowl, and stir in the caraway seeds. Separate the whole eggs, putting all the yolks together and straining the whites into a small bowl to remove the threads.
Cream the butter either by hand or with an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add the yolks two at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the rose water. Whisk the egg whites just until frothy, then beat them, a little at a time, into the egg yolk mixture. Beat in the cinnamon. Finally, beat in the flour mixture, sprinkling it a little at a time over the batter. This should take at least 15 minutes by hand, 5 minutes with a mixer. The batter will lighten and become fluffier. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan.
Bake until the cake starts to shrink from the sides of the pan and a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean when withdrawn, 11⁄4 to 11⁄2 hours. Let the cake cool in the pan on a rack until tepid, then unmold it and leave it to cool completely on the rack. When carefully wrapped, it keeps well at room temperature for several days and the flavor will mellow.
Andrew Friedman calls himself a chef writer because, as much as he loves food, he’s passionate about the stories chefs have to tell.
“My point of view is writing not so much about the food but about the chefs, that’s why I say I’m a chefie not a foodie,” he says. “I think too many well-known chefs are almost portrayed as cartoon characters and in a broad stroke. I wanted to spend time with them and really get to know their stories, who they really are and their impact on how we eat now. Like Wolfgang Puck. He’s a tremendous cook but people call him the first celebrity chef. He’s so much more than that.”
To accomplish this, Friedman interviewed over 200 chefs and food writers and others who were leading the food revolution against processed and packaged foods.
“I’m such a geek I would spend three hours with someone just to get a nugget or two,” he says.
The results? An accumulation of tens of thousands of transcript pages and his latest book, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New Profession (Ecco 2018; $27.99), where he recounts how dedicated and imaginative men and women in the 1970s and the 1980s, who were willing to challenge the rules, revolutionized America’s food scene.
Now chefs are like rock stars, often known just by one name, commanding their own empires of cookbooks, TV shows, restaurants, cookware and food products. But Friedman points out that up until 1976, the United States Department of Labor categorized cooks as domestics. It took lobbying by the American Culinary Federation, at the urging of Louis Szarthmary, the late Hungarian American chef who owned The Bakery in Chicago and wrote The Chef’s Secret Cookbook, a New York Times bestseller, to change the classification into a profession.
“I wanted to show how this became a viable profession,” he says. “I was talking to Jody Buvette, owner of Buvette in New York and she remembers sitting her father down and saying ‘I have two bad things to tell you. I’m gay and I want to be a cook.’ It was like telling your upper middle-class parents that you wanted to be a coal miner.”
Friedman, whose knowledge about restaurants, culinarians and food seems delightfully endless, chose three cities to focus on—San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. What does he think of Chicago’s food scene?
“It’s great,” he says. “I love dining in Chicago and you have some brilliant chefs but I think much of the beginnings started in those three cities.”
Besides, he has those piles of transcripts. There’s surely more than a few Chicago stories in all those pages. In the meantime, Friedman gives us a wonderfully written read about a defining time—one that in some ways separates frozen TV dinners and what many restaurants are serving today.
Ifyougo:
What: 5 course 80s-era dinner inspired by Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll with wines selected by Sommelier Rachael Lowe and conversation at Spiaggia Restaurant
When: Tues. October 2, 7 pm
Where: Spiaggia Restaurant, 980 North Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL
Cost: $150 per person
FYI: 312-280-2750; spiaggiarestaurant.com
What: Talk with Andrew Friedman about Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll
When: Wed, October 3, 6:30 to 8:30 pm
Where: Read It & Eat, 2142 North Halsted St., Chicago, IL
Cost: Purchase a ticket and book combo for $36.45 or 2 tickets and a book combo for $46.45
Life is busy for a lovely mermaid (and aren’t they all?). There’s riding seahorses through shimmering sea foam capped with frothy white waves, finding the perfect rock on which to display their fish-like tails sheathed in iridescent spangles so they sparkle in the sunlight, combing their beautiful long locks and, of course, singing enticingly so that sailors forsake their duty and travel to their doom all to get a better look.
For mermaids as well as mermaid wannabees or just those who love reading about these mythical creatures, folklore expert Carolyn Turgeon introduces us to their world in her recently released (Harper Design 2018; $35).
Turgeon, the editor-in-chief of Faerie Magazine, a quarterly print publication and author of several books including The Faerie Handbook, showcases all things mermaid by dividing her handbook into four sections. In “Fashion and Beauty” we learn techniques on creating mermaid hair—face it, haven’t you always wanted a reason to sprinkle glitter throughout your locks. Of course, then you need a mermaid mirror to admire yourself. Not to worry Turgeon includes directions. “Arts and Culture” tells the stories of sirens in classic mythology and contains luscious reproductions of mermaid art and recounts tales of mermaid from around the world. Fair warning—mermaids aren’t always nice.
You don’t have to go down to the sea for the section on “Real Mermaids and Where to Find Them.” Here, Turgeon takes us to the advent of mermaids as entertainers starting with the story of Annette Kellerman who learned to swim like a fish in her native Australia to overcome rickets and bowed legs, eventually becoming strong enough to swim an average of 45 miles a week. So good at what she did, Kellerman began swimming for money at young age and by 1907 was performing as the Australian Mermaid throughout the United States in glass tanks and in 1916 starred in A Daughter of the Gods, the first movie to cost over a $1 million to make as well as the first one featuring a naked woman (don’t worry, her long mermaid hair covered the most private of parts). Turgeon takes us into midcentury when there were a plethora of bars and restaurants with tanks for mermaids to perform in. Surprisingly, at least for me, not all of these have disappeared and some mermaid cocktail lounges are still in business including the Dive Bar in Sacramento, California, the Sip ‘N Dip Tiki Lounge in Great Falls, Montana and the Wreck Bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We also learn the stories of women who have made their livings as mermaids.
Mermaid libations
Of course, even a mermaid has to eat and the last section of Turgeon’s delightful book “Food, Entertaining and Stories of the Sea” includes recipes for the types of edibles a mermaid might nibble such as Savory Sesame Seed and Seaweed Cookies, Salmon Poke with Wild Rice, Pineapple and Macadamia Nuts and an assortment of sea-themed shaped cookies covered with royal icing. And because what mermaid wouldn’t want to set the perfect table to indulge in such delights, there are crafts to create seashell fortune party favors and shell cocktail glasses to sip such libations as Blue Sea Cocktails and Seductive Siren Cocktails (recipes included).
Those wanting to indulge their inner mermaids can try the recipes below.
Honey Gingerbread Cookies with Royal Icing
8 ounces of unsalted butter
One and ½ granulated sugar
2 cups good quality honey
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 teaspoons ginger
4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoons salt
¼ cup cocoa powder, optional
3 large eggs
9 cups all-purpose flour
1 large egg, lightly beaten and mixed with 1 teaspoon water
Melt the butter in a medium sized saucepan over medium low heat. Add the sugar is still mostly dissolved, then pour in the honey and stir to combine. Cook until very hard and mixture is smooth, but did not boil. Remove from heat.
Sift together baking powder, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and salt. Add up to 1/3 cup cocoa powder, depending on color desired. Add to the warm butter mixture and stir until well combined. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
Transfer the mixture to the ball of an electric mixer and add three eggs, beating until combined. Gradually adding flour, beating all the while.
When all the flour is absorbed, divided the dough in half and wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap.
Store in a cool place for at least 24 hours, or up to a week in the refrigerator. If the Joe is refrigerated bring it to room temperature before proceeding.
When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 375°F. Unwrap the dough and place on a well-floured work surface. Knead flour into the dough until it is very smooth, pliable and not sticky. Roll up to ¼- inch thickness for small cookies, a little thicker for larger cookies.
Use cookie cutters to cut cookies into mermaid friendly shapes such as seahorses, shells and starfish.
Big six minutes, checking to see if any bubbles form. If they do, gently smooth with a spatula and continue to bake until done, about nine minutes total for medium cookies and up to 14 minutes for larger ones. Remove to a wire rack and use a pastry brush to apply coat of the lightly beaten egg. Cool completely.
Decorate with Royal Icing (see recipe below).
Royal Icing
2 pounds of powdered sugar
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
1 to 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
10 tablespoons liquid pasteurized egg whites
Combine powdered sugar, cream of tartar, vanilla and pasteurized egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat high speed with a paddle attachment for 4 to 5 minutes.
Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
Blue Sea Cocktail
1 ½ ounces white rum
1 ounce Blue Curaçao
½ ounce Suze or any aperitif
½ ounce Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur
½ ounce simple syrup
Dash fresh lemon juice
Ice cubes
Combine all the ingredients in the shaker.
Shake until will chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass, on the rocks and serve immediately.
Andrew Friedman calls himself a chef writer because, as much as he loves food, he’s passionate about the stories chefs have to tell.
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Shelf Life 