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It is one of the few things in my lifetime about which I agreed with the Vatican.  In 1975, Craig Claiborne, the food editor of the New York Times and arguably the most influential food writer of the day, made the high bid at a charity auction for a dinner for two, donated by American Express, at any restaurant the winner chose.  He chose his business partner, Pierre Franey, as his dining companion; for the restaurant, they chose Chez Denis in Paris, where they ordered 31 dishes and nine wines, ringing up a $4,000 bill.  Claiborne’s “review” of Chez Denis ran on the front page of the November 14, 1975 Times, and was met with swift and vigorous disapproval.  The Vatican newspaper called it a deplorable display in a world where people were starving; Claiborne’s colleague Harriet Van Horne called it a stunt calculated to stimulate outrage; French newspapers noted that the night’s tab represented a year’s wages for many French workers.  Even their host at Chez Denis had suggested to them that their bill of fare would feed 10 people, and they could still dine splendidly without sampling every single dish.

After Claiborne’s death in 2000, the Chez Denis stunt was duly noted in his obituaries, and in tributes that poured in to the Times.  In hindsight, many writers expressed admiration for Claiborne, some grudgingly, some enthusiastically, for having had the moxie to pull this off.  I was not one of those people, and still am not.  I won’t even pretend to any sort of journalistic equivocation:  I thought that this was a disgusting thing to do, not because there were people starving around the world on that November night, but because it was a profoundly antigastronomic thing to do.  Claiborne wrote that he found the last of his three soups “anticlimactic.” Of course it was!  When you have that much food spread before you, at what point does each dish lose its individual integrity, its singularity?  When does it become an undifferentiated mass of food?  At what point are you no longer eating, but feeding instead?

I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of faux populism, the idea that haute is automatically inferior to bistro, which is automatically inferior to home.  (Granted, I *do* tend to favor home-cooked food, particularly the kind known in France as “cuisine de mere;” it is what I’d prefer to eat and certainly what I’d prefer to cook, but I believe that you can love your grandma’s beef stew without spitting all over the daube at your local four-star.) But if I don’t like faux populism, I absolutely, positively hate faux gourmandism, the idea that a high price tag justifies splashing about expensive ingredients hither and yon without considering basic principles of taste and balance.  If my Italian local is lucky enough to procure fresh white truffles in season, I have no problem with ordering a plate of spaghetti dressed with nothing but butter and a few shavings of those white truffles, and I understand that those shavings are going to put some serious additional change on the bill.  But I don’t want those truffles on every damn dish on the menu.  Nor do I need foie gras in a burrito, or ground Kobe beef in a hamburger.

Most of all, I don’t need caviar in a frittata.  I haven’t had too much exposure to caviar, but I’ve had enough to know that if you’re shelling out big bucks for beluga or sevruga, you don’t want to gunk up those little pearls with cream or meat or vinaigrette or chopped hard-boiled egg.  (Why this compulsion to serve egg with egg?  Why?) Apparently, though, someone at the Parker Meridien, one of the most expensive hotels in Midtown, has decided that what their frittata special really needs is caviar.  And lobster.  And cream sauce, plenty of cream sauce.  Thus it is that the P-M openly, freely and without shame, invites you to order this on your next visit.

The hotel’s general manager, Steven Pipes, has admitted that he doesn’t anticipate too many takers on this frittata, that he and the executive chef came up with this dish as a way to keep the menu from getting too “stale” (I still dream of the day when this sort of food fashion, “is it in or is it out?,” falls out of fashion), and that the whole thing is just a bit of a joke.  I agree that it’s a joke.  But it’s not funny.  What it is is a waste:  a waste of a good lobster, a waste of almost ¾ pound of caviar, a waste of butter and heavy cream, a waste of six eggs, all in pursuit of a stunt we should have got over playing 30 years ago.

Edit:  In my haste to get this post up, I neglected to mention that while I was able to track down the original Claiborne piece in the New York Times, I found both Harriet Van Horne’s comments and the remarks by Denis of Chez Denis in John and Karen Hess’s The Taste of America, a book that gets more and more useful to me with each passing day.

Philadelphia, here I come, off to get my semi-annual haircut, go to Reading Terminal Market, drink wine and eat cheese and watch hours of cooking shows with my mom, and celebrate a belated Mother’s Day with said mom and a belated birthday with my brother, who turned 26 on May 9.  I love my mom and my brother so much I could write encyclopedias about them both, but because I have to leave for my train in 10 minutes, I only have time for one little brag on how smart my brother is.

How smart is my brother? 

When I was 21, I worked in the special sales department at Viking Penguin.  Special Sales sells to any account that is not a bookstore, library or school.  We’re talking mail order catalogues, corporate gift buyers, non-book specialty retailers, wholesalers, jobbers and public broadcasting (PBS) stations.  Selling to PBS was my favorite part of the job, and thus it was not long before my boss decided to let me handle all of the PBS sales.  One day I received a call from the PBS station in Scranton, PA, one of the few channels which broadcasted to my little redneck mountain town, from which I had escaped just months before.  I told the buyer that I was actually a member of her station, having just come from the area, and we had a nice little chat.

I don’t remember relating this story to my mother, but I must have, because the following Sunday night I made my regular Sunday night phone call home, at which point Mom said, “Your brother wants to talk to you.” (Brother was 11 at the time.) I heard the telltale receiver handover noises, followed by my brother’s excited little voice.  “Jenny! Guess what! Mom and I were watching Mystery, and they broke for a pledge break, and they said if you sent them money they would send you books, and they said ‘we want to thank these new members…and we want to give special thanks to one of our members, Jennifer Mathis [this would be your Bakerina’s maiden name] at Viking Penguin in New York City, who helped us get our books on time!”

Dear friends, in those days I was not the experienced media whore that I am today, so even a mention on the Scranton public tv station’s pledge drive was a really big deal for me.  I was thrilled at the thought of my name being read on the air; I was touched that the buyer remembered me; and I hoped that all the kids who were mean to me in high school were watching Mystery that night (answer:  not bloody likely).  “Why, honey!,” I said to my sweet baby brother, “you’re kidding me!”

His excited little voice dropped down an octave, all excitement gone, replaced by a giggling snort.  “Yeah,” he said.  “I am.”

I know I proceeded to have a real conversation with him, followed by a conversation with my mom, but I remember none of it.  All I could remember, all I can still remember to this day, was thinking, “I’m 21 goddamn years old, living in goddamn New York City, and I just got swanked by a fifth-grader.”

Hello, poetry lovers,

In the face of unrelenting bad news, I decided to take some aid and comfort in poetry, specifically in the poems of Tibullus (55-19 BC), my favorite Roman poet, introduced to me by Kendall Hailey in The Day I Became An Autodidact (a swell book, unfortunately out of print).  Tibullus is known for his love poems, particularly those written to the faithless mistress who torments him, but his war poems are every bit as impassioned and lyrical.  I share Ms. Hailey’s admiration of anyone who stood up to be counted as a pacifist in an age when there was a god of war.  The penultimate stanza is especially poignant to me, a nice antidote to Cato’s advice to ”make her afraid of you.”

Off to Philadelphia for the weekend, dear friends, but I may try to visit one more time, LuthorCorp permitting.

Who first introduced the terrible sword?
What a brute he was, truly a brute-steel-hearted man!
From then on murder was hereditary in man, and war was born,
The shorter way was opened to the terror of death.
Or is the man innocent, to be pitied rather, we being the ones
Who turn what he designed against wild beasts to our own misfortunes?
This is surely the fault of precious gold; there were no wars,
When the cup that stood ready for the feast was made of beechwood.
There were no strongholds then, no pales; the shepherd looked for sleep
Among his piebald flocks in peace of mind.
If I had lived in those days, I would not have known the crowd’s desperate weapons,
Or heard with quivering heart the trumpet-call.
But as it is I’m pulled off to war, and some enemy soldier perhaps has on his back
Spears that are destined to come to rest in my side.

But as for me, kind Peace, come and possess my ears of wheat,
And from your white bosom overflow with fruit.

Consider this:  a Sunday morning in Astoria, a bit of a chill in the air but still your basic springlike day.  In the breadbox on top of the fridge is half a loaf of stale brioche, no longer fit for sandwiches but still usable for bread pudding.  Hey!  Bread pudding!  We’ll have bread pudding for breakfast!  I love bread pudding, not only because making it is easier than falling asleep on a cool spring night, but also because you can make it as lean or as rich as you’d like.  You can add eggs, subtract eggs, use whole milk, lowfat milk, cream; you can add sugar, honey, maple syrup, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, or eschew the sweets entirely and make a savory pudding.  Whatever you pick, it is easy to make, it is soothing and satisfying to eat, and it makes your kitchen smell like a million bucks. Hmm, I thought.  Maple pecan.

I turned on the oven.  I buttered a baking dish.  I cubed the brioche and laid it in the dish.  I sprinkled pecans and sultanas over the bread.  I took down my trusty Waring Blendor, plugged it in, loaded it up with milk and grade-B maple syrup (grade-B is stronger and more maple-flavored, definitely what you want here) and five eggs.  Turned on the blender, the blender of choice of bartenders everywhere, supposedly the only blender one will ever need to buy.  Watched first in surprise, then in curiosity, then in horror as the motor made a horrible grinding sign and the kitchen was suddenly filled with smoke and the smell of burning rubber.  Apparently the fan belt has given up the ghost.  I am able to decant everything into the Cuisinart and proceed as normally, but it is too late.  The kitchen should be smelling of maple and pecan, but instead it smells like an industrial nightmare.  The eventual bread pudding is indeed lovely, gently sweet, warming without being overfilling, but for me it is too late.  Every bite tastes like the cost of a replacement fan belt.

Consider this, part II:  Another Sunday morning in Astoria, the first warm muggy Sunday morning of 2004.  Lloyd turns on the air conditioner.  A horrible grinding noise is heard.

look me up.