Sunday, March 13, 2016

While watching Michael Pollan's Cooked, which is largely about how we have forgotten how to cook -- Dianne Harris...

While watching Michael Pollan's Cooked, which is largely about how we have forgotten how to cook -- Dianne Harris made bread. From scratch. Without a recipe. Using her stand mixer and the oven.

7 comments:

  1. Not using a recipe is brave. White bread is my nemesis. It never comes out like I want.

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  2. I really enjoyed Cooked, but some of the gender role stuff he jammed in there made me want to punch him in the face.

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  3. Eva Schiffer There's the ads from the 50s and 60s, yeah!

    Those seemed intentionally backwards: "A woman's place is in the house, so she may as well be in the kitchen." -- which yeah, the groaning here was palatable.

    I feel like -- and I could be misremembering -- that he does a lot of description, but not a lot of prescription. Am I wrong?

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  4. There's a lot of historical stuff that gets tied back to modern gender roles (like a bunch of BS about the essential masculinity of barbecue). I feel like he did well on history and very poorly on understanding that gender linked roles are a social construct that still exist in modern culture and poison his judgment about history.

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  5. I see the point. Yeah.

    Certainly in our household, my wife is the grillmaster. We don't cook whole hogs (because, seriously), but even at other people's house parties, she's handed the tongs and asked to watch the fire.

    It'll be interesting to see where this goes. I think we've watched two. The one on water had some remarkably unappetizing moments.

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  6. I enjoyed the series in spite of the gender role stuff, so I'd definitely recommend finishing it. :)

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