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Posts Tagged ‘jeff gordinier’

What Banana Pudding Hath Wrought

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 5, 2014| 4 Comments »

In the last couple years, my husband and I have seen so many fiction movies about chefs that now Netflix recommends any film related to food.

Not all films about chefs are equally good, though. High in our pantheon are Babette’s Feast, Today’s Special, and The Lunchbox. I’ll refrain from mentioning a couple recent ones that had too many Hollywood memes.

An article in the NY Times this week tells a real-life chef story that seems to imitate fiction. Jeff Gordinier interviews a pastry chef from the Bronx who has just landed a job at a restaurant in Copenhagen that some folks call the “best in the world.” The reporter, hoping to discover the source of chef Malcolm Livingston’s talent, travels with him to meet a great aunt.

“The person who had the answer, it turned out, was Aunt Alice. Aunt Alice is Alice Pulley, an 83-year-old deacon at Friendly Baptist Church and the sister of Mr. Livingston’s paternal grandmother. …

“Mr. Livingston nodded toward the kitchen as memories of poundcake and pecan pie poured forth. ‘This whole counter — she would have a little cake display,’ he said. When he was 5 or 6, he and his playground comrades became passionate advocates for Ms. Pulley’s baking. …

“Her signature dish, and the one that would wind up being pivotal in Mr. Livingston’s life, was a banana pudding filled with alternating layers of sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. She made the custard itself with eggs and milk, instead of relying on a powder from the supermarket, and she achieved the texture she wanted by way of flour, instead of cornstarch.

“ ‘I’m telling you, that banana pudding, really, it’s life-changing,’ Mr. Livingston said.” More here.

Photo: Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times
Malcolm Livingston II, recently hired to work in “the world’s best restaurant,” with his Aunt Alice Pulley, an inspiration.

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Insurance and Poetry

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 26, 2012| Leave a Comment »

My sister is a poet, among other things, and she sent me this story about a famous poet and his association with the not-always-poetic city of Hartford, where he worked for insurance industry. (Which just goes to show that poetry blossoms where it will.)

Jeff Gordinier writes in the NY Times about taking a Wallace Stevens walking tour that was, “like Hartford itself, quite modest. …  Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevens’s most indelible poems, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ That’s about it.

“Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving,” writes Gordinier, “After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute?

“Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself …

“ ‘It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,’ Prof. Helen Vendler, Harvard’s grande dame of poetry and the author of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, explained to me in an e-mail. ‘As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.’ …

“Evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford — his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company.

“ ‘Stevens enjoyed his work very much,’ said James Longenbach, a poet, a professor at the University of Rochester, and the author of Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. ‘It was crucial to his achievement. He turned down an offer to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his work. He continued to go to the office even when he was beyond the mandatory age of retirement. He never showed that he felt any conflict or tension between what might appear to be the different aspects of his life.’ …

“What moved me about the walk, in the end, was that he had chosen to walk at all. In a car-mad country that prides itself in being perpetually in motion, the poet made a clear and conscious decision to stop, to slow down, to burrow into his imagination. And walking had opened his eyes and ears to a place that was full of surprises. As Stevens himself put it in a poem:

“ ‘It is like a region full of intonings./It is Hartford seen in a purple light.’ ” Read more.

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