Broward Palm Beach Food Blog

Mediterranean Food
6:30 and 8:30 p.m. tonight at Cinema Paradiso, 503 SE Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale, as part of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. Call 954-525-3456, or visit fliff.com.

Babette: Sometimes a salad is more than just a salad

You don't get to the food until the end of Babette's Feast, the 1987 Danish movie based on a short story by Isak Dinesen, but it's worth waiting for the elaborate dinner scene that occupies the final third of the picture. I'd seen this movie years ago and long since forgotten how complex and touching it is. Two pious old ladies, daughters of the deceased town minister in a remote Danish village, hire a Frenchwoman who has escaped Paris during the Revolution to act as their maid and cook. Like most Parisians, Babette is a food snob (in a quiet way), modestly revolted by the stale-bread gruel the ladies teach her to cook. Babette has lost both son and husband in the Revolution; the pious old ladies have long since given up their dreams of a richer life -- one a budding singing career, the other a blooming love with an upper-class Swedish soldier. All of them, including the aged and now-much-decorated soldier who returns for the final dinner, make a kind of gracious peace with their losses -- the wistfulness is still there, coupled with the metaphysical recognition that on some level you always do live what you lose. And the whole party discovers new, mysterious pleasures in the feast Babette presents to them -- once the most celebrated chef in Paris, we learn, she cooks this meal as a way to finally lay her loved ones to rest; the preparation of the feast is a ritual of mourning, the consumption of this lavish dinner a metaphorical burial.

Dinner as funeral dirge.

Among the delicacies we watch being carted in, prepared, and consumed: bottles of Veuve Cliquot, turtle soup, blinis Demidof with Russian caviar and creme fraiche, a precious, rare tossed salad (probably impossible to come by in that snowbound village), and a centerpiece of cailles en sarcophages (whole quails stuffed with foie gras and truffles and baked in little puff pastry "coffins" -- another reference to the real point of this feast). There's cake, cheeses, and a platter of global fruit to follow -- recalling a time when a pineapple or a papaya seemed as exotic to Europeans as orangutans and crocodiles.

Dinesen seems to have invented the title for Quails in Sarcophagai if not the exact dish, but it's certainly a rarity. I did stumble across one recipe that seems to be pretty close, and once you get those quails deboned and pay for the truffles and foie gras, it's surprisingly easy. In the movie, Babette reattaches the little bird heads with toothpicks before she bakes them -- add this step if you want to be truly authentic. There's also an entertaining page about how to re-create the whole feast here, although the author takes some inexcusable short cuts.

Hit the jump for the quails in coffins recipe.

Andrea Ferreol and Philippe Noiret devour each other

I had to skip last week's Cucina Verite because it took me a full 10 days to get through the entirety of Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe, and frankly, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it. When the film was first shown at Cannes in 1973, Catherine Deneuve, who was married to one of the film's stars, Marcello Mastroianni, stopped speaking to him for a week. Ingrid Bergman reportedly had to leave the theater in a fit of nausea, and commented afterwards that she was almost speechless with disgust.

Some of you may better remember the English filmmaker Peter Greenaway's homage to La Grande Bouffe, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, a similarly appalling food/excrement/sex/cannibalism romp. I recall the experience of watching Greenaway's film twenty years ago vividly. Like Bergman, I nearly tossed my cookies.

What is the point, you might ask?

La Grande Bouffe does have its amusements. Were it released today, it would receive an X-rating.  There's certainly every variation of naked female pulchritude on display, most notably the fleshy, vivid carnality of a schoolteacher who turns out to be quite the nymphomaniac (played by Andrea Farreol). The plot concerns a foursome of debauched professional men who take off for a weekend to a deserted country house, where they plan to eat and fuck themselves to death.

There are wonderful foodie moments: One character holding a cow's head at eye level and reciting the "Alas poor Yorick!" speech from Hamlet. A live turkey massacre. Many processions of pasta. The pan-fried kidneys that win Andrea's heart.

But this isn't a movie to stimulate any appetites beyond the most depraved, and that's part of the point. We can't eat our way out of the human condition, much less out of our own animal skins. In the end, I'm afraid we're stuck with our own farts, bad breath, and bellyaches. We are what we eat. Even Mastroianni's stiffened corpse, stored in a meat locker, hardly escapes the resemblance. 

 

Hit the jump for a recipe, based on a dish served in the film:

Too many cooks make one lovely soup

I love to serve them roasted.
It gives them a more robust taste.
A wonderful side dish would be ravioli with boletus --
truffles with wild mushrooms
or chanterelles
depending on the season.
But you need a good pigeon.
It must be meaty or it'll dry out.
You could also cook them in a pig's bladder
in Madiera, cognac, and port wine.

Thus begins German director Sandra Nettlebeck's Bella Martha (released as Mostly Martha in English, in 2001) with chef Martha Klein's monologue over a black screen. Fade up, and we find her in a therapist's office, lying horizontal on a white couch.  "Please go on....," the good doctor murmurs, but as Martha launches into another round of free food associations, he stops her. "Why have you come to therapy?" he asks pointedly. Apart from the fact that her boss has threatened to fire her if she doesn't get help with her temper, Martha has no idea.

It took a movie like Mostly Martha to make me realize what a fully sensual appreciation of food might look like. Martha's monologues about food are poetry, and so is the opening montage of hands chopping vegetables, peeling shallots, dropping balls of gnocchi into a boiling pot, zesting a lemon,  shucking scallops. Is food preparation the only art that truly involves all five senses? The eye, the tongue, the ear and the nose are obviously integral, but I'd forgotten how important touch is to cooking, how much the cook gauges by feel.

Mostly Martha went immediately to the top of my favorite food films. I was  charmed, but weirdly, the critics were wildly divided on it. The plot involves a niece who comes to live with her after Martha's sister is killed in a car accident; Martha is thoroughly flummoxed by the prospect of raising a kid. It all works out in the end, as does the romance with an Italian chef who invades her kitchen, but it's the beautifully filmed cooking scenes (the cooks wearing white in a white kitchen, like angels), set to great songs by Paulo Conte and others, that you really savor.  The script was remade in America as No Reservations with Catherine Zeta Jones in 2007. Order them both from netflix.

Another of Martha's interior monologues: "One knows a good chef by the quality of his simplest dishes. Take for instance, salmon in a light basil sauce. Most people think it's no big deal and put it on the menu. But frying or steaming a salmon just right and putting the right amount of salt and spices in the sauce is very difficult.  In this recipe, there's nothing to distract you. No design. No exotic ingredient. There's only the fish. And the sauce. The fish and the sauce."

Want dinner and a movie? Hit the jump for a recipe for salmon with basil cream sauce from Ellen Brown's "Gourmet Gazelle Cookbook."

Raquel Welch and Hector Elizondo

Today begins our Cucina Verite Movie of the Week (see our list of upcoming films to watch along with us), and in honor of Cinco de Mayo, we start with Tortilla Soup.

First, a little trivia about Maria Ripoli's 2001 film. (1) The beautiful culinary scenes were choreographed by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feninger, the Food Network's "Two Hot Tamales," who run the Border Grill in Santa Monica. (2) Tortilla Soup is a remake of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (which we'll be watching in future weeks). (3) The studio released a book of recipes for the dishes daddy Martin Naranjo (Hector Elizondo) cooks during the movie, although I can't locate it anywhere. (4) A cultural studies professor from Maine has argued in print that the movie is a "neocolonialist discourse" that "reaffirms hegemonic ideologies about Latinos that privilege whiteness and contain ethnic 'otherness.'"

Three Extremes: Dumplings

I need junk food for the brain as well as the stomach, so I'm launching my own little mini Food Film Festival this month, beginning with movies I haven't seen yet and later circling back to my old faves (if I can keep from cheating. I can't wait to see Sandra Bernhard again as the hilarious insufferable food critic in Dinner Rush).

So tell me, which films have you seen? Which did you like best? Any I should add to the list? (I'm wondering about TV shows too). Anybody out there in the blogiverse care to watch along with me? I'm planning to do a run that looks something like this, maybe one a week, and post reviews. This ought to keep us busy for at least a year:
 

La Grande Bouffe

Films I Haven't Seen:
Tortilla Soup
Mostly Martha
The Last Supper (the one with Cameron Diaz)
Jamon Jamon (Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem -- who cares if it's any good?)
Woman on Top (more Penelope)
A Walk in the Clouds (Keanu Reeves, maybe my least favorite actor, falls in love with a winemakers' daughter. Possibly too hideous to sit through)
Red Sorghum (Li Gong)
Life is Sweet (directed by Mike Leigh)
Simply Irresistible (Sarah Michelle Geller -- meh)
What's Cooking? (multiculti Thanksgiving, with Mercedes Ruehl)
The Baker's Wife (ancient French from 1940, if I can find it)
Eat a Bowl of Tea (dir Wayne Wang, remember him?)
Mystic Pizza (I may have seen this and wiped it from memory, with Julia Roberts as a fat girl)
God of Cookery (no idea)
Soul Food (Vanessa Williams)
Fatso (Dom DeLouis and Anne Bancroft)
Rice Rhapsody
Oldboy (South Korea)
La Grande Bouffe (Marcello Mastroiani, the best)
Rare Birds (William Hurt as a chef)
Eat Your Heart Out
Three Extremes: Dumplings (Hong Kong)

Woman On Top

Movies I Plan to See Again
Big Night
Babette's Feast
Scent of Green Papaya
Chocolat
Fried Green Tomatoes
Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?
Vatel
Dinner Rush
Ratatouille
Tom Jones
Marie Antoinette (it is too about food!)
Like Water for Chocolate
Eat Drink Man Woman
Tampopo
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
My Dinner with Andre
Comfort and Joy
Waitress
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard, for the unforgettable coffee scene)
Sideways
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (Les Blank)