A few weeks ago we attended the birthday party of a little girl whose mother is from Russia. The party was held at a football stadium — it was a tailgate party — and on a perfect autumn day a couple dozen people of all ages milled around the tables that had been set up and arranged with a massive spread, not even counting the chocolate cupcakes. One of the centerpieces of the menu was a smoked trout, which was both delicious and a thing of beauty. I said, “Wow, look at that, where’d you get that?” and it turned out that the Russian mama was a regular customer at a tiny grocery store about two miles away from our house. “You know about Lina’s Grocery, right?”

I did not know about Lina’s Grocery. “Tell me everything,” I said. “They have everything,” I was told. My husband listened intently — he is always interested in learning where he can get smoked fish — and we said we would go there as soon as we could.

The day came recently. We piled into the car and drove out to Hamden. “Where is this place?” my husband asked. “It’s off Dixwell, kind of near the big malls,” I said. We headed north and we only made one wrong turn and we got there in about ten minutes. “It’s on a bus line,” I observed approvingly. We parked the car and walked in. The exterior of the store was not too promising looking: Lina’s Grocery is a tiny doorway adjacent to a big home care services operation (also called Lina’s); walking in requires a small leap of faith. However, it is totally worth the leap.

Lina’s Grocery is an imported food shop that focuses on Eastern European food. That’s all they’ve got. If you want anything else, like a box of Froot Loops or a bottle of shampoo, go elsewhere. But if you want huge jars of beautiful peaches, relatively obscure teas (they have the Ahmad tea my husband loves), German butter, access to dozens of different kinds of Russian and Polish penny candies, or Eastern European breads and cookies, this is the place to go. I walked around for a solid fifteen minutes before I even thought to get a basket. Lina’s is a tiny store, but there’s a lot of data to absorb. The whole place is crammed with tinned, jarred, or otherwise packaged food. There is a tiny deli counter where you can buy your smoked fishes (many types) and deli meats (I haven’t absorbed any of that stuff yet). There is a wall of refrigerator cases where they have bottles of kefir, stacks of different butters, and cheeses. You can buy bottles of kvass, jars of pickles, tins and bottles of eggplant and pepper spreads; if you have ever, ever wanted to buy a tin of sprats, Lina’s is the place to go.

It is, actually, a little overwhelming for the novice. I wanted to understand what the goods were like before I started making my selections — was I, in fact, going to buy anything at all? What were the prices like? Did it look like they had good turnover? Did Lina’s even take credit cards? It seemed like the kind of place where it was quite possibly cash-only, which would mean making more careful selections, because we only had so much cash on us. The shop was certainly busy – there were maybe six other people in there, when we first arrived, and in that space, six is a lot of people. I moved slowly, deliberately, until my daughter said, “Mama, LOOK!” and grabbed a can off a low shelf. The label read “Coffee Sweetened Condensed Milk.” And there was a vanilla one, and a caramel one. “Oh my god,” I said. “We need these.” I finally went to get a shopping basket, and put one can of each into the basket. Made in Lithuania.

And then the ice was broken. I debated buying one of the massive, beautiful glass jars of peaches, but held off: I’m not sure we have use for that quantity of canned peaches. But they are beautiful, and as soon as I can think of an excuse to buy a jar, I will. I did break down and buy a package of Marmalade Snails, which we haven’t tasted but look like a cross between a Goetz Bullseye candy crossed with Chuckles (the snails are fruit-flavored jelly rolled up with a creamy white filling, to look like tiny slices of jelly-roll, or snails — made in Belarus). We bought a loaf of a very dark rye bread, a pack of chocolate sugar wafer cookies, two Polo bars, and some kind of chocolate candy that I should have made a note of, but didn’t, which I regret, because it was really really good.

We happened to have some pastrami already at home, and once we unpacked our haul from Lina’s my husband got right to work building himself a handsome pastrami sandwich on the rye bread. “Do you think you could learn to make this?” he asked me. “Bread like this?” I read  the list of ingredients and said, “Probably.” And I probably could. But I’m not leaping to do it. The fact is, the groceries at Lina’s are very reasonably priced, and so long as we don’t mind trekking the two miles to go stock up on things, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t just give them our custom. And anyone else living in the New Haven area who feels a strong need for Russian or Polish candy, or coffee, or pretty much anything else they miss from the old country, should head out there straightaway.

My husband told me that he heard people speaking Russian in the store — in fact someone addressed him in Russian, clearly assuming that anyone who’d go to Lina’s would speak the language. I’m not sure how big the Eastern European community is around here, but it is clear that Lina’s is meeting the needs of an awful lot of people. The cans and jars on the shelves all look fresh and clean — this is not stuff that’s been sitting around forever waiting to be bought, it’s stuff that turns over frequently. And right now, of course, there’s tons of stuff that’s in, special, for Christmas — all kind of fabulous gift packaging of things. Tins of tea that look like Victorian decorated cloth-bound books and so on. Packages of frosted wafer cookies with extra-fancy icing decorations. And, let me say again, the prices are good: we loaded up our basket with lovely things and came out having spent only about twenty dollars.

I have been thinking very vaguely about having people over on New Year’s Day and I strongly suspect that if we do, a hefty percentage of the menu will be straight from the shelves of Lina’s. I owe that Russian mama a debt of gratitude.
Lina’s is at 119 Sanford Street, Hamden, CT. They’re open Monday through Friday from 10-7, Saturdays closing early at 3 o’clock. Closed Sundays. They do take plastic.

This year, we went to New York City for Thanksgiving: it was pretty much the usual gang of idiots, just in Manhattan instead of New Haven. My parents were there, my brother and his family, my aunt and uncle, my cousin and his family. We were all happy to see each other. We had a fabulous meal, in my aunt and uncle’s apartment. The meal was prepared by my cousin and his wife, people who know their way around a kitchen and who are able to plan a Thanksgiving dinner, long-distance, with extraordinary skill.

We went to New York mid-morning, on the train; we hung around the apartment for a few hours; we ate ourselves into a stupor; and then we staggered back to Grand Central Station, dozing most of the way home. When we got back to our apartment, we cracked open the Ziploc bag of leftover smoked turkey that we’d been given as a parting gift, and made sandwiches. “This is really good,” we all agreed, “but it’s too bad we don’t have leftovers of the other stuff.”

So it was that at eleven o’clock on Friday morning, we could be found at our local butcher’s counter, buying a ten pound turkey to take home and roast. While I chatted with Jimmy about the turkey — Jimmy and I had talked earlier in the week, and he knew the odds were pretty good I’d be coming in to buy a small turkey come Friday — my husband collected the other items we needed. A loaf of semolina bread, celery, onions, to use in the stuffing; some green beans, because everyone agreed we’d want a green vegetable. We bought more eggs, so I could make corn pudding, and my husband added some russet potatoes so he could mash them. My daughter threw a bag of potato chips. When I protested, “Why the hell do we need potato chips, if we’re about to cook all this food?” she said, “But I need a snack!” So we bought the potato chips.

We got home, turned on the oven, and immediately got to work. My husband and I don’t exactly work seamlessly together in our kitchen, but we do pretty well. We managed to get the stuffing assembled within 40 minutes or so (long sautéing of celery and onion, then quick combining with bread cubes, dried cranberries, parsley, and some beef stock we had sitting around) and the turkey was in the oven by 12.30. All afternoon we worked in fits and starts. We had to take breaks to take care of other pressing matters (there was a movie to return to the video store, for one thing; and our daughter’s little friend who came over to play needed a snack, and I needed to tell my daughter, after the little friend left, that if she didn’t clean her room she wasn’t going to get a bedtime story), but we were all seated at the dining table at 6.45, which is pretty much when we normally sit down to eat.

In the end, we were too exhausted from cooking to want to bother trimming and cooking the green beans. “Do we need to have the green beans tonight?” I asked. “Screw it,” said my husband. “We’ve got plenty of brown food here.” And we were gluttons. There were mashed potatoes done with sour cream and butter. There was turkey, which my husband had complained looked overdone, but which tasted wonderful and didn’t seem overdone to me at all. There was corn pudding, which my husband said was the best corn pudding I’d ever made (possibly because I messed up and used four eggs instead of three, but we’ll never know). There was the bread stuffing, which was a little bland to my taste, but which was still very satisfying. And there was gravy, which is my husband’s enterprise entirely — I refuse to have anything to do with it — and for once, he didn’t complain about it being wrong.

We ate and ate and ate and then we cleared the dishes and cleaned up and we were only a little sad that I hadn’t gotten around to making a dessert. “What we really need is a chocolate chess pie,” my husband observed. “I could make one tomorrow,” I suggested. But the weekend has come and gone. I haven’t made that chess pie. But we have eaten most of the leftovers. It feels pretty good. We had our Thanksgiving and ate it, too.

The Story of the Stromboli began because I had some random ingredients that I had to put together somehow to form a Meal. This is how many kitchen victories begin. It is, of course, also how many kitchen tragedies begin, but let’s not dwell on that right now.

I had thawed a 1 1/3 pound package of pizza dough. (This was homemade dough I’d put together last week. I deliberately made a vast quantity of dough, and used 1/3 of it the day I made it, and froze the rest of it, divided between two plastic tubs.) I had this notion that if I rooted around in the fridge, I would find that I had what it would take to make a novel dinner, with the pizza dough as a base. Unfortunately, I struck out. I had Parmesan cheese, but the jar of roasted red peppers I’d thought I’d use had gone moldy. (Whoops. Kind of a big jar, too,  which sucks to waste, but — sometimes these things get away from us.) I had half an onion in the fridge, and a half of a bag of frozen spinach. I could make pizza, sure, but…. wouldn’t it be more fun to make a stromboli?

But: meat. The only meat in the house that I needed to use up was pot roast. Could I make pot roast stromboli?

I suppose I could. On Facebook, where I voiced my query publicly, one person suggested making a stromboli using challah dough, and stuffing it with kasha and pot roast. I think I’d add some smothered cabbage and onions: an idea worth exploring another day.

But on realizing that I lacked mozzarella — without which I feel there is no stromboli — I decided that the thing to do was stop at the grocery store and find some other meat to put in the beast. Pork products were out of the question, and since the store didn’t have any beef salami (which would have been ideal), I opted for pastrami. My daughter, who has never seen me buy pastrami before, said, “Yuck, what’s that?” I said, “You’ll love it.” She scowled at me, but we walked home with our groceries and I told her my plan.

“I’m gonna sauté some onion and garlic and cook spinach into that too, and then I’m gonna roll out the pizza dough, and I’m gonna put cheese and pastrami and the onion and spinach and garlic on, and then I’m gonna roll it up so it’s like a jelly roll cake [something she’d seen made on the Great British Bake Off] and then I’m gonna bake it.”

“That sounds good,” she admitted.

“Ok, then,” I said. We got home and I got to work. I grated cheeses (mozzarella, Parmesan, provolone) and I cooked the vegetables and I greased a big cooky sheet. In the meantime, I texted my husband and said, “Pastrami stromboli for dinner.” He wrote back, “not sure what that is, but you had me at ‘pastrami.'” When he walked in the door, I was starting to assemble the thing itself.

Two weeks ago, I baked two dozen bialys. I baked one dozen toward the end of the week, and then two days later I baked another dozen. The first batch was mostly a failure. Well: the first half dozen were a failure; the second half dozen were a little better. By the second go-round, I was starting to get the hang of shaping the bialys correctly, and by the end of it all I thought, “When I do this again, I’m gonna be on top of it.”

I haven’t made bialys since. The last two bialys went moldy before we had a chance to eat them, which is my own fault, because obviously I should have just put them in the freezer. But for a few days, there, everyone here was gleefully eating bialy after bialy. We had bialys with butter and bialys with pimiento cheese and bialys with cream cheese and red onion. It was a good time, and well worth the work and angst involved in making the bialys. No one here said, “Uck, Mama, no more.”

Since making all those bialys, I have made chocolate chip-butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies, and I’ve made a lot of evening meals, more than a handful of lunches and snacks, and I’ve baked some white sandwich bread and one really good Aunt Velma chocolate cake with coconut frosting. In a couple of days I have to get ready to bake a birthday cake for my father, to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. All of this is to say, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and a lot of baking and it’s all fine. No one’s complained.

But yesterday, as my daughter and I were unpacking a grocery delivery, she asked me, “Mama, have you ever eaten an Oreo?”

I was taken aback. Oreos are one of the essential cookies of my childhood. I’ve eaten more Oreos than my daughter has had hot meals. “Sure,” I told her.

“Can you buy some Oreos sometime?” she asked.

This, on a day when we had a remarkable homemade chocolate cake with coconut buttercream frosting just sitting on the counter. Right there. Cold milk in the fridge waiting to be served alongside the cake. Right at that moment, my daughter wanted to know if I could buy her Oreos.

And I thought, “Why am I doing this?”

So I’m going go stop baking nice things for a while. We will eat up the cake we have, and the leftover Hallowe’en candy, and I will buy a box of Oreos one of these days, and my daughter will love them. (In fact, she HAS eaten Oreos; she has not reached the age of 8 1/2 without experiencing Oreos. That would be disgusting. It is true, I think, that she’s never had to suffer through eating Chips Ahoy. But we’ve made sure that she knows about Nutter Butters and Oreos and Fig Newtons and other American cooky classics.) (I can’t recall if she’s ever had Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies; we should get a box, just to be sure she’s well-rounded.)

I can’t decide if she will care that I’ve stopped baking for the household. It may be that she won’t care at all, and that she’ll be more than happy to just have Oreos or maybe some Keebler chocolate covered graham crackers, when she wants something sweet. But I bet one day she will sidle up to me and ask, “How come you never make those brown sugar coconut cookies anymore? Or those chocolate sandwich cookies? Those were really good.”

And I’ll say, “Chocolate sandwich cookies? You mean, the ones that are just like Oreos, except like even better?”

Yesterday I went to the public library to return my copy of the new Shirley Jackson book, which was due (appropriately) on Hallowe’en, but which I returned a day late. I paid my 20 cent late fee and ambled off to browse for something I could pay late fees on in the future. The books that fell into my hands were Michael Wex’s “Rhapsody in Schmaltz” and “The Gefilte Manifesto” by two hipstery sounding young Members of the Tribe named Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alepern. In case you are slow on the uptake: these are very different works on the same subject: Jewish food.

Wex’s book is of course primarily a work of prose, a cultural history, and the Yoskowitz/Alpern work is a straight cookbook. I began to poke through them both today, with some difficulty, as we acquired two new cats last night and this morning they’ve decided that it’s totally ok to jump up to wherever I am sitting and make it impossible for me to read.

But I can confidently predict a few things: 1. I will really enjoy the Wex book and 2. the cookbook will simultaneously drive me insane and make me feel a need to do things that will surely qualify for immediate cataloging in the Museum of Tsuris. They’ve got a recipe for sour cream, my friends. Sour cream. An item many of us keep in the fridge; an item almost no one in their right mind would make from scratch at home. I will accept this challenge. Apparently all I need is cream and buttermilk. How hard could it be? I am already very, very loyal to both Cabot sour cream and Arethusa Farm Dairy sour cream. But if I can make a comparable product on my own, at home? I might be willing to do it, once in a while.

More likely, I will wind up with some putrid-smelling yellowy-white glop that I have to rush out to the dumpster. But, it occurs to me — I had no great high hopes with my yogurt making enterprise, and that turned out quite well, so… Sour Cream, here we come.

I have an associate who is an American living in England, in Norfolk. She’s been there a long time and seems very happy there. The basis of our friendship is comparing notes on food and cookery, and one of our running dialogues is about how Jewish cooking gets bastardized by mainstream media outlets. We spent a long time discussing how the Great British Bake-Off treated babka, for example. And then she recently posted to Facebook a link to a recipe in Better Homes & Gardens, a magazine I only see when I’m at a doctor’s office. It was for something they called “Snickerdoodle Croissant Cookies.”

E. took one look at this and wrote on Facebook, “No, they are rugelach. I know it’s hard to pronounce, but at least give credit.” She is, of course, absolutely correct. These are rugelach. Not the kind I’d make, mind you — all my rugelach work is in the chocolate format — but they are undeniably rugelach. The cream cheese dough. The rolling out and twirling into little triangles. Etc. etc. These are rugelach.

I was as disgusted as E. was and commented in support of her post. When E expressed surprise at how many snickerdoodle recipes BH&G has on their website, I observed, “Well, a lot of people like snickerdoodles.” I added, “I think of them as a WASP cooky. Like, “We’ll make cookies, okay, but we’ll make sure they don’t taste TOO good.” “ This comment garnered an amusing number of “likes” and it got me thinking, “Maybe they really ARE a WASP cooky.” So I Googled “snickerdoodle” and one of the first sites I landed on opened with this paragraph of text:
“To me, Snickerdoodles are the quintessential Christmas cookie. [“Aha. There you go,” I thought.] Nope, they are altogether the quintessential cookie. Not chocolate chip cookies. Not oatmeal. And for heaven’s sake, not fussy decorated cookies. It seems there are a lot of people with this sort of reverent endearment for snickerdoodles. So what exactly is it that makes them so special?”
This is someone named Sommer, by the way, writing at The Pioneer Woman’s website. We all know that The Pioneer Woman is very popular; this post wouldn’t be up there unless it was felt that this snickerdoodle thing would resonate with a large audience.

So I read Sommer’s paean to the snicker doodle and then I read the list of ingredients for the cookies. It goes like this: Flour; sugar; butter; cream of Tartar; baking soda; salt; eggs; cinnamon. Assembly is the usual system — you cream the butter and sugar together, you add the eggs, you blend them in. Then you take the dry ingredients, holding back some of the sugar and the cinnamon, and you add those to the mixing bowl. You make little balls of dough with your hands, roll them in the cinnamon and sugar, and bake.

And what you wind up with is the Official State Cooky of Connecticut, I am sorry to say — the most abstemious cooky recipe I can think of, off the top of my head. An almost ascetic cooky.

“But shortbread!” you’re saying. “Shortbread has an even shorter list of ingredients.”

It does. It’s true. But the sheer quantity of sugar and butter involved in shortbread makes it so much more decadent than the snickerdoodle. E., over in Norfolk, and I were in agreement about this.

The snickerdoodle, we agreed, is among the most goyische cookies ever. Possibly the holder of the First Place Prize for Most Goyische Cooky. (There’s probably some orange-flavored spice cooky that would technically win first place except that no American bakes them at home, and they’re either imported from Germany or baked exclusively by a handful of small bakeries in Minnesota.) I admit that my notions regarding snicker doodles are colored by my primary association with them: my husband likes snicker doodles and has fond memories of his mother making them. So I associate them with Gentile mothers who now and then feel pressed to bake something vaguely sweet.

I posted on Facebook. “Who of you love snickerdoodle cookies? Like, if someone asks you what your favorite cooky is — it’s your BIRTHDAY and you can have ANY COOKY YOU WANT — do you want snickerdoodles?” Out of a fairly long run of comments, with (as of this writing) 23 people responding, only three people said they were their favorite cooky; one person said, “yes, they’re my favorite if my mom makes them”; and the overwhelming majority of commenters — an extreme minority of which were Jewish, by the way — said, basically, “meh.” Like, “I’ll eat them if they’re in front of me and there’s no other cookie option, but whatever.” One woman remarked, “They’re such a Mom cookie.” That rang some bells with me: they ARE a mom cooky. To me the snickerdoodle does convey that sense of “I have to do SOMEthing, here, I’ll do THIS” — that tired, harried woman who has to bake something for the PTA bake sale and knows she can’t get away with just chucking a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies onto a tray. It does not convey, to me, any kind of familial or holiday warmth. Between the “plain” vibe and the “spice cooky” vibe, it is so stern, to me. There’s no luxury in a snickerdoodle, there’s no treat in it at all. It’s a “doing the best I can” kind of cooky. And worst of all, it calls for Cream of Tartar, a substance that almost no one keeps around the house*, so it’s actually a pain in the ass to make. That’s the kind of cooky that doesn’t speak to me at all.

Rugelach, by contrast: rugelach is rich; it is warm; it is homey (even if it’s not made at home: the hands-on attention required to make rugelach makes serving even bakery rugelach an act of love: no one pretends that it’s a snap to make rugelach). Rugelach are, in a way, the exact opposite of snickerdoodles. It’s obvious that a plate of rugelach is gemutlich. I suppose there are people for whom the snickerdoodle also conveys that feeling, but I am 100% sure: those are people who grew up without rugelach.

And I am sad for those people.

If readers want to provide me with a list of cookies even less treat-like than the snickerdoodle, please feel free to post a comment.

*Yes, I keep Cream of Tartar around the house, but I’m not a normal person.

I hadn’t given Mimi Thorisson much thought at all since I last made one of the pear cakes I make that improve on Thorisson’s original.  But a recent copy of the Wall Street Journal brought her to mind because there was a lovely article about Ms. Thorisson’s kitchen at her house in France. I looked at the article quickly while I was sitting on a bus, and while I wanted to recycle the newspaper once I reached my destination, I actually saved this section of the paper so that I could really absorb the lunacy here at my leisure.

What actually happened was that a bottle of water leaked in my bag, and the newspaper got soaked, and in the end I had to go online and dig up the article in order to more fully absorb Ms. Thorisson’s beautiful house in Bordeaux. Which has fifteen bedrooms. I can’t figure out how many toilets have to get cleaned; I’m trying to remember how many children Ms. Thorisson has. It’s some mind-boggling number. Ditto with the dogs.

But it’s clearly ok. Ms. Thorisson and her husband are not worried much about money or housecleaning. They doubtless have people to worry about that stuff for them. I’m ok with that. (I mean, I’m jealous as fuck, but whatever.)

What bugs the hell out of me, with this article, is the layout of Ms. Thorisson’s kitchen. It’s a really good example of the kind of kitchen that I think about all the time — I have, in fact, been working on a long essay on the subject that keeps slipping away from me — which is, The Kitchen that is Really Beautiful and Really Big and Really Hard to Imagine Working in. They spent $45,000 working on this kitchen, and I can’t figure out where they set the dishes down when it’s time to bring them near the sink for washing; I can’t figure out where they set down the spoon when they’re done stirring the pot at the stove.

I decided to spend some time really looking at the pictures in the online version of the article to absorb what it would actually be like to work in this space. Photo 3/21 gave me some hope, for a moment. I considered the practical, real-life move of keeping the newborn in a pram near the stove. As long as Baby’s not blocking my path to anything, I find this a sensible solution to the “where should Baby go while I’m cooking?” problem. I looked to the marble-topped table, where one of the older daughters is working. “Ah,” I thought, “It’s on wheels! So, that’s smart, actually, because you can do your prep work and roll it further from or close to the stove as needed.” But then I looked more closely. The Kitchen Aid and the Cuisinart are both on that table — both plugged in. So you can’t just blithely wheel the table around. It’s got to be pretty stationery, or else there will be hell to pay (and possibly small children wounded). It was only after a few minutes of staring at this photo that my eye landed on the photo’s caption, which advised me that the young woman at the marble topped table wasn’t one of the older daughters, but was, rather, Ms. Thorisson’s assistant, Allegra.

My apologies, Allegra.

I get that Ms. Thorisson can do whatever she wants, and that she’s cooking for a mob at most times. And I get that these rooms are beautiful. I’d like a giant, curved, corner-fitting china cabinet too, folks. (Not that I have anywhere to put such a thing, but that doesn’t matter, does it?) I really like the purple sofa, though it seems a bit… well, I like to lie down on the sofa when I watch a movie, and it doesn’t seem to me quite that kind of sofa.

What I don’t get is, How can anyone view this household’s kitchen decor and design as actually aspirational, when the fact is, it must be really annoying to cook in such a kitchen? In fact, Ms. Thorisson has two such kitchens in her house. The second kitchen does seem to have some countertop near the sink, but there’s no dish drainer visible. I’m still left scratching my head. It’s all very lovely, but I keep looking at the pictures and thinking, “I couldn’t deal with that. It’s too big. Nothing is convenient to anything else.” If the stove and the sink were close enough to each other, and had a long countertop spanning between them, I’d feel a lot better. (Nowhere do we see the fridge, which also troubles me. )

There’s some other mindset at work, clearly, when people look at kitchens like Ms. Thorisson’s and say, “oooooo, I wish I had that.” I can’t relate. It’s not that I want to go back to the days when I had a kitchen that was (no exaggeration) smaller than the closet on the third floor of our row house — that closet, I turned into a “Fortress of Solitude” for my daughter’s last birthday party, and five young children (aged 8 and under, mostly 5-6) could sit comfortably on the floor in there and color pages from a coloring book. The Fortress of Solitude would make a perfectly workable kitchen, actually, if I had to install one there. There would not be a lot of floor space, but it would be enough. So long as I never had to cook for more than four people, it would be enough.

I think this is the real issue. Our sense of “enoughness” has evaporated. Mimi Thorisson’s kitchen is lovely, but it is far, far more than enough of some things, yet not enough of others. Then again, I guess it should have been obvious to me from the get-go that “enough” isn’t really a Thorisson family mantra. Eight children, ten dogs. Two kitchens. Fifteen bedrooms.

Whereas I live in a three bedroom, 2 1/2 bathroom apartment that my husband believes is more than we need. Perspectives vary widely on what is enough. I realize that, in practical terms, my husband is right. This is quite enough. But I would love to have two more rooms: a study for my husband, a study for me. But it’s a fantasy. I don’t actually believe we will ever live in such a grand space. Some people get to live in grand spaces with endless rooms, and maids to clean them: we are not those kind of people.

After thinking about all of this, and deciding on a whim to see what was out there online about Ms. Thorisson’s kitchen layout, I discovered that a while back, Ms. Thorisson engaged in a large-scale online feud with a cookbook reviewer who didn’t like her cookbook quite as much as she might have liked. She was actually quite gracious about it, though obviously she would have preferred a glowing review. Readers of the review accused the reviewer of sexism, of this, of that, and mostly of viewing Ms. Thorisson as nothing more than a mere lifestyle writer, not a real cook. Well: I have to say, I think there’s something to that; on the other hand, I take the position (that I think Ms. Thorisson would agree with) that the cooking that happens in peoples’ homes is as legitimate a thing to write about as professional cooking. Since Ms. Thorisson has to cook on a scale much larger than I do, I actually respect her cooking: she’s feeding this large family, right? That counts for something. I do think she can be a little tone-deaf in her writing, but on the other hand, who isn’t? Seriously: who isn’t? One of the most conscientious food bloggers I know — and I know her personally, I feel, after years of written correspondence, though I admit I’ve never met her in real life — has gone back, in recent months, to look at things she wrote a decade ago, and cringed. Assumptions about what is possible, and about who has access to what — and coming from the keyboard of someone who’s about as socially aware as a person can be — are rife. But we all suffer from this. We’re all writing from a certain moment’s mood, perspective, position. Who is to say that Ms. Thorisson won’t look back on her work of 2015 in ten years and think, “My god, what was I thinking?”

Ms. Thorisson responded to all of this with a surprisingly even temper, I thought. A lot of gorgeous women in her shoes would have stamped their perfect little feet and said, “Oh my god, you’re such an asshole, Mr. Cookbook Reviewer!” But she was calm and almost good-humored about the whole thing (not that humor is really Ms. Thorisson’s strong point, from what I see). Her responses online to this debate about her work made me somewhat sympathetic to her. Not because I don’t think her life is a bit ludicrous — I do — but I don’t think she’s trying to put over on anyone. The accusation is that her work is not really about food, but about “my life is better than yours.” There’s something to that. But I think she feels she is simply presenting herself as an example of one kind of thing. (An exceptionally attractive, well-dressed, clearly unAmerican version of her kind of thing.) She lives the way she lives, and she presents her life and her recipes in the way she right now wants to present them. She had an interesting aside about working on a TV show which really made me see her in a different light.

Her aside was more telling to me than anything else she’d written. It was reasonable, and made me sympathetic to her. She’s got a cooking show somewhere — I’ve never seen it — and apparently people saw her kitchen tables and complained about them.  She wrote, “….every now and then someone, somewhere, questions my choice of working tables. It seems they are just too low. But here’s the thing. They are my tables, that I actually use. And I’m tall. We filmed two seasons for Canal+ and a number of people commented on the tables. My tables. So they brought in a new table for the third season. It was higher, more comfortable perhaps. But it wasn’t real. When I cook at home, when we make blog posts, we use the things that are already there. Strange as it is sometimes reality looks weird or fake and sometimes when things are faked to look real, they feel all wrong. So I say, let’s keep it real – always, even when reality looks strange.”

I guess this is where I have to agree with her. Her reality is strange to me. It is entirely foreign. My reality would be strange to her. We’ll all have to accept that our realities are strange to one another. On one point, I will differ: it is a competition, Ms. Thorisson, and my pear cake is better than yours. (If you’re ever in town, I’d be happy to serve you a piece. Assuming I have some pears sitting around….)