From Tad Friend's Excerpt: 'Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor'
"...And yet. Until quite recently, I had the Wasp fridge: marmalade, wilted scallions, out-of-season grapes, seltzer, and vodka - nothing to really eat. (The Wasp fridge is like the bachelor fridge, but Wasps load up on dairy, including both 1 and 2 percent milk, moldy cheese, expired yogurt, and separated sour cream. And atop the Wasp fridge sit Pepperidge Farm Milanos, Fig Newtons, or Saltines - some chewy or salty or otherwise challenging snack.) I have a concise and predictable wardrobe, and friends even like to claim that I invariably wear the same oatmeal-colored Shetland sweater. I will never experience the pleasures of leather pants or a shark's tooth on a thong dangling in my chest hair. I will never experience the pleasures of chest hair. And, like the Tin Man, I don't articulate my upper body in sections; it moves en masse or not at all." more here
Guess who had the same theme as massmouth's next slam?
The New Yorker! November 16, 2009
Vicky Raab
This week, the Food Issue hits newsstands. We sent our writers home with new cookbooks and other culinary-themed reads to see how they measure up. Here, Vicky takes on Thomas Keller's "Ad Hoc at Home" and Michael Tucker's memoir "Family Meals: Coming Together to Care for an Aging Parent."
In Tucker’s engaging food-and-family-filled memoir, Tucker and his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, are hoping to leave New York and retire to a three-hundred-and fifty-year old house in Umbria, where they plan on cooking for friends and enjoying the cuisine at the numerous family-run restaurants and communal sagras. But the move would involve leaving Lora, Eikenberry's mother, who suffers from dementia and is prone to slugging her caregivers, behind. The problem of feeding her looms large. It is solved, in part, by looking to the Italian model of the extended family. “In Italy,” Tucker writes, “especially in the countryside—if a child has moved out of the house before the age of thirty-five, Mama has some explaining to do.” Tucker and Eikenberry's daughter, a caterer, moves to New York and lets her parents hire her to cook for her grandmother, an arrangement which happily allows the whole mishpacha to unfry from time to time.
Read more here
