The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  I can date that moment almost precisely—it was in December 1972—because that’s when I stopped buying Gourmet the first time around. And I can date that last Gourmet precisely because I have never thrown out a copy of the magazine. At the end of each month, I place it on the top of the kitchen bookshelf, and there it lies, undisturbed, forever. I have never once looked at a copy of Gourmet after its month was up. But I keep them because you never know when you might need to. One of the tricky things about the recipes in Gourmet is that they often refer back to recipes in previous copies of the magazine: for example, once a year, usually in January, Gourmet prints the recipe for pâte brisée, and if you throw out your January issue, you’re sunk for the year. All the tart recipes thereafter call for “one recipe pâte brisée (January 1976)” and that’s that. The same thing holds for chicken stock. I realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually use the recipes in Gourmet, so I must stop here and correct that impression. I don’t. I also realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually read Gourmet, and I’d better correct that impression too. I don’t actually read it. I sort of look at it in a fairly ritualistic manner.

  The first thing I turn to in Gourmet is the centerfold. The centerfold of the magazine contains the Gourmet menu of the month, followed by four color pages of pictures, followed by the recipes. In December the menu is usually for Christmas dinner, in November for Thanksgiving, in July for the Fourth, and in April—when I bought my first Gourmet in four years owing to my marriage that month to a man with a Cuisinart Food Processor—for Easter. The rest of the year there are fall luncheons and spring breakfasts, and so forth. But the point is not the menus but the pictures. The first picture each month is of the table of the month, and it is laid with the china and crystal and silver of the month. That most of the manufacturers of this china and crystal and silver advertise in Gourmet should not concern us now; that comes later in the ritual. The table and all the things on it look remarkably similar every issue: very formal, slightly stuffy, and extremely elegant in a cut-glass, old-moneyed way. The three pages of pictures that follow are of the food, which looks just as stuffy and formal and elegant as the table itself. It would never occur to anyone at Gourmet to take the kind of sleek, witty food photographs I associate with the Life “Great Dinners” series, or the crammed, decadent pictures the women’s magazines specialize in. Gourmet gives you a full-page color picture of an incredibly serious rack of lamb persillé sitting on a somber Blue Canton platter by Mottahedeh Historic Charleston Reproductions sitting on a stiff eighteenth-century English mahogany table from Charles Deacon & Son—and it’s no wonder I never cook anything from this magazine: the pictures are so reverent I almost feel I ought to pray to them.

  After the centerfold I always turn to a section called “Sugar and Spice.” This is the letters-to-the-editor department, and by all rights it should be called just plain “Sugar.” I have never seen a letter in Gourmet that was remotely spicy, much less moderately critical. “I have culled so many fine recipes from your magazine that I feel it’s time to do the sharing….” “My husband and I have had many pleasant meals from recipes in Gourmet and we hope your readers will enjoy the following….” Mrs. S. C. Rooney of Vancouver, B.C., writes to say that she and her husband leaf through Gourmet before every trip and would never have seen the Amalfi Drive but for the February 1972 issue. “It is truly remarkable how you maintain such a high standard for every issue,” she says. Almost every letter then goes on to present the writer’s recipe—brownies Weinstein, piquant mushrooms Potthoff, golden marinade Wyeth, Parmesan puff Jupenlaz. “Sirs,” writes Margy Newman of Beverly Hills, “recently I found myself with two ripe bananas, an upcoming weekend out of town, and an hour until dinnertime. With one eye on my food processor and the other on some prunes, I proceeded to invent Prune Banana Whip Newman.” The recipe for one prune banana whip Newman (April 1976) followed.

  “You Asked For It” comes next. This is the section where readers write in for recipes from restaurants they have frequented and Gourmet provides them. I look at this section for two reasons: first, on the chance that someone has written in for the recipe for the tarte Tatin at Maxwell’s Plum in New York, which I would like to know how to make, and second, for the puns. “Here is the scoop du jour,” goes the introduction to peach ice cream Jordan Pond House. “We’d be berry happy,” Gourmet writes in the course of delivering a recipe for blueberry blintzes. “Rather than waffling about, here is a recipe for chocolate waffles.” “To satisfy your yen for tempura, here is Hibachi’s shrimp tempura.” I could go on, but I won’t; I do want to mention, though, that the person who writes these also seems to write the headlines on the “Sugar and Spice” column—at least I think I detect the same fine hand in such headlines as “Curry Favor,” “The Berry Best,” and “Something Fishy.”

  I skip the travel pieces, many of which are written by ladies with three names. “If Provence did not exist, the poets would be forced to invent it, for it is a lyrical landscape and to know it is to be its loving captive for life.” Like that. Then I skip the restaurant reviews. Gourmet never prints unfavorable restaurant reviews; in fact, one of its critics is so determined not to find fault anywhere that he recently blamed himself for a bad dish he was served at the Soho Charcuterie: “The potatoes that came with it (savoyarde?—hard to tell) were disappointingly nondescript and cold, but I seemed to be having bad luck with potatoes wherever I went.” Then I skip the special features on eggplant and dill and the like, because I have to get on to the ads.

  Gourmet carries advertisements for a wide array of upper-class consumer goods (Rolls-Royce, De Beers diamonds, Galliano, etc.); the thing is to compare these ads to the editorial content of the magazine. I start by checking out the Gourmet holiday of the month—in May 1976, for example, it was Helsinki—and then I count the number of ads in the magazine for things Finnish. Then I like to check the restaurants reviewed in the front against the restaurant ads in the back. Then, of course, I compare the china, silver, and crystal in the menu of the month against the china, silver, and crystal ads. All this is quite satisfying and turns out about the way you might suspect.

  After that, I am pretty much through looking at Gourmet magazine. And where has it gotten me, you may ask. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Last April, when I began my second round, I think I expected that this time I would get around to cooking something from it. Then May passed and I failed to make the rhubarb tart pictured in the centerfold and I gave up in the recipe department. At that point, it occurred to me that perhaps I bought Gourmet because I figured it was the closest I would ever get to being a gentile. But that’s not it either. The real reason, I’m afraid, has simply to do with food and life, particularly married life. “Does everyone who gets married talk about furniture?” my friend Bud Trillin once asked. No. Only for a while. After that you talk about pistachio nuts.

  —December 1976

  A Sandwich

  THE HOT PASTRAMI sandwich served at Langer’s Delicatessen in downtown Los Angeles is the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world. This is not just my opinion, although most people who know about Langer’s will simply say it’s the finest hot pastrami sandwich in Los Angeles because they don’t dare to claim that something like a hot pastrami sandwich could possibly be the best version of itself in a city where until recently you couldn’t get anything resembling a New York bagel, and the only reason you can get one now is that New York bagels have deteriorated.

  Langer’s is a medium-sized place—it seats a hundred and thirty-five people—and it is decorated, although “decorated” is probably not the word that applies, in tufted brown vinyl. The view out the windows is of the intersection of Seventh and Alvarado and the bright-red-and-yellow signage of a Hispanic neighborhood—bodegas, check-cashing storefronts, and pawnshops. Just down the block is a spot notorious for being the place to go in L.A. if you need a fake I.D. The Rampart division’s main police station, the headquarters of the city’s seco
nd-most-recent police scandal, is a mile away. Even in 1947, when Langer’s opened, the neighborhood was not an obvious place for an old-style Jewish delicatessen, but in the early nineties things got worse. Gangs moved in. The crime rate rose. The Langers—the founder, Al, now eighty-nine, and his son Norm, fifty-seven—were forced to cut the number of employees, close the restaurant nights and Sundays, and put coin-operated locks on the restroom doors. The opening of the Los Angeles subway system—one of its stops is half a block from the restaurant—has helped business slightly, as has the option of having your sandwich brought out to your car. But Langer’s always seems to be just barely hanging on. If it were in New York, it would be a shrine, with lines around the block and tour buses standing double-parked outside. Pilgrims would come—as they do, for example, to Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City and Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas—and they would report on their conversion. But in Los Angeles a surprising number of people don’t even know about Langer’s, and many of those who do wouldn’t be caught dead at the corner of Seventh and Alvarado, even though it’s not a particularly dangerous intersection during daytime hours.

  Pastrami, I should point out for the uninitiated, is made from a cut of beef that is brined like corned beef, coated with pepper and an assortment of spices, and then smoked. It is characterized by two things. The first is that it is not something anyone’s mother whips up and serves at home; it’s strictly restaurant fare, and it’s served exclusively as a sandwich, usually on Russian rye bread with mustard. The second crucial thing about pastrami is that it is almost never good. In fact, it usually tastes like a bunch of smoked rubber bands.

  The Langers buy their pastrami from a supplier in Burbank. “When we get it, it’s edible,” Norm Langer says, “but it’s like eating a racquetball. It’s hard as a rock. What do we do with it? What makes us such wizards? The average delicatessen will take this piece of meat and put it into a steamer for thirty to forty-five minutes and warm it. But you’ve still got a hard piece of rubber. You haven’t broken down the tissues. You haven’t made it tender. We take that same piece of pastrami, put it into our steamer, and steam it for almost three hours. It will shrink 25 to 30 percent, but it’s now tender—so tender it can’t be sliced thin in a machine because it will fall apart. It has to be hand-sliced.”

  So: tender and hand-sliced. That’s half the secret of the Langer’s sandwich. The other secret is the bread. The bread is hot. Years ago, in the nineteen-thirties, Al Langer owned a delicatessen in Palm Springs, and, because there were no Jewish bakers in the vicinity, he was forced to bus in the rye bread. “I was serving day-old bread,” Al Langer says, “so I put it into the oven to make it fresher. Hot crispy bread. Juicy soft pastrami. How can you lose?”

  Today, Langer’s buys its rye bread from a bakery called Fred’s, on South Robertson, which bakes it on bricks until it’s ten minutes from being done. Langer’s bakes the loaf the rest of the way, before slicing it hot for sandwiches. The rye bread, faintly sour, perfumed with caraway seeds, lightly dusted with cornmeal, is as good as any rye bread on the planet, and Langer’s puts about seven ounces of pastrami on it, the proper proportion of meat to bread. The resulting sandwich, slathered with Gulden’s mustard, is an exquisite combination of textures and tastes. It’s soft but crispy, tender but chewy, peppery but sour, smoky but tangy. It’s a symphony orchestra, different instruments brought together to play one perfect chord. It costs eight-fifty and is, in short, a work of art.

  —August 2002

  I Just Want to Say: Teflon

  I FEEL BAD about Teflon.

  It was great while it lasted.

  Now it turns out to be bad for you.

  Or, to put it more exactly, now it turns out that a chemical that’s released when you heat up Teflon gets into your bloodstream and probably causes cancer and birth defects.

  I loved Teflon. I loved the no-carb ricotta pancake I invented last year, which can be cooked only on Teflon. I loved my Silverstone Teflon-coated frying pan, which makes a beautiful steak. I loved Teflon as an adjective; it gave us a Teflon president (Ronald Reagan) and it even gave us a Teflon Don (John Gotti), whose Teflonness eventually wore out, making him an almost exact metaphorical duplicate of my Teflon pans. I loved the fact that Teflon was invented by someone named Roy J. Plunkett, whose name alone should have ensured Teflon against ever becoming a dangerous product.

  But recently DuPont, the manufacturer of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) resin, which is what Teflon was called when it first popped up as a laboratory accident back in 1938, reached a $16.5 million settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency; it seems the company knew all along that Teflon was bad for you. It’s an American cliché by now: a publicly traded company holds the patent on a scientific breakthrough, it turns out to cause medical problems, and the company knew all along. You can go to the bank on it.

  But it’s sad about Teflon.

  When it first came onto the market, Teflon wasn’t good. The pans were light and skimpy and didn’t compare to copper or cast iron. They were great for omelettes, and, of course, nothing stuck to them, but they were nowhere near as good for cooking things that were meant to be browned, like steaks. But then manufacturers like Silverstone produced Teflon pans that were heavy-duty, and you could produce a steak that was as dark and delicious as one made on the barbecue. Unfortunately, this involved heating your Teflon pan up to a very high temperature before adding the steak, which happens to be the very way perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA) is released into the environment. PFOA is the bad guy here, and DuPont has promised to eliminate it from all Teflon products by 2015. I’m sure that will be a comfort to those of you under the age of forty, but to me it simply means that my last years on this planet will be spent, at least in part, scraping debris off my non-Teflon frying pans.

  Rumors about Teflon have been circulating for a long time, but I couldn’t help hoping they were going to turn out like the rumors about aluminum, which people thought (for a while, back in the nineties) caused Alzheimer’s. That was a bad moment, since never mind giving up aluminum pots and pans, it would also have meant giving up aluminum foil, disposable aluminum baking pans, and, most crucial of all, antiperspirants. I rode out that rumor, and I’m pleased to report that it went away.

  But this rumor is clearly for real, so I suppose I am going to have to throw away my Teflon pans.

  Meanwhile, I am going to make one last ricotta pancake breakfast:

  Beat one egg, add one-third cup fresh whole-milk ricotta, and whisk together. Heat up a Teflon pan until carcinogenic gas is released into the air. Spoon tablespoons of batter into the frying pan and cook about two minutes on one side, until brown. Carefully flip. Cook for another minute to brown the other side. Eat with jam, if you don’t care about carbs, or just eat unadorned. Serves one.

  —June 2006

  The Food Establishment: Life in the Land of the Rising Soufflé (Or Is It the Rising Meringue?)

  One day, I awoke having had my first in a long series of food anxiety dreams (the way it goes is this: there are eight people coming to dinner in twenty minutes, and I am in an utter panic because I have forgotten to buy the food, plan the menu, set the table, and clean the house, and the supermarket is closed). I knew that I had become a victim of the dreaded food obsession syndrome and would have to do something about it. This article is what I did.

  Incidentally, I anticipated that my interviews on this would be sublime gourmet experiences, with each of my subjects forcing little goodies down my throat. But no. All I got from over twenty interviews were two raw potatoes that were guaranteed by their owner (who kept them in a special burlap bag on her terrace) to be the only potatoes worth eating in all the world. Perhaps they were. I don’t know, though; they tasted exactly like the other potatoes I’ve had in my life.

  YOU MIGHT HAVE thought they’d have been polite enough not to mention it at all. Or that they’d wait at least until they got through the reception line before starting to discuss it. Or that they
’d hold off at least until after they had tasted the food—four tables of it, spread about the four corners of the Four Seasons—and gotten drinks in hand. But people in the Food Establishment are not noted for their manners or their patience, particularly when there is fresh gossip. And none of them had come to the party because of the food.

  They had come, most of them, because they were associated with the Time-Life Cookbooks, a massive, high-budget venture that has managed to involve nearly everyone who is anyone in the food world. Julia Child was a consultant on the first book. And James Beard had signed on to another. And Paula Peck, who bakes. And Nika Hazelton, who reviews cookbooks for the New York Times Book Review. And M.F.K. Fisher, usually of The New Yorker. And Waverley Root of Paris, France. And Pierre Franey, the former chef of Le Pavillon who is now head chef at Howard Johnson’s. And in charge of it all, Michael Field, the birdlike, bespectacled, frenzied gourmet cook and cookbook writer, who stood in the reception line where everyone was beginning to discuss it. Michael was a wreck. A wreck, a wreck, a wreck, as he himself might have put it. Just that morning, the very morning of the party, Craig Claiborne of the New York Times, who had told the Time-Life people he would not be a consultant for their cookbooks even if they paid him a hundred thousand dollars, had ripped the first Time-Life cookbook to shreds and tatters. Merde alors, as Craig himself might have put it, how that man did rip that book to shreds and tatters. He said that the recipes, which were supposed to represent the best of French provincial cooking, were not even provincial. He said that everyone connected with the venture ought to be ashamed of himself. He was rumored to be going about town telling everyone that the picture of the soufflé on the front of the cookbook was not even a soufflé—it was a meringue! Merde alors! He attacked Julia Child, the hitherto unknockable. He referred to Field, who runs a cooking school and is author of two cookbooks, merely as a “former piano player.” Not that Field wasn’t a former piano player. But actually identifying him as one—well! “As far as Craig and I are concerned,” Field was saying as the reception line went on, “the gauntlet is down.” And worst of all—or at least it seemed worst of all that day—Craig had chosen the day of the party for his review. Poor Michael. How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful! “Why did he have to do it today?” moaned Field to Claiborne’s close friend, chef Pierre Franey. “Why? Why? Why?”