by Nora Ephron
Obviously I didn’t start out in life wanting to be a food writer. These days there are probably people who do—just as there are now people who start out wanting to be film critics, God help us—but I started out wanting to be a journalist. Which I became. I was a reporter for the New York World-Telegram and Sun and I lived in a junior two-and-a-half, and whenever I was home alone at night I cooked myself a perfect little dinner. None of your containers of yogurt for me; no, sir. I would pick a recipe from Michael Field or Julia Child and shop on the way home and spend the first part of the evening painstakingly mastering whatever dish I had chosen. Then I would sit down to eat it in front of the television set. At the time I thought this was wildly civilized behavior, but the truth is it was probably somewhat Mamie Eisenhowerish. In any case, I learned to cook. Everyone did—everyone my age, that is. This was the mid-1960s, the height of the first wave of competitive cooking. I’m always interested when people talk about the sixties in the kind of hushed tone that is meant to connote the seriousness of it all, because what I remember about the sixties was that people were constantly looking up from dessert and saying things like: “Whose mousse is this?” Once, I remember, one of my friends called up to say his marriage had ended on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant. It was quite mad, really. I was never completely idiotic—I never once made a quiche, for example—but I held my own, and I’m afraid that I’m still known in certain circles as the originator of a game called If You Had to Have Only One Flavor Soufflé for the Rest of Your Life, Would It Be Chocolate or Grand Marnier?
Anyway, there I was at the World-Telegram when the food editor retired. There was a pause before the next food editor arrived, and I was asked to fill in and write the “A Visit With” column. You know the kind of column it was: I would go to interview famous people in their homes, and they’d talk about their dinner parties and their decorators and their indispensable housekeepers, and then, in the end, they’d give me a recipe. The recipes weren’t much—you’d be amazed at how many legendary hostesses tried to get away with newlywed garbage like chicken Divan and grapes with sour cream and brown sugar—but the interviews were really quite fascinating. People would say the oddest things about the servant problem and the extra-man-at-the-dinner-party problem and tipping at Christmas and how you could tell the economy was getting worse because of all the chicken you were starting to see at dinner parties. “Dark-meat chicken,” one woman said to me contemptuously.
It was just a mild little column in a newspaper no one read, but as a result of it, I began to have a field of expertise. That’s probably putting it too strongly—it wasn’t as if I had become an expert in law or economics or seventeenth-century England—but that’s how it felt: having spent my life knowing nothing much about anything (which is known as being a generalist), I suddenly knew something about something. I certainly knew enough to make jokes in the food-world language. I learned that the words “monosodium glutamate” were almost automatically funny, especially aloud, as were “The R. T. French’s Mustard Tastemaker Award,” “The Pillsbury Bake-Off” and “The National Chicken Cooking Contest.” This gave me an edge as a food writer that almost made up for the fact that I think that certain serious food-world subjects, like coulibiac of salmon (another automatically funny phrase), are not worth bothering with.
(Another argument I have with serious food people is that they’re always talking about how creative cooking is. “Cooking is very creative” is how they put it. Now, there’s no question that there are a handful of people doing genuinely creative things with food—although a lot of it, if you ask me, seems to consist of heating up goat cheese or throwing strawberry vinegar onto calves’ liver or relying excessively on the kiwi. But most cooking is based on elementary, long-standing principles, and to say that cooking is creative not only misses the point of creativity—which is that it is painful and difficult and quite unrelated to whether it is possible to come up with yet another way to cook a pork chop—but also misses the whole point of cooking, which is that it is totally mindless. What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.)
Normally I enjoy doing food demonstrations—I like giving my speech, I like the way it laces in and out of the subject of food. But when I was about halfway through the demonstration at Macy’s—I was right in the middle of cooking Lillian Hellman’s pot roast—I realized I was in trouble. Lillian Hellman’s pot roast is the sort of recipe that makes my reputation in the food world what it is, since it contains all sorts of low-rent ingredients like a package of onion soup mix and a can of cream of mushroom soup. It even has something called Kitchen Bouquet in it, although I always leave it out. You take a nice 4-pound piece of beef, the more expensive the better, and put it into a good pot with I can of cream of mushroom soup, an envelope of dried onion soup, I large chopped onion, 3 cloves chopped garlic, 2 cups red wine and 2 cups water. Add a crushed bay leaf and I teaspoon each thyme and basil. Cover and bake in a 350° oven until tender, 3 ½ hours or so.
The reason the pot roast recipe gets to me is that it’s an occasion for a point I like to make about couples in America. What I say is that I think Lillian Hellman had a remarkable effect as a literary heroine, although not the effect she was always accused of having. I have no problem with her political persona, or with her insistence on making herself the centerpiece of most of the historical conflicts of the twentieth century; but it seems to me that she invented a romantic fantasy about her involvement with Dashiell Hammett that is every bit as unrealistic as the Doris Day movies feminists prefer to blame for society’s unrealistic notions about romance. The Doris Day fantasy, you may recall, is that the big man and the little woman march into the sunset together and live happily ever after. The Lillian Hellman fantasy is that the big man and the big woman march into the sunset together, fighting and cursing and drinking and killing turtles, but they, too, live happily ever after (until, of course, one of them dies, leaving the other free to reinvent the romance). I’m not saying that Lillian Hellman was the first writer to animate this fantasy couple—and even Hammett had a hand in it, with his Nick and Nora Charles. But Hellman’s version was presented as fact, not fiction, so it makes you think it’s possible. And is it?
It’s a small point, just an aside that gets me through measuring the liquid ingredients, but it occurred to me as I delivered it yet another time that I had always zipped through that part of the speech as if I had somehow managed to be invulnerable to the fantasy, as if I had somehow managed to escape from or rise above it simply as a result of having figured it out. I think you often have that sense when you write—that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you’re free of it. And you’re not, of course; you’ve just managed to set it down on paper, that’s all. The truth is that I’m at least as big a sap about romance as old Lillian was, probably even bigger.
I’ll give you another example. I’ve written about cooking and marriage dozens of times, and I’m very smart on the subject, I’m very smart about how complicated things get when food and love become hopelessly tangled. But I realized as I stood there doing my demonstration in the middle of the Macy’s housewares department that I had been as dopey about food and love as any old-fashioned Jewish mother. I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you. I was so busy perfecting the peach pie that I wasn’t paying attention. I had never even been able to imagine an alternative. Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn’t cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone
love me if I couldn’t cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it’s Rachel Samstat, she’s bright, she’s funny, and she can cook!
I got so depressed and angry thinking about all this that I gave the onion an enormous whack and sent it flying into the front row of spectators, right into some lady’s Literary Guild tote bag. Everyone laughed, and I tossed my head blithely as if it were the sort of thing I do all the time—which it’s not—and that’s when I saw Richard. Richard is my producer. (I love being able to say things like that. My producer. My doctor. My accountant. My floor man. My agent. My maid.) Richard Finkel, who produced my television show, is tall and red-haired and cannot see even with his glasses on, and he was squinting through the crowd at Macy’s while I retrieved the onion. As if he weren’t obvious enough already, he began to wave wildly at me, and I immediately felt better. I love Richard. That I should have spotted him at that exact moment was really quite odd: the first night Richard and I slept together, he did an imitation of his father eating an onion, and I can almost never think of raw onions without remembering him, lying naked in bed, taking mad, passionate bites of an imaginary onion and producing spectacular belches. It’s a miracle I didn’t fall in love with Richard on the spot, because I’m silly enough to think that any man who would imitate his father eating an onion is a suitable love object; but I didn’t. I’ll tell you who would have fallen in love with Richard had she been there: Brenda, my former friend and current step-relative-once-removed. Brenda was always falling in love with men whose attraction utterly mystified me, and whenever I would ask her what she saw in them, she would say things like: “He does a wonderful Sophie Tucker.” Brenda fell in love with her husband Harry because he did a brilliant bit about a two-thousand-year-old man, and she always said she knew the marriage was over a week after it had begun, when she discovered that Harry had lifted the entire routine from Mel Brooks.
Richard and I slept together only a few times. We had one of those affairs that you begin by saying, “We’re making a big mistake,” and what you mean by that is not that you’re getting in over your head but that you’re just killing time. Richard and I killed a little time and then went back to being friends. Then I started seeing Mark, and Richard started seeing Helen, and things got complicated. Richard never really liked Mark, and I didn’t really like Helen—that was the complication. Helen is one of those people who never say anything, not because she’s shy but because she’s learned—in a way I always mean to—that if you don’t say anything, you make people far more nervous and self-conscious and careful around you than if you do. People like me, we just rush into the vacuum of silence people like Helen float around in; we blather and dither and yakyakyak, and people like Helen just sit there and smile into the wind.
“Does she hate me?” I said to Richard after I first met Helen.
“Of course not,” said Richard.
“Then why doesn’t she ever say anything?” I asked.
“She’s shy, that’s all,” said Richard.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You always underestimate how intimidating you are,” said Richard.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“He’s wrong about Iran,” Richard said after he first met Mark.
“Tell him,” I said. “Don’t talk to me about Iran. I couldn’t care less.”
“I tried to tell him,” said Richard, “but it’s very hard to interrupt a monologist.”
“He’s not a monologist,” I said. “He just likes to talk. Some people like to talk.”
“Leave Helen out of this,” Richard said.
“I wasn’t even thinking of Helen,” I said.
“Bullshit,” said Richard.
Then we all got married. It’s hard when you don’t like someone a friend marries. First of all, it means you pretty much have to confine your friendship to lunch, and I hate lunch. Second of all, it means that even a simple flat inquiry like “How’s Helen?” is taken amiss, since your friend always thinks that what you hope he’s going to say is “Dead.” You feel irritated because your darling friend has married beneath himself, and he feels irritated because you don’t see the virtues of his beloved. Then, if your friend’s marriage fails, he becomes even more irritated at you, because if you had been a real friend, you would have prevented him physically from making the mistake, you would have locked him up in a closet until the urge to get married had passed. Of course, I tried that with Brenda, and it didn’t work either. Long before we learned that Harry had pilfered the two-thousand-year-old-man routine from Mel Brooks, it was clear that he wasn’t good enough for Brenda, and I made the mistake of telling her so. And when I turned out to be right, when they finally broke up after eight miserable years, was she grateful to me for tipping her off in the first place? No indeed. She slept with my husband Charlie, and as an extra bonus we all ended up with Harry’s crabs.
I was dreading having to tell Richard about Mark and me; I could just imagine the look of smug satisfaction that would cross his face. But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that I finished my food demonstration and Richard swept me off to a dark bar and said, “I have to talk to you,” and before I could even hold up my hand to indicate that I had to talk to him, too, he began.
“I had a vision that something horrible was wrong,” said Richard. “And it is.”
“A vision?” I said. It’s not like Richard to talk of visions. Richard doesn’t even like to hear about dreams.
“I went to have my hair cut yesterday,” said Richard. “I was sitting there, trying to read the paper, and Melanie, who cuts my hair, was working away, and it suddenly crossed my mind to ask her how things were with her and Ray. She’s been engaged to Ray for a couple of years. So I ask her. And she rolls her eyes. And she tells me he’s fallen in love with someone else. He’s come to her, he’s told her he’s in love with someone else, but he still wants to be friends. So she says to him, I don’t want to be friends with you. And he says, why not? And she says, because you’re a real shithead, that’s why. Melanie looks at me and says, ‘Can you believe it? Can you believe his nerve? You know what he says to me after that? He says, “You mean you’re not even going to cut my hair anymore?” Can you dig this? The guy falls in love with someone else while he’s engaged to me and he actually thinks I’m going to go on cutting his hair. Fuck him. What do I want with him if he wants to be such an asshole?’ She rolls her eyes again, and she’s snipping away, and suddenly I’m looking dead ahead into the mirror, and something weird starts to happen to me. Maybe a vision is putting it too strongly, but that’s what it felt like. I thought to myself: Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, Richard Finkel, it tolls for you.”
“Richard,” I said, “what are you talking about?”
“I knew,” said Richard. “At that moment I knew.”
“You knew what?” I said.
“I knew Helen was in love with someone else.”
“Helen,” I said.
“My wife,” said Richard. “Helen. Remember? The one you hate.”
“I don’t hate Helen,” I said. “Helen hates me.”
“It was suddenly clear,” Richard said. “Helen was in love with someone else, and she was going to tell me about it, and there wasn’t the remotest chance that when she did I was going to be as healthy and strong about it as this girl who cuts my hair.”
“And is Helen in love with someone else?” I said.
“Yes,” said Richard. “I came home and I told her about my vision, and when I got through, do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘I think we’d better have a talk.’ ” Richard shook his head. “ ‘I think we’d better have a talk’ are the seven worst words in the English language.”
“Helen is in love with someone else,” I said.
“Yes,” said Richard.
“That is really weird,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Richard.
“Yes I do,” I said. “Ask m
e how Mark is.”
“How’s Mark?” said Richard.
“He’s in love with someone else,” I said.
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” said Richard.
“No I’m not,” I said. “Mark has fallen in love with someone else, and he’s treating me like an old beanbag.”
“Oh, sweetie,” said Richard, and he gave me a big hug. Then he ordered two more drinks. Doubles. Then he gave me another hug. One thing I have to say about marital crises is that people certainly do hug you a lot when you’re going through them.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” said Richard.
“Is what a boy or a girl?” I said.
“The person Mark’s fallen in love with,” said Richard.
“I know you don’t like Mark,” I said, “but that is truly an absurd question.”
“It’s a girl, right?” said Richard.
“Right,” I said.
“That’s what Helen’s fallen in love with, too,” said Richard.
“Oh, sweetie,” I said.
We looked at each other. It was a tricky moment. It’s always a tricky moment when a friend tells you his marriage is in trouble: you have to be very careful what you say, in case he rides it out. This moment, however, was trickier than most. It would have been a terrible mistake, for example, for me to have said “Good riddance to bad rubbish” to Richard, although that’s what I thought. It would have been an even bigger mistake for me to have introduced the word “dyke” into the conversation, but I didn’t have to worry about that.
“Did you know she was a dyke?” said Richard.
“There’s no way to tell if someone’s a dyke,” I said. “All sorts of attractive, feminine women are dykes. In fact, if anything, I would say that Helen isn’t quite attractive enough to become one.”
“That’s not funny,” said Richard.
“Yes it is,” I said. “Anyway, she’s not necessarily a dyke; she’s just having a thing with a woman.”