Blanche DuBois

Hebrew, from what I have been able to research, doesn’t really have a precise equivalent for the cooking term “blanching.,” at least not one that is familiar to even very well educated folks here. Which sucks (sorry Blanche), because it is one of those basic techniques I use all the time in my soul food kitchen: Boiling, salted water, quick immersion (about a minute), followed by an ice bath. The vegetables stay fresh, the colors simply jump at you, the taste, just like you want it. But I’m not here today to talk about a cooking technique most of you know well.

Linking the cooking technique blanching to one of the main characters in A Streetcar Named Desire, takes us in a dramatically different direction, the evocation of “pandering,” a word that figures prominently also in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s depiction of Daisy, another femme fatale. But boy am I digressing.

I often get the feeling that what I am doing in the kitchen is a form of pandering to my guests. Hell, no wonder we talk about food porn, right? You dress a dish up to have a come-hither look, to tease, to suggest, to play with the palate, to invite a request to do it again.. I feel the same way often about my posting about Etzlenu, a perhaps necessary prostitution of self to, literally, put food on the table. It is in basic ways a diminution of the artistic process. Blanche DuBois would have understood.