This is what people generally say when I tell them the title of my food blog.
That, or they just look at me and roll their eyes.
But I DO eat constantly! Just the other day, someone said to me, "My god---you're ALWAYS EATING!"
I attribute my slender figure to a combination of good genes, a weird metabolism, and the fact that I've always been a grazer.
This caused my poor mother no amount of embarrassment when I was a child.
Honey, you were always so skinny. But we fed you. Whatever you wanted. You'd eat as much as you wanted and then you'd be full. An hour later, you'd see the soft pretzels at Famous & Barr and you'd start crying, "But Mom! I'm starving to death!!!"
(You were always so dramatic, honey.)
And you were so skinny that I was worried people would think I wasn't feeding you. I'd be hauled off as an unfit mother. But we had just fed you! An hour ago! I was never so embarrassed in my life.
In all fairness, half of my mother's stories end with the phrase, "I was never so embarrassed in my life."
But I still remember her asking our pediatrician every year, "Dr. Sommers, are you SURE she doesn't have a tape worm?"
"No Judi," he would laugh. "That's just how she is."
To this day I eat whatever I want and never gain weight. I've never been on a diet a day in my life.
Feel free to hate me right about now.
The title of the blog comes from my deer-like grazing habits and the fact that I wanted to write about food. There are plenty of blogs with wonderful recipes and food porn photos---most of them doing it WAY better than I ever could.
How was I going to make my blog different?
Then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite writers:
"This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."
---Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was one of the members of The Algonquin Round Table---a group of writers who met for lunch at The Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan in the 1920s. Their plays, screenplays, magazine columns, short stories, and theatre and book reviews helped shape the culture of a new, more worldly, and more intelligent America. Most of them were the original writers for The New Yorker magazine.
In the 1920s, Parker ran a column in The New Yorker under the thinly-veiled pseudonym, "The Constant Reader". The column was supposed to be book reviews. But as Joan Acocella wrote for a "Life & Letters" piece in the same magazine in 1993:
"The Constant Reader columns are not really book reviews; they are stand-up comedy routines. You don't have to listen to her opinion, she says. If she didn't like the book, maybe that was just her hangover speaking."
"I hate writing. I love having written."
---Dorothy Parker
She was born Dorothy Rothschild. "But not THOSE Rothschilds" she refined.
She was beautiful, witty, brilliant...
And a bit of a hot mess.
"Tell him I was too fucking busy. Or vice versa."
---Dorothy Parker
A toxic blend of bad love affairs and booze with a few failed suicide attempts thrown in for fun.
If you've ever used the phrase, "one-night stand"----you can thank Dorothy Parker. She's the one who first uttered it---most likely over the hair of the dog that bit her.
Her biography (written by Marion Meade) is titled What Fresh Hell Is This?---a phrase Parker often uttered when the doorbell or the phone rang.
Sometimes she's like that dark, but funny friend you love to sit and snark on popular culture with over brunch; other times, she's like that friend on Facebook whose posts seem to be just on the edge.
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
---Dorothy Parker
Oddly, being an alcoholic may have saved her life. In those pre-Prozac days---the hooch at least seemed to calm her head. When she DID die at the age of 73, it wasn't by her own hand---it was just an old-fashioned heart attack.
I recently discovered a delicious little book that came out last year and I just got around to reading: Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick.
Because if anyone liked to booze it up during the age of classic cocktails, it was Mrs. Parker. You not only get a cocktail guide to all the classic (as well as obscure or forgotten) cocktails of the Prohibition-era----you also get tidy little sidebar pieces on the history of Prohibition, how the drinks got their names, speakeasies in NYC, some tightly-written bios on members of the Algonquin Roundtable---and of course, a delightful primer to Dorothy Parker herself.
In addition to the title of author, Fitzpatrick is the founder and president of The Dorothy Parker Society. He's also a licensed NYC tour guide who gives Dorothy Parker-themed tours to her legions of fans.
Fitzpatrick uses his tour guide skills to take you into a potentially snobby world of dead writers and extinct cocktails without making you feel like you just walked out of a lecture on "The Doric Column in Greek Architecture". You come away from his tour well-informed, delightfully entertained---and thirsty!
It's no secret that the world of mixology has moved past the Sex & The City-era of Cosmos and Appletinis and gone all the way back to the Eighteenth Amendment for inspiration.
When I first started waiting tables, if someone ordered an Old Fashioned, you knew it was going to that table of old folks out for the Early Bird Special.
Now that same Old Fashioned is using locally-distilled whiskey, kumquats, brandied cherries, infused house-made simple syrup, pricey boutique bitters---and it's going to the kids with tattoos and hipster handlebar mustaches.
My bartender friends went a little nuts over the book. And customers at the bar passed the book around as they sipped on Sidecars and took a snapshot of the cover with their iPhones so they could remember the title to add to the arsenal of their home bar.
Another little tidbit you'll learn is that the phrase you often see printed on bar napkins:
"I love a martini---
But two at the most.
Three, I'm under the table;
Four, I'm under the host."
---Dorothy Parker
SHE NEVER SAID THAT!
If she actually HAD, the NAACP would be getting a cut.
The N-Double-what?---you say?
Jewish white lady leaves her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. He's killed a few months later. Her ashes sit in a file cabinet in her lawyer's office for almost 20 years as they haggle out a lawsuit that goes on almost as long as the one in Bleak House. She's now buried in the NAACP Memorial Garden at their headquarters in Baltimore.
Don't believe me? Look it up.
With Fitzgerald being such an expert on Dorothy Parker, I decided to email him a few days ago. I went to the Dorothy Parker Society website, mentioned that I had just finished reading (and LOVING!) his book, and asked a question:
"What did Dorothy Parker like to eat?"
"I write doo-dads, because it's a doo-dad kind of town."
---Dorothy Parker
According to Meade's biography, Parker wasn't all that interested in food. She was more the liquid lunch-type.
Kevin got back to me quickly, thanked me for the compliments on his book, and then answered my question.
"I've heard Mrs. Parker was a meat and potatoes fan. I met the daughter of her housekeeper, and she said as much."
He refers to her as "Mrs. Parker". A thousand times love!
And then he sent me a terrific link to something he'd posted on the Society's website several years ago with an actual recipe for "Dorothy Parker Steak".
The recipe was sent to him by the granddaughter of Warren Dixon who was "chef to the stars during the Depression". I love the simple way recipes used to be written:
"A small, thick, juicy sirloin steak grilled along with halved tomatoes, mushrooms, and narrow discs of summer squash which have been boiled lightly in salt water and then covered with pats of butter, may be substituted for the marrow"
You can view the entire post here:
http://www.dorothyparker.com/wordpress/2000/05/cook-this-up.html
"Maybe you can think of a drink pairing?" Kevin suggested.
Naturally, I went to Under the Table for ideas.
While there is now on the market a Dorothy Parker Gin, Dorothy Parker preferred bourbon or rye---both of which would go much better with the steak, anyway.
So here's a recipe from Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide for a little something called the New York Cocktail, which was a favorite in speakeasies all over the city.
New York Cocktail
2 ounces rye or bourbon
3/4 ounce fresh lime or lemon juice
2 dashes grenadine
1 teaspoon powdered sugar
Orange peel
Shake liquid ingredients and sugar over cracked ice, strain into a chilled old-fashioned glass, and garnish with an orange twist.
So after all this, if you still don't understand why it's called The Constant Eater...
"There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it."
---Dorothy Parker
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