Such a good question,
@T Rex.
Still thinking about Marie and her pastry bag, and what story she thinks she's telling with her food.
I lived in an aspirational neighborhood, lucky me, for decades. One of the tiny chic storefronts was rented by a woman of a certain age who was going to sell pre-cooked upscale take-home meals for the many upscale non-cooks who lived in the hood, a really good idea for that space, and a good idea for a business at any time.
The problem was her idea of upscale.
There's a certain kind of blue collar small town woman who grew up in the 50s -- I have encountered her a bunch of times -- who abandoned the delicious cooking of her small town grandma, or strange uncle (hear me,
Lee Bailey,
Scott Peacock,
James Beard,
Ernest Matthew Mickler!). And she went the corporate cooking way, via the women's magazines corporate advertiser agenda. That is, canned soup sauce, Jello salad, insta-pudding cake, the mind-boggling chow mein noodle Christmas cookies made by my dear friend from Fargo, N.D. (She may have qualified as one of the strange uncles, too.)
Along with all the packaged additions to food, came the notion that adding Velveeta cheese spread (not officially cheese) to everything made it classy. Velveeta even became a sign of prosperity to the wonderful Mexican Tex-Mex cooks who could charge the gringos moar for Velveeta chili con queso than they could selling real cheese.
And so this hard-working lady in the aspirational neighborhood covered everything she made for the yuppies with Velveeta. Because it was classy and she just knew they'd buy classy home-cooking covered with cheese product.
They wouldn't touch it with a forty-foot pole, as anyone could have told her.
She was out of business in six months and seriously in debt.
I think that's where Marie is stuck.
Pavlovas are classy food to her. She seems to be stuck in a department store ladies' lunch dessert world of individual servings of lightish diet desserts, whereas what restaurant customers shell out for big time is liqueur-drenched, buttercreamed, jammed-out
cake. Cake. Caketty caketty cake. With chocolate dipped strawberries AND nuts on top.
I think she has rigid and completely delusional ideas about classy food.
One is, it's classy if it comes out of a pastry bag. Please note all the incredibly skilled cake decorating ladies who decorate cakes you'd rather die than be photographed next to. She's working another one, the perfection salad one, that if you can form, say potatoes, into perfect blocks, it's classy. There's a whole book about the puritannical home ec origins of attempting to tame unruly, delinquent ingredients into
Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.
She thinks Stephanie Jarvis is classy, and Jarvis' eating and cooking is completely dysmorphic. There's serious disorder in Jarvis' eating, as well as cruelty and grossness in her cooking. That cowpat she made for Marie's birthday is exhibit A at the mo, but I will never forget the gross slop she dished up for their Come Dine With Me contest at the shitoo.
I'm really not qualified to assess much of Jarvis' depravity except on food, narcissism, and fascist rhetoric. So I can go on and on. But there's something really wrong here. News flash.
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