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Pray, Love, and especially Eat

JOHN HODGMAN in conversation with ELIZABETH GILBERT

May 22, 2012

LIVE from the New York Public Library

live

South Court Auditorium

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Before getting into an introduction, which will last about half an hour I would like to offer something to Elizabeth Gilbert. Elizabeth Gilbert is particularly in love with Werner Herzog, so as a little treat, I would like her to see a drawing, a conversation portrait, that Flash Rosenberg, our artist in residence, did of Werner Herzog. To introduce it, Flash Rosenberg.

(applause)

FLASH ROSENBERG: Thank you, Paul. What does it mean to listen to a conversation? I was in the audience and realized that conversations are not just happening up here on the stage but in each of us as we sit here taking it all in. So how do ideas enter your mind? Specifically, I mean what’s the process? What does it look like to listen? So to find out I started drawing these LIVE conversations on a big pad of paper in my lap, then I started videotaping those drawings and edited them into animated summaries, because I wanted to show how ideas struck me during the conversations. I want to put the “ing” back in drawing, which means that its an active thing that happens. So the finished drawing is just a draw, but the drawing is something that becomes these animated conversation portraits. And instead of drawing caricatures or court reporting, I mean, these drawings are not even accurate, instead they trace what I see in my mind as if I could photograph a snapshot of concepts using a pen. So here’s a conversation portrait of Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Holdengräber.

(Conversation portrait plays)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So Liz, this was for you, but not only for you. You love stories about Werner Herzog, and you tell one yourself which I’d like to read out. “I have a friend who is an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant and perhaps half-insane German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to make an independent film, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how he audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood, and how the world has lost its taste, et cetera, et cetera. Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friends that essentially ran along these lines, ‘Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you have wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to but stop whining and get back to work.’ I repeat those words back to myself whenever I started to feel resentful, entitled, competitive, or unappreciated with regard to my writing. ‘It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist. Now, get back to work.’ Always at the end of the day the important thing is only and always that: get back to work. This path’s for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.”

I would like to now tell you about an upcoming—there’s no segue here—an upcoming exhibition we have here on Friday June 22, visitors to the New York Public Library will get a taste of Old New York when the library opens a new major exhibition, Lunch Hour New York City. We have one of the largest collections of cookbooks and menus here at the New York Public Library. The show explores our city’s relationship with that most quotidian of meals, lunch. Organized in four thematic sections: Quick Lunch, Home Lunch, School Lunch, and Power Lunch, the exhibition reveals how the city’s pace and people influenced how, where, and what they have eaten over the past hundred and fifty years. From kitchen tables to cafeterias, pretzels to chopped salads, lunchtime has morphed along with demographic shifts, economic development, and changing tastes, so I encourage you very much to come to this exhibition, which is opening in exactly one month. Fitting, in some way, to have this talk tonight be a foretaste of lunch in one month’s time.

I encourage you also all of you to become Friends of the New York Public Library and enjoy the upcoming fall season. Let me whet your appetite very quickly by saying that the fall will include Tom Wolfe and Pete Townshend. One year ago nearly to this day, on May 5, 2011, Elizabeth Gilbert appeared LIVE from the New York Public Library for her swan song to the world of talk, at least for three years, she said. She was now going to write a novel, she was going to travel. How surprised I was then when she enthusiastically agreed to come talk about At Home on the Range. Now, three years, not three years later, but one year after our conversation, and not at all about her new novel, I don’t think, no, but about a book she rediscovered that her great-grandmother wrote, so we are here today to celebrate a book that Liz Gilbert’s great-grandmother wrote.

John Hodgman as everyone knows and as the Gothamist reported has amassed the complete world knowledge in his trilogy of books but nowhere in them, they found, is there a recipe for calf’s brains with black butter. Hodgman, the Daily Show correspondent, speaks tonight with Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert about her great-grandmother Margaret Yardley Potter’s cookbook At Home on the Range, which has been reprinted for the first time. The cookbook, which Elizabeth Gilbert found unpacking a box of old family books, draws from recipes created in the nineteenth century. Potter espoused the importance of farmers’ markets and ethnic food, and derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts. Sales for the book tonight, which Liz Gilbert will sign, she will sign the book of her great-grandmother, benefit the educational nonprofit 826 National and Scholar Match.

Now, all of you know that for the four or five years I have asked the various guests I invite to give me a biography, a haiku, a tweet if you prefer, of sorts, about who they are, in seven words exactly. Well, some of them are seven words, some of them are eight words, you will see. Liz wrote, “Mother, grandmothers, aunties: everyone cooked. I napped.” Then John said, “Before television, Hodgman imitated Liz Gilbert.” Then Liz said, “I can’t help but add seven more: ‘Now an entire generation imitates John Hodgman.’” Please welcome them to the stage.

JOHN HODGMAN: Hi, Liz.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Hi, John.

JOHN HODGMAN: Hi, everybody, I’m John. This is Liz. We make appearances together from time to time and a number of people find this very confusing. There was one event that seemed like the perfect idea when we met at the Apple store to have a conversation, and about the half the audience were computer nerds and comedy nerds, and the other half of the audience was divorced ladies, (laughter) and they did not get together the way I’d hoped. Which would have been very exciting. What seems to be very natural for us to be together I think causes some disjunction in other humans’ brains, because the reality is that we in previous lives we were and are friends, long before my life changed dramatically and Liz’s, too, I daresay. Liz was a magazine writer and an idol of mine and a friend, and I worked in book publishing at the time, and was trying to figure out how I could lead a life as glamorous as being a magazine writer—at least the way you lead it—and you know Liz is still today the one of the greatest writers I have the pleasure to know and I am still her student in every way. Thanks, pal.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Thank you and good night.

JOHN HODGMAN: There you go.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: This has been a wonderful evening. I’m satisfied.

JOHN HODGMAN: So hi, Liz.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I’m satisfied. Hi John.

JOHN HODGMAN: So congratulations.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Thank you.

JOHN HODGMAN: You finally didn’t write a book, which is this book, which you did not write.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I didn’t write a book. This is a book that I did not write.

JOHN HODGMAN: Unless this is a massive exciting literary fraud, like a new JT LeRoy thing you’re pulling off.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Or like Eat, Pray, Love. I’m just kidding, sorry.

JOHN HODGMAN: Also found in my great-grandmother’s attic, Eat, Pray, Love.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: What a big reveal this is turning out to be. This book I had always vaguely and peripherally knew of, and I should have brought the original, I neglected to bring it, I’m sorry. But my great-grandmother published this cookbook in 1947. She was a columnist for Philadelphia newspapers and Delaware newspapers writing about food, and a terrific, natural, lively, vivid writer and I had sort of known of her existence but chose to completely ignore it for twenty years. My mom gave me one of the original copies of the book when I was about twenty-three and I took one look at the back jacket and saw a nice kindly old white-haired lady with cat’s-eye glasses, and I was like, “Eh, everybody’s mom, grandma, and great-grandma cooked, pah.” Like, I wasn’t interested in the domestic arts and just cast it away and discovered it again last spring and just thought, I should take a look at what this thing is and found this extraordinary living person inside that book who was much more Dorothy Parker than Betty Crocker, and just funny and kind of wild and really appealing and warm, and I just thought I had to do something with this and I did have a thought to write a book about it but then I decided it would be more of an homage to her to just bring the cookbook back exactly in her words with a new introduction and that’s what this is.

JOHN HODGMAN: And maybe to give us a sense of her voice you might read just a little bit, because the introduction of the book sets a scene that really dominates the scope of the book itself, in that this is an amazing writer, first of all, and clearly an amazing woman adept at thinking on her feet as everything falls down around her. But it’s also, it starts, she’s a young wife and mother in an age when entertaining was very, very formal. And she talks about one of the first formal dinners she gave with lots of servants and a cook and a menu that was fifteen lines long and includes the obligatory green turtle soup course—which sadly has been abandoned—and a separate line for celery and radishes, this kind of thing, you know what I mean, and in the midst of it it falls apart, and the lights go out and the babies start wailing and the guest of honor is confused, and yet somehow it all becomes rescued in a way that I think colors the entire book which in many ways is as much a memoir as it is a book about how to cook calves’ tongues, so if you wouldn’t mind reading from this is about where it goes horribly wrong, and then I’ll just go get a drink and I’ll be back in a minute.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Come back in about half an hour, John. So she’s borrowed her mother’s butler for this event and he has gone on a bender. Her sister has arrived and plugged in—this is in the thirties—has plugged in an electrical appliance and blown out all the fuses, the neighbors who were invited came, saw the house was dark, and left, had to be—so everything is going wrong, the meringue is collapsing. So we start here.

There in the kitchen sat cook, head in hands amidst unstacked dishes and guttering candles, gazing out of tear-filled eyes at a partially unwrapped meringue. The threatened headache was a grim reality and the poor creature could barely get upstairs. Bravely trying to keep some remnant of what I still felt was the necessary formality, I was just about to bring the meringue to the table when the guest of honor appeared in the kitchen and, with a heartening pat on my back, bore the icy pyramid to the dining-room sideboard where, amidst cheers, he announced himself as the new butler, and proceeded to serve the dessert and jovially press second and third helpings with all the confidence of a stage “Jeeves.” Coffee and brandy, still dignified by silver tray and cut glass decanter, were escorted into the living room by my husband, but by that time all formality had vanished and my guests continued what they maintained was their most enjoyable evening in years by shooting craps on the floor with the light of every remaining candle. When the electric company’s lineman arrived at eleven-thirty to fix a blown main fuse he was invited to try a few rolls of the dice before he finished the meringue, and he departed for his next call considerably richer. Our important guest really relished his kitchen supper of beer and self-made onion sandwiches, and when later he joined a game of softball in the hall, batting one of the baby’s worsted toys with a rubber-tipped plumber’s assistant, his dignity and my failure as a formal hostess were completely forgotten, and I realized that elaborate entertaining with inadequate help was neither convincing nor worth the nerve-shattering effort.

Since then I have been shuttled financially and physically between a twelve-room house in the suburbs, a four-room shack in the country, numerous summer cottages, and a small city apartment. An isolated and heatless farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore was my home during the war years. In all of these abodes I have found that providing a really heartfelt welcome and simple and plentiful food gives any hostess an advantage over the famous man who built the better mousetrap. A world of friends will beat a path to your door.

JOHN HODGMAN: It’s so lovely. Thank you, this my copy so I’ll take it back. It’s so lovely and poignant. I mean, you pointed out the poignancy of that last paragraph in your introduction because in many ways this is a celebratory moment where she kind of casts aside an entire entertaining and culinary tradition for something that is more her own, and clearly everyone’s getting drunk, too, which is more fun for her, for a while, but also it’s a bit of a riches-to-rags story how she goes from this very big house with all these servants to an unheated farmhouse during the war.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And to worse abodes as well, I mean, her story really is a riches to rags story. Her family was a prominent mainline Philadelphia sort of demi-aristocracy that I always forget that my family descended from because she lost it all. She and her husband, my great-grandfather, who I knew very well, lived lives of rapacious irresponsibility. Her father spent his life trying to keep the family’s money out of her husband’s hands and out of her hands because they were just wild and they blew it very quickly. They were in debt.

JOHN HODGMAN: They played craps on the floor by candlelight.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: They played craps on the floor. They were in debt their whole lives. He never developed a taste for work. She cobbled together things, you know, all the time. You know my uncle remembers that when times used to get rough and there wasn’t any money, and there never was, and times were always rough, and things were always strapped, she would put on her best, what was left of the jewelry that hadn’t been hocked, and put on her best clothes—because she had this kind of aristocratic bearing and this cachet she would go to make the rounds for about seventy-two hours straight, of all the private clubs in the Philadelphia area and sweep up at the medium-stakes bridge tables while drinking martinis and smoking, and she would come home with rent. And that’s how they lived, you know, which was a huge fall from the debutante balls and sailing clubs that she had been part of in her youth. And she tells that story in this book sort of with this great bohemian joie de vivre, but underneath it all is also what you sort of see seeping along the edges, the alcoholism, the sad marriage, the fall from grace, the struggle to maintain some sort of dignity, and at the same time her constantly being the center of every party she ever threw and being beloved by everyone who knew her.

JOHN HODGMAN: And the comfort taken from food and serving other people food and feeling that sense of family.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And not being the first or last woman in the history of feminine hardship to take refuge in the kitchen, whether it be eating or serving. And a true—and also I think an artistic sensibility, I mean you can tell from the little bit that I read, she was literate, she was witty, and she was strapped and constrained, and I think that the kitchen became sort of a palette for her to express a cramped sensibility.

JOHN HODGMAN: So you didn’t know her.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I didn’t know her. I knew her husband well because he lived to be ninety-nine, I knew him until I was in high school and he remarried after her. She died too young, she died at the age of fifty-eight from the alcoholism that permeates this story. You know, in addition to sort of all the partying that’s going on you do get the sense that the party went on for twenty-five years and never stopped and it did her in, and there were times I said she lived in worse abodes than an unheated shack, she went to mental hospitals to dry out because they didn’t know how to dry people out otherwise in those days. So there were these sort of sad episodes, but none of that—you don’t really get that tragic voice in her writing.

JOHN HODGMAN: No, that doesn’t sell newspapers.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And this was before—now she would write a great memoir about that, but there I think she was kind of trying to keep that on the down low.

JOHN HODGMAN: So you didn’t know her but she cast a real—not a shadow, but a light shadow over your family and she was legendary in your family.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Yeah, people can’t talk about—people who knew her which are still all her surviving grandchildren now in their seventies, they still can’t even talk about her without tearing up. My uncle Nick can barely mention her name.

JOHN HODGMAN: In your family you would call her Gima.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Gima. Because there was just this, you know, there are people who leave a family and there is just this vortex that’s left in their place, and he actually ended up naming his daughter after her, because he said, “I hoped that if I named my daughter Margaret I would stop dreaming about Gima, but I still dream about her.” She was just this vivid person. My father remembers Christmas began when she walked in the room. You know, I feel like everybody that I spoke to about her said essentially the same thing, the light went on when she walked into the room and when she left nobody ever replaced it.

JOHN HODGMAN: She knew how to throw a party.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She certainly did. And she invited everybody.

JOHN HODGMAN: To what you were saying, one of the sort of more touching moments in the book is when she discovers this exotic dish called pizza. To a degree it reminds you that you are reading an old cookbook. She says, “There is something I have found. It is called Italian Tomato Pie.”

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Or “pizza.”

JOHN HODGMAN: Exactly. But it’s couched in this story about how she’s pregnant with her second child, and I guess her mom thought that—

ELIZABETH GILBERT: It was sort of disgraceful. She had married too young, she had married below her, and she got pregnant twice in her two years, which—the WASPy family that she came from—there’s a line where her mother said that they were looking through their heritage to see if anybody had peasant blood that would just continue to have these pregnancies. She was pregnant with my grandmother, who was another great light in our family, and she would go on these long walks while hugely and embarrassingly pregnant through the Italian neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. Here she is, this Chestnut Hill matron in 1919, walking through these Italian neighborhoods where her pregnancy was welcomed, where everybody that she met was like, “yay, a baby!” and just this very different world than her own world and one of these—and it also shows her gift for insinuating herself into people’s lives and befriending them—one of these Italian matrons took her inside and said, I have something that’s good for you and for the, as she relays, “for-a the bambino,” because it’s important to keep those stereotypes solid. And this woman, then she proceeds to say, “she cut me a triangular piece of brownish-red pastry called Italian Tomato Pie, or pizza,” and you just get this kind of shiver that runs through you, like, “she was the first WASP to eat pizza.”

(laughter)

JOHN HODGMAN: And from this surrogate ethnic mother basically that would accept her and not be mean to her.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And not judge her for what really seemed to be her sensuality, this exhibition of whatever, lust, whatever it was that had made her be in that embarrassing position twice in two years.

JOHN HODGMAN: As you go through the book, you know, she casts aside the meringues and the green turtle soup, although green turtle soup comes up a lot in this book, actually. You know, the formality of that dinner, the food that she’s cooking becomes much more earthy, and she was certainly not afraid of ethnic food which was indeed very exotic at the time that she was writing. And, you know, I won’t say poverty food, but she wouldn’t turn her nose up at anything. There’s a great recipe in here on how to make your own scrapple, which I really recommend, as well as all of —hat they call “variety meats.” The calves’ brain in black butter is almost banal compared to some of the—you know, the calves’ head cheese.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And the eel. During the war when meat rations were on, she survived on eel on the Jersey shore. And she says things like—you know, I love the fact that clearly she’s addressing her book to respectable middle-class housewives because she’ll speak in this sort of “us” voice where she’ll say, “surely you have Jewish people who live in your neighborhood and surely you have German immigrants, and surely there are Italians around. Follow them, and find out where they’re getting your food, because they have better food than you do.” You know? And I mean, I think the kind of cooking that she was espousing any of us today would recognize as Portland, Brooklyn food. It’s like heritage, artisanal food.

JOHN HODGMAN: Even though she’s like “oh my gosh, pizza,” do you know what I mean, there’s something profoundly contemporary. So the book came out in 1947, right when we were just about to enter the huge phase of processed foods, and yet there was still a generational memory of really cooking with hands, grabbing food out of the ground with hands, killing things, cutting them up, taking a calf’s head, making him into cheese.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: “A fine summer snack,” as she describes it.

JOHN HODGMAN: My mom used to love it. And prefaced this whole Julia Child sort of deformalizing of dinner and at the same time ultimately, you know, she could be cooking in DUMBO.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She could have a food truck. She would. She would be a celebrity female butcher chef now if she were around. And what I feel is the most poignant thing about the book is this sense that one gets of somebody writing out of time. She is so much more of this moment than she was of the moment in which she was writing, and the plea that she is sort of crying out across the darkness of the postwar, you know, processed food generation that she’s speaking to is like, you know it’s falling on deaf ears, as she’s saying—because all of them are trying to get away from that. They’re trying to get away from wartime rationing. They’re trying to get away from the way their grandmothers cooked. They want to be modern, they want to open up a can. It makes them cool to open up a can. She’s saying, there’s this thing called Parmesan cheese, and it doesn’t come in a little green container. You can make your own chicken stock, and you know that people are like, “make your own—what the?”

JOHN HODGMAN: “That’s what my mom used to do, so no thank you,” you know what I mean? That was when all of food culture and indeed all of American culture was trying to get rid of anything that reminded them of an agrarian or even European past, do you know what I mean?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And there she was during the war thinking up—I mean, there’s food rationing, there’s a shortage, I mean, it’s very poignant when she says things like, “if you have butter use butter for this recipe,” or “if the eggs aren’t too expensive try it this way.” Even by ’47 she’s still deeply aware of her own bankruptcy that was constantly hanging over them in addition to the sort of general impoverishment of the country during the war. But she’s also just this spirited, creative, bored, restless person who’s on a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and goes knocking door to door to every poultry farmer around, and gathers cockscombs in a plastic bucket and takes them home and decides this is a great opportunity to learn how to make cockscombs, which I hear they eat in France, and just whips it up and makes her guests have rooster horns for dinner.

JOHN HODGMAN: Have you made the cockscombs?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I don’t even know . . . well, I’m sure you can get them.

JOHN HODGMAN: See, I’ve known you for a long time and I think I’ve seen you make some oatmeal once.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Oh my God, you’re outing me.

JOHN HODGMAN: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you self-make an onion sandwich in the kitchen.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: But you’ve seen me roll craps in the hallway.

JOHN HODGMAN: Oh, yes, I have, indeed I have.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: No, I’m more on the receiving end of the food.

JOHN HODGMAN: You have a lovely husband.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I had the good sense to marry a man who’s a better cook than I am, and who as my friends say, “You didn’t marry a Brazilian man, you married an Italian woman, an old Italian woman who cooks long stews.” I mean, I present this book honestly more as a literary treasure than as a culinary one, although it’s both.

JOHN HODGMAN: You ate a lot of this food last weekend in Frenchtown.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Last weekend. Let’s buzz market Frenchtown.

JOHN HODGMAN: That’s the crazy town that Liz owns in New Jersey, but before we get to that . . .

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I would only own a crazy town.

JOHN HODGMAN: What, since you never met her although you did eat her food growing up, what are some of the recipes that survived into your childhood and beyond?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Here’s the thing. She came from my dad’s side of the family. My dad’s side of the family is very careless with their treasures. There’s a sort of strain of carelessness that runs through the Gilbert Potters, they’re careless with their children, they’re just sort of like “uhh.” But my mom’s an Olsen from Minnesota, she’s a Swede, she married into this family and she took their treasures very seriously, and the reason that we even have these books is because she preserved them. I grew up eating food that my mother was cooking out of this book that I thought were her family recipes. So when I read the book I was like, “What? Poor Old Mom’s chutney—that was Grandma Olsen’s recipe,” but I didn’t realize it was hers. The cinnamon buns that we eat every Christmas.

JOHN HODGMAN: She just left those chutney gems lying about and your mom picked them up and passed them off as her own.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I just assumed they were her own because I didn’t think we had anything in my family, on that side of the family but she—so I had bread and butter pickles.

JOHN HODGMAN: I’m not calling your mother a liar.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: We’ll be discussing this afterwards. Braised celery, certain things that I just thought were Midwestern dishes that were hers. A lot of the preserves, my mom did a lot of food putting up when we were kids and most of it came from here, as it turned out.

JOHN HODGMAN: And then last weekend in Frenchtown, the little Liz Gilbert fantasy town that you live in . . .

ELIZABETH GILBERT: It’s true.

JOHN HODGMAN: You had a big event all weekend long where all the restaurants . . .

ELIZABETH GILBERT: On Liz Street, Main Street, we had the—

JOHN HODGMAN: On Eat, Pray, Love Lane. (laughter) The store lies just down Eat Pray Love Lane, turn right at The Last American Man Street. No one goes down GQ Road anymore. A little inside Liz Gilbert humor.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: You can park down at the Committed Culvert. We could do this all—I’m sorry.

JOHN HODGMAN: I think that’s about all we can do, actually.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I do own a town in New Jersey. I live in this wonderful little town in New Jersey called Frenchtown, New Jersey, and we have a business there my husband and I, we have a pan-Asian emporium.

JOHN HODGMAN: Let’s just keep the advertising to a minimum at this point.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: We’re going to buzz market that now. And we decided, I decided to do a signing of the cookbook at our store, and then I invited. . . . We have eleven restaurants in our town, and all eleven of them all weekend did nothing but cook food from this cookbook, and all the little shops in town did cookies and hors d’oeuvres and lemonades and cocktails, and so you could walk through our little town and just eat my great-grandmother’s food for one day. And it was really emotional for me because, first of all, all of her surviving grandchildren came, so it turned into a family reunion and all of these people were eating food that they hadn’t had since 1947, and they were having it in these wonderful little restaurants in our town, which was really sweet and moving, and also a friend of mine came into the shop and told me that in Hindu mythology, I shouldn’t say mythology, sorry, that myth called Hinduism. Oh, other people’s religions are so quaint!

JOHN HODGMAN: In Hindu hoo-ha in the crazy wacky stories of the Hindustanis—

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: In that silly old thing called Hinduism, they say, and it’s adorable, (laughter) they say that if you have a feast in the honor of a deceased loved one, you will ascend their soul rapidly through many levels of karma. And the fact that I know that my great-grandmother had a very sad death, that she was this great, buoyant woman with this tremendous curiosity and sense of adventure and invention and she was not for whatever reasons, personal and political, I would say, of being a woman in her time, she was not given the opportunities that I wish she had been given in her life, and sixty-five years after her book was initially published, this tiny little town in New Jersey decided that everyone for one weekend would be cooking and eating her food just makes me feel like—

JOHN HODGMAN: Bump up her karma.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Somewhere she’s just been moved out of economy into first class. She’s been given a big karmic upgrade.

JOHN HODGMAN: So what did you—did you eat anything that you hadn’t had in a long time or that you’d never had before?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Yeah, I ate things that I’d never had before, like mulligatawny soup. She had mulligatawny soup in her cookbook which is pretty progressive.

JOHN HODGMAN: It’s a kind of green turtle soup.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: That’s made by superstitious Hindus. Just keep that running.

JOHN HODGMAN: Tell a ghost story over it, and somehow it turns Indian.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Also it was my dad’s seventieth birthday and he is the five-year-old child who she describes making a—in the book she describes making a cinnamon roll in the shape of a bicycle for him one Christmas, to present him with before he got the bicycle that he also got. So his seventieth birthday was this weekend, so one of the bakeries in town prepared a cake from the recipe that he probably had for his fifth birthday cake, it was just very lovely. And it was heavier than the core of Jupiter. I don’t know what they did in old-fashioned cakedom, but it was just the densest but loveliest thing, with a butter frosting that was very nice. And he was very happy and he wept. As I might if we continue on this vein, so we’ll move to another topic. It was very sweet.

JOHN HODGMAN: There’s a lot of generosity in her cooking. There’s a whole chapter on what to bring for invalids, including beef tea, which is beef broth, basically, exactly as it sounds. She also talks about making wine jelly, which I think is the—she actually invented the JELL-O shot. (laughter) Because I was reading it very carefully and it was basically you make a gelatin, and then at the very end you add wine and then you let it set up and it’s not at a point where the alcohol would have cooked off, so I think it’s sort of like how to sneak alcohol into a hospital. Now you know who is popularly credited with inventing the JELL-O shot.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Franklin Roosevelt.

JOHN HODGMAN: No, that’s—

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I don’t know, (laughter) I just—it took the edge off the war.

JOHN HODGMAN: Exactly. No, Tom Lehrer, the satirical songwriter, is popularly credited with inventing the JELL-O shot. It may be apocryphal, but I did read it on the Internet.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Did he boil animals’ hooves himself to make the gelatin?

JOHN HODGMAN: It was when he, I think it was when he was in the Army or something. But she might have him beat on this.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I think, well look, she was twenty years ahead of Julia Child, I think we could say that she was thirty years ahead of Tom Lehrer.

JOHN HODGMAN: She also suggests holding parties for teenagers. “The best thing for teenagers’ parties is to give them waffles and bring a keg of beer.” (laughter) And then she says, “And you’ll be a part of the gang forever!” (laughter) Which as a parent is something I’m going to take very seriously.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: My grandfather. Keep this straight. Here’s Gima, she had her daughter, who she was pregnant with when she ate the Italian—tomato pie.

JOHN HODGMAN: Right, she didn’t eat the Italian, she ate the Italian tomato pie.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: So her daughter, my grandmother, so my grandfather married into this family and he married into that family, and I asked him, and this was not related to this cookbook, years ago I said, “Why did you marry my grandmother Madeline?” And he said, “I wanted to spend more time with her mother. (laughter) I wanted to be in Mrs. Potter’s kitchen all the time, and the best way to do it was to marry her daughter.” Everybody wanted to be in her kitchen all the time. She talks about this one summer where they got a rental, a little cottage somewhere on the Delaware shore. They hired an aerial plane photographer to take a picture of the town. They made a postcard where they circled their house on the town and that’s all it said, and then on the back it was printed, “Clambake and beer every day at noon, bring your own towels,” and they sent this postcard to every single person they knew, who knew that it was from them, and found them by carrying the postcard around the town and walking up the beach and arriving at the clambake. That is hospitality beyond—that is just so amazing.

JOHN HODGMAN: It’s almost exhausting to contemplate. Clambake and beer.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: That’s how you do a summer share.

JOHN HODGMAN: Clambake and beer at noon every day.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Every day. Every day.

JOHN HODGMAN: And then also to read how she would prepare for these hordes of drunkards who would come to her house (laughter) and just stay all day long and eat everything in sight, and it’s really, I mean, I don’t know how you do things in Frenchtown. You don’t have visitors that often, I suppose.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: No, John, I have them all the time. I just have been really busy.

JOHN HODGMAN: Oh. How interesting. I haven’t been there for quite a while. (laughter) I figured—

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Go on.

JOHN HODGMAN: She lays out strategies for making everything ahead of time so that you can actually enjoy yourself, poaching chicken with military precision. It was really interesting to read.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: And always making sure that the bottom of your icebox is filled with boiled potatoes. That was her emergency kit. Boiled potatoes, eggs, mayonnaise, and caviar. You can make something out of that. The other thing, it’s not just inviting people. It’s her husband, who was a barfly until the age of ninety-nine. I sat in bars in the 1980s with her husband when I was fifteen.

JOHN HODGMAN: Eating waffles and drinking beer.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Eating waffles and drinking kegs of beer and listening to new jazz records on the Victrola. And, you know, he would go to bars, he was incredibly social, he was very charming, he was very gregarious, and he would roll home when the bar closed with seven strangers, who he convinced to come home because his wife would love to meet them, and she’s a great cook and she would love to cook for you. And that’s where she says one of her rules of hospitality is never make unexpected guests feel that they’re an imposition because half the time they’re a little bit embarrassed themselves. You got the feeling that between the bar and waking up the housewife and turning on the kitchen light, the guests were like, “Ah, man, maybe we—”

JOHN HODGMAN: Appropriately. They should have been feeling that way.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: “We’re good, maybe we should—” she’s like, “No, I’ve got boiled potatoes and caviar. Let’s roll some dice.”

(laughter)

JOHN HODGMAN: I mean but I would almost say I live a completely different style of life which is, make even welcome guests feel unwelcome.

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Because they are.

JOHN HODGMAN: Even people that you invited feel like, “Yeah, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

ELIZABETH GILBERT: My husband taught me a wonderful Brazilian trick that they say, you look at each other across the table and you say, “I think our guests are tired. We should let them go home.” It’s a really good way to kick people out.

JOHN HODGMAN: I almost went home. That was great. I almost got hypnotized. Do you think she was just that generous of spirit? That she felt obliged by culture? Or—

ELIZABETH GILBERT: There’s so much joy in the way she relays being a hostess that I don’t want to pathologize it entirely. But I also do think and I think you and I have known people like this and I think I could say that my first marriage was sort of like this. There are couples who do best when there are a lot of people around. I think that she and Sheldon were the life of the party and when the party stopped it got very grim, so they just didn’t stop the party.

JOHN HODGMAN: They’re just staring at themselves over a bowl of boiled potatoes.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Yeah, they just didn’t stop the party. As long as there were a lot of other people in the room, and the Victrola was playing and everybody was playing craps and the cocktails were freely—I mean, she kept an icebox long after electricity came because she insisted on having cocktail ice, the iceman coming into the kitchen with a block of ice for her cocktails every day.

JOHN HODGMAN: And I absolutely don’t want to give the impression that it just seems totally tiring. I mean there is so much in this book that really makes you want to go like, “Yeah, I want to try to make a tongue hash,” you know what I mean? Or prepare for an army of drunks to come to my house. There is something very inspiring about it it makes you want to try things. And indeed, I found the last chapter—where she gives really good advice about what to buy for your kitchen that just holds up the test of time completely—with the one exception, her strong advice that you do not get an electric refrigerator but keep an icebox. And it was so tempting. I almost thought, “Yeah, I should get an icebox.”

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She was very convincing.

JOHN HODGMAN: And it is almost very convincing but unfortunately you can’t do that anymore.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: But do you remember why she said she mourned the end of the icebox? It’s because she mourned the end of the iceman’s visits, I think she had this craving to be around people all the time, and what she missed when electricity came was the iceman coming every day with his muddy boots, neighborhood gossip, and air of sex appeal. And all of a sudden you see a young Marlon Brando in his shirtsleeves with a sling of ice over—I don’t even know, were there things from the horror movies.

JOHN HODGMAN: The advice she gives about how to season a cast-iron pan is spot on, and why that’s all you need and how to, you know, if you don’t have a lot of money to get fancy things, don’t bother.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Nobody can tell the difference between shallots and onions when it’s cooked.

JOHN HODGMAN: Exactly, and it’s all really perfect advice, and particularly in that chapter you get a sense that she feels really at home—after this opening chapter of essentially her home falling down around her—and then the succession of country homes where the farmer neighbors are looking at them funny because they’re drinking a cocktail at seven instead of going to bed, you know what I mean? And her trying to convince teenagers to like her with beer and stuff. There is that moment where she’s really at home. So apart from getting an icebox, which I presume you don’t have, and since you refuse to self-make yourself an onion sandwich, going through the process of rediscovering this book, is there any advice you do take from it?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I’ll tell you what, it’s interesting, because I confess that I didn’t try the recipes before. I got so excited by her as a writer and as a historical figure—

JOHN HODGMAN: But she’s giving advice on more things than just how to make kidneys and tomato jellyrolls.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She is, and I think it’s funny because all the proceeds for this book are going to this wonderful organization that helps send kids from underresourced backgrounds to college.

JOHN HODGMAN: Please stop buzz marketing this charity.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I know, I’m sorry. Blah, blah, charity. But it’s a really good charity and I feel like she would have loved that and there are as of the last count twenty-three kids who are going to be able to start college in the fall because of this book. She—I was being interviewed by somebody who said, what advice do you think she would have given to these young people? And I just thought her life was so replete with irresponsibility that I’m trying to think whether you would want Gima giving advice to young people. But on the other hand the big-heartedness, you know, the fact that, how many people can you name in your life who sixty-five years after their death still bring tears to the eyes of anybody who remembered them? Like, that tremendous generosity and vivacity, I feel like the living of the life.

The story that I thought of when that question was asked was a story that I only recently learned about her, which is that there was a point where she was young, and she had just recently gotten married, when a wealthy relative died and she was left a great sum of money, and everybody told her to be wise with it, and to buy a home or to put it away in a bank, and instead she took her best friend and they went to Paris for three months and they stayed at the Saint Georges Hotel, which was the most expensive hotel in Paris at the time, and they spent every dime of it. They ate in the best restaurants, they went to all the nightclubs. I know that she hung out with movie stars. This is Paris between the wars.

JOHN HODGMAN: Frenchtown, they called it then.

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: As it was known to its inhabitants. And she had this tremendous, like, high-octane experience of France and came home absolutely broke, and was shamed by everybody in her family for having done this thing, and two weeks later the stock market crashed, and everybody was broke. And as she told it to my grandfather later, “Everybody else lost their money, I spent mine.” (laughter) I feel like that’s the spirit with which she lived her life and she paid a cost for that but at the same time, what a life, and there’s moments where I read this book and I think we haven’t had anyone this interesting in our family since then.

JOHN HODGMAN: I disagree.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: My dad’s pretty interesting.

JOHN HODGMAN: Your sister’s pretty interesting. (laughter) Maybe we should open the floor to some questions. If anybody has any questions on any subject. Tom Lehrer. Yes?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: We will repeat your questions, don’t worry.

JOHN HODGMAN: So be sure to whisper them.

Q: The part that you read in the book reminded me a lot of the certain rhythm and humor of your writing. When you first started reading these pages, was there some kind of recognition or did something resonate about a certain heredity of that creative spirit?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Thank you. Thank you. I’m honored to hear that. Here’s what I felt. I felt like I was listening to my sister, my sister’s e-mails, my sister’s writing, my sister’s a writer as well.

JOHN HODGMAN: I told you she was great.

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I felt like I was listening to my grandmother Mimi’s voice, and her really brilliant letters. She just had this confidence with language, her daughter, my grandmother, when I was a kid I was on a train with her going through upstate New York and we went through Poughkeepsie, and I was about ten years old and I was trying to spell it out. And I said, “Grandma, what does Poughkeepsie mean?” And she said, “Place where Vassar College is. It’s an old Indian word.” (laughter) You know, like, like that same, just very funny people, and I realized that there is possibly such a thing as a family voice. And that I had always thought, my great-grandfather, her, Gima’s husband, was a book collector, and he was very literary and he was sort of a literary snob, and he wrote these very ornate letters, and I always thought that the sort of writing strain in the family came from him. But she’s the one who’s the natural writer, you know? He was the one who was sort of a formal writer, but she’s the one who you would want to get a postcard from. And now I see it in my sister’s kids have sort of the same humor, the same voice, and I don’t know how long you can carry on a family voice or how deeply it reached behind her, but without a doubt there’s some sort of a living lineage that runs through there that’s really an honor to be part of.

Q: Hi, I’m Michelle, and I just want to tag onto that question, where I’m wondering, you know, from your sense of adventure, to you know, with the success of Eat, Pray, Love, do you see some of your great-grandmother’s personality or just interests in you?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Not just me, but in all her great-grandchildren and I mention that in the foreword, that it’s almost like she fragmented, and parts of her sort of got scattered into all of us, and my sister’s an extraordinary hostess and a wonderful cook who you will see make more than oatmeal, when you go to her house, is capable of any recipe in this book. My cousin Sarah lived in Europe for seven years, makes my adventures look very pale by comparison. There’s four of us, my cousin Alexa is a historian at the National Archives, and my great-grandmother was a food historian as well being as a food lover and writes about the antique cookbooks that she collected and studied. So like she just kind of reappears. Almost like sending out shoots underground, you know, she kind of pops up in all of us in various ways. I certainly feel as though I’ve been entitled to, you know, I mean the most obvious thing is that she left her husband at one point in the thirties and moved out on her own for a short while, and had this dream to move to France and live with her uncle, who was a portrait painter there, who had been kicked out of polite Philadelphia society for having an affair with a married woman, and she adored him and she was going to take her sixteen-year-old daughter, my grandmother, and move to Paris and start a new life, and her impossible husband, my great-grandfather, convinced her to come back to him, and she stayed with him until she drank herself to death essentially. And so the obvious point of departure here is that I was the one who got to leave my unhappy marriage, go into another part of the world, eat my way back to health, you know, have this sort of decadent and delirious experience of the self, and return home and re-create and renew and that was an opportunity that she was for whatever reasons not allowed to do. So I feel lucky and saddened by that. Anybody else feel lucky and sad? Margaret, as always? Go ahead and poke up questions, too, we don’t need the mike, it’s a small room.

JOHN HODGMAN: Just raise your hand.

Q: Did she publish other books?

JOHN HODGMAN: The question was did she publish other books?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She didn’t and, you know, when I talk about the carelessness of my family, we don’t even have her letters. My uncle Nick said, “Oh yeah she used to write me letters all the time, and I’d be like, ‘Ah, what a great letter.’” And nobody held onto any of that stuff. What we do have is a scrapbook of all her food columns for the Delaware Star and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and those are really wonderful as well. A lot of that stuff went into this book.

JOHN HODGMAN: How did come to start writing for the newspaper?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I think she needed the money, and she mentions in here a friend who’s a newspaper editor who she used to bring soup to when he was in the hospital, and I’m sure it was some sort of a family connection.

JOHN HODGMAN: Brandy soup?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She invented brandy soup that now all the frat kids do.

JOHN HODGMAN: One of the things I love about the book is it sort of anticipates Brooklyn-style foodieism, do you know what I mean, but has none of the selfishness of contemporary foodieism, do you know what I mean?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: No preciousness.

JOHN HODGMAN: It’s not just that it’s not precious. It’s that it’s not self-celebratory or indulgent. It is generous. I mean, perhaps to a fault, but it’s about making food for other people. Rather than, “Look at the thing I have on my plate right now.” Click. Tweet.

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Or that kind of aggressive cooking where people are like, “I fuckin’ cooked this! (laughter) Nailed it!” Like this abusive kind of pride in the cooking. I don’t think there’s that in there, and I’ve wondered what she would think of this moment, and I think there are things about it she would love, a great deal of it she would love, and a great deal of it she was preaching. You know and I think, what would she think of veganism? She has a vegetable soup recipe in this book that’s one of my favorite moments in this book. Vegetable soup for six, step one, get three pounds of beef. (laughter) And it’s not ironic. I’m like, yeah, we don’t call that vegetable soup anymore, but that’s now I guess it’s vegetable soup because there were vegetables in it, in addition to. We made that vegetable soup the other day, by the way, and it was stupendous and very beefy and delicious.

JOHN HODGMAN: Just don’t tell your vegetarian friends. They’ll love it.

(laughter)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Yes. It’s so good. But I think she would have. I think she would have treated vegans the same way she treats teetotalers and the ill in this book. (laughter) Which is that you work around them and you find something they can digest. If somebody comes to your house who’s not drinking, you make them a wonderful sparkling soft drink.

JOHN HODGMAN: A horse’s neck is what she recommends.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: It is indeed.

JOHN HODGMAN: A horse’s neck.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: She would have accommodated I think anything that came into her house without making the person feel freakish. Food allergies are not mentioned in this cookbook, either.

JOHN HODGMAN: Yes.

Q: I was wondering how you as a writer sort of attack projects that aren’t specifically in the writer path, and what this sort of project has made you feel in terms of working outside the box of where everyone expects you to be.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Well, it’s kind of, this one woman said to me, “So I heard about this, and I was like, ‘oh, all right, I get it, first you go have this great adventure and travel all over the world and you get all liberated and then your next book’s about marriage, and then you write a fucking cookbook,’” and I was like, “Hey, (laughter) lady, easy on the F-bombs in the library, first of all,” I said to her. (laughter) I said, “Mom, I’ll write the books I want to write, Mom.” (laughter) No, I see your point that it is unlikely. You know what? I did have—When I first discovered it, I really did get sort of shot through. A lot of creativity is about kind of walking through life with a divining rod, right, and you wait for the jolt of something to excite you and send a shock up your arm and tell you should be doing this. And when I first encountered this book I was so deeply involved in this novel that I’ve been researching for three years that I just started writing a few months ago, and I just almost felt derailed when I found this and I thought—you know it just had such a weight and it had such an impact, and I wondered, “oh wait a minute am I supposed to write a book about this, about this book and should I be cooking all these recipes and then should I go and do a sort of a history of midcentury American women?” I could of sort of picture everything I could do with this, go back and read all those columns, go find all those places where she used to live, it could be a cool book.

But the reality is I’m not a cook. I’m a grateful and shameless eater, but I’m not a cook, and I just feel like I couldn’t have honored it in the right way. And also there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing right now, and so the answer was to bring the book forth and just to present it rather than to write about it and I also sort of feel like, enough with the memoirs for a while, so instead I’m working on my big gardening epic novel. No, but it was a delightful, it’s been an act of fierce stewardship to bring her voice back into the world at this moment where I feel like it will be so much more appreciated than it was the first time, and the slogan that I keep telling people is “don’t make the mistake your grandmother made, read this book.” You know, this is her second chance to find her audience and it’s delightful to go bang a drum about it.

JOHN HODGMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, Liz Gilbert.

(applause)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Ladies and gentlemen, John Hodgman.

JOHN HODGMAN: The book is called At Home on the Range. Liz, you’re going to hang around and sign it?

ELIZABETH GILBERT: I will.

JOHN HODGMAN: The charity is called Scholar Match. The town is called Frenchtown. Anything else you want to promote? And such a delight to hang out with you anytime.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Thank you, John.

JOHN HODGMAN: Thank you, and thank you Paul for the wonderful introduction to the New York Public Library.

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Thank you everybody for coming and being part of this. I appreciate it.

JOHN HODGMAN: I didn’t see you guys there, thank you! So nice of you guys to come. Thank you very much.

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