Belts will be worn tighter this year,” said Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) in The Philadelphia Story, when she thought her sweetheart Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart) had bungled himself out of gainful employment. This fine and humorous film—adapted from a wildly successful Broadway play—stands as a stirring exploration of the difficult relationship between America’s distinct socio-economic classes. I love the movie, but I’m not sure its premise—that the haves and have-nots are more alike than we might have imagined—was true then, or is any closer to being true today.

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No Gaggle of Grease

Around this time of the year, people who like to cook and entertain begin to do the kind of fantasizing that leads some misguided people to climb Mt. Everest and, well…die. Since I long ago adopted a safer attitude toward holiday cooking, and my job here is to share with you some dubious pearls of wisdom, I will not be providing you with a recipe for turducken.

 

 

The $40 Tomato

Vegetable gardening used to be fun, but since everyone’s read and digested Michael Pollan’s seminal and generation-changing book The Omnivore’s Dilemma—you have read it, right?—the urge to garden has begun to feel more political, perhaps even evangelical. By raising and eating our own food, we’re told, we can save the planet for our children and theirs, but only if there are enough of us.

 

 

 

Let Caesar Be Caesar

Let us stop and consider the rich history — the provenance, if you will — of that crispy-creamy-salty tumble of leaves that is so beloved of restaurant-goers of all ages: the Caesar.

 

 

Go Dough

In the early ’90s, I found myself—rudely, abruptly—living in a small, whitewashed house on the southern coast of Spain. The reason is of such great convolution that to share it here would require far more space than even my generous editors are willing to sacrifice. At the end of the long drive from London, I pulled up in a three-ton truck full of climate-inappropriate mahogany furniture, copper pans, and cookbooks.

 

Senor Frijoles

Right out of college, my dad dabbled with socialism, communism, and a few Mexican ladies of the night. He was idealistic, an itinerant actor who found a community of like-minded bohemians clustered around Mexico City in the late ’30s. While they waited for World War II to break out, they put on plays, drank tequila, and explored the glossy-tawdry world that always seems to make up the expatriate population in a warm Latin country.