Jerusalem turned out fine. It’s not by any means the first time I’ve cooked from it, but as before I’ve come away feeling a kind of neutral distance from the book. No animus, no desire to put it in the give-away box, but no urgency to use the book again. When I contrast it against some of the other cookbooks I own that are in the same culinary space, I can’t help but feel there’s some edge missing from what Ottolenghi puts together. One of my readers wrote to me and I think got some part of it right, that a lot of the recipes are bland. That is maybe what I mean when I say there’s a sameness to them.
The swiss chard fritters are certainly beautiful looking—I think I would be careful to cook them just enough that they hardened and not enough that they begin to lose the bright greenness on the outside. The roasted cauliflower dish was, as another reader suggested to me, the best of what I’d picked to cook. It had a lovely balance and was also remarkably simple to assemble. Of the things I’ve made from Jerusalem, it’s one of the few I’d be eager to repeat. The lamb was, as my correspondent also predicted, not all that great. It was fine, nothing wrong with it, and also simple. (I left out the pine nuts: I’m one of those people who taste pine nuts as ‘metallic’ and they often linger on my palate for hours afterwards. I also accidentally forgot to put the yogurt sauce on the lamb, so that might have a more meaningful impact on its overall flavor.)
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll use the book again from time to time. The cauliflower salad in particular.
Two more short items that I don’t want to work up anything longer about. One is the death of Jordan Neely.
I hate hearing mass shootings called “tragedies”. They’re not tragedies any more than a car bomb is a tragedy. They’re an atrocity. They’re murder.
But Neely’s death? It might turn out to be some kind of culpable homicide (charged or otherwise) but I would be willing to call it a tragedy. A tragic collision of two men who both have been served less well by their society than I would wish.
It’s important that we live in a society where questions about criminal justice and individual culpability are open to public scrutiny. I have no problem with public conversation about these kinds of events: it’s how we all calibrate our individual and collective morality, how we think about what should and shouldn’t be. There are some obvious shouldn’t-be’s about this event. Jordan Neely shouldn’t be dead. We shouldn’t be dogmatically certain that mental illness is never a threat or that no mentally ill person should ever be confined.
But there’s a lot that isn’t obvious, and only some of that is about facts-yet-to-be-confirmed. I wish we were a public that could hold more uncertainties and ambivalences in our hearts and minds in these moments, without letting that willingness be abused in cases where there’s no question about what’s right and what’s wrong. I wish we allowed ourselves to be confused at times, or at least to not instantly take to mass media to denounce all those who fail our standard of certainty.
If there is a case that I am not confused about—where I think all the facts are in—it’s Elizabeth Holmes. Not just established in a judicial sense, but every other kind of public inquiry. That’s what made Amy Chozick’s NYT weekend profile of “Liz” Holmes so irritating to so many readers. Yes, Chozick admits part way through the piece that there’s a possibility that she’s getting played by Holmes, who is desperately trying to do some crisis-communication management of her image, perhaps to delay (or outright evade) her prison time, perhaps just to position herself for a post-prison comeback as a gentle, kindly purveyor of herbal remedies or some such thing.
It’s just such a Times thing, to make its writers and column inches available to a very particular kind of white elite criminal when everybody else in the world would have to pay for all that media space to do reputation management. (Or just get stuck with the plain old stigma of a criminal record.) The only way anybody should have agreed at this date to do a lengthy Holmes profile is if it was done on terms that Holmes didn’t control—say, if she’d had to sit down with several strong critics of Silicon Valley and had a no-holds-barred transcribed interview with them, or if she’d been put in some other conversational frame that put everything about her case in some other light—say, a discussion between Holmes, Frank Abagnale, and Billy McFarland convened by a tough-minded journalist willing to confront all three of them about their lies and misrepresentations.
Holmes is not uninteresting, but no reputable journalist should be serving as an unpaid public relations representative for her or anyone like her.