Hello friends!
It’s another fine Sunday and I hope it finds you well, healthy, and with coffee.
How’s your family text thread? Mine is filled with daily updates of everyone’s gardens, the frequent mention of cakes we miss eating together, pictures of our animals, and the occasional guilt-trip offshoot text which, as you might imagine, are my least favorite. So. Ya know. We’re all just in it and doing our best.
Accomplishments this week include and are strictly limited too, stress-baking funnel cake, stress-vacuuming, and stress-making myself a really nice gin and tonic. And yet… I’m ok, you’re ok.
The offering this week is below. Take what you need and only that:
• Here’s what we’ve been through: April was Death, April was Hope, April was Cruel. (The Washington Post)
• Would you rather go into the deep deep ocean or into outer space? Both are such a mystery but like… shoot me into the stars. Thirty-Six Thousand Feet Into The Sea: the explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth. (The New Yorker)
• Mmkay mmkay – so what I’m hearing is, we should have been buckled up: This Is The Most F*ed Up Astrological Week of the Year. (The Cut)
• Catch me on the latest episode of Ladyland. (Ladyland Podcast)
• This is the most thoughtful piece written on the Alison Roman drama: Alison Roman, the Colonization of Spices, and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture. (Pajiba)
• Correct. The Answer Is Tots. (Eater)
• On a whim this week I made Small Batch Baked Funnel Cake out of pate a choux dough and I have to say – what a stroke of genius. Please don’t sleep on this! (Joy the Baker)
• The best gift a man has given me: Justin Wilson’s Homegrown Louisiana Cookin’. It’s a treasure. (Biblio)
• Adriana makes the best strawberry cakes. She’s the queen. Mini Strawberry Sheet Cake. (A Cozy Kitchen)
• I don’t really need like, mass celebrity collaborations but Dave Grohl can give us anything and everything: Times Like These. And while we’re brushing against the Foo Fighters, let it be known that Taylor Hawkins if the best (and most humble) rock drummer we have. (YouTube)
• Hands down, the best sunscreen I’ve used on my face in a long time: Versed Guards Up. It protects against everything and goes on not too shiny, not too matte. (Versed)
Have the most lovely day!
xo Joy
Bonnie
Love the Foo Fighters! My son is a drummer- he just graduated HS and is attending Berklee in the fall ??. Taylor Hawkins started it all for him!! I have a great pic of the two of them before a show in Boston. He was so kind to him! I look forward to seeing your name in my inbox on Sundays!!
Kim
Have you watched Vivian Howard’s new show on PBS? Somewhere South. She traces some of our most universal foods back to their roots. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it may only be six episodes, which makes me sad.
joythebaker
Yes yes it’s an incredible show!
Susan Shores
Could you tell me where you got your glass flour canister and the name of it, please? I have mine in an old Tupperware canister and it is starting to smell like plastic. Thanks so much. Susan
joythebaker
I think I got these from Target a few years ago! They probably have something even better now!
Karen
I make up recipes all the time using ingredients that I like. I do not necessarily name them based on the culture of the ingredients. I also make Polish food often and do not necessarily call the stuffed cabbage, Polish stuffed cabbage. . I just say stuffed cabbage. Calling the food a “stew” didn’t bother me. A “stew” is a vegetable, fruit or meat cooked in a liquid, so if Alison thinks of it as a stew, that seems okay to me. There seems to be a rush to judgement over everything Alison Roman says or does right now. Her apology for things said has not been received well. For some reason it seems like in her case that is not enough. What should we do, make her lose her job, or take away all that she has built over time? Would that even be enough for some people. Judging each other has become a national past time lately. It is horrible that in this time of the Covid 19 virus, we cannot accept an apology and move on. I guess we will need to keep targeting Alison until we make her life as miserable as we can. How horrible is that??? I didn’t want to write this, but found that I just could not keep quiet. This is not my normal MO, but I feel a little sorry for Alison and those that want to drag her through the mud. Sorry if this offends some of you, but I guess I can still have my opinion. (or maybe not!)
Claire
Just on the point of Roman and apologies, setting aside the cultural food aspects, I think the reason people struggle to accept her apologies is that she never truly gave a real apology. Initially her apologies were laced with “I would never put down a woman” (well you did so you need to apologize for that, not say that you wouldn’t do it). Later on, her apologies were better but still relied on the “Sorry YOU were offended” type of formulas – putting the onus on others to accept her apology and now making them look like the bad guys if they are still upset by her (honestly vitriolic and unnecessarily harsh) comments that really came out of left field. So I don’t feel like she’s getting this unfair shake. People are just expecting more. A true apology should simply accept and acknowledge ones bad actions (without shifting the blame or responsibility back onto the hurt party). Roman never really does this in any of her various attempts at apologies. And as she fails to apologize, she keeps coming back with something different but again, it never hits the mark of a true apology.
It’s hard to accept an apology that never happened.
Karen
Maybe that is how she learned to apologize. Some people are just not good at it. It doesn’t always mean it isn’t sincere.It is not up to us to judge her sincerity, nor is it up to us to judge her at all. I have friends that really cannot do it well, yet I know them well and understand that part of them. To continue to bring her down for weeks because you, and I mean in general, do not like her apology seems mean spirited. Maybe she didn’t think her words were a put down, Maybe that was an apology for her. We cannot get into her head to analyse her thoughts. I just think that as people, we should be understanding of faults and not be so judgmental.I do not think anyone is perfect. People should not be expecting more than she can give. If that is how she apologizes maybe we are the ones that have to accept that. I just think that Alison Roman has already been raked over the coals. As I said before what would be good enough and are we really in a position to judge her sincerity?
Claire
She has, at bare minimum, the public relations help of her cookbook tour team and the New York Times. There’s no excuse for a bad apology in this case. I appreciate you trying to give her a lot of latitude, and I also do the same with my friends in my personal life, but at the end of the day she isn’t like us or our friends, and the mistake she made is different in scale and in effect. For example, she ended up attacking Chrissy Teigen, who actually was signed on to executive produce Roman’s future TV show. That’s a professional misstep combined with, whether you agree or not, outcry over racism, all done on a massively public scale; arguably very different from what we and our friends experience. Even in my personal life, I would expect a professional apology to be better than what she attempted in the first few tries. If someone has a PR team to help, I expect much more.
She’s a professional with a popular public-facing career and a team to help her. There is a different standard there and there should be. Everyone makes mistakes but she did not handle the aftermath of this mistake the way she should have for someone in her professional and public situation.
Danielle
What you are defending here, Karen, is white privilege. She is making food and using spices, flavor, ingredients, and inspiration from a culture that isn’t hers and passing it off as her own. Then, she is refusing to acknowledge that or the people who’s culture she’s appropriating. And then, she’s taking it further by belittling and badmouthing other women, women of color no less. She is the clear example of white privilege and supremacy in this country and you defending her actions because “it’s not up to us to judge her” is only fuel for the fire.
joythebaker
I really appreciate the decency you all are bringing to a disagreement here. Of course you’re welcome to share you opinion Karen. I’m not dragging anyone through the mud or trying to make anyone’s life miserable. We’re holding the gate-keepers accountable for the things they do and say. I don’t include these articles to simply judge Alison Roman. People reveal themselves. I think it’s important we recognize the larger points at play here: white-washing cultural elements of our food, lazy-thinking racism and downright mean-girlness. This is likely the last I’ll link to or discuss it here. I’m thankful we had a little space to get into it.
Danica
My new moto for just bout everything: “Brush with butter. Sprinkle seriously with powdered sugar. Enjoy immediately”
joythebaker
This is our new mantra. HA! I’m totally with you.