Amanda Hesser...the foodie's Amy Sohn

The BBQ Pit
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So for the past few months, the food column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine has been written by this Amanda Hesser puppy.

I’m not sure where the hell Amanda Hesser popped up from. The artist draws her every week as a sort of a cross between a Vassar co-ed and a young Westchester hausfrau, with clips in her hair, a long, elegant, slender figure, and some surprisingly big tits. She’s supposed to have studied in France, and is a cordon-bleu chef.

Among her intensely irritating writing tics is her tendency to give people cute nicknames. Her boyfriend (who does not share her discerning palate, overwhelming fascination with food, and magnificent culinary skills) is called “Mister Latte,” due to his amusing habit of ordering Yuppie coffee drinks with his Chilean Sea Bass Braised with Endive or Lark’s Tongues in Aspic. How Amanda had to struggle to avoid laughing at him, hiding her smile behind her goblet of winsome Puligny-Montrachet Caillerets 1998. Guess she likes him for his large wiener.

(This bugs me as much as it did in the old Amy Sohn columns in the New York Press. Sohn used to write an astonishingly unerotic sex piece every week, wherein she referred to her current squeezes as “Novel Lover” and “Unpublished Author” and “Famous Director’s Son” and shit like that, in between describing the last blow job she gave and how she flashed her breasts at some guy on the IRT. Amy wrote a self-obsessed novel back in 1998 and immediately quit the Press, as she had become a Literary Lioness. Nothing became of the book, and I’m not sure what became of Amy.)

Like Sohn, Hesser seeks to share her fascinating personal life with her readers, rather than simply discuss cooking and offer recipes.

So far, over a spell of weeks, we have heard about having dinner at Mister Latte’s parents’ house, where poor Amanda feared she would be called upon to eat Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli and iceberg lettuce. Surprise! Mister Latte’s Mom cooked a nice meal! Whew. Then Amanda had dinner in a fancy restaurant with some famous food guy. Then Amanda had to have dinner with her parents, and she worried that she would have to eat Cheez Whiz and baloney sandwiches. Surprise! Her Mom cooked a nice meal! Whew. Then Amanda had another dinner in a fancy restaurant with a famous food guy.

Amanda Hesser seems to have been brought in as a replacement for Molly O’Neill, another abysmal food writer who collected a New York Times paycheck for more years that I want to think about.

Like Molly, Amanda has NOT YET PROVIDED A RECIPE in her column with which I would hit a dog in the ass.

Dozens of talented cooking writers in NYC, some of who are even on the Times payroll. How did Amanda acquire the plum of the weekly Magazine column? Did she Amysohn the young publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, perhaps?

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25 bonus points for the deftly handled King Crimson reference.

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Ugh. I heard her on Arthur Schwartz a year or so ago. Boy was she full of herself. “Oooh. The gardener at the Cordon Bleu didn’t like anyone, but he liked meee! He gave me all the best herbs and vegetables! Then I had dinner with Julia Child and now she’s my best friend! Then Jean-Georges Vongerichten offered to kiss my butt but I refused, because he’s so…common.”

Lark’s tongues in aspic? Ha! I’d like to see her and Mark Bittman in a cage match.

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Bittman would crush her like the bug she is.

Not only does Bittman suggest dishes and techniques one might find appetizing and intriguing, but he writes with style and a sense of humor. Here he is on cleaning freah greens if you don’t own a salad spinner:

“Go get a clean pillowcase, put the greens therein, go out onto the porch, fire escape, deck, sidewalk, terrace, or what have you, and swing that pillowcase around so that the centrifugal force forces the water from the greens, through the linen, and into the air. This is what you call ‘fun.’”

– Mark Bittman; LEAFY GREENS, Macmillan, 1995.
Oh, I found a picture of Amanda Hesser online. It’s not a beach shot, so I can’t tell if the illustrator is accentuating her rack for her, but she sure ain’t as cute as she gets drawn.

When I get to write the Sunday Times Magaine food column, I’m gonna have them draw me stripped to the waist every week, flaunting the powerful chest muscles I don’t have. And maybe with a salami down the front of my pants.

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pldennison

Well, it’s an album, silly!
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

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Oh, in the name of…c’mon, wake up! Of course Phil knows that!

Say, did you know that the Greek name for Neptune was Poseidon? Just a little free bonus knowledge, there. A day without fresh knowledge is like a night sky that is starless. And I could swear I read that somewhere in the Bible. It was right there in black and white.

[sub]Thirsty? Have a Coke

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I’ve never heard of her, but your description of her attitude is just what I try to avoid as a foodie. She sounds like she’s using food as a social climbing tool, which takes all the joy out of it.

Besides, never trust a foodie who’s too skinny. She’s probably yakking it all up in the toilet right after having scored a big night out with the latest fashionable chef.