Pie Talk #37: Focaccia

I moved into this apartment just before Christmas 2019. By Christmas 2020, we’d launched a little media company whose theme color was a bright light lavender, and though as a kid I would have thought a fake tree tacky (if not as tacky as the college field hockey captain who insisted the only proper way to decorate a tree was with lit white candles?), I decided to look for one in the same shade. Then I saw a pic of Kat Rosenfield’s (ep. #90) pink tree and thought, ohhh…

You know what else has people gathering ‘round? A hot hunk of fresh bread. I don’t think I bake to bring people closer to me, but maybe that’s part of it. Few things make me feel as whole as bringing a warm focaccia to the table, it acts as a homing device, it gives people something to do with their hands as they talk and drink wine and tear off hunks of bread to eat with cheese and olives and, my fave, dipped in olive oil sprinkled with flaky salt. Communion, baby.

Speaking of baking and Kat, she’s got a great little piece on tradwives up at Reason. A clip:

“[T]he one thing the internet's tradwives have in common isn't how they live but what they represent, culturally and politically: a conspicuous (and sometimes explicit) rebuttal to the feminist ideals of education, career, and financial independence. That doing this is a choice—as tradwives are inclined to point out when they're accused of undermining the entire women's liberation movement one muffin tutorial at a time—makes it all the more galling to those inclined to be galled.”

She mentions Ballerina Farm - whose Instagram I’ve followed since Chaya Leah Sufrin (ep. 87) told me she was obsessed. I am too. Is it that Hannah Nelleman, a Juilliard-trained dancer and current Mrs. America, is expecting her 8th child and is more fit than I was at 15? Sure. But what knocks me out is that, when she wants to make, say, BLTs for the family, she harvests the tomatoes, bakes the bread, makes the cheese, and films herself doing it, while whatever moppets wander in and out, sometimes lending a hand.

She also caused a bit of an internet kerfuffle last week, which I’ll let my pal Liz Wolfe handle:

Eugenics tradwife rooster discourse is touching on a million things that have been driving me mad lately // PLEASE STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT A WHOLE DISSERTATION ON THIS

*The core thing is envy––it's the successful people, the beautiful and ambitious and hardworking, that attract the most ire from the peanut gallery. What they did to elicit the scorn is most often beside the point; some people just want to find fault in others.

*Another thing is that public humility is seized on. Ballerinafarm seems to have made a mistake by letting her baby near the mean rooster. Accidents happen! Errors of judgment happen! Can any parent seriously claim they don't? She rectified the problem (by killing the rooster) and will probably make a different choice going forward, which is...kind of the best you can hope for. What alternative are the internet assholes proposing?

*There's also an expectation of maternal perfection. Not parental perfection, mind you –– MATERNAL perfection. A mother should always sufficiently supervise the whole brood, or so the logic goes, and NEVER screw up. Well, do you ever wonder why so many people are choosing to have ever-fewer children? There's an opportunity cost component, and a women working component, OK, but there's also a weird cultural shift that's happened where it's about quality of childhood now, vs. quantity of kids. She's pregnant with her 8th kid. Now, I don't have 8 kids, but I would hazard a guess that one becomes a little less hawk-eyed in their supervision of each individual kid under those circumstances. Which is a foreign concept to most internet commenters and, frankly, sad. Why do you, mother of 1 or 2, think that you get to tell Big Family Mom how to do her job when she's running a totally different show? Fuck off, you have so little experience with this, do you even understand the first thing about it?…

Read the whole thing here. Also, I don’t know if the “I felt the feminism leaving my body…” video is true, but I like her nail polish!

Video of me making focaccia in my “big libertarian kitchen,” baby blanket I’ve crotched (trad-wife adjacent!), baking equipment tips, Pornhub data link (ed: one of these things is not like the other?) and some love for my friend, fab cook, upcoming Smoke ‘Em guest Batya Ungar-Sargon (whose brownies we baked last week!) after the break.

Last minute gift? I got you!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I mention in the audio that my dimpling is not always so dimply. This one did!