Dinner and a Movie:
Six Writers on Cinema
Good Enough to Eat

In Nigella Lawson’s 2004 cookbook Feast, she includes a recipe for penne alla vodka, part of a menu she titles “Supper Alla Romana For Ten.” She imagines a scenario in which she spontaneously corrals a gang of ten back to her West London flat “for supper after going to the cinema.” It is a Saturday night and possibly raining. Her friends are, likely, at least lightly soused, and so is the pasta—easy entertaining. A vat of penne rigate is dressed in an “amusingly retro” tomato sauce enriched with vodka, butter and cream, inspired by a now-shuttered trattoria in Rome that proudly fed the cast and crew of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s historical epic Cleopatra. The restaurant, which Lawson visited in the 80s, contained a shrine to Elizabeth Taylor.

An extraordinarily expensive blockbuster production, the film’s original cut runs more than five hours. Excess does not begin to describe Taylor’s sixty-five costume changes and forty-odd custom wigs; the most memorable (and perhaps most controversial), a brunette braided bob weighted with gold beads, sold at auction in 2011 for $16,000. There was also the Todd-AO celluloid it was shot on (daily rushes had to be couriered from Rome to Hollywood and back), the twenty-acre set with imported palm trees and a custom-built Roman Forum that dwarfed the real thing. Fox moved the production to Rome in the hope that an unhappy Taylor would show up to set more; she continued to busy herself with booze, painkillers, and new lover Richard Burton, the Antony to her Cleopatra.

Depending on who you ask, penne alla vodka was invented in either Bologna or Tuscany in the late 70s and popularised in New York in the 80s. With its lurid orange sauce, it feels appropriately camp. A more Roman accompaniment might be spaghetti all'amatriciana, made with tomatoes, guanciale and pecorino, but its earthy farmyard flavors—cured pork jowl, aged sheep’s cheese—can’t compete with penne alla vodka’s tacky charm.

Lawson’s recipe is for an unthinkable party of ten, but half the quantities would do nicely for four, or two with leftovers for the next day. Both she and Taylor’s Cleopatra are sensualists after all, striking and imperious with their dark hair and exaggerated curves and covetable silk nightgowns. Dinner should be fitting of a diva, eaten from a bowl and dragged to the sofa.

Lightly adapted from Feast: In a large pan, gently fry a large diced onion and perhaps a couple of cloves of chopped garlic in olive oil. Add two tins of plum tomatoes, crushing them with your hands as you go, and simmer for 20 minutes before stirring through a generous slug of double cream. Remove from the heat. Boil a kilo of penne rigate in salted water until al dente, draining it a few minutes shy of the instructions on the packet (but reserving some of the pasta water). Toss the pasta with 125ml or half a cup of vodka and a bigger hunk of butter than seems sensible, then add to the sauce. Mix thoroughly and season to taste with salt, loosening with pasta water if necessary. Serve from a large, warmed bowl with freshly grated parmesan.

Simran Hans is a writer and film critic for The Observer in London.

The woman’s face is pale, unrecognizably so. She has lost all of her hair, wearing a wig to cover her bald head. Her former lover visits her at her hospital bed, where she is confined due to a brain tumour. She tells him she is hungry. There is only one food soft enough for her to eat: Turkish delight.

It is not a spoiler to tell you that Olga (Monique van de Ven), the female lead of Paul Verhoeven’s stirring Turkish Delight, does not survive her ailment. Her death functions as the framing device for the film, structured as a long flashback through the eyes of her lover, an artist named Erik (Rutger Hauer). Set in the Netherlands, Turks Fruit charts Olga and Erik’s doomed romance. The two young, impulsive souls meet by chance, when Olga picks Erik up while he is hitchhiking. The bond between them is electric and undeniably toxic, making it impossible to look away: They have sex. They fight. They make up. They terrorize one another. They marry. They split up.

Turkish Delight, based on the 1969 novel of the same name by the Dutch writer Jan Wolkers, was only Verhoeven’s sophomore feature. Even then, though, he already displayed signs of the filmmaker to come, eliciting shock at every narrative turn. Verhoeven veers into the grotesque without apology in this film, and food is often his tool of choice. In an early scene, Erik flushes a pot of food down the toilet, an unappetizing sight. Moments later, we meet a sexual partner of his who is eating a banana with a spoon; he decides to stuff the fruit into her mouth. He discovers a horse’s eyeball while eating a meal. The camera lingers on a piece of meat crawling with maggots.

These scenes may test a casual viewer’s patience, but Verhoeven wanders towards a crushing denouement. After a period of separation, the two lovers reunite due to Olga’s escalating medical crisis. The film’s most moving note also centers around food—Olga’s sincere plea for Turkish delight cuts through the film’s excesses. Call Verhoeven a provocateur if you must, but at his finest, he could mine extremities for human truth. She stuffs her mouth with those gummy, pastel cubes until she can barely speak; she asks Erik to wipe her fingers, now chalked in powder. Olga seems to approach a state of delirium as she eats. This film is full of difficult images, but the sad sight of Olga, reduced to the most desperate version of herself as she feasts on Turkish delight, is the hardest to stomach.

Mayukh Sen is a writer in New York. He has won a James Beard Award for his food writing, and he teaches food journalism at New York University.

Rahat Lokum (Turkish Delight)
Adapted from A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1972, Knopf) by Claudia Roden

Add cornflour to another large pan. Add 6 cups water gradually, stirring until well mixed. Bring to the boil slowly, stirring all the time, until you have a smooth, creamy white paste. Add this slowly to the hot sugar syrup, stirring vigorously so that no lumps form.

Bring to a boil again, and cook, uncovered, over a constant low flame for 3 hours, stirring as often as possible with a wooden spoon. (In the commercial preparation, a mechanical stirrer operates continuously.) If the flame is too high, the bottom of the mixture will tend to caramelize.

The mixture must be cooked until it reaches the right consistency. This takes about 3 hours, and on this depends the success of the recipe. To test if the consistency is right, squeeze a small blob of the mixture between two fingers. Only when it clings to both fingers as they are drawn apart, making gummed threads, is it ready. It may then have acquired a warm golden glow.

Add the lemon juice and the flavorings. The mastic should be ground with a little granulated sugar to be successfully pulverized. Add coloring if you wish. Stir vigorously and cook a few minutes longer. Add the chopped nuts and mix well.

Pour the hot mixture out about 1 inch deep into trays that have been dusted with cornflour to prevent sticking. Flatten it with a knife and leave it to set for at least 24 hours. Then cut into squares with a sharp knife, and roll in sifted icing sugar. The lokum will keep for a long time packed in a box.

I may not believe in G-d, but I believe in kugel. And matzo brei. And lox and cream cheese and chopped liver and latkes and knishes and these absolutely delicious airy-yet-dense treats that my mother used to make called “Passover bagels.” Of course, for the sake of the holiday, there’s neither yeast nor flour in them, so they can’t really be considered bagels. Nevertheless, they persist, perched atop the pile of sweet and savory Jewish delectables that make me feel closer to my heritage than any rabbinical incantation ever could.

No film for me has captured the heft of the Jewish meal—the spread, the shmear, the schmaltz—quite the way Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey does. It’s a New York romantic comedy steeped in questions of class and tradition, soaked in pickle brine and vanilla, and it’s a film that gets to the heart through the stomach. The Lower East Side milieu is not just a setting, it’s the essence. It’s here, downtown, that career-driven single woman Izzy Grossman (Amy Irving, nimble yet harsh-edged) is fixed up, against her wishes, by fussbudget matchmaker Hannah Mandelbaum, who’s been unceremoniously employed by Izzy’s lovingly meddling Bubbie (Reizl Bozyk, a genuine veteran of the downtown Yiddish theater). Izzy is attracted to a colleague, the continental, confident novelist Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbé). Hannah thinks Izzy should consider Sam Posner (Peter Riegert); after all, he’s a mensch who runs his own pickle business. Upwardly-mobile Izzy is quietly horrified by the idea, though for the remainder of the film her defenses—not only romantic ones, but those related to tradition and heritage—will be broken down. Rarely is there an interaction that isn’t somehow related to food, from the first matchmaking session, in which Hannah scarfs down apple sauce, gefilte fish, and latkes with her mouth open in Bubbie’s kitchen; to the mortifying date in which Izzy tries to pawn patient pickle-man Sam off on her best friend over chips and salsa in a downtown Mexican restaurant; to Izzy’s birthday celebration with dollar hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya. It’s a diverse, gastronomic tour of New York, but it’s the depiction—the centrality—of Jewish food that really sticks. And while the LES delicacies that give the film its flavor are representative of the “old world” traditions that Izzy is trying to escape, Crossing Delancey never falls back on food-as-life clichés. Like everything else in Silver’s film, food is authentic, literal, unavoidable; it’s the artery-clogging past your svelte New York self can’t escape, and that you probably don’t want to anyway.

Bring to boil oil, water, sugar, and salt. Add matzo meal; stir. Remove from fire and add eggs one at a time, beating after each. Wet hands and roll pieces of dough into small balls and place on greased sheet. Make hole in center with fingers. Bake 25 minutes, 375- 400 degrees. Let stand.

Michael Koresky is the Editorial Director of Museum of the Moving Image; co-founder and editor of the online film magazine Reverse Shot, a publication of MoMI; a regular contributor to the Criterion Collection; and the author of Terence Davies (University of Illinois Press, 2014) and Films of Endearment (Hanover Square Press, 2021).

In Phantom Thread, a mushroom omelette is the catalyst for profound realization: power comes in many forms. It’s the simplicity of the omelette that belies the potential for power, for the rich complexities of flavor, of texture, of pleasure and pain. Consider the mushroom. These earthy fungi commonly found in black bogs, in dung deposits, on dead and dying trees, are portals. Some can open up the third-eye, make you see things and feel things—some are lethal. When cooked and seasoned properly, smothered in butter or herbs, they can activate ecstasy. And then, of course, when one is not careful, they can leave you lying on your back, helpless, tender, and open.

Alma, our heroine, understands this potential for power, which culminates in a scene, the scene, in the final moments of the film. It is the first and only erotic moment in the movie, and the eroticism, the sensuality, all hinges on the act of watching. You watch Alma slice the plump, meaty (toxic) mushrooms that she foraged in the forest outside Reynold’s country estate into chunks. You watch her sautee them in butter—lots of butter—until they brown, golden and languidly drowning in fat. Then salt. Then more butter, a large pad of it (Reynolds hates too much butter), and then she pours in the whisked eggs.

The eggs, poured into the pan from high, sizzle and puff and envelop the mushrooms in a manner that feels salacious. All her movements are deliberate, intentional, sensuous and commanding. Once the omelette is set, folded in half, she places it tenderly on a plate. She garnishes the omelette with freshly chopped chives. She presents it, triumphant, before her lover.

Reynolds has been silently watching all this, too. He takes a bite, and in doing so he has conceded. He has surrendered to Alma, to the intoxicating simplicity of the meal, to the unknown potentials of the omelette—just an omelette—he’s given up control.

This is, without a doubt, a toxic relationship, but what fascinates and intrigues me every time I watch this film are the ways in which Alma devises ways to enact control, to shift power, through seemingly simple, even rustic means. A thimble filled with poison mushrooms, sprinkled surreptitiously into Reynolds’ tea. Food, particularly the making of it, has so often been designated as “women’s work” and therefore often unremarkable. Alma uses this distinction to her advantage—it’s covert. With a simple mushroom omelette, she reminds Reynolds that he is, after all, just a man, dependent on a woman for sustenance. It’s often the simplest things that hold within them the most power.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in frying pan over medium heat. Add mushrooms, cook until golden brown. Add salt to taste. Add more butter and once melted, pour in whisked eggs. Season with salt and pepper and allow omelette to set. Fold over and transfer to plate. Add freshly chopped chives as garnish.

Zeba Blay is a Senior Culture Writer at HuffPost. Her book of essays, Carefree Black Girls, will be published in October 2021.

During the early days of quarantine—a time of expiring flirtations and culinary endeavors—I thought a lot about Hong Sang-soo’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, in which a young Korean woman (Jung Eung-Chae) navigates the messy pieces of her illicit affair with a teacher after the departure of her mother to Canada. Haewon’s mother tells her to enjoy her life—“we’ll only have happy days from now”—but moments later, Haewon breaks down in an outpour of tears. It’s the last scene they share together. I always cry.

My mother, who lives in Korea, and I have been separated by an ocean for more than a decade, and we’ve exchanged countless goodbyes over the years. But the pang of her abysmal absence has never been more greatly felt than this year, when travel became especially complicated and I found myself confined to my kitchen more than ever before, left to fill a void of dread with whatever familiarity I could muster.

In normal times, I would probably be thinking about a trip home for the holidays around now. More importantly, about what I would eat there: My mom always takes me out for gamjatang (pork bone stew), often stopping at my favorite specialty restaurant straight from the airport. When we go out to the hip shopping district of Seoul called Myeong-dong, our go-to is their trademark kalguksu (a brothy hand-pulled noodle dish), which is what I think Haewon and her mother eat together during their last meal together.

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon didn’t inspire me to attempt this particular soup, but rather a simple favorite, one not shown in the film but which my mom always makes whenever I’m home: tteokguk (rice cake soup). It’s traditionally a Lunar New Year dish but a year-round comfort for me, and in desperation a few months ago, I texted my mom for her recipe. Missing a crucial ingredient (the rice cakes themselves), I turned to a nearby Korean friend, and her mother generously shipped me a package from her local Asian market. Though I haven’t had my own mom during this time, I don’t feel like nobody’s daughter.

Kristen Yoonsoo Kim is a South Korea-born, New York-based critic who writes for The New York Times. She also runs the food-on-film Instagram, Meals on Reels.

The scene in Hook, where Peter is sitting hungrily waiting for the food to arrive, while all the lost boys are chowing down on food that looks to be invisible, can be read as a metaphorical praxis for the way relational witnessing calls each of us into being. If you are trans, this calling into being, this cyclical witnessing, is woven into the texture of all relational experience. As the skin horse says in The Velveteen Rabbit:

"Real isn't how you are made, it's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The ability to use the hooks of faith to take one's imagination from hunger to eating food, is what Peter eventually does in the iconic transformation that fills an empty banquet table with brightly colored slop and hamburgers and anything imaginable. It is a scene that has entered a few mood boards for us, but what I think is notable is the “making it real” part. Once you are able to make the leap from the unseen, to the imagined, to the Real, you’ve acquired a skill that expands your own beingness. You are always made more real by your ability to see the realness of others.

Spiral Theory Test kitchen is a queer food project~ angel life as lived praxis. Bliss frequencies beckoning the songs of our spiraling life. STTK engages food as a psychosexual object that enacts anti-alienation through desire and the desire under desire. Communal breakdown of the self, resisting effacement through an earthly and otherworldly paradise.

STTK is comprised of Precious Okoyomon, Quori Theodor & Bobbi Menuez.