When I pick up a magazine it’s usually Food & Wine or Eating Well. Not Vogue. But the current issue features Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover, with the tagline “a Hollywood Princess becomes Queen of the Kitchen.” It beckoned me to grab it. So I did. Then went home, plopped myself on the sofa and started reading. Gwyn can cook? And apparently very well too! I’ve always respected Paltrow as a woman with a solid head on her shoulders. But now, there was a foodie kinship forging… and perhaps a tinge of envious excitement when I read that she is coming out with a cookbook. Renowned food writer and Vogue food critic, Jeffrey Steingarten, was given the privilege (or challenge as he saw it) of meeting with Paltrow to talk food and whip up a few recipes from her book.
Paltrow’s cookbook, titled My Father’s Daughter, features 144 recipes which come largely from her late father’s kitchen as well as from restaurants she and her father loved. Paltrow was “exceptionally close” to her father, Hollywood producer Bruce Paltrow, who had a passionate love of cooking- a passion that Gwyneth carries on. Bruce’s death from cancer in 2002 was “one of her life’s greatest traumas.” So it seems a rather touching gesture that she honor her father by sharing with others the food he loved to share with his friends and family. As she says in the introduction to MFD, “This book is meant to channel the ethos of my father by sharing the greatest gifts that he imparted to me. Invest in what’s real. Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It will be what it will be.” Oh Gwyneth, how you speak to my soul!
Gwyneth’s daily diet is rather healthy (you can get an idea of her health habits on her website, Goop). Despite this, she is at her core a true gourmand, having a, perhaps not so secret, love affair with food. While “health food was never really on the agenda” for Gwyn’s cookbook (or her father’s cooking), many recipes are healthy by way of delicious. Paltrow also offers healthy variations to some of her not-so-healthy recipes… like oven-baked fries alongside her deep-fat French fried ones.
Steingarten and Paltrow agreed to cook a few recipes together, in Paltrow’s Manhattan home. The chosen menu included “gazpacho, corn chowder, chicken and dumplings, and Bruce Paltrow’s World Famous Pancakes. “ Paltrow, who is apparently impeccably organized, knew exactly what they’d have time to cook and plotted their time out accordingly. However Steingarten’s consistent stop-and-talk routine, and unabashed persistence in making her gazpacho recipe his way (which Paltrow kindly protested they would not have time to do, but graciously agreed to concede his request) left the duo with only enough time to make two of the four recipes. The gazpacho was left behind.
A few weeks later, Steingarten and Paltrow rendezvoused in her London home, which she shares with rock star hubby Chris Martin and their two children, to make pizza and chicken-under-a-brick in Paltrow’s outdoor pizza oven. Another pleasantly perfect afternoon… a little too perfect for Steingarten’s journalistic taste. So he decided to stir things up by asking some rather untimely and inappropriate questions. Like, had Gwyneth ever had plastic surgery, and what part of her body she hated the most. She may have a body that drives men crazy and women wild with jealousy, but what, I ask you, does that have to do with cooking?! Her undeniable beauty, both in body, mind and spirit, might lead some to wonder whether there are demons lurking beneath Paltrow’s glossy veneer. Perhaps it didn’t occur to Steingarten, who has built an infamous career on his ability to criticize, that maybe, just maybe, this uber famous leading lady is really and truly just that lovely of a person.
Is it coincidence that following this interrogation, Steingarten was politely uninvited to a third encounter he was previously scheduled to attend? Maybe karmic retribution. Don’t worry Gwyn… I got your back.
My Father’s Daughter is scheduled to be released in April 2011.
Check out Jeffrey Steingarten’s full article in Vogue.
