Mercantile / Dinner and a Movie
The most complete object in the Mercantile.
A great film and a great meal occupy the same register of attention. The pairing is the wit, never literal and never explained beyond the note. Under all of it a secret subject, the beauty of the people the world has stopped looking at, which is the subject of the whole property.
Seventeen pairings, and a new one every other week. The quarterly box carries two recipe cards, a film note in the curator’s voice, one beautiful table object, and a Fox House candle for the season. Each pairing also keeps a book, which routes through the Reading Room.
The lineup
- Babette’s Feast · Blanche Fox
- Cinema Paradiso · Blanche Fox
- Three Seasons · Claire Fox
- Like Water for Chocolate · Luisa Ortega
- The Taste of Things · Blanche Fox
- The Shape of Water · Hazel McGuire
- The Horseman on the Roof · Blanche Fox
- Chocolat · Annette Fontaine
- The Pillow Book · Ana Fiala
- Eat Drink Man Woman · Blanche Fox
- Faces Places · Blanche Fox
- Big Night · Hazel McGuire
- Tampopo · Ana Fiala
- The Lunchbox · Blanche Fox
- Julie and Julia · Hazel McGuire
- Mostly Martha · Blanche Fox
- The Grand Budapest Hotel · Ana Fiala
1. Babette’s Feast
1987. Directed by Gabriel Axel.
This is the film the entire format is organized around, whether I admitted it or not. A French chef in exile spends everything she has on one dinner for twelve people who have sworn not to enjoy it. The theological argument for the table as the site of grace has never been made more completely or more quietly. I have watched it nine times. I understand it differently each time.
Babette’s actual menu, cooked exactly as the film specifies, course by course. No substitution.
- Turtle soup with aged Amontillado sherry
- Blinis Demidoff with Ossetra caviar and crème fraîche
- Cailles en Sarcophage, quail in a pastry coffin with foie gras and truffle
- Endive salad with walnut oil and a single perfect cheese
- Savarin au Rhum with figs and candied cherries
The good cloth, the good plates, the crystal from the cabinet, many tall candles. The guests dress. This is not negotiable.
2. Cinema Paradiso
1988. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore.
The last time I was in Taormina the light on the water at six in the evening was the color of the inside of an apricot. I have been trying to describe it correctly for thirty years. This film does not try. It simply shows you what it means to love a place so completely that leaving it is the only thing worse than staying.
- Pasta alla Norma with ricotta salata and fried eggplant
- Bread with good olive oil, before anything else
- Braised lamb with olives and preserved lemon
- Cannoli filled the morning of, not before
- Bitter orange granita to finish
White linen creased from the drawer. The Sicilian ceramics with the lemon border. A Nero d’Avola Hazel identified empirically and correctly.
3. Three Seasons
1999. Directed by Tony Bui.
My mother loves this film the way she loves things she cannot fix, which is to say completely. I came to it later and from the side she does not, through the frame. Watch what the light does in the lotus pond and you understand that nothing here is an accident. I do not watch it for the story. I watch it for the certainty of every frame, and by the end the certainty is the story.
Southern Vietnamese, unfussy and exact. The lotus opens the meal, because the lotus opens the film.
- Goi ngo sen, lotus stem salad with shrimp, herbs, and a bright fish-sauce dressing
- Ca kho to, caramelized clay-pot fish, dark and sweet and salt
- Canh chua, the clear tamarind soup, sharp with herbs
- Steamed jasmine rice
- Che, or fresh lychee and longan, to finish
Spare and quiet. A single lotus floating in a shallow bowl of water. Pale linen, celadon. The food does the work.
4. Like Water for Chocolate
1992. Directed by Alfonso Arau.
My grandmother made mole the way Tita makes it in this film, with her whole body and something else that does not have a name in English. I watched this movie for the first time when I was nineteen and I called her the next morning and asked her to teach me. This dinner is hers more than mine. I am glad to have somewhere to put it.
Mexican the way the film is Mexican, regional and serious. Luisa begins the mole two days before.
- Chiles en nogada, poblanos in walnut cream with pomegranate
- Mole negro with turkey, the sauce made over two days
- Rice cooked in tomato broth, the way it is done correctly
- Fresh tortillas, made by hand, served warm
- Tres leches cake, the one she makes for occasions that deserve it
A cloth in deep red or embroidered white. Talavera, marigolds because the film earns them, mezcal in small clay cups. No one leaves early.
5. The Taste of Things
2023. Directed by Tran Anh Hung.
There is a woman in this film who cooks with the kind of attention that makes love seem like the obvious consequence rather than the cause. I have been making the dinner I serve with it since 1994. I have never written it down until now. I am writing it down now because some things should outlast the person who knows them.
- A consommé so clear you can read through it, in the good cups
- Sole meunière with brown butter and a squeeze of lemon, no more
- A vegetable course, whatever is correct for the season
- A main that has taken all day and shows none of it
- A tart Blanche has been perfecting since 1994 and considers finished
The best cloth, the best plates, the candles kept for occasions that deserve them. The table set the night before, so it settles into itself.
6. The Shape of Water
2017. Directed by Guillermo del Toro.
I am not, as a rule, a person who cries at fairy tales. I am telling you that so you understand what follows. A mute woman who cleans a government laboratory falls in love with the creature they keep in the tank, and she teaches him the world with boiled eggs. What undoes me is not the strangeness. It is the boiled eggs. The film is about the ones no one thinks are worth loving, and it is right about all of them.
Built from the film itself. It opens on eggs and ends on the impossible green pie.
- Soft-boiled eggs, jammy and perfect, served first and almost ceremonially
- A good chowder or a simple fish, the plain American plate of 1962 Baltimore
- Buttered greens, the color held on purpose
- Key lime pie, sharp and impossibly green, the pie the film keeps reaching toward
The film’s palette. Teal and green glass, a cloth the color of the deep end. One note of red held back to the very end, a single napkin, a bowl of cherries.
7. The Horseman on the Roof
1995. Directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.
A man rides across a cholera-ridden landscape in the full heat of a Provençal summer for a woman he has no reasonable claim on. The coat she wears in the third act is the reason I have never been able to throw anything away.
- Tapenade on bread, with a glass of something cold before anything is discussed
- Tomato tart, the tomatoes sliced nearly translucent, on a pastry that shatters
- Lamb with herbes de Provence and a gratin that has been in the oven since three
- Three cheeses, one hard, one soft, one that requires explanation
- Lavender honey with the cheese, not with dessert
Faded Provençal cotton in yellow and blue, soft from many washings. A serious Luberon rosé throughout. The windows open if the evening permits.
8. Chocolat
2000. Directed by Lasse Hallström.
Le chocolat n’est pas une indulgence. C’est une position philosophique.
- Leek and potato soup, the real kind, finished with crème fraîche
- Roast chicken with tarragon butter under the skin, a pan sauce that cannot be hurried
- Green salad after the chicken, not alongside it, because that is correct
- A single pot de crème au chocolat, barely set, served cold
Annette sets this table herself. French linen, the small white ramekins she brought from Paris in 1989. No flowers. Candlelight, because she requires it and is right.
9. The Pillow Book
1996. Directed by Peter Greenaway.
I watched this in Prague at twenty-three in a cinema that no longer exists. I have never entirely recovered, which I consider the correct response to a film about the body as text and text as the body. I served this dinner the first time without a recipe. I have made it the same way since.
- Dashi broth with tofu and a single sheet of nori, in a bowl that deserves looking at
- Cold soba with sesame dressing and cucumber cut very thin
- Grilled mackerel with pickled ginger and a rice so plain it is the most important thing on the table
- Black sesame panna cotta, just set, barely sweet, in a small glass
A cloth almost black, white or celadon dishes. Calligraphy paper and a pen beside each setting, not explained. No music before the film. Ana considers this non-negotiable.
10. Eat Drink Man Woman
1994. Directed by Ang Lee.
He cooks because he cannot say it any other way. I understood this the first time I watched it and I have not found a better sentence for it since.
Chinese the way the film is Chinese, serious and specific. Blanche goes to Mott Street for three ingredients she will not substitute.
- A clear pork and winter melon broth cooked four hours
- Three-cup chicken with basil, the sauce dark and glossy
- Steamed fish with ginger and scallion, the oil poured over at the last moment
- Garlic spinach, very simple, the counterpoint to everything
- Sesame mochi to finish, bought rather than made
The blue and white porcelain from Shanghai in 2003, used only for this dinner. Tea before and after. Shaoxing in small cups for those who are ready.
11. Faces Places
2017. Directed by Agnes Varda and JR.
Agnes Varda was nearly ninety and going blind when she got into a little van painted like a camera and drove across France with a man sixty years younger, and together they made the faces of ordinary people enormous. It taught me the thing I most needed to learn late, that the most beautiful face in any room is almost always the one no one has bothered to look at properly. She looked, until the looking became love.
The food of the French countryside they drove through, a farmhouse lunch on a long table. The villages, not the cities.
- A board of bread, good butter, and a single great regional cheese, before anything
- A rustic tart or a tian of summer vegetables
- A roast chicken with herbs, carried to the table in the dish it cooked in
- A green salad with a sharp mustard vinaigrette
- Fruit and a second cheese, with coffee taken slowly
A long table, ideally outdoors, where the van stops. Mismatched plates used and loved. A creased cloth, wildflowers picked on the way, a good country red poured without ceremony.
12. Big Night
1996. Directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci.
I have seen this film eleven times. I did not intend to. I find it the most accurate account ever made of what happens when excellence and commercial failure occupy the same kitchen, the same family, and the same evening. The timpano is a drum of pasta baked inside pastry and turned out at the table, and I have made it twice. Both times it was worth it. That is my complete endorsement.
The timpano is the reason for the evening. Everything else is the preparation for it.
- Antipasto, good salumi and olives, while the timpano finishes
- Il Timpano, the great drum of pasta, meatballs, egg, and salami baked inside pastry
- A green salad after, because the timpano has said everything
- Espresso and Italian pastries, bought, because the timpano earns that
A plain white cloth, never checked. A good Sangiovese opened early. The timpano is carried to the table whole and cut there. This is not optional.
13. Tampopo
1985. Directed by Juzo Itami.
The first time I saw this I laughed for an hour and then sat very quietly for another hour, because I had not expected a film about ramen to say the things it says about desire and mastery and the kind of love that expresses itself entirely through craft. I make the broth over two days. It is worth two days.
Ramen made properly, which is to say over two days. The broth is the project.
- Tonkotsu broth cooked eighteen hours until it is white and completely itself
- Chashu pork, braised and rested and sliced cold
- Soft-boiled eggs marinated in soy and mirin
- Noodles cooked to order, served in heated bowls
- Toppings, bamboo, nori, scallion, a curl of butter melting at the surface
Large heavy bowls that hold the heat. The kitchen smells of the broth before anyone arrives and long after they have gone, which Ana considers the point.
14. The Lunchbox
2013. Directed by Ritesh Batra.
A wrong delivery. A note tucked into a tiffin box. Two strangers in Mumbai who will probably never meet, corresponding through the food one of them cooks for a husband who does not notice it. The dinner is simple on purpose. The film has already said the complicated thing.
- Dal tadka, yellow lentils with a tempering poured over at the last moment
- Aloo gobi, potato and cauliflower dry-cooked until the edges catch
- Basmati rice, cooked until each grain is separate
- Cucumber raita to cool the table
- Kheer, rice pudding with cardamom and rose water, served cold
A cloth in saffron or deep teal. The tiffin carrier as centerpiece. Served family style, everything at once. Chai after, made properly.
15. Julie and Julia
2009. Directed by Nora Ephron.
I consider this film somewhat beneath the canon. I have watched it four times. I made the boeuf bourguignon twice, once from Julia’s recipe exactly and once from memory, and the second time was better, which I believe Julia would have considered the correct outcome. Meryl Streep is the reason this film belongs here. That is my complete position and I will not be elaborating.
Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon, from Volume One, started the day before. No shortcuts.
- Boeuf bourguignon, beef braised in a full bottle of Burgundy with pearl onions and lardons
- Egg noodles tossed in butter, the plainest vehicle for the sauce
- A green salad with a proper French vinaigrette, after
- A baguette good enough to deserve the sauce
- Something chocolate, because Nora Ephron would have wanted it
A sensible cloth, the good wine glasses because the Burgundy deserves them. Hazel sets the table herself and does not fuss over it, which is correct.
16. Mostly Martha
2001. Directed by Sandra Nettelbeck.
This film was remade as No Reservations in 2007 and should not have been. The original is a German film about a perfectionist Hamburg chef and an Italian sous chef who cooks with joy rather than precision, and the argument it makes about the two kinds of cooking is the most interesting thing any film in this canon says about the kitchen. I serve a German dinner with it, because German food is more beautiful than most people expect.
German food treated with the seriousness it deserves and rarely receives outside Germany.
- Gelberbsensuppe, split pea soup with smoked pork, the kind that takes all afternoon
- Sauerbraten, beef marinated three days, with a gingersnap gravy
- Rotkohl, red cabbage braised with apple and cloves
- Kartoffelklösse, potato dumplings worth the patience
- Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, the real Black Forest cake, with enough kirsch
Simple white linen, German stoneware if available, a Riesling Spätlese. The film served after the meal, because Martha’s kitchen makes more sense then.
17. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2014. Directed by Wes Anderson.
This is not a food film. It is a film about confection in every sense of the word, the pastry, the hotel, the story, the whole beautiful constructed thing. I serve a dessert evening with it rather than a dinner, because the film is a dessert and placing a main course before it seems structurally incorrect. The Courtesan au Chocolat is the reason I am here.
The only dessert-only evening. Guests arrive at eight. Champagne, the film, then the table.
- Courtesan au Chocolat, a tower of profiteroles in three sizes and three shades of fondant
- Linzer torte with raspberry jam, thin and precise
- Mendl’s boxes, one madeleine, one macaron, one truffle, set at each place
- Champagne throughout, because Anderson would have wanted it
Set before anyone arrives and kept covered until the film ends. A pale pink cloth, boxes tied in the Mendl’s pink. The whole thing looks like a set, which is the point.
The double features
Two pairings served on consecutive evenings, each film gaining what the other completes. Eat Drink Man Woman and The Taste of Things, two kitchens released the same year and never mentioned as such. Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate, two women who pour themselves into a single meal, co-curated by Luisa and Blanche.
The films, the objects, and the books are named and shown, and the reading companions route through the Reading Room.