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Authors: Ellen Sweets
Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins
Foreword copyright © 2011 by Lou Dubose
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Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2011
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATASweets, Ellen, 1941â
Stirring it up with Molly Ivins : a memoir with recipes / Ellen Sweets;
foreword by Lou Dubose. â 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes indexes.
ISBN
978-0-292-72265-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN
978-0-292-73874-4 (e-book)
1. Ivins, Molly. 2. Women journalistsâUnited StatesâBiography. 3. Cooking. 4. Cooking, American. 5. Sweets, Ellen, 1941âI. Dubose, Lou. II. Title.
PN
4874.
I
92
S
84 2011
070.92âdc22
[
B
]
2011016693
FRONTISPIECE
People-watching and community chats were in order at the 2005 Sesquicentennial celebration in Martindale, Texas. From left, David Butts and Mercedes Peña engage one another in conversation while I watch the world go by and Molly holds her own tête-à -tête with an unidentified woman.
Photo courtesy of Joe Pinelli.
Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins
This book was supported in part with
a gift from Lowell Lebermann, Jr.
Dedicated to
Hannah,
the
Texas Observer,
and
ACLU families
everywhere
Cooking is like love.
It should be entered into with
abandon or not at all.
HARRIET VAN HORNE
, October 15, 1956
7. Julia Child Meets Chicken-Fried Steak
12. We Get By with a Little Help from Our Friends
14. Steel Magnolias, Texas Style
21. Food Stamps and Fun on the Dole
22.
Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler
, Y'all
26. The Great Leonard Pittsâless Dinner
27. Plans? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Plans
28. . . . and a Partridge in a Bean Stew
29. Bienvenidos a Tejas, Comrades
32. The
Observer
's Observant Observer
35. Dinner and the Dancing Tampon
38. Let's Diversify This Popsicle Stand
Lou Dubose
SOME YEARS BACK, MOLLY WAS HOLDING
forth at the head of a long table at McCormick & Schmick's on Congress Avenue when I noticed that Adam Clymer's menu was on fire. Adam was midway down a table of twenty-one diners, just close enough to Molly to follow one of her long riffs on Texas politics and too close to a candle on the table.
Adam is the quintessential
Times
manâformer editor of the
Harvard Crimson
, arid sense of humor on good days, hard facts, reasoned analysis, and all that. He's the
New York Times
reporter Dick Cheney called a “world-class asshole.”
Molly adored him. Adam, that is.
Just in from Washington and travel-weary, Adam was the final arrival at a dinner party that had grown exponentially as waiters added tablesâall on Molly's tab. (Molly would part ways with McCormick & Schmick after I told her its owners had tried to eliminate the minimum wage for waiters in Oregon and bankrolled Republican campaigns.) On this Friday night in December, however, she turned the restaurant's large dining room into her salon. Anyone lucky enough to be thereâincluding Molly's “Chief of Stuff,” Betsy Moon; Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson's former press secretary; omnivorous state representative Elliott Naishtat;
Texas Observer
publisher Charlotte McCann; Jane's Due Process founder Susan Hays; Fox newsgirl Ellen Fleysherâwas, well, lucky to be there.
I tried to get Adam's attention, but he was not to be distracted. So I removed the menu from his hand and smothered the flames with a clean dinner plate. It was no surprise that Adam missed his own fire. Molly was a marvelous
performer. She performed on paper, eight hundred words, three times a week for four hundred newspapers, until breast cancer ended it.
She also performed in the kitchen, where she could whip up a remarkable lobster bisque or a perfect steak au poivre. She performed at the table, where conversations were fueled by good wine and good food, or beer, burgers, and barbecue. She loved cuisine, haute and not-so-haute, served up with conversation, high- or lowbrow.
Regarding the not-so-haute, Molly and I once planned a magazine piece that would describe a white-linen dinner built exclusively on the recipes we found in
The Ron Paul Family Cookbooks
. That's Ron Paul, the Libertarian obstetrician Republican congressman adored by gold bugs, Ayn Randers, and conspiracy theorists (anyone who believes right-wing nuttiness isn't congenital might read up on the Kentucky Senate campaign of Dr. Paul's son Rand).
The cookbook has been filed away in my attic archives. But I recall ambrosia, a Spam recipe, Jell-O dishes, and green beans in cream of mushroom soup; it also had a Dream Whip dessert that I think required the crushing of Oreos. They embodied the congealed sixties-in-suburbia offerings that Johnny Depp's alien character found so utterly alien in the film
Edward Scissorhands.
“We'll cook it. Alan Pogue will photograph it. Sweets will review it. And someone else will eat it,” Molly said. Sometimes journalism requires sacrifices too great to bear.
I admit that I had misgivings about a book about cooking with Molly Ivins. It seemed that it was neither fish nor fowl, neither a cookbook nor a memoir. Yet the more I thought about it, the more the idea of a culinary memoir appealed to me.
Here's why: because she was a performer (she described herself as a professional Texan), Molly Ivins was a difficult person to know. Too often, even among large groups of friends, she was “in character” or “in voice.” Molly's métier was that remarkable voice, appropriated from the gargoyles who pass for elected officials in Texas and from the decent elected officials who still speak in a genuine Texas idiom.