Finding Comfort in Food, A Lesson From Nora Ephron’s ‘Heartburn’

This story was composed by Noëlle de Leeuw.

“Food, I consider, is my preferred issue,” Nora Ephron as soon as mentioned to Vogue’s foodstuff critic Jeffrey Steingarten, through an interview in her Upper East Facet kitchen area, “When I go somewhere, I have no need by any means to see a well known Renaissance portray. I only want to go to the market place and I only want to go to the dining establishments. It’s all I care about.”

Nora Ephron generally realized greatest, in particular when it came to food. Her quips and a person-liners have constantly been a source of comfort. On a undesirable day, there is almost nothing a bowl of pasta—my carb of choice—and a Nora Ephron movie cannot salvage, or at minimum until the credits roll. As for Ephron, she’d transform to potatoes—her carb of choice—when lifetime got sharp about the edges, and wallowed in a bowl of buttery mashed comfort and ease. At the very least, which is what she wrote in her 1983 autobiographical novel Heartburn, a ebook that is as a great deal a lesson on hauling on your own out of heartache as it is on mastering the fantastic vinaigrette. In Heartburn, she recounts the stop to her second marriage. At 7 months expecting, she finds out her husband has taken a lover, leaving her with very little but a newborn on the way and her recipe for the excellent vinaigrette. And you’d be a idiot to imagine she’d at any time give that to her spouse.

In Heartburn, she thinly fictionalized herself as a food stuff author, scattering recipes during the e-book. As to suggestion my hat to Ephron on the 10th anniversary of her death, I resolved to devote my weekend cooking my way as a result of the pivotal times of Heartburn, starting off with the heartache-soothing mashed potatoes, the “you just never bump into a vinaigrette that good” vinaigrette, and vital lime pie, the latter of which is additional than just a sweet ending to Ephron’s legacy. At the end of Heartburn, when her marriage was really at the level of boiling about, a sliver of catharsis was observed in a critical lime pie, which she threw into her husband’s face with gusto through a evening meal celebration.

This critical lime pie truly is unbelievably uncomplicated to make and a lot more importantly, it’s loaded with butter. Nora Ephron didn’t feel in God she considered in butter. Given that this is the lady who at the time uttered the words and phrases “All this stuff about butter is most likely as shut as I’ll ever get to faith,” I figured it would be rude to disregard her philosophy on the make a difference. So off I went, pouring a continual stream of melted butter into the graham cracker crust. Whilst I poured a second comprehensive can of sweetened condensed milk into the mixing bowl as Harry Connick Jr. performed in the history (it would not be an ode to Ephron with no him), it crossed my thoughts that I had absent quickly crazy for performing this.

When the pie sat in the freezer to set, I tossed a few handfuls of arugula with the vinaigrette and went to town on the butter for the mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes might be labor-intensive, but it is a correct labor of appreciate. While the recipe phone calls for a potato ricer, my kitchen area built for pasta-in excess of-potatoes is not equipped with 1. This was not the time for disappointment, so with my aged-fashioned potato masher, I grabbed nevertheless a great deal butter was leftover from the critical lime pie and, per instruction, extra, “as significantly melted butter as you really feel like” as very well as a tablespoon of large product. I grilled a filet of salmon to accompany the assault on my arteries in an energy to obtain something resembling harmony.

So that evening, when looking at the opening credits of When Harry Fulfilled Sally, I was satisfied to forgo my usual bowl of pasta for buttery mashed potatoes, salad, and pie. The vinaigrette was thick, creamy and tangy, and the critical lime pie was as rich and completely tasty as it appears. With just about every chunk, I couldn’t assist but consider that if I at any time had been to vindictively throw an product of food in a lover’s experience, this would be it. The custardy lime with the mountain of whipped cream really tends to make it the fantastic mess for a task like this. Even at a meal occasion. Specially at a meal bash.

I’m sorry to notify you that the vital lime pie from Heartburn was a fictional story from Ephron. In fact, it was a bottle of red wine that widened the eyes of those people around the dining desk, the contents of which she poured more than his head. The entire bottle, to the extremely final fall, streaming down his deal with, soaking his dresses and drenching the linoleum floor. So that night time, even though Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal sang Surrey with a Fringe on Top rated in front of Ira, I had to pour myself a glass of merlot.

In Heartburn, Nora Ephron phone calls the relationship with her best pals “a shrine to food”, but Nora Ephron’s whole daily life was a shrine to meals. Even in the deepest throes of heartbreak, she knew just how to get to for the stovetop in a way that could melt away the sharpest edges of the ache, discovering convenience in whichever mouthful would come up coming. Braving herself by means of the heartache, until finally she was completely ready to cook for someone new again.

“What I really like about cooking,” she wrote, “is that just after a tricky day, there is one thing comforting about the point that if you melt butter and increase flour and then sizzling stock, it will get thick. It is a guaranteed point! It is a absolutely sure detail in a earth exactly where very little is guaranteed it has a mathematical certainty in a planet in which individuals of us who extended for some variety of certainty are compelled to settle for crossword puzzles.”

And I, for one particular, will never ever settle for a crossword puzzle either.

Share your preferred memories and lessons from Nora Ephron in the remarks under.