_Emily writes:_
Of the assorted Mad Men recaps I read every week, New York magazine’s are often my favorite. I interrupt myself to say, though, that the first one I read each week, and very nearly hyperventilate while waiting for, is Mark Lisanti’s matchless, dirty Mad Men Power Rankings, which are less recaps than they are manic fanfic, or meta-dystopias, or thought balloons kidnapped from the dank shadows of the writers’ room.
Then, throughout the week, I savor the Slate TV Club dialogues, which I love; letter-writing and -answering is still such a civilized form, and the correspondents’ sign-offs always make me laugh. Plus, the Slate trio (Michael Agger, John Swansburg, and Julia Turner) often cite reader comments and research, which is classy. You’d be a fool to miss James Wolcott’s (and others’) recaps at Vanity Fair, which include a playful plaint on the weary burden of recapping that is, as a friend of mine says, “the stuff of an S. J. Perelman Greatest Hits.” In the same column, Wolcott writes, elegiacally, of Sally:

I hate seeing Sally cry; there’s something so pure and defenseless about her plight. She’s either going to evolve into a saint forged in suffering or develop telekinetic powers and turn their next residence into a house of flying daggers, converting her mother into a lovely order of shish kabob. Either way, we’re pulling for you, Sally! Your tears shall not spill in vain!

I also enjoy the Lemondrop recaps, which have an appealing carefree zest but are sometimes a little sloppy. I can wait a few episodes to catch up with the Movieline recaps and Entertainment Weekly‘s “Mad Men Central,” though I relished EW‘s “‘Mad Men’: Unpacking ‘The Suitcase.'” Correct me if I’m wrong, but is EW a couple of episodes behind? Think of the people, like me and Duck Phillips, prone to the shakes!

Anyway, back to the always expertly composed and deeply considered writing on the show from New York. I thought this was an especially elegant, and relevant–see the Observer‘s recent instant classic “So Sorry To Do This! Flakiness Epidemic Sweeps Digital New York”–graf from Logan Hill this week:

This season, the show has become more critical of the actual conditions of Madison Avenue. Abe was the first character to really embody a hard-left critique of the ad world (only Midge’s bohemian critique came close) with his “Nuremberg on Madison Avenue” jeremiad. There are a whole lot of historians and sociologists, like David Montgomery (or Christopher Lasch, whose Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged seems especially pertinent to this episode) who might be frustrated by the way a lot of the period arguments we fans have had about Mad Men — in terms of women in the office and work-life balance, and gender roles and so forth — tend to occlude the macro-level changes in the ways Americans work. We talk about how Betty’s a bad parent, and Don’s a bad parent, but rarely about how the way work — and, particularly, this kind of obsessive Manhattan work world — is eclipsing all other sorts of power and order, requiring and overtaking more and more of people’s values and lives. When, at a funeral, there’s more talk of money than religion, more talk of work trips than the journey to the afterlife, the show’s making a point.

Read the rest. This is rewarding, satisfying television criticism. That’s not an implied slight to anyone else’s (I hate the blog idiom sometimes–it’s so binary), but here’s to Logan Hill for doing this so well. Meanwhile, can someone pay Mark Lisanti to blog all day? I’m sure he has better things to do, but it would make a major contribution to my quality of life.

See also: 5 Other Necessary Mad Men Tumblrs, from Movieline.

Jonathan Taylor writes:

At the markets here in New York, there are still plenty of tomatoes to be had, but you can tell the season is on the wane. Thank God. I am tired of summer’s tyranny of ingredients over the cooking process, of avoiding actual cooking due to the stifling weather—and simply tired of all the tomatoes, however delicious for eating raw or cooked into a simple pasta sauce.
It is time, in autumn, to reacquaint ourselves with the civilizing process. A tomato dish that I made both Saturday and Sunday is the way to bid a fond but firm farewell to the tomato, and submit nature to the genius of cookery. In other words, the tomatoes are cooked with cream. It is also a recipe whose modest nature and brusque expression are foreign to the didacticism and the sentimental mugging found in so much food writing these days.
First, the recipe, and then some notes on its source:
Tomates à la crème

Take six tomatoes. Cut them in halves. In your frying pan melt a lump of butter. Put in the tomatoes, cut side downward, with a sharply pointed knife puncturing here and there the rounded sides of the tomatoes. Let them heat for five minutes. Turn them over. Sprinkle them with salt. Cook them for another 10 minutes. Turn them again. The juices run out and spread into the pan. Once more turn the tomatoes cut side upward. Around them put 80 grams (3 ounces near enough) of thick cream. Mix it with the juices. As soon as it bubbles, slip the tomatoes and all their sauces onto a hot dish. Serve instantly, very hot.

In 1967, Elizabeth David wrote an article about French cookbook author Edouard de Pomiane for the London Sunday Times that was also published in Gourmet in March 1970 (perhaps it can be found in the new Gourmet iPad app?), and in David’s 1984 collection An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. It includes those verbatim instructions of Pomiane’s for tomates à la crème.
As David notes of the dinner menu that Pomiane presented tomates à la crème as a part of, it is “a real lesson in how to avoid the obvious without being freakish” and “how to start with the stimulus of a hot vegetable dish.” Even once I had just read the recipe, it was easy to picture as a canonical bistro classic. But that was not the case; David wrote that it “makes tomatoes so startingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes that any restaurateur who put it on his menu would, in all probability, soon find it listed in the guide books as a regional speciality.” But the Pomiane attributed the dish to his Polish mother, and David notes that many of his techniques are actually traceable to Central European cooking—”thereby refreshing French cookery in the perfectly traditional way.”
David was also out to praise Pomiane’s way of food writing: “courageous, courteous, adult. It is creative in the true sense of that ill-used word, creative because it invites the reader to use his own critical and inventive faculties.” Like her own writing it, it resists promiscuous superlatives, emotional self-indulgence and much cant surrounding authenticity: “He passes speedily from the absurdities of haute cuisine to the shortcomings of folk cookery, and deals a swift right and left to those writers whose reverent genuflections before the glory and wonder of every least piece of cookery-lore make much journalistic cookery writing so tedious.”
A more practical virtue of the tomates recipe is that it will come in handy even when you’re not up to your ears in Greenmarket heirloom tomatoes. Those will certainly make the dish better, but it is also a recipe that can make something much more presentable out of inferior supermarket tomatoes. Take Julian Barnes’s word for it:

I didn’t much trust this: the quantity of butter was imprecise, the strength of the gas unspecified. Further, it was mid-February, so the best tomatoes I could find were pale orange, frost-hard, and pretty juice-free inside. I fanatically observed the approximations of De Pomiane’s recipe, while chucking in a little salt, pepper and sugar in the tiny hope of not disgracing the kitchen … and the result was unbelievably good – the method had somehow extracted richness from half a dozen fruits that looked as if they had long ago mislaid their essence.