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Marilyn Monroe’s stuffing — 34 Comments

  1. Looks awesome. I think I’ll substitute sirloin cubes for the hamburger and triple the amount.

  2. The flavors don’t go with a traditional turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie dinner. Did she serve pasta as a first course with this? If I want to get creative with stuffing, I’ll do it with a smaller fowl and not at Thanksgiving.

  3. Oh how I long for a return to the days when womenfolk went to such extraordinary lengths, spending hours in the kitchen just to satisfy their husbands palate!

    Oh wait – da wifey never has gone to those lengths…lol…different era entirely.

    Damn if I don’t always miss out….

    🙁

  4. It sounds disgusting. It sounds more like a medieval recipe where they stuffed lentils inside. You might as well stuff fish heads into the cavity. But I’m not a gourmand like everyone at the NYS.

  5. I just read the article – I have doubts that Monroe invented that recipe. I am kind of a foodie myself and a food history geek too – I own vintage versions of both the Boston Cooking School cookbook and Joy of Cooking, not to mention several other old cookbooks.

    The mixed meat protein, raisins, as well as the chopped boiled eggs in a stuffing jump right out at me, as being something very commonly done in old cuisine – for example in a 1600s Northumbrian cookbook I have.

    The article kind of gushes about Monroe, of whom I am not such a fan, so I think they attribute more talent to her than might have really existed.

    I vote heavily that she did not invent the recipe and obtained it from somewhere else. It is not as innovative as they think, it is just archaic.

  6. helvetica: funny, but when I read the post (admittedly, rather quickly) I didn’t get the impression they thought she’d invented it. I thought they insinuated that she’d gotten it from someone in Joe DiMaggio’s family when she was married to him, because of its Italian influences.

  7. I was going off of phrases like the following:
    “It also bears the unmistakable balance of fussiness and flexibility that is the hallmark of an experienced and confident cook.” insinuating that it was Marilyn herself.
    “…we agreed to embrace the period in which the recipe was written…” they apparently assume it was written in the 1950s instead of the more likely 1650s.
    They also refer to it as “her recipe”.

  8. rickl: a wooden one.

    The recipe is an example of unimaginative crude Italian cooking. No sense of ingredients complementing each other, just “the more the merrier”. Pine nuts to chicken livers? Ginger – to beef? And most illiterate: boiled eggs added to barely-cooked meat+vegetable, to staff into a bird to be slow-cooked again.

    And a TABLESPOON of kosher salt to a pound of meets – that’s beyond horrible. That’s inedible.

    Actually, I believe this is Monroe’s recipe. Or the one she liked..as crude, vulgar and unimaginative as she herself was.

  9. Marilyn may have been crude and vulgar–so much the better for the sexual appeal. But she was not unimaginative. Consider the following from “Some like it hot,” by Tony Curtis and Mark A Viera:

    “Then Orry-Kelly went to Marilyn’s trailer. She was waiting. I heard she was reading books in there, odd things like Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke. When Orry-Kelly went in, she stood up. She was wearing a white blouse, panties and three-inch heels. Orry-Kelly said hello, and then he took measurements here and there: 37, 24. When he had his tape measure across her hips, he kind of chuckled. “Tony has a better-looking ass than you do.”Marilyn turned around, opened her blouse, and said, “He doesn’t have t**s like these.” Of course it was true. Her breasts were so beautifully arranged. She had the best figure I ever saw in a girl.”

    Crude, vulgar, and imagination. That’s why she was and remains the top sex symbol ever.

  10. Curtis, pointing to one’s tits is not “imaginative”. Every prostitute would react the same way, pointing to her tools of the trade.

    As to sexual appeal…depends to whom one wants to appeal. To people like you? I wouldn’t want to.

  11. Besides, “figure” is used incorrectly in that passage. Figure consist of full 9 yards and means all body parts arrangement. It could be beautiful or ugly, balanced or disproportional. What it couldn’t be is to mean JUST breasts.
    Man, for example, can have a beautiful figure, too.

  12. I knew you would miss it.

    She was reading Whitman and Rilke and there is no suggestion that this was an affectation.

    As to her action: Can you think of a more succinct and clever repartee to Orry-Kelly’s gibe?

    And finally, figure: There’s no sense that the authors were equating “breasts” with “figure.” In fact, the opposite is implied with the phrase “beautifully arranged,” which is a transitional phrase signalling a move from the particular (breasts) to the whole (figure). The authors meant what they said: She had the best figure I ever saw in a girl.

  13. No, Curtis, I didn’t “miss it”.
    Her reading books is irrelevant to possessing imagination.
    Whitman and Rilke are not signs of HER being especially imaginative; it’s not even a sign of unique intellect: it’s mundane, basic reading.
    To your anecdote: “they”? So who, in fact, witnessed that apocryphal scene, which one of them – Curtis or Viera?

    Sure, I can think of plenty rejoinders better than this crude port-whore jest she employed; f.i., one:”I don’t aspire to possess a man’s ass. Or “an ass”, period.”

    Figure: yes, that’s exactly what “they” meant – her “beautifully arranged” breasts constitute a figure to “them”, since her other body parts, if we are to believe their own words, are not exactly perfect.

  14. Tatyana: Reading Whitman and Rilke is certainly not evidence of “unique intellect.” But it was an unusual and hardly “mundane” activity for Hollywood bombshells of that era—perhaps of any era.

    Monroe, as far as I can tell (and I certainly have not read exhaustively on the subject) had a great deal of native but undeveloped intelligence. She had a rough childhood and became a model, pinup girl, and star early in life. Later on, especially around the time she married Arthur Miller, she did a lot of reading and tried to educate herself. I don’t know how successful she was, but she was “unusual,” I think, among starlets of the time, in the attempt.

  15. Neo,

    Monroe’s curiosity and a drive to educate herself are admirable qualities, for sure. It’s just they can not be sited as evidence of her being “imaginative”, as presented by Curtis (the commenter, not co-author of the book). It just doesn’t follow.
    Nor can do her answer to a vulgar remark – if anything her rejoinder speaks of even bigger vulgarity than that of her tailor.
    I don’t know if Whitman and Rilke were considered mandatory reading in school of her time, but I heard she was a student at Actor’s Studio, and I can easily imagine both authors on a reading list dictated by Lee Strasberg.

    Curtis: you think yourself to be the 1st one inventing this pun playing on my name?

  16. I’ve rethought my position and Tatyana, you’re right: Reading poetry doesn’t prove imagination. As a matter of fact, reading poetry is rather a more strenuous exercise of rational effort. And I don’t think Neo is stating that reading poetry proves imagination–only perhaps that it shows an attempt by Marilyn to develop intelligence.

    But it does’t show that Marilyn was unimaginative either. It is rather neutral and perhaps leaning to showing an imagination. People who read poetry may not need an imagination (perhaps again) but people who write it surely do–or at least use that same part of the brain which is inductive versus deductive. Marilyn reading poetry doesn’t prove she had an imagination but it is a darn toot in good clue.

    But we have so much more. Marilyn, from the record, was imaginative. She had many sides, the bitchy diva side for one; but she had a child-like side which escaped into fantasy and imagination as well. Further, she was a damn fine actress as anyone who can watch a film can see. What is the major requirement for an actor? Imagination. Empathy. Feeling. All of those require an ability to put oneself in another person’s personality which requires imagination.

    Marilyn was unimaginative? Not even close. She had the requisite intelligence; she succeeded in an industry whose main requirement is imagination; her psychic dysfunctions highly suggest imaginative components; and her recipe–its use or adaptation although not pleasing to you was imaginative.

    Addendum:

    Tit for tat: an equivalent
    given in return.
    But in this case,
    I think I won.
    So, I’ll submit
    to your opinion on the pun,
    because one should not
    keep a cat on the run.

  17. Tatyana: and by the way, if you read anything about Monroe’s early life (see this for more details), you might conclude it was quite an achievement that she was reading Whitman and Rilke (or much of anything) at all.

  18. Curtis: love is blind.

    Monroe was an actress of relatively limited emplois: that of a curvy empty-headed blond bombshell. There are a lot of attempts of biographers to present her personality as something more than that image. Generally, it is true, an actor’s persona on the stage is not the same as in life, but in her case I don’t think the difference was very big. Just look at people she married, and at her affair with JFK…

    Btw, before you proclaim yourself a winner of an argument, it would be nice if you actually prove your statements. So far, you conceded that “reading poetry” does not prove a person is imaginative. Your sentence “Marilyn, from the record, was imaginative.” lacks requisite examples. You presented no logical argument, only sophistry and unsubstantiated love cries; I can sympathise with your condition, but am not going to pretend you’ve won, even out of charity.

    So far your example is proving my side: that she WAS vulgar, and crude.
    As to her imagination: the industry she worked in – Hollywood movies – manifestly does NOT require an actor to be imaginative to succeed, only to be a malleable instrument in the hands of truly imaginative and creative professional: art director or producer. I could grant oyu that point if she was performing on the stage, and in the drama theater, where an actor is actually transforming part of his/her personality into the role, every night anew. But it was not the case with Monroe.

    Neo,
    as I said before: her achievements in trying to educate herself might be many and laudable – but the topic is besides the point.
    She was vulgar and crude. In appearance, in her roles and in her life behind the camera.
    Not that there is anything wrong with it – for a certain audience. Hey, it’s a free market: some like it crude.

  19. Tatyana: It is unclear whether Monroe had an affair with either JFK or Bobby Kennedy, although there’s certainly a ton of speculation about both. However, I can’t see how those particular choices of men would, if an affair did in fact happen, be an example of either vulgarity or crudity. Moral lassitude, yes (in terms of having affairs with married men); but I don’t see that as a synonym for either vulgarity or crudity. Nor would a marriage with Arthur Miller be an example of either.

    I seem to recall we’ve had that “vulgarity” argument before, about Sophia Loren, in the comments section here. You are perhaps using a different definition of the word than I am.

    That said, Monroe was (IMHO) closer to vulgar and crude than Sophia Loren. The anecdote related above in the comments section certainly shows both traits. But in general I see Monroe more as sexy and playful and sort of gentle in her sexy playfulness, than crude and vulgar. I’ve never been a big Monroe fan, nor have I read all that much about her, but I’m familiar with the broad outlines and some of the details of her life, and I find it mostly sad.

    Somebody like Mae West—now, there was a lady who was both crude and vulgar. And she reveled in it.

  20. “Sad” does not negate “vulgar”. Mae West’ “vulgar” does not negate Marylin Monroe’s “vulgar”(nor it does Sophia Loren’s).

    Yes, I detest vulgar women. I’d think that a ballet dancer, trained in classic ideals of beauty, would do, too. But everyone is entitled to his/her quirks, sure.

    Going back to the topic of this post: the recipe is awful, I agree with Kate. With one addition: a gourmand will find it disgusting, too. This recipe might appeal to suddenly-rich peasants: buy as many and as expensive ingredients you can afford with no regard of their comparability, push them into the biggest bird you can find and bake for hours. Some sophisticate!

  21. Some observations from others who knew her:

    Photographer Elliott Erwitt: I had always thought that all those amusing remarks she was supposed to have made for the press had probably been manufactured and mimeographed by her press agent, but they weren’t. She was a very bright person, an instinctive type.

    Lee Strasberg: She had a luminous quality — a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning, that set her apart and yet made everyone wish to be part of it, to share in the childlike naé¯vete which was at once so shy and yet so vibrant.

    Shelley Winters: If she’d been dumber, she’d have been happier.

    Arthur Miller: She was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.

    Montgomery Clift: Marilyn was an incredible person to act with…the most marvelous I ever worked with, and I have been working for 29 years.

    Lawrence Schiller: She comes out of the dressing room Norma Jeane. When she stepped in front of the camera, she was Marilyn.

    Jane Russell: Marilyn is a dreamy girl. She’s the kind who’s liable to show up with one red shoe and one black shoe.

    Joe DiMaggio: It’s no fun being married to an
    electric light.

    Ayn Rand: Anyone who has ever felt resentment against the good for being the good, and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.

    What Marilyn said:

    I’ve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.

    I restore myself when I’m alone.

    Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.

  22. Dr. Curtis to Tatyana:

    Are you ready to grow? Ready to cut new teeth?

    Okay then, here’s what you must do.

    You buy the ingredients of Marilyn’s stuffing. You exert all your considerable skill in making Marilyn’s stuffing. And at the big Thanksgiving meal which you will serve, you announce to your friends: There is at this meal a dish which I have prepared. I abhor this dish but I am not telling you which one it is because I am an open and tolerant person and wish you to make your own opinion about it. Please eat and enjoy and with your sophisticated pallets, please inform me of the dish which I abhor.

    Further, to not provide any information about which dish it is you might abhor, you must eat with relish and gusto, a helping service of Marilyn’s stuffing.

    Bon appetit!

  23. Curtis, if you want to grow, remember rule number one: don’t think yourself superior to others. Reason: you will be wrong too many times to find yourself on your butt in a paddle.
    Corollary: give advice only when asked.

  24. You don’t speak advice to nonsense. You ridicule it. You’re speaking nonsense on this subject and anyone with a lick of sense can see that.

    Marilyn Monroe not imaginative! She was one of the most successful artists ever. In all of history. Her image, her art, her persona, her creation is recognizable all over the world. Look at Norma Jean. Then look at Marilyn Monroe. She is up there with the Phoenix, the Beatles, the Eiffel Tower.

    And don’t tell me it was all done for her. More nonsense. I could provide a treatise on the subject, but I’d rather take my chances feeding broccoli to a child.

    And it is nonsense to characterize her as crude and vulgar, as well. Lyndon Johnson was crude and vulgar. Mao was crude and vulgar. Marilyn Monroe was troubled, honest, sexy, artistic, intelligent, dedicated, wounded, accessible, loving, hateful, curious: all these and more as well as crude and vulgar at times. But by no reasonable judgment can your ugly and crude characterization of her be true.

  25. Curtis: a typical repressed-sexuality-religious bully.

    I don’t tell you anything, dude. It’s all in your head. Since you can’t get it in polite language I’ll tell you plainly: keep your idiotic advice to yourself, keep your whore pictures for your midnight trips to the bathroom and leave normal people alone.

    When I invite people to my dinners I usually wish them well and feed them well. It would never cross my mind to serve something as disgusting as this recipe to people who honored my home with their presence.

  26. Will there be s’mores for desert?

    If Marilyn were alive, would you have dinner with her?

    I suppose she wouldn’t get her favorite stuffing.

    Oh, we love you when you’re angry!

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