Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (4 page)

Donna Shalala, former US secretary of Health and Human Services who is now president of University of Miami, tells of the time she and Molly were on a fishing trip. No one was catching anything.

“Suddenly we saw a big dead fish and Molly got the idea to hook it on the line, pull it out of the water, and pretend we'd caught it,” she said. “Immediately
someone suggested we cook it that night. We looked at one another and it promptly ‘fell' off the hook and back into the water. Later, at a going-away party for her, we actually brought a great big
live
fish and put it in her bathtub. She hooked it, pulled it out of the water, and killed it—but this time we did cook and eat it.”

As I offered recollections of playing in the kitchen, Keystone Kops grocery-shopping expeditions, zany epicurean escapades, and Molly's impressive culinary skills, friends offered their stories or told me about someone else with a story to tell. As word of the book spread, food dominoes began to fall.

3

WRITING A BOOK ABOUT COOKING WITH MOLLY
was nowhere on my horizon. I was still mourning her death. It felt unseemly. Writing a book felt too much like capitalizing on a friendship, not to mention way too much work. Plus, I've always been suspicious of tell-all tomes that pop up within femto-seconds of a famous person's demise. She wasn't “famous” to me; she was my friend. I was still dealing with the fact that, as in years past, I had planned to be with her on my birthday. She died on the afternoon of January 31, 2007. On February 1 I would turn sixty-six, sharing double digits with my favorite highway.

Clearly, since you're reading this, you can tell that the Moores planted the seed of an idea. Over a two-year germination period the idea grew, blooming in a clichéd movie moment. In late winter 2009 I sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and thought: of course—a Molly cookbook.

Not a cookbook kind of cookbook, but one built around memories from people who knew her and her fondness for good food; people who, like me, had cooked with her, eaten with her, shared stories and told tales around a dinner table of comestibles consumed during somber discourse, raucous laughter, big fat Texas lies, or some permutation thereof. Such stories were legion, moving many of her fans to echo one another: “Wouldn't Molly have a field day with Sarah Palin's particular brand of nuttiness? or Glenn Beck's? or Michele Bachmann's?”

Never mind John Edwards's; there's a child involved there, so it's anybody's guess how she would have handled that—but she would have written a nice
eulogy for Elizabeth Edwards, who died of breast cancer in 2010. I truly believe she'd have had a field day with the bombshell dropped on Mark Souder, the eight-term family-values Indiana Republican whose television “interview” on sexual restraint was conducted by a woman who just happened to be his mistress. He stepped down shortly after that dark matter came to light. As Molly often said, you can't make this stuff up.

Closer to home, she for sure would gleefully have pounced a couple of years ago on the Associated Press revelation that anti-tax conservative state representative Joe Driver, a Republican from the Dallas suburb of Garland, thought it was “perfectly appropriate” to double-bill the state
and
his campaign coffers for more than $17,000 in personal expenses incurred on high-dollar travel. She for sure would have toasted Gary Cobb, the lead attorney who successfully prosecuted former Texas representative Tom DeLay, who was convicted in 2010 for money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Molly's Austin universe was such that I decided to limit my focus almost exclusively to her local cadre, who, for the most part, were within a thirty-mile radius of her Travis Heights home. It only made sense that, given her progressive, populist proclivities, feisty Julia Child—another Smith “girl” and a classmate of Molly's mother, Margot—would be one of Molly's heroes. Molly didn't rattle easily, but she came as close as she needed to when Julia Child turned up at one of Molly's book signings in San Francisco. It lent a new definition to a smile lighting up one's face.

Molly's sister, Sara Maley, remembers Molly's Julia Child cookbooks as treasures. “Mother had given us the usual Rombauer and Becker books [
The Joy of Cooking
] and we used them, but the last summer I lived at home, our parents were in Europe and Molly and I cooked together. I must have been twenty-two and she was twenty that summer. Ordinarily Mom did all the cooking, but Molly had spent a year in France and learned a lot. She was cooking out of Julia Child's books before anybody else we knew. She had all these recipes underlined, with comments in the margins. I just remember lots of butter and lots of pastry.”

Patricia Wells's
Simply French
was another of Molly's favorites. It is dog-eared, grease-spattered, well-marked, and in several places just plain falling apart. From these pages came her fabulous cheese and bacon potato cake, a perfectly herb-roasted chicken, a luscious veal stew with spring vegetables, sea scallops with fresh ginger sauce, and a cool summer gazpacho.

4

ALMOST EVERYONE KNEW A SIDE OF MOLLY
, but it wasn't until a bunch of us were sitting around a dinner table (of course) that we began to deconstruct the many facets of Mary Tyler Ivins: writer, loyal and loving sister, devoted aunt, raconteur, rugged outdoors aficionado, accomplished cook and skilled baker, and music lover, as long as it didn't include too much grand opera, except for a few warhorse choruses and Luciano Pavarotti's “Nessun Dorma.” She said opera beyond Gilbert and Sullivan made her flesh crawl and her toenails grow inward.

Molly's love affair with French gastronomy had its origins in her multiple visits to Paris (France, not Texas), including living there for a year as a student. French is scattered throughout these pages, primarily because when she described something she planned to cook, it was often in French, which she spoke fluently. It might have been “trout with almonds” to you, but it was
truite amandine
to her. The intersection of Molly and food is but one aspect of a multifaceted, complicated, kind, and very stubborn woman.

There was Pet Lover Molly, who lavished love and attention on her badly behaved dogs, showering them with the kind of forbearance and affection that she doubtless would have shown children had she had them. Even if you don't like dogs, you can't help but be impressed with the cunning of Athena, Molly's too-smart standard poodle, as the number of dressed ducks, destined for a dinner-party conversion to
canard a l'orange,
diminished proportional to each successive trip Athena made from the kitchen counter to her secret place at the bottom of Molly's heavily wooded backyard.

After a respectful mourning period following Athena's heartbreaking death due to cancer, Molly acquired Fanny Brice, another standard poodle every bit as pampered as Athena and almost as badly behaved.

Fondly remembered is Persistent Molly, who finally decided to treat herself to a month-long vacation in Paris. She left in mid-August 2001 and was due home in mid-September. On September 11 she experienced the day's horror from the European side of the Atlantic. Instead of accepting an embassy offer to fly her back to Texas, she did what good reporters do: she stayed and wrote about it, refusing to be cowed by one of this country's worst catastrophes.

Solitary Molly frequented the locally owned Austin Land & Cattle Company restaurant, often quietly accompanied by only a book. ALC is an old-school kind of family-owned steak house with superb food and outstanding service. She always sat at the same table and had the same server. Owner and general manager Theresa Mertens expressed the same sentiments voiced by restaurateurs and servers at Molly's other favorite haunts: they recognized her, but out of respect for her privacy, they left her alone.

She earned the family nickname “Mole” for being Voracious Reader Molly, who devoured books from all genres throughout her abbreviated life.

At her most relaxed was Chef Molly, who could reduce a kitchen to shambles in the course of assembling an exquisite clafouti—the fresh cherries having been first addressed by her handy-dandy cherry pitter. She loved kitchen gadgets.

If you've never been camping on one of the scenic rivers of Texas, grab a longneck and float along with Outdoors Molly and the guys—and there were almost always more men than women on these sojourns. Join the unofficial camp cookout at Bob Armstrong's ranch in the Texas Hill Country.

It would be disingenuous to ignore Tippler Molly, whose affinity for wine and beer is not classified information. Eddie Wilson, founder of the late, great Armadillo World Headquarters, and now proprietor of Threadgill's World Headquarters, doesn't remember meals with Molly, but in his inimitable curmudgeonly way, recounts “knocking back a whole buncha beers” with her. When friends suggested naming a library for her as a long-lasting memorial tribute, he suggested instead a mobile library and bar that served beer on tap.