Olivia Wilde solves salad dressing mystery with a Nora Ephron recipe

The scene she described involving Wilde and Sudeikis — a man realizing the depths of his associate’s betrayal as a result of she made the opposite man salad dressing — might have been lifted from a ebook by Nora Ephron, the late author whose characters usually expertise love and loss via meals. And right here’s the place the subtext of Wilde’s recipe-posting will get really, nicely, wild. The “Don’t Worry Darling” director really posted a picture of a web page from Ephron’s 1983 novel, “Heartburn,” during which infidelity and meals are inextricably linked. (Though it’s essential to notice that in “Heartburn,” the protagonist, a thinly veiled model of Ephron herself who makes the French dressing, is the devastated associate whose husband’s affair blew up their marriage.)

In the novel, the French dressing is a motif for one thing important between husband and spouse in addition to the secrets and techniques they maintain from each other. It additionally might be learn as a image for marriage itself: a tenuous mixing of disparate parts that may simply disintegrate.

We can not know what Wilde’s motivation for posting the recipe was. What have been we alleged to make of it? I dove into “Heartburn” in search of clues. The novel has a tabloid-worthy backstory of its personal: Ephron famously primarily based the plot on her marriage to former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein. In the ebook, her character, Rachel, is a cookbook author, and her husband, Mark, is a columnist. Her fictional telling of his affair, which passed off whereas she was pregnant, appeared an train in score-settling, as was Jack Nicholson’s caddish portrayal within the film model reverse Meryl Streep.

Let us break all of the drama down for you with ‘Don’t Worry Darling’

As Rachel experiences the indignities and wounds of Mark’s dishonest, she sees all the pieces via the prism of meals. She wonders how he might dwell not simply with out her, however with out the salad dressing she has perfected. “Even now, I cannot believe that Mark would risk losing that vinaigrette,” she muses. “You don’t bump into vinaigrettes that good.” And she wonders how her husband may very well be glad with his mistress, who has little interest in meals and made “gluey puddings.” Recipes are scattered all through the ebook, not separated out, however tucked into the textual content as in a dialog.

And there are breakup meals, so many breakup meals. There is a creamy sorrel soup Rachel makes whereas staying in her father’s house after leaving her husband. (“If I couldn’t have Mark, I could at least be back making sorrel soup.”) She eats takeout shrimp fried rice with Chinese mustard and ketchup, “which is something I love when I’m feeling blue.” There is bacon hash, “another thing I like to eat when I’m feeling blue.”

Ephron’s most good, tear-jerking rendering of meals to console a damaged coronary heart is available in her passage describing potatoes. Beginnings of relationships, she writes, name for crispy variations: potatoes Anna or pancakes. Endings, although, name for one thing comfortable. “Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there isn’t anyone to make them for you.”

But again to the French dressing. Later within the ebook, Rachel returns to Mark after he guarantees to finish issues with his girlfriend, however she is rightfully cautious. Mark asks her to show him the best way to make the dressing, and he or she initially refuses. “I figured my vinaigrette was the one thing I had that Thelma didn’t (beside a pregnancy), and I could just see him learning it from me and rushing over to her house with a jar of Grey Poupon mustard (the essential ingredient) and teaching her the wrist movement and dancing off into a sunset of arugula salads.”

Finally, she breaks it off for good, a selection she cements by launching a Key lime pie at Mark’s face throughout a ceremonial dinner, in a scene memorably repeated within the film model. Only then, within the ebook’s final passage, does she share her French dressing recipe with her soon-to-be ex-husband as a form of farewell gesture and with readers, as if revealing one thing elementary about their story.

And though we will speculate on what else Wilde might need been making an attempt to speak by sharing the web page, there’s at all times the chance that she was merely passing alongside a recipe for a actually good French dressing. Was this, I puzzled, a salad dressing that would make an in any other case sane man sprawl out in entrance of a automotive?

Ephron’s is a easy method: “Mix two tablespoons Grey Poupon mustard with two tablespoons good red wine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly with a fork, slowly add six tablespoons olive oil, until the vinaigrette is thick and creamy. This makes a very strong vinaigrette that is perfect for salad greens like arugula and watercress and endive.”

I adopted the instructions, ensuring to acquire some Grey Poupon moderately than the opposite Dijon I had readily available. I puzzled about utilizing a fork as an alternative of a whisk, worrying that it might not emulsify correctly. But I pressed on, and shortly had the graceful combination Ephron had promised. It was potent, as marketed, with the heavy dose of mustard including additional acidity. I didn’t even miss salt and pepper, which I sometimes use.

I tossed it with arugula and dug in. It was good, actually good. But it was not so distinctive that I’d threat life and limb for it. But then once more, as Ephron nicely understood, meals and cooking is extremely private. Each of us has recipes and flavors that evoke reminiscences and feelings.

To Proust, a madeleine is not only a little cake. Perhaps to some, salad dressing shouldn’t be a mere condiment. As Ephron writes in “Heartburn,” as her heroine contemplates the dissolution of her marriage: “I know how complicated things get when food and love become hopelessly tangled.”