Theme your Oscar party with these movie-inspired dishes
At first glance, the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture this year seem to offer little more than a faint whiff of the passion for food that has been portrayed on the big screen in recent years.
There are no indie hits like 2014's “Chef,” the food truck/road trip movie written and directed by its star Jon Favreau; no star vehicles along the lines of 2009's “Julie and Julia,” showcasing Meryl Streep as the irrepressible Julia Child; and no family favorites like 2007's “Ratatouille,” about a country mouse who goes to Paris to become a French chef.
But if you look a little closer, a handful of top movies do offer key scenes that illuminate the pivotal role that cooking plays in nourishing love and intimacy, evoking memories of childhood and serving as a metaphor for life itself.
Since the awards season provides a perfect excuse to throw a theme party - with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood providing the perfect backdrop on the big screen - we have chosen a few of the top 10 Best Picture nominees to help you plan your menu.
1. The main course: Food as love
“Moonlight,” which nabbed eight Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe award for Best Picture, is expected to shine during the 89th annual Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 26, as it goes head-to-head with the reinvented, modern musical, “La La Land,” which earned a record-tying 14 nominations.
Many believe the sheer gravitas of “Moonlight,” an African-American coming-of-age drama set in Miami, may overwhelm the retro, escapist romp that is “La La Land,” a light-hearted love letter to Los Angeles.
“Moonlight” tells the story of protagonist Chiron across three periods of his life: as a shy and withdrawn boy with an emotionally abusive mother; as a sensitive teen-ager who realizes he is gay, then goes to juvenile jail for beating up the bully who attacks him; and as a hardened adult making a living from drug-dealing while living in near isolation.
The food scene occurs at the very end of the film, when Chiron returns to Miami to visit his childhood friend, Kevin, the only person who has ever touched him sexually. Now working as a cook at a diner, Kevin prepares a comforting Latin dish, arroz con pollo, in a touching vignette that Bon Appétit has described as “one of the best food scenes of the year.”
Director Barry Jenkins shot the cooking scene in slow motion, dropping out the sounds of the kitchen and inserting the film score. After Kevin forms the rice lovingly with a ring mold and plates the dish, the sound of the knife returns viewers to reality as he chops the cilantro for the garnish.
“Kevin was deliberately preparing this thing out of love,” Jenkins told Bon Appetit magazine. “When you cook for someone, this is a deliberate act of nurturing. This very simple thing is the currency of genuine intimacy.”
Arroz con pollo, a staple that nearly every Latin American associates with their mother or grandmother's kitchen, is an easy, one-pot dish that has as many variations as there are cooks.
“Arroz con pollo ... has provided easy, tasty sustenance for centuries of folks from Taos to Tierra del Fuego,” Chef Rick Bayless wrote in his cookbook, “Mexican Everyday.” “Each prepared, of course, with those inimitable qualities unique to one's own mother.”
2. After dinner: Food as memory
“Lion,” nominated for Best Picture and five other Academy Awards, is a moving biopic based on the autobiographical book, “A Long Way Home,” by Indian-Australian author Saroo Brierley. Considered an underdog for Best Picture, the feel-good film tells the compelling story of the 5-year-old Saroo, who is accidentally separated from his family in India, then adopted by a well-to-do family in Tasmania.
As a young adult, Saroo goes to Melbourne to study hotel management and meets some Indian friends who gather together with food from their homeland. Alone in the kitchen, Saroo is stopped in his tracks by a plate of jalebis, a sticky, fragrant dessert that he coveted as a youth growing up poor in India. Similar to a funnel cake, the dessert consists of pretzel-shaped fried dough dipped in sugar syrup.
This is the film's pivotal moment. The sight and aroma of the jalebi brings back a flood of memories of Saroo's early life. This emotional tsunami eventually leads him on a determined, single-minded search for his roots. Through the help of Google Earth, he finally finds his village and ultimately reconnects with his mother and sister, 25 years after being lost.
Smells can be a particularly powerful reminder of the past. In his famous novel, “In Search of Lost Time, French author Marcel Proust depicts a narrator who is transported back to memories of his childhood as he dips a madeleine cookie into some tea. Ever since then, the ability of odors to cue memories has been known in psychology as the “Proust phenomenon.”
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: