“It [rotolo] taught me a lot about Italian food. It also taught me to see food through the eyes of a woman. Rose [Rose Gray, the River Cafe’s co-owner] was incredible. She wasn’t a chef, but a self-taught cook at a time in Britain when there weren’t many women in the kitchen, and certainly no female owners who weren’t trained chefs. Mostly, Rose didn’t give a damn about protocol. She and her business partner, Ruth Rogers, had spent many years living in the mountains of Tuscany, and instead of the almost robotically methodical way most chefs operated at the time, they would buy fresh ingredients and write two new menus – one for lunch and one for dinner – every single day. They taught me about seasonality, and using the whole animal, and they gave context to ingredients. They weren’t academic about food – they taught me to be more responsive and more nurturing.”
(“Jamie Oliver: The recipe that changed my life,” as told to Dale Berning Sawa, The Guardian)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
“Through his mysterious and appealing lectures, they were guided away from the cold sobriety of genuine knowledge into the picturesque realms of pseudoscience….” (Grete de Francesco, “The Power of the Charlatan,” quoted by John Ganz in an opinion piece in the NYTimes)
When the title of this comment occurred to me, I thought it was from some old comedic shtick, akin to “Take my wife… please.” I have no idea when or where I first heard it. On impulse I Googled “When did you stop beating your wife?” It came up as an example of the “loaded question.”
For me, it symbolizes a type of headline that seems to be a staple of clickbait journalism: The provocative assertion posed interrogatively. It’s a come hither device to draw the surfer into an inflamed or tendentious opinion piece. It’s of a piece with headlines that taunt “You won’t believe…,” and those that scream words like “destroy” and “shred” to proclaim the outcome of a tweet skirmish.
I understand the drive to capture audience. It’s hard to write dispassionately and disinterestedly about a topic. Unvarnished reflection isn’t always shiny. The principled urge to write without embellishment fights with the yearning to be noticed.
My contrivance vice tends to be to let a soupçon of swagger creep in, a saucy dash of erudition, wit, or even modesty. Such strutting, besides playing the reader unfairly, compensates for under-confidence in the face of the sheer volume of quality blogging that’s out there.
I resolve to try to: (1) Strive for greater allusiveness and economy of expression; (2) Err oftener on the side of understatement; (3) Refrain from snuffing my own candle.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)