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Guess who's coming for dinner?

Roger Ebert and his Pot
food_glenda1

Two humongous giants of the Western World died since the last Pique came out.

It's funny, as in quirkily funny, to consider Roger Ebert and Margaret Thatcher in the same beat. You wouldn't, normally, other than the fact that death knocked on their doors within four days of each other. But when you think of it, both were forces of nature within their own right, and both were hugely influential beyond their respective bodies politic.

Given some measures, some would argue it's Thatcher who's the greater giant.

I wonder.

For one, you can't trump love, and Ebert remains awash in it. Then there's the fact that the Washington Consensus is finally, finally being questioned. I can see the Thatcherism-Reaganism pendulum swinging back to more common ground, and all that "every man for himself" business ending up in the muck-heap of history, where it belongs.

In 100 years, I wonder, how will Margaret Thatcher be remembered, if at all? Witness the tweets reacting to The Guardian's Harry Style's announcement of, as one tweeter put it, "market thatcher's" death. "wish iknew what all this meant..." tweeted another. Politics lives in its own dry chamber.

On the other hand, I doubt very much that Roger Ebert's movie reviews or his famous thumbs will disappear a century from now. Gianter yet, after the Ebert lens was so gently but firmly placed on our eyeballs for all time, I don't think anyone, from any generation, will ever look at movies the same way again. Movies: arguably the most influential cultural force on the planet when they get things right.

Even if people don't know his name, his force remains — in his reviews, in his many books and teachings — long after his blogging stops. Just try to put down The Great Movies after telling yourself you're going to read one, only one, essay.

Besides, I'd be more than happy to have Roger over for dinner. (Maggie? Never.)

I'd even use his singular literary foray into the world of cooking to guide me.

One of the coolest things about The Pot and How to Use It is that Ebert wrote it in 2010, after surgery for cancer (papillary thyroid cancer) removed part of his jaw and rendered him unable to speak — or eat or drink.

"To be sure, health problems have prevented me from eating," he writes in chapter five, "To Repeat, Get The Pot". "That did not discourage my cooking. It became an exercise more pure, freed of biological compulsion." Imagine all of us cooking, freed of biological compulsion!

The Pot he's referring to — he capitalizes the "P" to distinguish it from some ordinary, riff-raff kind of pot — is the mighty rice cooker. And after reading The Pot, like after reading one of his movie reviews or essays, you'll never regard the subject matter the same way again.

For Ebert, the rice cooker is not merely an appliance for cooking rice. It is a god, more likely a goddess, or at least a holy grail on the altar of the kitchen counter, one that will miraculously — or as near to a miracle as you can get in the kitchen, without regressing to instant-something — cook oatmeal, chili (with maybe some cocoa powder tossed in: genius!), Brunswick stew, or mushroom risotto, all to perfection, all in a no-brainer kind of way.

And while he accepts that ultimately you'll buy the kind of Pot you want, he really is convincing, in a Thatcheresque convincing kind of way, that what you'll want to get is the most basic of Pots, one with only two speeds: Cook and Warm. Let's just say it: the Zojirushi is the one you want, the three-cup size. His went to the Sundance Film Fest with him.

So the Pot really isn't a pot. And neither is The Pot and How to Use It really a cookbook. In fact, much like Roger Ebert's movie reviews are more like ways to think about movies, and life, The Pot is more of a way to think about cooking, and life.

How much salt do you want to eat? How much meat? Basically, how healthily and how tastily you want to eat, and how much time you want to spend doing it when life has so many other tantalizing riches to offer, besides biologically driven eating and cooking.

Ebert does toss in a few actual recipes, not his own recipes, since I bet he never had any, but recipes from readers, along with some of their comments on his blog — all very congruent since this whole exercise was blog-inspired.

But on the whole, The Pot is trying to get you to think about how to frame your cooking and eating.

What kind of a scene do you want to create?

"Chop in some onions on the far turn. Throw in onions, peppers and mushrooms, and when they're thundering down the home stretch, some stirred-up eggs, and you have what down home we call Skillet."

Now, I'm not an appliance kind of gal. The only appliances we have in our house are a toaster and a blender. But I am down-home. And how can I resist a guy who tosses cocoa powder into his chili? One who calls the bluff on microwave oatmeal by pointing out the salt, the corn syrup and oils that have been added to it, then calls out palm and coconut oils as the two deadliest oils on the planet, all the while throwing in obscure food/movie references. (Hey, cook up some amaranth, the favourite side dish in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.)

Now there's a real giant, one, to use one of his own lines, "with more character and humanity than he needed for his line of work." You couldn't say that about Maggie.

Coda: Speaking of palm oil, which I wrote about last week, Steve Sabey emailed to point out that I got my zeroes crossed regarding palm oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia. Indonesia and Malaysia produce 28 million tonnes and 19 million tonnes, respectively. But they still stand as the No. 1 and 2 producers worldwide of this dubious product.

Roger would not be impressed.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who is working her way through all the movies in Roger Ebert's The Great Movies.