Julia Louis-Dreyfus last year delivered the commencement address at Northwestern University. Yeah. Elaine. From Seinfeld. At Northwestern University. Apparently Barney had already committed to speaking at Harvard, and the trampy but cute blonde with the freckle on her nose on Friday Night Lights was booked at Oxford. Anyway, given such standards, I figure it is only a matter of time before some educational institution, Yale or Bud’s College of Transmission Repair, asks me to give the graduation address. So with spring here, I’m ready. Here’s what I will say:
Any of you here today have spent nearly the first two decades of your life trusting in the wisdom of those older and more lettered than you. That has, for the most part, held you in good stead. You will do well to spend the remaining decades of your life being grateful to those who have hopped before you onto the Great Merry-Go-Round of Life.
There are also many of you sitting here wondering how you will pay off or evade the staggering debts you have incurred in getting to this moment. If you are among those pondering that sort of thing today, please discreetly slip in your iPod ear buds now. I have little or nothing to say to you. There will be others among you, however, who are sitting there wondering, “What sounds good for dinner tonight?” It is to you I shall address these blessedly brief remarks. For you understand what is important in life.
Let me begin:
Never trust men who wear sunglasses like they are tiaras, and never trust women who wear more than one ring on each hand. These people tend to be affected. Affectation is the great, festering poison-ivy rash of our times. You will see it in menus, where the description of a meal reads like a short story. Shun affectation in your daily life—or better yet, quietly ridicule it—just as you do in your culinary life.
It is probably impossible to eat too many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Keep this in mind: “Scones,” properly pronounced, rhymes with “lawns.” “Crêpes” rhymes with “preps.” The region and style of cooking is “Sich-wan,” not “Say-shwan.” Learn this and figure out a way to work all of these words, with the correct pronunciation, into your first job interview, and there is probably a CEO position or something similar in your future. People who can and do make such distinctions in the important areas of their life, like food, are apt to apply similar distinctions in the less vital aspects of living, like jobs—and consequently be more successful.
When someone asks if you’d like whipped cream with that, whatever “that” is, the correct answer is always the same.
If you have not yet learned the difference between a wineglass designed for Bordeaux and one meant for a Riesling, your education is incomplete. This should not come as a surprise to you. College, despite what a bunch of pompous, self-important professors have told you, is not about getting all the answers. It is about learning how to ask the right questions. For example, What’s the price of today’s special of braised, bone-in lamb shank?
Here’s some news: Chilean sea bass isn’t always from Chile, and it is never a bass. Portobello mushrooms are just ordinary brown mushrooms that have gotten too large to sell under that name. And prawns are shrimp. All of your life there will be people trying to sell you things that are not what those people say they are. You have to accept this. And be able to distinguish between those times—and there will be many of them—when the deception is relatively harmless, as when bleu cheese is passed off as Roquefort, and when deceptions can cause you grief, like when you discover, a month after the wedding, that your spouse was, before a trip to Pedro’s Clinica in Matamoros the month before you met, shall we say, “factory-equipped” in a way he or she no longer is.
Health-food evangelists are full of more hot air than a freshly baked croissant, and just as flaky. But what is most annoying about them isn’t their tedious sermons on healthy eating and living—and everything else. It is the obnoxious certainty with which the sermons are delivered. That is not to say there is anything necessarily wrong with certainty. Being uncertain or unwilling to make a judgment or a decision has gotten a lot of good press it does not deserve. In the old days, back before “party” was a verb, equivocation used to be called waffling, fence-sitting; hemming and hawing. Unsophisticated people think being uncertain is sophisticated. There are certainties in life, though. And you should not be afraid to embrace them. For instance, a steak with a bone in it is always better than one without.
Finally, resign yourself, with all the grace you can, to certain realities. There is no real pizza more than about 30 miles west of the Hudson River. People in New England cannot fry chicken. People elsewhere cannot fry clams. French bread, no matter what you do with it or to it, will not last overnight. That does not mean you cannot dream. And hope. But as you do, as you go through life, keep this in your mind and in your heart, and in perspective: Dare to dream. But eat the French bread while it is fresh.
