Behind the Scenes Minis: Frank, Lizzie, and Noodles

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:16
Speaker 2: Wilson.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: We talked about Frank Duvnik and Lizzie boot this week, which I really really like so many things about both of them. One thing we didn't get into. I mean, we touch on their relationships a little bit. Lizzie was the inspiration for a lot of Henry James, Like if you have a portrait of a lady or the Golden Bowl, they are inspired directly by her and her family. There are a lot of pieces, Like I said, much theorizing about whether or not he was in love with her and couldn't quite admit it to himself. There's a fun story about Frank Duvenik and Whistler in Italy. He started hanging out a lot and kind of drawing together a lot, and then there were arguments about whether one or the other had plagiarized from the other. And the funny part is the Duvenik kind of didn't care, like he was so unbothered by stuff like that. He's like, well, I know what my heart is. It's fine. I oh, I admire that approach to life. I think I think he sounds like more fun than you think he sounds like. I well, I thought all the part about being so encouraging of other students and you know, being recognized as kind, the parts about like hiding under the table to make animal I was like, I would I be bothered if I were one of the people at the table and a person was like making a fake argument. I mean, I think, to keep it in mind, it's like at a place that is probably very loud, you know what I mean. It's not like you're having a quiet meal with a friend and there's a dude under your table bugging like.

00:02:06
Speaker 2: It's a little more like.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: He's adding to the audio drama that plays out in a restaurant and trying to like make it more interesting. He sounds fun as heck to me, I will drink with you any day, Frank Duvenik. That is also another thing we didn't talk about a whole lot. We talked about how her father and Henry James did not think he was refined enough for her, but there was a lot of like this kid from a beer garden thinks he can marry my society daughter, Like there's a lot of that going on, and he was really unassuming. I think one of the things that's most fascinating and speaks the most about him is that, you know, he was a really good art teacher. He was really really wonderful at supporting other artists, and that a lot of those students who like would follow him to the ends.

00:02:57
Speaker 2: Of the earth.

00:02:59
Speaker 1: Were not much younger than him, like in some cases, like a year or two. They were more like peers, but he was so ahead of them in terms of talent and skill and ability to like work with people, that he was the natural leader of that scene, which is kind of cool.

00:03:18
Speaker 2: I like him.

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Speaker 1: He One of the things we also didn't talk about that kind of helps knit together the historical fabric and where people touch up together is that he was very influenced by previous podcast subject Gustav Corbet, who was really he learned about through his one of his teachers, Wilhelm Leibel, who kind of was part of the German realist movement that was really into Corbet at that time.

00:03:50
Speaker 2: I just like it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, another thing we didn't talk about but I love is there are three paintings of essentially this same thing that he did as a project with William Merritt Chase, who was one of his close friends in art school. Chase was the one who got sick when they were traveling in Venice and then got a job back in the US. But the two of them did this cool project where they did paintings. It's sometimes called just Turkish Page, and it's like a little boy who is in like Turkish Garbie has a little head wrap and he's you know, kind of dressed very simply, and he's seated and there's you know, animals around him and stuff and food. And they each painted this same scene, which was interesting because they're very different. Right like Frank's version of it, the page looks very skinny and really much more kind of dramatically run down for lack of better phrasing, whereas Chase's is almost lush. It's a really beautiful painting. But then there's a third painting that William Merritt Chase painted, which is Duvenec painting his.

00:05:00
Speaker 2: Version of the painting.

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Speaker 1: And when you look at the three of them together, there's something so weird and wonderful and delightful that these two painters were, like, I have a cool and weird idea. Yeah, let's make a project together. It's interesting because it's a really good way to look at how different painters of the time were interpreting things differently. And it's a really good lesson for people that are maybe not maybe not confident that they can pick out differences in art to be like, yes, you can look at these two right together of the same thing and how differently they express it. I love it.

00:05:38
Speaker 2: I love art.

00:05:38
Speaker 1: Did you know I think I gathered that. Ah, here's a thing that boils my blood.

00:05:48
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: There are a lot of biographies of Frank Duvenek that say he married one of his students. That makes it sound a little seedy, like he married someone much younger than him. That was you know, that there was a power imbalance that does happen when people have relationship with students. But like, not only does it make him sound like a creeper when that wasn't what was going on, but it also makes Lizzie not an active participant when she clearly pursued it right, And it's like, no, she was actually.

00:06:24
Speaker 2: Older than him.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, she kind of had all the power because she had money and social status and he did not. Yeah, and so I'm always like, I hate when it gets simplified that way. It's like, that's not really you're not really conveying that this was a pretty equal partnership in terms of like two people actually wanting.

00:06:46
Speaker 2: To be together.

00:06:48
Speaker 1: It is very I really really like Lizzie's take on things that She's like, I didn't think I was ever gonna get married.

00:06:56
Speaker 2: This is weird. Yeah, I understand that.

00:06:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a husband and a baby inside of a year. I don't know how that happened. I mean she does, it's like, whoops.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:07
Speaker 1: When when Patrick and I met, I had been I will describe it as like aggressively single for like five years, and I had been in a relationship before that for a couple of years, and then the years before that was like another period of being again aggressively single, sort.

00:07:25
Speaker 2: Of being like, how did this happen? I get that.

00:07:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, we didn't have any babies though, same same, I didn't think I ever wanted to get married, and then I met Brian and.

00:07:36
Speaker 2: He messed that whole plan up. Gee. Yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting too the way that some writers over time have talked about their weddings specifically, like there are some versions that make it sound like it was really really important to her to get married before she was forty. It's like, I don't get that vibe. Yeah, you and I were going to talk about The Whistling Boy. Yes. Reading through this before we recorded, I was like, I feel like I know this painting and I just couldn't bring it to mind.

00:08:14
Speaker 2: So I googled it.

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Speaker 1: And at Wikimedia Commons, which is a place you can find lots of usually public domain work, there's this sentence that says this painting was originally titled The Smoking Boy. Art censors at the time forced Frank Duvenek to paint out the cigarette in the boy's hand, leaving us with the painting, which now hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum. So I was like, what, that's a thing to not like that? Seems like if that were the case, it would have been in the episode. This painting comes up a few times. And then I didn't find any other source claiming that he had been forced to paint it out, and instead I have found and I think you found, also sources that basically said that there was a varnish on the painting that had darkened and made it hard to see and once that was removed, you could see that there was a cigarette in his hand. So I'm like, where did this whole thing come from about him being forced to paint it out? The other thing is, when I read that, I thought that the thing being discussed was that there had been a cigarette in his left hand that had been painted out, because the way this person is holding his hand in the picture, like the position of his hand seems like there could have been a cigarette between his index finger and his middle finger. But where it actually is is in the other hand entirely, and you can see it if you zoo Like it's a little hard to see at computer screen resolution, but if you zoom in on it, like, it's obviously right there.

00:09:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: So I don't know where that whole thing came from about him being made to paint it out. I have a theory. Okay, Now it's possible someone out there is like, oh, I know exactly where, and I just have not come across it. But I wonder if part of it isn't because that first big exhibit that like popped off where he suddenly got famous, there isn't a catalog listing for it. And one of the things that I read, which was by mahonri Sharp Young. This was written in nineteen sixty nine, but that rite up mentions that oddly, in the reviews of it, the Whistling Boy isn't mentioned, but only three of the paintings are, and so it's possible that either maybe they were like, we shouldn't even talk about this painting it's a kid smoking, although that seems odd, or that someone has made the assumption that it was left out of discussion or that it was not part of the exhibition because of it. That's the trick is if we don't know what all was in that, we know those three that we mentioned, and beyond that, it's guesswork. Sure like there's even a little confusion because one of the things that's mentioned there are two notes mentioned. I think it's in Henry James's review that it's all male subjects, but then he describes a painting of a baby, and at that point the only baby painting that anyone knows of that he had done was a little very obviously like a little girl in like classical stuff. So it's a little unclear, and I wonder if some of that confusion is what has led to this. But as I mentioned, he really liked to lay shellac and varnish on because he thought it made his stuff look old and cool. And I and that stuff yellows over time, and I think it had just obscured that detail because it's still there. It didn't get painted out. Oh, Frank Duvenek, that's time travel and we'll go on a little drinking party together. He sounds so fun, so fun, but like, I love the idea of this like boisterous fun person who is not full of themselves, because often that's how that works. But he's instead boisterous and fun and wants everybody to like be recognized for their work and praised and supported. I'm like, yeah, And if you do, go to the met like I said, go see that that memorial sculpture. It's so beautiful. It is so beautiful.

00:12:38
Speaker 2: I love it.

00:12:48
Speaker 1: We talked about Noodles of Noodles this week. I feel like when I was a kid, there was a Ramen brand, like an instant Ramen that.

00:12:59
Speaker 2: Was called Noodles of Noodles.

00:13:01
Speaker 1: There was, I'm sure of it.

00:13:02
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's still around here. We'll look it up.

00:13:08
Speaker 1: While we do that, we'll mention that The thing that I refrained from talking about in relation to the Stroganoff family was their amazing art collection.

00:13:19
Speaker 2: I mean there's a tiny mention of it in the episode.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, but like they were famed for their art patronage and lauded for it. Stroganoff, how I love it. Yeah, I love it so much. I want to make it all the time.

00:13:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was.

00:13:37
Speaker 1: That's one of those dishes that my mom made when we were kids, for the both ease and economy of making it.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: And we've talked about my many.

00:13:46
Speaker 1: Issues with food textures when I was a kid. I did not love the texture of egg noodles for some reason. I don't have this problem now. Yeah, but you would serve that or something similar over like mashed potatoes or rice or some other starch, that very inexpensive starch, adding a component to it as part of like what makes it yeah, super economical. Yes, families, Yeah, I really really love And we only touched on it briefly. Alexander Grigorovitch Stroganov, who was the one who anybody could walk into his house and eat, and I love that so much, And he would have, like I forget what the exact rules were. It was basically like you had to be smart, like you had to be interesting and be able to converse, and you had to be dressed decently, which didn't mean fancy. It was kind of like, you know, shirt and shirt and shoes required. This is this isn't a beach vacation, not that you would be at the beach in Odessa, but I love that idea of just anybody can come and eat and my I presumably very talented professional chefs will serve you like they would anyone else, and we'll all just sit down and have a meal together. I'm like, oh, that sounds kind of amazing. It makes me like him heaps. I also really really love Luisa Tetrazini. Everything I read about her is so fun and she just sounds like she had a great time, and I love that she was. I mean, I can't imagine being that self confident from right out of the gate, but she seems like she always was the envy I feel for that. Yeah, yeah, where she just knew exactly who she was, what she was capable of, and what she was willing to put up with. Yeah. I'm not sure offhand if I have eaten a Tetrazini, Like everything in it. I'm like, yes, I'm on board with all of this, but it also seems like something I might have been more likely to eat and at restaurant, and maybe and I'd like, I think if I were in a restaurant that we're serving it, there would probably be other things on them in you that would call to me more. Maybe, But don't sleep on tetrazini because it's real good.

00:16:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds delicious.

00:16:14
Speaker 1: I forget where it was that I was in the research when someone mentioned that Vincent Price had included loved It and included a recipe, and I was like, I have that book to collection, and I got to open up my treasury of Great recipes and look up their recipe, which is so good.

00:16:30
Speaker 2: I love it. It's like parentheses chicken and spaghetti casser Yeah.

00:16:37
Speaker 1: Ah, I'll do my plug for that book again. If no one has read it, you can still get copies of it. It is Vincent and Mary, who were both big foodies, recreating with blessings the recipes from all of their favorite restaurants that they had visited around the world. So it's like, here's the section on this place we love in Rome, here's this section on this place we love in Paris, and it's really wonderful because I mean we've I've talked about Vinsur Price on the show.

00:17:09
Speaker 2: I love him very much.

00:17:10
Speaker 1: But the way that he really wanted to democratize art history for a lot of people, like he did the art print collections and seers so that people can be exposed to great artists at almost any budget. He similarly wrote books like this. He wrote several cookbooks that were about, like, allegedly, fancy food should not just be for wealthy people. Everyone should know and delight in like the delicious combinations that food can create. And I love him for that. I love him for many reasons. But if you get your hands on it also he has. He and Mary put a little trick for making roo in that cookbook that I live by, which is that they pre make it huge batches and then freeze it and you just use like a melon baller to scoop out the right amount and you're ready to go. You put it in your skillet and you're ready to start adding other stuff to it. Yeah, their recipe comes out velvety smooth every time. It's so good nice, So like their proportions are exactly correct. Yeah, so highly recommend if you're a yeah cook, My my spouse is I think grandmother teaching him to cook told him as long as you know how to make a room, you'll never starve. That's correct, You'll never starve, and everything will taste pretty good. Listen, a root and correct a lot of problems. Super simple, but it is easy, like to get it wrong and it seizes up sometimes, and you know when you add the I literally fixed some not great tasting stuff while visiting my dad recently by making a roue and then a parmesan sauce out of it. Listen, did the pork get overcooked? Yes, it did, but the sauce was so good you wouldn't even notice.

00:19:04
Speaker 2: Nice. I love it.

00:19:18
Speaker 1: I feel like we're getting to a point kind of with eponymous foods. We're not there yet, but we're nearing it that you got to with nursery rhymes, where it's like we're going to reach the.

00:19:27
Speaker 2: End and out.

00:19:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are more, but some of it is like if it's too obscure, I feel like it doesn't quite fit the bill because part of what's great is like most people have heard of beef stroganov. Most people have heard of tetrazine even if they haven't had it, so that name recognition helps. There are a few more on the list that'll be there. But then there are some where it's like, you know, super obscure person, you've never heard of, dish that's not very common.

00:19:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: I feel like you're probably having some but the same thing that I have had with nursery rhymes where it's like, I'm sure there are foods that are named for people that are incredibly well known in like just let's say China, that haven't necessarily been exploited out of China, Yes, for sure, and like for us to try to find and talk about those, like we're gonna miss a bunch of cultural nuanced that would be important, as that's my imagining imagination of Yeah, I mean it came up a lot in this episode right where it's like people with tetrasini in particular, where people are claiming different years and I can go back through newspaper records and go, Nope, it's right here, Nope, it's right here. It's harder to do when you get to foreign language. So we'll see, we'll see how often they come up again. But I love doing them, and there I always like to talk about food. So Oops All noodles, which is you know what that's a reference to, right, oops all berries?

00:21:01
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:21:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I discovered someone recently who had never heard of oops all berries, which, just in case there's anyone hearing this, that is the version of Captain crunch Cereal where I only put crunch berries in it. I love it, but it sure does tear up the roof of my mouth. Yeahs, Oops All Noodles wouldn't do that to me. Yeah, I just googled Oodles of Noodles to circle back to that. Me too, And I think the brand still exists but doesn't really use the name anymore. Maybe, I don't know, don't know for sure. Yeah, I'm not sure either. But there is a commercial from the nineteen seventies.

00:21:42
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: I see that as a results for it, and it looks very much I'm not watching the commercial, but it looks very much like a Ramen packet would yep.

00:21:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:21:50
Speaker 1: I think your memory is one hundred percent correct. Yeah. I think when I was in high school it was the first time that we ever had instant Ramen and it was because my mom had gotten like maybe not so far as a recipe, but like a food idea from a friend that was making an almost faux like fondue with uh would that be phone do? Yeah, I'm sorry, that was terrible. I'm going to jail for that. But like you would have the noodles and you would use the broth like the flavor packet part of the ramen, and you would get your vegetables and stuff in that. It was really a lot like making instant ramen and putting a lot of vegetables in it, which is a thing I will still like dress up my instant ramen with other ingredients. Oh yeah, listen. Ramen satte is one of my favorites. Here's a question. I don't know if I've ever asked you this before. Hi. I know you're your parents were really really intent on nutrition as a lesson for you and your brother. Did your mom do much prepackaged stuff or was it all pretty much from scratch? So when I was really little, everything was from scratch. Mom didn't even buy like prepackaged baby food for us. There was a baby food grinder that like the food went in to be ground up to be suitable for babies.

00:23:26
Speaker 2: And after my brother was born.

00:23:30
Speaker 1: My mom was a stay at home mom for some years, and during those years pretty much everything was made from scratch all the time, and any like any fast food or any prepackaged whatever that we had was like some kind of special circumstance.

00:23:47
Speaker 2: Eventually, my mom was.

00:23:49
Speaker 1: Like, if these kids are going to go to college, I got to get a job and I'm just going to stress at this moment. What my mom did to send us both to college is not the amount of money it takes to go to college today. I am not at all suggesting that if mom and dad both has a job, you can afford to go to college, but not how it works anymore. But mom went back to work full time pretty much so that they would have enough money for my brother and me to be able to afford to go to college. And when that happened, there was a lot more like prepackaged stuff, and that as my mom became disabled, her her disability meant that like a lot of stuff was more accessible if it was coming out of a jar or pops.

00:24:29
Speaker 2: Rather than being like.

00:24:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, my mom was very hardcore about everything had to be made from scratch, uh huh, and like, by the way, as we have this discussion. Also, there's no shame in the prepackaged game.

00:24:44
Speaker 2: I really no, no, I love a.

00:24:46
Speaker 1: Matrom scratch meal, but I also love but because my mom was kind of militant about it, like she I feel like that was her thing she could control, you know what I mean, Like sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, So it became like the dirty little secret of like my dad and I sneaking out to McDonald's on occasion. It was like, do not tell your mother. But as a consequence, I think I had a period in life where I'd lived on my own and I embraced prepackaged things so much as a form of rebellion. Yeah, now I'm kind of back to making more stuff from scratch, but also like I love a little doctored up anything. You can doctor up most prepackaged things to be pretty darn tasty if you have a little creativity. Like I said, there's no shame in that game. If you're not a cook, I am not judging you.

00:25:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:25:33
Speaker 1: I had a kind of similar Mine was really sugary cereals because even after uh like, even as there was more prepackaged and pre prepared stuff as part of our lives, no sugary cereals was just like a standard rule. And the only time we had sugary cereals was that one grandmother's house who always had fruit loops. And when we would go on vacation, Mom would get those little like single serf boxes that came with like a mix of different things. And then I got to college and they had lucky charms on in the cafe.

00:26:07
Speaker 2: Area every day.

00:26:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. Literally, I'm the little thing that you lifted up in the lucky charms came out, and that like I also was vegetarian. Let me, I don't send me notes about the gelatin and the and the marshmallows.

00:26:20
Speaker 2: I didn't know.

00:26:22
Speaker 1: But because I was not eating meat and there was always lucky charms, there was a lot of lucky charms in my Dietlicious delicious. You took me back instantly with the multi packs of mini bags of cereal. And I'm like those poor sugar smacks that sat there forever because I never wanted those.

00:26:41
Speaker 2: The corn pops were our favorite. Oh all the all the apple jacks.

00:26:46
Speaker 1: Holy man, To this day, I think about apple jacks and it's like a dopamine hit. Yeah, but now I don't I don't enjoy sugar cereals as much just because like I don't feel great after it, you know, yeah, we don't keep older can't handle sugar the way.

00:27:02
Speaker 2: All right.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: If you have some time off this weekend, I hope you eat something really delicious and that it does not in any way impact you negatively.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: If you are not.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: Taking time off, I still hope you get something delicious wedged in there, because listen, yummy things are a great moment of joy that you can find in most days. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday something brand new for you. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.