SOOKIE: Bob has two seconds to get the hollandaise off the flame before I break his neck!
Hollandaise sauce, a mixture of egg yolk, melted butter, and lemon juice/white wine/vinegar, usually seasoned with salt and pepper/cayenne pepper. It’s a key ingredient in eggs Benedict, and often served on vegetables such as steamed asparagus.
The name is French for “Dutch sauce”, but it’s unclear why. The first known recipe was published as “fragrant sauce” in a 1651 recipe book by Francois de la Varenne, and it’s possible he invented it. A Dutch recipe for a similar sauce was published 16 years later, which may explain the name.
When making the sauce, it’s very important not to overcook it, or you will turn it into something resembling runny scrambled egg – hence Sookie’s stress about Bob leaving it on the flame too long.
SOOKIE: Uh, chaos? Uh, a travesty of cooking? It’s a salmonella laboratory in here!
Salmonella is a genus of bacteria, named after a veterinary surgeon called Daniel Salmon (1850-1914). Most salmonella infections are caused by eating food contaminated by faeces, so poor hygiene is the usual culprit. They can cause food poisoning, or in more serious cases, typhoid fever.
In fact, Sookie’s food handling is pretty unhygienic anyway – she’s constantly tasting things with her finger dipped in the food, or eating from the spoon then using it to stir food again. In this episode, she goes through the garbage and doesn’t wash her hands. The way food is treated on this show, you’d expect a salmonella outbreak on a weekly basis!
LORELAI: I can’t believe [the Beales] were related to Jackie.
RORY: Well, the Kennedys kind of hid them in the background for many years.
LORELAI: Well, when you’re a Kennedy, how do you even choose who in the family to hide?
I’m not sure that there’s much evidence that the Kennedy family “hid” Jackie’s relatives away. Jackie and her sister Lee Radziwill certainly didn’t seem to pay them much attention until they began to be featured in the tabloid press as eccentric upper-class hoarders.
However, it’s said Jackie and Lee paid for Grey Gardens to be cleaned up to some extent – the house in the documentary is actually much less of a hovel than it had been previously. And it was Jackie and Lee who approached the filmmakers about the documentary, hoping it could be a way for the Beales to make some money, so they actually helped give them publicity, rather than hid them away.
Lorelai’s snarky comment reflects the number of scandals the Kennedy family have had over the years. She may be specifically thinking of Rose Marie “Rosemary” Kennedy (1918-2005) [pictured], the sister of President John F. Kennedy. Due to a difficult birth, she was developmentally delayed, although it is unknown to what extent, as the Kennedy family kept her life private.
When Rosemary was in the early twenties, she became increasingly irritable, and went into convulsions, as well as attacks of rage in which she would hit other people. At the age of 23, her father, Joseph Kennedy, agreed to her being lobotomised to help control her violent mood swings – he did not tell his wife until the procedure had taken place.
The lobotomy had a devastating effect on Rosemary, whose mental capacity became that of a two year old. She couldn’t walk or speak intelligibly, and was incontinent. She was immediately institutionalised, and separated from her family for over 20 years – her siblings did not know where she was, and the press was told she was “reclusive”. After her father’s death in 1969, she gradually became part of the family again. By that time, she had learned to walk, although with a limp.
Some say that Rosemary was one of the inspirations for Eunice Kennedy Shriver to later found the Special Olympics, although Eunice said that the Games were never about one individual.
[Lorelai and Rory are on the couch watching television]
RORY: I like these women.
LORELAI: I love these women.
During the cold open, Lorelai and Rory watch Grey Gardens, a 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles. The film depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive, upper-class women, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale, who lived in poverty at Grey Gardens, a derelict mansion in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighbourhood of East Hampton, New York.
Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), known as “Big Edie”, and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917–2002), known as “Little Edie”, were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two women lived together at the Grey Gardens estate for more than fifty years with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation.
Throughout the fall of 1971 and into 1972, their living conditions—their house was infested by fleas, inhabited by numerous cats and raccoons, deprived of running water, and filled with garbage and decay—were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine after a series of inspections by the Health Department.
With the Beale women facing eviction and the razing of their house, in the summer of 1972 Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill provided the necessary funds to stabilize and repair the dilapidated house so that it would meet village codes.
Albert and David Maysles became interested in their story and received permission to film a documentary about the women, which was released in 1976 to wide critical acclaim. Their direct cinema technique left the women to tell their own stories.
The film was controversial from the start, with some feeling that the Beales were being exploited, and that because they were paid for taking part, the documentary was ethically compromised.
“Big Edie” died in 1977 and “Little Edie” sold the house in 1979, dying in Florida in 2002. The fashion designer Liz Lange now owns the house, which has been extensively remodelled and landscaped.
Lorelai and Rory both enjoy eccentric biographies, and stories about mother-daughter relationships, so this film is a natural fit for them. It’s clear they can see a little of themselves in “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” – like the Beales, the Gilmores share the same name. Other similarities are that their home is similarly described as needing work (“The Crapshack”), and they live a life of of genteel squalor, doing exactly as they please. Most importantly, like the Beales, the Gilmore girls are intensely codependent.
It’s hard not to think that Gilmore Girls was influenced to some extent by Grey Gardens – their names even have the same initials!
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 