Food Movie Pairings

The New York Times food section had a great article yesterday on pairing movies and drinks. I especially loved the Knob Creek bourbon with the film noir classic "Out of the Past," a movie so convoluted that you feel hammered by end whether you're drinking or not. Still a very good movie by the way, Robert Mitchum at his pouty, macho best, slouching his way to doom.

It made me think of pairing food with some of my favorite movies. Here's my cinematic menu:

The Godfather: Homemade marinara and spaghetti and homemade wine with cannolis for dessert. Leave the gun locked up. Enough said because you never ever let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Skewered coconut-encrusted chicken and mead. A silly dish that recalls both the coconuts used to simulate horse hoofs and the African (or European) swallow paired with a medieval alcoholic beverage. For the starch, some type of potato that looks like the mud in honor of the scene where Michael Palin and Terry Jones are playing in the mud (I'm being oppressed! I'm being oppressed! Now you see the violence inherent in the system!).

Pulp Fiction: Sugar pops, milk shake with whiskey and a steak bloody as hell. Love Eric Stolz blithely eating the cereal as Vincent frantically calls for help with the ODing Uma Thurman. And who can forget Jackrabbit Slim's. Vincent is right. A $5 shake needs a shot of whiskey. Drink up Peggy Sue.

Shoot the Piano Player: Steak Frites, red wine, braised beets. A somewhat obscure French movie that I've always loved. A concert pianist haunted by his wife's suicide and his criminal siblings gives up his career to play in dive bars only to fall in love -- with tragic consequences. Like the food, straightforward, delicious and a little bloody.

The Tin Drum: Sardines, crackers and boiled potatoes. The great German novel of World War II and its aftermath, the story of Oskar the dwarf who refuses to grow up in order to escape complicity for the Nazi regime and its crimes. His mother dies from eating too much eel (hence the sardines). She is conceived in a potato field when her German mother hides in her skirts her Polish father who is fleeing the German police. You do the math. You might throw in some wurst and kraut, red or regular, as this is very, very German.

Any ideas or suggestions? Please comment.