Because winter is the time when everything good about life either dies or becomes significantly less pleasant, disease has found its way into my apartment. Common sickness does strange things to the human psyche, including increasing its desire for old TV shows. Last night I sat with my roommate, the bastard who brought the dreaded seasonal rhinovirus into this home, and we flipped through the few channels we could get on our digitally-converted antenna TV, stopping occasionally on whatever program our plague-addled minds found interesting. This led us more often than not to one of several PBS stations. After watching Rick Steves embarrass his fantastically white self in Iran, we delighted in the grandmotherly decadence of Julia Child and her caretaker/assistant Jacques. Two things occurred to me then: Ouch, my throat really hurts, and cooking shows have really, really low production values. So, I decided to pop over to Youtube to see what the cheap videographers of the medium have to offer in the form of cooking shows.

My assumption about the ability of Youtubers to make decent cooking shows was correct, but there was one true standout performance in the form of Clara, a then-91-year-old great grandmother who hosts a Youtube show called Depression Cooking with Clara. I'm happy to report that Clara is not only still alive and cooking, she's also got a book out featuring a lot of recipes she uses in her series. Depression Cooking is actually a rather well-done show. Clara isn't exactly charismatic, but she's in her freaking 90's so tough crap. Really, she acts exactly like an entire generation of grandparents always did. She mixes her obvious physical limitations with moments of surprising acuity, like when she dices up potatoes and onions in her hands using a method that would pretty much guarantee blood in the majority of kitchens. All the while, Clara regales us with simultaneously sad and amusing stories of what it was like to grow up during the worst financial crisis in US history.

I suppose what I find endearing about Depression Cooking with Clara, aside from the fact that she's essentially a virtual grandma, is that her recipes are rather timely. She often says things like, “During the depression we ate a lot of pasta and potatoes because they were cheap”, then I think to myself, “Wait a second. I eat a lot of pasta and potatoes because they're cheap!” Oh, but I will never consider our country's current crisis quite as bad as the one Clara faced, if only because we today can get legal booze. I sure hate being poor, but if I was forced to go through this mess stone sober I'm pretty sure I'd take out a giant life insurance policy on myself just prior to having an “accident” on the roof of the tallest building in my city.

Really, it's the little things that make good Youtube videos and Clara doesn't skimp on the details. I appreciate bizarre bits of mise-en-scene like the Depression-tastic tin can marked “Peas” in a hasty scrawl, or the unexplained pickle just sitting behind a jar for no reason that is readily apparent to us viewers. Clara's a true artist and one of the things that make Youtube good. Also, now I'm hungry for food that embodies sadness.