PART SEVEN
ONE OF the issues this section addresses is the very one that stands at the heart of the entire anthology: What is the appeal of reading about food? In effect this question is analogous to a related one: What is the attraction of looking at pictures of food instead of eating that food? Hungry lions would probably not salivate at the photo of a zebra, but show a person an image of a sour pickle and the juices will start to flow. Similarly, we might ask what is the attraction—sensuous, intellectual or emotional—in reading about food? We live in a world saturated by food writing (besides the tsunami of restaurant reviews, food blogs, and magazines centered on food and drink, over three thousand cookbooks were published last year), so why are we drawn to this writing? What exactly is so compelling?
Molly O’Neill calls her selection here “Food Porn,” and we’re all familiar with enticing, seductive, and titillating photos of lavish or sensuously exciting dishes. But if looking at images of food at once draws us towards and distances us from the experience itself, what of reading about food? If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words does it take to make our taste buds explode with pleasure, or our brains dream of great meals? O’Neill implicitly speaks to this issue when she traces a brief history of food writing, and shows how such literature is at once nostalgic in its ability to summon food memories and as alluring in its voluptuous appeal as a Victoria’s Secret catalog. But O’Neill’s mission is also high-minded: she sees good food writing as addressing important issues of science, economy, health, culture, and politics, as much as it does the hedonism of the palate.
One of our best writers on food is Adam Gopnik, who takes a similar stance in his book The Table Comes First: “There is too much food in most food writing now—too much food and little that goes further.” Referring to several of the most eminent, classic authors in the field, he continues: “When [A. J.] Liebling and [M.F.K.] Fisher wrote, they gestured from plate and glass to something bigger, outside the dining room.” Gopnik wants food writing to speak to larger issues: to family, to “appetite itself,” and to the world outside mere food. This is precisely what he himself does in the selection we’ve included here. Analyzing why we read cookbooks, he argues that they speak to our fantasy of making recipes come out perfectly, doing what might well be impossible to master; but poignantly he suggests that while we read food writing because of our desire to be like the cookbook’s author or a master chef, the process leads to disillusionment when we realize that we cannot triumph in the kitchen merely by following a set of rules. Rather, it takes a lifetime of skill and experience to turn out brilliant meals. For Gopnik, reading about cooking is a plaintive life-lesson in disappointment and frustration.
Betty Fussell emphasizes the relation of food to words, beginning with the observation that eating and speaking both involve the mouth. She argues that food and language inevitably belong together insofar as both activities “are forms of knowledge,” teaching us to distinguish what is inside ourselves from what is outside. She notes that food writers often speak of such issues as love and war, and hence discourse about food frequently expands to treat grander themes. Doubling down on this coupling, Terry Eagleton shows how figures of speech connect feasting and writing, whether through metaphors of one activity for the other or through the characterization of literary texts and writing style in terms of food and digestion. Who previously would have thought to link the cliché to fast food?
At its best, then, the food writing we cherish is both sensual and a reminder of our human limitations: its themes are hunger and satiety, yearning and disappointment, indulgence and remorse. It encompasses other dualities as well: comfort and adventure, memories of the past and hopes for the future, delicacy and gluttony. In short, we read about food because it reminds us of our complex cravings, what we’ve most enjoyed, and what we have been deprived of and might restore in the next meal or, if not at the table, then perhaps on the page, in the very act of reading about eating.
ELOQUENT, AWARD-WINNING FOOD writer Betty Fussell began her career as a specialist in Shakespearean and Renaissance literature, teaching at Connecticut College, Rutgers, and Columbia before devoting herself full-time to freelance culinary writing. She has written a number of cookbooks as well as scholarly histories of corn and beef but is perhaps best known for her witty memoir My Kitchen Wars, which describes her years as a popular Princeton hostess and the wife of critic Paul Fussell, often hilariously exploring boozy academic dinner parties while bitingly lampooning her onetime husband. Our selection reveals how wide-ranging and thoughtful her approach to gastronomy can be.
FOOD IS NOT a subject in the way that the great subjects of literature like War, Love, Death, Sex, Power, Betrayal, or Honor are subjects. Neither is food an object, in the way that a Car, a Washing Machine, a Computer, a House are objects—generic commodities that we desire and consume. Rather, food is an action, more primal than speech and more universal than language. And for humans, there’s the rub. While everything in the created universe eats, not everything speaks. Wind and water eat stone, night eats day, black holes eat light—silently. We find words to address these actions, but long before we ever arrived on the scene or said a word about it, every link in the terrestrial food chain, as in the cosmic chain, was chomping away and changing one thing into another. It’s one of those givens we like to avoid because we don’t fancy our table companions or dining conditions. We don’t like to be reminded that if dung were not caviar to the dung beetle, the earth would be covered in shit.
Nor do we like to be reminded that we are steak tartare to worms or, if we thwart their slow munch, a grillade to flames. We want to be exempt, special, excused. We don’t want to be reminded that in the game preserve staked out for us, we are flesh and blood like our fellow animals, subject to the same feeding frenzies but with inferior teeth. In terms of brains, we may be first among mammals, but we are mammals nonetheless, and as such we cannibalize our mothers in order to live. Each of us, no matter how noble his sentiments at a later stage of development, drinks mother’s blood from the time he is a tiny egg clinging hungrily to a uterine wall. Long before speech, the drama of communication begins in the womb and is merely amplified with baby’s first intake of breath that ends in a howl, acknowledging in premonitory outrage that life-long separation of the feeder from the fed. From birth on, what comes out of the mouth and what goes in are inextricably mingled because there is only the one orifice for both feeding and speaking, not to mention kissing. Was that a mistake in engineering or a brilliant subversion of human pretense?
Elias Canetti asks whether it wouldn’t have been better to have one orifice for food and another for words. “Or does this intimate mixing of all our utterances with the lips, teeth, tongue, throat, all those parts of the mouth that serve the business of eating—does this mixing tell us that language and eating forever belong together, that we can never be nobler and better than we are?” But what if we ask the question another way? Does this intimate mixing of language and eating suggest that both are forms of knowledge and of communication, that ingesting what is outside us with lips, teeth, tongue, and throat is intimately related to excreting from within the cries, sighs, babbles, and prattles that are eventually transformed into words and sentences in the cauldrons of the human mind and imagination? Could we go further and suggest that the lineaments of the mouth lick into shape the very images that the mind of man conceives in his struggle to find sound bites and transmit them? The crunch of teeth biting into an apple shapes the image of the father of mankind, who hungers and thirsts after righteousness with actual lips and throat. Does not this intimate mixing suggest that the human animal is forever a bewildering compound of body parts and spirit sensors, a belcher of hymns, an angel that farts, and that wise eaters and speakers will savor the mixture?
For is not the mouth our primary mediator in distinguishing what is without from what is within, as we suck first our own and then other people’s fingers and toes? We learn to see and to say “Mama” out of hunger, for both speaking and eating express similar actions of hungering, desiring, gathering, preserving, communing, laughing, fearing, loving, and dying in the long agon of separation and connection. Even a mouth eating in solitude—and silence—is engaged willy-nilly in discovering and communing with what is outside itself, which its hunger transforms by taking the outside literally in. We eat the world to know it and ourselves. If we fail to distinguish outside from in, we are stamped with a name and a story: Narcissus, hungering to eat himself, imaged in a pool, opened his mouth and drowned.
Eating, like speaking, reconnects through the imagination what reason has learned to disconnect through the senses. In this way, eating is a form of magic. When Shakespeare’s Leontes discovers in The Winter’s Tale that the statue of his Hermione is alive, he exclaims, “If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.” Eating, like speaking, mediates between opposite worlds, forging a bridge over the natal chasm between mind and body, images and substances, symbols and things that reason works hard to keep apart. Even as a noun, food suggests the action of ferrying meaning across species, across ontological continents, ensuring that despite the logic of appearances, you can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse through the “turn” of trope, or the “transfer” of metaphor, through speaking pictures, or images in action.
Food is always image and icon as well as substance. Semioticians explained decades ago how food, cooking, and eating create a tripartite language of their own through which a culture expresses itself, and this language dances between the literal and the figurative in the way that we usually expect of speech but not always of food. Despite laboratory analyses, mother’s milk is never simply the sum of its biochemical or molecular parts, no more than a bottle of milk is. Who’s holding the breast or the bottle or the baby, and where? Are mother and baby sitting on the grass in suburban sunshine or are they flat on a canvas surrounded by drapery and haloed cherubs? Are they on a railway platform herded into a cattle car by soldiers in uniform? Food always condenses a happening, a plot, which unfolds like any enacted drama in the spotlit present, surrounded by shadows of the past.
The most ancient originating plots in the Western world, in fact, hinge on the relation of food to language. Before the Madonna there was Eve, and before Eve there was Nin-ti, the Sumerian mother goddess whose story, told in the world’s first written language, Sumer, is a food story. After the water god Enki ate eight of Nin-ti’s magic plants, the goddess cursed eight of his bodily organs with death, then relented and restored the god to life. Nin-ti’s name was a pun, which meant both “rib” and “to make live.” In the language of Sumer, Eve’s name also meant “rib,” but the language and the food got muddled in the transition from Sumer to Hebrew, so that in the Hebrew story the lady Eve was given life by the rib of the man, whose death was caused by the woman’s eating of a magic plant. Despite the gender and cultural reversal from mother goddess to father god, the paradox of the human animal remains intact: that which gives him life also kills him, and his tragedy is that he knows it.
Human life is so bound up with food—the sounds, textures, smells, tastes, emotions, ideas, and rituals of the one so meshed with the other—that to take a slice of life at any point is to cut into a full loaf, a pie, a roast, a terrine of meaning. Personal and cultural memories are so integral to eating and speaking that simply to name a food is to invoke the lifetime of a person—and a culture. We don’t need Proust’s madeleine. We have Twain’s cornpone. Even when the nominal subject is a single food, such as coffee or oysters or beans, it is also about place and time and occasion and memory and need, just as it is about politics and economics and trade and war and religion and ceremony. While the first person singular is the instinctive voice in which to express our thoughts and feelings about food, the point of view will be as diverse as the position of the speaker: social critic, gardener, connoisseur, athlete, chef, housewife, farmer, dentist, historian, garbageman, politician, pastor, poet. All walks of life eat, in every corner of the world, whether in Nigeria, Bombay, Austria, Israel, Kyoto, or Iowa. Although attitude and tone of voice may play every key from rhapsodic to obscene, both the particularities of food and the universality of hunger keep the speaker, or writer, rooted in common ground.
Food, like language, forever unites the concrete with the universal, and a writer’s attitude toward food will appear in how he manipulates the nervy relation between substance and symbol, jittery with dramatic tension, that dictates the behavior of us all. The materialist asserts the primacy of flesh: “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” sings Brecht. The spiritualist denies or subjugates the flesh: “I need nothing. I feel nothing. I desire nothing,” writes Wole Soyinka in prison on the eleventh day of his fast. The ritualist transforms substance by symbol into rules of purity: Chitrita Banerji tells us that only luchis, a kind of fried bread, and cold vegetables may be eaten by the widows of Bengal. The sensualist translates substance and symbol alike into physical sensation: “The gamey taste and smell of ripened cheese is sexual, and provocative; the smell is maternal still, but now it is the smell of cyclical time,” writes Paul Schmidt. The satirist mocks symbols by fabricating ridiculous substance: “The correct drink for fried bologna à la Nutley, Nouveau Jersey, is a 1927 Nehi Cola,” writes Russell Baker.
Writings about food are necessarily as diverse as writings about any part of life and as illuminative of the things that matter because food is connected to everything. Homer, whether speaking of epic wars or journeys, never neglected food and drink. He specified in detail how to roast and salt the joint of meat and how to mix wine with water to invite the gods in. Greek gods ate and drank in the company of man long before Christians turned their God into cooked food to be eaten by men. That changed the nature of the feast, of course, although there was nothing new in gods who existed to be eaten. Think of Prometheus with his eternally gnawed, eternally renewed liver, wherein man’s lips and tongue tasted forever the sour of cyclical time, the bitter of eternal hunger, the sweet of immortality, the salt of death.
In imaging the unavoidable and appalling fact that life eats life, the Ancient Maya invented a language in which men and gods were made of the self-same food in an eternal interchange of substance. A literal ear of corn growing in the fields was also the finely shaped head of the sacrificed young corn god with his hair of green leaves. To eat corn was to eat one’s mother, father, sister, brother, and ancestor gods. Substance and symbol were so intimately mixed in the mouth of man that life and death were as mingled as body and soul, as eating and speaking. Maya speech wrapped the cosmos in a language of verbal and visual food puns, so that eating and speaking were alike actions of punning. To eat a kernel of corn, the substance of life, was to swallow a drop of blood, a sign of death. The Maya sign, or glyph, for bread abstracted the corn-husk wrapper and the ball of corn dough of an actual tamale, so that both speaker and eater alike shared in the bread’s layered meanings of “sacred offering,” “sacrificial blood,” “something precious,” “day.” Every kernel of corn condensed the plot of the Popul Vuh and its hero, the sacrificed god Hunahpu, whose decapitated head in the calabash tree, after he and his twin brother outwitted the Lords of Death, impregnated Blood Woman who gave birth to man from her body of corn.
And so then they put into words the creation,
The shaping
Of our first mother
And father.
Only yellow corn
And white corn were their bodies.
Only food were the legs
And arms of man.
Those who were our first fathers
Were the original men.
Only food at the outset
Were their bodies.
Nothing else can do for man’s mind and imagination what food does because it is the one and only thing that accompanies every single man, Maya, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, on his journey from cradle to grave. If his first sound is a cry for milk, his last may be a whimper for sugared tea or a spoonful of Jell-O. Sans teeth, tongue, or throat, he still must open the veins of his body to the outside world to sustain life, whether or not he is conscious of that mechanized connection. His final image may not be of the loved face hovering over his bedside at all, but of a wished-for muffin or martini, as real and intense as the griever left behind.
Never underestimate the power of food to summon images and dictate lives in the here and hereafter. Why are the graves in almost every ancient culture stuffed with containers for food and drink to accompany the corpse on its journey between worlds? As in life, so in death, food remains our most faithful attendant on the ferry across the river Styx, giving comfort and sustenance to the frightened soul soon to swallow and be swallowed by a realm where outside and inside have no meaning and where that peculiar mixture of eating and speaking will vanish in the emptying out of appetite and the entering in of silence.
FINDING FRESH WAYS to describe taste has always been difficult, and the metaphors used to do the job are relatively meager. But while he is not especially interested in helping restaurant reviewers be more eloquent with their writing, Eagleton does show how much everyday language employs images and terms from eating. He finds “gustatory tropes” everywhere in our speech, and conversely maintains that when we talk about food we’re inevitably talking about something else—love, joy, anger, power. Furthermore, he argues, the language we use is charged with emotional significance, as if contemplating food were indistinguishable from a grand passion. As he puts it, “Food looks like an object but is actually a relationship.” Eagleton analyzes talk and writing about food as carefully as if he were interpreting a literary text—understandably, since he is one of the foremost literary thinkers in the English-speaking world, having written some forty works of criticism including the highly influential Literary Theory: An Introduction.
THE LINK BETWEEN eating and writing has a venerable pedigree. Francis Bacon famously observed in his essay “Of Studies” that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Literary language can be mouth-filling or subtly flavored, meaty or hard-boiled, spicy or indigestible. Words can nourish or poison, and somewhere beneath this figurative equation lurks the Eucharistic word itself, a body that feeds other bodies, a sign that is also a meal. There are anorexic texts such as Samuel Beckett’s, in which discourse is in danger of dwindling to a mere skeleton of itself, and bulimic ones like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s, muscle-bound and semiotically overstuffed. The language of Keats is as plump and well-packed as an apple, while less palatable poets such as Swinburne are all froth and ooze. If Dylan Thomas binges on words, Harold Pinter approaches them with the wariness of a man on a diet. Bombast is a kind of verbal flatulence, a swelling which, like the bodies of the famished, conceals a hollowness.
Words issue from the lips as food enters them, though one can always take one’s words back by eating them. And writing is a processing of raw speech just as cooking is a transformation of raw materials. One of Roland Barthes’s structuralist models, bathetically enough, was a menu: just as a diner selects one item each from the “paradigmatic axes” of starters, entreés and desserts, and then combines them along a “syntagmatic axis” in the actual process of eating, so a literary work chooses items from various repertoires (genres, formal devices, narrative forms) and then goes on to string them together. These are the kind of speculations that send most English critics scrambling for their Helen Gardner. The later, post-structuralist Barthes threw over this model for the delights of semantic indeterminacy, but nothing is more alimentary than the ambiguous. If there is one sure thing about food, it is that it is never just food. Like the post-structuralist text, food is endlessly interpretable, as gift, threat, poison, recompense, barter, seduction, solidarity, suffocation.
Food is just as much materialised emotion as a love lyric, though both can also be substitutes for the genuine article. A sign expresses something but also stands in for its absence, so that a child may be unsure whether receiving nourishment from its mother’s hands or breast is a symbol of her affection or a replacement for it. Perhaps a child may rebuff its food because what it really wants is some impossibly immaterial gift of affection, rather as a symbolist poet wants to strip language of its drably functional character and express its very essence. Food looks like an object but is actually a relationship, and the same is true of literary works.
If there is no literary text without an author, neither is there one without a reader. The doctrine of transubstantiation, which states that the bread and wine of the mass become the body and blood of Christ, redescribes physical substances in terms of relationships. A chemist would still identify the consecrated elements as bread and wine, but this for Catholic theology would be as pointless as describing the proferring of a box of chocolates in physiological terms. There is a parallel mystery about writing: why are these little black marks actually meanings? By what strange transfiguration do arbitrary physical inscriptions come to be the medium of spirit, a matter of human address in the way that random tracks in the sand are not?
Language is at once material fact and rhetorical communication, just as eating combines biological necessity with cultural significance. Hunger-striking is not just refusing food, but a question of not taking it from a specific oppressor, and thus a dialogical affair. Starving here is a message rather than just a physical condition, semiotic as well as somatic. Food is cusped between nature and culture, and so too is language. Nobody will perish without Mars bars, just as nobody ever died of not reading Paradise Lost, but food and language of some sort are essential to our survival.
Fast food is like cliché or computerese, an emotionless exchange or purely instrumental form of discourse. Genuine eating combines pleasure, utility and sociality, and so differs from a take-away in much the same way that Proust differs from a bus ticket. Snatching a meal alone bears the same relation to eating in company as talking to yourself does to conversation. It is hardly surprising that a civilisation for which a dialogue of the mind with itself has provided a paradigm of human language should reach its apotheosis in the Big Mac.
Those starved words, gaunt bodies and sterile landscapes of Beckett’s dramas may well carry with them a race memory of the Irish famine, a catastrophe that was the slow death of language as well as of one million people. The famine decimated the farm labourers and small tenants, who made up most of the Irish speakers, and using the language in post-famine Ireland rapidly became a symbol of ill-luck. It is possible to read Beckett’s meticulously pared-down prose as a satirical smack at the blather and blarney of stage-Irish speech. Beckett hoards his meagre clutch of words like a tight-fisted peasant, ringing pedantic changes on the same few signs or stage properties like someone eking out a scanty diet. There is, perhaps, a Protestant suspicion of superfluity here, in contrast to the extravagant expenditure of a Joyce, the linguistic opulence of J. M. Synge or the verbal gluttony of Brendan Behan.
But all that reckless prodigality may itself have a bearing on food, as a form of compensation in the mind for what is lacking in historical reality. In conditions of colonial backwardness, language is one of the few things you have left; and though even that in Ireland had been put down by the imperial power, words were still a good deal more plentiful than hot dinners. Part of the point of language was to bamboozle the colonialists. The linguistic virtuosity of the Irish writers springs partly from the fact that, like Joseph Conrad and many a modernist émigré, they are inside and outside a language simultaneously. But it is also a form of displacement, whereby you hope to discover in discourse a richness denied to you in reality.
The most celebrated food-text of English literature is the work of an Anglo-Irish patriot who bitterly recommended munching babies as a solution to his country’s economic ills. During the Great Famine, this may well have happened; as Swift’s fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde observed, life has a remarkable knack of imitating art. Language in Irish culture, however, is associated less with food than with drink. As drink flows in, so words pour out, each fuelling the other in a self-sustaining process. In fact, apart from the notoriously bibulous trinity of Behan, Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh, remarkably few Irish writers have been alcoholics—far fewer than American authors, for whom alcohol seems as much of a prerequisite as a typewriter.
There is a fair amount of eating in Ulysses, but the novel itself, at least in the view of the critic John Bayley, is impossible to consume, “sunk in its own richness like a plumcake.” Bayley misses the point that Joyce’s work is deliberately calculated to induce dyspepsia. Modernist art was born at much the same time as mass culture, and one reason for its obscurity is to resist being sucked in as easily as tabloid print. By fragmenting its forms, thickening its textures and garbling its narratives, the modernist text hopes to escape the indignities of instant consumption.
It is significant that our word for the use of a commodity—consumption—is drawn from the guts and the gullet. This modern metaphor has a rather more high-toned ancestor: taste. The 18th-century idea of taste was partly a way of freeing artistic evaluation from too rigid a consensus: taste was subjective, beyond disputation, a je ne sais quoi that refused any total reduction to rules. Just as there was no moral obligation to like rhubarb, so it was not a capital offence to turn up your nose at Rembrandt. Similarly, what food you enjoyed was a private, arbitrary affair—until, that is, you tried ordering in your London club the kind of meal they ate in rural Cork. But this gustatory trope made room for individual freedom only at the risk of trivialising art to the status of a sausage, rather as the modern idea of consumption celebrates individual choice while threatening to drain it of value.
Food is what makes up our bodies, just as words are what constitute our minds; and if body and mind are hard to distinguish, it is no wonder that eating and speaking should continually cross over in metaphorical exchange. Both are in any case media of exchange themselves. There is no more modish topic in contemporary literary theory than the human body. But there has been strikingly little concern with the physical stuff of which bodies are composed, as opposed to an excited interest in their genitalia. The human body is generally agreed to be “constructed,” but what starts off that construction for all of us—milk—has been curiously passed over. There has been much critical interest in the famished body of the Western anorexic, but rather little attention to the malnutrition of the Third World. Perhaps such dwindled bodies are too bluntly material a matter for a so-called “materialist” criticism.
One notable exception to this indifference to the politics of starvation is Maud Ellmann’s brilliant study The Hunger Artists, which concludes with the following reflections: “[Food’s] disintegration in the stomach, its assimilation in the blood, its diaphoresis in the epidermis, its metempsychosis in the large intestine; its viscosity in okra, gumbo, oysters; its elasticity in jellies; its deliquescence in blancmanges; its tumescence in the throats of serpents, its slow erosion in the bellies of sharks; its odysseys through pastures, orchards, wheat fields, stock-yards, supermarkets, kitchens, pig troughs, rubbish dumps, disposals; the industries of sowing, hunting, cooking, milling, processing, and canning it; the wizardry of its mutations, ballooning in bread, subsiding in souffles; raw and cooked, solid and melting, vegetable and mineral, fish, flesh, and fowl, encompassing the whole compendium of living substance: food is the symbol of the passage, the totem of sociality, the epitome of all creative and destructive labour.”
Ellmann quite properly makes a meal of it. Her paragraph coils like an intestine, the sense slipping from clause to clause like a morsel down the oesophagus. As these lines track the processing of food, so they in turn process that subject matter, by the cuisinary transformations of style, into a delectable feast.
A WELL-KNOWN COOKBOOK author and writer on food, O’Neill has been a recipe columnist for The New York Times and a restaurant reviewer for Newsday. The sister of former New York Yankee outfielder Paul O’Neill, she has written a memoir, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball, and edited the award-winning New York Cookbook. She has also hosted the PBS series Great Food and edited the anthology American Food Writing for the Library of America. In addition to the ingredients, recipes, preparations, and menus of the American table, she focuses on the connection of food to our relationships, our communities, and our family memories. Here, in her brief account of how food writing has evolved over the centuries, O’Neill moves the narrative of culinary journalism forward to its current moment of obsession with what she calls “food porn”: the way the foodie lifestyle and the fantasies embodied in our preoccupation with food have become gastronomic versions of erotic dreams.
FOOD WRITERS HAVE always walked the dangerous lines between journalism, art, and their role as handmaiden to advertising. But we have not wobbled quite so regularly in nearly a half century as we do today. Food has carried us into the vortex of cool. There, the urge to become part of the story is stronger than the duty to detach and observe and report the story.
ROOTS
TRADITIONALLY, there were several schools of food writing and each served as social arbiter. In the gentlemanly tradition of gastronomic prose, the food writer was a sort of everyman’s “Jeeves,” the one who knew all. The domestic science branch of food writing was the voice of an über-Mom. The merging of these two sensibilities was part of what created food-writer chic in the final years of the twentieth century.
As early as the 1840s, when food writing first appeared in American newspapers, culinary writers were already established as more than cooking instructors. They were trusted to describe the world, as explorers had in the earliest written accounts of food in America. They were also relied upon to supply guidelines for upward mobility. The first cookbook published in America, known as American Cookery, was written in 1796 by Amelia Simmons, presumably a member of the serving class, and gave clear instruction on cooking for the gentry. The cookery writing by abolitionists, ideologues, and dietary religionists also primed the culture to look to food writers for life advice.
That advice began to appear regularly in newspapers in the late 1880s. An enormous wave of immigration had brought people who wanted to live and eat like Americans, and newspaper publishers wanted each of them to read their papers. Women with sights set on the middle class needed instruction in living accordingly, and given the rise of suffrage and increased female literacy, newspapers were happy to oblige. Another social and economic change—the shift from making everything in the home to mass production—was also an incentive to publish food stories. Food, fashion, and fiction that were heart-rending, or inspiring, or an object lesson for gender or class training were as heady as free chocolate to Victorian ladies—and to the advertisers who wanted to reach them.
As nonpartisan commercial journalism grew, so did a code of ethics designed to protect its editorial integrity. Except in women’s news. “During the time that women’s pages were emerging, journalism was becoming more independent politically, and objectivity was emerging as the dominant journalistic ethic,” says David Mindich, a professor of journalism at St. Michael’s College. “But the women’s pages were not included in the objective mix. Even into the twentieth century, women’s pages were not seen as real journalism.”
In fact, until the early 1940s, newspaper food writing was generally the province of home economists or reporters who’d failed elsewhere. Then, in the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar era, food began moving up the social scale.
RIPENING
SINCE Pliny, stories about food have located the reader in time and then, by evoking distant lands, exotic flavors, or lives unlived, taken the reader elsewhere.
For almost as long, gastronomic writing has also sought to ease readers’ anxieties and to affirm their ambitions. Therefore, the aspirations of those who read food stories influence their style and content.
As the middle class grew after World War II, a reconciliation began between elite cuisine and the meals of everyday people. The concerns of those who cook (traditionally, women) and those who savor but do not cook (traditionally, men) became more similar. The polarization between continental taste (once considered the gold standard of cuisine) and American taste (once thought to be an oxymoron) began to subside.
These changes were reflected in the pages of Gourmet magazine and in the food coverage of The New York Times, and they suggest that a new audience—if not a nascent mass market—for fine food had taken root.
When Gourmet was introduced in 1941 it was conceived not as a food magazine, but as a general interest one. The early Gourmet was aimed at a small social elite that could afford to hunt, fish, and travel, and that viewed fine dining much as it did art, theater, or opera: as something one need only appreciate in order to possess. During its first decade, the magazine sounded as if it were written by and for members of “a pre-war London gentleman’s club,” wrote the food historian Anne Mendelson in an analysis of sixty years of Gourmet that appeared in the magazine’s September 2001 issue.
The food advice that appeared during the magazine’s first decade wasn’t aimed at people who cooked; it was crafted for people who considered themselves connoisseurs. But by the 1950s, the magazine began to recognize people outside the old club. Its travel stories became more service-oriented; its recipes more accurate and concise; its tone less pompous and more practical.
As if to balance the shifting class lines of the postwar era, food was romanticized, primarily in nostalgic ways. In fact, according to Mendelson, the most important part of Gourmet’s identity in the 1950s was “an intense fixation on the past as the standard of meaning.”
But even in the whirl of their purple prose and gossamer tales of edibles gone by, food writers promoted a fundamental shift in the way America began to view dinner in the 1950s. “Food acquired a . . . gloss of snobbery it had hitherto possessed only in certain upper-income groups,” writes Nora Ephron in an essay called “The Food Establishment” that appeared in her 1967 book Wallflower at the Orgy. “Hostesses were expected to know that iceberg lettuce was déclassé and tuna fish casseroles de trop.”
The photographs in Gourmet reflected this change. When I was growing up, an elderly neighbor subscribed to the magazine and I remember leafing through it before I could read, studying pictures of quiet streets dappled with light, charming doorways, and wide open, unpopulated vistas. But by the late 1960s, when I perused Gourmet while waiting in the orthodontist’s office, there was a picture of girls in miniskirts outside a pub in London, and one of a long-haired boy careening around a fountain in Rome on a Vespa. There was a picture of people eating paella—people I wanted to know.
By 1968 good food was no longer remote and rarefied in Gourmet; it no longer revolved around a “romantic glorification of the past,” wrote Mendelson. Good food was young. It drank. It showed thigh. It probably rubbed elbows with the Beatles. “Food became, for dinner-party conversations in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties,” writes Ephron.
This evolution from food-as-fuel to food-as-aesthetic-experience was mirrored—if not urged along—by the food coverage in The New York Times.
From the nineteenth century until nearly the middle of the twentieth century, the Times published a single weekly column dedicated to food, and its titles, “The Household,” “Hints for the Household,” and “Timely Hints for the Household” suggested whom the column was written for.
In the late 1930s, however, food information in the Times became newsier and appeared under the heading “Food News of the Week.” And while most stories maintained a dowdy and dutiful tone, a few suggested that food was social climbing. In 1940 a story by Dr. O. Gentsch, for instance, declared cooking “one of the greatest arts.”
The best evidence that food had arrived, however, was the anointing of its own specialist. The term “food writer” first appeared in the Times on March 12, 1950. Given the intimate connection between food writing and the food industry, it may be no coincidence that the phrase made its debut in a story by Jane Nickerson about a press trip to the manufacturing plant of Tabasco sauce in Louisiana. Interestingly, Nickerson was the one of the first to apply news-side ethics to the food report.
When Craig Claiborne became food editor at the Times in 1957, he continued the trend, banning press trips, free meals, and gifts (other than food samples and cookbooks) for those who wrote in his pages. With an undergraduate degree in journalism and culinary training from École Hôtelière, the venerable Swiss hotel school, Claiborne treated food pages as if they were part of the news report. He also reformatted recipes and lifted them from within stories to an adjacent space, making them easier for aspiring cooks to follow. Many were, in fact, learning to cook from books, cooking classes, and the food section of the paper and, by melding culinary criticism, consumer information, and education, Claiborne became their guide. His authority rested, in part, on his gentlemanly reserve, on the fact that he was the paper’s first male food editor. However, his most significant contribution, the four-star restaurant rating system with its protocol of multiple, anonymous visits, was not a result of his gender, but of his training as both a journalist and chef.
Claiborne’s tenure at the Times spanned nearly thirty years. In 1976 food was broken out into its own section, called “Living,” a rubric that suggested both simple sustenance and “really living,” as in “the good life.”
By then, Claiborne was established as one side of a gastronomic trinity that also included Julia Child, a.k.a. The French Chef on PBS, and James Beard, the cooking teacher, cookbook writer, and impresario.
Between them, they brought journalistic muscle as well as style and joy to the subject. In addition, each personified some of the characteristics that defined food writing until the last decade of the twentieth century; they embodied, in other words, the traits and qualities that lent cachet to culinary expertise. Claiborne’s air of impeccability and unflagging curiosity engendered absolute trust in his readers. He also commanded a respect among his colleagues that had not previously existed. Beard’s memoirist approach to food writing lent mystique to daily life and created an emotional resonance with readers. Child was a clown who made cooking fun and, week by week, demonstrated the delight of being wholly human and less than perfect.
Not one set out to be a food person. Beard imagined himself in the theater, Child wanted to be a spy, Claiborne had writerly ambitions. Food was Plan B for all of them. Each, therefore, exuded the delight and wonder of the amateur, a feeling that resonated with the counterculture’s antiestablishment, anticorporate cosmology. Food was fun and relatively lawless when I started writing about it. The hurdle between being a culinary illiterate and having food savvy was not particularly high. There was plenty of room for idiosyncrasy, but most of all, the writers who shaped my generation—primarily Claiborne, Child, Michael Field, M.F.K. Fisher, Richard Olney, and Elizabeth David—exuded the excitement of discovery.
I wanted to be all of them, with a slice of Woodward and Bernstein on the side. My fantasy was fated. The “foodie stories” (such as a chef profile, a report on an ingredient or cooking technique) had slowly been eclipsing “news” stories (such as a report on famine or food poisoning or a culinary event with news value) for almost forty years. . . .
Led as much by Claiborne’s frequent profiles of them in The New York Times Magazine as by the era’s idealization of “working-class heroes,” American chefs began to be viewed as trailblazers and life-style gurus in the late 1970s. And the celebration of the amateurism of the early Claiborne era began to give way to a celebration of professionalism.
Chefs, and by association food writers, became stars, an image bolstered by the habit of dressing sex up in gourmet drag in food stories. Books such as Blue Skies, No Candy, the 1976 novel by Gael Greene, the restaurant critic for New York Magazine, that chronicled the awakening of a young woman’s appetite for good sex and good food, brought an outlaw aura to food writing. The mystique of food writing received another boost from Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel whose heroine is a cookbook writer.
But even as the profession came to be seen as a sexy life-style arbiter, food writers had, by the early 1980s, begun to respond to public taste rather than lead it. In part, this was because food became news during the decade and covering news is, by its nature, reactive. Nouvelle Cuisine unseated traditional French cooking, and America finally began to mint its own tastemakers—native-born chefs. In California, New Orleans, New Mexico, Boston, and New York, American cooking was being elevated to “cuisine.”
At first, these happenings were reported in excited trumpet blasts—it was so cool to see the small town of Food becoming Food Nation! But as the decade waned, food writing began to sound arch. The detachment was an understandable response to the 1980s ethos: although more and more people were turning gourmet, the conversion had less to do with sensual engagement than it had to do with status and the appearance of living like a sybarite.
The pursuit of lean body mass was, after all, second only to the pursuit of lucre in the early 1980s. Treadmills and Stair-Masters gobbled rare leisure hours, liquid diets were vogue, and both anorexia and bulimia were on the rise. Food writing became voyeuristic, providing windows into a world of unattainable bodies and unimaginable disposable income and time, an unreal world.
There is a fine line between soothing readers’ anxiety and becoming the Victoria’s Secret of the Fourth Estate.
This world was increasingly attractive to advertisers. The New York Times began publishing the first freestanding magazine supplement on food in 1979. The appearance of the advertising-driven insert signaled that food had become a comfortable atmosphere for advertisers such as automobile, liquor, and credit-card companies. Food, in other words was not just food, it was a life-style. And, as the decade progressed, the taste for living high on the food chain trickled into the middle class from the wealthier spheres and spread from both coasts into the nation’s center. At the same time, dietary health concerns became more pronounced, everyday life became more frenetic—and fine homemade meals became the stuff of dreams.
Given the dissonance between food fantasies and everyday eating, the birth of food porn was all but unavoidable. Waxing sentimental may have been questionable art, but as a counterpoint to the technological changes that clicked through the culture over the past three decades, nostalgia served an important role. Likewise, first person singular was a reassuringly human voice; it was also a logical extension of the confessional mode that was popularized in the feminism of the 1970s.
Some social analysts believe that citizens of an increasingly violent world watch crime shows to feel safe. Reading food writing offers a similar sort of reassurance. People tell me that they read my cookbooks “like novels,” to enter an alternate reality where cooking is slow and leisurely and imbued with a comforting glamour.
The upper middle class is willing to pay dearly for these feelings. By the mid-1990s, it was not uncommon for people to spend much of their disposable income on fancy food and wine, traveling to eat, and building kitchens large enough to accommodate crowds: cooking was becoming a spectator sport.
ONE OF AMERICA’S outstanding essayists, and a dependably brilliant writer for The New Yorker, Gopnik has produced hugely popular books on Paris, on raising children in New York City, and most recently a magisterial work on food, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food. A witty and highly quotable writer, Gopnik meditates in his latest volume on the preoccupation with food that has made gastronomy such a large part of modern life. As he says, our top chefs are “deities” and our favorite restaurants are “places of pilgrimage.” Gopnik finds the community of the table more important than the dishes on that table. In our selection he shows how good cooking is never a matter of simply following recipes, but also always a function of intuition and experience. Mere imitation can never lead to mastery, Gopnik asserts, since you need to know about the very nature of cooking itself, not just lists and quantities of ingredients. His piece is a philosophy of kitchen practice, as much as the writing of his admired precursor Brillat-Savarin.
from What’s the Recipe?:
Our Hunger for Cookbooks
A MAN AND a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the fashion reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (Monet’s Table, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make that are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as conservative as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Yet the new cookbooks show up in bed, and the corners still go down.
Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get what they promised to yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jancsi slices, Sacher Torte with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.
Yet, if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between—the melted chocolate’s gleam, the chastened, improved look of the egg yolks mixed with sugar—are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? At the same time as I was illicitly baking in the afternoons, I was learning non-recipe main-course cooking at night from my mother, a scientist by day, who had long been off-book, as they say in the theatre, and she would show, not tell: how you softened the onions, made them golden, browned them. This practice got you deeper than the words ever could.
Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.
Yet the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages: The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, The Adaptable Feast, the ones with disingenuously plain names—How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking (a good one, in fact)—and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like Dining on the B. & O.: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age. Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as part of an appetizer” is all you get.
Other good things go. Clarified butter (melted butter with the milk solids skimmed and strained) has vanished—Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, once used it like holy water—while emulsified butter (melted butter with a little water whisked in), thanks to Thomas Keller’s sponsorship, plays an ever-larger role. The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln or the Inuit ice oven or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert has a new book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone, on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill. Even the imagery of cooking has changed. Sometime in the past decade or so, the actual eating line was breached. Now the cooking magazines and the cookbooks are filled with half-devoured dishes and cut-open vegetables. Michael Psilakis’s fine Greek cookbook devotes an entire page to a downbeat still-life of torn-off artichoke leaves lying in a pile; the point is not to entice the eater but to ennoble the effort. . . .
The urge to meld identities with the pros is tied to a desire to get something out of a cookbook besides another recipe. For beneath those conscious enthusiasms and trends lies a new and deeper uncertainty in the relation between the recipe book and its reader. In this the Great Age of Disaggregation, all the old forms are being smashed apart and their contents spilled out like piñatas at a birthday party. The cookbook isn’t spared. The Internet has broken what once seemed a natural tie, between the recipe and the cookbook, as it has broken the tie between the news story and the newspaper. You can find pretty much any recipe you want online now. If you need a recipe for mustard-shallot sauce or boeuf à la mode, you enter a few search terms, and there it is.
So the old question “What’s the recipe for?” gives way to “What’s the cookbook for?,” which turns it, like everything else these days, toward the memoir, the confessional, the recipe as self-revelation. . . .
ANOTHER answer to the question “What good is the cookbook?” lies in what might be called the grammatical turn: the idea that what the cookbook should supply is the rules, the deep structure—a fixed, underlying grammar that enables you to use all the recipes you find. This grammatical turn is available in the popular “Best Recipe” series in Cook’s Illustrated, and in the “Cook’s Bible” of its editor, Christopher Kimball, in which recipes begin with a long disquisition on various approaches, ending with the best (and so brining was born); in Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, with its allusion to Strunk & White’s usage guide; and, most of all, in Mark Bittman’s indispensable new classic How to Cook Everything, which, though claiming “minimalism” of style, is maximalist in purpose—not a collection of recipes for all occasions but a set of techniques for all time.
You see a progression if you compare the classics of the past century: Escoffier’s culinary dictionary, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins’s The New Basics, and Bittman’s recently revised Everything. The standard kitchen bible, the book you turn to most often, has evolved from dictionary to encyclopedia, and to anthology and then grammar. Escoffier’s book was pure dictionary: quick reminders to clarify a point or make a variation eloquent. Escoffier lists every recipe for tournedos and all its variations. His recipes are summaries, aide-mémoires for cooks who know how to make it already but need to be reminded what’s in it. (Is a béarnaise sauce tarragon leaves and stems, or just leaves?) This was the way all cooks cooked once. (In the B. & O. cookbook, one finds this recipe for short ribs: “Put short ribs in a saucepan with one quart of nice stock, with one onion cut fine, steam until nice and tender. Place in roasting pan and put in oven until they are nice and brown.” That’s it. Everything else is commentary.)
In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as in Waverly Root’s The Food of France, which came out at around the same time, the turn is encyclopedic: here’s all you can find on a particular kind of cooking, which you will master by reading this book. Things are explained, but, as in an encyclopedia, what is assumed is the need for more and deeper information about material already taken to be essential. You get a list not of everything there is but of everything that matters. Julia gives you only the tournedos recipes that count.
You didn’t want to master the art of French cooking unless you believed that it was an art uniquely worth mastering. When people did master it, they realized that it wasn’t—that no one style of cooking really was adequate to our appetites. So the cookbook as anthology arrived, open to many sources, from American Thanksgiving and Jewish brisket through Italian pasta and French Stroganoff—most successfully in The New Basics cookbook, which was the standard for the past generation. The anthology cookbooks assumed curiosity about styles and certainty about methods. In The New Basics, the tone is chatty, informal, taking for granted that the readers—women, mostly—know the old basics: what should be in the kitchen, what kinds of machines to use, how to handle a knife.
THE cookbooks of the grammatical turn assume that you don’t know how to do the simple things, but that the simple things, mastered, will enable you to do it all. Bittman assumes that you have no idea how to chop an onion, or boil a potato, much less how chopping differs from slicing or from dicing. Each basic step is tenderly detailed. How to Boil Water: “Put water in a pot (usually to about two-thirds full), and turn the heat to high.” How to Slice with a Knife: “You still press down, just with a little more precision, and cut into thick or thin slices of fairly uniform size.” To sauté: “Put a large skillet on the stove and add the butter or oil. Turn the heat to medium-high. When the butter bubbles or the oil shimmers, add the food you want to sauté.” Measuring dry ingredients, you are told to “scoop them up or use a spoon to put them in the cup.” And, “Much of cooking is about heat.”
This all feels masculine in tone—no pretty side drawings, a systematic progression from recipe to recipe—and seems written mainly for male readers who are either starting to cook for friends or just married and learning that if you don’t cook she’s not about to. The old New Basics, one recalls nostalgically, was exclamatory and feminine. “The celebration continues,” reads the blurb, and inside the authors “indulge” and “savor” and “delight”; a warm chicken salad is “perfection when dressed in even more lemon,” another chicken salad is “lush and abundant.” The authors’ perpetual “we” (“We like all our holidays accompanied with a bit of the bubbly”), though meant, in part, to suggest a merry partnership, was generous and inclusive, a “we” that honest-to-God extended to all of their readers.
Bittman never gushes but always gathers up: he has seven ways to vary a chicken kebab; eighteen ideas for pizza toppings; and, the best, an “infinite number of ways to customize” mashed potatoes. He is cautious, and even, post-Pollan, skeptical; while Rosso and Lukins “love” and “crave” their filet of beef, to all of animal flesh Bittman allows no more than “Meat is filling and requires little work to prepare. It’s relatively inexpensive and an excellent source of many nutrients. And most people like it.” Most people like it! Rosso and Lukins would have tossed out any recipe, much less an entire food group, of which no more than that could be said. Lamb is a thing they “fall in love with again every season of the year,” and of pork they know that it is “divinely succulent.” Bittman thinks that most people like it. His tone is that of Ed Harris in Apollo 13: Let’s work the problem, people. Want to thicken a sauce? Well, try Plan A: cook it down. Copy that, Houston. Plan A inadequate? Try Plan B: add roux. And so on, ever upward, until you get to the old one, which they knew on the B. & O.: add a little cornstarch. The progressive pattern appeals to men. The implication, slightly illusory, is that there’s a neat set of steps from each point to the next, as in a Bill Walsh pass pattern: each pattern on the tree proceeds logically and the quarterback just has to look a little farther upfield.
GRAMMARS teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman’s approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written a book called How to Play Catch. (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all’ Amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason. . . .
HOWEVER we take cookbooks—grammatically or encyclopedically, as storehouses of craft or illusions of knowledge—one can’t read them in bed for many years without feeling that there is a conspiracy between readers and writers to obscure the ultimate point. A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dressup, we always end up making. We make béarnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make béarnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies. The herbs change; the hope does not. . . .
ALL appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. Going back to our own primal scene, that’s why the husband turns those pages. The truth is that we don’t passively look at the pictures and leap to the results; we actively read the lines and internally act out the jobs. The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn’t passively imagining the act of having; she’s actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that—for a decisive imagined moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice, too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities, and the act of wanting ends up mattering more than the fact of getting. It’s not the false hope that it will turn out right that makes us go on with our reading but our being resigned to the knowledge that it won’t ever, quite.
The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages—all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.