Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table Edited by Amanda Hesser WW Norton 204pp, £18.99
HERE IS a timely book in these post-seasonal feasting days, now that we are back to the economic downturn and wondering where our next meal is coming from.
Amanda Hesser is in charge of the food section in the magazine of the New York Times – a great paper which the whole world can now peruse daily, free of charge, through its website, one of the best there is.
Her book is the fruits of a column which started in the paper in 2004, for which well-known writers contribute a short essay about an important moment in their lives that involved food. An ingenious idea, because, as she observes, if you want to portray a person succinctly you describe the way he or she eats. “There was just one rule: nothing sentimental,” says the editor.
“No one wants to read an overwrought paean to grandma’s corn bread.”
The subtitle’s mention of great writers suggests foodie extracts from classic novels - Proust’s cookies, Dickens’s ploughman’s lunch, Joyce’s gizzards – and the title’s nod to Nabokov’s autobiography promises more. But no matter. These are not “great writers” in that sense, but there is some great writing.
To write about food, as about music, is difficult; the effects are produced in another dimension, which has nothing to do with words, and the attempt to describe these effects can often emerge as pretentious, or absurd.
The safest approach is to concentrate on what there is to see or smell (or hear), not to speculate on what is behind it. The best pieces in this book direct their gaze at the grub, or else get on with life, giving the food a sidelong glance.
All 26 contributions are worth reading, as are the accompanying recipes; the New York melting pot becomes a stockpot of cultures.
There is a certain amount of foodie-ism, and a little food loathing.
Gary Shteyngart is very funny about the horrible Russian, “or should I say Soviet”, cuisine served by his mother. “Growing up I dreamed of garlic the way some dream of city lights,” he says, convinced as he was that the smell offered a connection to sex.
Billy Collins’s poem has a sorrowful conversation between the author and the fish he is about to eat. Anne Patchett’s recipe for watercress soup from the Taillevent restaurant in Paris looks troublesome but fabulous. Tucker Carlson would put you off canned baked beans; in their place, he offers a time-consuming fresh alternative – “it will easily take up an afternoon”.
George Saunders proposes the Absolutely No-Anything Diet. “I was, of course, honoured to be asked to write this essay on food, but also somewhat puzzled, since I completely ceased eating four years ago.”
The novelist James Salter identifies old and expensive French restaurants, and has the best, and shortest, recipe – Figs in Whiskey.
Many of these contributions are like good travel pieces, bringing a place to life; not just abroad, but home too. As Hesser puts it, “the sound of fat snapping in a pan sets the mood of a place”.
Yiyun Li, the short-story writer, expresses with feeling how one fairly innocuous consumer item – Tang, a powdered orange drink, renamed Fruit Treasure for the China market, and outrageously expensive – can symbolise a whole sense of deprived childhood, even a transformed society. And she has a way of describing taste: it “was not like real oranges but stronger, as if it were made of the essence of all the oranges I had ever eaten”.
Allen Shawn is not writing directly about his ailing mother and sister, but about a simple birthday party meal for them which turns into a miracle.
It is done most tenderly, with a great sense of humanity; no sentimentality.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist