by Adam Gopnik
He is briskly tough, though, and quite courageous in his assaults on the Times’ reviewing. The whole elaborate, boastful rigmarole of disinterestedness and disguise celebrated in Reichl’s book he sees not as honest but as ignorant and provincial, common sense clouded over by fear—as though restaurants were there to scam you. He insists that the food in the kitchen is, of necessity, the food that gets served to everyone, critic or yokel (and the few exceptions are those restaurants where contempt for the paying customers is apparently part of the charm, as at Le Cirque). There is no more need for the elaborate masks of the restaurant critic than there is for the art critic Robert Hughes to go to a museum in a Groucho Marx nose and glasses. A good critic can’t be fooled. The best that the critic can hope for is to be treated as a friend of the house, but all you have to do to become a friend of the house, Shaw says, is to be one. Restaurants are businesses before they are anything else. Dine twice a week at Le Bernardin, the thought is, and you will magically have the table you want at Le Bernardin. This is only partly true; the known critic gets sent out far more plates and extras and desserts than you or I do, and often far more than he knows what to do with. (I once ate with a very fine chef who had the habit of sending out extra plates to friends at his own place. When the chef at the place where we were eating kept sending out extra plates to him, he said, finally, “You know, it never occurred to me before how annoying this is. You’re forcing people to eat things they weren’t in the mood for and then to make a big show of appreciating them.”)
Shaw, it emerges, is a rare thing, a food writer who identifies not with cook or critic but with the restaurant owner, whose struggles and exasperations he admires and sympathizes with. (Please call to cancel that reservation, he urges.) He wishes that restaurant critics, instead of skulking around cross-dressing and pretending to be called Marmeluke, would, like critics in other fields, be “champions of excellence who promote the best… while exposing the worst.” But, of course, all those other critics, though rarely dressed up in wigs and makeup (or dressed at all, for that matter), are notoriously irascible, tendentious, bad-tempered observers who like nothing more than settling old scores, indulging eccentric prejudices, and using someone else’s table or text as an occasion to riff on their own obsessions. Critics cannot be made responsible any more than chefs can be made calm; it is the occupational disease. The real use for the food critic’s disguises, anyway, one suspects, is not as a form of espionage but as a form of armor: it is not we who are protected from getting a false impression but the critic who is protected from violating the most primal of all taboos—being publicly ungrateful to someone who has shared his food with you. (If it wasn’t really you, then you weren’t really ungrateful.)
From these practical essentials, it is a pleasure to move to the world of encyclopedic knowledge. The encyclopedia form, of brief and then longer bursts of pure weird data, only just touched by the spry hand of commentary, is irresistible, and alphabetical organization, being both hyperorderly and completely random, is irresistible, too. In the extraordinary new Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, edited by Andrew F. Smith, the dour history of Pizza Hut abides near the basic conundrum of Plates, which nestles beside the joys of Plums, while a neat, disabused bit on the Politics of Food in America gives way to the fun of Pomegranates and Popcorn, before the social historian resumes his seat with a history of Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits. Anyone who can put it down is unburdened by curiosity about anything. Through its countless entries, two stories emerge. First, of the overwhelming abundance of the American larder, and how capitalism has struggled to enlarge and exploit it, and, second, of how the Protestant tradition of making people feel guilty about eating well—expressed in fad diets, health scares, and so on—has been balanced by the Protestant tradition of making people feel guilty for not eating well, expressed in cooking lessons, recipe books, and the growth of a huge industry of food writing meant for home cooks. One has only to compare Ducasse’s Culinary Encyclopedia to see what can be made elsewhere of the same idea. Ducasse’s encyclopedia consists not of entries on food but of pictures of and recipes for good things to eat. Under “P,” we get a picture of simmered suckling-pig chops and feet with porcini-mushroom polenta in a sage sauce, and the recipe. Even for a good cook the dishes are essentially unrealizable, but that does not alter their encyclopedic significance: images of Heaven are painted to encourage you to go there, not to help you build it in your backyard. At the opposite pole lies Denise Gigante’s Taste: A Literary History, which takes food and eating as a metaphor for Western experience. Gigante’s is the kind of book that one can mock with ease and imitate at peril: “If we approach Wordsworth’s concept of feeding through the mechanics of assimilation, as described in Romantic Naturphilosophie, we find that the feeding mind naturally exists in a precarious state of tension with its own abjected matter,” and so on. But it makes an arresting point: the model of food as a metaphor for pleasure is balanced uneasily between the mouth and the anus, between taste that urges us on and the excrement (“abjected matter”) that food becomes. The larger argument is that the bourgeois age of the restaurant was born of (or accompanied by; it is sometimes hard to be sure which) an aesthetic shift, vast in scope and incarnated by the poets, in which the old attempt to banish excrement from the discourse of appetite by emphasizing the purity of the eater was overtaken by an aesthetic in which the reality of digestion was accepted and made part of the acceptable way in which people thought and talked about life. Appetite need be neither indulged nor suppressed—it could be modified, by that very thing called “taste.” Gigante has a nice section on Charles Lamb in which she shows how, in his famous essay on roasted pig, he invented a comic but still largely melancholic, elegiac tone with which to write about eating.
Gigante is surely right that eating, along with seeing, provides the most universal of all metaphors of value: along with the sensations of light and dark, which properly belong to painting, the perception of sweet and bitter is the most natural of all natural metaphors. The metaphors of taste are so basic that they imbue and infiltrate our entire experience, and we no longer think of them as metaphors.
With no other crafted thing is the line between sensation and meaning quite so quickly crossed, quite so easily extended from something felt to something known, as with food. The tongue has no sooner said “Sweet” than the heart says “Home!” All art, it has been said, aspires to the condition of music. But we want some of our art to aspire to the condition of background music. What makes Mozart, Vivaldi, the Beatles, essential to our lives? Is it the hours we spend with scores on our knees, listening in the dark? Or the hours and hours and hours we spend with them just on, wrapped around our lives—giving them some emotion to organize that they, miraculously, do? What makes van Gogh’s stars and cypresses or Botticelli’s faces so dear to our existence: the minutes we spend footsore, staring at them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, or the glimpses on posters and in books and postcards that fill the corners of our eyes and lives? Good cooking is beloved because, when it is good enough, it gives more immediate pleasure and then recedes more rapidly, more gracefully, into the metaphoric middle distance than any other cultural thing, letting us arrange our lives, at least for one night, around it. The metaphors of food are so closely tied to our sensations that they must be elevated to ring out. That would explain why good food writing, by cook or critic, has been so expansive in theme. This largeness of vision (“I write of hunger,” Fisher said flatly, when tasked with writing about food) seems to have become harder to achieve, perhaps because the subject has become so specialized.
There is too much food in most food writing now—too much food and too little that goes further. When Liebling and Fisher wrote, they gestured from plate and glass to something bigger, outside the dining room—to France, or to appetite itself—and the gesture carried instantly, because there was little else in the room to absorb it. These days, the old twin circles (the family around the table, the cos
mos beyond) have been supplemented by so many other circles of attitude that the writer points from the plate to—another writer. Like so many other subjects, food writing is constricted within these ever-tighter circles of opinion, when what we want from it is ever-broadening metaphors of common life. Metaphor is social and shares the table with the objects it intertwines and the attitudes it reconciles. Opinion, like the Michelin inspector, dines alone.
14. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Rice, Milk, Sugar
Dear Liz:
All these recipes! All this time. I was feeling a bit, well, unmanned, reduced, by the practice of writing down recipes, no matter how delicious they might seem or how much one could defend the practice—insufficiently testicular, to use the word with which Lane Coutell offends Franny Glass in Franny and Zooey—and so I bought Keith Richards’ autobiography, wittily entitled Life, to read. I am a keen Stones fan, who begins each day with a piece of “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out,” but… could I explain British R & B to you, Elizabeth, modern woman you may be, but still a woman of the nineteenth century? A defining feature of my time, and your adopted country, it seems to escape prediction and explanation. You see, Elizabeth, in about fifty years, poorer English boys from the London suburbs—the ones with the lunatic asylums—will listen to recordings of American Negroes, and try to imitate them as closely as they can, and these imitations, heavily amplified, will become the most popular music in the world. And then they will move right around the corner from you; Keith’s home, through his druggy London years, will be in Cheyne Walk, the very heart of the Chelsea-Whistler country!
Oh. Rather like… rather like minstrel music? I hear you ask. Well, yes and no, I reply—yes, in that they’re imitating the sound, no, because it’s serious and sexual and admiring. Anyway, I keep an electric guitar tuned to an “open G,” Keith’s favorite, and strum through it, searching for those voicings, the dumb revelation that most of what seems mysterious and beautiful—from Stones riffs to béarnaise sauce—is just a matter of breaking it down and learning the technique. The tuning matters even more than the technique, and I wonder if that isn’t true of cooking as well. The tuning is just the base of what you do—the eggs you buy, the fishmonger, the thing itself—and with every good cook I’ve known, the sound is like that: a good tuning and a resonant drone, a fine fish and a favorite spice.
In any case, I thought to myself, well, Keith Richards, there’s the man, be more like him; utterly forgiven, no matter what he says or does—women are all bitches, and gay people are poofters, and no one is indignant or offended, because we all make up the rules by which we are to be judged in advance. Declare yourself irresponsible when you begin to act, and all will be forgiven when you are. In this case, the book, crafted as a celebration of living on the edge, is in fact on every page a testimonial to the privileges of money and fame. Each time poor Keith is about to be arrested for drug possession (of which he is, like it or not, always guilty), he is saved by a lawyer or hyperwealthy fan (or the father of a groupie) who intervenes on his behalf. … Well, okay. He’s still a wonderful guitarist. (The funniest and most telling remark in the book concerns his bandmate Ronnie Wood. After detailing Wood’s many long periods of crack addiction, and his many efforts in rehab to get free from them, Keith concludes, “To be honest, it didn’t make much difference. He was about the same both ways.” Thus the epitaph on all artistic addictions.)
But after all the heroin and the cocaine and the general sense of a man nodding off in space, what really gets Keith alight, what does he end up caring about most? Yes, he devotes a few glancing evocative paragraphs to guitar playing, the technique of the blues, a few words to warn against freebasing. But what is the one thing that he offers in carefully itemized detail? The one thing that he offers with real zing and passion? His recipes!
His favorite food! His own ways of making shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash—which he reproduces right there in the book alongside his tales of scoring heroin on the Riviera. How you should get bangers made fresh—presumably a challenge in Connecticut, where he lives, though God knows there’s probably a chic pork store in Greenwich by now—and then, interesting point, this, that you should put the sausages cold into the frying pan, and then slowly turn up the heat. Rather an English approach, but still, okay, and there’s something nice about the way he implies his mashed potatoes but doesn’t feel it necessary to explain his mashed potatoes. His shepherd’s pie, ground meat and more of those mashed potatoes, sounds very good—and, as a true food lover will, he insists that the key moment is the moment when you plunge the knife into the shepherd’s pie. The aroma, not the dish, fulfills the appetite. So the attempt to run away from food to something more obviously male, rock and roll, leads us inevitably and inescapably … back to food. If Keith writes down recipes for his readers, we can all write down recipes. And with it share the strong, intelligent realization that it is the first cut of the shepherd’s pie that makes the pie—that is the point of the pie.
And then—there is a connection here, trust me—the point that Keith makes about his distinctive open-G tuning is that it’s a drone tuning, a folk tuning—that one steady note, the G, buzzing in the background even as the rest of the chords mark the changes. (And he makes the musically alert point that Vivaldi and Mozart write this way, too, in reverse, with the steady unchanging note up in the treble.) Would you agree with me that the folk tuning of food, the open-G tuning, is rice pudding? Everywhere you go in the food world, there is a rice pudding playing somewhere in the background, droning a little sweet and nubbly number behind everything more ambitious that goes on. If you go out for Indian food, you can rely on a rice pudding; if you go for Italian, or Greek, there is at least a pudding made with rice. In every culture and every country, as Elisabeth Luard’s lovely book Sacred Food demonstrates, some mix of rice and milk (or coconut milk) and vanilla (or cardamom) and sugar (or honey) is the drone sound of the table. And this sweet, this pudding, is almost always part of rites of passage, of weddings and christenings and funerals, gifts to the gods and rites of the elders. There seems to be something close to a natural magnetism between rice and ritual, most familiar to us in the habit of throwing rice at weddings (and leading to Woody Allen’s perfect one-liner about the wedding where the bride was pregnant and everyone threw puffed rice). And what’s more, just as Keith says about open-G tuning—that it lets you add stray extra notes to the chords, so that in every G there’s a touch of A; in every B dominant seventh, a little hint of E minor—is true of pudding-making, too. A certain sloppy elegance is necessary in both rock guitar and rice desserts.
I make three rice puddings, and each one has a savor and meaning particular to itself. The first and in some ways the simplest, and in some ways my favorite, is the baked-custard rice pudding my mother used to make. I’m not sure where she learned it—and I know that I could answer that question with a phone call, but somehow making that phone call turns recollection into an interview—but it’s simple and perfect. You take two cups of cooked rice, left over from the night before, most often (and I often don’t oversalt the rice so that it works for the next-day pudding), put it in an ovenproof dish, and then make a simple custard alongside—say, six cups of milk, five eggs, two-thirds of a cup of sugar—which you beat together and heat until it’s almost scalded but not yet thickened. Then you just pour it over the rice, add some black raisins, and bake for about an hour at around 350°. Oh, and sprinkle some cinnamon on top when you put it in. You take it out when a knife comes out almost dry. (Almost dry—it’s one of those cooking terms, like “about to boil,” that are unknowable regions that everyone is thought to know.) The thing that I think is nicest about this pudding is what the kids don’t like: the rice and raisins settle down sweetly on the bottom of the pudding cup, while the rich but simple custard sits on top. It’s really a two-layer pudding, a sort of wholesome pousse-café. I love this effect, but it is, I will admit, antipudding in conception, since a platonic pudding is one in which everything is e
venly mixed. For children, the promise of a pudding is that there will be no unpleasant surprises.
So the second pudding I make, most often with Olivia, is one that solves this problem by mixing things all together and smooth. I add Indian spices, too. You just make your rice on the stovetop with coconut milk instead of water, and then you make a simple crème anglaise, a stovetop custard: six egg yolks, four cups of milk, into which you place four to eight crushed cardamom pods. You mix the coconut rice into the cardamom custard, sprinkle on cinnamon, and let it cool.
My trouble with this one is that whenever I make a crème anglaise it never gets quite custardy enough. My friend Peter Hoffman suggested working with a candy thermometer, so that I’ll know when it’s at 165°. That helps, though not always and not enough. The curdles come. So I add to the custard… a bit of liquefied cornstarch. That always works. Cornstarch and gelatin, the two thickeners of an earlier age, have more going for them than we quite allow. Cornstarch is also, along with Karo syrup and condensed milk, one of the three bashful but beautiful sweet ingredients. What can improve on a pecan pie made with Karo dark syrup, or on a chocolate fudge sauce made with its lighter brother? And is there anything better than a key lime pie made with condensed milk and a graham-cracker crust? And a butterscotch pudding made with cornstarch and burnt brown sugar has a depth of flavor that few Sauternes can equal. Sweet is simple, emotionally and practically.