It was Grimod—witty, quick, and unabashedly opinionated—who is the forefather of the great majority of today’s food writers, those who fill the food pages of newspapers and magazines. Grimod once wrote of journalists, “They are recognizable by the apoplectic throats, their bushy moustaches and their puffy, bibulous visages.” Since Grimod, they have remained, puffy faces and all, if not the most respected then at least the best-known and most read of food writers. In the 1920s and 1930s a new and prolific species appeared, the American journalist loose in Europe with an expense account. These were not food writers, but they ate well and they wrote well, and in time, usually as they grew fatter, they began to feel as if they had something to say about food. The tradition has continued. The problem with it was well explained by one such food writer, A. J. Liebling. Himself a journalist who wrote for The New Yorker, earning a comfortable but not lavish living, Liebling maintained that a true gourmet had a middling income: poverty bars too many experiences and an unlimited budget does not develop curiosity or discrimination. “A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante,” Liebling wrote. “This is not because millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment.” A gourmet, he believed, needed to be a scrounger, not a frequenter of the most famous and expensive.
Liebling was by nature such a scrounger. Exploring the back streets, he ate and ate and ate and became enormous. He was a close friend of Waverley Root, a fellow American journalist who was sent to Paris to cover news for the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. Liebling wrote of his friend, “A kindly and humorous man of wide and disparate interests, he could talk well of many things, but our conversations, from the time I met him, were preponderantly about what we had eaten, or were about to eat—a topic varied by what we had drunk or were about to drink with it.”
It is a fallacy, and one perpetuated by many of their successors, that eating a lot is sufficient education for a profound knowledge of food. Liebling got a great deal of his food facts from Root and it has remained a mystery where Root got his information. They were both occasionally wrong, though certainly less frequently than Alexandre Dumas. What distinguished Liebling and Root is their prose style. Very different, they were both wonderful writers, the kind of writers who seduce their readers after two sentences. Liebling began a piece:
Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasure; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.
Root began an entry on dandelion, “Whoever first called the dandelion ‘a tramp with a golden head’ captured nicely the humble rustic nature of this eminently edible plant, which probably accounts for the fact that very little attention is paid to it in literature.” At the end of his life Root gave up news for food writing, contributing a regular column to the International Herald Tribune, where I was a young journeyman journalist.
With interesting prose now largely omitted from cookbooks because of Fannie Farmer’s almost universal influence, the mid–twentieth century, the time of Root and Liebling, became a golden age of food writing in English. The British were producing von Rumohrs—such writers as Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, who were writing encyclopedic volumes aimed at preserving the fast-fading traditions of British food—while the Americans were turning out Grimods and Brillat-Savarins. At the same time, Europeans came to America and brought European sensibilities to the craft. Joseph Wechsberg, an Austrian writer; Ludwig Bemelmans, the Austrian writer and illustrator best known for his children’s books about Madeline; Angelo Pellegrini, an Italian who mastered English so beautifully he was renowned for his Shakespeare lectures at the University of Washington—these writers, like Brillat-Savarin and von Rumohr, were literary people who sometimes wrote about food.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, M.F.K. Fisher, born in 1908, was the American-born master of this genre of literary food musings. Her food writing, in the tradition of Brillat-Savarin, is seldom entirely about food. Fisher wrote about cultures, people she met, people she loved. She wrote a great deal about herself. She was a writer. But whatever she wrote about, food was always in some way a part of it. Her 1949 translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste was instrumental in securing his place, perhaps an overly exalted one, in America. Fisher conveyed a love of food, among other physical and emotional pleasures. Though sometimes surrounded by snobs, she always rejected food snobbery. While she spent years in France and frequently wrote about it, she never participated in the American food writing of the time, which insisted that everything French was orgasmic and everything American a disgrace.
In 1954 Clifton Fadiman wrote, in an introduction to Fisher’s compendium The Art of Eating, “We Americans, however, do not as a rule take gladly to the literature of gastronomy. Perhaps a native puritanism is at fault. Though things are on the mend, we still plump ice cream into carbonic acid gas, rank steak and potatoes just below the Constitution, and contrive the cafeteria.” Fisher always opposed such a mentality. “All around are signs of it,” she wrote. “Everywhere, little trickles of snobbish judgment, always changing, ever present.” I think she would have agreed that plumping ice cream into carbonic acid gas is a creative American idea. In point of fact, the egg creams of Avenue A in New York and the root beer float, still done particularly well off Harvard Square in Cambridge, are among the high points of American gastronomic inventiveness. And Americans are less embarrassed about steak and potatoes since the world has grown smaller and we have discovered that the French rank steak-frites slightly higher than the Declaration of the droit de l’homme.
When contemplating food, Fisher found sex more interesting than snobbery, as in her discussion of the cooking of single men: “Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman. Few of them at any age will consciously ponder on the aphrodisiac qualities of the dishes they serve forth, but subconsciously they use what tricks they have to make their little banquets, whether intimate or merely convivial, lead as subtly as possible to the hoped-for bedding down.”
The enduring popularity of food books shows that we do take gladly to the literature of gastronomy, as do readers everywhere else in the world. There is simply no better way for a writer to approach the fundamental subjects of the human condition than to talk about the food we choose to ingest.
—M.K.
CHAPTER ONE
Gourmets and Gourmands
MARK KURLANSKY ON GOURMETS
No one ever knows when he is well-off. Whenever I was called a gourmet, I suspected I was being accused of something at least slightly unpleasant. But that was before I heard the term “foodie.” I am still not sure that a gourmet is a good thing to be, but it must be better than a foodie.
Although I cannot say exactly what a gourmet is, like Justice Stewart said of pornography, I know it when I see it, and I am slipping into contemplation of the meaning of the word “gourmet” because I am clearly in the company of a couple of them. The two gourmets who have invited me to lunch in a rural Basque restaurant in the green mountains of Vizcaya province are a small, red-faced, and energetic author of a popular Spanish food guide and an enormously round and well-fed man of unclear profession whose business card labels him as “gastronomic adviser.”
The enthusiastic author rates all his food from one to ten. He wants all of us to do the same. He gives the lomo, the thinly sliced burgundy-colored prime cut of cured pork, only an eight. The gastronomic adviser had ventured a nine, and so they turned to me, the indecisive Hamlet of the group, who requested clearer definitions of both eight and nine.
A gourmet, according to Webster’s dictionary, is “a judge of choice foods.” It comes from an old French word for a wine-tasting serva
nt and is generally confused with the word “gourmand”—an old French word meaning glutton. From this it appears that medieval Frenchmen knew the difference between a judge—someone guided by intellect—and a glutton—someone guided by appetite. But contemporary Americans are somehow getting the two notions confused. In French, by the way, the two words are still distinct. When I wrote for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, the French accountant who processed my expenses used to delight in pointedly calling me “Monsieur Gourmand.”
Is it a lingering Puritanism that causes Americans to suspect the analysis of a physical pleasure? In 1901, Picasso depicted in blue paint a little girl reaching up to a table to scrape a bowl. It is usually labeled by its French title, le gourmet. But at a recent show in New York it was translated into English as The Greedy Child. Is a gourmet greedy? In truth, most people who are labeled gourmets, like my two lunch companions, go beyond the act of judging and analyzing. They are arriving at their judgments by eating a lot of food. Is the discussion an excuse for the real act, which is eating? Picasso’s little girl did eat all the contents of the bowl.
My gourmets are discussing the lobster. The red-faced author has given it a ten and is trying to get me to concede that these tough little clawed creatures shipped from northern Europe are far better than the lobster that come from what he does not realize is my native New England, which in fact they are not.
Plato would not have thought much of these two. He mistrusted any interest in the preparation or presentation of food. In The Republic he states that the enjoyment of food is not a true pleasure because the purpose of eating is to relieve pain—hunger. To turn it into more than that through culinary skills, to him, was the use of artifice to disguise the true nature of food and eating. In Gorgias he states that cooking “is a form of flattery … a mischievous, deceitful, mean and ignoble activity, which cheats us by shapes and colors, by smoothing and draping.…” Was Plato right that gourmetism is morally and intellectually suspect or was he simply one of those unfortunates with a rubber palate incapable of appreciating food’s pleasures? Or both?
Gourmet is a word with dangerous boundaries. In itself it may be a worthwhile pursuit. Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture. Shouldn’t someone be examining it? But the discipline risks perilous proximity to both physical and intellectual overindulgence. In his 1996 novel The Debt to Pleasure, John Lancaster toys with our suspicion of gourmets. The narrator of the book is a man who, as the character himself puts it, is engaged in “the application of intelligence to pleasure.” While telling the story of his life he rambles on about soups, stocks, and curry. Discussion of the perfect vinaigrette leads to analysis of the perfect seven-to-one martini. The perfect everything must be espoused, declared, and examined. By instinct, the reader does not like this rambling dilettante full of unsolicited opinions. The beauty of this novel is that the writer makes the readers doubt themselves. At first we struggle to like him and the book, but we find him pompous, then unbearable. Just as we are growing angry with this book and its smug narrator, we start to realize that he is obsessive. The fault is not with the book nor with the reader. There truly is something “not right” about this man. His gourmetism is not about a universal pleasure, the common human experience of eating, but about setting himself apart, eating special foods, having special pleasures, being answerable only to special laws. Finally we realize that we were right to have suspected this gourmet, that he truly is deranged, in fact, a dangerous psychopath.
My tablemates don’t like the monkfish, and only give it a five.
What should a gourmet look like? I’m afraid most Chinese would not accept my friend the fat gastronomic adviser as a gourmet. A true gourmet—a judge—has the wisdom to know when to stop eating. From Confucius to Mao, most Chinese philosophy has contended that excess is unnatural, wasteful, and alien to proper dining. Chinese food writing emphasizes the healthiness of gourmets and their choices. Otherwise gourmetism is suspect. The contemporary Chinese writer Lu Wenfu in his novella “The Gourmet” writes: “The word gourmet is pleasing to the ear, perhaps also to the eye. If you explain it in simple everyday language, however, its not so appealing. A gourmet is a person who is totally devoted to eating.”
Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, an early-nineteenth-century gourmet, known in his language as a feinschmecker, literally a fine taster, not only separated gourmands and gourmets but perhaps shed some light on Plato when he wrote in 1822, “Dull witted brooding people love to stuff themselves with quantities of heavy food, just like animals for fattening. Bubbly intellectual people love foods which stimulate the taste buds without overloading the belly. Profound, meditative people prefer neutral foods which do not have an assertive flavor and are not difficult to digest, and therefore do not demand too much attention.”
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French lawyer, politician, and self-declared gourmet, also insisted that a true gourmet was health conscious. It is interesting to note that in France, gourmets, like intellectuals, are often self-declared. Curiously Brillat-Savarin rejected any distinction between the words “gourmet” and “gourmand,” consistently calling the epicurean judges of food gourmands but denying that it had anything to do with gluttony. He did not have the American awkwardness about celebrating physical pleasure.
But plump men were of little appeal to Brillat-Savarin and so he denounced overeating by men while stating that women gourmets “are plump, chubby, pretty rather than beautiful, with a slight tendency to fullness of figure.” In another work he wrote, “Gourmandism is far from unbecoming to women,” and so we have a good idea of how Brillat-Savarin liked his gourmets.
Having finished and rated a light fruity young Basque Rioja, my well-fed, arithmetical lunch-mates opened a big imposing garnet-colored Rioja just as a thick, rare, salted, and grilled steak, a chuleta, is brought to our table. After giving it a ten, the food guide author placed the bone on my plate. “Take that,” he says. “It’s the best part, but you have to pick it up with your hands and gnaw on it.” And he was right. A gourmet knows that the best part is not always the expensive part, and he will find that part, and then he will share it. A gourmet should want to share. Brillat-Savarin insisted on gourmets sharing.
I took the bone in my hands.
Judging foods without regard to price is a rich man’s game, and yet poor people can be gourmets able to discern a good potato from a bad one. As though to underscore this point, the steak was followed by an oxtail stew, and this black-sauced peasant dish met with the double-digit rating as well. But not everyone could afford to be so tested. Only the rich can follow a thick, aged, choice steak with a stew from the tail. And so I sometimes wonder if it does not behoove those who have that luxury to talk less about it. It comes back to Plato’s point. Fundamentally, gourmetism, unlike judging the fine points of art or music, is focused on a biological need designed to ease the pain of hunger, and lifting it above this level implies overlooking the sad fact that some people do not have the means to assuage that pain.
Dessert arrives, a white mousse with a berry sauce, and my two friends are engaged in lively discourse over whether it contains queso de filadelfia, which further descends into competing eulogies in praise of cream cheese.
I wonder: Are people who spend all their time meticulously dissecting a physical pleasure far from needing a twelve-step program? In 1997 the American Academy of Neurology announced the discovery of something called gourmet syndrome: “a new eating disorder in which some patients with right anterior brain lesions suddenly become compulsively addicted to thinking about and eating fine foods.” In this study of 723 patients with brain lesions, 36 were observed becoming gourmets, and of those, 34 were found to have lesions in the right anterior part of the brain. A businessman who preferred a good tennis match to dinner suffered a brain hemorrhage and afterward “couldn’t stop talking or writing about food.” One patient had been a political journalist until a brain hemorrh
age led him to become a food writer. Maybe I should go to a doctor now for my scan.
Things are getting worse at the table. Over brandy and Cuban cigars they have turned from the cream cheese debate to the rating of Cuban versus Brazilian woman. I notice by the physical descriptions offered to bolster their arguments that they both like their women pretty much the way Brillat-Savarin did. That must be what gourmets like. Or is it gourmands?
—based on an article from Food & Wine magazine, October 1999
BEN SIRA AGAINST GLUTTONY
In the second century B.C., according to legend, Simeon Ben Sira was born already speaking and with his teeth fully formed. After reaching a more acceptable age he began writing a series of maxims and proverbs.
—M.K.
If you are sitting at a grand table, do not lick your lips and exclaim, “What a spread!”
Remember, it is a vice to have a greedy eye.
There is no greater evil in creation than the eye; that is why it must shed tears at every turn.
Do not reach for everything you see, or jostle your fellow-guest at the dish; judge his feeling by your own and always behave considerately.
Eat what is set before you like a gentleman; do not munch and make yourself objectionable.
Be the first to stop for good manners’ sake and do not be insatiable, or you will give offense.
If you are dining in a large company, do not reach out your hand before others.
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