November 22, 2010 Issue

Of the various thematic issues that the magazine publishes each year – The Money Issue, The Travel Issue, The Fashion Issue, The Technology Issue, etc. – my favorite is The Food Issue. Why? I think it has a lot to do with my love of description – sensual description, description of process, description of place – that is often abundantly present (sometimes in heady combination) in food writing. Here are just a few examples – all from previous issues of The Food Issue – of what I’m talking about:

There were hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood’s spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made (Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Beer," The New Yorker, November 24, 2008).

Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree. We drove into a mountainous region above the town of Piertraunga, a land of thick woods with small farms in the valleys. Stone houses where the landowners had once lived, many of them now abandoned, sit on the tops of hills. The old orchards are gone, but the landscape is dotted with a few rugged arboreal survivors: almonds, olives, and pears (John Seabrook, “Renaissance Pears," The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

With its rustic, nicely browned crust and the crunchy protruding brambles that developed as the dripping baked on, the cut sekacz revealed a buff-gold cake that had seductively dense sweet-smoky and slightly ripe overtones (Mimi Sheraton, “Spit Cake,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).

When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Faberge Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle. He was proud of this little move. It saved him about a second versus having to grab an egg from the bin. If he cracked six thousand eggs a week, the move saved him about an hour; in a year, it saved him more than a week (Burkhard Bilger, “The Egg Men,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I provide these examples to give some idea of what I look for, what I appreciate, when I read food writing. I regret to say that I found the servings of it rather meager in this week’s The Food Issue. I confess I merely skimmed Burkhard Bilger’s revolting “Nature’s Spoils.” It appears Bilger has reverted to his pre-New Yorker "Noodling For Flatheads" grossness. I found the introductory paragraphs of “Lauren Collins’s “Burger Queen” unpalatable. Am I the only country hick who doesn’t know who Jay-Z is? Should I be interested in a “gastropub” where the Jay-Zs of this world get special privileges and the great unwashed rest of us have to line up? The Spotted Pig’s elitism turned me off, and I quit reading about it. Later, I reluctantly went back and finished the piece. There are one or two felicitous sentences in it (e.g., “When Bloomfield peels a carrot, she holds it out in the palm of her hand, like sheet music”), but none of the succulent detail about food, kitchen reality, or geographic place that I crave. The New Orleans roadhouse in Calvin Trillin’s “No Daily Specials” is more my speed. But Trillin’s piece lacks zest, seems bland. I would’ve appreciated less information about who sat with him at his table, and more about what Mosca’s Chicken a la Grande actually tastes like. As for Jane Kramer’s “Down Under” – there isn’t an inspired sentence in the whole thing, unless you get your thrills from lines like “Late last spring, I asked Nach Waxman to give me a capsule history of root vegetables.” Laura Shapiro’s “The First Kitchen” is straight history written entirely in the third person, and my eyes could not skim-read it (and be done with it) fast enough.

That leaves Chang-Rae Lee’s memoir “Magical Dinners.” I’m pleased to report that it’s a wonderful piece of writing. Lee’s details – which include the parquet wood flooring in his family’s New Rochelle apartment (“its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts”), the light-gray leatherette (“stippled like the back of a lizard”) that covers the seats of their Beetle, the result of prying open the roof of a Hot Wheels car with a hammer (“the enamel paint flaking off from the twisting force and gilding my fingertips”), gu jeol pan (“a nine-compartment tray of savory fillings from which delicate little crêpes are made”) – beautifully accrue; his food descriptions are delectable:

… but always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It’ll corrupt you for all time.

“Magical Dinners” is delightful! It has whetted my appetite for more of Chang-Rae Lee’s factual writing. Until now, I’d associated him only with fiction. I hope he continues in the nonfiction vein. He appears to have a knack for it.