Culinary Quests

In conjunction with The New Yorker’s launch of its new Food & Travel Issue this week, the magazine’s online Archive spotlights eight classic New Yorker “culinary journey” pieces: Susan Orlean’s "The Homesick Restaurant" (January 15, 1996); Calvin Trillin’s "Where's Chang?" (March 1, 2010); Adam Gopnik’s "Sweet Revolution" (January 3, 2011); Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen" (April 9, 2010); Bill Buford’s "Extreme Chocolate" (October 29, 2007); Kelefa Sanneh’s "Sacred Grounds" (November 21, 2011); Jane Kramer’s "Spice Routes" (September 3, 2007); and Dana Goodyear’s "The Missionary" (January 30, 2012).

I relish “culinary journey” writing, particularly a subcategory I call “culinary quests,” in which the writer searches for, say, the perfect pumpernickel bagel (Calvin Trillin’s "The Magic Bagel," March 20, 2000), or a golden-brown Baumkuchen baked the traditional way (Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake," November 23, 2009). My favorite New Yorker “culinary quest” piece is Molly O’Neill’s wonderful "Home For Dinner" (July 23, 2001), a “Letter From Cambodia,” in which O’Neill superbly describes Le Cirque chef Sottha Khunn’s return to his hometown, Siem Reap, to learn how to make the one quintessential Cambodian dish – “sea bass steamed over a broth of lemongrass and galangal (a gingerlike root), thickened with butter and enlivened with chopped tomatoes, chives, and basil” – that has always frustrated him (“He worked and reworked the dish, and it earned him critical praise, but he felt that some minute calibration between sweet and sour continued to elude him. ‘Not yet the perfect balance, the sensation that lets the customer taste the world as I taste it,’ he said”).

“Home For Dinner” ’s tagline (“A leading chef tries to reconcile himself to the past with one perfect meal”) neatly captures the story’s essence. If you enjoy culinary quests, as I do, you’ll likely devour Molly O’Neill’s great “Home For Dinner.”

Credit: The above photo by Hans Gissinger is from Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake" (The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).

March 21, 2016 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. Among its many pleasures – Maira Kalman’s color-drenched cover (“Spring Forward”), Laura Parker’s delightful Talk story "Bee's Knees" (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water”), Lizzie Widdicombe’s superb "Barbie Boy" (“At ground level, herds of strange footwear scurried around: silver Adidas sneakers with wings sprouting from the ankles, fuzzy ones with tails and tiger stripes, high-tops with green Teddy bears for tongues”), four excellent reviews (Peter Schjeldahl’s "Laughter and Anger," Dan Chiasson’s "The Tenderness Trap," Jill Lepore’s "After the Fact," and “James Wood’s "Floating Island") – the most piquant, for me, is Judith Thurman’s brilliant "The Empire's New Clothes," a profile of China’s first homegrown master couturier, Guo Pei. Thurman’s lines are as textured as the clothes she describes:

Guo’s Paris début proved to be more of a dessert course than an entrée. There were dresses for a thé dansant, dainty and frosted, in a macaron palette. Sabrina might have worn them. A chiffon poet’s blouse with embroidered cuffs was paired with the only trousers on the runway. Tabards were a theme, gorgeously bejewelled, but they seemed extraneous to the clothes they decorated, and one of them looked like a lobster bib. The first number that Guo sent out, however, announced what she can do when she pulls out all the stops. It was a strapless gown of distressed guipure—with scorched edges, stiffened and gilded—that looked like a giant sea sponge. Salt crystals glistened in its pores. It had the idiosyncratic “hand” of a great artisan.

Normally, I’m allergic to displays of wealth. But Guo’s gown of distressed guipure is something else. A ravishing Pari Dukovic photo of it illustrates Thurman’s piece. I’m glad to have seen it. 

March 14, 2016 Issue

Anthony Lane’s comment on Terrance Malick’s Knight of Cups, in this week’s issue – “It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball” – made me smile. It pretty much sums up where criticism is today regarding Malick’s vacuous follies. Lane writes,

The aesthetic compulsion is so pressing, in “Knight of Cups,” that someone can approach a person, possibly homeless, who is sleeping on a stone bench, and lay down not a dollar bill or a sandwich but a flower. Malick’s pursuit of the beautiful was already devout in “Days of Heaven,” in 1978, and in recent decades it has grown more flagrant still. In “The Thin Red Line” (1998) and “The New World” (2005), it was touched with environmental anxiety, as the pristine glories of the world were menaced by war and by colonial invasion. Since then, in “The Tree of Life” (2011) and “To the Wonder” (2012), the impulse to seek out grace and loveliness—in weather, in women, and in rhapsodic flashes of the past—has all but blunted the dramatic urge.

I’d go further. Malick’s pursuit of the beautiful has all but blunted his sense of reality. David Denby, in his review of To the Wonder, said that Malick’s work has fallen into “a kind of gorgeous emptiness.” He said,

A Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the trivial narcissism of Caribbean-travel ads on TV. The sun sinks in flames on the horizon, tides ripple, oceans batter rocks, but this time the natural splendors return to an inane, undeveloped situation. Passages of music by Berlioz, Wagner, and Henryk Górecki lend an aura of solemnity to scenes as insubstantial as the wind.

Insubstantial as the wind. That’s mild compared to what Pauline Kael said about Malick’s Badlands: “The film is a succession of art touches. Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974). Forty-two years on, Malick is till making those art things. Nevertheless, I might go see Knight of Cups. I’m curious about those underwater dog shots.

Postscript: It should be noted that The New Yorker's Richard Brody has consistently championed Malick’s work. He says of Tree of Life, “Malick daringly tries to capture not just memories but the feelings aroused by the act of memory—indeed, to represent subjectivity itself, by way of the cinema” (" 'The Tree of Life': Roots and Shoots"). In "The Cinematic Miracle of 'To the Wonder,' " he writes, “There is perhaps no film in the history of cinema that reveals such attention to light, which seems to suffuse the space of every frame and to imbue the characters with its moral and spiritual element.” And in his "Terance Malick's 'Knight of Cups' Challenges Hollywood to Do Better," he calls Knight of Cups “one of the great recent bursts of cinematic artistry, a carnival of images and sounds that have a sensual beauty, of light and movement, of gesture and inflection, rarely matched in any movie that isn’t Malick’s own.” This is eloquent praise. But I’m not persuaded. Malick is way too cosmic for my taste.

March 7, 2016 Issue

Reviewing A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism, in this week’s issue, Nathan Heller sets the tone by quoting from George Orwell’s bleak “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”: “In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it.” This crushed figure in a dressing gown is Orwell’s image of the book-reviewer. Heller calls him “Orwell’s hack.” Heller’s next move is to quote Gore Vidal: “I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States.” Heller doesn’t take issue with Orwell’s seedy portrayal of the book reviewer. He doesn’t question the validity of Vidal’s observation. It seems that the inference he wants us to make is that book reviewing is a low business and that all book reviewers are hacks. A bit later in his piece, Heller says, “Reviewers write with skill, but so do lots of tax-accountant bloggers.” Then he quotes from Scott’s book (“Will it sound defensive or pretentious if I say that criticism is an art in its own right?”) and says,

It does sound a little defensive, though one understands the impulse. When Duke Ellington composed “The Queen’s Suite,” he was working from the blank page; he brought a previously unimagined musical offering into the world. Orwell’s hack, by contrast, produces his review by standing shakily on other works.

I enjoy reading criticism more than any other form of writing. My heroes are Pauline Kael, John Updike, Helen Vendler, Janet Malcolm, and Whitney Balliett – all of whom wrote stylish, subtle, perceptive, writerly criticism for The New Yorker in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Vidal said he couldn’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I just named five. And the tradition of superb writerly New Yorker criticism continues today – James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, Dan Chiasson, Judith Thurman, Anthony Lane, Alex Ross, Joan Acocella, Richard Brody, Andrea K. Scott. They speak to art in its own language.  

Heller, in his disappointing piece, asks “What’s the point of a reviewer in an age when everyone reviews?” Substitute James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, or any of the other New Yorker critics I’ve mentioned, for Heller’s generic “reviewer,” and the cogency of his question vanishes.

The problem with Heller’s perspective is that he disregards inspired writing as a key ingredient of great criticism. In his cynical view, it seems, all critics are hacks.

"New Yorker" Connections

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

Recently, Lorna, our daughter, Isabel, our thirteen-month-old grandson, Rowan, and I spent a few days in New York City. Many of the places we visited reminded me of New Yorker pieces: the High Line (Peter Schjeldahl’s "High Line Rhapsody"); the Whitney Museum (Schjeldahl’s "New York Odyssey"); Canal Street (“Ian Frazier’s "Canal Street"); Bryant Park (John Updike’s "Comment"; retitled "Bryant Park" in his 1965 collection Assorted Prose); the 9/11 Memorial (Adam Gopnik’s "Stones and Bones"). But it was a bike rental shop called Blazing Saddles, on South Street, in the Financial District, that produced the most satisfying connection. Lorna found it online. We decided to walk there. As we made our way down Fulton Street, I knew we were in Joseph Mitchell territory. I was looking at the street, trying to imagine what it might’ve been like in the Fifties, when Mitchell was there, poking around the Fulton Fish Market, eating at Sloppy Louie’s, talking with the owner, Louis Merino, the subject of his wonderful “Up in the Old Hotel” (originally titled "The Cave," The New Yorker, June 28, 1952). We found Blazing Saddles, rented a couple of bikes and a bike buggy, and spent a beautiful March afternoon cycling a path that took us across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, then over the Brooklyn Bridge, and back to Blazing Saddles. Two days later, I’m back home on Prince Edward Island, reflecting on the trip. Just for fun, to savour the Fulton Fish Market details, I get out my copy of Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, and read the first page of the title piece. The second paragraph begins, “Sloppy Louie’s occupies the ground floor of an old building at 92 South Street, diagonally across the street from the sheds.” I check the Blazing Saddles receipt. It states the shop’s address – 93 South Street. Without realizing it, I’d come within a few feet of the location of one of The New Yorker’s greatest pieces.

February 29, 2016 Issue

Jeffrey Toobin’s Talk piece, "Looking Back," in this week’s issue, perfectly expresses my view of Antonin Scalia:

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.

I’ve read several comments on Scalia’s death, e.g., Lawrence H. Tribe’s "The Scalia Myth" (NYR Daily, February 27, 2016), David Cole’s "Scalia: The Constitution in Politics" (NYR Daily, February 15, 2016), Dahlia Lithwick’s "Why Liberals Loved to Hate Antonin Scalia" (Slate, February 14, 2016). Toobin’s piece strikes me as the only one that's adequately damning.   

Postscript: One of the best sentences in this week’s issue is Peter Schjeldahl’s “Take Rat and Bear, their costumed roles as fame-hungry artists turned murder detectives in the very funny Super-8 film 'The Least Resistance' (1980-81), which they made in L.A. on a budget not far north of nothing, despite a triumphant finale involving a helicopter” ("Light Heavyweights") – where “best” means surprising, delightful, specific, textured, variegated, surreal. 

Gone to New York

Tomorrow, I travel to Manhattan for a week’s visit. I’m taking the February 29^th New Yorker with me. (The New Yorker is a wonderful travel companion.) I’ll post my review of it as soon as I return (March 11).

Credit: The above artwork is Jennifer Bartlett’s Hospital (2012), a view of the East River, Queensboro Bridge, and F.D.R. Drive.