September 19, 2016, Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (“Along the way, the film offers verse by Christina Rossetti; a record of Caruso; Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony; souped-up cars, and a man crushed under one; a woman on a meat hook; a whiff of narcotics; a primordial answering machine; bloody street fights; and nuclear catastrophe”), Becky Cooper’s “Lunch à la Mode” (“The real star, though, is the hot sauce. It’s the marigold color of a Buddhist monk’s cloak, with a complex bitter heat, and it should be spooned onto everything”), Colin Stokes’s “Bar Tab: King Tai” [“The #5 (Barr Hill gin, Cocchi Americano, Dimmi, grapefruit bitters) is a caustic confusion, but the #1 (Yaguara Cachaça Branca, apricot, Licor 43, grated nutmeg) was described by a drinker as ‘lovely stuff’ ”], Rebecca Mead’s “Costume Drama” (“The seductiveness of Michele’s vision was signalled by a barely subdued clamor among the guests over the emerald seat cushions, which were to be taken home as gifts”), Nick Paumgarten’s “Wild Man” (“Guilt and high principle mutate into marketing: this was the Patagonia feedback loop, on high screech”) – the most sheerly enjoyable, for me, is Ian Frazier’s “Patina,” an inspired reflection on the irreproducible color of the Statute of Liberty’s patina (“that elusive, flickering, familiar, sea-polished shade of copper-green”). There’s poetry in “Patina” (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”) and lots of fascinating Statue of Liberty facts (e.g., The Statue’s copper is “only three-thirty-seconds of an inch thick and unusually pure”). “Patina” is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Postscript: Another pleasurable piece in this week’s New Yorker is Jane Kramer’s “Eat, Memory,” a review of Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Kramer writes delicious long lines. For example:

Reading Paul Freedman about America, stalking myself through the taste of meals at eight of his ten restaurants, each sampled for different reasons at different moments in my life, I began to draw the outlines of a world I shared with other people, people more or less like me, and to wonder what “like me” meant when it came to expectations of inclusion, of common flash points of reference, of understanding and participating in the coded language of what we eat and how it is prepared and who is sitting at all those tables around us.

I relished Kramer’s recollections about eating in Le Pavillon, Antoine’s, Sylvia’s, Shrafft’s, the Grill Room, and Chez Panisse – all on Freedman’s list. But I wish she’d provided at least one extended quotation from Freedman’s book to help me decide whether I’d enjoy reading it. John Updike, in his “A Poetics of Book Reviewing” (included in his 2011 collection Higher Gossip), says, “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.”

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).

June 29, 2015 Issue

Italy is a wonderful place to bike. I was there a couple of weeks ago, cycling the Parco del Mincio and Parco del Ticino. I took the train to various cities (Trenitalia is an amazing system). One morning, at a packed café called Cuppi (est. 1934), on Via Matteotti, in Bologna, I watched the guy running the cappuccino-maker; he was like a virtuoso pianist, his hands flying over the machine, working the various knobs and handles. He produced the best cappuccino I’ve ever tasted. On another day, at a canteen overlooking the Mincio River, I drank a glass of iced, freshly squeezed pomegranate juice that was so damned good, I’ll never forget it. As I sat there savoring it, contemplating the beautiful Mincio, I suddenly realized I’d become an italophile. And so, when Jane Kramer’s "The Demolition Man," a profile of Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, appeared in this week’s issue, I devoured it. What a Tuscan feast of political detail! Renzi’s clothes (his work uniform consists of “jeans and a rumpled white shirt, open at the neck”), how he came to power (he struck a deal with Silvio Berlusconi; “In the matter of craftiness he was miles ahead of the man whom no politician in Italy had ever managed to outfox before”); his previous occupation (he was an “immensely popular” mayor of Florence); how he selected his cabinet (“he opted for youth and women – the obvious appealing things”); his conversation (“He has what could be called a peripatetic mind and, like any good performer, he uses it to keep you on the edge of your seat, not asking inconvenient questions, and also, perhaps, to impress himself when he is about to confront an obstacle in his path”); his enemies (Beppe Grillo, leader of the Five Star Movement, on the populist left, and Matteo Salvini, leader of the new “national” Lega party, on the populist right, “both competing for the same anit-Europe, anti-immigrant votes”); on and on – Kramer includes it all in a superbly structured report that, interestingly, begins and ends with Angela Merkel. Kramer’s level of access to Renzi is impressive. She even visits him in his New York hotel suite (“ ‘They love their past, their present, but they need a vision and an explanation of their future – in the possibility of a future,’ Renzi told me that night, flopping onto a couch in the living room of his hotel suite”). My take-away from this immensely absorbing piece is that Italy is fortunate to have, in Matteo Renzi, a young, spirited, dynamic leader who is determined to make real change. It will be interesting to see how he fares. I hope he doesn’t get worn down the way another young, spirited, dynamic leader, Barack Obama, has been worn down by relentless conservative stonewalling.

Postscript: Another attractive aspect of Kramer’s piece is Riccardo Vecchio's gorgeous illustration - a delicately hued portrait of Renzi with a jumble of Florentine rooftops, including the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, in the background. Ravishing! 

Postscript #2: All four Talk stories in this week’s issue are beauties: Ian Frazier’s "Secuity"; Emma Allen’s "Landlord"; Dana Goodyear’s "Life With Father"; and Alec Wilkinson’s "Hands." Of the four, my favorite is Goodyear’s layered "Life With Father," about (1) the time in 1996 when Maya and China Forbes picked up their dad, Cameron, at McLean, the psychiatric hospital outside Boston, and took him to lunch; (2) Maya Forbes’s movie Infinitely Polar Bear (“The title comes from a phrase Cam once used to describe his condition on a McLean intake form”), which tells the story “of how Cam, recently recovered from a breakdown, took over the care of Maya and China, aged ten and eight, while Peggy [Maya and China’s mother], in order to support them, went to New York to get an M.B.A. and eventually, a job at the brokerage firm E. F. Hutton”; (3) China’s home life with her husband Wally (“Wally, who was wearing shorts and black socks with Birkenstocks, did a crossword puzzle”) and her three children, Clementine, Imogene, and Hackley. Goodyear has worked her text close to the compression of poetry.

November 4, 2013 Issue

This week’s issue – The Food Issue – brims with wonderful, sensual, tactile writing, e.g., “the cymbal clang of heat” that occurs when a flake of Trinidad Scorpion Butch T chili pepper hits the tongue (Lauren Collins, “Fire-Eaters”); Spanish gooseneck barnacles that look like “tiny dinosaur claws” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Toro”); air that is “warm and moist and pungent with the scent of soured milk, like the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day” (Rebecca Mead, “Just Add Sugar”); “the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-the-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bred smell that comes from the oven as it bakes” (Adam Gopnik, “Bread and Women”); “air of rosemary so delicate and light that it’s almost invisible; you know it’s there by the burst of flavor on your tongue” (Jane Kramer, “Post-Modena”); “a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful” that – “quiver on quiver on quiver – was almost impossible to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush” (Dana Goodyear, “Beastly Appetites”).

That “quiver on quiver on quiver” is inspired!

All five pieces are admirable for the subjective, experiential approach their authors take to their material. Collins, Mead, Gopnik, Goodyear, and Kramer not only observe; they participate. Here, for example, is Collins, sampling one of the “superhots” she describes, a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T (no less):

Taylor took a knife and whittled off a flake no larger than a clove. I put it in my mouth and chewed. The capsaicin hit loud and fast, a cymbal clang of heat. My face flushed. My eyes glassed over and I started pacing the kitchen, as though I could walk off the burn. It took twenty minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to banish the sensation of having sort of tinnitus of the mouth.

Of the five features, I think my favorite is Gopnik’s “Bread and Women.” It’s the most richly sensuous (e.g., a fresh-baked loaf of his wife’s bread is “braided like the blonde hair of a Swedish child”; broissants “crumble, with a spray of soft crumbs, under the lightest touch”; “real bagels, as produced in the Montreal bakeries, with a large hole, a bright sesame glow, and a sweet, firm bite”).

My least favorite is Goodyear’s “Beastly Appetite.” Reading about eating cod sperm, cut-in-half live lobster, horse tartare, scorpions on toast, yak sausage, and other “new things” is almost gag-inducing. I couldn’t read it fast enough and be done with it. Gross!

And – one more cavil - please, New Yorker, next year, return to using Wayne Thiebaud for The Food Issue cover. Ivan Brunetti’s liney, textureless, Pac-Man-like cartoon is an anemic substitute for Thiebaud’s gorgeous, creamy, thick-painted creations. (Googling Thiebaud’s name, I see he’s age 92; perhaps he’s no longer painting? But, as a replacement, Brunetti is so obviously not the answer. Only sensualists need apply. Maybe Maira Kalman? See the scrumptious bowl of tomato bisque soup in her The Principles of Uncertainty).

December 3, 2012 Issue

Mmm. The air is warm, “with a breakfasty smell.” I taste the “caramelized endive, smothered in bread crumbs, Parmesan, thyme, and cream, and roasted with a topping of serrano ham.” I lick “the platter itself, and even that has a complex nutty flavor, the flakes of crust melting in my mouth.” Where am I? I’m deep inside The Food Issue, experiencing the exquisite double bliss of its prose – double in the sense that there’s the deliciousness of its words and there’s also the deliciousness of the food it describes. Lauren Collins writes that a bite of Poilâne miche “reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings,” and my eyes eat the words. Of the many pleasures of this year’s Food Issue – the pungent details (e.g., the “half a roasted pig’s head, teeth in, glistening fiendishly on the counter,” in Dana Goodyear’s “Toques from Underground”), the surprising similes (e.g., “but this food touched me, it had a message of concern in it, of interest, like a letter” – Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Sameer and the Samosas”), the interesting concepts (e.g., “palate memory,” in Calvin Trillin’s “Land of the Seven Moles”) – the most piquant are the sensuous passages drenched in food enjoyment. For example:

In the early nineteen-sixties, while doing research for a German cookbook, I made several visits to the handsome gray and rainy port of Hamburg. Each time, I stopped at A. Michelsen, a shop famous for its elegant delicatessen. The lure was a sublime goose liverwurst, a creamy, gray-beige sausage with whole goose livers running through the middle, held in place by a pâté of goose meat and liver. At the center was a luscious slab of pure foie gras. Late each afternoon, I would buy a quarter of a pound of the thinly sliced wurst, a rye roll, and a half bottle of chilled Riesling, and then dash to my room in the gracious old Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, to indulge privately in front of an open window overlooking the Inner Alster lake. [Mimi Sheraton, “Missing Links”]

And:

Now Poilâne is bread’s most venerable brand, the Louis Vuitton of boulangers. It is, however, an affordable pleasure – an eighth of a miche, which yields ten or so slices, costs about five dollars. One week, I drizzled the first piece with some olive oil; dunked the second in a bowl of gumbo; spread a few more with pumpkin butter, spanning the holes like spider’s silk; and, on the sixth day, used the hardening remains as the base of a ribollita. Apollonia likes hers with soft-boiled eggs, “just smeared with a little bit of salted butter, and having the grease of the egg revealing all these flavors.” [Lauren Collins, “Bread Winner”]

And:

The smiliest dish I’d seen that week was shakshuka – a North African breakfast from “Plenty,” cooked and served in little cast-iron skillets. It wasn’t fancy: a couple of eggs poached in a spicy saffron-onion-tomato-and-bell-pepper sauce, flecked with fresh herbs and dappled with drops of yogurt. But it was irresistible. I could taste it before I raised my fork. [Jane Kramer, “The Philosopher Chef”]

Ah, yes - I could taste it before I raised my fork – spoken like a true sensualist. There is, in this great Food Issue, an enormous pleasure taken in description. I devour every word, lick the plate clean, and hunger for more. 

July 23, 2012 Issue

“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams wrote, introducing his long poem Paterson. I enjoy writing that follows this dictum. This week’s New Yorker brims with things, e.g., Charlie Watts’s “carefully cut gray suit, a violet shirt, and brown tasseled loafers” (Alec Wilkinson’s “Tag Team”), the “old bicycle sprouting bundles of bamboo fishing baskets” on display in a museum in Hanoi’s old market district (Jane Kramer’s “A Reporter at Odds”), the torturous Apollon’s Wheels barbell that caused Brian Shaw to “tweak” his left biceps at this year’s Arnold Strongman Classic (Burkhard Bilger’s “The Strongest Man in the World”), and the intimidating “field hockey stick, decorated with bright racing stripes” wielded by Brigadier Mahana Bashir, commander of an S.P.L.A. training camp in the Nuba Mountains (Jon Lee Anderson’s “A History of Violence”). My favorite “thing” in this week’s issue is the unbroken white clay pipe with the “irregular tooth marks” at the base of the stem that the conceptual landscape artist Matthew Jensen found “half buried near a park trail in Riverdale.” It’s mentioned in Ian Frazier’s dandy little Talk story about Jensen (“Lost and Found”). Looking at those tooth marks sparks Frazier’s imagination, inspiring him to write this wonderful line: “Suddenly, the face of the snaggletoothed smoker seemed to materialize, the café faded out, and a landscape of old New York sprang up magically all around.” 

November 21, 2011 Issue

Mmm, my favorite themed New Yorker, The Food Issue, is here. I love the Wayne Thiebaud “Turkey Dinner” cover. Thiebaud lays on the paint in such delicious thick strokes that I almost want to eat it. John Seabrook’s piece about the SweeTango apple (“Crunch”) is excellent. I particularly liked its last paragraph:

I bought as many SweeTangos as I could carry, walked out onto Broadway, and stood on the sidewalk with an apple in my hand, my fingers not quite encircling its girth, feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm. I stared at the skin, and the lenticels gazed indifferently back at me, as I contemplated man’s long and sometimes discordant relationship with this fruit. Then I set my teeth on its skin, and crunched.

That “feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm” is inspired!

Lauren Collins’s “The King’s Meal” brims with inspired lines (e.g., “‘The only way you can eat like a king is to eat like a king,’ Meltonville had said, liberating a gleaming ladle , part of Hampton Court’s collection, from its bubble-wrap cocoon”).

I smiled and chuckled my way through Calvin Trillin’s wonderful “My Repertoire.” At one point, I read a passage out loud to my daughter, and we both laughed. Here’s the passage:

One of my sons-in-law was not crazy about my salmon hash – I won’t say which one; that sort of thing will come out in good time at the reading of the will – but just about everybody else seemed to like it.

I like the boots that René Redzepi is wearing in the vivid photo by Alfredo Cáliz that illustrates Jane Kramer’s superb “The Food At Our Feet.” When I say “superb,” I’m referring to the second half of the piece. The first part, concerning Kramer’s preparation for her foraging excursion with Redzepi, didn’t grab me. It contains too much information about her “distinguished” friends and their bourgeois surroundings. But at the point where Kramer writes, “I met Redzepi at Noma early the following afternoon,” her piece really takes off. I savored Kramer’s beautiful long lines. For example:

But, at the moment, the food he cherishes is cabbage – from the big, pale cabbages that he slices and steams, at home, in a knob of butter and a half inch of his wife’s leftover tea, to the tiny, vividly green-leaved wild cabbages that sit in pots, basking in ultraviolet light, on a steel counter in the middle of one of Noma’s upstairs kitchens, waiting for the day they’re ready to be wrapped with their stems around a sliver of pike perch and served to customers on a beautiful stoneware plate, between a green verbena sauce and a butter-and-fish-bone foam.

Kelefa Sanneh's "Sacred Grounds" is factually interesting. But in terms of style, it suffers from the same weakness that afflicts all his pieces - an impersonal, almost godlike objectivity that leaves me cold. I much prefer the subjective approach in which the writer establishes his or her presence in the material.

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.