September 6, 2021 Issue

Wow! Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. Six great pieces on food and drink, picked from the magazine’s vast archive: M. F. K. Fisher’s “Once a Tramp, Always …” (September 7, 1968); Anthony Bourdain’s “Hell's Kitchen” (April 17, 2000); Calvin Trillin’s “Breaux Bridge, Louisiana” (May 20, 1972); Dana Goodyear’s “Grub” (August 15 & 22, 2011); Susan Orlean’s “The Homesick Restaurant” (January 15, 1996); and Kelefa Sanneh’s “Spirit Guide” (February 11 & 18, 2013). 

Here’s a choice sample from each:

My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. [“Once a Tramp, Always …”]

“Where’s that fucking confit?” I yell at Angel, who’s struggling to make blinis for smoked salmon, to brown ravioli under the salamander, to lay out plates of pâté, and to do five endive salads, all more or less at once. A hot escargot explodes in front of me, spattering me with boiling garlic butter and snail guts. [“Hell’s Kitchen”]

Crawfish étouffée means smothered crawfish, and is otherwise indescribable; crawfish bisque is indescribable. [“Breaux Bridge, Louisiana”]

“This is an amuse from the chef,” a waiter said, presenting me with the dish, a composition as spare and earthy as a Japanese garden. “It’s smuggled-in ant eggs.” I rolled the leaf around the tortilla and bit: peppery nasturtium, warm, sweet tortilla, and then the light pop of escamoles bursting like tiny corn kernels. A whiff of dirt, a sluice of beer, and that was it. They were gone by night’s end. [“Grub”]

Until then, there might have been no other place in the world so layered with different people’s pinings—no other place where you could have had a Basque dinner in a restaurant from Havana in a Cuban neighborhood of a city in Florida in a dining room decorated with yodelling hikers and little deer. [“The Homesick Restaurant”]

As the guests sipped, he supplied some real-time tasting notes. “It’s a little bit spicy,” he said. “If you add a little bit of water, then you get the apricot, the peach, the pear—maybe a little bit of gooseberry.” There was some stammering from the translator as she tried to summon the Japanese word for “gooseberry.” [“Spirit Guide”]

Of the six, my favourite is Bourdain’s “Hell’s Kitchen.” I love its intense first-person-present-tense action. For example:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen. 

Old Favorites

Lately I find myself spending more time re-visiting favorite old books than I do reading new stuff. By “old,” I mean books I acquired back in the seventies and early eighties. For example: Edward Hoagland’s Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), Whitney Balliett’s Ecstasy at the Onion (1971), Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon (1980), Sanford Schwartz’s The Art Presence (1982), John McPhee’s Pieces of the Frame (1975), M. F. K. Fisher’s As They Were (1982), Helen Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), John Updike's Picked-Up Pieces (1976). I love these books. I love everything about them – their dust jackets, their feel as physical objects, the wonderful writing they contain. If there were a fire, these are the books I’d try to save first.

M. F. K. Fisher's "Two Kitchens in Provence"

Illustration from M. F. K. Fisher's "Once a Tramp, Always ..."

This week I’ve been enjoying “Sunday Reading: Culinary Journeys,” a collection of food pieces from the newyorker.com archive. It includes a wonderful essay by M. F. K. Fisher titled “Once a Tramp, Always …” (September 7, 1968), containing, among other delectable morsels, a description of Fisher eating caviar at the Café de la Paix:

I was perhaps twenty-three when I first ate almost enough caviar—not to mention any caviar at all that I can now remember. It was one of the best, brightest days of my whole life with my parents, and lunching in the quiet back room at the Café de la Paix was only a part of the luminous whole. My mother ate fresh foie gras, sternly forbidden to her liver, but she loved the cathedral at Strasbourg enough to risk almost any kind of attack, and this truffled slab was so plainly the best of her lifetime that we all agreed it could do her nothing but good, which it did. My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. We ate three portions apiece, tacitly knowing it could never happen again that anything would be quite so mysteriously perfect in both time and space. The headwaiter sensed all this, which is, of course, why he was world-known, and the portions got larger, and at our third blissful command he simply put the tin in its ice bowl upon our table. It was a regal gesture, like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword. We bowed, served ourselves exactly as he would have done, grain for grain, and had no need for any more. It was reward enough to sit in the almost empty room, chaste rococo in the slanting June sunlight, with the generous tub of pure delight between us, Mother purring there, the vodka seeping slyly through our veins, and real wood strawberries to come, to make us feel like children again and not near-gods. That was a fine introduction to what I hope is a reasonably long life of such occasional bliss.

My favorite Fisher piece is “Two Kitchens in Provence” (The New Yorker, August 27, 1966; included in her great 1982 collection As They Were). It's an account of her experience in two different Provençal kitchens. Here’s a taste:

The sink was faced with the same red tiles as the old stove and the floor – the rough glazed squares of red and pink and ochre clay that comes from the soil of Provence, the clay that makes the roofs there glow and burn even in the moonlight. They were cool in summer, warm and comforting in winter, and easy to clean, and altogether so pleasing that the prospect of ever having to walk about on another surface was painful to me.

And another: 

The Place Richelme et aux Herbes is small, and shaded by very tall and noble plane trees, which in summer sift down such green light as I have seldom seen. Perhaps some fortunate fish have known it, but for human beings it is rare to float at the bottom of the deeps and yet breathe with rapture the smells of all living things spead out to sell in the pure, filtered moving air.

And another:

The fruits and vegetables of Provence are dying as they grow – literally leaping from the ancient soil, so filled with natural richness and bacilli and fungi that they seem a kind of summing up of whatever they are. A tomato there, for instance, is the essence of all tomatoes, of tomato-ness, the way a fragment of a Greek frieze is not a horse but horse itself.

And this marvelous one-hundred-and-fifty-seven-word sentence:

With the mistral surging and leaning against the windows and the chestnut trees and the red poppies in the meadows, and the spiritual food a part of the whole, we would eat at breakfast canned grapefruit juice, large bowls of café au lait with brown sugar, slices of Dijon gingerbread with sweet butter and Alpine honey; at noontime whole new potatoes boiled in their jackets in a big pot of carrots-onions-sausgage, which we’d eat later, sweet butter, mild cheese, and a bowl of green olives and little radishes; then for supper the vegetable broth, with the sausage cut in thin rings, the whole new carrots and onions drained and tossed with a little butter and chopped parsley and celery tops from the farmer’s garden, and a bowl of three cans mixed together of peaches-pears-pineapple, all with hot, delicious, somewhat charcoalish toast made on one of those flat grill things our parents used at least forty years ago.

Fisher lived and wrote by her senses. She was the quintessential carnal writer. Her “Two Kitchens in Provence” is pure, sensuous pleasure.