I’ve just finished reading this week’s issue – the Food
& Travel Issue – and I’m exhilarated. What a superb New Yorker! All four features are excellent: Lauren Collins’s "Come to the Fair," Dana
Goodyear’s "Mezcal Sunrise," Carolyn Kormann’s "The Tasting-Menu Initiative," and Dexter Filkins’s "The End of Ice." I want to consider each one and pick my
favorite. To help me decide, I’ll use my old standby “thisness” – “any detail
that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a
puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion”
(James Wood).
Collins’s “Come to the Fair” is about the Salon
International de l’Agriculture, “the enormous show that each spring brings the
farmers of France together under the eight roofs of the Porte de Versailles
convention center, accompanied by nearly four thousand of their bovine, ovine,
caprine, porcine, equine, asinine, and canine companions.” Not sure what the
“asinine” refers to, unless it’s the politicians who roam the corridors of the
exposition halls “playing folksy.” Collins calls the Salon a “political
crucible.” She says, “It’s basically an unseated town-hall meeting with
tremendous amounts of booze thrown in.” But, for me, it’s the food and the animals,
not the politics, that are interesting. I especially like the Seabright
chickens (“The Sebrights were crazy-beautiful: proud-looking, with jutting
breasts, each of their silver-white feathers edged in black, as though someone
had outlined them with a Sharpie”) and the produce-aisle facsimile of the Eiffel Tower with its “soaring
midsection of leeks and carrots, topped by a four-layer finial of tomatoes,
potatoes, pears, and lemons,” and a burger-and-fries booth where “sauce
dispensers—andalouse, mustard, curry, cocktail, barbecue, américaine,
poivre—hung from the rafters like udders.”
My favorite passage
in Collins’s piece conveys the rich mishmash of Salon ingredients:
The notaries of France have a stand, as does the national
association of drainage. You can buy a beret or a birdcage. You can obtain an
I.D. card for your pet. You can subscribe to Pâtre, a monthly magazine
for shepherds. Each of the country’s eighteen regions sponsors an area
highlighting its gastronomy. Slurp down some oysters in Arcachon, grab some
choucroute in Alsace, and then turn a corner and you’re in Martinique, drinking
Ti’ Punch. Picture the Iowa State Fair crossed with the Aspen Food & Wine
Classic, with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show going on in a side ring.
How I savor that “Slurp down some oysters in Arcachon, grab
some choucroute in Alsace, and then turn a corner and you’re in Martinique,
drinking Ti’ Punch”! “Come to the
Fair” exudes appetite and pleasure. I devoured it.
Goodyear’s “Mezcal
Sunrise” is a search for the ultimate artisanal mezcal. I relish this form of
narrative (see my post “Culinary Quests” here). It starts with Goodyear’s visit
to Bricia Lopez’s mezcal bar at Guelaguetza in Los Angeles where she tastes
Lopez’s prize mezcal (“She poured some into a jícara, the dried hull of
a fruit, often used to serve mezcal, and offered it to me. It was tangy and
slick, like a dirty Martini, with a whiff of neat’s-foot oil”). Lopez says, “You
can’t order this anywhere. You have to go to these places. You have to drink it
hot off the still.” With these words, Goodyear’s quest is launched. Goodyear
travels to Oaxaca City, Mexico (“Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom, and
the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of gasoline”). She visits a palenque
where mezcal is produced (“The palenque was simple and clean, newly
built: a pit filled with burning coals; four fermentation barrels brimming with
mashed, cooked agave that smelled of apple-cider vinegar; six wood-fired copper
stills; two gleaming ten-thousand-litre stainless-steel storage tanks; and a
small bottling facility”). She visits Hipócrates Nolasco, the president of the
Consejo Regulador del Mezcal (“His office, separated from the lab by glass
panels, is a museum of mezcal. Hundreds of bottles—his personal collection—line
the walls on mirrored shelves”). Lopez arrives in Oaxaca City and takes
Goodyear to El Destilado, “a new spot that focusses on uncertified, nano-batch
mezcals.” There they meet El Destilado’s owner, Jason Cox. Cox gives them a
drink of his favorite mezcal (“It was wonderfully weird and comforting,
salty-sweet and leathery, like Old Spice on a beloved cheek”). He says his
source is located in the tiny village of Santa María Ixcatlán. He says he’s
going there tomorrow. He agrees to let Goodyear and Lopez tag along. In this
serendipitous way, Goodyear eventually meets the twenty-five-year-old mezcalero
who made the rare mezcal she’d tasted at Guelaguetza. I love “Mezcal Sunrise”
’s quest-like structure. And I savor its sensuous mezcal descriptions,
particularly that “tangy and slick, like a dirty Martini, with a whiff of
neat’s-foot oil.”
Carolyn Kormann’s
“The Tasting-Menu Initiative” has a great subject – La Paz’s Danish-Bolivian
restaurant Gustu. Kormann calls Gustu “both a restaurant and an experiment in
social uplift.” The piece talks about Gustu’s proprietor, Claus Meyer, who also
owns Noma, in Copenhagen, “named the world’s best restaurant for the third year
in a row by a jury of international chefs, critics, and restaurateurs.” It
tells about a foundation that Meyer started called Melting Pot, “which taught
prisoners in Denmark how to cook.” It tells how Meyer decided to create a
Bolivian equivalent of Noma and establish a culinary school for disadvantaged
youths. It profiles Gustu’s head chef, Kamilla Seidler, “a thirty-two-year-old
Dane who had worked in some of Europe’s top restaurants, including Mugaritz, a
two-Michelin-star establishment in northern Spain that is known for such
whimsical experiments as edible cutlery.” It describes Kormann’s experience of
shopping with Seidler at a market in central La Paz (“Venders—mostly
fierce-looking women with long braids and bowler hats—sat in stalls between
heaps of Andean produce: watermelons as big as a bulldog’s belly, purple corn
with kernels like gumballs, plantains the color of paprika”). It talks about
Seidler’s challenges (“Seidler needed to please many kinds of people: prominent
Bolivians, the local press, the international press, travel bloggers, food
tourists, regular tourists, backpackers, Bolivian ex-pats who are nostalgic for
flavors from their childhood, and judges for Latin America’s Fifty Best
Restaurants, a ranking started in 2013. She had to come up with a formula that
nobody else had”). It describes Gustu’s first menu (“The palmito was on
it, along with rabbit confit served with pale kernels of choclo and lime
zest; papalisas with beetroot and hibiscus; and a boozy dessert made
with tumbo, the fruit she had given me in the market. The food was
sculptural, deconstructed, Technicolor”). It profiles Coral Ayoroa, Gustu’s
first Bolivian employee, who was put in charge of setting up the culinary
school. It describes the difficulties experienced by culinary school students
in adjusting to the exacting demands of Gustu’s kitchen (“Then, unexpectedly,
eight of them quit. ‘It might have been that the work was too tough for them,’
Ayoroa said. The students had long shifts, sometimes training all day and then
helping during dinner service. Another problem was the long commute from the
neighborhoods where they lived, in the mostly impoverished city of El Alto,
which sits on a dusty plain a thousand feet higher than La Paz”). It tells how
Meyer devised a two-tiered system for training employees (“Melting Pot would
start a network of entry-level cooking schools in El Alto, where their students
lived. The top graduates would be eligible for scholarships to continue their
studies at Gustu”). It describes the “uneasy position” that Gustu inhabits in
Bolivia’s food revolution. It talks about the response of Bolivian President
Evo Morales (“Despite Gustu’s social projects, it can’t be easy for a populist
President to credit a European chef with ‘rescuing’ local food and farmers. He
is not above a private endorsement, though”).
My favorite part of
“The Tasting-Menu Initiative” is Kormann’s detailed account of a dinner she has
at Gustu. Here’s a taste:
“First, you will
eat cauliflower,” Levin Tøttenborg said. He set down a piece of slate bearing a
thin triangular slice of what looked like watermelon, neatly cut to leave a
sliver of green along the side. A single rectangular grain of salt sat on top.
There was no cauliflower in sight, and yet, when I took a bite, the flavor
announced itself unmistakably as cauliflower. A waiter set down bread—a pink
hibiscus brioche and a coca-leaf bun, served with coca butter and quinoa tofu.
The tofu was bland, but the coca butter was savory, like a grassy crème
fraîche.
Kormann’s style is
plainer than Collins’s and Goodyear’s. There’s less figuration. But she’s a
superb noticer of detail. Her Gustu dinner description is a tour de force
of close observation – that “neatly cut to leave a sliver of green along the
side,” for example.
In his “The End of
Ice,” Filkins accompanies an international group of scientists on an expedition
to the Chhota Shigri Glacier in India’s Himalayas. The piece opens
magnificently with two paragraphs, the first describing the route to Chhota
Shigri, and the second bringing Filkins into the action as
participant-observer:
The journey to the
Chhota Shigri Glacier, in the Himalayan peaks of northern India, begins
thousands of feet below, in New Delhi—a city of twenty-five million people,
where smoke from diesel trucks and cow-dung fires dims the sky and where the
temperature on a hot summer day can reach a hundred and fifteen degrees. The
route passes through a churning sprawl of low-land cities, home to some fifty
million people, until the Himalayas come into view: a steep wall rising above
the plains, the product of a tectonic collision that began millions of
years ago and is still under way. From there, the road snakes upward, past cows
and trucks and three-wheeled taxis and every other kind of moving evidence of
India’s economic transformation. If you turn around, you can see a great layer
of smog, lying over northern India like a dirty shroud. In the mountains, the
number of cars drops sharply—limited by government regulation, for fear of what
the smog is doing to the ice. The road mostly lacks shoulders; on turns, you
look into ravines a thousand feet deep. After the town of Manali, the air
cools, and the road cuts through forests of spruce and cedar and fir.
A few months ago, I
followed that route with an international group of scientists who were
travelling to Chhota Shigri to assess how rapidly it is melting.
I read that, and I
was hooked. The piece is riveting! Its subject slightly reminded me
of Elizabeth Kolbert’s "Ice Memory" (The New Yorker, January 7, 2002).
In that piece, a group of glaciologists drill cores in the Greenland ice sheet.
In “The End of Ice,” glaciologists drill cores in the Chhota Shigri. But
Filkins’s piece is more exciting. He crosses a river in a sketchy gondola lift:
Near the valley
floor, we veered onto a rocky trail that tracked an icy river called the
Chandra. Our van halted and a group of men appeared: Nepali porters, who led us
to an outcropping on the river’s edge. Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped
like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most
accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage
reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With
one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one,
while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.
He explores Chhota
Shigri’s snout:
The opening of
Chhota Shigri’s snout was five feet high, large enough for us to enter.
Pressing ourselves against the interior walls and shimmying along the narrow
banks of the rushing water, we worked our way into a vaulting palace of ice,
where ten-foot-long icicles hung from the ceiling like giant fishhooks.
Underneath the roar, you could hear the drip of melting ice. In the walls and
the ceiling, water and earth streamed behind sheets of clear ice, the sediment
tinting the walls orange and pale green. Air bubbled in the water, trapped when
the glacier’s ice froze around it, more than two hundred and fifty years ago.
“It could collapse at any moment,” Azam said. “When we come back next year, it
will be gone.”
He camps on Chhota
Shigri’s slope:
The sun was setting
behind the peaks as we arrived at the high camp, at nearly sixteen thousand
feet, and the horizon glowed deep orange. The porters had set up tents, and
were donning headlamps to help prepare the equipment for the next day’s ice
core. The temperature was dropping fast, into the teens. We ducked inside the
main tent and found the rest of the team huddled in the dark around a stove,
drinking cups of salty broth. Ranjan arrived just after the sun went down. “I
am so happy to have made it!” he said. The camp was just a handful of tents on
the glacier’s slope, connected by a little stairway carved into the snow. The
porters had made a dinner of lentils and chapati, but we were too nauseated
from the altitude to eat more than a few bites. That night, we slept in a
ragged tent with no tarp, its doors flapping open, directly atop the ice, nine
hundred and fifty feet thick.
Filkins’s brilliant
factual style epitomizes thisness. After agonizing consideration, I choose his terrific “The End of Ice” as my Pick of the Issue. But I want to stress that all four
features in this week’s New Yorker are extraordinary. I look forward to
more Food & Travel Issues.
Postscript: A
special shout-out to Michael Sragow for his wonderful capsule review of Sam
Peckinpah’s The Deadly Companions (“Goings On About Town: Movies”). The
line, “Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats corruption through his
buffalo-fur coat,” is inspired!
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