Postscript: Mimi Sheraton 1926 - 2023

Mimi Sheraton (Photo by Julien Jourdes)

I see in the Times that Mimi Sheraton has died: see “Mimi Sheraton, Innovative New York Times Food Critic, Dies at 97.” Sheraton wrote one of my favorite New Yorker pieces – “Spit Cake” (November 23, 2009). It’s an account of her search for an authentic Baumkuchen, “a towering cake that is improbable both for the way in which it is produced and for the strong appeal of its simple, innocent flavor, redolent of butter, flour or cornstarch, eggs, sugar, and gently sweet hints of marzipan, rum, or vanilla.” She finds it in a pastry shop in Chicago. She observes it being made:

The Lutz Baumkuchen does not taper, because Kozik does not use a cone; before preheating the tubular spit, he wraps it in many layers of aluminum foil. Nor does he ladle the deliciously sweet batter on. Instead, he pours small quantities into the trough beneath the spit. Then he releases a lever that lowers the spit into the trough, where it revolves and picks up the batter before it is hoisted back up to cook. After about the eighth layer, Kozik holds a long wooden comb against the sides of the revolving cake to impress the ridges, a process that is repeated about six times until the ridges are firmly set. Then subsequent layers are baked on, and the drippings are smoothed off against a board as they turn. The process takes about two hours for a Baumkuchen that has twenty-four ridges, or is about forty-eight inches tall, with sixteen to eighteen layers of batter and weighing six pounds. The result was the closest to Kreutzkamm’s that I have found, but with slightly less defined rings and a milder flavor devoid of marzipan.

Rereading “Spit Cake” just now, I realize that the passage I most relish isn't about Baumkuchen; it's about the making of a Polish spit cake called sekacz. Here’s the passage:

Gradually blushing red-faced as we sweltered in the Sweet World’s tiny utility room, where Ryba clocks a three- to four-hour watch over his rotating sekacz, he demonstrated the most traditional method. First, he preheated a big, worn vertical gas-fired oven that looks like a Rube Goldberg improvisation of a sheet-metal barbecue grill. After wrapping a large metal cone in layers of parchment, he slid it over the spit’s spindle, where it establishes the cake’s tapering form. He then let the whole thing turn and heat for about fifteen minutes. “Cone must be hot, so first layer of batter sticks and also bakes the cake from the inside,” he explained. The turning of the spit also kept the batter clinging as it wrapped around itself.

Donning a protective clear plastic face mask, somewhat like a welder’s, as the heat built up, Ryba ladled the batter from a big pail. Every ladleful was poured into a trough under the spit so that it would become more liquid. As each layer toasted to a golden-brown glaze, the next was poured over, and so on until the desired width was achieved, thereby creating the defining brown rings one sees when the cake is sliced. With its rustic, nicely browned crust and the crunchy protruding brambles that developed as the drippings baked on, the cut sekacz revealed a buff-gold cake that had seductively dense sweet-smoky and slightly ripe overtones.

Mm, that description is crazy good!

Sheraton connects with The New Yorker in another way. In  1979, she wrote a piece for The New York Times, blowing the cover of the chef named Otto in John McPhee’s now classic “Brigade de Cuisine” (The New Yorker, February 19, 1979; later retitled "A Philosopher in the Kitchen"). According to Sheraton, McPhee pleaded with her not to publish her piece. She says, in her memoir Eating My Words (2004), that McPhee accused her of breach of trust. She replied,

“It’s not my breach,” I said. “I never promised Lieb [the chef’] or anyone else anything and you should not have, either, if you were going to write about him in The New Yorker. Anyway, the story is already in and the paper will be dropped on my doorstep in an hour or two. You made this a matter of public interest, especially when food is such a hot topic.

Maybe someday, I’ll delve into this ruckus in more detail. Today, I want to pay tribute to Sheraton as the writer of “Spit Cake” – one of the best food pieces ever to appear in The New Yorker. 

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).

Jiayang Fan's "Searching for America with General Tso"

I relish “food quest” stories (the one that immediately comes to mind is Mimi Sheraton’s classic "Spit Cake," The New Yorker, November 23, 2009). And I enjoy autobiographical criticism. Both genres combine in Jiayang Fan’s superb "Searching for America with General Tso" (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2015). It’s a review of Ian Cheney’s The Search for General Tso, which, Fan says, is “a jovial feature-length documentary that probes the origins of this iconic poultry dish.” She calls it “a detective story devoted to the art of un-blurring and disentangling: the ‘t’ from the ‘so,’ the meat from the myth.” On further consideration, she says it is “really a quest narrative in which the chicken is a Trojan horse for America’s history of complicated and choleric relationships with those deemed suspicious or disquietingly ‘exotic.’ ” But Fan's piece is more than a review. The film prompts her to consider an aspect of her cultural identity. She says that the name “General Tso” is “simultaneously so evidently Chinese and not-Chinese that its very pronunciation presents, at least to this neurotic immigrant, a paralyzing problem of cultural fidelity and perfidy.” She asks, “Is it a sense of belonging that I momentarily gain (even if it’s only in my head) when I say ‘Sichuan’ or ‘mapo’ in a way that signals my knack at convincingly feigning a non-Chinese?” In “Searching for America with General Tso,” Fan does more than describe Cheney’s film; she extracts personal meaning from it. The result is absorbing and memorable.

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. 

January 24, 2011 Issue

Did you see the lineup of heavy hitters in this week’s The Talk Of The Town? Wow! Nick Paumgarten, Ian Frazier, Tad Friend, and Mimi Sheraton. First up is Paumgarten. His “Swarm” is about a “handmade analog synthesizer” called the Swarmatron. The surreal reality of the Swarmatron calls out for description; it has the potential to generate some of those surprising collage-like sentences that Paumgarten, a describer par excellence, is able to assemble, and has assembled so memorably in previous Talk stories, e.g., his classic “Little Helper” (June 16 & 23, 2003), which begins: “Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day.” “Swarm” has a great beginning, too. The first paragraph describes the formation of the word “bassoon” (“The word ‘bassoon’ comes from Pleury de Basseau, a vice-admiral in the French Royal Navy,” etc.). But then, in the second paragraph, Paumgarten says, “Actually, no. ‘Bassoon’ is merely ‘basso’ (Italian for ‘bass’) with an augmentative suffix.” I marveled at the audacity of Paumgarten’s move – the way he undermines the seriousness of his first paragraph. A less confident writer (me, for example) would likely delete the first paragraph and use the second one to form the lead. So “Swarm” begins with an interesting structural twist – one that I hadn’t seen before, one that takes a writer writing with authority to pull off. Not many would do it. Liebling would do it. I can’t think of anyone else. But “Swarm,” interesting though it is, doesn’t produce the transfixing kind of surreal sentence that I was hoping for. Nevertheless, there are some dandy lines, e.g. “the dissonance stretching like taffy,” and this beauty:

A visitor inserted a quarter, twirled some knobs, and had the sensation, partly real, of producing, with his ignorant hands, a marvelously unholy barrage of noise.

Next up in this week’s all-star Talk lineup is Ian Frazier. Frazier is the Talk story master. Last year alone, he produced three pieces that went straight into my personal anthology of Talk favorites: “The Big Shoe” (February 1, 2010), “Lovefest” (March 1, 2010), and “Parade of the Night” (September 20, 2010). And then there’s his great “Dial-A-Tree” (“A man eating a West Indian meat pie comes up to the museumgoer at at 188th Street and asks, ‘Hey, papi, can you help me out? I just got out of jail?’”) in the July 20th, 2009 issue, and, of course, his classic “Bags In Trees” trilogy (collected in his great 2005 Gone To New York). Whoops, I just discovered in the magazine’s online archives that none of the “Bags In Trees” articles are actually Talk stories. “Bags In Trees” and “Bags In Trees II” are “Shouts & Murmurs” pieces and “Bags In Trees: A Retrospective” is an “Our Local Correspondents” item. Nevertheless, I mention them here because they could work as Talk stories and they exemplify the magic that Frazier performs in his Talk stories – in all his writings, for that matter – his ability to notice commonplace things and write about them in such an empathetic way that he converts them into amazing stories. Those bags in trees are a perfect example.

Regarding Frazier’s Talk story “Shower” in the current issue, one sentence into it, I found myself smiling as I read this delightful construction:

On a fortuitously clear night, in the far reaches of the borough, beyond where the Q-16 bus makes its turnaround, on the grounds of old Fort Totten, atop a small hill that once held a mortar battery, two urban park rangers and twenty-five or so shivering visitors scoped the sky.

It’s cool the way that sentence adjusts its focus as it goes, starting wide “in the far reaches of the borough,” then tightening on “the grounds of old Fort Totten,” then tightening even more on “a small hill that once held a mortar battery,” and finally zeroing in on the “two urban park rangers and twenty-five or so shivering visitors.” I also like the way Frazier delays the verb “scoped” until almost the end of the sentence. “Shower” is a terrific little Talk piece. The fact that there are no meteors to see doesn’t crimp Frazier’s style at all. He reports what the rangers say about meteors and what some of the people in the group say. And his descriptions, such as this one, bring the night scene atop that Fort Totten hill vividly to life:

Meanwhile, Ranger Eric Handy gave an impromptu lecture, his blue-white face beneath the broad brim of his ranger’s hat popping into startled visibility when those with flash cameras took pictures of him.

Batting third in Talk’s super lineup is Tad Friend. His “Lenny Again” hooked me immediately with this nifty opener:

Time pares the flesh and nerve from an artist’s reputation, leaving only the barest of bones. Lenny Bruce’s skeletal remains are those of a hipster satirist who got arrested for saying “cocksucker” in a night club so that modern comedians could say it on HBO. Was he funny? Was he even supposed to be?

“Lenny Again” is a mini-profile of Steve Cuiffo, an “actor and magician,” who’s going to re-create Bruce’s infamous 1961 “midnight gig at Carnegie Hall” that, in Friend’s words, “marked Bruce’s free-associative peak.” Cuiffo’s gig will be held at a place called Ann’e Warehouse in Brooklyn. Of the many pleasures of Friend’s piece – the comparison of Cuiffo with Bruce (“he has the same black quiff and confiding eyes”), the names of places where Bruce once played that no longer exist (Village Gate, Café Au Go Go) – the most piquant is Friend’s description of Bruce’s delivery:

Bruce muttered his segues and asides in the ha-ha-ha! Manner of someone that you edge away from on the bus, so Cuiffo had made a phonetic transcription of the concert to get every verbal tic. Often the words didn’t parse: “And conductors, the same idea as, very bourgeois to even fly now, yeah, fifteen years ago, real status symbol, you know. Flying. But, now, any szlubbo, like, can make any fff.” In performance, though, it mostly made sense, as if Cuiffo were simultaneously translating from and annotating the original Synapsese.

Friend is a genius at describing “verbal tics,” which is why he’s so great at profiling comedians, e.g., Steve Carell (see “First Banana,” The New Yorker, July 5, 2010).

Batting clean-up in this all-star Talk line-up is Mimi Sheraton. She delivers a grand slam with “Opera Buffet” – thirteen sharp, tight paragraphs that tell the story of the Peking duck dinners that bass opera singer, Hao Jiang Tian, and his wife, Dr. Martha Liao, serve up after every performance. It’s a light piece, brimming with interesting detail – the metal cones that Liao packs for a concert tour, the green parrot named Luke that likes sunflower seeds and Peking duck, the steamed yeast buns stuffed with “crackling skin, moist duck meat, slivers of cucumbers and scallions, and dabs of fruity hoisin sauce.” It’s a pleasure to read along Sheraton’s lines, watching her craft the piece, joining facts and quotes, to create a concise, swift-moving story. I like how “Opera Buffet” ends in song. It’s perfection! If you want more of Sheraton’s great writing, check out her “Spit Cake” (The New Yorker, November 23, 2009). It’s one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles.

So there you have it – Swarmatron, Quadrantid meteor shower, Lenny Bruce, Peking duck. Welcome to The New Yorker’s cabinet of wonders, the one and only The Talk Of The Town.