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. 

Susan Orlean's "All Mixed Up"

Alexandra Schwartz’s recent “Bounty Hunters” (The New Yorker, November 25, 2019), an account of her experience working at Park Slope Food Co-op, in Brooklyn, reminded me of another great “grocery store” piece – Susan Orlean’s “All Mixed Up” (The New Yorker, June 22, 1992; included in Orlean’s 2004 My Kind of Place). It’s about Sunshine Market, a grocery store in Jackson Heights, Queens. Orlean wonderfully captures the complexity of “grocery store” reality. Here, for example, is her description of the start of a delivery day:

One Monday morning, I got to the market at seven forty-five – fifteen minutes before opening time. There were already trucks from Polaner/B&G Pickles, Ingegneri & Son, Pepsi-Cola, Damascus Bakery, and Star Soap and Prayer Candle parked out front. The B&G driver, Wally Wadsworth, had started his morning at B&G’s warehouse in Roseland, New Jersey, and was delivering sweet gherkin midgets and kosher dills. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, had come from a warehouse in the Bronx with fifty cases of assorted groceries. Ronnie Chamberlain and Chris Laluz had started in Long Island and had Pepsi liters. Jim Hazar had come from the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn, with fresh pita bread. Manny Ziegelman, of Star Soap and Prayer Candle, had also come from Brooklyn. This particular morning, he had a mixed case of Miraculous Mother, Lucky Buddha, and Fast Luck prayer candles for Sunshine Market in his truck. 

Orlean talks to Sunshine Market’s owner, Herb Spitzer (“Herb is now sixty years old. He is a medium-size man with a smooth, pinkish, egg-shaped face and a scramble of graying hair. He has a soothing, precise manner, which suggests benevolence and intelligence and absolutely no patience for goofing around”). She visits Herb in his office above the trash compactor at the back of the store (“The trash compactor runs, off and on, all day long. Conversations in the office that begin in a normal speaking tone often shift in a shout at some point”). She talks to the store’s manager, Toney Murphy (“Toney knows everything. Toney even knows some things he doesn’t know, like Spanish”). She attends the store’s tenth birthday party in Herb’s office (“There were eight people clustered in the corner of the office: Ashima, Marta, Rose Mary, Jerry, Robert, Toney, and Richard and Bill, who had taken a break from carving a side of beef”). She talks to Jerry Goldberg, the store’s produce manager (“He has huge hands, with fingers as gnarled as parsnips. It is quite a sight to wander back to his worktable and catch him hacking at the lettuce heads, cutting off the ugly leaves and tossing them away. A few heads into it, he’s ankle deep in greenery”). She visits the butchers and wrappers in the cutting room:

Lack of sentimentality may actually be an advantage when you’re spending eight hours a day around carcasses. Once, Bill, who is the meat manager, was telling me what I thought was going to be a sweet story about a little old lady who approached him one Thanksgiving for advice on cooking her bird. His summation: “I said to her, ‘Hey, lady, you’re seventy-two bleeping years old. I’m sure this isn’t your first turkey.’ ”

“All Mixed Up” is a triumph of close observation and detailed description. Revisiting it twenty-seven years after it first appeared, I enjoyed it immensely. 

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).

February 11 & 18, 2013 Issue

I’m drawn to writers who celebrate everyday life and “give the mundane its beautiful due” (Updike's great credo). This week's issue features three of the best: Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, and Susan Orlean. Mitchell, in his wonderful “Street Life,” celebrates “the common, ordinary city.” Describing the pleasure of aimlessly riding city buses, gazing out the window at “the flowing backdrop of buildings,” he says,

There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city – not the lofty, noble, silvery vertical city, but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city.

Mitchell’s piece is remarkable for its long sentences. I don’t associate him with long-line writing. But “Street Life” contains at least three sentences exceeding 140 words. One of them is a gorgeous assemblage that begins, “At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets …,” and runs for 348 words.

Another writer who seeks his material at street level is Ian Frazier. In his sad, brilliant “The Toll,” he drives and walks the “crumple zone” of Staten Island, noting the debris left by Hurricane Sandy:

A chain-link fence that ran along Bobby Thomson Field nearby had caught the flood’s smaller pieces of debris. Mostly they were grass stems and vine tendrils, combined with plastic shreds, zip ties, coffee stirrers, cup lids, swizzlesticks, plastic cutlery, and plastic drinking straws. In the fence, they glitter like minnows in a net.

Frazier’s eye for bags in trees is as sharp as ever (recall his great “Bags in Trees” series, included in his 2005 collection Gone To New York). In “The Toll,” he writes,

Deep gouges in the banks undercut fences and asphalt biking trails, and the scrubby trees far above the usual high-tide line hunkered down as if some massive creature had slept on them. Shreds of plastic bags hung among the branches everywhere, while the ocean, distant and calm at low tide, offered its quiet wavelets and asked, “Who, me?”

Bags in trees are also an ingredient in “The Toll”’s most inspired sentence:

Standing in a soggy no man’s forest near a beach, with invasive Japanese honeysuckle and bittersweet and greenbrier vines dragging down the trees, and shreds of plastic bags in the branches, and a dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs on the ground, and heaps of hurricane detritus strewn promiscuously, and fierce phragmites reeds springing up all over, I saw the landscape of the new hot world to come.

That “dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs” is very fine. Of course, Frazier isn’t celebrating storm debris. But he’s an acute noticer of it. His descriptions of it are sublime. See also his description of the waterfront junk pile in Nome (Travels In Siberia, 2010), the trash on the ground around Yellow Bird’s gas and convenience store (On the Rez, 2000), and the contents of abandoned prairie farmhouses (Great Plains, 1989).

Susan Orlean’s marvelous “Walart” profiles artist Brendan O’Connell, who sees art in “eight feet of Cheetos.” O’Connell paints “Walmart paintings” and perceives Walmart stores as the ideal place to study “the practice of everyday life.” Regarding O’Connell’s work, Orlean says, “The paintings are soft and luscious, built out of small brushstrokes, as if Pierre Bonnard had ventured into Supercenter Store No. 5154 with an easel.” “Walart” has a terrific opening line: “Some years back, Brendan O’Connell had a revelation in a Winn-Dixie.” I read that and smiled. It reminded me of another supermarket piece by Orlean – her splendid “All Mixed Up” (The New Yorker, June 22, 1992; included in her My Kind of Place, 2004), about Sunshine Market in Jackson Heights. O’Connell isn’t the only one who makes art out of supermarkets; Orlean turned the trick twenty-one years ago.

The appearance of a new Mitchell, Orlean, or Frazier piece is, for me, an event. In the case of Mitchell, who died seventeen years ago, it’s a miracle! To find three of them in one issue is pure bliss. Thank you very much, New Yorker! 

February 14 & 21, 2011 Issue

There’s no obvious Pick Of The Issue in this week’s New Yorker (“The Anniversary Issue”). But there are plenty of transfixing details. For example: the dining room at Annisa, where, “At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open and out comes Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage” (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two”); the woman attending the George Eliot conference “who had upswept blond hair and wore teetering heels and a gash of red lipstick” (Rebecca Mead, “Middlemarch and Me”); Frank Gehry’s New World Center, where “high-definition projectors inside the hall can show slides and films on five separate ‘sails,’ gently curved surfaces floating above the stage” (Alex Ross, “Schubert on the Beach”).

How does this year’s Anniversary Issue stack up against last year’s? There’s no contest. Last year’s wins easily; it contains Susan Orlean’s great “Riding High.”

February 15 & 22, 2010 Issue

I want to get a mule. I haven’t always had this desire. In fact, before I’d read Susan Orlean’s wonderful “Riding High” in this week’s double issue, I didn’t know mule from donkey. It was the same regarding chickens. After I read, Orlean’s “The It Bird” in the magazine (September 28, 2009), I wanted to get some chickens. This wish was recently reinforced by my trip to Cuba, where it seems every backyard is full of chickens (and roosters). Orlean’s writing style seduces me every time. She’s a master of what I call naturalness. Her opening lines hook me every damn time. For example, here’s how she starts “The It Bird”: “If I had never seen Janet Bonney reenact the mouth-to-beak resuscitation of her hen Number Seven, who had been frozen solid in a nor’easter, then was thawed and nursed back to life – being hand-fed and massaged as she watched doctor shows on TV – I might never have become a chicken person.” I read that opener, and I just kept going. Before I knew it, I’d devoured a whole article about chickens, and enjoyed every word.

Orleans makes writing look easy. The whole piece just seems to pour out, following its own logic. But there are descriptions that only Orelans can pull off. For example, here she is describing some mules at an auction: “a few dozen yearlings, still wide-eyed and whiskery; a score of experienced teams, with high-gloss rumps and bunchy muscles; dozens of riding mules, their ears waggling as they trotted around the stockyard ring.” I love that “high-gloss rumps and bunchy muscles.” Nabokov couldn’t have written it any better. Here’s another example: “Next in the ring was a chestnut mule with a bristling blonde mane and the sleepy, watchful gaze of a bank guard.” Orlean’s piece is endlessly quotable.

Another great thing about Orlean’s work is that it’s true journalism. She goes to interesting places, observes what’s happening, and writes interestingly about it. When, in “Riding High,” she says, “Last year, I went to the Reese Brothers’ November auction, and sat in the auctioneer’s booth with Dickie Reese and J. B. Driver, the auctioneer,” I think to myself, Hey this is cool! What a cool place to go! I find such sentences thrilling. I’m happy to be along with her. The same is true for a line like this: “I wandered around the stalls, the soft sounds of snuffling and chewing and the occasional thump of a hoof as it hit the wood floor filling the air, and then made my way over to the auction ring.” This is reality, “the thing itself,” as Updike would say. And it just goes to show that you don’t have to go to Tehran or Moscow and meet with dictators in order to write an interesting piece. A trip to Dickson, Tennessee, to see a mule auction is just the ticket, thank you very much. Orleans without end, amen!