Strangling Tortoises
Now Playing: The Hold Steady--"Hot Soft Light"
Ever since my recent career goal decision, I've been haunting the cookbook aisles of the library (and produce, meat, fish, and poultry sections of the grocery store) seeking to expand my expertise in and knowledge of food. I worked as a busser in several restaurants and as a prep cook in this one, and so I think I have a basic working familiarity with the stuff. Along with that familiarity, though, comes an iron-cast habit of finding the frequent excessive seriousness and pomposity of the culinary universe (in short, "foodies") mildly ridiculous. This skepticism goes, by and large, for any area my interest touches, but it's especailly abhorrent when it comes to food. Historical analysis and research, music, cinema and literature aren't absolutely fundamental to our physical lives--food is, and some of the extremes to which many foodies seem to go give me a little pause. For example, I read the Zingerman's Guide To Good Eating recently, thinking it would provide a lot of valuable information on healthy yet flavorful dishes to enrich someone's recipe repertoire. It was more a guide to the most "authentic" wines, olive oils, and cheeses; sometimes there would be interesting practical issues discussed, such as the ethical and environmental morality of fish farms, but it was basically about what was most real (preferably prohibitively expensive and from some rockcliff village in Tuscany hermetically sealed for a milennium--whenever I think of places like that, I think less of good food than I do of Tombs of the Blind Dead). As any good historian could tell you, "authenticity" of something like "cuisine" or "culture" is largely a crock. Just about any cultural enterprise you care to name--cooking, art, music, literature--arose from a hundred different sources and is constantly influenced by countless more. Nothing exists in a vacuum. I read a few books on the cooking experience recently dreading the primacy of this worldview, and was pleased to find that it was largely frowned upon (in print, though--you'd sometimes see remnants of the attitude poking through).

Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires: When I first heard about this book a couple of years ago, written by the then food critic for The New York Times, I was outraged (well, as outraged as I could get, anyway). Working as a busser in a multiple-plague-inflicted Mexican restaurant (I may have mentioned it in passing), the idea of a food critic was in itself apalling as my compadres and I figured such a person to be like one of our most obnoxious customers tripled, especially since this one (and I imagine many others) went out of her way to go incognito, and probably kvetched and prima donna'd her way all through the meal, then savaged whatever unlucky place got the "privilege" of being reviewed in some overrated rag (and there are areas, such as the continued employment of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd, in which The New York Times is indeed such a thing). Years later, I'm a lot more understanding, and the face that Reichl employs a variety of entertaining disguises in horrifyingly snooty Manhattan restaurants makes it soooo much different. She focuses on the end product, rather than the service (although that's important), and really, bussers there probably make at least three times what I presently pull down as a prep cook and general dogsbody (see my observation on Mookie in Do The Right Thing several entries back). It's entertaining enough, with some choice ruminations on eating and identity, but tends to become a little name-dropping and mystical towards the end. There are a few pretty cool-looking recipes in there, though, and her assertion that risotto is very hard to make properly inspires me to try it myself (but not right now).

Julie Powell, Julie and Julia: Some of you may have heard about this one, detailing a New York City secretary's decision to blog her way through Julia Child's classic Mastering The Art of French Cooking, doing a recipe a day and chronicling the results online. For some reason, I thought this was going to be terribly cutesy and worshipful, and was wonderfully relieved to find how dead wrong I was. As a cook and blogger of about an age with the author, I found this really hit some wavelength of mine, and enjoyed it tremendously. As Powell confesses, she "swears like a sailor," only making the whole thing seem more immediate and tactile. In many ways, Powell has a life much like one of those overrepresented young women on television: around thirty, white, cute, witty, New York-based, and there the resemblances end. She's married. She lives in Queens, in a tiny apartment (which actually sounds fine to me). She has to worry about money, having a shitty job--as a secretary, but that just made me all the more grateful that my own less-than-stellar culinary work experience makes me enjoy cooking at home more, not less. Electrical breakdowns, marital spats, family visits... all become simply spanners to be wrenched free of the works. The revelation at the end that Julia Child herself finds the whole thing "disrespectful" (it sounds weird, but this actually diminishes my hitherto unblemished respect for the woman), made me love it all the more. My house's stove isn't all that great either (although it's strangely better than the one at work), the kitchen's dingy but lovable, and when I'm doing something like making soup on a Saturday night (sadly no longer listening to CBC 3), I can think of Julie Powell, her bizarre home life and (now former, apparently, bless her) crappy day job, and can relax in an imagined solidarity with thousands of put-upon cooks around the country, Julie Powell first and foremost among them.

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: It's probably just as well that I read Bourdain and Powell before someone like M.F.K. Fisher, as I might have been frightened away by all the encrusted tradition. Bourdain's experiences went toward creating an unjustly short-lived FOX comedy of the same title as the book, with Bradley Cooper and Frank Langella. As it was the time I began to seriously think about changing career goals, I found its portrayal of life in the restaurant world both pleasantly cathartic and very familiar. Bourdain's a distinguished executive chef and writer in, you guessed it, New York City (you're not the only one who senses a pattern, and their alleged ineptitude at making picante sauce doesn't make me feel one whit better), and has kicked around the darker edges of the culinary world for some time (as well as, eventually, a nasty heroin and cocaine habit)--Kitchen is a mix of helpful tips, life lessons and bizarre misadventures in some classy-looking places (perhaps inevitably, every one of the restaurants he described turned into Piatto once they hit my brain). Bourdain's frequently a man after my own heart, particularly when it comes to celebrity chefs, describing Emeril, for example, as "fuzzy" and "Ewok-like" (after remembering the shitstorm we had to go through when I worked at Barnes and Noble in Baton Rouge the day Emeril came to sign, I'm totally cool with that). He's also apparently trashed Rachel Ray in print (in Food and Wine, I think--I've never seen her show or read her books, but I'm fine with that, too, as she reminds me of my boss). Sometimes he tries a little too hard to be edgy and "dangerous", he (self-confessedly) seems a bit of an asshole, and he even starts to get the foodie shakes a little, but the latter are usually on the side of freshness and simplicity, which isn't usually the case (no garlic presses, homemade sauces, use the freshest ingredients), and which I'm trying to start doing around the house.

Will I become a food snob? I hope not. Eating's way too important to take too seriously, if you get my drift, but it's nice to have the option to go all hoity-toity. At least I'll know how. Besides, while food snobbery can be excessive, so can its mirror-image, a faux-proletarian wallowing in diner food and cheap beers (Stroh's is pretty good, PBR less so, but to ignore all else in favor of those two is sheer lunacy). One of the things I enjoy most is having feet in two worlds, and this seems as good a way as any to do it.