February 10, 2008 | By Adam Roberts | 52 Comments
The soup dumpling was balanced cautiously on my spoon, the twisted top bitten off and, as I stared into the murky, steamy depths of broth, I was struck by the gray lumpy brain-like matter in the middle. Struck, not because it was unfamiliar—soup dumplings at Grand Sichuan are almost monthly staples of our diet—but because, suddenly, after reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” that lump of pork conjured forth images of tortured pigs, in crowded pens, their tails cut off to a stump so that other pigs won’t chew on them. Was this the meat of a factory pig? Would I, by biting in, be complicit in its tortured death? I drowned the dumpling, and my quandary, in gingered soy sauce and bit in quickly.
Eat fast and don’t think. I gobbled it up, like a good American.
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November 1, 2007 | By Adam Roberts | 10 Comments
It takes a great deal to make me burst out laughing in the middle of a coffee shop. First of all, I suffer from some social anxiety: I don’t like to make a spectacle of myself (unless I’m making horror movies on the internet) and I often give dirty looks to those who carry on obnoxious cell phone conversations or cackle loudly as I try to write my memoirs while sipping frothy cappuccinos. But yesterday, as I finished Phoebe Damrosch’s fantastic new book “Service Included,” I broke out of character and burst out laughing. It happened on page 179 and it may be the most shocking sentence I’ve yet encountered in a food book. I can’t repeat it here nor, for that matter, can I repeat it anywhere: it’s filthy. It’s something a customer says to Phoebe when she’s a captain at Per Se, one of New York’s (if not the country’s) most illustrious and renowned restaurants. The context alone would make any irreverent comment hilarious, but this particular one–well, I’ll let you get there yourself. It still makes me laugh just thinking about it.
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October 16, 2007 | By Adam Roberts | 16 Comments
I am guilty of a great crime. No, I’m not talking about murder or wearing brown pants with black shoes, I’m talking about a crime of the heart. A crime of insensitivity, of incredulity. When I first heard of celiac disease, I sort of rolled my eyes and thought, “What’ll they think of next?” You see I had a teacher in grad school who was allergic to gluten, so I had to make a big effort, when baking for class, to make things without flour. It was annoying. And really, wasn’t this teacher a bit of a hypochondriac? And how bad would it be if she had gluten, anyway?
Well, I just received a copy of Shauna James Ahern’s beautiful new book “Gluten-Free Girl” and I feel like a punk. In the book’s opening chapters, Shauna–who I had the pleasure of meeting in Seattle–describes a childhood of illness and pain that sent my empathy bone atwitter. “Sometimes, I felt horribly unwell,” she writes of her childhood in the book’s first chapter. “Wheezing chest, headaches, and fevers; desperate fatigue. I developed pneumonia six times in my life, nearly dying once. If it wasn’t pneumonia, it was bronchitis, my throat constricted, my chest squeezed tight. Breathing in too deeply–more than half-hearted pants–brought prickles of pain deep in my lungs.”
It’s a credit to Shauna’s writing that by the time the diagnosis finally comes (on pg. 16) you want to get up and cheer. I finally understood, with absolute clarity, how frustrating it must be to be allergic to something so commonplace, to suffer for so long without an answer and how revelatory it must be to finally have an answer and a new way to live your life.
This book is a lovely, inspiring memoir that isn’t just for those with celiac or other food allergies. It’s a book about turning lemons into lemonade, of taking the cards that life hands you and playing a great game. Having met Shauna, I can attest to her spirit, her energy, and–most wonderful of all–her heart. She’s such a generous person and writer, that having this book on my shelf makes my apartment noticeably brighter. I highly recommend it.
July 16, 2007 | By Adam Roberts | 6 Comments
There is a giant chicken in my brain. Every time I try to tell you about David Kamp’s wonderful book “The United States of Arugula” the chicken appears and squawks out “bok bok bok.” I want to tell you about Kamp’s masterful storytelling skills, the way he treats America’s food icons like beloved superheroes, revealing their creation myths with comic book flair; or how he renders even the most obscure food figures with such loving detail. Only there’s that damn chicken. The chicken entered my brain at page 73 in Chapter Three, “The Food Establishment.” The chicken, you see, belonged to Craig Claiborne, whose name you may recognize from your mother’s New York Times cookbook. He was part of what Kamp calls “The Big Three” (the other two were James Beard and Julia Child) and, as Kamp documents, he led a tortured, self-destructive life. When drunk, he talked compulsively about sex and, according to Arthur Gelb–chief cultural correspondent of The New York Times while Claiborne was there, “He told me once, when we were drinking, that he and this little black kid, when they were small boys, would fool around with the farm animals. They would have sex with chickens.”
Craig Claiborne had sex with chickens.
There, I said it, now giant chicken be gone. (Giant chicken flies away.) That was hard to shake off. No matter how far away I got away from that tidbit on pg. 73, it’s the sort of thing that you don’t easily forget. In fact, I must confess, that forevermore when I see The New York Times Cookbook or Craig Claiborne’s name that chicken will return and I’ll have to cast it away again. Such is the power of food literature.
But there’s much more to David Kamp’s book than Craig Claiborne’s sex chicken. I’d say it’s pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to understand how the constellations in the sky of foodiedom all fit together, how they came to be constellations and why many of them still burn so brightly. (How’s that for an extended metaphor?) For example, it’s one thing to know that Wolfgang Puck was sent away by his parents at the tender young age of 14 to work in an Austrian hotel kitchen; it’s another to understand how his decision to open Spago with an open kitchen and a wood-burning oven (a vision carried out by his aggressive wife, Barbara Lazaroff) absolutely transformed not only California cuisine, but restaurants all across America. You know that California Pizza Kitchen in your mall? You can thank Wolfgang Puck for that.
Remember that scene in “The Devil Wears Prada” where Meryl Streep chastises Anne Hathaway for thinking that the color on the belt she’s picking doesn’t matter: “I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back” and then proceeds to explain how “you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” That’s the thrust of “The United States of Arugula”: how visionary taste-makers–from Julia Child and James Beard to Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse–have their hands in what’ll be on your plate tonight. It’s a fascinating story and one that’s rife with drama, intrigue, betrayal, and–yes–sex. For anyone interested in the history of food in the United States, this is the book for you.
