BOOK REVIEW : A Charming Horde of Cooking Lore

“A Kipper With My Tea,” by Alan Davidson. 259 pp. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1990. $17.95.

The cover of Alan Davidson’s new book--a sketch of the British food writer staring suspiciously at a forkful of herring--makes it clear that this is not a massive scholarly work like his “North Atlantic Seafood” or “Seafood of Southeast Asia.” It’s an entertainment, a wonderfully peculiar tour of the world’s food by-ways; a food book for bedside reading.

Davidson is really more comfortable with this sort of writing, I suspect. Certainly, he loves scholarship. When I first met him, he had just reduced the size of his back-yard garden to have more room for his thousands of food books. In London, the idea of voluntarily cutting down your garden-puttering space practically goes beyond the bounds of eccentricity.

But he finds the pose of scholarly authority burdensome. In these essays, which were often by-products of visiting one scholarly event or another (the “fishy business” he is likely to mention in passing), he usually portrays himself as having stumbled into a bit of fascinating food lore by chance. However he came across it, it’s wonderful stuff. Nowhere else could you read about:

* A giant gooseberry raising contest in Yorkshire (the custom goes back 200 years).

* The largest and reputedly also the tastiest mushroom in the world, Termitomycites titanicus, a yard-wide puffball that grows on termite mounds.

* A Paris restaurant where, if you want, you can buy the antique furniture you’ve been eating off (Davidson does not neglect to review the food).

* The pressure cooker invented in 1679 for the purpose of cooking bones into an edible food; characteristically, Davidson tried pressure-cooking bones himself and finally had reasonable success, but recommends the process primarily as a way of getting marrow fat for flavoring biscuits.

* The Thai custom of preparing a memorial cookbook to be distributed to your friends after your death.

* The giant catfish of Laos, pa beuk, the smallest specimen of which ever caught was 4 1/2 feet long; he records associated folkways, such as the traditional requirement that pa beuk fishermen insult each other continuously while they fish.

* A very expensive water-beetle secretion which is applied to Vietnamese dishes by an eyedropper; Davidson recommends it highly.

Along the way there are some moderately systematic studies of British cheeses and the nature of our ability to taste things, and tip sheets on up-and-coming ingredients, such as Brazilian sapacuya nut and Korean bellflower root. Davidson is not a cookery writer, but there are even some recipes, mostly for fish, and some boiled wisdom on marmelade making.

Basically, though, this is a charming horde of lore, most of which will probably never be of the slightest practical use to you. You’ll just find yourself looking for occasions to work it into conversation.