On Reading Food

My first cookbook was a floppy orange thing that came free with a wok as something of an owner’s manual. The book was useless as a guide to Chinese cooking--as I recall, servants had done all the cooking for the author, who was trying to re-create his favorite dishes from an apartment in Ohio--but fascinating as a portrait of American China-hands before the revolution, affable, paternalistic businessmen who lived well, spoke no Chinese and were completely at a loss to explain the culture on which they depended so much. You could read any number of novels or histories of the period--and I have, from Suzie Wong to Jan Morris--but you couldn’t find as direct an expression of what the last few colonials really thought of themselves, their daily routine, and how they related to their dying colony. A report from the front, no matter how unintentional, is more fascinating than a workable recipe for moo goo gai pan.

Writers let parts of themselves seep into their cookbooks that they’d sooner die than reveal in a novel or business memoir. A library of cookbooks contains a thousand secret histories, political manifestoes disguised as recipes for tuna salad, love affairs sublimated into showers of garlic and truffles.

Novels are about the extraordinary; cookbooks about the mundane, and you can learn more about a man from the way he likes to make scrambled eggs in the morning than you might from his battles and affairs. Eating is, after all, one of the few human functions whose description excites no censor.

What marks good food writing is passion, often sensual passion displaced from its normal course, and not just in Gael Greene-style baring of the loins. Some of us consult Mexican-cookbook writer Diana Kennedy because we want to learn how to cook posole . But her books also convey the picaresque adventures of a high-born foreign correspondent’s widow loathe to leave the land of her greatest happiness, sadder than Graham Greene novels and more real, a portrait of sensual obsession sublimated into food. Food is sexy to M.F.K. Fisher, a loaf of good bread inseparable from the firm, white teeth of the man who bites into it, and it is this intertwining of food and desire that drives us to read her indifferent collections of recipes 40 years after they were written. Elizabeth David’s best cookbooks, dating from the early ‘50s, are pure memory and desire, making vivid Mediterranean flavors dance for an audience of postwar-grim, food-rationing Brits.

In the kind of cookbooks I like--none of that proscriptive “Diet for a Small Planet” stuff, thank you very much--sensual experience makes for happier, healthier, better people, more cheerful because better fed. In the introduction to the first Chez Panisse cookbook, an inspiration-seeking Alice Waters pulls a bunch of fresh thyme out of her pocket and lays it on her kitchen table; the detail rings true--she must be the kind of person who keeps fresh thyme in her pocket, precisely the sort of quirk that makes us fall in love with a character in Colette or Muriel Spark--and we understand her passion for food.

Marion Cunningham’s new revision of Fanny Farmer is an enveloping, educated bourgeois world, a warm, sensible household where people throw splendid dinner parties and know about pies and smoked-tomato sauces and how to steam asparagus in the microwave. You can almost see the Volvos parked in the circular driveway out front. Victoria Wise’s “Good and Plenty” sets down the routine of a loving, chaotic family where somebody unexpected always shows up at the supper table, all between the lines of a hundred-odd recipes designed to serve six. I’ve never felt the need to use a recipe from that book, but I’ve read it a half a dozen times as if it were fiction. Fred Plotkin’s underrated “Authentic Pasta Book” seems to be the self-portrait of an obsessive, solitary man devoted equally to Italian opera and to exquisite recipes for pasta-for-one. Know how a person eats, and you know how he lives.

A good cookbook, like a novel, can make us dream. But while, outside of a Woody Allen story, none of us can ever sleep with Emma Bovary, we can, given the time and desire, eat Richard Olney’s sorrel soup or the cassoulet that Paula Wolfert goes on about, in the privacy of our homes. Imagine a copy of GQ or a Victoria’s Secret brochure as a catalogue of available romantic partners. Cookbooks are different from novels, because reading is only the first step; the pleasures within are at least theoretically reproducible.

The process of reading a cookbook can be like that of a conductor reading through a score. As a skilled musician is able to glance at a scherzo of Brahms and hear in his head the spiky shape of a melody, the irregular massing of a chord, so is an amateur of food able to see a Sicilian pasta recipe that calls for raisins, wild fennel and sardines and anticipate the taste.

When we learn how to cook, we learn how ingredients brown and rise and blend, how to make a piecrust and to roast a bird. When we run across something like “A Gastronomic Tour of the Scandinavian Arctic,” a celebration of haute Laplander cuisine filled with recipes for snow grouse, clever things to do with bleak roe and the best way to clarify reindeer consomme, we know exactly what the book is talking about even if we’ve never run across those ingredients in our lives.

Nobody needs more than a few cookbooks, perhaps, and most people don’t actually cook all the way through more than a few. (Personally, I’ve gotten about halfway through Paula Wolfert’s “Cooking of South-West France” . . . and worried more about the general unavailability of goose fat than any Southern Californian ought to.) A “Joy of Cooking” for the basics, plus maybe a Julia Child, a Marcella Hazan or “Cucina Fresca,” and a dog-eared vegetarian cookbook left over from college days are sufficient to feed us and our families very well. But cookbooks, while they can be useful instruction manuals, are first and foremost books --a man who tires of cookbooks is also tired of life.