LesGensFaims

The Holy Trinity

My Catholic upbringing has slowly worked its way into my subconscious this week beginning with gastronomy's seven deadly sins. Gluttony is definitely one of them and I am certain that Addiction and Craving are culprits, too. Greed is Gluttony's longstanding  partner in crime reminding us that too much of a good thing may invoke the wrath of……. 

This week's New Yorker seemed to be on the same wavelength. Its weekly cartoon montage inevitably brought some humor but this time to the table with its 'The Holy Trinity' - cartoon of butter, sugar, and salt - perhaps the real reason why we say grace. Either way, it's a laugh as well as subtle reminder of the bare necessities when it comes to food: the basics. This rarely crosses the mind or enters the food publishing world. The focus tends to lay with trends: artisnal craft, wines, and where to dine. It's all good but it has to begin somewhere and if it is indeed "artisnal" then it must come from scratch and therefore pay tribute to the "Holy Trinity". Whether it's in your cellar, million dollar kitchen in the Hamptons, or your dusty pantry along with your mouse traps, we need that sugar for the creme brulee, the butter for the bernaise sauce, and the salt for that juicy hanger steak. 

This cartoon reminds us that the "Holy Trinity" is the  reason and basis for why we make food taste good. "Lend me some sugar, I am your neighbor" is both an adage as well as  reminder of the Three Little Pigs and their demise by the scheming Big Bad Wolf . He knew those "pigs" had plenty of sugar to lend….fatal attraction, no doubt. But, sugar is a key ingredient for many recipes as is salt and butter. These staples can take you far and aid you in those culinary endeavors that may seem too lofty. Plus, they add warmth and ambiance and even endearing clutter to your home. I am only sorry that olive oil and garlic were not included. Perhaps, they are lingering in purgatory. I am confident they will get there soon. Both are healing as well as taste enhancing.  Plus, they are both good for the skin, nausea, and the occasional hangover. Yes, roasted garlic and olive oil can give you that jolt that the watery coffee across from your office cannot. 

 Either way, cross yourselves, and think about the gastronomical basics and their ability to uplift your palette. Amen.

 

 

G is for Gluttony

 

Gluttony is a word that invokes immediate denial. Associated with one of the seven deadly sins, it is nothing to gloat about or promote. However, everyone has trespassed at some point in time. It is only a matter of whether the individual can be honest with himself and acknowledge the bed crumbs below his bed, empty bottles lying in the trash bin, or even see the chocolate smeared across his face. 

No doubt, it is a subjective word and entirely depends on your own lexicon of taste. Admittedly, gluttony is a word that I have come to know in the past year. I knew that studying food would require a voracious appetite plus my stomach needed to expand and my palette needed to improve. Fortunately for me, my university was conveniently located in Piedmont Italy, home to some of Italy's best wine varietals as well as only miles from the anchovy belt of Liguria. 

 The pleasure of eating well is a key element of Italian culture. However, it, too has its own roots in gluttony. After all, it was the Romans who set the bar high inventing vomatoriums so they could ride the wave of gluttony. It is not certain if this was the reason for their downfall but it certainly fell in line with the late Empire's lesser attributes of rampant corruption, incest, and other weird voodoo perhaps making the  Gothic barbarian invasion more inevitable and the Romans more vulnerable and a little soft.   

So yes, gluttony comes at a price but it also reveals some truths about human nature....we are bound to fall, to be tempted and to bite, and in this case, overindulge until both our physical and spiritual sensibilites can take these  bilious excesses no more. 

Gluttony can be tragic in the Roman sense or comical - an element that seems to escape much food writing today. I am not sure if it was or can be romantic but I am sure Shakespeare has a sonnet or two with the "G" word. Either way, gluttony, as I have learned can function as a source of gastronomical enlightenment. It teaches you many a lesson, gives you some historical perspectives, a burp, and occasionally a laugh or two. 

 

 

The Food Writing Life

Back in December, Dave Eggers, writer and writing instructor, wrote a short opinion piece in the Washington Post discussing “ the writing life”. Echoes of both Joan Didion and George Orwell’s essay, ‘Why I Write’ came to mind. However, Eggers’ piece was a little less serious and leavened with humor. No doubt, he, like Orwell and Didion, is serious about his craft but he also acknowledges the hiccups and doldrums that grace his “writing days”. Rather, than brood, he muses on the trials and tribulations of being a writer. How it is not “easy come, easy go”, when it comes to constructing the perfectly powerful sentence, to completing an article (on time), or even finishing a novel that one day will be considered a tour de force.

 

Reading Eggers piece made me laugh as well as reminded me of some enduring truths that exist amongst the writing milieu – namely our daily routines. While I would like to think that I sit pensively at a desk or a café all day long constructing words of wisdom about life, its own trials and tribulations, inanities and tragedies, fleeting romances,  implications and greater significance, I am afraid I do not. And with food writing, I find it even more difficult since the distance between the plate and pen are often out of reach.

 

This is the trick with food writing and one that I constantly battle with…. daily. Since I am not cooking, tending my garden (I have one plant), milking cows or herding sheep everyday but sitting on my derrière chained to a desk, thinking about food and its greater implications, all the while I sip copious amounts of tea and coffee and even occasionally forget to eat!

 

Then I sit back and think the whole food-writing thing is a farce and I, myself, am a faux food writer who over intellectualizes food rather than gets her hands dirty.

 

“Oh shit! I missed the farmer’s market because I was working against a deadline, meeting with an editor, or in general have too much work to do”

 

I find these “hiccups” part of my quotidian writing life and it worries me. I call food my muse or métier when in fact it could not be farther from me. This is madness, I think, and I should just quit the whole thing and be honest with myself.

 

But I am honest with myself and therein lies the trick of being a good food writer: honesty - that word that every writer should put under his or her pillow at night whether they write about food, the Middle East, or short story fiction.

 

Honesty must be part of a food writer’s daily gruel and grind. If there is integrity in your writing, if you are able to look the dead fish in the eye, gut it, poach it, and eat it, then your writing will not suffer. Actually, it will go in the opposite direction, making various connections from the experience of your first day in the Valle D'Aosta with strangers who quickly became friends, the trout monger at the foot of the mountain, who with a diligent whap whap and strong iron rod, handed you four fresh and recently departed river trout, and how you learned to gut a fish and to not squeal, to eat it, and to witness  a culinary wizard ask for the skins so she could make fume and to think that this is really cool.

Suddenly, this memory will surface, after your fifth cup of coffee one fine day or depending on the time, a stiff glass of wine. The important part is whether you remember it not just vividly but honestly. This will allow you to convey some truth about that unique experience rather than just paint a pretty and appetizing picture.

 

And this is the real merit and pleasure of taste when it comes to food and probably a food writer’s best ally besides appetite: experience - how we remember things, how we make them our own and how we continually draw upon them and incorporate them into our daily writing life whether we are sometimes cognizant of it or not. Experience has that Proustian tick working its way under our bellies and into our subconscious allowing something to catch and take hold. 

 

Here, you ( i.e. the food writer) begin to see how honesty and experience work together and function as the pillars of your daily writing life. They allow you to go beyond the daily motions of life and especially as a food writer, they allow you to go beyond your taste buds, down through your gut until they begin to rest somewhere in the back of your head until one glorious writing day, this small sliver from the montage of your strange and ever-evolving life will resurface oddly re-grounding and reconnecting you to the plate, even if you happen to be sipping coffee and indulging in cigarettes.

 

Outlaw Cook

John Thorne’s Outlaw Cook is a must have for your gastronomical library. His writing is refreshing, informative, and very modest.

 

There is less pomp and more circumstance in Thorne’s writing. He takes you on a gustatory journey beginning with his early year’s in Manhattan’s lower east side where he skimmed the poverty belt as well as learned how to eat. Whether perfecting his omelet flipping technique or wandering through Chinatown to frequenting the Empanada stands, Thorne discovers that there is more to just being a writer in the Big Apple. Rather, it involves a little sustenance, which soon becomes his muse.

 

The rest of Outlaw Cook, demonstrates that Thorne is an authority on food he is just  a very modest and laid back one, which makes him even more appealing. While he invests in a wood oven stove for some serious bread making, he is also relaxed about the annals of gastronomy and takes pleasure in stirring a pot of chili with a beer in hand. Whether the dish is a success or gastronomical landmark does not matter so much. Rather, it is the process and probably the company, too.

 

In his chapter titled, On Not Being A Good Cook, he simply states:

 

Professional food folk, especially, are confused and sometimes upset by my lack of interest in the sorts of competencies that most interest them. Why do I write about food at all if I’m not an expert in the art of good cooking, nor do I want my readers to be? Because I think you don’t have to be a good cook, or even aspire to be one, to be an interested cook.

 

Here, the reader begins to see that the author is wise and ahead of his years surpassing the foodie snobs and elites proving that simple interest and appetite are all a good food writer needs.

 

Les Gens Ont Faims

 

There is the presumption that because you write about food, you are somehow a skilled and superior cook. I am afraid this is a falsehood and now I would like to put the record straight. If one writes about something, it does not mean that person embodies every aspect of it. If you write about art, are you in fact Cezanne? No, probably not and far from it. No one is but you understand the significance of his work and perhaps identify with the fact that he was a late bloomer while Picasso was not. The main thing is your writing which is your art.

When people realize that I write about food, they assume I can cook anything or identify the different appellations of wines. It’s unlikely and while I do have a wealth of knowledge about some things – I am no expert or culinary wizard.

More so, I am not very detailed in the annals of my metier and prefer to observe the people who are the actual cooks, producers, oenophiles, etc. They gives me my fodder and not to mention my food. So I resolve to wash the dishes aka write, when they are done.

Of course, I do lament that I am not a better cook or a more organized and trained one for that matter. Everything I know is from experience, from watching my Mom, to simply flipping through cookbooks and deciding what looks good, or eating out one night at restaurant thinking to myself – I could cook this at home. I suppose the gut reigns supreme but I don’t go out of my way to push my culinary skills to the test in order to improve my writing. If I did, I would be fooling myself and I would forget my key ingredient: people.

So, I stay interested in food mainly by observing the people in it -their raison d’être, their background, their favorite things to eat and to cook – what makes them tick is far more interesting to me than learning the differences between a béchamel and hollandaise sauce.

Why people do things? How people eat? How they treat and view food and incorporate into their lives – however subtle or profound it may be. It’s curious how much it can reveal about a person, a place – think of the seasons.

From time to time, certain details can be interesting – some clue down a dark alleyway and suddenly you are enlightened. Admittedly, I was happy to learn that marmalade did not come from oranges but from quince, when I was in Portugal. That was defintely interesting, as was our overzealous and often domineering tour guide, Victor and our jamon loving bus driver, Pepe.

My point is that because I am not a very good cook (I am disorganized, messy, and I always leave the grocery list at home) or spend the wee hours of the night studying the Oxford Companion to food that I am a bad food writer. It's just that my focus and inspiration lies elsewehere and it still includes food – just a little differently.

Rather, it is with the people – les gens ont faims (the hungry people) both inconnu (unknown) and connu (known). Afterall, they let me taste food a second time.