The September 6, 2021 New Yorker Food Issue featured reprints of articles from cooks/writers such as M. F. K. Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, and Susan Orlean, as well as Chapter 6 of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, which is about a dinner party with perhaps enough pirozhki for even my insatiable appetite for tiny savory pies.
But the article that rang my bell, blog-wise, was Adam Gopnik's Cooked Books. Originally published April 9, 2007 as "What's the Point of Food in Fiction?" it starts off with this proposition:
There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader. (New Yorker)
Now it is true that most books have food in them. The glaring exception being, of all things, The Tale of Genji, 1066 AD, which has endless detailed descriptions of clothing, handwriting, perfumes, flowers, ghosts, and sex. But the only mention of actual food is medicinal, when a woman asks a lover that he please not stop by that night since she still reeks from eating garlic, believed to cure colds.
But most of the time, food is a way of giving the characters something to do, or a reason to get together. Especially if someone's going to be poisoned by foxglove in the sage dressing, fish paste in the sandwiches, or just hit with a frozen leg of lamb that will be roasted later on with (I hope) rosemary and garlic.
Side note: While Gopnik mentions James Bond's (a/k/a Fleming's) obsession with food, the quote I remember best is Felix Leiter's discourse on martinis in Thunderball. I read it in junior high, sitting in the back row during some godawful boring assembly. Now I'd already had a martini or two (this was the summer my mother worked her way through the Bartender's Manual with interesting results for all), and didn't like them: I was too young, and favored Cuba Libres. But the passage stuck with me. The trouble was I was reading the entire Bond series at the time (a thing, like work my way through the Bartender's Manual, that I never plan to do again), and I couldn't remember which one it was. But here it is, found at last:
The Martinis arrived. Leiter took one look at them and told the waiter to send over the barman. When the barman came, looking resentful, Leiter said, “My friend, I asked for a Martini and not a soused olive.” He picked the olive out of the glass with the cocktail stick. The glass, that had been three-quarters full, was now half full. Leiter said mildly, “This was being done to me while the only drink you knew was milk. I’d learned the basic economics of your business by the time you’d graduated to Coca-Cola. One bottle of Gordon’s Gin contains sixteen true measures – double measures that is, the only ones I drink. Cut the gin with three ounces of water and that makes it up to twenty-two. Have a jigger glass with a big steal in the bottom and a bottle of those fat olives and you’ve got around twenty-eight measures. Bottle of gin here costs only two dollars retail, let’s say around a dollar sixty wholesale. You charge eighty cents for a Martini, one dollar sixty for two. Same price as a whole bottle of gin. And with your twenty-eight measures to the bottle, you’ve still got twenty-six left. That’s a clear profit on one bottle of gin of around twenty-one dollars. Give you a dollar for the olives and the drop of vermouth and you’ve still got twenty dollars in your pocket. Now, my friend, that’s too much profit…”
But moving along, back to Gopnik and cooking from/ with/ in/ off the books. First, I find it sad that he never mentioned Fanny Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, which combines murder, friendship, race relations, my favorite lesbian couple (outside of Angela Thirkell's Hampton and Bent) in all of literature, and a lot of cooking. Ms. Flagg even provides excellent recipes for everything except - well, read the book. Those fried green tomatoes really are delicious. But maybe it was too low-brow for Gopnik.
On the other hand, he likes Robert B. Parker's Spenser, who does cook a lot. The thing is, to me, I was never interested in any the dishes Spenser made. And his constant production of cornbread was always a mystery to me, when a light, flaky buttermilk biscuit is just as easy to make and tastes better with gravy.
Another author Gopnik didn't mention was James M. Cain, which is a shame, because Mildred Pierce is both my favorite of all his works, and the one that finally taught me how to make those light, flaky buttermilk biscuits with the simple line: "She made pie crust, for biscuits." 100% correct. All you have to do is make a short pie crust made with baking soda and buttermilk, barely knead it, and cut thick.
BTW, Cain often seems to describe every meal the hero or heroine has, which makes sense considering how many of his novels are set in hard times. He also uses food and sex kind of interchangeably.
In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frank's first meal at Nicks' diner is "orange juice, corn flakes, fried eggs and bacon, enchilada, flapjacks, and coffee", and it's Cora who makes the enchiladas. She's hot in more ways than one.
In Mildred Pierce, Mildred is an excellent cook, but it doesn't hurt that she uniforms her staff and self in "sharkskin dresses, of a shade just off white, white with a tint of cream in it, and... little Dutch caps... Always vain of her legs, she had the dresses shortened a little. Now, she hurriedly got into one, put on her Tip-Top shoes, stuck on the little cap... she looked like the cook in a musical comedy." It works: her ex-husband Bert and her first ex-lover Wally eye her legs and her restaurant, but it's her current lover, gentleman ne'er-do-well Monty Beragon, who takes her home: "I've been looking at that damned costume all night, and with great difficulty restrained myself from biting it. Now, get it off."
In noir, sex and food and ambition are all wrapped up as tight as Cora's enchiladas.
Of course, when we talk of detection and food, we have to talk about Nero Wolfe, whose life revolves around books, orchids and food: solving mysteries at high prices is how he pays for them. I have a copy of The Nero Wolfe Cookbook (by Rex Stout and the Editors of the Viking Press). And I've read a lot, if not all, of the Nero Wolfe stories and novels.
A few things leap out:
Nero Wolfe was as obsessed with eggs as Anthony Bourdain. Eggs burgundian, coddled eggs, eggs au buerre noir, apricot omelets, bacon and apricot omelets, strawberry omelets, shirred eggs (one scoop of flour away, I hate to tell Wolfe, from toad in the hole), clams hashed with eggs, forty minute scrambled eggs, etc., - none of which I have made, because I need a Fritz to make something that time-consuming that early in the morning. Nor have I nor will I ever make my own scrapple, brioche, or green tomato jam. And Fritz puts sugar in his buttermilk biscuits - Anathema!
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| Stan Hunt © The American Magazine (June 1949) – Wikipedia |
Also, frankly, Fritz often overdoes the richness: the flounder swimming in cheese over buttered noodles is enough to make Gunter Grass' Flounder choke on his sorrel. And there's ingredients you can't even hope to find today in most American butcher shops, much less grocery stores: kidneys, tripe, turtle steaks, quail... and starlings?
Of course, things used to be different. In my childhood I remember seeing kidneys, liver, gizzards, and brains for sale right there in the meat counter at Safeway. Grossed me right out. Now you have to ask at the local if they even have liver, and they'll look at you funny. (And they do not carry songbirds, thank God.)
Also, Wolfe - or Fritz - never seemed to have heard of sweet red peppers, which certainly existed prior to modern times. Green peppers show up in recipes where they never should, including Fritz' Hungarian Goulash (p. 94), which I have made, replacing the green peppers with red, and using a strong Russian vodka in place of Polish vodka. It was pretty good, served with buttered noodles, Celery and Cantaloupe Salad (p. 35), Tomato Tarts (p. 51), Corn Cakes (p. 80), and Blueberry Grunt (p. 59). We had 10 for dinner, including ourselves, and we all ate well. But I have a feeling that Fritz would have served more unctuous side dishes than we did. What Nero Wolfe really needed with every meal was a side of lipitor.
And, looking over the cookbook, and the novels, I have to agree with what Archie Goodwin said in The Final Deduction:
“At the dinner table, in between bites of deviled grilled lamb kidneys with a sauce he and Fritz had invented, he explained why it was that all you needed to know about any human society was what they ate. If you knew what they ate you could deduce everything else—culture, philosophy, morals, politics, everything. I enjoyed it because the kidneys were tender and tasty and that sauce is one of Fritz’ best, but I wondered how you would make out if you tried to deduce everything about Wolfe by knowing what he had eaten in the past ten years. I decided you would deduce that he was dead.”
Ya think?
PS - Some people have asked about the on-going shenanigans in South Dakota, from the further fallout of the Pandora Papers, to the current investigations (two!) of our Governor, to the apparent race to see how many state legislators can get a DUI covered up, to the SD Senate Majority Leader's son, who got almost $750,000 in coronavirus relief funds for a SD business which was actually located, operated, and paying (some) taxes in Texas - fear not, eager readers. All shall be revealed.
