The Year in Reading Food

Bittersweet on the page

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Wednesday, Dec 17 2008

You know that scene in Annie Hall, when Diane Keaton tells Woody Allen, as the two are dividing their library after the breakup, that all the books on death and dying are his? When I look over at the nightstand, taking quick inventory of what I’ve been reading over the last few months, the pile is depressingly salted with books on the death and dying of the ocean, not just passages from the usual Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser, or Paul Roberts’ baleful The End of Food, but things like the fish-death travelogue Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe, the even more mournful The End of the Line by British journalist Charles Clover, and Mark Kurlansky’s The Last Fish Tale, a meditation on the slow decline of the fishing lifestyle in Gloucester, Massachusets. (His last one, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, was an improbably good history of New York City as seen through the prism of the shellfish in its harbor. Dying shellfish, it goes without saying.) In this company, Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic, Redmond O’Hanlon’s puke-by-puke, fish gut–scented account of a fishing voyage in the stormy North Sea, is almost uplifting, even if it does sound like the worst boat ride on Earth. Sasha Issenberg’s TheSushi Economy may be only slightly pessimistic but in some ways — bluefin tuna, a majestic animal that once ruled the Atlantic as the lion does the Serengeti, is nearing extinction because an airline executive needed something to fill the holds of electronics-carrying cargo jets flying empty back to Japan — it is even more depressing.

Throw into the mix Rowan Jacobsen’s Fruitless Fall, about the collapse of the world’s honeybee population (although you wouldn’t know it from the hives that have established themselves in the walls of my sleeping porch) and Alice Feiring’s splendid The Battle for Wine and Love, which mourns the death of honestly made wine. Adam Gollner’s The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession isn’t really about the death of anything, but I find myself mournful at the lack of local opportunities to taste the Seychelles’ forbidden coco de mer, a giant nut shaped like the ass and loins of a beautiful woman. The flavor is “refreshing and sweet with earthy, spunky notes,” Gollner says. “It tastes like coconut flesh, only sexier.”

Anne Fishbein

In dogged pursuit of the perfect licorice infusion

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Extinction, of course, is not limited to creatures that swim. I have a small collection of Paris travel guides from the 1920s, and I am fond of constructing imaginary itineraries through nightclubs and restaurants that haven’t existed for generations. In another 90 years, readers may be poring over Alexander Lobrano’s great new guide, Hungry for Paris, as ravenous for Pierre Gagnaire’s experiments as I am for lièvre à la royale, picking through nostalgia for the vanishing traditions of the 1950s the way I wonder about 1920s wistfulness for the belle époque. Lately, I have been spending almost as much time with Pableaux Johnson’s Eating New Orleans, a loving, rather comprehensive restaurant guide that had the misfortune to be published just a few weeks before Katrina, a genome readout of the city’s gastronomic DNA, a map of a watery world. A huge percentage of the restaurants in the book have reconstituted themselves in one way or another, and Johnson probably has enough material to put together another edition by now, but there is something beautiful about the definitiveness of the current book, a particular culinary moment fixed with a pin.

Johnson’s standing Monday night red beans and rice dinners take a central place in Sara Roahen’s fine memoir Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, which is kind of about a young woman with few traditions settling into a place with many but also manages to be about Katrina, which is rarely mentioned but settles on the pages like dust, every “is” reading as “ought,” every Sazerac and pod of okra rendered salty and bittersweet.

Cookbooks can be bittersweet, too. I first ran into Martha Hall Foose when she was working at the La Brea Bakery in its earliest days, a young Southern woman for whom the word “lovely” was barely sufficient. Her Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, a childhood memoir of the Mississippi Delta disguised as a cookbook, pulls off the magic trick of being at the same time lovely and useful, a place to find graceful versions of things like fried chicken, red velvet cake and sweet tea pie but also a book that leaves you somewhat happier for having spent a few hours in its pages.

The trend in food and cookbooks this year, if there can be said to be a trend, veers from the Rabelaisian fixations of last year, where one out of every two books seemed to be about how to raise, disembowel and transform your own custom-bred Duroc into sausages and stuffed trotters, toward the kind of comprehensive megacompilations that the record industry happened upon years ago.