Choosing books about food to read is a funny thing. It seems a majority of what is written falls into the category of illustrated recipe collections or step-by-step cooking tips to prepare a simple or fancy dish. Up on a ladder searching the alphabetized shelves of the cookbook section of a prominent used bookstore, this notion becomes fact. Every possibility that appeared interesting as a serious book about food by its cover, nevertheless, when opened often showed many pretty pictures with a minimum of text. But luckily, two titles of interest, or rather two books written by two familiar authors, deviated, stuck out like a sore thumb, from the ocean of "flavor of the month" cooking manuals.
One book that immediately caught my eye was a slender volume from North Point Press of Serve it Forth by MFK Fisher. Subtly colored of ripe orangy mango and trendy light mauve, yet graceful, its cover features a Hurrell-influenced black and white photo of a younger MFK Fisher staring pensively off. Years earlier as a sales clerk at a major discount bookstore chain familiarized me with her name and reputation as a bigshot, a heavyweight, who wrote elegant prose about eating, food, and those involved in both. I took a chance, enamored by its refined classic cover design that whispered "tasteful" in my ear, and flipped through a chapter entitled, "The Standing and the Waiting" while crouching on a stepstool nearby.
What I ingested certainly whetted my appetite to continue on as MFK Fisher reminisced about returning to dine at her favorite out-of-the-way restaurant as a young innocent in France. At the center of her anecdote is a waiter whose perfect service a number of years ago, she absolutely requests, wanting to impress her dining companion, a notable connoisseur, with his skills. This sad fellow, weakened by alcohol, older, and only a shell of his former self, she discovers, was dismissed by the owner just that morning. But he swallows his pride for the sake of MFK Fisher and allows this man the final glory of waiting on her table. As the night at this restaurant progresses, the old guy, shaky at first, grows more confident and through immense force of will transforms himself back into what he used to be, preserving her nostalgia, her perfect moment. I imagined hearing violin strings and said to myself, "Might as well read another----just to make sure."
Next I browsed the chapter entitled, "Garum," of which a passage was read aloud during class as an example of Roman cuisine. Her account of this concocted condiment that Romans became addicted to also reveal her scholarship concerning the history of gastronomy. A wonderful writer, MFK Fisher interweaves the recorded tales of the extravagant circus many upper class Romans spent on exotic evening-long banquets just to "keep up with the Jones" and how, through sheer sensory overload and abuse, come to incorporate garum as a daily part of their diet.
It was hard not to keep reading on, so I decided, one book picked out, one more to go. I climbed back up the ladder and continued my search. Several minutes later, after rejecting a few prospects, I noticed a blue collar-sounding title called Why We Eat What We Eat, a paperback written by Raymond Sokolov. His name rang a bell as a columnist for the Natural History magazine.
While Serve It Forth by MFK Fisher can be described as dessert, something sweetly pleasurable like "tangerine sections dried on top of a radiator in a French pension, then cooled in fresh snow on the windowsill to grow miraculously plumper, hot, and full," Why We Eat What We Eat is strictly "meat and potatoes," the main entree. His book is a didactic historical argument about how Columbus changed the way the world eats. Employing careful research to support this premise, Sokolov dissects his hypothesis geographically by investigating the cuisines of different cultures and ethnicities at first. He points out that most of the food items we associate as authentic cuisine endemic to a particular culture, or more specifically, a certain country most probably originates from another culture or area. For instance, most Americans know Mexican food as tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and quesadillas, but before the Spanish colonized their land, as Sokolov shows, "Mexican cuisine had no dishes with beef, pork, or lamb. There were no dairy products, no milk, no cream, no butter, no cheese. Fried Foods were unknown." Then, according to Sokolov, the Spanish settled into Mexico and brought along many domestic livestock to supply themselves with familiar foods. Eventually, their meat, milk, and cheese made the Mexican food we recognize, possible.
Secondly, Sokolov extends his supposition to include specific foods such as the tomato. A New World food, this fruit, some say vegetable mistakingly, travelled back across the Atlantic to become a main staple for Italian cooking. This so-called food revolution is responsible, as far as Sokolov is concerned, for the cross-fertilization, exchange of traditional cooking ideas and foods that ultimately created nouvelle cuisine as new inventive dishes surface from one culture borrowing from another.
Like Fisher, Sokolov travels the world to encounter first hand his food experiences. The notable difference between this similiarity is that Sokolov visits various places usually as a socioanthropologist interested in food and cooking. Fisher is a gourmet prone to the trimmings of the gastronomic world. While he is plain scientific curiosity, probing information to check its authenticity, she, on the other hand, epitomizes the finer arts of higher and better living. Her book is a poetry of gastronomic anecdotes; his book, a feast for the mind of factual information written in the first person, an exploration of the changes in the world's tastes.
Both the books I have chosen represent a love of food. Through the gourmet eyes of both Sokolov and Fisher, although his is more objective and hers more traditional, subjective, the world of food can be tasted, seen, heard, pondered, and felt. To read as I did about food from their perspective, their distinct writing styles compares to your basic two-course meal. I gorge off the big course of Why We Eat What We Eat first, leaving room for Serve it Forth as dessert. Educational, enlightening, and entertaining, the only thing remaining to do is loosen the belt buckle and sigh, "Mmm boy, good reading."