Food as history
Oct. 22nd, 2006 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and enjoyed it (although his defensive machoism (drugs, sex, endurance cooking) does get a mite irritating at times), and I'm enjoying Poppy Z Brite's New Orleans chef/restaurant series (Liquor and The Value of X, so far; I'm behind). This book, however, starts off like these ones - the grinding and unattainable perfection of restaurant cooking, the repetition, the training, and the slow process of getting it, interspersed with tidbits of history or technique - but ended up somewhere else; one of those books which gives you something you needed, but hadn't expected or even necessarily conceived of, beforehand.
, is about the author's journey into Italian cookery, from working in the kitchens of a three-star restaurant in New York, to learning to make pasta in Italy, to working with a butcher (more, an artist) in a hard-scrabble area of Tuscany. He keeps himself out of his writing to a large degree - you find out he has a wife, at least, but there's nothing else of his life outside the kitchen (where does he live? How does he get to, and from, work? What does he think about anything other than cookery?), which is refreshing and effective, as you do feel you know him anyway, because cooking becomes so crucial to him. He is also prone to obsessions and good at research, tracing the history of Italian cookery by reading increasingly elderly recipe books, emailing the secretary of the pasta museum to ask her (subject line "urgent question") when Italians first began mixing their pasta dough with egg.
The restaurant training section is rewarding in the way any well-written description of learning a skill is rewarding, and the pasta section repeats this with the addition of tradition and family, the ghosts of ancestors present in the repetition of each recipe. The butchery section, the final one, is different again, and I need to think about it some more to sort this out. It's partly about learning about meat, something most of us are cut off from in many ways; it's also about tradition, and family, but in darker (and obviously bloodier) ways than the pasta section. Dario, the butcher Buford works with, had planned to leave the family trade; be a vet instead. His career was decided instead by his father's deathbed command, and his relationship with his job is less apprentice, more artist, where each product is a transient masterpiece. It's about respect for food, and about what Buford describes as the difference between "small food" (local, handmade, seasonal) and "big food", but it's also about the relationship between people and food, specifically Italians, and the neglected importance of this. Buford pays attention; to people, to cooking, to history, and to his own writing, and although I don't own a copy of this book myself yet, I will be buying one shortly.
, is about the author's journey into Italian cookery, from working in the kitchens of a three-star restaurant in New York, to learning to make pasta in Italy, to working with a butcher (more, an artist) in a hard-scrabble area of Tuscany. He keeps himself out of his writing to a large degree - you find out he has a wife, at least, but there's nothing else of his life outside the kitchen (where does he live? How does he get to, and from, work? What does he think about anything other than cookery?), which is refreshing and effective, as you do feel you know him anyway, because cooking becomes so crucial to him. He is also prone to obsessions and good at research, tracing the history of Italian cookery by reading increasingly elderly recipe books, emailing the secretary of the pasta museum to ask her (subject line "urgent question") when Italians first began mixing their pasta dough with egg.
The restaurant training section is rewarding in the way any well-written description of learning a skill is rewarding, and the pasta section repeats this with the addition of tradition and family, the ghosts of ancestors present in the repetition of each recipe. The butchery section, the final one, is different again, and I need to think about it some more to sort this out. It's partly about learning about meat, something most of us are cut off from in many ways; it's also about tradition, and family, but in darker (and obviously bloodier) ways than the pasta section. Dario, the butcher Buford works with, had planned to leave the family trade; be a vet instead. His career was decided instead by his father's deathbed command, and his relationship with his job is less apprentice, more artist, where each product is a transient masterpiece. It's about respect for food, and about what Buford describes as the difference between "small food" (local, handmade, seasonal) and "big food", but it's also about the relationship between people and food, specifically Italians, and the neglected importance of this. Buford pays attention; to people, to cooking, to history, and to his own writing, and although I don't own a copy of this book myself yet, I will be buying one shortly.
