Getting sent to my room as a kid was no dire sentence; in fact, I probably schemed up some minor infractions from time to time hoping for such a verdict. Holed up in my room, I was free to travel anywhere I pleased through the world of books: everything from old baseball biographies (I once read Phillie first baseman Dick Allen’s bio in one sitting, even though I never once saw him play an inning) to The World Book Encyclopedia and The Guinness Book of World Records (my favorites were the eating — read: gluttony — records) to your many varietals of short and long-form fiction.
My first exposure to a lot of things (hello, sex!) came through reading, but one of the more transforming effects of my bookworming came through reading descriptions of food and eating. As with sex, I would often scan a book for the tasty parts, reveling in the mouth-watering descriptions (great food scenes, as with sex, must be written with hunger).
My own mother was — and is — an amazing down-home style cook, able to whip up a tasty meat-and-three within minutes. However, my first real obsession with gastronomy began with those quiet evenings tucked up in bed, some classic or shoulda-been classic or just-plain-not-classic-at-all (Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever, read three times) propped up underneath the covers.
I read with a trencherman’s relish about James Bond dipping fresh-cracked lobster into melted butter and washing it all down with a few draughts of pink champagne. I felt the sand between my toes as Jack Kerouac’s alter-ego Ray Smith “chomp chomped” wieners and beans while camping underneath the stars on a moonlit California night. I wished for an island of my own as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and their gang of merry pirates whiled away a few days of childhood freedom from bathing and prayers and, to use Huck’s phrase, “all that old truck.” In fact, one particular passage from that book — Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — has stuck with me throughout the years and never fails to get my mouth watering.
Huck found a spring of clear cold water close by, and the boys made cups of broad oak or hickory leaves and felt that water, sweetened with such a wildwood charm as that, would be a good enough substitute for coffee. While Joe was slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him to hold on for a minute. They stepped to a promising nook and threw in their lines; almost immediately, they had reward. Joe had not had time to get impatient before they were back again with some handsome bass, a couple of sun perch and a small catfish… provisions enough for quite a family. They fried the fish with the bacon and were astonished, for no fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They didn’t know that the quicker a freshwater fish is on the fire after he’s caught, the better he is; and they reflected little upon what a sauce open-air sleeping, open-air exercise, bathing and a large ingredient of hunger makes, too.
Passages like this represent great food writing, sure, but they’re also just plain great writing. I don’t just want the description of a meal, I want the context. I want to feel a writer’s passion come through with his diction, his grammar. I want the joy and pain of life. I want the background. I want to see how the food fits into the Great Knowing. It’s for this reason that “food” writers like Jim Harrison and M.F.K. Fisher hold my attention for years, while the work of most current food scribes — John T. Edge and Jeffrey Steingarten excepting — seems to me the equivalent of fast food: flavorless, generic and aimed at the largest possible demographic.
Great food writing even does that rarest of things: It moves me immediately to the kitchen. I’ve prepared homemade franks and beans while rereading Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and I’ve found that Thomas Wolfe’s idea of mint-and-cinnamon-infused butter on a chargrilled steak to be inspiration of the highest order. Wolfe wrote with more energy and sheer hunger than most any novelist this country has ever produced. If the writing thing hadn’t worked out — and, some might argue, it didn’t — he would have made a hell of a chef. The man spends three pages describing a single meal in his underrated The Web and The Rock.
They say a great book leaves you hungry for more. In the right hands, it can leave you hungry, too.
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2005.
