Original Food Porn: “American Food Writing” … with recipes

Greeting and hallucinations, my dears, and welcome.

First, nods of thanks. Two new people deigned to follow me since I last posted. Rahul, April, thank you for joining the insanity, and I hope you won’t regret it.

(Small warning: food pun ahead!)

The term “food porn” has only been coined recently, but reading and writing about food is as old as the mid-1700s, before America became the United States. From preparation to cooking to eating, food has never been just about sustaining life but enhancing it. Molly O’Neill brought together such articles, recipes, and at least one novel excerpt in one volume.

The first nonfiction book reviewed here, it has collected from a wide range of disparate sources and writers, including: a chapter from Moby Dick by Melville, expounding on the various chowders available to whaling crews; the original recipe for ice cream Jefferson had brought from France; and as recent as the late Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000) and Michael Pollan’s take on the organic food industry.

As much as the articles are about food, many of them link it to a particular culture, like Jade Snow Wong and Chinese immigration in 1930s San Francisco. Others equate it with a sense of community, like Langston Hughes and soul food during the Harlem Renaissance (and how bad service can ruin the best cooking). There are nods to the food industry, those people who earn their living making and breaking reputations of restaurateurs and chefs (thank you, Nora Ephron).

Other articles expound on various restaurants and how they are run, from a humble Paris bistro to French restaurants in New York and Chicago. One article by Alice Waters details the opening of San Francisco’s Chez Panisse and the beginning of California cuisine. An article recounts the early days of McDonald’s turning into the chain of fast-food places we’ve come to know, while another nods at the 1980s updating of cooking food on car engines. (Don’t laugh; long-haul truck drivers had been doing it for years before.) Even the late, great Julia Child contributed from the earliest days of cooking television, with her memories of filming the pilots of The French Chef before it finally landed on PBS for the following three decades.

The recipes are also slices of history. From ice cream and hoe cakes to Lady Bird Johnson’s recipe for chili, they cover almost everything for 250 years. When the recipes also include a recipe from Rex Stout, creator of the gourmand armchair detective Nero Wolfe, you know it’s as complete as it can get, without being updated for the last decade. (FYI, this book makes a distinction between gourmet and gourmand that is quite funny.)

At 728 pages (not counting the bibliography and index), it is dense, but it doesn’t need to be devoured all at once. It can be taken in smaller bites and nibbles. Think of it as bookworm snacking.

“American Food Writing” is available from the Library of America.

Thank you for reading my ramblings, my dears, and I hope to hear from you. If you’d like to recommend a book for me to read and review, or even need me as an editor for your own work, please leave a comment or contact me.

In the meantime, keep reading, keep writing, and never give up making your own magic. Be well.