Food Writing

Self Reference?

I've long been a fan of John Thorne, author of Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, and Simple Cooking. This is great food writing with much the same sensibility as the best food blogs. In fact, Thorne's books are collections of individual essays. He writes with marvelous evocativeness and a certain dourness reflective of his New England heritage. Best of all, I've learned a great deal about my cooking style and attitudes from reading about his. M.F.K. Fisher also teaches me about my own cooking.

I've been meaning to read Fisher for years and this past winter I finally began doing so. Since January I've read The Gastronomical Me, How to Cook a Wolf, As They Were, and Among Friends. She really does deserve her reputation as America's first great food writer. For instance, she writes: "There are many ways to love a vegetable. The most sensible way is to love it well-treated. Then you can eat it with the comfortable knowledge that you will be a better man for it., in your spirit and in your body too, and will ever have to worry about your own love being a vegetable" (How to Cook a Wolf).

I think you read Fisher, not so much for recipes, as for philosophies. You read a chapter, or a page, or a sentence, and then put the book down to ponder a moment. Sometimes to ponder what she wrote, and other times to ponder what might be fun or interesting or surprising to do with that last bit of hard salami in the refrigerator.

And when my head became too full of darkly ambitious thoughts about food and cooking, I turned to Jeffrey Steingarten, food writer for Vogue.

Why a magazine like Vogue needs a food writer, and how it ended up choosing a lawyer to do the writing baffles me. But Steingarten is tremendous fun to read. He combines passion for food and cooking with what I can only describe as a lawyer's sense of humor. His rants about things like food allergies and raves about things like blood sausage leave your jaws aching with a grin. The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must've Been Something I Ate are a perfect antidote to Fisher's serious reflections.

Along the way I've read Jaques Pepin's The Apprentice -- an apparently genuine likeability shines through this autobiography and leaves you very much wanting to have a meal and a glass of wine with him. And currently I'm reading Calvin Trillin's Feeding a Yen with The Tummy Trilogy yet to go. I've long been a fan of Trillin's wry and often acerbic political wit, but somehow I had never read his food musings. When the topic is food he is more self-deprecating and passionate: "One morning, late in the week, I held out until almost eleven before I bought my first helping of macaroni pie, and found myself boasting to Alice about my willpower."

And don't miss Ruth Riechl's Garlic and Sapphires. It's not food writing but writing about a food writer by the food writer (a partial autobiography). Nevertheless, it's an amusing story easily read in an afternoon.

Food writing for the Web has requirements and limitations the traditional press doesn't encompass. For instance, anything much longer than this piece (about 600 words) probably won't be read. The Web is a medium designed for browsing, not deep reading. And because it's so easy to add photography to an article it's almost incumbent on the writer to do so.

Digital Dish, a collection of writings from food blogs edited by Owen Linderholm, presents a cross-section of articles from food blogs. Not having read it yet, I can't report on how well it succeeds in translating from one medium to another. But it's clearly a worthy experiment.

At heart though, whether writing for Bon Appetit or Il Forno, the main requirements are the same -- clarity and enthusiasm.

For more recipes and essays on food and cooking log on to Seriously Good .