The Table Comes First

Reading on the Way Home

Though this book isn’t meant to be a scholarly history of the subject, it does draw on scholarly histories, and on the amazing renaissance of academic studies of cooking, culinary, agricultural, and all-around eating history that has appeared in the past quarter-century. This literature hasn’t always been neatly integrated into what amateur diners say about food or think they know about it—bringing the two together is one of the purposes of this book. Some of these new studies were books I was asked to review; more often, they were books I found I had to draw on to make sense of my own senses and appetites.

In places, of course, what the scholars know is less profound than what the eaters already experience. The search for the “ideological” or intellectual basis of how we eat and why we eat what we eat can seem remote, since after all, we eat all the time. But we could say the same about breathing, and it is worth knowing something about how our lungs work, and what kind of air is good for them, even while we go on breathing; we don’t breathe better, but we might breathe easier. The things we do without thinking are often the things most worth thinking about. If we don’t think about them, then the thoughts we have are just the thinking that others have done for us. Good history, even when it’s wrongheaded in parts, always clears away myths and puts better stories in their place; every myth cleared away is a spot where common sense can blossom.

Most of the key books receive shout-outs as called for in this book’s chapters, but, without even remotely pretending to list all of the books that, passing under my eyes in the past quarter-century, entered my mind and thus these pages, let me try to name some of the most obvious and, mostly, scholarly ones, particularly for those who might want to read more.

On restaurants, their invention and meaning, and the life of Paris around the time of their first appearance, Rebecca Spang’s excellent, mind-changing history, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), is essential. So is Amy B. Trubek’s Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). The writings of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson on the birth of the French food “field” (or scene) are indispensable, particularly her Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). W. Scott Haine’s The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) is a mine of information (though he draws the lines between café, bistro, and brasserie too tightly). In French on the same subject, and just as helpful, is Des Tavernes aux Bistrots by Luc Bihl-Willette (Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Hommes, 1997). I also relied on Andrew P. Haley’s Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the Middle Class, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Giles MacDonogh has taken the two great gastronomes, and inventors of food writing and brought them out of legend into history in his Brillat-Savarin: The Judge and His Stomach (London: J. Murray, 1992) and A Palate in Revolution: Grimod de La Reynière and the Almanach des Gourmands (London and New York: Robin Clark, 1987). The best version of Brillat-Savarin’s book for those who read French is the 1975 edition (Paris: Hermann) with a “reading” by Roland Barthes, by far the best thing ever written about Brillat or the birth of gastronomy; in English, the best edition is still M.F.K. Fisher’s translation (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). In French, Francois-Regis Gaudry’s Mémoires du restaurant: histoire illustrée d’une invention française (Geneva: Aubanel, 2006); Alain Huetz de Lemps and Jean-Robert Pitte, Les Restaurants dans le Monde et a travers les ages (Grenoble: Editions Glenat, 1990); and Philippe Alexandre and Beatrix De L’Aulnoit, Le Roi Carême (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003) are all very fine. About Carême, the first great cook, one should also read Ian Kelly’s Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême, the First Celebrity Chef (New York: Walker and Company, 2003). And I should add that the very first book I ever published, in collaboration with the artist (and best high-school friend) Jack Huberman was a cartoon life of Carême, Voilà, Carême! The Gastronomic Adventures of History’s Greatest Chef (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980)—let me know if you can find a copy! It was while researching that book that I first encountered so many others.

The great Robert Courtine of Le Monde had tragically ugly politics when it counted, but his books on the history of French cooking are indispensable, particularly his Le Ventre De Paris: de la Bastille à l’étoile—des siècles d’appétit (Paris: Perrin, 1985), and his Anthologie De La Littérature Gastronomique: Les Ecrivans à Table (Paris: Editions de Trevise, 1970). The last is one of my favorite books; the opening epigraph to this book, from Léon Abric, comes from there.

About the history of recipes, I recommend the chewy The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), which includes, among other good things, a Talia Schaffer essay on Elizabeth Pennell that first made me aware of her. See also Sandra Sherman’s The Invention of the Modern Cookbook (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010).

On France, its cuisine and its crisis, see Michael Steinberger, Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), as well as Patric Kuh’s The Last Days of Haute Cuisine (New York: Viking, 2001). For a sort of defense of the state of the art there’s Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire, Cooking: The Quintessential Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). My friend Benedict Beauge’s Le Gourmand des Quatre Saisons and his wonderful Aventures de la cuisine française (both Paris: Nil editions, 1999) are a defense of French traditions and a critique of them, often on the same page.

On questions of wine, in addition to the historical books mentioned in the text, I turn to Rachel Herz’s The Scent of Desire (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008) and to Lawrence Osborne’s The Accidental Connoisseur (New York: North Point Press, 2004). Maynard A. Amerine and Edward B. Roessler’s Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation (San Francisco: Freeman & Company, 1976) is also a lot of fun. On spices, including sugar, and their history, there is Wendy Woloson’s Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and Nicholas Whittaker’s Sweet Talk: The Secret History of Confectionery (London: Gollancz, 1998) and, more far reaching, Andrew Dalby’s Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) and, most stimulating of all, Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New York: Vintage, 1993).

On larger, more ultimate if moony questions of What It All Means for Man, I learned from James E. McWilliams’s A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009), and Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Walker, 2009). The great Canadian scholar Margaret Visser’s many writings on the rituals of eating are essential, too, though for some reason I haven’t found the occasion to quote them nearly as often as I read them. Inspiring studies in the anthropology of the table, I’d be glad if some subtle shared Canadian hue colors every one of these pages. I’d particularly single out her The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (New York: Penguin, 1992). A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals remains the model. It seems only right, and fit, that I first encountered Jacques Decour, and his last letter, in Liebling’s great, now overlooked anthology of French Resistance writing, The Republic of Silence (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1947).

Darra Goldstein’s extraordinary journal Gastronomica has become a constant resource for anyone concerned with the higher history of the higher (and lower) cooking; I’m happy and proud to say that the chapter on the problem of taste, and its history, in this book began life as the keynote lecture at a symposium at Williams College on the occasion of Gastronomica’s tenth birthday.

And in addition to the dedicatees, especial thanks to the cooks who have illuminated my life, and made me always aware that beneath all conversation and arguments are the plain facts of the kitchen, and among them most of all Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, and Ruthie Rogers. My thanks to my first family, the original table, Mom Myrna, Dad Irwin, Alison, Morgan, Blake, Hilary, Melissa; I still set a table for eight in my mind. (In memoriam: Eugenio Donato.) And to George Andreou, who composed the menu, and Henry Finder, who tasted all the plats. And thanks, too, to Lydia Buechler at Knopf, and to my indispensable and alarmingly brilliant trio of assistant- apprentices who have occupied the lion’s chair in the hallway while this book was being written—who dug out books, made lists, and read chapters and, for this one, actually tested recipes: Rebecca Cooper, Madeline Schwartz, and, especially, Ariel Knutson.