Foraging Intellects in a Wintry Wild

Jan. 21, 2010

I admit I've been bad. But it's winter, and the cold inspires it. You know what I mean -- Eating chocolates, sipping espresso, listening to Miles, Coltrane and Bill Evans on that penultimate jazz album, Kind of Blue. In short, doing what I want to do. And, of course, reading whenever I can.

I'm only halfway through the mammoth compendium, Secret Ingredients, enjoying a diverse sampling of styles and culinary subjects that bring to life the culture of various times, but, so far, only three essays have stood out.

One, describes foodie Joseph Wechsberg's first foray to the famed Restaurant de la Pyramide, once considered the finest restaurant in France, run by the formidable Fernand Point. Wechsberg's piece, published in 1949, is in the style of a short story, with the climax being a grand lunch, the sort that few of us will ever be lucky enough to enjoy, but that clearly has the capacity to illuminate the sensibilities and even transform --like a work of art.

After pates, croute, and foie gras, Wechsberg is informed by M. Point: "'A good meal must be as harmonious as a symphony and as well constructed as a good play. As it progresses, it should gain in intensity, with the wines getting older and more full-bodied.'"

Wechsberg's final take on the experience? -- "Whenever I think back to that lunch, I feel contentedly well fed; the memory of it alone seems almost enough to sustain life."

Next, I fell upon a charming essay about Julia Child. What, concerning Julia Child, does not turn out to be charmante? I really wished I'd watched her cooking shows way back when. I was distracted instead by The Galloping Gourmet's fun-loving, loopy antics as he guzzled wine and cooked.

Child was a determined perfectionist. She took 10 years to complete Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which is renowned for its fine detail and precision, and she was known on her television shows for rooting as much for the success of a dish as for her audiences as she taught them how to cook. Whenever she herself failed at a recipe, or ruined a dish, she would do it over -- sometimes more than once -- all the while, instructing her viewers, "Never give up!" Her super involvement in making a recipe work, fascinated and won over fans. But it wasn't only her personality that worked for viewers, Child had character and aplomb.

Lastly, I had no idea how fascinating Euell Gibbons was, or how valuable his obsession with wild food. Writer John McPhee describes a days' long trek he took with Gibbons with intimate, almost tender detail. While accommodating to chilly temperatures and inclement weather, McPhee learns how to forage and prepare a few of nature's edibles -- such as dandelions, walnuts, and various teas -- many of which turn out to be tasty and satisfying!

McPhee's description of Gibbons is unique and masterful: "His head is a high and narrow one, with a long stretch from chin to forehead but a short distance from ear to ear, as if he had somehow successfully grown up in the space between two city buildings."

Gibbons, a Quaker, was wise, complicated and ahead of his time. His ruminations on nature became pearls on the subject: "The product I gather out here means something different to me than food from a store, but I don't feel that I have made nature stand and pay tribute. I know that when I disturb the earth to get these plants I will almost always cause more of them to grow. I don't like to eat Indian cucumbers, because I have to destroy the plants to get them. I don't want to destroy; I want to play the part I am supposed to play in relation to plants. I come to a persimmon tree and the tree is growing something sweet, so I'll eat it and scatter the seed. When I do that, I'm carrying out the role I'm supposed to be carrying out. Nature has many, many balances, and we have to find a balance that includes man. If man accepts that he has to be a part of the balance, he must reject the idea of the conquest of nature Whenever I read that phrase, 'conquest of nature,' I feel a little depressed. Man is part of the total ecology. He has a role to play, and he can't play it if he doesn't know what it is -- or if he thinks that he is conquering something."

Sad to say, McPhee's interview with Gibbons took place more than 40 years ago, and some folks have yet to realize the truth in Gibbons' words!

Food and Memory at The New Yorker

Jan. 10, 2010

Between watching Bourdain and reading about recipes, I've learned the best food is often found in the most surprising places -- not necessarily a restaurant, but a warm, intimate hearth, where people comfortably gather to drink, eat and laugh. So too, the best recipes are not necessarily found in the hands of the pros, but of ordinary people -- Aunt June's legumes, Uncle Frost's turkey, neighbor Betsy's apple pie. Cookbooks comprised of such recipes may rank among the best. M.F.K. Fisher writes about this in her wonderful, The Secret Ingredient.

Having a penchant these days for books that surpass 500 pages, I'm now into Secret Ingredients, The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick. Let me tell you, launching on a read like this feels a bit like hiking up the Himalayas -- You really want to get to the finish, but can't imagine how you are going to get there!

I like Remnick for a couple of very good reasons, aside from the fact that he is the current editor of The New Yorker. He had the good grace to apologize for the way his magazine went along with other media, initially failing to challenge the Bush II regime for its decision to invade Iraq. Remnick was eloquent and humble, addressing a full house on this subject at Fairleigh Dickinson University a few years ago, when I met him.

Remnick is also just a B.A., like I am. He got his at Princeton. I got mine at Wesleyan (the one in Middletown). I am fully prepared to list him as a model, if, during any of my work searches for the position of magazine editor, someone challenges my level of education -- "If it's good enough for David, it's good enough for me," I will tell them.

He's also the only writer I've ever asked for an autograph. I'm not quite sure why, as I don't do that sort of thing. I guess I was just overwhelmed with a sense of awe and respect for the man at the time.

The whole autograph thing seems silly -- even though I know people make money off it -- Ann Margret for example, and her husband Roger, who, despite outward appearances, does still live. They collect money from poor schmucks who have a lot less than they do every year at venues like Chiller Theater in New Jersey, where people who will never have their 15-minutes of fame come to almost claim it, rubbing shoulders with those that have been there. There's a whole list of celebrities who show up for this. Once in a while, they'll claim to be passing along your meager fortunes to some cause, but I find the whole thing rather cheap and disgusting -- and I don't use those words easily, or lightly.

But on to more urbane and sophisticated subjects, such as The New Yorker and its writers and reads. In Secret Ingredients, I'm venturing into the one department I never spent a minute on, all the years I faithfully scanned The New Yorker, "cover to cover."

Reading TNY usually meant for me, glancing at all the cartoons, reading the fiction -- which has remained exceptional through a slew of diverse editors, including Remnick -- and the delightfully detailed portraits of people and places that are the magazine's trademark.

In his intro to Secret Ingredients, Remnick notes that Harold Ross, TNY's founding editor (who had a very bad stomach) had the idea to put together "a recipe compendium for the gastrointestinally challenged" called "Good Food for Bad Stomachs." William Shawn (who had a very good stomach and long life, and succeeded Ross as editor) wasn't as interested in food. When gathering to dine with the famous writers of the Algonquin Hotel, he would order an insipid bowl of cereal and leave it virtually untouched, favoring to dialogue instead with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Wolcott and a few brilliant others.

One can understand.

What I love and have always loved about TNY is that you can't get through an issue without reading an essay so chock full of detail, you really feel you've ingested a fine meal or book at the end. Even after Tina Brown's modern tweaking of TNY, all I have to do is glance at a cover to recall Paris of the 20s or The Algonquin Round Table or any of the grand drunks that happened to be great writers who were a part of those scenes and became constants at the magazine.

I often wish I'd lived in Paris of the 20s or New York's East Village in the 30s, or 50s, when so much that was vibrant and real in the way of art was happening -- all the best conversations, best ideas and great works. I'm always looking for a thread to these times in TNY criticisms and commentaries. And I like that TNY treats and has always treated both the past and memory, at least upper class past and memory, as national treasures.

Once a TNY writer always a TNY writer. The list is endless, and urbane. Hemingway, Updike, Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme in the fiction department.

The aspiration to write at TNY until you drop runs true for the food writers too. A.J. Liebling began his food writing tenure at TNY in 1935 and continued until his death in 1963. Calvin Trillin took over in 1963 and still writes for TNY.

In one piece, Liebling had one of his characters observe to Adam and Eve: "First parents of the human race... you lost all for an apple, what would you not have done for a truffled turkey?"

Sounds like the one-liner of a TNY cartoon.

As Remnick wryly observed, TNY's editors "understood ...that a magazine travels not only with its mind, but also... on its stomach. Food is a subject of subsistence, manners, pleasure, and diversion."

Remember the discovery scientists made a few years back that humans possess a second brain in the stomach? Was it really a surprise? All things are interrelated -- the stomach to the mind, the meal to the read.

Now back to my long winter's feast.

New Year's Medley

Jan. 4, 2010

I'm gingerly working back to food reading, since that's what keeps my interest piqued. Last week, I read Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl's delectable memoir of "growing up at the table." She is the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, and, as you may recall, I blogged recently about her memoir about her eccentric mother.

Of the two books, I prefer Tender at the Bone. It's like the difference between a smorgasbord and a plate of scrambled eggs with everything tossed in -- I'll take the buffet. The smorgasbord includes portraits of the charming and wise Mrs. Peavey, a great cook from Reichl's early childhood days; the beautiful and proud Serafina, Reichl's college roommate and best friend who learns as an adult that she is both Black and adopted; Doug, the sculptor Reichl marries who turns out to be much like her father; and the indelible charm, Milton, who is the quintessential tour guide. You will find recipes in this book relating to each period of Reichl's life, and you will enjoy the read, appreciating the delectable characters as much as the recipes.

In case you think I'm limited to reading just one book a week, I'm going to confess that I read more than that. And would read still more, if I could. I'm also halfway through the 500-page Practicing the Path, A Commentary on the Lamrim Chenmo, by Yangsi Rinpoche, to which, you, reader, may now be responding --Huh? What? And, to which I will reply -- Exactly. You have to be there when it comes to this one. Still, I urge you to explore it and any other Buddhist texts you are moved to read. You don't have to be Buddhist to read about the religion or agree or disagree with its tenets. And thankfully, Buddhists don't sell their religion.

Segueying further, I also read Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, and pretty much annihilated a section of a jazz encyclopedia, reading about jazz pianists. If you don't know by now -- and why would you, you haven't been listening to what I hear as I type -- jazz of the 40s and 50s, bebop and hard bop, is a kind of obsession.

Evans was a hard bopper, the first "modal" pianist, an American Chopin. Jersey-born, he was known for his classical touch and his ability to make the piano "sing." He explored modal language with trumpeter Miles Davis, whom he joined in 1958. Evans had the gift of being able to communicate his feelings on musical instruments -- and was able to create a singing vernacular with his left hand on the piano. Downbeat magazine ranked him second only to Thelonius Monk, that great spontaneous jazz pianist. Evans was a member of a few trios and quintets and was well-respected internationally, particularly in France. He worked with the talented bassist Scott LaFaro, whose death in a car accident in 1961 not only ended the trio that included Evans, but devastated Evans so much, he didn't play for months. Evans himself died in 1980 from bronchial pneumonia and a hemorraghing ulcer, but really from drug abuse that had plagued him for two decades, resulting in bouts of malnutrition and hepatitis. A friend of Evans' once observed that his "was the longest suicide in history."

As is true with so many of my jazz faves, once you read about them, you have to set down the stories and return to the music, which, thankfully, continues to "sing."

And, while you're listening to the likes of Fats Waller, Art Tatum or Monk, grab yourself a piece of fine chocolate. It's the new year, after all, and resolutions were meant to be broken. I was just perusing the bookshelves at Barnes & Noble and came upon the most delectable image of a chocolate dessert...

Reading is like eating. One good thing leads to another, and another. And another.

The Risks of Unraveling

Dec. 26, 2009

A few years ago, journalist Norah Vincent went underground as a gender spy, dressing and living as a man in order to write, Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back. Her book garnered accolades and became a New York Times best-seller. But the emotional price of her 18-month experiment was a nervous breakdown. The experience led to her next book, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin.

Vincent launched her loony bin experiment getting off the meds her psychiatrist had prescribed -- Prozac, or Vitamin P, as she called it-- and voluntarily committing herself, first to a city public hospital, then a small private hospital, and finally, a holistic recovery facility.

Early on in her experiment, Vincent writes, "Being put away does a number on you very quickly, and very thoroughly, no matter who you are in the outside world." She also recognizes fairly soon that the brain -- unlike the kidney or other types of the body -- requires more than medicine in order to be treated. It requires empathy.

You have to marvel at Vincent's brazenness and willingness to go the distance. She informs her insurance company that she (not they) should foot the bill for her institutional stays, as she is a journalist doing research, and shells out $14,700 not once, but twice -- to the public institution, then to the private facility, both of which put her in a state of roiling anxiety about all the freedoms she's turned over. Vincent doubts whether she can recover in these places, where patients are over-medicated, and conditions, often inadequate.

Vincent becomes fascinated by the habits and prognoses of the patients she encounters in wards, but their colorful stories would be old news to anyone who's ever been in rehab or made the rounds of recovery rooms for group therapy.

Vincent writes with confidence and her quirky observations can be inspired -- as she depicts day-to-day life among the addicted and mentally ill, and particularly as she questions her own mind, her surroundings and the system into whose hands she's entrusted herself.

She asks, for example, "How does one exist as a self, as a discrete person in the world, and yet not inhabit one's own self?" While at a private hospital, where she finds herself spending too much time curled up alone on the tiles of her bathroom in order to avoid having to deal with the overwhelming pain of those surrounding her, she realizes this is how many sensitive people feel out in the world and how the homeless mentally ill and addicted especially feel, as they are forced to live without a break on the streets, bombarded by chaos, noise, pollution and fear.

Vincent also ponders, "What might happen if we as a culture took even the most minor responsibility for the lost among us, rather than consigning them, and quite possibly ourselves, to the ravages of the system? The indifferent system."

At St. Luke's, the name she gives to a private hospital, she is touched by the kindness and simplicity of Sister Pete, who prompts her to muse: Maybe "true goodness... in this fucked-up creation" is a "form of retardation. Not an avoidance of vice but an ignorance of it, a lack of acquaintance with it that cannot be willed after the fall, no matter how strong the intention."

By the time Vincent leaves St. Luke's, she is beginning to emerge from her depression, a depression complicated by the power struggles she encounters in the institutions in which she places herself. At St. Luke's, she realizes how much a private room can mean, providing as it does, healing space, even room for exercise.

By the time Vincent commits herself to Mobius, a place she determines is easily "within the reach of the middle class," she is back on Vitamin P, taking 20 milligrams a day, and holding. Unlike the previous two institutions, Mobius aims to heal mind, spirit and body. It's a place where Vincent is able to explore past traumas and experience deeper healing. She finds therapists there to whom she can relate as they freely share their own humanity. They inform her that she is not mentally ill after all.

Summarizing, Vincent laments the overcrowding, lack of fresh air, cleanliness and nutrition that she has experienced in institutions, noting significantly, that among all the patients she encountered during her hospital stays, she found very few willing to take responsibility for their own health and lives. The resistance of patients to change stymies many in the system who want to help and often turns them cynical.

At one point, a therapist at Mobius asks Vincent to consider the word 'compassion" as a means to heal. Unable to stomach the word, she opts for the idea of help instead. Vincent realizes, "I am not bound by my diagnosis. I can help myself, and I will," a perception that, once seized, could make all the difference to anyone suffering mentally, physically or spiritually.

Death and Laughter

Dec. 18, 2009

We're getting close to Christmas and the farthest thing from most people's minds is death, or so I'm assuming. But it's pressing on my mind this year. My father died last Wednesday, and today we are going to the funeral of a friend's brother, who died suddenly this past Tuesday.

One thing I've learned for sure is, try as you may, you can't plan death. The world is full of surprises, and death, even in the midst of a holiday that rains so much color and joy. Like holidays, life with all its color and vibrancy ends too. Throughout it all, you try to keep laughing. That's why, even in the midst of my father's passing, I wanted to read David Sedaris. I wanted to laugh.

I loved Naked, published a few years ago, and expected great things from When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which I picked up a few days before we heard the news that dad was in the process of dying. I wasn't altogether disappointed, although the dark humor and pointed quips struck almost too close to home.

The cover of Sedaris' book has a skeleton on it that appears to have a cigarette between its teeth. The cover is meant to be the death mask of Sedaris himself, who was, until fairly recently, a habitual smoker, and whose final essay, "The Smoking Section," refers to his process of quitting. There's also an essay in this collection about a skeleton that Sedaris once bought for his partner Hugh, who decided to hang it in the bedroom. Sedaris found himself looking at this dangling skeleton, which seemed to say to him, "You are going to die."

I can't say this struck me as particularly funny, just true, having recently stared at death straight in the face and recognized, sure as I'm sitting here right now, that this life, solid and real as it seems, is indeed ephemeral as a dream and quick as smoke to disappear.

My father was a strong, indomitable soul, full of enthusiasm for life, with a vitality so palpable it was intimidating to some. He lived a year and a half longer than he was expected to live, and no one, least of all the doctors who predicted his demise, could believe he could carry on so long, his heart being in the shape it was. He humored us, mugging till the very end, reminding us of his amazing resilience and also of his capacity for laughter and the importance of it. It has always been a balm and savior for our family.

Taking my dad's cue, the night after his passing, my siblings and I drank, smoked pot, and drove fast and furiously around Hilton Head, where my dad lived. I turned around to my two sisters and brother once and said, "How does it feel to be 15 again?" No doubt, each of us was filled with the intractable knowledge somewhere deep within that we are no longer 15 and will never again be, and are in fact now ourselves on death's list, however far into the future each of us may live.

Still, the laughter helps, and for us, for me, provided a much needed respite from our vigil with death, reminding us that good times can be there, sometimes even in the midst of heartbreak.