2011 Trailers: Still Craving Food

Several books sit on the nightstand as remnants of my reading list of 2011, or just an odd assortment of tangents. To wrap up the diversion I took from lust into gluttony, today I finished Adam Gopnik's Te Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food. And like the Michelin restaurant critics that have fallen so out of favor, I must rate this four stars.

Right with his appetizing prologue, Gopnik adds context instead of garnishes to his subject: "Why do we care so much about food? There's a sociological explanation (it's a signal of status), a psychological explanation (it takes the place of sex), and a puritanical explanation (it's the simplest sign of virtue) ... Having made food a more fashionable object, we have ended by making eating a smaller object. When "gastronomy" was on the margins of attention it seemed big because it was an unexpected way to get at everything -- the nature of hunger; the meaning of appetite; the patterns and traces of desire; tradition, in the way that recipes are passed mother to son; and history, in the way that spices mix and, in mixing, mix peoples. You could envision through a modest lens of pleasure as through a keyhole, a whole world; and the compression and odd shape of the keyhole made the picture more dramatic. Now the door is wide open, but somehow we see less, or notice less, anyway. Betrayed by its enlargement, food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter."

Even the reason behind how he selected the title resonated with me: "I don't understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television ... Don't they know the table comes first? ... The table comes first in the sense that its drama -- the people who gather at it, the conversation that flows across it, and the pain and the romance that happens around it -- is more essential to our real lives ..." I subliminally knew that when at age 28 and still living at home, I knew the piece of furniture I had to buy and store temporarily in my bedroom to convince my mother I really was moving out was a dining room table, the very one that still reigns in my formal dining room decades later.

Gopnik is upfront in his acknowledging the link between my two favorite deadly sins, at least in the realm of the restaurant: "The man who asks the girl out to dinner is not, after all, actually suggesting sex except by the airiest remote inference; he is pretending to be a better man than that; let's meet, talk, try. The restaurant offers the hope of happiness that gives greedy sex the look of lighthearted love, and, in the erotic sphere as much as the eating sphere, turns raw hunger into formal appetite. The restaurant offers not seduction but what precedes seduction, the false promise of pure motives." Perhaps this is why so many restaurant reviewers refer to their fellow dinners as "fair companion" or some phrase equally double entendre-d. Or this is why a friend of mine describes his meals at the latest chi-chi restaurants to a retired chef, hoping that she knows the code to translate these commentaries into the sexual adventures they "feed" into.

Written clearly as his conclusion, is another tenet of fine dining that I hold dear yet never verbalized as well: "A modern meal is a drama unfolding between the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee, with the several acts passing between the libations. And, without strong coffee and red wine, it isn't possible to have good restaurants ... French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives ...Alcohol ... is above all a myopic drug: it forces the imbiber's attention even more narrowly upon what's in front of him. It closes us off and isolates us ... A little glass of wine, and all there is in the world is the date and the table ... Caffeine, on the other hand, is a far-sighted drug. Several sips of cafe noir and the sipper feels charged up ... Wine takes us from the world, nd coffee restores us to it again. In between, we eat."

This is a deeply researched book, resting on the aproned shoulders of history making dining chroniclers. Here's Gopnik's read on Brillat-Savarin: "... gastronomy is the great adventure of desire. Its subject is simple: the table is the place where a need becomes a want ... Eating together is the civilizing act. We take urges, and tame them into taste ... His allied subject was sex, which also began with a gasp and was tamed into a game." Why try to look for lusty turns of phrase elsewhere, mais non? A bit further on in the book, using his ever-sharp down-beat phraseology, Gopnik writes: "... the idea of the restaurant as a public place where women could come for their health without having their morality impugned allowed for a whole new ritual of courtship and sublimated sex. (The appeal to self-improvement is always an acceptable cover for sex; that's why they call them health clubs.)"

Moving on to his second "R" pillar, the recipe, Gopnik once again distills the implicit experience of all kitchen chemists: "Anyone who cooks knows that it is is following recipes that one first learns about the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved ... if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets."

The middle section of the book has many fewer page corners turned down as Gopnik writes about the vegetarianism, being a locavore, why it seems innate to rate wines, etc. In these chapters, he seems to be "overstuffed" with analytics and short of his "bon bon" mots. Another device that he relies on overly during his "entrees" is email to Elizabeth Pennell, a woman who in the 1890s, he attributes, was the first to see cookbooks as a literary form. His admiration towards her is based on a common geography but by the end of the book, it separates like cold Bernaise, as he discovers a deep streak of anti-Semitism in her portrait of Philadelphia neighborhoods. At this point, the book for a small book, becomes ponderous. But shortly after this heavy segment, Gopnik moves on to sugar and desserts and the tone lightens up. Once sugar becomes plentiful during the Elizabethean Age: "Fine distinctions between similar states of burnt sugar, between caramel and butterscotch, had just opened up. (A feeling surrounds a flavor when it becomes widespread enough. No one yet quite talks about the umami of a marriage, or the hint of soy when we see our in-laws -- but we all talk easily about our saccharine sisters and our vinegary in-laws and our hot-pepper neighbors ..."

And my last quote: "... the real end of dinner is to articulate time ... the point of eating is to slow down life long enough to promote ... with simple charm, good cheer. It doesn't just take time, but makes time -- carves out evenings, memories."

And finally, my own interpretative corollaries.
1. Children discover participatory theater in restaurants. They move out of being stage hands, setting the family table, and become directors. The show is equal to the menu ... or at least I was equally in love with the finger bowls at Keelers as I was with the raspberry sherbet and expounded on both in fourth grade show and tell.
2. Adults know restaurants are for lovers; therefore, there should never be tables larger than ones sitting two. More people at a restaurant are exercising power: a business lunch, a mother's escape for cooking for visiting relatives, or perhaps worst of all, the banquet to mark some coming of age or transitional event where they wealthy and established regale the neophyte, green in a new role or station of life.
3. Homemade cooking, unlike the erotic undercurrent at restaurants, is all about parental love. Cookbooks become annotated with dates of first time bakings and roastings; scores and opinions of family members are marked in the margins, a written proof that they loved me, the cook. Hallmark cards get thrown out eventually, pictures end up being on Beta tapes no longer accessible or in albums where no one wrote the date, but cookbook marginalia documents a successful household.