Eating One's Words
St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, February, 2005
By Michael Depp

Writing of her first kitchen in France as a young newlywed, M.F.K. Fisher devised that it was there she would cook the first meals of her life for her husband and friends that would “shake them from their routines, not only of meat-potatoes-gravy, but of thought, of behavior.”

It was a prescient observation, not only for the food she would soon begin to prepare in the kitchen, but for the prose on food that would follow and elevate her to a sacrosanct position in American letters, nearly peerless among other writers on the subject.

A new biography of Fisher, Poet of the Appetites, by Joan Reardon, has had me thinking quite a bit about the craft of food writing itself lately. It is, at once, a practical and peculiar enterprise: Everybody eats, and everyone is hard-wired for taste sensations, but taste is a uniquely intimate sense that is inextricably bound to our own personal psychology, our dearest, formative memories, our private archetypes. Four people might sit down to share a meal together, but they're likely as not to be having four separate meals.

The writer who takes on food as a subject, especially one who does it with some frequency, has a daunting challenge. An entire vocabulary must be invented for the purpose, not only of adjectives but associations and revealed intimacies, analogies and anecdotes. For Fisher, writing about food soon became a vehicle to memoir – as natural a prompt for her as Proust and his Madeleines.

This ruminating on the language around food got me to talking with two colleagues for whom I have great respect, both former food critics who are as careful in their engagement with language as they are discerning in their palettes (I hasten to add that their knowledge of the subject greatly surpasses my own). Food criticism, which must be distinguished from the more general practice of writing on food, has its own perils, and our casual conversations revealed something of the conflicts and strictures a critic faces.

“It's the most difficult writing I ever did, and I did everything in newspaper writing except sports,” says Gene Bourg, former restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune who now writes for the quarterly Culinary Concierge (he is also a former National Magazine Award winner for a contribution to Saveur). “To avoid repetition is not that easy. And actual mouth taste and mouth feel is very difficult to communicate.

“I tried not to develop any kind of formulaic writing about food and to keep from being dogmatic or dictatorial about what my tastes are. People deserve to have their own tastes in food.”

Bourg cites Fisher, A.J. Liebling and Mimi Sheraton as those food writers who struck him most as a reader, particularly Liebling's New Yorker pieces that would culminate in the publication of Between Meals. But as he surveys the current national landscape of food writing, he finds it wanting.

“I don't see a lot of very distinctive food writing on the level of Fisher or Liebling,” he says. “Major magazine food writing is more concerned with being flashy or attention-getting.”

Sara Roahen, who is just coming off a four-and-a-half year stint as the restaurant critic for Gambit Weekly, professes a distaste for food critics who use their bully pulpit to make a name for themselves. “It's not very helpful to be mean if you're trying to convey a taste experience,” she says, admitting that she doesn't read very much contemporary writing on the subject.

Roahen says that she has wrestled with the vocabulary of taste in her own writing. “If you're describing something you like, it's really difficult to do it without being hyperbolic,” she says. “And a lot of times when you're trying to analyze the taste or what something reminds you of, it's so personal that it wouldn't make sense to the reader.”

Reconciling such personal associations with the formula of a review was an ongoing struggle, she says, as was avoiding redundancies in description, though she did find one route that has led her, and those writers she admires, in a favorable direction. “You can get around it by building a story around the thing and not using adjectives,” she says. “My favorite kind of food writing is the kind that doesn't have adjectives and is more of a story. But that's really hard to do, especially if you have an assignment.”

When she does look at other prose on food, she likes the more writerly approach taken in Gourmet magazine (which often hires contributors for the writing prowess first and their food knowledge second), and she particularly admires the work of Jonathan Gold.

But Roahen chafes at categorization, and says prefers thinking of her métier as writing about food, not food writing. “The whole food writing label really bugs me,” she says. “It's so limiting and the topic of food is so broad.”

Perhaps contemporary food writing needs just such a nudge away from categorical thinking. Perhaps the world of food journalism should lift its emphasis off food trends and rewarding formulaic constructions a little more. Or perhaps writers might be a little less circumspect in sharing the interior journey that a good meal (or a bad one) prompts. But consider the freshness of Fisher's prose, like a loaf of crusty, just-baked bread heaving steam when it's broken open, describing “The Best Meal I Ever Had” of simple bread, a fresh garden salad, Petites Suisses cheese, apples, wine and coffee with her husband in France, 1929:

Falling in love for the first time since I was nine, being married for the first time…they all led irrevocably to 1:43 p.m., September 25, 1929, when I picked up a last delicious crust-crumb from the table, smiled dazedly at my love, peered incredulously at a great cathedral on the horizon, and recognized myself as a new-born sentient human being, ready at last to live...

Postscript: A Revolution

Menu changes at Brennan's are, to put it mildly, an infrequent event, so I was taken aback during a recent dinner there to find three new additions in place, amounting to something of a sea change for the French Quarter mainstay. They include the filet Serice, a filet of beef stuffed with Boursin cheese with cracked peppercorns and orange Cabernet reduction sauce (an invention of chef de cuisine Mark Serice); Blake salad, comprised of mesculin greens, a cranberry vinaigrette, blue cheese and candied pecans; and strawberries Suzette for dessert. They've also brought back the classic trout amandine, for those who have missed it.

And before I leave the subject of food writing, one final note: Dale Curry, the recently retired food editor of The Times-Picayune, has joined this magazine's sister publication, New Orleans Magazine, as a food writer. I wish her the best of luck in her new position.