Food and the Written Word

August 23, 11:43 AMFood ExaminerEric Burkett

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From "World of the East Vegetarian Cooking"

If you’re like me, you love reading cookbooks. Let me rephrase that: if you’re like me at all, you love good writing in cookbooks. There is a difference.

I have a small library of around 200 cookbooks. More than most, but I have friends who own literally hundreds and hundreds more. I buy cookbooks for any number of reasons: I’m interested in the style of food or technique a book might promote; I’ve suddenly become infatuated with a particular ethnic cuisine; occasionally, a book might have just one recipe I decide I really must have. But what draws me most is the writing.

Sometimes the writing is so compelling I find myself diving back into its pages simply to savor a description, such as this one from Irene Kuo’s influential “The Key to Chinese Cooking”:

“Pour the soup into a serving bowl or tureen, letting the meatballs nestle here and there over the fluffy noodles, or scoop up the silky threads and drape them gracefully on one side of the bowl, next to the mound of smooth balls of meat. Sprinkle on top a little black pepper and a scattering of fresh coriander leaves.”

That description inspired me to try the dish; I’ve made it many times since. Sometimes, the writing evokes a time, or a state of mind, as in this passage from Anna Thomas’s first book, “The Vegetarian Epicure”:

“If you have passed a joint around before dinner to sharpen gustatory perceptions, you most likely will pass another one after dinner, and everyone knows what that will do—the blind munchies can strike at any time.”

Recipes, too, tell stories not only about the countries from which they originate, but about the authors. Recipes are more meaningful to me when I know the significance to its writer, as in this story from Madhur Jaffrey’s “World of the East Vegetarian Cooking”:

“At least once a month my brother in India turns to his wife at the dining table, just as I remember my father and grandfather doing, and makes a bit of a face. ‘So,’ he says, ‘your yogurt didn’t turn out too well?’ She, just as my mother and grandmother before her, grunts as if to say, how little you understand, and goes on eating.”

Yogurt is so much more  interesting now.