This book represents to me a lost way of life. It’s a life in which I would read books like this, slowly, with particular pleasure, laughing out loud at regular intervals. Afterwards, I would have time to write about them all, and share some of my pleasure. I almost did this today but that’s because I am on holiday.
The Man Who Ate Everything is a book of essays, and really each one should be savoured at length. No rushing. Gentle but steady progress is the thing. I am at an age where I no longer need to read the recipes (which shortens the book by about ten per cent) because I have no intention of attempting to make them. It’s enough to read about Jeffrey Steingarten’s noble culinary inventiveness, the people he meets, the morsels he tastes, the trips in taxis to find ingredients, the joyous errors, the fabulous achievements, the wonderful life of a professional food writer.
Good cookery books tend to make me salivate, which I imagine is a good sign. Sometimes I have to resort to a savoury snack because the whole business of FOOD starts to get too much for me. But here, if I resisted the early instinct to eat, I found there there was a counter-effect. By the end of most of the essays, I felt pretty full. In fact, once or twice, I felt slightly queasy as though I had eaten too much granita or one Piedmont truffle too many.
The best bit though is the style. He writes so well. It’s vivid, sensuous, and the humour is dry and cumulative. I thought it funny to start with but even by the very last chapter, I forced my partner to listen to me reading aloud an extract from ‘Big Bird’, which is about cooking turkey. It was the part about getting the perfect turkey skin, using in this case a "new electric Farberware Standard Smokeless Indoor Grill with Rotisserie".
My partner did not laugh, but I laughed all over again while reading it to him. I think my taste for humorous writing is better developed than his, though in brief quotation (or briefly reading aloud) one can’t recreate the way the serious description of product and process gradually builds towards a high point. Here is the sample he resisted:
"The Faberware booklet envisions cooking a turkey weighing up to seventeen pounds, and that is the size I tried, with the bird unstuffed and tightly trussed and a roasting time of five hours. Less than one of the five hours had passed when the turkey’s wing slipped from under the string and caught on the electric coil, preventing the bird from turning further. Thus fixed, the turkey began to brown rapidly and then to blacken along a stripe from neck to tail; the string holding the legs against the body burned through, and both legs plunged into the glowing coils. It was the stench of charring flesh and the billows of smoke that attracted my attention and drew me back into the kitchen, where for the next hour I struggled with seventeen pounds of hot, greasy flesh and protruding bones as I retied and rebalanced the bird, and plugged the Farberware back into the wall socket. When I returned half an hour later, very little progress was visible because I had, in actual fact, plugged in the blender, whose cord eerily resembled that of the Farberware."
I don’t want to give the impression that the book is one big laugh. Lots of it is in the tradition of the best cookery writers – recreating atmosphere, character, ingredients and the search for regional food. I grew up on Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher. I predict that this book, though it has taken me nearly twenty years to read, and some of the references to food research are probably now out of date, will wear well. And I love the way the author’s wife walks in and out of the pages. Wives are extremely useful when you want to be amusing. So much so that I almost wish I had one, instead of the male partner who didn’t even find this funny, though I continue to believe you would. (Said partner is still waiting for dinner to appear, while the dinner-maker has been reading a food book instead.)
But I’m going to leave you with the author’s wife’s last word. Jeffrey Steingarten has just spent the best part of fourteen pages exploring how to make the perfect potato fries (or as we in the UK call them, chips). On page 345, yet another possibility occurs:
"I have just learned that Alain Dutournier, the excellent Parisian chef from southwest France, cooks his French fries in goose fat. He uses an unusual combination of temperatures: after a first low-temperature frying, you wait two hours, start the second frying at 280 degrees Fahrenheit, and slowly increase the temperature to 392 degrees. The idea is intriguing, and I would like to try it immediately. But my wife has just passed through the kitchen and slipped into bed, leaving me alone, surrounded by four white bubbling-hot electric deep fryers and piles of unpeeled Idaho potatoes. ‘Smile and the world smiles with you,’ she said as she disappeared. ‘Fry and you fry alone.’ "