Oh, New Yorker Food Issue, Why Have You Failed Us?
By Meredith Brody
I can't say I look forward all year to The New Yorker's annual Food Issue, exactly. It's not as though there aren't plenty of other places to read literate food-writing all year round. Too many, in fact: there's John Thorne's intermittent and marvelous Simple Cooking, Edward Behr's The Art of Eating, Alan Davidson's late-lamented Petit Propos Culinaire, happily still available online; the glamorous though sometimes academic Gastronomica, the young and feisty and local Meatpaper, and there's always the mass-market food magazines, of which Gourmet tends to have the most dependably well-written articles.
But, well, maybe I did look forward to it all year long. Some of the best and most influential food writers of all time are indelibly associated with the magazine, including A.J. Liebling, M.F.K. Fisher, and Calvin Trillin, and other New Yorker writers, though not primarily known for their writings on food, have been known to toss off a brilliant piece about eating from time to time (vide John McPhee on farmers' markets and his favorite chef, and Joseph Mitchell on the Fulton Fish Market). The New Yorkerpublished Waverly Root, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Joseph Wechsberg - giving them a great history from which to draw pieces to reprint.
And besides the great writing, I anticipated cartoons about food, book reviews about food books, and the like. Not to mention a great cover (suitable for framing).
The cover, I thought, was quite nice, a bit reminiscent of the market paintings of Gustave Caillebotte (see below). But the issue felt a trifle thin to me, clocking in at 131 pages. (My cache of back Food issues is hiding from me somewhere, so I can't do a compare-and-contrast.) OK, so it's the economy, stupid, and fewer ad pages throughout the industry.
But, as I read through the issue, tiny moments of pleasure (Hey! A graph on a candy store tucked into the Goings On About Town section, as well as the usual Tables for Two) were counterbalanced by (equally tiny) moments of irritation at missed opportunities. OK, all the spot drawings were food-related, but why not the poems?
Why were there seven cartoons that had nothing to do with food, almost as many as the ten I counted that did? (My favorite is the one with the guy telling the waitress "I'll have whatever is hot, fast, and artisanal.") I'll let two others slide into the "maybe" category, because they're set in a kitchen and at a bar, though food isn't mentioned in either one. Is it that hard to stockpile food cartoons over a year? (The Cartoon Caption contest wittily managed to spotlight food in not one but two out of the three cartoons on its back page. Thanks!)
Then there's the articles. Round up the usual suspects: Calvin Trillin on BBQ, Mimi Sheraton on the Italian fish soup brodetto, Jane Kramer on a cookbook-writing couple. And the lesser-known Fuschia Dunlop, who also blogs for the magazine, on a Chinese restaurant that sources its ingredients locally, Todd Oppenheimer on a knife maker and Burkhard Bilger on extreme beer.
I missed the tiny personal essays specially commissioned from an eccentric panoply of writers that had graced the last Food Issue.
I did enjoy Trillin's piece, trudging as it does over well-worn territory for him, but dependably excellent and amusing. It's about an eccentric spot that serves its meat once a week from 8 a.m. until it runs out. The place was predictably buoyed and buffeted by a #1 recommendation from Texas Monthly, whose editor responds to Trillin asking them if they suffered any remorse "for having turned the place into an ugly scene" by responding "We don't publish Best-Kept Secrets Monthly."
The Sheraton piece left me in about the same place I am with bouillabaisse and cioppino: there are lots of different recipes, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The Kramer essay had the unintentional (I think) effect of making me less sympathetic to the authors (whose Hot Sour Salty Sweet I found useful) than I was before I read it.
Oh, don't mind me. It's still an awful lot of tasty reading for $4.99. I guess I just want egg in my (artisanal, extreme) beer.
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