Book Review: 'Word of
Mouth' by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
People talk about the dinner they had last
week and the dinner they'll have next week as they photograph the dinner
they're having now.
By Moira Hodgson in
the Wall Street Journal
Americans have gone
food mad. In restaurants, we take pictures of our meals and post the photos to
Instagram before taking a bite. We binge on "Top Chef" and watch
shows on the Food Network about striving home cooks. We splurge on expensive
cookbooks gorgeously illustrated with dishes so complex only a madman would try
to make them at home. Food has become an object of fascination over the past
two decades, and we discuss it—endlessly.
The ex-chef and TV
personality Anthony Bourdain remarked recently that when he grew up in the
1960s he'd go to a movie and afterward have dinner in a restaurant where he and
his friends would talk about the movie they'd just seen. These days, people
talk about the dinner they had last week and the dinner they'll have next week
as they photograph the dinner they're having now.
What exactly they're
talking about is the subject of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's new book
"Word of Mouth." A professor at Columbia University, she approaches
her topic as a sociologist, peppering her text with wide-ranging references to
literature and popular culture. In addition to the obvious choice of Marcel
Proust, her list includes everyone from the Greek historian Athenaeus, author
of "The Deipnosophists," 15 volumes written in late second-century and
early third-century Rome that give an account, filled with lore and anecdotes,
of a banquet held by a patron of the arts, to Mrs. Ramsay of Virginia Woolf's
novel "To the Lighthouse," who casts a spell on her dinner guests
with a triumphant boeuf en daube. The author points out that Winnie the Pooh
and the Dagwood character in "Blondie" are both "happy
gluttons" (no mention of my beloved Homer Simpson) and discusses the finer
points of such films as "Chocolat" and "The Big Night." She
even provides us with the lyrics from the Newbeats' 1964 hit "Bread and
Butter"—"He likes bread and butter / He likes toast and jam / That's
what his baby feeds him / He's her lovin' man"—noting solemnly that she
found them while surfing the Internet in search of a song about mashed
potatoes.
Amid all these
references (and some arcane jargon) one can trace the story of the radical
change in Americans' perception of the food they eat over half a century.
Ms. Ferguson, who is
the author of "Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine"
and other works on French culture, makes no secret of her reverence for French
gastronomy and her belief that the French have perfected the art of food talk.
She loves the animated film "Ratatouille," which tells the story of
Remy, a rat who becomes a celebrity chef in Paris. "The film reenacts the
primal encounter of the New World and the Old," she writes. "The
fairy-tale ending notwithstanding, it presents a model of culinary connection
that is simultaneously a paradigm for cultural understanding." It was
France, Ms. Ferguson argues, that set the standard that became the model for
Americans.
But Ms. Ferguson never
touches upon the current decline of French food, and she passes over nouvelle
cuisine in silence. Instead she quotes Julia Child's preface to "Mastering
the Art of French Cooking," published in 1961: "The Frenchman takes
his greatest pleasure from a well-known dish impeccably cooked and
served." Compare that with Americans during the same period who, she
points out, were far more interested in quantity than quality. (Remember those
"all you can eat" buffets where you'd be lucky to could find anything
you'd even want to taste?) Ms. Ferguson tells us that Ms. Child had to adjust
her recipes for American cooks, doubling the amounts she'd have given for the
average French meal. Since then, of course, we've witnessed the far-reaching
effect Alice Waters has had on the American palate beginning in the 1970s: Now,
even McDonald's
boasts that its potatoes are farm-to-table.
Today, just over 50
years since Julia Child's first book came out, American cuisine has gone
global; our most celebrated chefs travel around the world picking up new
flavors and techniques. "Creativity is the watchword, innovation the goal,
endless reinvention the motto," Ms. Ferguson writes. We have seen, she
says, a shift from haute cuisine to "haute food," including such
ground-breaking delicacies as tacos with kimchee and ice cream flavored with
Earl Grey tea, both served daily out of trucks in New York City. "Haute
food chefs do not need to set their sights on the familiar classics. They want,
and the restaurant needs, to come up with the unexpected."
To describe what they
do she comes up with an awful word: "chefing." "Chefing turns
the material to aesthetic and intellectual account, precisely the
transformation that food talk is all about." She writes that "chefing
makes cooking part of the show. Production becomes as conspicuous as
consumption." Mastery of the media is essential to "chefing," as
these cooks try to communicate, via television and memoirs, the sensual
pleasure of working with food.
The idea of
"chefing" raises the question: Is the food being produced what you
really want to eat? Not always. "Whether the diner likes the dish or not
is of little concern," writes Ms. Ferguson, a trifle snippily. As for the
modernist cuisine of a chef such as Ferran Adrià, she sees nothing more
destructive of Brillat Savarin's idea of the dinner table as a place of
conviviality where decent food and good wine are served and guests given time
to enjoy the meal and conversation uninterrupted. I never ate at El Bulli, Mr.
Adrià's restaurant in Spain, which is now closed (nor, I gather, did the
author). But I have eaten at Alinea, Grant Achatz's Chicago restaurant that is
based on a similar modernist concept. The food—generally unrecognizable as
such, and served on sticks, pins and metal racks—was thrilling on an
intellectual level, a show directed by the chef, with audience participation.
But the experience, which jolts you out of your comfort zone, isn't the same as
the one you'd have eating a familiar dish such as Mrs. Ramsay's boeuf en daube.
Does talking about
food trump consumption? I'm not sure about that. But Ms. Ferguson is correct
when she writes that today's chefs have transformed what it means to dine out.
Ms. Hodgson is the
author of "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life
and Food."
No comments:
Post a Comment