Delicious Reading

Dig into these food diaries on things as diverse as war-time cooking and the contents of Frida Kahlo’s lunch boxes

Nibble, quibble, sputter and smile, is what you might do after diving into The Joy of Eating, edited by Jill Foulston. Her tapas-style literary servings cover subjects as mundane as kitchen floors and Mason jam jars to more erudite ones like culinary linguistics and the contents of artist Frida Kahlo’s boxed lunches.

When Foulston maps out her food territory, you know this is not going to be a lick-your-chops read, but a heavy rumination on subjects like food and race by anthropologist Margaret Mead and reflections on war-time cooking by home-economist Marguerite Patten. There’s a clear attempt to sandwich as many eclectic eatisms as possible between the covers.

That’s why this book takes you places where no others have, like the persuasive interview with Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein, where Monique Truong explains what she wanted to do unto pineapples in 1930s Paris. But be warned, The Joy of Eating keeps flipping back and forth in time since the chapters run by themes.

With plenty of pre-Suffragette material between the covers, you have to suffer dated and dire instructions such as, ‘My Dear Ladies, to begin with you must have nicely rendered butter…’ Other portions that make you squirm are, ‘there’s nothing on earth so savage—except a bear robbed of her cubs—as a hungry husband, keep him well fed and languid’.

Skip those sections if you like, but read The Joy of Eating for its revelations, the bits on faux foods. How and why parsnips were fried to look like trout, tofu’s use as imitation meat for Buddhist monks, to a true account about an Italian who sold parmesan cheese (made of grated umbrella handles). In contrast, the sections on poisons and panaceas are like forcement, there principally to heft up the flesh.

The unkindest cut of all are the 35 words quoted from The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer’s’ classic. The introduction to Rombauer is thrice the length of the first excerpt. That’s rude, especially considering that Foulston’s title is a tweak on the Rombauer classic, the only cookbook voted as one of the most influential books of the century.

Given today’s global food menus, you keep looking for accents and cadences and come up short. Indian contributors Shoba Narayan and Chitrita Banerji (once again with her fabulous ode to the Bengali bhonti-scythe), Chinese American Amy Tan and Brick Lane’s Monica Ali, are writers who’ve broken though into Englishtan. You wish there was more foraging for hidden voices from China, Iron Curtain Russia…

Though it pretends to be, this isn’t a book about food in its most sensory primal aspect but a literary canon tilting up as a cerebral culinaria. With excerpts almost entirely by women like Fannie Farmer, Mrs Beeton, Isabel Allende and MFK Fisher, The Joy of Eating really made me wish there were more men in it.
If you’re okay with women authors mostly, go get your book-fork.

About The Author

Pramila N. Phatarphekar