LARB Digital Edition: Food & Drink

By Los Angeles Review of Books

This month’s Digital Edition serves up eight irresistible courses from LARB’s Food and Drink section. Including a taste of the dizzying heights of gourmandise in John McIntyre’s essay Finer Dining Through Chemistry,” and samples of extreme foodie-ism in Douglas Bauer’s review of Anything that Moves by Dana Goodyear; with John T. Scott’s review of American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite Spirit as an aperitif, and a bonus interview with Leslie Stephens, author of Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box, for dessert. Two reviews by Steven Shapin pique our appetites with the Enlightenment debate over the palate, as well as an intellectual history of cannibalism. And Amy Finnerty’s take on Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story rounds out this wholesome spread of food writing. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Feb 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940660080

Book preview

Introduction

To write about food is to write about life in all of its sublime and vexing complexity. In eating we express our highest and lowest humanity; if you doubt it, take a look at the range of thought in this collection of pieces. You will survey the dizzying heights of gourmandise — how interesting it is to appraise Ferran Adria’s molecular gastronomy three years after the closure of his restaurant El Bulli — as well as its lows, in the repasts of corn fungus and baby ants consumed today by the contingent known as extreme eaters (chronicled by Dana Goodyear in Anything That Moves and reviewed here by Douglas Bauer). You will contemplate, in a piece called People Who Eat People, the reasons why cannibalism has been with us since antiquity (recounted in Catalin Avramescu’s dazzling An Intellectual History of Cannibalism). And while we may never truly know the answer to such mysteries, in his review Steven Shapin lets us at least see the usefulness of the cannibal in fueling theories of governance and human nature.

On the other hand, if your stomach is made queasy by such questions, let us recommend John T. Scott’s review of American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite Spirit. More than a guide, Clay Risen writes a lively history of the distilled refreshment so helpful as an aid to digestion (among other things). Mary Roach’s book Gulp (reviewed by moi) centers on digestion itself, summoning the fresh take of an extremely smart 12-year-old who isn’t afraid to ask the most obvious and embarrassing questions about how our bodies work.

We have been debating whether the palate is located, metaphorically, closer to the brain or the stomach since we began debating, as Steven Shapin relates in his erudite review of Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760, by E.C. Spary. Some locate it, with good reason, closest to the soul; take Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story (reviewed by Amy Finnerty). Rosenstrach sees dinner as the central civilizing force in a day filled with other pursuits that claim, usually wrongly, to be more crucial to our humanity.

As an added bonus we include a new interview, by Leslie Stephens, with Nancy Spiller about her memoir Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box. Having grown up with a mentally ill mom, Spiller used the food-splattered cards to summon childhood memories and better understand a woman who was often inaccessible to her. Recipes are a form of communication for women who possibly didn’t have the strongest voices because of their place and time in the world, notes Spiller. And, in fact, all manner of eating and cooking tells us much of what can be known about our endlessly strange and endearing human proclivities.

Laurie Winer

Editor at Large

Los Angeles Review of Books

An Interview with Nancy Spiller

By Leslie Stephens

NANCY SPILLER, a fourth-generation California native, survived a childhood growing up in the East Bay suburbs that included celebrating her 16th birthday at Altamont. She went on to work at the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and as a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times. The heroine of Spiller’s first book, Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes), is a food writer who makes up the fabulous dinner parties she reports on — until her editor comes to town. In her new book Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box, she takes the story-with-recipes form into the realm of memoir. Leslie Stephens spoke to her for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Leslie Stephens: You refer to your memoir Compromise Cake — a collection of memories as told through the recipes from your late mother’s recipe box — as a project. What started you on this project?

Nancy Spiller: I had taken the recipe box out of my mother’s house when we were closing that down to move her to a care facility in 2002, and I had even used it as a plot device in my autobiographical novel, Entertaining Disasters, but I really hadn’t looked into it until a few months after she passed away in 2007. I started finding recipe titles that intrigued me, like My Man Cookies and Dark Cake. Recipes are a form of communication for women who possibly didn’t have the strongest voices because of their place and time in the world. And then I found, buried in the middle of it, my mother’s teaching credential. She had taught for exactly a year until she got married, moved to the suburbs, and had four children, at which point she grew very unhappy and became a mental patient and then a divorced mother of four. And so, when I found the teaching credential, I felt that that was a communication from my mother, that it was saying something about her identity and how it had become lost in domestic pursuit.

So that began my exploration of who she was before she became a mother. Writing my novel, which is autobiographical, was my effort to better understand the epidemic of mental illness among suburban housewives of the 1960s and 1950s because my mother was one of the statistics. The novel was a darker undertaking, and so in the memoir I wanted to also explore the good, which was the two of us in the kitchen together.

LS: Did reading the recipes do the work of invoking your childhood?

NS: Yes, and that was the fun part, my anthropological mapping of the recipe box. I laid the recipes out and numbered them, each one teasing out a different memory. For example, on New Years Eve we used to make that Scramble recipe, what today is called Chex Mix. When I was a small, it was thrilling to have that happening in the oven.

LS: I like the moment where you cook the Scramble mix for your granddaughters, expecting them to be as entranced by the magic of it as you were, but they weren’t.

NS: Yes, it was an experiment in living. I was going to perpetrate this food reenactment on the next generation and see what happened, and, of course, nothing happened. Nothing and everything happened. I’m sure my mother had that same feeling that she was whipping up all of these things to an unappreciative audience. I mean she had these four rowdy kids that were just dedicated to annoying each other, so that had to be a little bit frustrating. Children are rarely wowed in the moment; it takes a while to find out what the ultimate effect was on them.

LS: You write that your mothers showed her feelings for you as a child through food, that sugar was her sole expression of affection. Did the process of writing help you to better understand her?

NS: I think I have understood her my entire life on a certain level, but through this project I have articulated my understanding of her to a greater degree, and that’s been one of the benefits of writing it for me. And I also hope that it’s a benefit for the reader. I’ve had so many readers, across a variety of age groups, tell me that this was their story.