John Whiting

Good writing has always been built on a foundation of knowing and enthusiastic readers. I've no statistics, but I would venture a guess that the standard of sports writing in the US is pretty good -- there are so many knowledgable fans that ignorant or incompetant writers would be blown out of the water. But a large proportion of those who see the food columns wouldn't know a truffle from a trifle. They're happy to devour the restaurant gossip and look at the photos while they munch their microwaved goodies. More than mere ability to write competant prose is required; journalists must also know that they have editors and a reading public who will allow them to write as well as they are able. A handfull of US newspapers have built up reputations that allow at least part of their writing staff to address their loyal publics, but they rely in turn on local networks of restaurants and food suppliers that are worth writing about. Who's going to read reviews of the local Taco Bell and Wal-Mart?

Children’s literature as a separate genre is only a couple of hundred years old, as recent in fact as the invention of childhood itself. In primitive societies children were required to reach maturity as early as they were physically capable of doing so; nature’s intentions (if any) may be surmised from the age at which humans are capable of productive intercourse. The Dutch psychologist J. H. van den Berg puts it succinctly: “Pedagogic manuscripts of the past do not contain anything on the nature of the relationship between old and young.” Early maturation was the inevitable result of children having no choices to make as to the direction their lives would take; girls became wives, boys did what their fathers had done, so that what we call childhood was simply a period of apprenticeship. We see this today in war-torn societies in which options disappear and young children use small arms as skillfully as their elders. In modern society, the right of choice has been capitalized to the point where every narrow band of childhood and adolescence has a whole industry attached to it which sells dedicated products. Children’s books are as carefully age-targetted as clothes and popular culture; teachers are given bibliographies telling them which titles should be introduced at each grade. Concomitant with this worship of childhood has been the artifical postponement of maturity and even a regression into a state of mind in which good and evil may be clearly delineated. Much of today’s most popular literature consists of books nominally addressed to children but really aimed at adults who are desperate to have their world shifted back into an ethically simplified prehistory. The film industry has moved massively in this direction. Even Presidential campaigns are conducted at this level.

The writers I come back to most often are those whose company is like a good dinner in which the conversation predominates over the food. John Thorne, Waverley Root, M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, A.J. Liebling, John & Karen Hess – they are all writers whose eyes and ears are as observant as their palates. So far as fiction and poetry are concerned, I’m naturally drawn to the writers I spent most time over at university, as both undergrad and graduate – poets Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams; novelists Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover; critics Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Rexroth, Hugh Kenner. They were all writers who declared their literary independence from England as definitively as their forebears had asserted their political independence.

"To walk with kings, nor lose the common touch . . ."

In the world of books, this is almost impossible. Since few literary critics can scrape even a modest living, they tend to be authors reviewing each other. The attentive reader soon learns who are the objective ones and who are the luvvies.

Sorry, I was doing that while you were posting and have incorporated it above.

If it's the case, word gets around, particularly if you really want to know. As to the NY Times penchant for upper-echelon restaurants, John Hess disposed of it neatly a quarter-century ago. It's all in Taste of America, and it's hardly changed. Charles Shere tells of dining with a friend in Maasricht several years ago and ordering a Salade Nicoise. It arrived ostentatiously laid out on the plate, complete with half-a-dozen shrimp. Charles looked at it in some bemusement and his friend apologized that pretentious Dutch restaurants had a tendency to “shrimp it up” – “opgarnalened” was the lovely Dutch word. An equally slippery word is needed to describe the same tendency in over-the-top American restaurants.

Any multi-starred restaurant which treats customers in a supercilious manner has simply been rated too highly. The critics responsible are as dilatory as the restaurateur and have thereby demonstrated their incompetance. EDIT: Of course a rating may quickly become obsolete for any number of reasons, particularly in a fashion-driven milieu.

Few inflexible rules there, Russ, but a lot of wisdom, particularly about getting chummy with the establishment.

If a restaurant (or any other institutions) is not first class, trying harder in desperation is more likely to produce a worse result than a better. I would suggest that certain expensive top-rated restaurants have got where they are for the same unreliable and ultimately fragile reasons as, say, dot.com stocks. Like musicians with an awesome technique but no taste or understanding, they will wow the impressionable for a while and then give way to the next fashionable virtuoso.

Exactly what Shawn Hill had to say on the subject. And, to draw a not irrelevant analogy: musicians, in my experience, do not -- indeed, cannot -- suddenly play better if they spot an eminent critic in the audience.

Is it likely that a kitchen will cook to different standards for different tables on the same evening, not knowing who the strangers may be? A restaurant in a major city can never assume that all the diners on a particular evening will be ignorant. EDIT: I once heard Rubenstein play badly (i.e. carelessly and distractedly) in London's Royal Festival Hall. I doubt if it was the result of any preconceptions about the audience. Homer nods.

Right on! Shawn Hill of Mansion House, Ludlow, says that when he recognizes a celebrity of any sort, he doesn't tell front-of-house because he doesn't want them to be nervous.

We're hardly talking food any more, and certainly not regional food. As in Russ's quoted observation above, there's a tendancy for top level restaurants to become as geographically ambiguous as airports. Furthermore, when a particular cuisine is featured, it's likely to be from half-a-world away. Even when local food is nominally featured, it's likely to have been sexed-up to the point where it's more expressive of the chef's libido than of the locale. London is full of expensive nosheries, but the only one that's really serious about traditional English food is St John, which is modestly upper-middle in price and a long way from luxurious in decor.

I hope Russ won't mind if I quote a shrewd remark he once made in a Chowhound thread. I've carefully preserved it:

The trouble with chili and authenticity is that it is so easily adapted in all sorts of ways -- and in so many places -- and still appeals. Vegetarian chili is served at the Cool Chili Company stall at Borough Market, London, and it tastes fine. In London so many of those who are interested in ethnic foods are vegetarians that CCC would probably cut their sales in half (as well as increasing their costs and preservation problems) if they included meat. Chili belongs to the world!

John Thorne's comment, posted with permission (he wasn't able to sign on):

Is it perhaps the case that advice is only useful in making a bad writer mediocre?

Two modern classics that include both are Madeleine Kamman's The Making of a Cook and Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement was the Time/Life series, The Good Cook, under the editorship of Richard Olney. A friend who worked on the project told me that it was a tax dodge, in which Time/Life set out to spend an enormous amount of money. They succeeded, but much more surprisingly, they didn't waste it.

It's difficult, alas, to reform recipe writing without reforming society. Up to a rather high plateau, the more money people have, the less time (at least those with growing families). Those who write for popular periodicals know that, roughly speaking, there are those who read for titilation and those who read for instruction. The former are happy with celebrity chefs describing the impossible, but the overwhelming majority of the latter want recipes that begin, "You can do this in half an hour or less when you get home from work," or "Here's something you can do for a dinner party that doesn't take much skill but will wow your guests." The minority who cook seriously -- that's us -- find those authors who speak to them in a language they understand, enjoy and find useful.

Even more careful readers will note that, although "I" never appeared, the ego predominated throughout. When you address the reader in the second person in a hortatory manner, the first person is inevitably present by implication, especially when the invisible speaker is getting visibly worked up. In stylistic terms, I [sic] suggest that "first person" is not just a matter of grammar but more particularly a state of mind. EDIT: Grammatically, it's possible to avoid the first person in a personal narrative in the Victorian fashion: "Upon tasting the disgusting mess on the plate, one might have wished to stick one's finger in one's throat."

Waverley Root, Richard Olney, Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher wrote about food in such a personal and intimate manner that they always seemed to be writing in the first person, even when they weren't. In a sense, all writing, except the most formal, is in the first person, unless the author specifically identifies himself as someone else. (Even Fowler's English Usage has a very personal feel.) You have to go a long way in the encyclopaedia direction before that stops being the case.

Russ, Amen. What you've written could virtually serve as a postscript to the Hess's chapter on snobbery.

There's a problem with applying the social standards of today to the writing of yesterday. For instance, A.J. Liebling was as far from being a snob as it's possible to get, and yet his subject matter, French cuisine, and his highly literate prose would, if he were writing now, make him liable to the accusation. Snobbishness lies not in the subject but in the manner of its treatment. John and Karen Hess dealt with this at eloquent length in The Taste of America. Chapter 10, "The Gourmet Plague", begins: Read the book. It's been reprinted after twenty-five years and is as devastatingly relevant as the day it first appeared.

I've had that experience as well, with both ducks and geese. The factory feeding I was referring to is quite another matter, in which the ducks are held by machinery and fed on a conveyer belt. Treatment is so rough that there's about a 20% fatality rate. It's common in Eastern European countries, from which the livers are sent to France, where they are then processed, packaged and sold as a domestic product. I like to get my foie gras straight from a known farm. My thoughts on foie gras are at http://www.whitings-writings.com/essays/liver.htm