American Food Writing Anthology

[Carrot Top]

Apparently released on April 19, 2007.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

In a groundbreaking new anthology, celebrated food writer Molly O'Neill gathers the very best from over 250 years of American culinary history. This literary feast includes classic accounts of iconic American foods: Henry David Thoreau on the delights of watermelon; Herman Melville, with a mouth-watering chapter on clam chowder; H. L. Mencken on the hot dog; M.F.K. Fisher in praise of the oyster; Ralph Ellison on the irresistible appeal of baked yam; William Styron on Southern fried chicken. American writers abroad, like A. J. Liebling, Waverly Root, and Craig Claiborne, describe the revelations they found in foreign restaurants; travellers to America, including the legendary French gourmet J. A. Brillat-Savarin, discover such native delicacies as turkey, Virginia barbecue, and pumpkin pie.

Recipes, too.

I ran into the book at B&N today, or it ran into me. One way or the other, it came home with me. I am thrilled.

[rconnelly]

Apparently released on April 19, 2007.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

In a groundbreaking new anthology, celebrated food writer Molly O'Neill gathers the very best from over 250 years of American culinary history. This literary feast includes classic accounts of iconic American foods: Henry David Thoreau on the delights of watermelon; Herman Melville, with a mouth-watering chapter on clam chowder; H. L. Mencken on the hot dog; M.F.K. Fisher in praise of the oyster; Ralph Ellison on the irresistible appeal of baked yam; William Styron on Southern fried chicken. American writers abroad, like A. J. Liebling, Waverly Root, and Craig Claiborne, describe the revelations they found in foreign restaurants; travellers to America, including the legendary French gourmet J. A. Brillat-Savarin, discover such native delicacies as turkey, Virginia barbecue, and pumpkin pie.

Recipes, too.

I ran into the book at B&N today, or it ran into me. One way or the other, it came home with me. I am thrilled.

←

Isn't it grand?

I've barely skimmed the surface, but I love it.

There is one excerpt from Jade Snow Wong's "Fifth Chinese Daughter". I read the book as a young girl and rereading the piece brought me back to the same space I was back then. It was from that excerpt that I learned all about Chinese cooking.

I cannot believe what a flashback that was! What a feeling!

[Carrot Top]

I look forward to getting to the more modern pieces, myself, at the moment. I've been putting the book aside then picking it up again because I do want to read through *everything* and some of the older writings are harder to slog through for me.

What a really impressive collection, all in one place though! Incredible job.

[Carrot Top]

There is one excerpt from Jade Snow Wong's "Fifth Chinese Daughter". I read the book as a young girl and rereading the piece brought me back to the same space I was back then. It was from that excerpt that I learned all about Chinese cooking.

I cannot believe what a flashback that was! What a feeling!

←

This story is about one-third of the way through the book, and I'm pleased to say I finally managed to eat my required vegetables in the form of historic writings and found myself reading "Fifth Chinese Daughter" among several others last night, and what a trip!

For me the ride really begins on page 263 with S.J. Perelman's "Avocado, or the Future of Eating" from "Crazy Like a Fox" (1944). Perfect, deadpan, absurdist humor that could be sold like candy wrapped up in gold cellophane if only it could.

Betty MacDonald's "That Infernal Machine, The Pressure Cooker" was an eye-opener.

She writes like a rural Dorothy Parker, tied tightly into an apron with wooden spoon in hand, with all that infers. From "The Egg and I" (1945).

Where did Ogden Nash come from and how did he manage to write things like "The Strange Case of Mr. Palliser's Palate"? How did those words flow into his head in such a manner, and actually manage to mean something too? This was reprinted from The New Yorker (1948).

The details of "Fifth Chinese Daughter" were mesmerizing, and the way the story ends with the scene drawn of the rice pack being opened by the father, the bamboo straps saved, the terrible moment shown of how "who we are", so tightly bound to this food, this reality that is both something known, desired, something to be proud of and then at times something that is both painful and frightening, inescapable and pre-ordained. But in the larger scheme of things, it seemed it was not pre-ordained, finally, forever, in this "new world", as we gaze along with the writer's eyes at a time close yet past. (1950).

A deep sigh has just escaped me in looking back at "A Walker in the City" by Alfred Kazin. My god, the tactile elements roused from the street as he walks through it as a boy, back in 1951. Brownsville was a much different place when I lived in Brooklyn twenty years later, a much different place. Neighborhoods can appear and disappear within that time in the city as if someone dropped them from another planet, if one watches from afar, the differences are so great on the exact same blocks one would walk. My father walked those blocks, in that time. How lucky he was. But the taste, the richess, the overpowering exultation of life, in that street, again, but yet always with a nudge of a slightly painful kick to it when you get closer, as a mother urges her child to eat, eat, eat, fix yourself by eating, more. Food, would save you.

The favorite injunction was to fix yourself, by which I understand we needed to do a repair job on ourselves. In the swelling and thickening of a boy's body was the poor family's earliest success. "Fix yourself!" a mother cried indignantly to the child on the stoop. "Fix yourself!" 

In those lines I can see the children, naive in ways most children today are not. I can feel the tense maternal desire of the mother to have their babies grow and "do well", with a fear underlying that is not so common in our culture today, a fear of the unknown that might just whisk their child away if indeed, he or she did not "fix themselves" in some mysterious fashion. And the food, was what would somehow make their feet solid on the ground, to move forward safely in a very big world.

And then Maria Sermolino's "Papa's Table d'Hote", growing up inside an Italian restaurant, with all the life and exuberance and struggle and generosity shown as she wrote it. (1952).

But then, the final story I read, which was simply electric. A passage from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", about eating a hot roasted yam on the streets of Harlem in the snow, in 1952. If that story had been a prize-fight, it would have been a rising tide of vital and strong body-punches, none of them meant to hurt, but all of them meant to do what had to be done, knock the opponent to his knees. Astonishing. All in a yam. All in . . . a yam.

I'm on page 297, aiming for page 727, to finish the book.

The question has risen in my mind as to whether the other periods of time, moving forward, will be as impressively filled with stories this hard-hitting and passionate, this boldly visceral and yet satisfying to the mind at the same time. I'm wondering if it was that post-war era that had something to do with how these stories took shape and definition with such impressive strength, the "newness" of things that were happening in our culture at that time, the rumblety-tumblety of it all, that somehow sparked these magic utterances that hit paper to last forever.

I can't wait to find out.

Edited June 2, 2007 by Carrot Top (log)

[judiu]

There is one excerpt from Jade Snow Wong's "Fifth Chinese Daughter". I read the book as a young girl and rereading the piece brought me back to the same space I was back then. It was from that excerpt that I learned all about Chinese cooking.

I cannot believe what a flashback that was! What a feeling!

I, also, read that book as a child, and was totally fascinated by the look into another culture. I still remember it to this day, but couldn't recall the author's name. Thank you! I'll now have to check out our local library's juvenile section and see if they have the book; I want to read it again! I also just ordered the Molly O'Neill book from Amazon as a Mother's Day present to myself.

[srhcb]

Okay, based on the posts above, I'm sold.

Or, at least, I've added this book to my Amazon Wish List!

SB (really wishes he had more time to read! )

[rconnelly]

It's interesting to see how people read this book. Some work from cover to cover. Others, like me, read a bit here, a bit there.

Either way, I'm glad everybody is getting into it.

[The Naughti Literati]

Apparently released on April 19, 2007.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

In a groundbreaking new anthology, celebrated food writer Molly O'Neill gathers the very best from over 250 years of American culinary history. This literary feast includes classic accounts of iconic American foods: Henry David Thoreau on the delights of watermelon; Herman Melville, with a mouth-watering chapter on clam chowder; H. L. Mencken on the hot dog; M.F.K. Fisher in praise of the oyster; Ralph Ellison on the irresistible appeal of baked yam; William Styron on Southern fried chicken. American writers abroad, like A. J. Liebling, Waverly Root, and Craig Claiborne, describe the revelations they found in foreign restaurants; travellers to America, including the legendary French gourmet J. A. Brillat-Savarin, discover such native delicacies as turkey, Virginia barbecue, and pumpkin pie.

Recipes, too.

I ran into the book at B&N today, or it ran into me. One way or the other, it came home with me. I am thrilled.

←

The same thing happened to me, I was rounding a corner at B&N in Chelsea, and there it was on a display table. Couldn't leave without it - I am slowly reading it from cover to cover but haven't picked it up lately. I think I'll read some more of it tomorrow!

[Carrot Top]

The same thing happened to me, I was rounding a corner at B&N in Chelsea, and there it was on a display table. Couldn't leave without it - I am slowly reading it from cover to cover but haven't picked it up lately. I think I'll read some more of it tomorrow!

←

I found that there were lots of parts I just wasn't in the mood for at the time and had set it aside for awhile, too. Maybe it's time now to take another gander.

Do write in and tell what your favorite stories were from it . . .