I am befuddled by those who reach for their measuring beakers and electronic scales, as if they were lab technicians, when pouring over sauce-smeared tomes such as Cuisine Actuelle and French Chefs Cooking. When I read lush descriptions of lamb tarts and pear Napoleons, my first instinct is to chase my wife around the butcher's block.
I am convinced that descriptions of pot lids trembling in the kitchen, will, if executed well, quicken the pulse of even the most straight-laced and proper. Who did not, for example, redden with embarrassment and roar with laughter when, in the publishing and film sensation, Julie & Julia, Julia Child compared the hot and hard sheaf of the al dente pasta boiling in the pot to the stiffness of a man's saucisson?
It is probably the culinary image we will recall long after everything else about Julia Child has been washed away with the dishes. And even though cookbooks are the utilitarian manuals of the kitchen, the best really belong in the boudoir rather than in the butler's pantry. Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential, amusingly calls good culinary writing "food porn." He is entirely right. The language of the kitchen - with its "searing," "juices" and "drippings" - is semi-erotic.
Of course, some will consider it utterly inappropriate to be aroused by the mere suggestion of pied de cheval oysters. Perhaps they are right. But sweating palms and sweating onions have long been bedfellows in the stews of great literature. Mrs. Waters' famous dinner seduction of Tom, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, is not just serious literature and highly amusing, but, in the Tony Richardson film at least, also seriously hot.
But reducing the sensuality of good culinary writing to mere sex also misses the point. For the best culinary prose is really about a healthy and earthy appetite for life, and the goal of the culinary-inclined author is to stimulate the readers' senses until they are fibrillating with excitement and ravenous for the very essence of life.
You don't have to be a professional scribbler to get this. I was recently studying the writings of a 13th century Buddhist priest, research for my next novel, when I came across a letter thanking a supporter for sending him a sack of rice. The monk wisely pointed out that rice does not just sustain life. It is life itself.
I couldn't agree more. In the hands of the great literary masters, food morphs into a symbol for all of life, from the sensual trigger of a deeply personal story (Marcel Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past) to the instrument of deprivation at the heart of a cruel society (Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist). Gluttony and starvation, the destructive extremes of food intake, have consumed every scribe from St. Augustine to Franz Kafka.
I learned the value of food as social commentary when I was Forbes' European Bureau Chief. My personal journalistic technique, when needing to quickly understand where a country was on the global scale of economic development, was always to head directly to the local markets. In the Ugandan capital of Kampala, for example, I followed brown-hide longhorns into the abattoir, where the walls were splattered with blood and the steers' hacked-off hooves were stacked and sold as a culinary delicacy. Outside, under the flame trees, women sipping milky tea shelled beans and sold Nile Perch broth or a peanut sauce to go with a starchy-green banana mush called matoke.
In short, the hardscrabble African nation instantly entered my soul through my pores, and the market descriptions in the subsequent article made Forbes' readers in New York or Seattle viscerally understand Uganda's economic landscape, far more effectively than the dry recitation of per-capita GDP statistics.
Now, in The Hundred-Foot Journey, my novel published by Scribner about a lowly Indian chef who conquers the elite world of French haute cuisine, I have tried, successfully or not, to use food in the same big-picture manner. The novel is very much about the lighthearted joy that comes from whisking together good food with eccentric characters, but it is also, at another level, about clashing cultures, destiny, ambition, passion, and the opposing pulls of modern society. All of life, in short, and it's funny how, during the writing process, the unconscious pulls from its depths the precise culinary image the novelist needs to make his case.
When writing my novel, I came to a passage where I wanted to convey the shock that hits my Indian protagonist when he is abruptly transplanted from steamy Bombay to chilly London. At that precise moment, I recalled the local Portuguese technique for catching octopus, which we all used when I was a boy summering with my family in Cascais, Portugal, during the late 1960s. I flashed to my father dragging the quivering grey blob from its underwater lair up on to a rock, where he inserted his fingers inside the slit of the octopus' gill, and then abruptly turned its entire head inside out, so the octopus' organs were exposed to the air. Death was fairly quick.
This
culinary image - head turned inside out - seemed like just the right
means of conveying what profound culture shock feels like. And that's
how it mysteriously unfolded. Every time I put pen to paper, I found
my nib dripping with the juices of a cognac-basted pork roast.
Follow Richard C. Morais on Twitter: www.twitter.com/richardcmorais
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