Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
It's my pleasure to introduce our next guest, James Beard Award-winning food
writer John Thorne, who makes his home online at http://www.outlawcook.com/.
John is co-author, along with his wife Matt Lewis Thorne, of the 
just-released "Mouth Wide Open: A Cook and His Appetite." The book -- a
compilation of pieces originally published in his newsletter, "Simple
Cooking" -- includes recipes and observations delivered with a relaxed,
casual approach that warms the heart of the experienced cook and invites 
even the most wary of kitchen novices to give it a try.

John explains his laid-back approach: "As an eater, I take it as it comes;
as a cook, I'm still trying to solve the mystery of stone soup."

Leading the conversation with John is Ed Ward. Although best-known for
writing about music, Ed has been writing about food, usually under the
pseudonym Petaluma Pete, since the 1970s. Under his own name, he's opined
about food, wine, and beer in American Way (American Airlines' in-flight
magazine), the Wall Street Journal, in his blog Berlin Bites
<http://berlinbites.blogspot.com>, and as part of the team for Hungry In
Berlin <http://www.hungryinberlin.com>.

He's taught Cajun cooking at the University of Texas' adult education
program and was honored to be quoted on the subject in John Thorne's book
"Serious Pig." He currently lives in Berlin and yearns for France.
  

    
I made black-eyed peas with scallions, celery, green pepper, and
country ham for supper tonight and served it over rice. Also included
in the mix were onions and parsley, hot pepper sauce, and a pinch of
thyme. We've eaten this dish so often that I can't even remember if and
when I wrote about it. This is the sort of dish that when you get
tired of it, you don't change it, you just stop making it for a year or
so, and then, when you make it again, you say, "Where have YOU been!"
  

    
And there, folks is simple cooking in a nutshell: classic ingredients
combined in pleasing proportions. No glitz, no pretension, nothing
trendy about it. 

But behind the production of a dish like that there's a lot of
thinking going on, and I suspect that's what drew me to John's writing
originally. As he says in his new book, "What I do is look for recipes
with the potential for a lively conversation...I don't follow recipes;
I interact with them." And, a little further on, "Cooking is about
doing the best with what you have...and succeeding."

Ultimately, I think that all of us who like to cook believe this,
although it's not exactly a trendy or flashy philosophy. But the food
needn't be boring, either, nor need it be mundane. Among the "what you
have" in my kitchen are some Chinese sauces and ingredients, and
tonight I'm going to make a stir-fry I love which I found in Irene
Kuo's book The Key to Chinese Cooking under the boring name Spicy Beef
with Vegetables. There's the usual garlic and ginger, some tree ears,
celery and carrots, some beef, and a sauce holding it together with the
usual suspects of soy sauce, sugar, and black vinegar. Not flashy, but
larrupin' vittles for a cold Prussian night. One of the lovely things
about the world we live in now is that it's as easy to get Chinese
chili paste for a buck as it is to get Campbell's Cream of Mushroom
Soup for the same buck. 

But while you won't be seeing any John Thorne's Simple Cookhouse
chains opening soon, I was a little shocked by the preface to Mouth
Wide Open, where he actually has nice things to say about today's
celebrity chefs. 

What's up with that, John?
  

    
Ed! Not CELEBRITY chefs. Just plain everyday "workin' hard for the
money" chefs. A major reason for what you're talking about comes from
the fact that my nephew Hank, who's in his early twenties, has been
doing a lot of cooking recently, and I know it isn't from my writing.
Not that he thinks ill of it, but its kind of like... you know...
literature. He's totally into people like Alton Brown and Jamie Oliver.
This got me thinking about what it would be like to enter the food
scene now, as opposed to back in the sixties and early seventies, and
one of the big differences I saw right away is how prominent a role
chefs would play in my imagination. When I was a teen in the fifties,
writers were such a big cultural icon that I actually started to smoke
a pipe in imitation of them. Then, when I was in my twenties, musicians
were petty much kicking the writers off the podium, although they
themselves started getting jostled by certain movie stars. All this
made sense to me, but when CHEFS appeared, I just couldn't grasp it. Of
course, if I were hipper, I'd have immersed myself in celebrity
studies and got a better handle on it, but all I had to work with was
my perspective as a cook, and my attempt to see things through Hank's
eyes. It was hard, but I did start understanding why a liberal arts
graduate, who majored in art history, might find something in chefs
that I had never noticed. 
  

    
Okay, whew, I was afraid we were going to see you on Food TV there for
a minute. And I was thinking of a point near the end of Marco Pierre
White's autobiography (hey, I'll read anything; English-language books
are thin on the ground here and one of the Hungry In Berlin crew
loanded it to me) where he says "Look, there's only one way to fry an
egg, right? So a young chef comes up to me and I order him to fry an
egg." 

You, on the other hand, have a whole essay on how to do that. I wanted
to make the arrogant jerk read it. 

I'd also read The United States of Arugula and posted on my blog (at
<http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/2007/01/eat-think-gossip.html>, in
fact) a review taking David Kamp, the author, to task for omitting you
and Edna Lewis, and he sent me an e-mail in which he admitted
admiration for both of you, but said you didn't fit in with the
narrative of the James Beard->Craig Claiborne->Alice Waters kind of
crowd he was profiling. I'd take that as a compliment. 

One thing about your books is it's possible to use them as cookbooks
-- I certainly do -- but it's most advisable to sit down and *read*
them. This puts you in a league with a small number of other food
writers, some of whom, like Richard Olney and Patience Gray, you
acknowledge, but also with one whom I think most people here will be
familiar with, MFK Fisher, whom you don't seem to say much about. Is
this intentional?
  

    
I've read all of MFK Fisher's works except the collection of letters
(I've never been a fan of reading other people's mail, unless I know
them), and I know she enjoyed reading Simple Cooking, because in the
last days of her life she had her personal assistant write me to tell
me so. That being said, I think of her as someone who liked to be
admired more than understood, and since I liked her very much, I
just... admired. Also, she is a very wily writer, clever at making you
think you are much closer to her than you actually are. You've probably
discovered this, too, that a personally inviting prose style can be as
good as any strategy for keeping people at arm's length, except the
very, very persistent... and then you get something scary like
Jeannette Ferrary's M.F.K. Fisher and Me: A Memoir of Food and
Friendship. 
  

    
Haven't read that, but I have read the big Art of Cooking several
times. 

Do you have any thoughts on Edna Lewis? I once ate at Gage & Tollner
while she was executive-cheffing there and took some German foodie
friends who flipped over the simplicity and directness of the fare. I
haven't seen her name crop up in your accounts of Southern cooking. 
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
I kind of intuited that. 

It's good that writing about food has escaped cookbook-ism, though. I
particularly liked the section at the end of Mouth Wide Open where you
had book reviews, only a couple of which were about cookbooks. The one
that reallky had me cheering, though, was your piece on Eric
Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. I hate asking this, because it's such a
painstaking analysis, but could you give us a fast-and-dirty summary of
this chapter? I suspect a lot of the folks reading this will want to
talk to you about it.
  

    
Ed, that piece is the summary. However, to reduce it to a couple of
talking points... The book made a lot of good points, but it undercut
itself partly by simplistic finger pointing (fast food is hardly the
only culprit when it comes to the practices of corporate agriculture,
and partly by an unsettling condescension toward the poor (whom
Schlosser seems to think are fast food's primary victims). I also
brought up the law of unintended consequences, where good intentions
wreak havoc with ordinary people's lives. Schlosser writes in the same
Carry Nation, Anthony Comstock tradition. Prohibition made us a nation
of soda guzzlers, giving up tobacco has the side effect of gaining
weight. Making marijuana illegal has led to the development of super
potent strains. I believe that people need ways to act out and
sometimes self-destruct, whether it be speeding, drinking, cussing, or
eating double-bacon cheeseburgers. 
  

    
um for those of us who are ill-informed, can
you summarize what is wrong with ms ferrary's book
on mfk fisher? i too am an admirer of fisher's,
but always observed the cageyness with which
she both revealed and hid her personal life
(which i feel is a fine thing to do, to
not be -regurgative...)

and john, i have some very vague association
with you from when i was living in nyc in the
80s and subscribed to petit propos culinaire
for a bit --- did you have any association
with them? would both you and that pub
have been mentioned/reviewed in the same
place?
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Hi Paulina, I knew the late Alan Davidson through Matt and actually
met him once, but my connections with PPC were (and are) extremely
tenuous, apart from the fact that we exchange complimentary
subscriptions (a good deal for me). I certainly admire the publication,
but I don't think that's what you're asking. As to Jeannette Ferrary,
I felt that the book milked a lot of presumption to extract that cup of
friendship, and I put down the book feeling that it told me a lot
about Ferrary I didn't want to know and very little about Mary Frances,
except what she was like when dealing with a fawning but essentially
unwanted visitor. 
  

    
well, now i am even more confused about why i associated
you with ppc. hmm...well it was several lifetimes ago...

and i know exactly what you mean about that
kind of tagalong memoir of a 'friend' to
a celebrity. from reviews i;ve read,
something similar is afoot with the current
friend-of-iris-chang memoir.
  

    

(Note: Offsite readers with questions or comments may have them added to
this conversation by emailing them to <inkwell@well.com> -- please be sure
to put "John Thorne" in the subject line. Thanks!)
  

    
#11: you can't edit. You can scribble and repost.

It was so funny to read #1 because I made pretty much a batch of
exactly that the other day, though I glop some cheese on to it too.
  

    
Speaking of PPC, what food media do you read? Do you ever get into any
of the big-time cooking magazines like Saveur or Gourmet as a reader
-- or as a contributor?

Sharon slipped in.
  

    
or that wonderful food/cooking studies magazine out of
UC-berkeley?
  

    
Hi John. I'm eating up your book. (sorry, I couldn't help myself).  What I
enjoy most is that you write about your cooking the way my husband cooks.
An idea from here, a recipe from there, a good fresh piece of something or
other from the market and Voila-dinner!

I am new to your writing, so forgive me if this question seems obvious...Do
you have any formal training in cooking, or did you just stumble upon it out
of joy?
  

    
I really, really like this book. The intro, with a scant two pages,
contains some of the most heavy-hitting cooking wisdom I've ever seen:

1) "Cooking changes best by epiphany." Amen. NOTHING teaches better or
more than those AHA! moments that totally change the way you do
something. Choking up on the knife is one I've semi-recently
discovered--it completely changed the way I handle knives. Realizing
one can cook with tea. Making confit out of garlic. Bottarga as
parmesan. Preserving lemons. It's endless. I call it being fallible --
to have a great deal of conviction and passion about ways of doing
things, but to have eyes and mouth wide open to the possibility that
someone, somewhere, has a better way.

2) "Cooking is about doing the best with what you have . . .  and
succeeding." People are so afraid of making mistakes. My main cooking
motto is "declare victory."

There are many, many more throughout the book -- this will be fun.
  

    

>  "Cooking changes best by epiphany."

My wife went from disinterested in cooking to a devotee as a result of
watching "Supersize Me" so maybe that qualifies as an epiphany. Not only
did she get interested in cooking, but in Thai and Indian cuisine.

There's nothing like going to the Indian grocery to find a couple of
spices that we never knew existed and spending an hour in preparing a
masala using fresh spices. As an aside, the last spices we bought were
"black salt" which is not black but pink and not salt and ground
pomegranate seeds. You cannot find what we eat in a restaurant either in
quality (fresh vegetables and spices) nor in taste.

So I was wondering if you can offer any recommendations for Thai or Indian
cookbooks or if they are too far from your usual culinary haunts?
  

    
Well, I do have Thai and Indian cookbooks that I like more than
others. It's funny how the more certain culinary traditions get written
about, the more cookbooks you end up owning for that sort of food,
which doesn't necessarily represent a preference on your part, but
rather an indication of what's available. I once got interested in
researching a Tibetan dish (or what I thought was a Tibetan dish) and
ended up owning every book on the subject published in English -- four
of them, at the time. In any case, as to Thai cooking: David Thompson's
THAI FOOD is an amazing book if rather intimidating at 673 pages, but
when you're looking for answers, he provides them. The two Thai books I
reach for when I want to do a little exploring are Jennifer Brennan's
THE ORIGINAL THAI COOKBOOK and William Crawford and Kamolmal
Pootaraksa's THAI HOME COOKING FROM KAMOLMAL'S KITCHEN, which is twenty
years old but nothing over that time has dimmed my esteem for it. Now,
on to Indian cooking. Two books I've spent pleasurable hours with are
Camellia Panjabi's THE GREAT CURRIES OF INDIA and Maya Kaimal
MacMillan's CURRIED FAVORS: FAMILY RECIPES FROM SOUTH INDIA. And then
there are the various volumes by Jeffrey Alford and Maomi Duguid, HOT
SOUR SALTY SWEET (Southeast Asia) and MANGOES & CURRY LEAVES (India and
Pakistan), more general but wholly absorbing and wonderful to just
leaf through.
  

    
Re scribbling above. My wife, Matt, was unhappy about something I
wrote regarding Edna Lewis and her writings (not at all critical of
Edna, but regarding something she had confided to Matt about an
editor). Here is the same post minus the offending aside: 
Edna was a close friend of Matt's for many years. I admire her greatly
and have all her books. She was very shy and not at all comfortable
writing and it's my feeling that her other cookbooks would have been so
much better if someone did for her what Richard Olney did for Lulu
Peyraud — conveying simultaneously a near intuitive grasp of who she
was and what she was doing in the kitchen. By the way, I wasn't
recommending the Ferrary book, but using it as an object lesson in the
dangers of fame. The world is still awaiting Mary Frances's book,
Jeannette Ferrary and Me. 
  

    
Formal training? I was just pushed into the pool. When I dropped out
of college in 1961, I ended up in a tenement apartment on the Lower
East Side, with the bathtub next to the kitchen sink. But this was
still a time when cooking seemed relatively obvious, and when it
wasn't, you looked at the directions on the package. My problems came
about when I bought food that was not part of the family repertoire,
chicken gizzards, for example. I had no idea what to expect from them,
so I had no idea as to whether I had cooked them properly. It reminds
me of the time my mother encountered an avocado but confused it with an
artichoke.  Close, in a way, no? Still, the results were not a
success. I ate a lot of scrambled eggs at first, then branched out to
cooking hamburger and chopped onion, then stirring in frozen peas. And
on and on. Anyone for more kasha and chicken gizzards? 
  

    
I must tell you that my husband, who is the real cook int the house (I
prefer baking) loved your piece on smoked kielbasa fried in bacon fat.  This
appeals to him on so many levels - smoking kielbasa AND anything in bacon
fat.
  

    
Lisa, your husband is a mensch. Allow me to observe, however, that the
piece you refer to was about fried smoked kielbasa CASING. As one
reviewer noted about me, I seem incapable of knowing when to stop.