Girl: I’m thinking of writing a book about my Nana.

Boy: You’d better get on that. Like, write down what she says before you forget. I’m just sayin’. I mean, how old is she?

Girl: Sixty-eight.

Boy: I’m just sayin’, she’s probably gonna die soon. I write down stuff that occurs to me at work so that when I write a book someday I have all the good stuff. I just write down a word or two to remind me. [Pulls out his iPhone and pulls up his list of genius thoughts for her to admire.]

Girl:  [Suddenly has a great idea.] I could be in there! After you drove your friends home that night you gave a girl her first kiss. [Her voice has grown soft at the memory.]

[Silence.]

Boy: I don’t know about that. I write down just a word or two of the interesting stuff.

[Some time later...]

Girl: My white fluffy Northface is getting kind of dirty. I wanna get a new one.

Boy: I’m thinking of getting one at Christmas.

Girl: [excited] For me?

Boy: [Sounds incredulous.] No, for me! I’m not sure if black or brown is better…what do you think?

Chips or crisps, depending on how you slice it

…The potato crisp is at the crossroads, and to judge by the sundry aromas arising from the secret kitchens of R-and-D departments, the industry can’t guess which way it will go. Whoever guesses right could make a real killing. The value of Britain’s annual crop has doubled since 1964 and now stands around 62 million quid–crunch that!

…the old basic crisp they still eat down at the Rover’s Return, even if it is doomed elsewhere, was unique among the works of man in being as neatly related to its pack as was the egg to its shell. Different kind of neat, but almost as instructive to look at.

For a start, it is an inherently unconformable shape. The cooking process that makes it crisp also crumples it into rigid but irregular corrugations. There is no way to make it pack closely with its neighbours, so that any quantity of crisps must also contain an even larger quantity of air. Bulk for bulk, as packed, crisps contain even less weight of food than cornflakes, and thus give conviction to the myth that they just can’t be fattening.

This sense that there is no diet-busting substance in crisps is reinforced by their performance in the mouth. Apply tooth-pressure and you get deafening action; bite again and there’s nothing left. It’s a food that vanishes in the mouth, so, I mean, it can’t be fattening, can it? It certainly isn’t satisfying in any normal food sense; the satisfactions of crisps, over and above the sting of flavour, are audio-masticatory–lots of response for little substance.

The pack is analogous in its performance. Keeping the crisp means keeping water-vapour away from it; and until recently the only cheap, paper-tape flexible materials that formed effective vapour-barriers were comparatively brittle and inflexible, and thus produced a lot of crinkling sound effects whenever they were handled. What with the crisps rattling about inside, and the pack crackling and rustling outside, you got an audio signal distinctive enough to be picked up by childish ears at 200 to 200 yards.

But more than this, the traditional method of sealing off the top of the pack produced a closure that could only be opened destructively and couldn’t be resealed. So eating crisps was an invitation to product-sadism. You tear the pack open to get at the contents, rip it further to get at the corner-lurkers int he bottom, and then crush it crackling-flat in the fist before throwing it away. It’s the first and most familiar of Total-Destructo products and probably sublimates more aggression per annum than any quantity of dramaturgical catharsis.

Excerpted from The Oxford Book of Essays, edited by John Gross. Read the rest of Banham’s essay here. See what the late, great man looked like here. 

P.S. Did you notice how he wrote ‘childish ears’ and not ‘a child’s ears’? A critical distinction, to be sure.

Post-travel pocket contents on newly-acquired trivet

On my way home from an all-too-short trip to England last week, I was loitering outside the baggage claim at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, zoning out as the rain began to fall over Michigan and recalling how the notoriously fickle British clime had very kindly offered up a series of beautiful days during my stay and made my visit even more wonderfully unreal, when I suddenly realized that from within the dark recesses of the car parked in front of me, there was a long shadowy finger, beckoning.

This is a scene I’ve been taught since dressed in onesies to read as a prelude to kidnappings and drug deals. However, after (in)expertly canvassing the scene and discovering that the finger belonged to a neatly-dressed old woman, I decided it was safe to make contact.

“Hi…?”

“Hello, my dear. I wondered if you know when the flight from Amsterdam arrives?”

Unfortunately, I did not. But she looked so deflated that I told her I would go in and check, since my bus wasn’t due to arrive for a long time.

“Oh, would you? That would be so kind. It is either flight 542 or 645.”

A foray back into the baggage claim revealed that there were no such flights either already on the ground or scheduled for later in the day.

As I went back outdoors I saw her rustling in her purse, and when I came up to her window again, she thrust two hard candies at me as I told her the news.

“Oh dear, oh dear. Flight 542 or 645? My friends should be here now. Flight 542 or 645. It is okay. I will wait. What is your name? Is there somebody to drive you home? Do you want to come into the car and sit with me?”

I told her I had to keep an eye out for the bus and so we continued our little dialogue through her car window, she leaning over the emergency break while I hunched toward the opening, companions in contortion and conversation.

“What a wonderful name, Alice. Like Alice in Wonderland! I am Tatiana. I was born here but always spoke Greek when I was growing up, so I have this accent….Oh, how wonderful that you are doing a PhD! My husband is an academic too. He teaches economics….You are doing English, how wonderful!… And do you have any brother or sisters?…A brother, how wonderful!….Have you noticed that I am very interested in biography?“

In due course, I had to leave her waiting for her friends who may or may not have been arriving from Amsterdam that day in order to board the bus that drove me home in torrential rains. It didn’t feel very wonderful at all, but when I glumly thrust my hand into my pocket to keep it warm on the walk home I touched the two foil-wrapped toffee candies that will remind me that this too could be wonderful. That it is. That there will always be that elderly Greek lady in the pastel skirt suit who thinks so, which does count for something in the grand scheme of things.

Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729)

A man well-rounded both in physical proportions and intellectual interests, Sir Richard Steele  is best remembered today for starting The Spectator with his friend Joseph Addison. One of the first periodicals in England, The Spectator sought ‘to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality… to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses’. A noble task, and one perhaps easier for him in his day than us in ours by the fact that The Spectator’s circulation of 3,000 reached approximately a tenth of London’s population as each paper was passed from hand to hand–mainly in the rising institution of the coffee house–over the course of the day. 

The excerpt below comes at the end of his essay, ’On Recollections of Childhood; Death of Parents; First Love’. My favorite part, other than the last bit, is the way he manages to convey sincerity rather than euphemism in his use of ‘commended’ as a alternative verb. 

From Steele’s ‘On Recollections of Childhood’: 

Garraway's Coffee House in Exchange Alley, circa 1800

A large train of disasters were coming on to my memory, when my servant knocked at my closet-door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday next, at Garraway’s coffee-house. Upon the receipt of it, I sent for three of my friends. We are so intimate, that we can be company in whatever state of mind we meet, and can entertain each other without expecting always to rejoice. The wine we found to be generous and warming, but with such a heat as moved us rather to be cheerful than frolicksome. It revived the spirits, without firing the blood. We commended it until two of the clock this morning; and having to-day met a little before dinner, we found, that though we drank two bottles a man, we had much more reason to recollect than forget what had passed the night before.

From Sir Richard Steele, ‘On Recollections of Childhood; Death of Parents; First Love’, 1710.

No rolling stone

Now, to thrust away the transitional crutch and patter back into productivity at my new desk at my new home in the new city of Ann Arbor. A pity this aging, beleaguered computer isn’t also new. But as I say this I remember the words of the strange but wise father I overheard today in the gift shop of the Natural History Museum, swooping his son away from the dinosaur display and throwing the boy over his shoulders with the playful words, “You’re just hungry for more things. Things, things, things!” To which the boy responded with a giggle from behind his father’s head, “I’m hungry for more thinggggggggs!”

The word ‘hungry’ fits in nicely with the idea of being a consumer, I suppose, but struck me as very weird at the time. In any case, settling into a new place and trying to make it a home has made me very conscious of my own hunger for things, as well as the constant anxiety of wanting to make sure that they are not just any things but the right ones. Which is why I still have bookshelves made out of cardboard boxes and my mattress sits on top of a sheet of plastic on the floor while I continue my quest for the right pieces of furniture to welcome into the family. 

This is all a roundabout and unplanned way of introducing the poem for today, which is about making do without much, and the friend who sent it to me, who has often extended a much-needed finger of mockery at my obsessive-compulsive impulses about both concrete and abstract things. Especially those invisible things called germs: my first memory of Bryan is during the morning all of the new English teachers met each other at HKIEd as he triumphantly held up a water bottle full of the tap water that we were told not to drink. 

Together, we taught a folk-singing class to elementary school students who were too cool for school. Or rather, Bryan picked the Beatles songs and I desperately tried to learn them the night (sometimes the afternoon) before each class, while he shook his head at my ignorance. Together, we watched the BBC plays of Shakespeare. Or rather, Bryan watched them while I inevitably fell asleep by the end of the first act. Together–this time really together, we hatched plans of a massive Olympics-like event revolving around food-based challenges, only to discover that everyone else thought we were nuts, half-cracked. 

Below is a poem by the Latin poet Catullus, inviting his friend Fabulle to come over for dinner (apparently bringing with him the makings of a feast).  An odd poem in some ways, but one that despite its slightly disturbing turn celebrates the idea that the most deep-seated hungers must be satisfied by intangible things.  My superficial gesture at research  on The Full Wiki revealed that the word ‘sale’  in the fifth line is the word for ‘salt’, but ‘came to mean wit…because salt was used to add flavour to the meat, and so in literary terms the “flavour” to words is wit.’ Keep an eye out for it, folks. 

Guest Post by Bryan, the old salt: 

A would-be godsend for housewives

This summer, I’ve made a pact with my father. I can read my literary stuff and putter around and do my own thing writing about novels and food while doing my internship as long as I also read a couple of books that he picks for me. To compensate for the overdevelopment of my education in certain directions, and all that. I suspect they’ll mostly be on financial topics since he considers me a monetary dimwit–not in that I spend excessively, but that as a person who generally deals with words rather than numbers, I have a very tenuous and small-picture grasp on how fiscal transactions work on the macroscopic level. Of this, I can only say that I’m guilty as charged.  A few other works detailing global shifts, human psychology, and social patterns will probably serve as the other sheets of sandpaper applied to the rough edges of my knowledge.

Though it’s all been surprisingly enjoyable, the most unexpected moment of amusement I received this week was while reading Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Turning past pages about pricing schemes and twenty-first century conceptions of what ‘free’ means, I came across a description of a bizarre moment in computing history during the 1960s when engineers imagined a mind-bogglingly limited and off-target future for the personal computer–though I suppose one can’t blame them too much for immediately latching on the idea of food:

Engineers of the time understood Moore’s Law on one level: They knew it would bring computers that were smaller and cheaper than the mainframes of the day. Indeed, it was not too much to imagine computers becoming so small and cheap that a regular family could have one in their home. But why would anyone want that? After much pondering, the computing establishment of the late sixties could think of only one reason: to organize recipes. The world’s first personal computer, a stylish kitchen appliances offered by Honeywell in 1969, did just that–and it even came with integrated counter space. The Honeywell was featured in that year’s Neiman Marcus catalog, selling at the bargain price of $10,600 despite the fact that the only input method was toggle switches on the front panel and the housewife would have to speak hexadecimal. It’s unclear whether anyone ever bought one.

I’ve already put a picture of the unfortunate machine at the beginning of this post. If the user-unfriendly facade and the system descriptions above aren’t enough to give you a sense of the weirdness of it all, however, here’s an ad for the Honeywell 316 that I turned up online that is at once depressingly patronizing and oddly optimistic about the average housewife’s technological aptitude:

“If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute.”

Honeywell Kitchen Computer Ad, circa 1969

Text:

Her souffles are supreme, her meal planning a challenge? She’s what the Honeywell people had in mind when they devised our Kitchen Computer. She’ll learn to program it with a cross-reference to her favorite recipes by N-M’s own Helen Corbitt. Then by simply pushing a few buttons obtain a complete menu organized around the entree. And if she pales at reckoning her lunch tabs, she can program it to balance the family checkbook. [...]

I suppose that if one had a sudden household expenditure of $10,600 , it would indeed be quite useful to have a machine to calculate the precise amount of the damage and then suggest some thrifty recipes with which to pave the penny-pinched way back to sound financial health. Of course, that is a bit like dropping a large block of ice on your foot so that you can treat the injury that the impact creates. With the added complication of toggle switches and hexadecimals. Line up here to get yours now!

Book excerpt from Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009), p. 87. 

Alaskan Halibut

Since my last post two months ago, I’ve gone from having my brain slow-roasted over the open flame of university examinations in England to having my flesh consumed by insatiable Taiwanese mosquitoes. Fortunately the abject suffering has come with some perks, such as post-exam barbecues and summer berries in Oxford and abundant spreads of fresh produce in Taiwan. And, of course, the people who make these indulgences meaningful. Though it has left little time and mental capacity for blogging, life has been good. 

At the moment, I’m working (slowly, I have to admit) on a longer post about some of my last moments and last eats in England. To tide you over until that much-anticipated day, here is a poem by the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper about a subject that bridges the cultures of the two island nations I’ve recently called home: eating fish. I’ve italicized my favorite part, the pseudo-benediction at the end. 

To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut on Which I Dined This Day

Written by William Cowper in 1784

WHERE hast thou floated, in what seas pursued
Thy pastime? when wast thou an egg new-spawn’d,
Lost in th’ immensity of ocean’s waste?
Roar as they might, the overbearing winds
That rock’d the deep, thy cradle, thou wast safe—
And in thy minikin and embryo state,
Attach’d to the firm leaf of some salt weed,
Didst outlive tempests, such as wrung and rack’d
The joints of many a stout and gallant bark,
And whelm’d them in the unexplor’d abyss.
Indebted to no magnet and no chart,
Nor under guidance of the polar fire,
Thou wast a voyager on many coasts,
Grazing at large in meadows submarine,
Where flat Batavia just emerging peeps
Above the brine,—where Caledonia’s rocks
Beat back the surge,—and where Hibernia shoots
Her wondrous causeway far into the main. —
Wherever thou hast fed, thou little thought’st,
And I not more, that I should feed on thee.
Peace therefore, and good health, and much good fish,
To him who sent thee! and success, as oft
As it descends into the billowy gulph,
To the same drag that caught thee!—
Fare thee well! Thy lot thy brethren of the slimy fin
Would envy, could they know that thou wast doom’d
To feed a bard, and to be prais’d in verse.

An egg is dear on Easter day. –Russian proverb

Painted (and carved) Easter eggs for sale in Prague

Last year, my eye was caught by a caption in the New York Times for the photo to an article by the former editor of House & Garden. “Unemployed,” it read, “the author became obsessed with gazing at and eating eggs.”

Hey, I thought. I am a bit obsessed with them too. Hard boiled, cut in half and sprinkled with a light kiss of salt, each grain gathering itself into a tiny saline droplet on the flat surface of the egg white. Hard boiled, with the egg yolks mixed with a bit of mustard and sprinkled with paprika. Hard boiled, chopped into salads or sandwiches. Hard boiled, peeled, and further cooked in fragrant salty broths until they become tea eggs or lu dan. Soft boiled or poached, and then drizzled with soba-tsuyu, the mixture of dashi (a fish broth usually made from bonito flakes), mirin (rice wine), and soy sauce that the Japanese use as a dipping sauce for cold buckwheat noodles in the summertime. Poached and spread on crispy toast with anchovies, bacon, or some other very salty thing. Fried, sunny-side up. Fried, sunny-side up, in sesame oil with a few slivers of fresh ginger. Scrambled, plain or with a bit of cheese or spinach or mushrooms or (on a rich day) shrimp or smoked salmon. Carefully cracked and swirled into hot pot or brothy soups, so that the waving egg-white fins pick up the flavor of the soup but remain attached to the saucered yolk. Steamed into soft, savory, silken concoctions in Japanese or Chinese cuisine…

The egg, my friends, is a marvelous thing. And I have not even forayed into its contributions to the dessert table.

Sadly, in six pages of text, Ms. Browning actually only gave six sentences to eggs, and short ones to boot:

Time hangs heavily on the unemployed soul. If I ate an egg at 8 a.m., by 9:30 I was starving. I became obsessed with eggs, gazing on their refined shape in wonder. Perfect packets of nutrients. I ate eggs all day long. When I had a job, I never thought about eggs.

I read to the end, but the honorable egg had done its duty and figured no more in the text.

So I’ve decided to generate a bit of my own.

Our word today comes from the Old Norse, gradually spreading down and across through the Scandinavian settlements in the north and east, eventually replacing the Germanic ei, plural eier or eiren. In 1490, the printer William Caxton laments in the Prologue to Eneydos (The Aeneid), ”What sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certaynly it is harde to playse every man.” [A translation, just in case: Whatever a man these days writes, egges or eyren, it is certainly hard to please every man.] One hundred years before Caxton, Wyclif’s 1382 Bible renders ‘”they hatch adder’s eggs” in Isaiah 59:5 as “the eiren of edderes thei to-breeken.” A century in the other direction, Brutus says of the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c. 1600), ‘Thinke him as a Serpents egge.” Language changes. The imaginative appeal of reptilian zygotes in association with unsavory people does not.

Anyway, I had to laugh at the definition offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, just because it seems so circumlocutory and self-qualifying:

1.a. The (more or less) spheroidial body produced by the female of birds and other animal species, and containing the germ of a new individual, enclosed within a shell or firm membrane.

The parenthetical (more or less) is definitely the best part, though  ”germ of a new individual” and “a shell or firm membrane” are slightly ridiculous as well.

In any case, if the perennial chicken or egg question is difficult to answer in either biological or philosophical terms, in terms of proverbial precedence the victory of the latter is clear. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. A rotten egg cannot be spoiled (Roman). An egg in the mouth is better than a hen in the coop (Hausan). An egg does not fight a rock (Madagasy, Chinese, Italian, and more, apparently). The egg will be more knowing than the hen (German). Even “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” is really more about the egg than the chicken, isn’t it? I rest my case.

To end, Chocolate and Zucchini’s Clotilde Dusoulier recently featured a French idiom, plein comme un  œuf, “full as an egg”–used, alas, only for objects and spaces and not for people who have eaten well. Still, it’s an idiom that I am fond of already. For an egg is full–of nutrition; of wisdom; of possibility, culinary and literary; even of little insights into the development of our weird but wonderful English language.

How many other foods can claim as much?

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in the British TV series Jeeves and Wooster (1990-1993)

As Bertram Wooster, Laurie played the well-heeled, chirrupy, and oblivious foil to his proper, problem-solving, and considerably sharper valet Reginald Jeeves (Laurie’s longtime comrade-in-arms Stephen Fry) in a serialized adaptation of the comic novels by the fabulously prolific P.G. Wodehouse. The books are always good fun. How could they not be, when written by an author who occupied himself by doing this and this and this when not cranking out works with the enthusiastic productivity of a home cook on a newly-purchased pasta press? 

In addition to providing a taster of the Wodehousian humor for those unfamiliar with it, the following excerpt from Much Obliged, Jeeves illustrates  that just as food can affect mood, mood too can affect food. 

From the opening of Much Obliged, Jeeves:

As I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I was conscious of a strange exhilaration, if I’ve got the word right. Pretty good the set-up looked to me. Here I was, back in the old familiar headquarters, and the thought that I had seen the last of Totleigh Towers, of Sir Watkyn Bassett, of his daughter Madeline and above all the unspeakable Spode, or Lord Sidcup as he now calls himself, was like the medium dose for adults of one of those patent medicines which tone the system and impart a gentle glow.

‘These eggs, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘Very good. Very tasty.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Laid, no doubt, by contented hens. And the coffee, perfect. Nor must I omit to give a good word of praise to the bacon. I wonder if you notice anything about me this morning.’

‘You seem in good spirits, sir.’

‘Yes, Jeeves, I am happy today.’

‘I am very glad to hear it, sir.’

‘You might say I’m sitting on top of the world with a rainbow round my shoulder.’

‘A most satisfactory state of affairs, sir.’

‘What’s the word I’ve heard you used from time to time–begins with eu?’

‘Euphoria, sir?’

‘That’s the one. I’ve seldom had a sharper attack of euphoria. I feel full to the brim of vitamin B. Mind you, I don’t know how long it will last. Too often it is when one feels fizziest that the storm clouds begin doing their stuff.’

‘Very true, sir. Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, kissing the golden face the meadows green, gilding the pale streams with heavenly alchemy, Anon permit the basest clouds to ride with ugly rack on his celestial face and from the forlorn world his visage hide, stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. I couldn’t have put it better myself. ‘One always has to budget for a change in the weather. Still, the only thing to do is to keep on being happy while you can.’

‘Precisely, sir. Carpe diem, the Roman poet Horace advised. The English poet Herrick expressed the same sentiment when he suggested that we should gather rosebuds while we may. Your elbow is in the butter, sir.’

‘Oh, thank you, Jeeves.’

Well, all right so far. Off to a nice start. but now we come to something that gives me pause. In recording the latest instalment of the Bertram Wooster Story, a task at which I am about to have a pop, I don’t see how I can avoid delving into the past a good deal, touching in events which took place in previous instalments, and explaining who’s who and what happened when and where and why, and this will make it heavy going for those who have been with me from the start. ‘Old hat’ they will cry or, if French, ‘Déjà vu’.

On the other hand I must consider the new customers. I can’t just leave the poor perishers to try to puzzle things out for themselves. …

P.G. Wodehouse. Much Obliged, Jeeves. London: Penguin, 1981, pp.1-2. First published 1971.

Paris in spring.

Word has it that no one can resist Paris in the spring. Personally, I beg to differ, possessing a special emotional resistance to blossoming flowers and abundant sunshine and the romance of je ne sais quoi that is generally conferred to people only in curmudgeonly old age. Still, I offer a few excerpts from Émile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873) today for those who do mourn their inability to stroll along the Champs Élysées this seasonal cycle, lover or ice cream in hand. 

Literally, Zola’s title means ‘The Belly of Paris’, though Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, who made the translation that the excerpts below are taken from, rendered it as ‘The Fat and the Thin’–which sounds like it might have unintentionally inspired the catty title of the recent book comparing American dietary habits to French ones that garnered so much press and generated massive hoopla. Zola’s novel is probably more worthwhile, though sometimes difficult going. Let’s just say that there are a lot of characters, and it is very long. The full book (trans. Vizetelly) can be accessed here on Project Gutenberg, though I think the new translation by Mark Kurlansky is probably a better bet, if his ability to make salt and cod into fascinating historical topics that remain engaging over hundreds of pages is any indication.*

From Le Ventre de Paris:

I. Picnicking Youngsters

Cadine and Marjolin had struck up an acquaintance with Leon, Quenu’s apprentice, one day when he was taking a pie to a house in the neighbourhood. They saw him cautiously raise the lid of his pan in a secluded corner of the Rue de Mondetour, and delicately take out a ball of forcemeat. They smiled at the sight, which gave them a very high opinion of Leon. And the idea came to Cadine that she might at last satisfy one of her most ardent longings. Indeed, the very next time that she met the lad with his basket she made herself very agreeable, and induced him to offer her a forcemeat ball. But, although she laughed and licked her fingers, she experienced some disappointment. The forcemeat did not prove nearly so nice as she had anticipated. On the other hand, the lad, with his sly, greedy phiz and his white garments, which made him look like a girl going to her first communion, somewhat took her fancy.

She invited him to a monster lunch which she gave amongst the hampers in the auction room at the butter market. The three of them—herself, Marjolin, and Leon—completely secluded themselves from the world within four walls of osier. The feast was laid out on a large flat basket. There were pears, nuts, cream-cheese, shrimps, fried potatoes, and radishes. The cheese came from a fruiterer’s in the Rue de la Cossonnerie, and was a present; and a “frier” of the Rue de la Grande Truanderie had given Cadine credit for two sous’ worth of potatoes. The rest of the feast, the pears, the nuts, the shrimps, and the radishes, had been pilfered from different parts of the market. It was a delicious treat; and Leon, desirous of returning the hospitality, gave a supper in his bedroom at one o’clock in the morning. The bill of fare included cold black-pudding, slices of polony, a piece of salt pork, some gherkins, and some goose-fat. The Quenu-Gradelles’ shop had provided everything. And matters did not stop there. Dainty suppers alternated with delicate luncheons, and invitation upon invitation. Three times a week there were banquets, either amidst the hampers or in Leon’s garret, where Florent, on the nights when he lay awake, could hear a stifled sound of munching and rippling laughter until day began to break.

II. The famous ‘Cheese Symphony’ scene

As the three women stood there, taking leave of each other, the odour of the cheeses seemed to become more pestilential than ever. It was a cacophony of smells, ranging from the heavily oppressive odour of the Dutch cheeses and the Gruyeres to the alkaline pungency of the Olivets. From the Cantal, the Cheshire, and the goats’ milk cheeses there seemed to come a deep breath like the sound of a bassoon, amidst which the sharp, sudden whiffs of the Neufchatels, the Troyes, and the Mont d’Ors contributed short, detached notes. And then the different odours appeared to mingle one with another, the reek of the Limbourgs, the Port Saluts, the Geromes, the Marolles, the Livarots, and the Pont l’Eveques uniting in one general, overpowering stench sufficient to provoke asphyxia. And yet it almost seemed as though it were not the cheeses but the vile words of Madame Lecoeur and Mademoiselle Saget that diffused this awful odour.

*A slight post-post digression: Ah, the fearsome and pungent beauty of French cheeses. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the translation done by Mark Kurlansky for the Modern Library series in 2009 is the way to go if you’re looking for Le Ventre de Paris but can’t read the original French. I haven’t seen it yet, but as I mentioned above, Kurlansky is also the author of the unexpectedly fascinating Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1998) and Salt: A World History (2003). He’s probably among the first and the best to venture into the history-of-the-world-through-one-type-of-edible-item genre that seems to have become ridiculously popular recently. The titles of such works, if you are not familiar with them, inevitably follow a surefire formula:

[Food Item] + [Colon] + [Grandiose/scintillating claim about said food item's role in shaping human history]

Examples:

(a) Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerers

(b) Spice: The History of a Temptation

(c)  The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World

Mad Libs, anyone?