Primordial glee
Primordial glee
John Maytham appreciates the work of Jeffrey Steingarten for making food fun.
I don't have as many books about food as I have books about birds, but I still have a large number - including the very first one I bought in 1976 as a varsity student, desperate to escape the drudgery of toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches or baked beans on Smash.
You can still see the price: R3.95. A small sum to pay for chicken chasseur and beef Wellington and lemon meringue pie!
I have books by Elizabeth David and Joël Robuchon; by MFK Fisher and Thomas Keller; by Anthelme Brillat- Savarin and Heston Blumenthal; by Marlene van der Westhuizen and Ferran Adria, and so on.
Whenever I am planning a dinner party, most of them get paged through as I search for that elusive recipe that will make me seem casually brilliant in the kitchen. I can't imagine getting rid of any of them.
But the books I return to most often, not so much for the recipes as for the precise and beguiling philosophy of food they espouse, are the twin volumes by Vogue magazine's food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten.
The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must've Been Something I Ate are classics of erudition, wit and unashamed gourmandising.
He meets a girl at a party who says to him, "I know you, you write about food for fun", and he comments: "I'd forgotten there was any other way." He can't be reading many other food writers, then, because too many of them seem to write to show how clever they are, or out of a sense of malice, or for an unending stream of free meals.
Steingarten celebrates food, and people who grow food and prepare food, and does so with a restless intelligence and a refusal to accept conventional wisdom on anything.
He does double blind tests on the world's most expensive and celebrated salts and discovers that you can't tell the difference between table salt and Oshima Island Blue Label Salt - the world's most exclusive and expensive.
He participates in the day-long butchering of a pig to find out why this particular French village's method leads to the most sublime boudin noir. He does homecooked braised short ribs for his golden retriever because he can't understand why man's best friend should have to eat desiccated pellets.
He tries more than 200 recipes for gratin dauphinois until he finds the perfect one, which he then delights in so much that he cooks it every single day for five weeks. (Yes, he does share the recipe - thank goodness.)
At the core of his approach is respect - respect for ingredients, respect for the cultural traditions out of which great food grows, respect for those who refuse to accept second-rate in their kitchens, whether those kitchens are in private homes or in Michelin-starred restaurants.
It doesn't matter whether he is writing about a R750 starter of green asparagus and black truffled zabayone cooked by Alain Ducasse or a €2 pane Genzano from a bakery on the Campe de'Fiori in Rome; he delights in the transformative and bewitching power of great food.
It helps that Steingarten is not only clever and witty, but also has the knack of conveying the wonder of food without needing flowery language. Many of us live constrained lives where the need to watch our wallets or our waistlines, or both, imposes limits on the joy we allow ourselves to take from food.
How important it is, then, to have people like Jeffrey Steingarten in our midst; people who "feel an elemental, primordial glee" every time they are called to dinner.
John Maytham is the host of the afternoon drive show on 567 CapeTalk. Though he's never been formally trained in the kitchen, he's been writing about food for 25 years, and if restaurant meals consumed counted academically, he'd have a PhD.
