The Man Who Ate Everything
by Jeffrey Steingarten
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeffrey SteingartenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-10-27
ISBN: 0375702024
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Man Who Ate Everything
Book Review: A Leading Contemporary Culinary Essayist. Great Read
Summary: 5 Stars
`The Man Who Ate Everything' is written by Jeffrey Steingarten, credited with being the food critic for `Vogue' magazine, belongs to a very exclusive club of American culinary columnists whose present leading light is James Villas and whose biggest star was M.F.K. Fisher. Oddly, I always had trouble appreciating Fisher's writing, while I simply can't get enough of either Villas or Steingarten. And, of these two, I am leaning to Steingarten if anyone asked me for a `good book on food'.
Steingarten's greatest strength as a writer to the amateur foodie is his ability to put himself in our position vis-à-vis the experts. He never pictures himself as an expert like Harold McGee on food science or Mario Batali on Italian cuisine or Nick Malgieri on baking or even like gifted neophyte Alton Brown on cooking technique. Unlike these professionals and teachers, Steingarten's shtick is how he gets there, not what he as learned after arriving. He is the culinary everyman's surrogate who can travel to Venice to visit Marcella Hazan for an education in cooking and eating Venetian seafood and have cooking expert Marian Cunningham fly in to teach him how to make a perfect piecrust.
Steingarten's introduction which gives an explanation of the book's title makes one seriously wonder what our dear reporter did before he was tapped to write on food for `Vogue'. His list of culinary aversions could fill several major cookbooks, and have. One wonders if Steingarten had any food related assignment before he embarked on reforming his tastes to fit his `Vogue' assignment. While I sometimes fear that my sense of taste is remarkably dull compared to those of talented chefs, my compensation is that there is literally nothing I will not eat and there are very few things I will avoid. In contrast, pre-Vogue Steingarten had aversions to kimchi, dill, swordfish, anchovies, miso, falafel, clams, and all Greek food. The introductory essay is the story of how Steingarten overcame all of these aversions except to the one for eating insects.
This first essay is a perfect exemplary of Steingarten's style. It may have been easier to say these are the aversions he overcame, but it is much more fun to describe how he overcame them. This is not to say that the book is all about the tourist to the banal. Steingarten is well prepared for most of these trips and we, along with the author, learn much in the course of his trials and errors.
While this is not a book about food science a la Robert Wolke's `What Einstein Told His Chef', there is a lot of scientific method afoot in many of the essays. My favorite is Steingarten's excursion into the world of the perfect piecrust. As dedicated `Good Eats' fans know from Alton's episode on pie crusts, the building of the perfect pie crust involves resolving two contrary properties, flakiness and tenderness while doing battle with properties of wheat flour gluten which work so well when creating bread, but which, it is said, cause all sorts of undesirable characteristics in pie crusts, known to the French as `pate brisee'. Before expert Cunningham flies in from California, Steingarten surveys the entire body of writing in English on what makes a good pie crust and comes up with a perfect procedure involving a whiz of the flour in a food processor with half the shortening followed by a careful folding in of the remaining shortening and a hint of water to bring everything together. The result is a disaster.
The lesson from this attempt is that that villain gluten is not so irrelevant to a pastry crust as some writers would have you believe. When Madame Cunningham arrives on the scene, she whips up a dandy piecrust in about as much time as it may take you to write about it. Ms. Cunningham then flies off before Herr Steingarten has gotten everything about her technique down on paper. This leads to many transcontinental telephone calls while our Jeffrey perfects his fingering with the dough and gets everything down in black and white. The really ironic outcome of this exercise and the resulting essay is that Steingarten's description of the complete procedure takes SEVEN (7) full pages. And, that is with a recipe using shortening rather than my preferred butter. I may not follow his procedure, but I certainly enjoyed his journey needed to get him to that result.
Like Villas, it is quite likely that you will find much in Steingarten's writing with which to disagree. This is part of the fun. For example, he can find little to like about roasted turkey, the national American holiday meal. Since `Gourmet' and `Bon Appetit' and Nigella Lawson (among others) are still cooking up new recipes for the maligned bird, I suspect Steingarten has not talked anyone out of eating their gigantic poultry, but it is certainly fun listening to him rant about it and, as Ms. Lawson so aptly points out, tradition may be as much or more important than the turkey's culinary virtues.
As we are approaching the dark evenings of winter, I definitely recommend this book as a classic of American culinary writing. It is our Yankee answer to B'rer Villas' writing about food from the Southern perspective. As an essayist, Steingarten has the eye and mind of Stephen Jay Gould and the wit and wordsmithing (and similarly strong prejudices) of H. L. Menchen, my two favorite American essayists.
Highly recommended.
Summary of The Man Who Ate Everything
Winner of the Julia Child Book AwardA James Beard Book Award Finalist
When Jeffrey Steingarten was appointed food critic for Vogue, he systematically set out to overcome his distaste for such things as kimchi, lard, Greek cuisine, and blue food. He succeeded at all but the last: Steingarten is "fairly sure that God meant the color blue mainly for food that has gone bad." In this impassioned, mouth-watering, and outrageously funny book, Steingarten devotes the same Zen-like discipline and gluttonous curiosity to practically everything that anyone anywhere has ever called "dinner."
Follow Steingarten as he jets off to sample choucroute in Alsace, hand-massaged beef in Japan, and the mother of all ice creams in Sicily. Sweat with him as he tries to re-create the perfect sourdough, bottle his own mineral water, and drop excess poundage at a luxury spa. Join him as he mounts a heroic--and hilarious--defense of salt, sugar, and fat (though he has some nice things to say about Olestra). Stuffed with offbeat erudition and recipes so good they ought to be illegal, The Man Who Ate Everything is a gift for anyone who loves food.
When Jeffrey Steingarten was made food critic of Vogue in 1989, he began by systematically learning to like all the food he had previously avoided. From clams to Greek food to Indian desserts with the consistency of face cream, Steingarten undertook an extraordinary program of self-inflicted behavior modification to prepare himself for his new career. He describes the experience in this collection's first piece, before setting out on a series of culinary adventures that take him around the world.
It's clear that Vogue gave Steingarten carte blanche to write on whatever subjects tickled his taste buds, and the result is a frequently hilarious collection of essays that emphasize good eating over an obsession with health. "Salad, the Silent Killer" is a catalog of the toxins lurking in every bowl of raw vegetables, while "Fries" follows a heroic attempt to create the perfect French fry--cooked in horse fat. Whether baking sourdough bread in his Manhattan loft or spraying miso soup across a Kyoto restaurant, Steingarten is an ideal guide to the wilder reaches of gastronomy, a cross between M.F.K. Fisher and H.L. Mencken.
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