Book Club /November
Book Club: "The Man Who Ate Everything"
When it comes to commentary in the food world, Jeffrey Steingarten serves the main course
“I hope you don’t mind that I’m finishing lunch on the phone,” Jeffrey Steingarten says through a mouthful of snack. “My new assistant, perhaps sensing that I was not altogether happy with something she didn’t look up very well, made me my recipe for chocolate chip cookies.”
Steingarten — who recently returned to his Lower Manhattan home after two long trips chock-full of the no-holds-barred professional eating he does as Vogue’s food writer — takes another bite.
“I have a plate right in front of me, and they’re delicious.”
He should know. Researching the question of the perfect chocolate chip cookie is just the sort of subject that Steingarten has torn into with gusto, following questions where they may lead, until deadline ends the hunt.
Then he sits down to write painstakingly reported essays for Vogue, seasoned with arch, self-deprecating expositions on his journey to the truth of the dish. He’s been on the trail since 1989, and “The Man Who Ate Everything,” his bestselling 1997 collection of essays, is The Buffalo News’ Book of the Month.
The Man Who Ate Everything
By Jeffrey Steingarten
Vintage
528 Pages,
$15.95
“I’m very, very flattered that my book is being treated in this way. I can’t tell you how perceptive I see your people as being — and what good taste they have,” Steingarten deadpans. “Fabulous taste.”
Even so, Steingarten averred that his second collection, “It Must Have Been Something I
Ate,” is “more mature, and some people think it’s funnier.”
In recent years, Steingarten’s audience has been broadened by his appearance on the Food Network’s Iron Chef America. His tart comments are often the most critical voice heard when competing chefs present their dishes for presentation, prompting some show fans to call Steingarten “the Simon Cowell of Iron Chef.”
The fact that Steingarten knows more about practically anything edible than his fellow judges does not come across on television. But he’s not complaining — he’s kicking himself.
“Well, if I had a brain in my head it would have changed things more,” he said when asked how “Iron Chef” has changed his career. “I have a feeling that if I had a new book out, it would have really helped with sales.”
There’s no doubt about the cable network’s reach, he said. “Someone asked the other day, ‘Who’s the chef with the greatest income from cheffing — Mario Batali? Emeril?’ It’s Rachael Ray,” Steingarten said, warning that he was passing on hearsay.
“Mario Batali is a brilliant cook,” Steingarten says. “He’s not really an Italian cook, but he’s a brilliant cook. An amazing mouth — he could sell you anything. When he had a show on the network, it was fairly substantive. He wasn’t telling you to open cans.”
Steingarten started writing about food after Harvard Law, a job with Boston Mayor Kevin White and a legal career that enabled him to eat at noted restaurants around the world. Then fashion editor Anna Wintour hired Steingarten to write a 500-to 800-word article about whether fish could be cooked in a microwave oven.
Driven to offer the most informed answer possible, Steingarten tried filets in 12 microwave ovens. The finished manuscript was 4,200 words long. Wintour printed most of it, and Steingarten was off.
His first Vogue column, in “The Man Who Ate Everything,” details his first task: confronting his food phobias, a must, he reasons, for a professional food writer.
“As I considered the awesome responsibilities of my new post, I grew morose,” Steingarten wrote. “For I, like everybody I knew, suffered from a set of powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime. I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness.”
Take Greek cuisine, for instance. “Any country that pickles its national cheese in brine and adulterates its national wine with pine pitch should order dinner at the local Chinese place and save its energies for other things,” he wrote. “The British go to Greece just for the food, which says volumes to me.”
Before he relates his experiences in confronting Greek food and other specters, including kimchi, Indian desserts, clams and lard, Steingarten has already adopted his voice: the intrepid explorer bound for the dark areas of food knowledge with a retinue befitting a moneyed gentleman in pursuit of knowledge.
So if Steingarten wants to write about turducken, the Cajun chicken-in-duck-in-turkey stuffed masterpiece, he doesn’t just journey to Louisiana to watch master poultry deboners at work.
He struggles through the process in his own kitchen, a four-day odyssey of hunting ingredients, struggling with sharp cutlery, and finally, propping the door to his stuffed refrigerator closed with a chair the night before it roasts for 13 hours.
But the man who has probed the mysteries of foie gras and supped on dog in China has just as much to say about the familiar. French fries are just as deserving as a subject, even if he’s willing to order a vat of horse fat from France to exhaust his options.
“Good barbecue is the best food ever invented in America, by far,” he asserts.
Trapped in a rest stop with nothing but American fast-food chains, what would he eat?
“Of course, I have to know what they all are in order to answer your question,” he says. Popeye’s, a Cajun fried chicken chain, would be his first choice. But that’s a regional chain.
“I eat a fair amount of KFC,” Steingarten says. “I would probably order a small bucket regular, and a small bucket of extra crispy.”
Both? “Yes,” Steingarten says. “Because I couldn’t choose.”
