It is 10 years since Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential rocked into town and gave food writing such a hard slap that it has never quite known which end to stand on since. Bourdain’s account of life as a professional chef in New York City made midweek service at Les Halles or the Supper Club sound like going on tour with the Rolling Stones circa 1972. In exquisitely dirty prose he described a life of constant high pressure, meaty sweats, singed fingers and drunken all-night come-downs with his crew of semi-desperadoes. Kitchen Confidential blew the idea that there was anything refined or effete about cooking for a living and gave its entranced readers the kind of insider information that made them feel as though they had been initiated into the coolest gang on Earth.
Now, a decade on, Bourdain has published Medium Raw. There have actually been five books in between, but this one is branded as the official follow-up to Kitchen Confidential. There is something identifiably different about it, though. It is not just the tone — Bourdain is in his 50s now, off drugs and a first-time father, so some of the piratical swagger has been burned off, although the language remains as rococo as ever. It is more that the landscape into which Bourdain is launching his sequel has changed entirely. Whereas Kitchen Confidential was free to slash and burn its way through literary territory that felt relatively static, even stuck, Medium Raw is obliged to pick its way carefully through a richly variegated and much expanded genre. Food writing has evolved its own elaborate ecosystem, bristling with subgenres, starting points, cross-currents and trip wires. For Bourdain to repeat his trick of 2000 and storm in, steak knives rattling, would not look so much heroic now as simply ignorant.
In Medium Raw, then, Bourdain is obliged to insert himself into a crowded field, carefully feeling out his position and defining himself as much by what he is not as by what he is. He is not, he makes clear, Eric Schlosser or Michael Pollan, two campaigning writers (authors respectively of Fast Food Nation and In Defence of Food) whose recent work he admires, but whose handle on the science and politics of agribusiness is a million miles from his own blood-and-guts approach. He is not Marco Pierre White, a man who anticipated his foul-mouthed persona, but who nevertheless received Michelin stars that Bourdain could never aspire to (by his own admission, he has never been more than just good enough to work as a line chef in second-tier restaurants). He is not Jamie Oliver, the English TV chef about whose cooking he remains tactfully mute, but whose commitment to doing the “harder thing” he finds admirable. “Most chefs I know, were they where Jamie is on the Success-O-Meter, they’d be holed up at a Four Seasons somewhere, shades drawn, watching four tranny hookers snort cocaine off one another.”
‘Don’t touch my dick, don’t touch my knife’
But most significant of all is the fact that Bourdain is no longer a professional chef, but a professional food writer. Ever since hanging up his whites following the global (he calls it “freaky”) success of Kitchen Confidential, he has made his living outside the bloody chamber that is the restaurant kitchen. Thus Medium Raw‘s subject matter is no longer the discipline of twice-daily service (and yes the religious parallels have been noted), but its ersatz reconstructions in the various foodie television shows on which Bourdain is now a regular celebrity participant.
His beefs no longer concern light-fingered colleagues — “don’t touch my dick, don’t touch my knife” — or his personal hatred of vegetarians, but instead centre on the idiocy of the Food Network or the nullity that is Rachael Ray (a wildly successful middle-of-the-road American TV cook).
Instead of riffing on a lavish, career-hobbling multidrug habit, Bourdain’s main dilemma now is whether he should endorse a rubbish restaurant in return for $40 000 a month. (In the end he decides not to, but not before torturing himself — and us — with the fact that the only thing stopping him is a narcissistic desire to believe himself “above all that”). Medium Raw is not so much written in a minor key — it is as ferociously rude as anything Bourdain has done before — as written at one remove from the thing that made him who and what he is. As Bourdain admits, by letting the world in on his love affair with cooking, he managed to kill the thing he loved the most.
Still, if Bourdain is working out his issues about what it means to be a food writer, plenty of others are ready to seize the moment with relish.
Indeed, we are currently experiencing a bit of a food writing renaissance, with the genre occupying the kind of sunny uplands that travel writing did 30 years ago. Back in the late Seventies a clutch of young men — Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux — reanimated the dusty travelogue with high style, strong narrative presence and a box of tricks to match any literary novelist. For the next 15 years travel writing offered a viable freelance career for writers who couldn’t do fiction, weren’t academics, but felt themselves to be something more than journalists. Suddenly everyone was at it. Newly expanded colour supplements of Britain’s Sunday newspapers provided outlets for shorter pieces from intellectuals who, although not primarily travel writers, had something they wanted to say about faraway places, much as Julian Barnes or Simon Schama today might turn in an elegant piece about food as a kind of holiday from their usual writing selves.
Of course, there were plenty of travel writers before Chatwin and his gang pitched up (Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark and Norman Douglas, for starters), just as there were excellent food writers before the current crop: Marguerite Patten, Robert Carrier, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson all nudged the genre into new and slightly different shapes.
Production or recipes
What all these writers had at the core of their practice was the production of recipes. No matter how sparkily delivered, their books and accompanying television programmes were essentially rebranded as home economics lessons. No surprise, then, that when food writing started to take off again in the mid-Nineties, it was still predicated on the recipe book, albeit glamorously packaged as the River Cafe Cook Book or Nigella’s How to Eat.
Since then the realisation has spread that food writing is about much more than recipes. Instead of being simply the fuel we put in our mouths, it is now understood as our culture’s — all cultures’ — connective tissue.
Rolled up in a feast or a snack, a Sunday roast or a piece of sashimi is a story of history, geography, memory and time just waiting to be unpicked. Writers, who might once have worried that showing an interest in food suggested they were either effete gourmandisers or vying for Delia Smith’s crown, now stake a proud claim for the subject’s centrality. And because food is as universal as breath, it is hardly surprising that it has insinuated itself into every aspect of the literary imagination. These days you will find food wherever you look on the bookshelf — in memoir, biography, popular science, academic anthropology, post-colonial studies and, of course, in travel writing. Indeed, so varied now are its domains that very often you have to squint to recognise any family resemblance at all.
One of the most popular of these new foodie forms is memoir. Mostly written by cookery writers as opposed to professional chefs, food memoirs typically season the story of a fractured childhood with recipes from a much-missed home. So in last year’s Risotto with Nettles (Chatto & Windus) the doyenne of British-Italian food writers, Anna Del Conte, tells of a prosperous middle-class girlhood in Milan blown apart by World War II. Trips to fancy restaurants are replaced by foraging in the countryside as young Anna learns to eat (and survive) like a peasant. The book is sprinkled, too, with recipes that chart her unbelieving first few years in postwar England, a culture that still thought that olive oil was something you bought from the chemist to treat earache.
Equally telling, and part of a further subgenre of British-Asian food memoir, is Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook (Portobello). Here the political journalist plots the multiple dislocations of her Ugandan-Indian family in the 19th and 20th centuries through the foods they inherited, adapted and chowed down in great greedy gulps. The recipes she includes illustrate what academics call “hybridity” and everyone describes as a glorious mash-up: “roast red spicy spuds”, “carrot halva” and shepherd’s pie with a dash of chilli. Alibhai-Brown has made a point of clinging to her home (wherever that might be) comforts, but for an account of what happens when you attempt to remodel your cultural identity by rejecting its iconic dishes, try Yasmin Hai’s zesty The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter (Virago).
Growing up in Seventies’ Wembley, Hai and her schoolfriends, the daughters of middle-class British Pakistanis, try to out-English one another by declaring to whoever is listening that they never eat curry at home.
Ironically, given that memoir is a form predicated on the value of individual experience, many of these books tend over time to take on a generic quality. There’s always a granny in them, one who makes daily trips to the market before bustling home to toil over a dish that had been handed down as a precious secret through the maternal line.
But what, say, if you had a gran whose idea of nurture was to rummage in the freezer and cut you off a hank of Arctic Roll before tottering back to watch the wrestling on the telly? For those kind of food memories, the patron saint remains Nigel Slater. In Toast (HarperPerennial), Slater told of a childhood no less busted than that of Del Conte or Alibhai-Brown, but one that took place in Sixties’ Wolverhampton rather than prewar Europe or Fifties’ Uganda.
Instead of homemade pasta and fruit lovingly plucked from the orchard, Slater told gleeful stories of Angel Delight and Rolos bought from the Spar shop. Sensing he was on to something (there are, after all, more of us in Britain whose culinary heritage involves Wall’s neapolitan ice cream than homemade bread), Slater followed this up with the brilliant Eating for England, which didn’t even pretend to bother with proper chapters, but instead formed itself out of little riffs on those food items that collapse time in a suck, crunch or slurp — Spangles, KitKats and Heinz tomato ketchup.
Eating for England
Given the success of Eating for England, it was perhaps a little cheeky of Simon Majumdar to call his new book Eating for Britain (John Murray).
Although the premise is a good one — a road trip to try out the regional specialities of British food undertaken by a writer who is partly British-Asian, the execution is not quite sharp enough to compete with those recent classics of the genre, British Regional Food (Quadrille) by Mark Hix and The Taste of Britain (HarperCollins) by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown. And, by the way, if it’s simply recipes using regional ingredients that you’re after, then you still can’t beat Nose to Tail Eating (Bloomsbury) from Bourdain’s culinary hero, Fergus Henderson. (So passionately does Bourdain feel about Henderson that in Medium Raw he solemnly damns to hell the former New York Magazine food critic, Gael Greene, for once slightly getting the man’s name wrong.)
Memory may seem to be a guarantor of memoir’s authenticity, but when pressed into service for a more general kind of food history, it can be become as slippery as an eel. The genre as a whole is shot through with the most damaging nostalgia for a golden age of eating that never quite was.
The cream of the crop of the recent historical reprints remains The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (OUP) by Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner. Originally published in 1888, it aimed to do for memsahibs (madams) what Mrs Beeton had done for their stay-at-home sisters. Steel and Gardiner were both married to members of the Indian civil service. The book provides, as do all household management guides, a window not on how women lived, but on how they desperately wished they did. Steel and Gardiner preach a severe counsel of perfection, one that involves teaching your native cook to rustle up fish quenelles and how to treat the bites of “mad, or even doubtful dogs”. Their mission, to create a domestic space that was forever Wiltshire, throws a bright light on the larger project of which they were part, that of running the British empire.
New titles may suggest that food writing is flourishing in one sense and it is. But although new and reissued books seem to be doing well in difficult times, the same is not true of newspaper and periodical food journalism. Amid much lamentation, Conde Nast took the decision to close Gourmet magazine last autumn. A bible of the elite American table for the past 70 years, Gourmet was a place for elegant, informed writing about high-end home and restaurant dining. Its editor, Ruth Reichl, formerly restaurant critic of the New York Times, blamed a steep fall-off in advertising revenue. All those car, travel and jewellery companies could no longer justify taking space in a publication that didn’t deal directly with their core constituencies (just because you like reading about sushi, it doesn’t mean you want to drive to Tokyo wearing diamonds).
Although Reichl’s analysis is doubting mostly correct, commentators have been quick to see Gourmet‘s demise as part of a broader shift. Expertise and even prestige are increasingly passing from paid journalists to food bloggers, who combine a deep and committed knowledge of their subject with almost nonexistent start-up costs. In every city in the world (and, perhaps more pertinently, in the countryside, too) you will find an articulate commentariat able to respond nimbly to both local and international conversations about food production and consumption. Their responses and suggestions range from locating the best coffee beans in Sunderland to the effect of the Icelandic volcano dust on the importing of cheap veg from Kenya. There are wit and invention here too. The recent Oscar-winning film Julie and Julia is based on a blog written by New Yorker Julie Powell as she attempted to cook her way through Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is hard to see how Powell’s quirky project would ever have found page space in an American food magazine, let alone in the hallowed (and strictly rationed) pages of Gourmet.
Food writing is just writing
It is this opening up of what might be called a pro-am space in food writing that likewise accounts for the new buoyancy of smaller and more specialist journals dedicated to the subject.
It is customary to end an article such as this by pointing out that, despite the exponential increase in books, blogs and journals dedicated to food, we now cook less than we ever did. We are, say the doomsayers, a generation of food voyeurs, porno-dependent quick-fixers who snack on crisps (quite possibly of the hand-crafted kind) while virtual-feasting on pictures of Nigella’s store cupboard.
Even Bourdain, who usually says the opposite of everyone else, agrees that it is a crying shame that children aren’t automatically taught to cook in the American school system.
All this is laudable, but slightly misses the point. Food writing is a literary activity, built upon words, sentences and paragraphs rather than flour, butter and eggs. It may refer to the kitchen and the dining room, but it is forged in the library and the study. Someone who reads Ernest Hemingway is not assumed to spend their weekends fishing or fighting bulls. A devotion to Agatha Christie does not require you to be either a fiendishly clever murderer or a detective.
Even an “armchair traveller” who laps up travelogues by Michael Palin or Jonathan Dimbleby while never stirring further than Southwold is an object of benign contemplation rather than sharp rebuke. And so it must be with food writing. You can appreciate its delicious qualities without feeling the least need to pick up a wooden spoon and have a go yourself. (The recipes included in all those food memoirs are surely for illustrative purposes only.) Food writing is writing full stop — and the best of it does what good writing always does, which is to create an alternative world to the one you currently inhabit. Anything else is gravy. — Guardian News & Media 2010