Skip Dinner Tonight: Culinary Writing Feeds The Mind

Sometimes books serve as pathways to the pleasures we are incapable of obtaining in real life: Flying and spells for readers of Harry Potter, hot and easy women for readers of Maxim, and, for me, a good meal.

This summer I got my first taste of financial independence—and of being broke. I realized that exorbitant meat prices meant that I was going to become a de facto vegetarian, a horrible fate for someone whose truck back home bore the bumper sticker, “I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat a salad.” I had developed a life-long aversion to vegetarianism, growing up in a place where most vegetarians and vegans were aged hippies or their equally self-righteous spawn, convinced that in denying themselves protein and pleasure they had earned a karmic bonus to lord over the rest of us.

I refused to go over to the dark side. So I turned to books and became a vicarious carnivore.

The genre of food writing is similar to any other specialized genre, in that the biggest names still remain unknown to most generalists. M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin—such great masters of culinary writing go unrecognized by the American public. But despite their anonymity, food writers have crafted some of the best prose of the twentieth century. They face a unique challenge in trying to represent in words experiences that are primarily smell- and taste-oriented.

Laurie Colwin, a little-known author who, during her short life, published a few novels and several stories in the New Yorker, is one of the great American food writers. This summer, working three jobs to make rent and reduced to herbivory, I would open up “Home Cooking,” Colwin’s masterpiece. My personal favorite text over the summer was a chapter analyzing the intricacies of creating the perfect fried chicken.

Colwin expounds on her own time as a starving student in Manhattan and as I re-read the familiar pages, I had an epiphany. This was me: I had no money, I lived in a tiny apartment; in all essentials I was Laurie Colwin.

My reading inspired me to forsake my nutritional but meatless diet for one that involved filet mignon and red wine on payday and a strict diet of ramen for the second half of every week.

This is the danger and the beauty of food writing. It influences your daily life by changing your own relationship to food—and it can become addictive itself. Prompted by the release of “Ratatouille,” I attempted to expand my interest from books to movies. Unfortunately, American cinema de cuisine tends to be as soulless as mainstream American cooking. Witness this summer’s “No Reservations,” a painfully vapid remake of the sublime, German “Mostly Martha.”

Then, in mid-July, I discovered the Schlesinger Library, one of the undiscovered jewels of Harvard. Located in the Radcliffe Yard, Schlesinger is an epicurean’s dream, with stacks upon stacks of food writing, from the purely instructional to the anthropological. In the evenings I would return home weighed down with John Thorne’s accounts of diners in rural Maine and Penelope Casas’ explications of Spanish foods and wines.

Now that the school year has begun, I have unlimited access to food again. But the monotony has become too much; red spiced chicken is only so exciting the third time around. I am beginning to lose interest in the dining hall’s feeble attempts to entice me.

Unfortunately, I’m still broke, so the majority of Harvard Square’s restaurants are unattainable (I may love food, but I love a new pair of shoes even more). But even if I can’t afford Rialto, the sequel to “Home Cooking” is at The Harvard Book Store for a fraction of the price and none of the calories.

—Staff writer Madeline K.B. Ross can be reached at mross@fas.harvard.edu.