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Review by Lillian Kayte
At first glance, John Thorne's third book, Serious Pig, appears to be a cookbook with more text than recipes. But start reading and, like peanuts or potato chips, you won't be able to stop. Although the recipes seem to play a secondary role, they're actually exclamation points along the way to bring home Thorne's warm, thorough, and witty foray into food history.
The book is divided into three parts, "Here" (Thorne's "here" is mostly Maine, but occasionally touches on other parts of New England), "There" (southern Louisiana, particularly bayou Cajun and New Orleans), and "Everywhere" (America at large). I loved them all. Thorne's musings about people and food are as fascinating as his recipes from Maine's eating places and home kitchens. He shares with us the Down Easter's thrifty (but never mean) approach to deceptively simple specialties like Bean Hole Beans, Lobster Stew, and Blueberry Bread-and-Butter Pudding. He also introduces us to the local mind-set where a vegetable is just a vegetable but the potato is king, comes in 70 varieties, and is worth a 50-mile round trip in order to put a hundred pounds or so into the cold cellar for winter keeping.
In the last section, "Everywhere," Thorne addresses the origins of that nonsequitur known as American cooking, exploring American classics and explaining how they have survived down through the generations despite their lack of any roots of their own. He even comes to terms with white bread and American cheese, follows the evolution of chile con carne from its buffalo hunter roots, and helps us get a grip on why we may never completely abandon chocolate chip cookies and greasy burgers.
The best food writers are, of course, good writers first and food mavens second. John Thorne is both. The nearly 500 pages ended much too soon for me, but I take comfort in knowing that, like my other classics, it's something I can dust off and reread anytime I like.
Like his award-winning Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig is a collection of essays, most of them originally published in John and Matt Lewis Thorne's food letter, Simple Cooking.
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