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Eve Zibart

Food & DrinkCookbooks

Fine wine reading for fine people

Review by Eve Zibart

The 900-pound gorilla in the room—whose 1,600-odd pages give that term new weight—is Wine Advocate founder and national wine critic-in-chief Robert Parker and the seventh edition of his Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide. This edition, which happens to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the first mailing of what was then called the Washington/Baltimore Wine Advocate, focuses on wines currently available or expected to be released in the next two years and also puts a greater emphasis on value.

Parker's focus on accessible wines is echoed in the section of the introduction dealing with the issue of drinking wines young vs. cellaring them for long periods. It's satisfying (for those of us too indulgent to wait for more than a few years) to see Parker encouraging wine lovers to adopt a sort of carpe diem attitude, concluding that "only a small percentage [of wines] are more interesting or more enjoyable after extended cellaring than when originally released." Parker further puts himself on the side of the consumer by denouncing restaurants whose excessive markups discourage patrons from ordering good wine. And he displays an admirably democratic attitude toward price, valuing Penfolds Koonunga Hill line, one of its more inexpensive styles, as highly as some of the high – end releases. (Perhaps in a gesture of sympathy, Simon & Schuster is simultaneously releasing the "Guide" in paperback for a more affordable $35.)

However, it's a little less comfortable to find Parker taking aim at what he calls the "dark side" of wine production, especially "the growing international standardization of wine styles." This is arguably self-serving, as Parker's own 100-point scale is widely blamed for the bulking up of many classic wines. His pointing out that many of the wines in his cellars have scores of 87 or 88 likewise seems rather defensive, as many other wine writers (such as the author of our next book, Robin Goldstein) blame him for wine stores' increasing reluctance to stock any wine rated less than a 90. Nevertheless, the descriptions of wines and winemakers—some trenchant, some dismissive, some fulsome and some fully enthusiastic—are clear and absolute.

It seems likely that "Fearless Critic" food writer Robin Goldstein is hoping to get a rise out of the wine community with his myth-busting manifesto, The Wine Trials. Goldstein and co-conspirator/editor Alexis Herschkowitsch organized 17 double-blind tastings—mostly in Texas, where they're based, and New York—enlisting more than 500 wine professionals and amateurs to taste inexpensive wines and big-ticket bottles in a sort of viniferous smackdown. (One half-expects Bobby Flay to burst in and quaff a few glasses.)What they discover is that many of the tasters preferred the cheaper wines to the luxury versions, even when they would have predicted the opposite outcome. Goldstein attributes this result partly to psychological factors such as perceived value (we are still, of course, the most conspicuous consumer society in the world), manufacturers' expenditures on advertising and a set of rather distracting genetic speculations. He also points to the "Parkerization" of wines, which Goldstein feels leads to the homogenization of wines and their increasing in-your-face, jammy, high-alcohol style.

Eventually the book gets to listing 100 under-$15 wines of note, but having apparently exhausted themselves in trying to make the front matter "heavy," the authors go pretty light on the write-ups, spending nearly as much space on the label designs as the wine. Goldstein also seems to have a champion-of-the-underdog attitude, shrugging that while Dom Perignon "has a classic, expensive Champagne taste … a lot of our blind tasters didn't like that taste." However, the "smoothness of the bubbles" apparently trumps the metallic aftertaste of Freixenet. (Full disclosure: not the opinion of this Champagne freak.) It's a fun book and cheap enough for a stocking (or tucked in with a bottle), but should have been more focused.

Bold blends
Somewhere between the two selections above is the glossy, hefty 1001 Wines You Must Taste Before You Die—which, as it happens, describes Dom Perignon as "sublime." It seems to pander to the type of wine lover who is really a collector for appearance's sake, snapping up the right labels, the right vintages, etc. As a source of information for particular wines, it's very good, but as a "bucket list," it kicks.

It's a little hard to figure out The Wine Planner: Select the Right Wines to Complement Your Favorite Food by wine teacher Chris Hambleton, which is sort of a "Pat the Bunny" of wine and food pairings. It's a heavy spiral notebook with each page divided into four mini-pages, the top listing appetizers, the second main courses, the third desserts and the last cheeses. The idea is that you flip through looking for the food you want to serve wine with, and there's your drink recommendation and tasting notes on the flip side. But listing a specific Pinot Blanc for monkfish tacos or Zardetto prosecco di Conegliano for "peaches stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts," five vintages of the Chateau Lagrange St. Julien (at $50 plus) to dispense with "roast beef, roast lamb, or steak tartare" or (only) the 2005 De Ladoucette Pouilly-Fume for "salmon en croute, baked trout with almonds, or steamed bass" seems showy and somewhat arbitrary.

Top tier
The well-behaved dinner guest of the lot is WineWise: Your Complete Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Enjoying Wine by Steven Kolpan, Brian H. Smith and Michael A. Weiss. These three wine educators from the Culinary Institute of America have produced a clear and useful (if not particularly unique) primer with descriptions of major wine-producing regions, wine styles, etc., with full-color photos and maps. There's also a surprisingly useful final chapter that lists all three critics' favorite wine bargains of all styles—more than 650, with most in the $15 or less range. Now that's timely.

The 900-pound gorilla in the room—whose 1,600-odd pages give that term new weight—is Wine Advocate founder and national wine critic-in-chief Robert Parker and the seventh edition of his Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide. This edition, which happens to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the first mailing of what was then called the Washington/Baltimore Wine Advocate, […]
Food & DrinkCookbooks

Old and new world wine writing

Review by Eve Zibart

Wine books make corking good presents, and this year's offerings run the gamut from info-packed to irreverent. George Taber's smart and highly readable To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle is firmly in the former camp. Taber, whose 2005 bestseller Judgment of Paris detailed the crucial 1976 victory of California's Stag's Leap and Chateau Montelena wines over their French rivals, takes a widely researched (as per the subtitle) but highly entertaining tale about how the issue of cork spoilage has roiled the winemaking industry and lifted the once lowly screwtop and other non-cork options to at least relative respectability. Not surprisingly, Bonny Doon's Randall Grahm and Australian Riesling star Jeffrey Grosset come in for applause. Taber's chapter lead-ins are great anecdotes of how bad corks have spoiled great moments for winemakers, collectors and critics.

Just as screwtops regularly get the (Thunder)bird from wine snobs, Beaujolais Nouveau are routinely ridiculed as the $10 version of, well, screwtop wines definitely dernier cru. (Wine Bible author Karen MacNeil, who wrote the foreword for To Cork or Not to Cork, famously compared it to cookie dough.) Beaujolais wines are immensely food-friendly, fruity and light, which is why these wines were traditionally tasted as soon as bottled. The man who made this tasting into a worldwide event every year on the third Thursday of November is village winemaker turned importer George Duboeuf, hero of I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine by Rudolph Chelminski. He may have started out, in some eyes, as a simple peasant though his palate has repeatedly been validated but the Beaujolais Nouveau with his imprint now sells some 2.5 million bottles a year in this country alone.

VIN NOUVEAU
Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide to Wine, an oh-so-chatty primer by 28-year-old San Francisco sommelier-cum-social events organizer Courtney Cochran, is like one of those infomercials where you hear more about what you're going to learn than anything else but there's a much better, albeit very small book buried under all the cuteness. Cochran, who organizes monthly tasting parties for wine newbies, as she would say, seems to have taken a microphone to one of her events and simply transcribed her spiel, with bums me out, kick-ass and juvenile sexual innuendoes intact. Luckily, the useful explanations of terroir, flavors and aromas to look for and so on are in a much more straightforward tone.

For those who prefer the Year in Provence-style memoir (albeit with an R rating), Eric Arnold's First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine . . . Down Under is the choice book on this list. Would-be standup comedian Arnold takes a year's apprenticeship at Allen Scott's Marlborough winery, during which he nearly kills several people, drinks and eats extensively and occasionally imparts good information about the process amid the profanity and locker-room jokes. The two strains of the memoir becoming one of the wine boys, and the actual Wine 101 stuff don't always flow smoothly, but his workplace is a first-rate down-and-dirty winery, anyway. (Incidentally, there is a short and quite subjective but memorable explanation of the screwtop vs. cork debate included here.)

MADE IN THE USA
Wine Across America: A Photographic Road Trip, by husband-and-wife team Charles O'Rear and Daphne Larkin, took two years and 80,000 miles to create; but as a coffee-table book, it makes a pretty travel brochure. O'Rear, a longtime photographer for National Geographic, has already produced seven wine books; Lardin reports on the wine industry for various magazines. But here her reporting is limited mostly to captions, some useful and some simply descriptive. Ultimately, it seems the best way to use this book is if a friend has visited a particular winery included here, and wrap it with a bottle. There is a spread of American wine labels glossily reproduced that would make a great wall poster, ˆ la the pub signs of London or bottles of hot sauce; I'd order several myself.

Wine books make corking good presents, and this year's offerings run the gamut from info-packed to irreverent. George Taber's smart and highly readable To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle is firmly in the former camp. Taber, whose 2005 bestseller Judgment of Paris detailed the crucial […]
Cookbooks

A taste of Old England

Review by Eve Zibart

We think we live in an time of great cooking and we do but in 18th-century England, the worldwide boom in travel and trade was mirrored by housewives’ discovery of an equally wide world of foods: exotic spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper and cloves; nuts and fruits; new vegetables (including American corn, tomatoes, chilies and beans); chocolate, vanilla, tea and coffee. It was also a time when prominent writers began extolling the virtues of fresh vegetables, scientific farming, botanical research and so on. Once cooking became not a chore but a profession, simple recipes became ambitious cookbooks.

Sandra Sherman’s fascinating Fresh from the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flanders’ Kitchen is a culinary and cultural history with 120 revamped and modernized recipes developed by Maryland caterers Henry and Karen Chotkowski. A professor of English lit and history at the University of Arkansas, Sherman puts not just food but politics, trade policy, etiquette, social climbers (witness her titular heroine), rakes and rouŽs (the Earl of Sandwich and his famous gambling snack) and even the fragile male ego on the table. (British men swore by those notoriously huge slabs of roast beef of Old England because they believed meat increased virility.) The Chotkowskis have come up with everything from sweet pumpkin soup to black pudding and gooseberry trifle, from roast turkey with crayfish to Polish chicken, from pickled lemon to Parmesan ice cream. And the many woodcut reproductions and folk songs make this book a prize.

We think we live in an time of great cooking and we do but in 18th-century England, the worldwide boom in travel and trade was mirrored by housewives’ discovery of an equally wide world of foods: exotic spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper and cloves; nuts and fruits; new vegetables (including American corn, tomatoes, chilies […]
Fiction

Bret Lott

Interview by Eve Zibart

Brett Lott is a constant stranger. Born in Los Angeles to a transplanted Mississippi family, educated in Massachusetts and Ohio, married to a woman from New Jersey and now teaching in Charleston, he writes as one coming into, rather than growing out of his environment.

So it is not surprising that when he began Jewel, a novel based on his own family history, he wrote not a Roots-type celebration of continuity but a severe if sympathetic examination of one woman’s obsessive dedication to her mentally retarded child and the wrenching displacement it wreaked on that family.

"My grandmother is 84, my aunt is 48," Lott says as if the ages were themselves a reminder of their constant struggle, "and every day my grandmother makes my aunt’s lunch and wraps the lunchbox with masking tape so it won’t break open if she drops it. My aunt has a job bagging nuts and bolts . . ."

One day they’d do the bolts, another day the nuts, then the bolts, then the nuts. Certainly there’d been joy in her accomplishing that much; she even brought home a paycheck once a month, always for some odd small amount, $7.31, or $6.96. On those afternoons, she came home waving the check, we’d go right down to the bank, cash it, then go to dinner at a Denny’s or Sizzler, where I’d let her pay for her meal herself, though money still meant nothing to her, only pieces of paper, chunks of metal handed over to a smiling waitress.

". . . and when she gets paid they go out to Denny’s for dinner, and grandmother waits for the bus every day, and that’s what Brenda Kay’s life is about — wrapping tape around the lunch box and waiting for the bus."

Jewel, the book’s eponymous narrator, is Lott’s grandmother, and Brenda Kay is his aunt (the names and relationships in the book are all real, although the author’s is slightly changed). In 1943, after giving birth to five healthy children, Jewel and her husband Lester had what doctors then called "Mongolian idiot" who was not expected to live much beyond her second birthday. Terrified and then enraged, Jewel refused to institutionalize the child and committed herself to getting Brenda Kay the best treatment and training available – thus sentencing her already poor "cracker" family to even more severe financial privation, social stigma and finally a total and irrevocable uprooting. Those two harsh sacrifices — Jewel’s singleminded drive to better her child’s lot and the heavy price it exacted from the rest of the family — are the helix at the heart of the novel.

Some of the research for the story was relatively straightforward, Lott says, "Like, ‘What did you eat for dinner in the winter in Mississippi? What was it like to be told in the backwoods World War I Mississippi, that your child was a Mongolian idiot?’" But the real undercurrents ran deep, and for a long time dark.

"I had always intuited the difficulties" the family faced, Lott says. "My father told me he and his brother used to feel ashamed sometimes; they wouldn’t know whether to tell their girlfriends or take them home to meet the family, and sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. Uncle James" — the oldest, who had joined up and was going to school in Texas on the GI bill before Brenda Kay’s condition was known — "never told his wife until the day the whole family showed up at their door on the way to California. My other uncle had a football scholarship to Mississippi State, but he gave it up to go on ahead to California to make money to support the family."

It was James who gave Lott the first important clue. "He told me, ‘Mama had to break Daddy’s will.’ It was a known fact in the family that Grandma has to completely break my grandfather to get him to go to Los Angeles," where there was a school that pioneered in education for retarded persons.

But the real key to the novel came, fittingly, from the Jewel herself. "I believe that all the great characters in Southern literature are failures," says Lott. "So I asked my grandmother, ‘What was your failure? How did you fail in your life?’ and she said, ‘I thought I could fix things, but I couldn’t.’"

I could fix things, I knew I could. All the child in my arms, all Brenda Kay — I decided then, there, that no one would ever use those two words, use Mongolian idiot to describe her in my presence, unless they wanted my full wrath down on them — needed was my love, not my abandonment . . . no matter my baby wasn’t normal as I’d been, was sick in some way I couldn’t understand; no matter he was already figuring on her dying. He didn’t know me, didn’t know what I could live through. I could do it. I could fix things: my life, my children’s lives, my husband’s life, Brenda Kay’s.

"There it was, the perfect motivation. I had a wonderful character who was convinced she could fix anything, and a situation that would never change." Every day, packing lunch, taping the lunch box, waiting for the bus.

The rest, says Lott, began to tell itself. Every day he sat at his desk, surrounded by "hundreds of family photographs," and lost himself in Mississippi. The one completely invented character, the black deus ex machina with the name Cathedral and the awful gift of prophecy, is at once truly Southern and larger than life, a gothic spirit of both revelation and retribution that gives Jewel its most pervasive Southern flavor.

That in itself poses a sort of dilemma for Lott, whose first two novels ("apprenticeships," he calls them) were kindly reviewed but not particular commercial successes. Jewel, on the other hand, has already been optioned by Sally Field, and "it would be the easiest thing in the world to write another big, sprawling Southern gothic novel. But I don’t want to be a Southern novelist, or a ‘New England novelist’" — his first two books were set in the North, garnering the predictable comparisons to John Cheever — "I just want to be an American novelist."

He’s already at work on his New Jersey novel, a love story set in the Pine Barrens; and after that he pans to try a novel based on his other grandfather, the merchant mariner-streetcar conductor-bit movie player. Yes, that would mean writing about Los Angeles, the hometown he’s never understood — but after all, it would be L.A. before it was L.A.

Brett Lott is a constant stranger. Born in Los Angeles to a transplanted Mississippi family, educated in Massachusetts and Ohio, married to a woman from New Jersey and now teaching in Charleston, he writes as one coming into, rather than growing out of his environment. So it is not surprising that when he began Jewel, […]
NonfictionPolitics

James Carville

Interview by Eve Zibart

James Carville is beginning to sound like Lamont Cranston's evil twin. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but he has no intention of using any old Tibetan mind-clouding methods to make himself invisible while tackling it. This is one up front, in-your-face Shadow, and if he is practicing a sort of verbal incantation, he's certainly doing it in public, out loud, and with a sort of deadpan folksiness that takes no edge off his words.

"You know something?" begins his new book, And the Horse He Rode In On: The People v. Kenneth Starr, with the sort of companionable frankness of a guy buying you your second beer. "I don't like Ken Starr. I don't like one damn thing about him. I don't like his politics. I don't like his sanctimony. I don't like his self-piety. I don't like the people he runs with. I don't like his suck-up, spit-down view of the world, how he kisses up to the powerful and abuses the life out of regular people. I don't like his private legal clients. I don't like . . ." well, you get the idea. And if you don't get it right off, Carville will make sure you get it a page or two farther along.

Impossibly impolitic and irresistibly quotable, James Carville is the President's most unabashed, adamant, and flamboyant advocate. His intentional lack of polish may be an anomaly in the political consultant-cum-talking head circles (and may in fact be as much pose as some people's polish), but it plays to the hilt outside the Beltway, as Washingtonians say. And Carville's hot-off-the-presses tract, with its last-minute appendix addressing the release of President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony, is as much an indictment of the anti-Clinton forces as it is a rallying cry for his supporters.

"I'm trying to get the Democrats fired up, so they'll get out there and vote," says Carville. "The press is so anti-Clinton: Where can the people who like the President go?" Horse is written in the same conversational style, a mix of straight stuff and a little commentary along the way, that he used in his last book, We're Right, They're Wrong, which like Horse trumpeted the economic and social victories of the Clinton administration. It's also a mix of demonstrable fact and reprinted legal criticism with partisan argument. After all, as Carville cheerfully admits, "People don't look to me for objectivity. A lot of the straight stuff is already out there, so it's sort of lists, talking points," Carville says. "My readers really want to have the information; I see them all the time with my book, and the pages are dog-eared and stuff is underlined. But they like a little sizzle with their steak, too, so I have to give them some of that." And once you get beyond that thigh-smacking style, it's a horse of a different color: furious, yes, somewhat redundant and occasionally ingenuous, but also deeply disturbing in its litany of conflicts, constitutional breaches, and at best ill-considered actions he lays at the door of Starr's office. (The publicly-funded ones, that is, not his private law firm's.) It may not win him any Mr. Congeniality titles from the Republican leadership, but then, as Carville would undoubtedly say, a man is known as much by his enemies as by his friends.

Besides, Carville, the most famous Clinton advisor who has neither been impersonated by Michael J. Fox nor sucked toes in the Jefferson Hotel (well, actually, I didn't ask about that), already has a list of sobriquets to treasure. From the relatively benign Ragin' Cajun jokes (he is in fact a native Louisianan) and marital Mad Dog jibes of the early '90s (Carville is famously married to the equally blunt-spoken former Bush campaign maven and staunch Republican Mary Matalin), his critics have long since passed to Clinton hatchet man, henchman, spinner and the snider political op, Washingtonspeak for hired gun. Even the usually straitlaced New York Times, which seems to dread Carville as some type of Sherman's revenge, denounces his scorched earth approach.

But no one can accuse Carville of backstabbing, ambushing, or entrapping his prey. This army announces its campaign plan in advance. He is Cpl. 'Cueball' Carville rollin' back into battle, as he put it on Meet the Press.

Much of Horse came right out of Carville's files. Carville has been stewing over Starr since he was first appointed as independent counsel in April, 1994; he wrote a letter to the White House urging that he be allowed to take on the man he already saw as unacceptably partisan, to warn the American people about who Ken Starr really was, but was persuaded to sit it out. Carville takes aim as well at the national media pack Carville thinks has given the baying Starr his head in return for a daily ration of scraps, i.e., news bites. One of the funniest (well, in a grim way) sections of the book just quotes one newspaper or news magazine story after another that as weeks and months passed each announced that Starr's investigation had reached a critical stage. He has a telling nickname for the journalists, editorialists, reporters, columnists and sycophants of the Washington establishment: JERKS.

On the other hand, Carville stands by the handshake rule your word should be your bond and is ungrudging in acknowledging the fair players among the press (in particular, the late Ann Devroy, a Washington Post reporter who agreed not to release the copy of that April 1994 letter secret when Carville asked to withdraw it).

Interviews and quotable jokes notwithstanding, Carville has more serious pre-2000 campaigning to do. "There are some books you want to do, and some books you have to do," he says. "This is a book I had to do, but now there's a book I really want to do." Tentatively titled Five Smooth Stones, he describes it as a more optimistic take on progressive policies, one in which he hopes to return to the politics of ideas rather than individuals. That's the sort of politics, in case you think he's going soft, in which you prove your enemies are merely fools, not criminals.

Incidentally, Carville has not interest in filling any elected office himself. "I couldn't stand the kind of scrutiny everyone comes under these days," he says flatly and for him, seriously. Then, "The only thing I'm running for is the state line. "

SIDEBAR
One reason Carville immediately sniffed at Starr's heels was that he had already met him or rather, been accosted by him. In what may be the single strangest episode in Carville's book, he tells of waiting for Matalin, whose flight was late, in an airline club at Washington National Airport in October, 1993. An intense, bespectacled man sidled up to Carville, and when Carville nodded at him, thinking perhaps they had met during the 1992 campaign, this guy started spouting an unsolicited and shameful tirade against the President. "Your boy's getting rolled," the man said with evident glee. Carville shrugged him off as just another hate radio fan, and forgot about him until ten months later, when a TV clip announcing Starr's appointment revealed him to be the weirdo from the airport.

 

Eve Zibart wishes to make clear that opinions expressed in this interview do not reflect those of any of the publications she writes for except perhaps this one.

James Carville is beginning to sound like Lamont Cranston's evil twin. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but he has no intention of using any old Tibetan mind-clouding methods to make himself invisible while tackling it. This is one up front, in-your-face Shadow, and if he is practicing a sort of […]
History

David Halberstam

Interview by Eve Zibart

Almost exactly a century after America’s first civil rights war began with the artillery shelling of Fort Sumter, the nation’s second civil rights revolution was launched with a much quieter, but in some ways far more powerful, bombshell. It was called Big Saturday: Saturday, February 27, 1960.

A group of some 300 well-dressed college students, nearly all of them black, walked quietly from a black Baptist church in North Nashville to the central shopping district downtown, entered a handful of prominent department stores and sat down at the lunch counters, waiting to be served. Although it was not the first time some of them had done so, and although another band of protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina, had also organized what became quickly known as a sit-in, the Big Saturday demonstration proved to be the first action — the first violence, the first bloodletting — in the long and cruel campaign to win equal rights for black Americans. Eighty-one of the protesters, many badly beaten, were taken to jail: none of the white assailants was arrested.

The Big Saturday protesters had formed a group the size of a first-year college lecture course. Five years later, a crowd only twice as large — still barely the size of a small church congregation — walked six blocks from a Selma church to a bridge across the Alabama River. On the other side waited a "sea of Alabama state troopers," as march leader John Lewis later recalled it. Lewis and Hosea Williams moved on quietly until they were within speaking distance of the guard, knelt and began to pray. And as they knelt there, their hands clasped and their heads bent, the state troopers charged, bludgeoning the protesters with clubs and raking them with tear gas. That day, March 7, 1965, became known as Bloody Sunday.

"It was a war," says journalist/author David Halberstam, who covered those early sit-ins as a young reporter for The [Nashville] Tennessean and who shortly after made his reputation covering the war in Vietnam for the New York Times. "Martin Luther King was the general, and these kids were the foot soldiers, the shock troops . . . who deliberately picked out the most dangerous places to put their bodies on the line. They were like the airborne brigades that dropped in on D-Day.

"And the more I looked back at it, the more I found out about the Freedom Rides, the more respect I had for their extraordinary courage," says Halberstam, who had been sent abroad in the early ’60s but returned for a short time toward the end of the period. "Mississippi in 1964 was scarier than Vietnam."

Nearly 40 years after he covered the early sit-ins in Nashville, Halberstam has returned to reread, and to rediscover, his first big story, one that perhaps he is less well-known for but which meant as much to him and his forging of a professional ethic as his Vietnam coverage. The Children, Halberstam’s evocation of the central characters in the Nashville movement, "brings me back to a particular point in my career that I’m extremely proud of — and going back to these stories all those years ago, I was pleasantly surprised" by the maturity of his reporting.

The Children painstakingly recreates the lives of the eight young men and women who became the core committee of the Nashville Movement, layering their memories, their fears, and their victories in overlapping chapters. It was a testament, Halberstam says, "to the nobility of ordinary people, acting upon the democratic ideal."

In 1960, Halberstam writes, "They did not think of themselves in those days as being gifted or talented or marked for success, or for that matter particularly heroic, and yet from that little group would come a senior U.S. Congressman [Georgia’s John Lewis]; the mayor of a major city [Marion Barry of Washington, D.C.]; the first black woman psychiatrist to be tenured at Harvard medical school [Gloria Johnson-Powell]; one of the most distinguished public health doctors in America [Rodney Powell]; and a young man who would eventually come back to be the head of the very college in Nashville he now attended [Bernard Lafayette of American Baptist College]."

"These young people were not ’empowered,’" Halberstam says soberly, "they were scarcely members of the privileged class. In fact, most of them came from dramatically underprivileged circumstances. Yet somehow they found the faith to make this country worthy of its promises in the face of constant physical danger."

Their revolution was greatly assisted by the coincidence of two unrelated historical forces: the growing appeal of moral rather than physical authority, as articulated by Mohandas Gandhi, whose philosophy of passive resistance they adopted; and the emergence of television as a national "eye" (the rise of American media being a subject Halberstam has explored in other books as well). The violence, the immediate enormity of it and the undeniable, almost contagious ugliness of it struck the American public as forcibly as video from Vietnam, the first "armchair war," would only a couple of years later.

In fact, it might well be said that the Civil Rights Movement was the real first armchair war. Because when television showed children being blasted down streets with water guns, or when newspapers all over the country printed the photograph of a state trooper splitting open the head of a praying John Lewis, it made every American citizen a witness to such inhumanity, and forced each to make a moral choice of his or her own. "Their ability to use television in a moral sense, to dramatize on TV what it cost America to be racist and to maintain the system of segregation" was an argument of irrefutable power.

Against what might have seemed overwhelming logistical and political odds, the war was won.

"It was an extraordinary triumph," says Halberstam. "In 1960, Congress was dominated by a decrepit generation of Southern leadership that was dead set against them; the Justice Department grudgingly supported them; JFK thought they were a pain in the ass; and the FBI, or Hoover, was violently opposed to civil rights. Four years later, both houses of Congress were competing to pass legislation, Hoover had gradually come to respect them, and [President] Johnson was their greatest ally.

"And they succeeded in doing it all really on a moral principle. They set out to appeal to the conscience of the federal government, to draw the beast of segregation out from under cover and make the American people see the price the country was paying to remain segregated: Bull Connor and his police dogs and the fire hoses and the cattle prods."

When Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, John Lewis was there.

Eve Zibart is a staff writer with The Washington Post.

Almost exactly a century after America’s first civil rights war began with the artillery shelling of Fort Sumter, the nation’s second civil rights revolution was launched with a much quieter, but in some ways far more powerful, bombshell. It was called Big Saturday: Saturday, February 27, 1960. A group of some 300 well-dressed college students, […]
Memoir

Jacques Pepin

Interview by Eve Zibart

Jacques Pepin walks very softly in an era of the big schtick. He does not wham, or "Bam!" (although he is generous to his more flamboyant colleagues: "After all, Emeril Lagasse has done a lot to introduce people to food and to the fun of cooking"). He prefers to inspire rather than to dazzle and has been teaching at the French Culinary Institute in New York and Boston University for more than 30 years.

Pepin still loves to cook and says that "if I don't cook for two or three days, I get edgy." Despite his classical training in the kitchens of France, he maintains that he found his own style in the anti-artifice revolution of nouvelle cuisine. "My tastes have remained simple," he writes.

And finally, there is the sense of spiritual as well as physical nourishment that pervades his cooking shows. Here's a guy in touch with his feminine side. "I realized," he writes, "although I had worked mostly with men in the great restaurants of Paris and New York, the sort of cooking I was now turning to had been shown to me by women. It was the type of cooking I most loved." So naturally, the man Julia Child calls "the best chef in America" has modestly titled his memoir The Apprentice.

After 21 cookbooks, including the landmark La Technique and The Art of Cooking, Pepin has produced a characteristically gentle reminiscence of his "Life in the Kitchen," as the subtitle has it. It ranges back to his boyhood in his mother's various restaurants (and his escapades of stealing fruit with his brother), through his years learning sauces, grill techniques and stocks in some of the most famous restaurants of two countries: Le Meurice and the Plaza Athenee, Le Pavillon and his own Midtown Manhattan "soup kitchen," La Potagerie.

Public TV viewers who remember the video of Pepin bicycling to the market to fill his handlebar basket will be charmed to know that it's a sort of quiet tribute to his mother, who worked as a waitress supporting three small sons while her husband was off in the army during World War II: "[Riding] an old bicycle with solid rubber tires (no inner tubes) . . . she pedaled thirty-five or forty miles, going from farm to farm, filling the wicker basket strapped on the back of her bicycle with bread, eggs, meat, chicken, honey anything that she could find that would help feed us." With this background, it is not surprising that Pepin is a champion of food that is good from the bottom up, so to speak: fresh, healthful and prepared with an appreciation of its true nature rather than its "star quality."

"You know, a lot is said these days about great chefs, but not enough is said about the farmers," he said recently from his office in the French Culinary Institute. "Food should taste of what it is, as well as of how it has been transformed. Both things are worthwhile. If you have a nice piece of pork, and you roast it and maybe serve it with a little sauce, it has its own character. And if you add some shallots and some mushrooms and cognac and make a pate, that is also delicious. But it must have quality, and the cook must respect that."

On the other hand, Pepin is astonished at the wastefulness of modern-day chefs, and says that he was recently at one of those celebrity chef extravaganzas in California. "There were like 20 chefs, and when I went into the kitchen, I went crazy. A slightly wilted piece of broccoli or a bruised piece of basil and they threw it away. Frankly, I'd like to do a series on 'garbage food,' just using what most people waste."

His own cooking "was always pretty straightforward, but you have to remember that I started my apprenticeship in 1949, and we still had [ration] tickets for sugar and meat and eggs. A chicken was a big deal." The recipes that are scattered through the memoir, from a Reuben sandwich and New England clam chowder to braised rabbit, are examples of what he calls his "modern American cuisine with strong French influences." And yet none will frighten the amateur chef.

Apprenticed at 13, Pepin has cooked high and low. Having survived naval KP to become personal chef to de Gaulle before emigrating to New York, he turned down the position of chef to the Kennedy White House to take a job re-inventing the corporate kitchen for (the real) Howard Johnson. And he very nearly gave it all up for the life of an academic, lacking only the thesis for his doctorate in French literature from Columbia, even though he'd had to begin by taking English classes. He became a close friend of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Alice Waters and of course the ebullient Child. He consulted on the creation of the Windows on the World.

Then in 1974, a car crash left him with multiple fractures. It was during his slow convalescence that he stumbled onto consulting, teaching, writing and doing television.

In fact, Pepin is about to tape a new series. "I wanted to call it, 'My Fast Food,' to show how to make simple, good but quick family food, but the producers didn't like it; so I don't know what to call it." It will be his 14th series, but the phenomenon of the celebrity chef is still a marvel to Pepin. "When I was coming up, you know, 50 years ago, being a chef was pretty low on the social scale. A good mother would have wanted her son to be a doctor or a lawyer."

Eve Zibart is a writer for The Washington Post.

 

Jacques Pepin walks very softly in an era of the big schtick. He does not wham, or "Bam!" (although he is generous to his more flamboyant colleagues: "After all, Emeril Lagasse has done a lot to introduce people to food and to the fun of cooking"). He prefers to inspire rather than to dazzle and […]
Memoir

Alex Prud’homme

Interview by Eve Zibart

There have been few sign-offs in television history more famous, or more frequently parodied, than the emphatic, "This is Julia Child: bon appetit!" And it was thoroughly characteristic straightforward, enthusiastic, convincing and delivered with the gusto that pervaded her life. It was that frank If I can do it, you can do it approach, says her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, that so swiftly made Julia a friend, confidant and coach to millions of amateur cooks.

But what her viewers and readers also recognized was her very real passion for food, particularly French, of course, but also for any honest, fresh, imaginative and generous approach to cooking. In fact, Julia Child was a great romantic, and her new memoir, completed with Prud'homme's help after her death, is first and foremost a love story.

"This is a book about some of the things I have loved most in life," she writes in the introduction to My Life in France. "My husband, Paul Child; la belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating." And it is impossible not to feel Julia's excitement at her progressive discoveries of French cuisine, culture, cookware, cooking and ultimately teaching throughout this lively reconstruction of the Childs' first posting to Paris, from 1948-1954, and later in their second home in Provence.

It's also clear how much she adored her husband, a self-taught gourmet and bon vivant, a painter and photographer despite having lost one eye as a boy and her greatest fan. Both the dedication, "To Paul Child," and the cover make this clear. The jacket photograph shows P & J, as they sometimes signed themselves, with red paper hearts pinned to their shirts. It was their habit to send out Valentine's Day cards instead of Christmas cards, Prud'homme says, and he includes photos of several in the book.

For Prud'homme, who had not known his great-uncle in his prime, getting to know Paul through his letters was part of the fun; "it was sort of like doing archaeological exploration of my own family. We were fairly close Paul and [my grandfather] Charlie were twins, and we were always together for Thanksgiving and so on but they seemed kind of exotic, always flying off to Paris or California or something." Fortunately, Paul Child was a great correspondent.

"He was such a vibrant person as a young man," says Prud'homme. "He sent letters to his brother every week, long, handwritten letters, funny, acerbic, very lively." Prud'homme, a successful freelance journalist, uses many of these old letters, as well as photographs and mementos ("she had them stuffed everywhere ") to set off his great-aunt's often irreverent reminiscences.

"She had always talked about writing a book like this, and every year I used to go and visit and offer to help. But she was very much of a life moves forward' person, and it would have made her lonely to pore over old letters. So I would just get her talking and take notes." The stories are frequently hilarious—post-World War II Paris was not always an easy place for a six-foot-two and rather gawky American naif—often with her sense of wonder and delight still tangible. It's especially vivid when discussing her determination to learn French techniques, and her unhappy sense that the great school Le Cordon Bleu was in decline, even as she subjected her husband and friends to endless batches of homemade mayonnaise.

That she and two of her friends, Simone Simca Beck Fischbacker and Louisette Bertholle, dared to call their fledgling school L'Ecole des Gourmettes was a sort of declaration of culinary independence. They were determined to teach not haute cuisine but honest cuisine bourgeoisie—an attitude that led to the publication of the landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Prud'homme says, "She patterned her teaching technique on Chef Max Bugnard, her mentor at Cordon Bleu. He taught her not only how to cook like the French but how to shop like the French take your time, ask the vendors about their wares and they'll open up to you. He used to say, Goutez! Goutez! (Taste! Taste!)" There are fascinating cameos and sidelights throughout the book: the wild-haired grande dame of literature Colette at her favorite cafe; James Beard in a vast billowing Japanese kimono strolling across the fields to breakfast with the Childs; a series of eccentric maids, including one who flushed a beer can down the toilet, and so on. There's a cheery Calamity Julia tone to these adventures. It's somehow not at all surprising that just before she was to tape the first episode of "The French Chef," the studios at WGBH, the Boston public television station that produced the show, burned down.

"What you see in 'The French Chef' is what you got with Julia, maybe a little amp-ed up for television, but not much," says Prud'homme. " But what I didn't really get as a kid was what a great impact she had on so many people. And I also didn't realize how hard she worked at it. She had tremendous discipline, despite the funny stuff."

Julia Child died in her sleep on Aug. 13, 2004, two days short of her 92nd birthday. She was so indelible a part of American culture that the kitchen where much of " The French Chef" was filmed has been reconstructed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Her last words in the book refer to her first meal on French soil, in 1948. "In all the years since that succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite—toujours bon appetit!"

 

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post and the author of nine books, including The Ethnic Food Lover's Companion.

There have been few sign-offs in television history more famous, or more frequently parodied, than the emphatic, "This is Julia Child: bon appetit!" And it was thoroughly characteristic straightforward, enthusiastic, convincing and delivered with the gusto that pervaded her life. It was that frank If I can do it, you can do it approach, says […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

David Baldacci

Interview by Eve Zibart

This is something all Southern writers know: Truth makes the best fiction (and not infrequently, vice versa). With more than 50 million copies of his books in print, and seven screenplays, including the Clint Eastwood/Gene Hackman film Absolute Power, under his belt, Virginia-born novelist and screenwriter David Baldacci is no exception. He still looks like a Richmond kid, prone to khakis and loafers and collared shirts, and his office in the Washington suburbs recalls a Virginia gentleman's library, complete with leather couch and armchairs—except that nearby building signs read Northrop Grumman and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that the details of Baldacci's political thrillers, featuring agents of the FBI, CIA, DEA, Secret Service and so on, are so accurate that increasingly higher-up officials are willing to talk to him. His novels based on true crimes, like the Bill Clinton favorite Simple Truth, have a human impetus more moving than mere righteous indignation.

Even when his plots are not inspired by real events, the procedures, the prejudices, the in-fighting and the more literal hand-to-hand fighting are meticulously researched and reported. And when Baldacci can throw in a famous puzzle, a musical code, a prison-camp escape tunnel and a real-life secret government installation, not to mention a childhood trauma or two, he has a story recipe that's hard to top.

This year, however, Baldacci will try to top himself. Instead of coming out with his annual fall thriller, he's publishing two—Simple Genius, the third adventure of former Secret Service agents-turned-private eyes Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, and Stone Cold, a follow-up to 2005's Camel Club. He is also re-releasing the most Southern novel in his repertory, and the book closest to his heart: Wish You Well, a semi-autobiographical reflection on his family history. Simple Genius and Wish You Well are out this month; Stone Cold, already into second draft, will be published in the fall.

Baldacci has always been a writer, or at least a talker, which is how all storytellers start. He says he talked so much as a kid that finally, when he was eight or nine years old, "my mother got me a book with blank pages to write on, mostly to keep me quiet." But, like most Southern-bred writers, Baldacci originally set out to write short stories. "It's the characters," he says, citing the quality of the characters in what might be called the Southern canon: To Kill a Mockingbird, Walker Percy's Lancelot, the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and Truman Capote. "I really loved them. I still prefer my books to be people-driven rather than plot-driven."

As it transpired, Baldacci was better suited to clarity than simile. He was writing briefs (after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, he worked as a litigator in a prominent Washington firm) and trying to write short stories at night, when he gradually realized he had a stronger narrative drive.

"I like economy in language; it makes it stronger," Baldacci says. "There's much to be said for narrative flow—saying something decisive in a paragraph instead of two pages. I love to edit; if I can find a section of a [para]graph that's not necessary, I'm delighted." Having said that, he wryly admits that the experience of turning in a screenplay and having the director "challenge every word" can really "focus one's attention."

He works out much of the story in his head before writing the first draft on a computer, and then edits in longhand. He keeps notebooks with details and "backstories," but although he generally has a character's future, and past, sketched out, things occasionally take an unexpected turn. "Spontaneity is not a bad thing," he says. "You shouldn't be afraid to go off the road, because if you surprise yourself, you'll surprise the reader."

Simple Genius involves ciphers, computers, childhood traumas and the CIA, among other elements. Woven through the evolving relationship between King and Maxwell are forays into classical codes and Internet encryption (factual), Virginia colonial history (slightly fictionalized) and modern-day government operations at Camp Peary, a CIA "farm" on the York River. While the story and characters that Baldacci places at the installation are entirely fictional, the camp itself is not, although "if you call the CIA and ask them about Camp Peary, they don't admit that it exists."

To research it, Baldacci went along the river as close to the station as he could, and talked to locals who have lived with its various agencies (it started out as a Navy base) all their lives. One of the most chilling sentences in the book has to do with the unidentified jets that land there: A small-town newspaper editor tells King and Maxwell, "I knew something was up before Gulf One and Afghanistan and Iraq started because that damn runway at Peary looked like Chicago's O'Hare what with all the traffic going in." That's precisely what a local resident told Baldacci—a quote not only stranger but stronger than fiction.

Baldacci's villains are not the only ones playing games. His books are filled with literary allusions, historical "borrowings," name games, etc. Simple Genius includes a reprint of the famous Beale Cypher, only one page of which has ever been deciphered—using the Declaration of Independence as the key—and which allegedly leads to a vast treasure buried in Tidewater Virginia. (Baldacci, whose family owns a country place in Bedford County, says he grew up with treasure hunters digging holes all around the area.) And the new edition of Wish You Well has an appendix encouraging readers to begin to track their own family histories.

Baldacci has another quintessential trait of the Southern writer: As a man who loves to read, he wants others to love reading, and most of the programs funded by his Wish You Well Foundation are literacy campaigns. He's concerned about a general disappearance of literacy tools—not only reading, but writing, which is the gateway to creativity. "I think it's great that the SATs finally include an essay, but did you realize that 80 percent of students wrote their essays in block letters?

They don't even teach writing in schools anymore." Among the programs Baldacci has created is "Feeding Body and Mind," which partners with America's Second Harvest food banks to provide used or new books along with the meals. So far, they have distributed more than 40,000 volumes. If you're interested in contributing, you can find out more at davidbaldacci.com, which also lists Baldacci's reading schedule.

This is something all Southern writers know: Truth makes the best fiction (and not infrequently, vice versa). With more than 50 million copies of his books in print, and seven screenplays, including the Clint Eastwood/Gene Hackman film Absolute Power, under his belt, Virginia-born novelist and screenwriter David Baldacci is no exception. He still looks like […]
Memoir

Ruth Reichl

Interview by Eve Zibart

In the 1997 film My Best Friend's Wedding, Julia Roberts, her curls tossing and her waistline improbably small, plays a glamorous New York restaurant critic who has chefs and managers quaking in their aprons. She nibbles here, quivers a nostril there and heads off to write reams of prose that have dining dilettantes salivating in absentia. Underscoring her character's connection to food is the fact that many of the movie's key scenes take place during some type of meal.

Roberts' character may not have been directly inspired by Ruth Reichl, but it's impossible to believe that she didn't at least influence the screenwriter's choice of profession. As restaurant critic for The Los Angeles Times and then The New York Times, and now as editor of Gourmet magazine, Reichl's passion, humor, abandon, intelligence, whimsy and vital sense of food as culture have revolutionized a nation raised on Betty Crocker cookbooks and school cafeterias. While not the only "new" food critic of the '80s and '90s, she was among the most imitated and, by dint of her own wild mane and physical presence, the one who put the quietus to the stereotype of the short, fat, freeloading food writer.

"It's a very seductive profession these days," says Reichl, whose 1998 memoir Tender at the Bone was a bestseller. "Tender turns out to be a big hit among pre-teenage girls."

In that case, you have to wonder whether her follow-up, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table will get past the more PG-minded librarians. This second volume of memoirs, which details her affair, the breakup of her first marriage and her romance with and marriage to her second husband, is both bittersweet and almost hilariously indulgent. For Reichl, all passions are connected. In fact, her sensory reactions are so synesthetic you wonder how she survives.

Consider the way she writes about her affair. At 31, she meets a man she refers to only as the food editor. He's pompous, she thinks, and older; she, in her turn, tries too hard to seem knowledgeable and finds herself waxing fervent about black truffles, champagne vintages and tiny-gauge caviars subjects she knows nothing about.

But when they have dinner at L.A.'s legendary Ma Maison, all pretenses drop away. The beluga caviar was "seductively fruity." There were "baked oysters wrapped in lettuce, sprinkled with caviar and bathed in beurre blanc [and] terrine de foie gras with warm toast. The flavors danced and the soft substances slid down my throat."

The next morning, waking up in his bed, she is momentarily horrified. "What was it that I found so irresistible about this man? I replayed the night in my head the caviar, the oysters, the foie gras, the cigars. It had been like a wonderful dream, all my fantasies made real." Fantasies about "the man from another time, the bon vivant who had unabashedly devoted himself to food."

As it happens, the lover was Colman Andrews, now editor of Saveur magazine, and in a friendly way Reichl's rival, since it was the success of the extravagant, literary and sensual Saveur that convinced the publishers of the increasingly frumpy Gourmet that it needed a bonne vivante of its own. The affair, which hadn't been public knowledge until the book's galleys got around, will undoubtedly be a food trendies' gossip sensation, but it really says more about their mutual sensual attentions, and how we have all benefited from their fearlessness.

"You can't be a good cook if you don't have a generous soul and the impulse to take care of people," says Reichl, whose books are studded with recipes that parallel her experiences. "Look at someone like Alice Waters: no matter how much she's done for someone, she always thinks it's not enough. I only know two good cooks who are stingy in their souls."

Comfort goes on to the harder parts the divorce, the new marriage, the adoption and then loss of a baby whose birth parents successfully reclaimed her as well as the happier stuff, her hiring by the L.A. Times and the birth of her son, Nick. Throughout, she obviously tries to be honest and even-handed.

"I thought writing the second book would be easier, but it was much harder. For one thing, I have an extremely demanding job now, so the work ended up being consigned to the cracks, early and late. But also I was dealing with living people and issues of divorce and love and some very difficult emotions. I think of Tender as a happy book, but there were times when I was crying as I was working on this one."

In Tender at the Bone, Reichl detailed a remarkably bohemian youth and, intriguingly, an ambivalent attitude toward fine food. Her manic-depressive mother was so bad a cook, and so breezily indifferent to bacterial caution, that she inflicted food poisoning on an entire wedding party.

When Comfort Me with Apples picks up the tale in 1978, Reichl and her first husband are living in a San Francisco commune, still half-scavenging for whole-earth foods, and her interest in freelancing stories about food and restaurants is looked upon almost as a betrayal of principle. Her palate wins out, of course, but the principles remain, and in many ways inform the change of Gourmet from an armchair grocery list to a thinking person's kitchen tool.

"The quality of food writing is much better than it was 20 years ago. If you pull out some of the reviews from back then, they're shockingly bad," Reichl says. "It used to be considered almost poor taste to be concerned with food. We were all raised on Diet for a Small Planet, thinking how much more food could be produced from the grain fed to a cow and so on."

"We still eat far more than our share of the world's protein. We're greedy pigs. But I think that will change, too, because as a nation we know so much more about food."

Comfort Me with Apples ends with Nick's birth in the late '80s. As for whether she will write a '90s volume, Reichl says, "Well, not right away. Up until I went to work at The Los Angeles Times, I was freelancing; so I would tape record everything and I had the time to transcribe them all. So I had reams and reams of material, plus I had diaries and packets of letters to go back to. But somehow when I started working in the newsroom I quit keeping journals. It just isn't compatible with a computer. So I'd have to depend more on other people." She laughs. " The next book may have to be fiction."

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for The Washington Post's weekend section and author of several books including the forthcoming Ethnic Food Lover's Companion (Menasha Ridge Press).

In the 1997 film My Best Friend's Wedding, Julia Roberts, her curls tossing and her waistline improbably small, plays a glamorous New York restaurant critic who has chefs and managers quaking in their aprons. She nibbles here, quivers a nostril there and heads off to write reams of prose that have dining dilettantes salivating in […]
NonfictionFood & Drink

John-Bryan Hopkins

Interview by Eve Zibart

Despite the title, John-Bryan Hopkins’ Foodimentary: Celebrating 365 Food Holidays with Classic Recipes isn’t quite a calendar or a cookbook. The first entry is “Peanut Butter Lover’s Day” on March 1, and from there the book covers everything from the Aztecs and Incas to health-food pioneer Dr. John Kellogg to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

The January 1 entry, many chapters later, is not about black-eyed peas, soba noodles or lentils but a specialty concoction for “Bloody Mary Day.” It is one of many holidays that Hopkins shamelessly admits to having personally anointed. “I looked up all sorts of recipes going back to the 1910s and ’20s,” he says. Ultimately, Hopkins makes his Bloody Mary with vodka, for those into such spirited debates.

Foodimentary—inspired by Hopkins’ popular blog, foodimentary.com—is what he calls a celebration, a daily indulgence and an appreciation of food, culture and nostalgia. It’s also an evocation of Hopkins’ own story, “fleshed out” with recipes, vintage photographs and delightful trivia.

“It’s how I wanted to tell my tale,” says the Birmingham native, “with as much layering as I could bring to it.” It’s comfort food in both senses, a hometown story alongside his favorite dishes.

Hopkins, whose blog began in 2005, came up with the Sherlock Holmes-inspired name during a freewheeling and slightly inebriated post-dinner conversation. Ironically, he had a mild bias against blogs because he felt they tended to be about the blogger, not the subject. He styles himself more as the wizard behind the delicious and decadent curtain. When he discovered the word “foodimentary” was free and clear of copyright, he took it as a sign.

Hopkins’ goal is to lead his readers to their own food-inspired “A-ha!” moment: “When you learn a fact about a food or recipe you think, oh, that makes sense!”

For Foodimentary, Hopkins originally tested 176 recipes, which have been whittled down to a few dozen highlights. Some are personal favorites; others, such as Eggs Benedict, are classics. There’s also his own “personal best” dish, an extra-savory take on grilled cheese featuring sun-dried tomatoes, arugula and sautéed mushrooms on baguette slices.

Altogether, Hopkins estimates he’s introduced the world to around 150 national food holidays. So many, in fact, that one of his proudest achievements is that Google has taken up his food calendar. Foodies can sign up for his daily alerts that include food trivia along with fun historical facts, like his salute to bologna and its Italian origins.

Some holidays are comparatively serious (September 25 honors the multitude of waiters, busers, servers, dishwashers, chefs, etc. in the food service industry) while others are more akin to guilty pleasures. We have “Cheez Doodle Day,” March 5; “Pizza and Beer Day,” October 9; and “Whiskey Sour Day,” August 25 to name a few. This reviewer is looking forward to both the soft and hard taco days, October 3 and 4, respectively, though it seems like October 5 should probably be Alka-Seltzer Day instead of “Apple Betty Day.” While the ubiquitous and beloved fall flavor, pumpkin spice, is seasonally celebrated on October 1, sometimes Hopkins eschews tradition in favor of his own agenda. For example, August is famously among the months when it is considered inadvisable to eat oysters. Perhaps flaunting the all-season convenience of our modern age, he has assigned Oyster Day to August 5.

Adding to the nonstop fun are the trivia questions in the sidebars. The word “zucchini” may translate from Italian into “small squash,” but a full-grown fruit can grow the size of a baseball bat—no doubt thanks to the same food science that allows us to eat oysters year-round. Peanuts have more antioxidants than either green tea or spinach; Brits like to enjoy pigs in a blanket on Thanksgiving; ramen noodles were taken into outer space; Italy is the world’s largest exporter of caviar. This is a book that could easily be displayed in the kitchen or on a coffee table for visitors to leisurely graze.

One of the more intriguing elements of Foodimentary is that the illustrations are by four different artists, one for each season, which are harmonious without being identical. “I wanted each season to have a slightly different feel as you travel through the book,” Hopkins, a former interior designer, says. “I didn’t want the concept just to be about a series of days, I wanted [the nostalgia] to visually rise up under a seemingly simple premise.”

Now that his whimsical almanac has gone public, Hopkins is stirring up ideas for a second book. He envisions a more serious reference title, though still accessible: “Need a quick substitute in a recipe? Don’t go to Google, go to Foodimentary.” He managed most of his first book’s text in six weeks, so followers may not have to wait too long.

Speaking of whimsy, Foodimentary begins with March because spring is Hopkins’ favorite food season. He says it’s the “best time to me to celebrate food.” Hey—it worked for the Romans.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Despite the title, John-Bryan Hopkins’ Foodimentary: Celebrating 365 Food Holidays with Classic Recipes isn’t quite a calendar or a cookbook. The first entry is “Peanut Butter Lover’s Day” on March 1, and from there the book covers everything from the Aztecs and Incas to health-food pioneer Dr. John Kellogg to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

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