Steal the Menu (30 page)

We owe this unprecedented cornucopia to the success of well-informed chefs and cookbook authors, of food critics and health-food advocates—an elite of tastemakers and providers of examples of the good gastronomic life. It all started with food-minded travelers, with writers propounding an alternative to the cuisine of home economists in books filled with authentic recipes from the great traditional cuisines, with chefs who fanned out around the world cooking those same dishes and then improvised on them in their own spirit. The gospel spread and it converted millions, all newly
alert to a standard of quality unknown or unavailable fifty years ago in the most prosperous and best-educated nations in history.

There is a dark side to this. Obesity is the hobgoblin that stalks a food-mad culture. Fast food, and its effect on our health, mocks our claims of sophistication and refinement. But there really has been a radical growth of good taste, now firmly entrenched in the homes of Food Network watchers and in the malls where they shop.

After returning from Noma, I made a tour of the supermarket nearest to my home in the semirural Hudson Valley eighty miles north of New York City. Alongside the aisles of staples and soaps and pet food were hundreds of specialty items beyond the dreams of any American shopper, even in New York City, when I started out there in 1967. In those days, if you wanted clarified butter, you followed Julia’s directions and made it yourself, painstakingly. Now I can buy the Indian version of it, ghee, prepared in Sedalia, Colorado.

My supermarket also offers me dozens of filled pastas, ready-to-bake pizza dough, and several kinds of basmati rice (some of it domestically grown). In addition to generic bread crumbs, I can now purchase more delicate Japanese panko. The meat department carries pancetta, the unsmoked bacon that was once a crucial barrier to the authentic preparation of Italian classic dishes outside Italy. At the end of the aisle is a fish department, with wild-caught salmon and live lobsters in tanks.

There are also several aisles of products aimed at the health-minded customer, who formerly had to buy dreary stuff in special shops selling wilted kale. Now my supermarket lets me stay pure while indulging in chipotle sweet potato soup. I can still remember when Manhattan’s most highly regarded Mexican restaurant listed chipotle peppers on its menu but never actually had them available.

Back then we trekked to the Arab enclave on Atlantic Avenue
in South Brooklyn to buy hummus, which has now been totally naturalized. I lost count of the different varieties currently for sale ten minutes from my house in exurbia. Prepared and uncooked tabbouleh has also been assimilated by the mass market. As has the crusty French loaf, which I now find baked in my supermarket’s in-house bakery with dough shipped in from a central supplier. Elite boutique bakers in the city may do an even better job, but the gap is narrowing.

Once home from the market, I cook with a
batterie de cuisine
that has also improved decisively since 1971. Before then—and even several years later for most people, including me—there were no food processors. If you wanted to chop or puree, you used a knife or struggled to do the job with a blender. If you wanted to beat egg whites, you could go after them either with a balloon whisk or a less-satisfactory motorized mixer. Now the food processor does the heavy-duty work of chopping and pureeing, while immersion blenders (with whisk attachments) have liberated us from the clogging confinement of the blender jar and the wrist fatigue of the balloon whisk.

I will concede that I still make mayonnaise with a hand whisk, because I like the feel of sudden emulsification, when the yolks seize the oil. I also don’t think the processor makes that job easier. But on balance, the processor has made a radical difference in my kitchen. As have several other tools and appliances not available when I started cooking.

Life is also easier with a stovetop that puts out nearly four times the heat of my first gas burners. Life is better, too, with a magnetic induction burner that boils water even faster than that powerful stovetop, with vastly less heat leaked into the room. Life will take a great leap forward when I buy a sous vide machine for the price of a full-size power mixer I barely touch anymore or a microwave oven I turn on only to defrost or reheat.

Forty years in food have turned me from a cynic into an optimist. In other areas of life, Gresham’s law may hold; the bad drives out the good. But in food, the reverse has been overwhelmingly true. Forty years ago in this country, there was no first-rate American cheese, no radicchio, no world-class restaurant, no fresh foie gras, no Sichuan food and no top chef of native birth.

At the beginning of my eighth decade, I take comfort from two great leaps forward in human life. As a passionate reader and writer, I exult in the scientific advances that have given me the computer and the Internet. As a physical creature chained to a wasting body, I look back with pride at the progress we have made in feeding ourselves and rejoice to think of the even better meals that lie ahead.

This book itself is an acknowledgment of the many, many people in my life who opened doors and taught me about food and restaurants, who permitted me to write about food and gave me the money to eat it. So I will limit myself here to thanking those whose generosity contributed directly to the work at hand. Jason Epstein steered me enthusiastically away from the laziness of a simple compilation of my restaurant pieces for the
Wall Street Journal
and toward the soul-stretching labor of a memoir, “a real book,” he said. (God knows I tried, Jason.) Judith Jones at Knopf agreed that it would be a good idea. She was in a position to know something about my past, since she had presided with wisdom and undeserved fondness over two earlier books, the first of which,
The Saucier’s Apprentice
, I proposed to her in 1972, almost at the start of my professional life in food, forty years ago. This time out, I continued to benefit from her care and feeding, which continued after her formal retirement from Knopf in 2011. Then, I also benefited from a new association with Jonathan Segal, a veteran editor at Knopf, who oversaw the meticulous preparation of this book’s text for publication with the energy and taste I have known him for since we met at the
New York Times
, more than forty years ago. His assistant, Joey McGarvey, provided invaluable help as well.

Stuart Karle, a great
Journal
pal and a greater attorney, stooped to represent me with Knopf and offered much other wise counsel.
Another Dow Jones friend, John Geddes, pointed me to the right people at the
New York Times
, who granted permission for the quotations from my work there and for an extract from a
Times
article by Charlotte Curtis. Tom Weber, yet another
WSJ
mate, made this book’s happy ending possible, by hiring me as a bornagain restaurant critic at the
Journal
’s Pursuits section in 2006.

Still other friends, John Henry of
Time
and Hendrick Hertzberg of
The New Yorker
, helped me secure rights for illustrations.

Some material in chapter four appeared in a slightly different form in
Natural History;
similarly, some material in chapter five derives from my restaurant columns in
The Wall Street Journal
.

Finally, I thank my wife, Johanna, for sharing meals, sage advice and so much else.
Commensalis, contubernalis, coniunx
.

Raymond Sokolov ate his first meal in Detroit in 1941 and dined with tenacious curiosity in France as a correspondent for
Newsweek
. He went on to sustain himself writing about food at
The New York Times, Natural History
magazine, and, most recently, by covering restaurants worldwide for
The Wall Street Journal
. He is the author of
The Saucier’s Apprentice
, the novel
Native Intelligence
, and a biography of A. J. Liebling,
Wayward Reporter
. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Other titles by Raymond Sokolov available in eBook format

The Saucier’s Apprentice.
978-0-307-76480-5

Follow:
@sokolovr

For more information, please visit
www.aaknopf.com