I’ve said it before and I will no doubt repeat myself in the future: I love Food Writing. Good authors writing about food is some of the best vicarious living through reading that you can experience. When that author also makes you laugh out loud quite frequently, that’s some good food writing.

American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater is the first book in Calvin Trillin’s “Tummy Trilogy” and is a collection of his articles and essays in various magazines in the 1970s. Trillin isn’t much of a cook himself, so he mostly writes about eating out, and this book takes you to restaurants all across America.

Despite being written in the 70s, and the fact that many of the establishments mentioned have doubtlessly changed or closed, the collection still feels timeless. There is one funny part that can be best summarized by the line “I admit to having been intrigued by the idea of storing restaurant information in a computer.”

I definitely recommend this collection, and can’t wait to begin the second book in the trilogy: Alice, Let’s Eat.

Here are some of the lines that made me laugh:

The other New York newsletter I have seen, The Craig Claiborne Journal, devotes more space to recipes than to restaurants, and is therefore of less use to me, since my cooking skill does not extend past a special way of preparing scrambled eggs so that they always stick to the pan. (page 78)

New York line behavior can be explained only by assuming that just about everyone in the line believes himself to be in possession of what the Wall Street people call inside information. (page 96)

He was not going to be able to meet me until a few hours after I arrived in Cincinnati, but he suggested on the phone that for my first taste of authentic Cincinnati chili, at lunch, I might want to try the unadorned product and therefore should start with what is known locally as “a bowl of plain.” He had no way of knowing, of course, that I have never eaten the unadorned version of anything in my life and that I once threatened to place a Denver counterman under citizen’s arrest for leaving the mayonnaise off my California burger. (page 129)

Fairs are good places to eat, particularly for stand-up eaters – which is one of the kinds of eaters I am, although when I eat standing up away from home I sometimes miss the familiar cool breeze coming from the open refrigerator. (page 185)

Buster’s fried chicken tastes as if it is made from chickens that have spent their entire pampered lives strolling around the barnyard pecking contentedly at huge cloves of garlic. (page 213-214)

There are some types of food that do lend themselves to sophisticated techniques of interrogation. When an Italian restaurant is suggested, for instance, I always say, “Who controls the city around here?” I suppose a good Italian restaurant could exist in a city that doesn’t have enough Italians to constitute at least a powerful minority in city politics, but a man in town for only two or three meals has to go with the percentages.

From American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater by Calvin Trillin, pages 20-21

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

Laurie Colwin

I’ve been on a “Food Writing” reading kick lately, and I don’t really know how to explain how much I love this genre. I suppose it’s partly because I love to cook and bake, but also a large part of it is just how fun most of the books I’ve read from this genre are. It’s been fun living and eating vicariously through Julia Child, Ruth Reichl, Gael Greene, and now Laurie Colwin.

When Emma and I were shopping at Three Lives and Company Bookstore, I spotted a book displayed on a table that looked very fun. It was Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, by Laurie Colwin. I had never heard of it before, but after flipping through it, I knew I had to get it. It’s a book of essays about making food at home, full of descriptions of cooking and baking, charming illustrations, and recipes.

This is one of the coziest books I’ve ever read. It was delightful. You don’t have to be an experienced cook yourself to enjoy her essays. She writes about the pleasures of eating and cooking and how certain foods are tied to your memories and past in interesting ways. One of my favorite parts of the book is a description of one of her memories involving soup:

Soup has come to symbolize the ultimate in comfort and safety. Many years ago, when I was about fifteen, I saw someone served a cup of soup, and this vision, which had all the sentimental charm of a painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, is indelibly imprinted on my mind.

It was a cold, rainy autumn night and some grubby teenagers had gathered at a friend’s rather splendid house. We heard the crunch of a car on gravel. A taxi pulled up and into the wet night stepped the friend’s older sister, who was coming home from college for the weekend. She was probably nineteen but she looked like the picture of sophistication. She wore brown pumps, a green tweed suit, pearl earrings and her hair was pulled back in a French twist.

She took off her wet coat, sat down in front of the fire and her mother brought her a large, ornamental bone china cup of soup. She warmed her hands on the cup and then she set it on its saucer, balanced it on her lap and ate the soup with a bouillon spoon. The dog, a weimaraner, lay dozing at her feet. Outside the rain clattered. Inside that pretty living room was all safe.

Of course you need not have a weimaraner or a fire or anyone coming home from college. To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

Is that not one of the coziest descriptions ever? The entire book is a treat.

Unfortunately, Laurie Colwin died in 1992 at the age of 48. Two books were published posthumously, including a sequel to this collection, called More Home Cooking. I’m looking forward to reading it, and am very excited because it just came in for me at the Hoboken Library and I’m going to go pick it up today.

She also wrote five novels and a few collections of short stories, that I’d also like to check out someday.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)