Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times
edited by Amanda Hesser

Eat, Memory should not be read on an empty stomach. This collection of essays, written for The New York Times primarily by well-known authors and chefs, are near-pornographic – filled with indulgent descriptions of dishes and fully recounted recipes that put the food tantalizingly close.

Two of the biggest names in food writing appear on the pages. Dawn Drzal writes of her meeting with M.F.K. Fisher for a simple lunch; Fisher’s nurse leaves the writer an inedible and revolting memento. And one essay, excerpted from Julia Child’s My Life in France, finds the grand dame of cooking fuming over a Cordon Bleu exam that asked her to list the ingredients of a veal chop “en surprise,” that is, in a paper bag. It was, she writes, “the kind of gimmicky dish a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner party to épater the boss’s wife.”

Still more fun to read, especially for those who eat more than they cook, are the odes of non-chefs to foods they never made. Novelist Kiran Desai’s long-ago attempt at a soufflé is DOA, and her family’s cook none too pleased with her decision to throw the yellow mess off the rooftop. Tang – yes, the orange powder in a can – fuels writer Yiyun Li’s young crush on a boy. Fat Burger, Pink’s, and El Coyote haunt playwright Jon Robin Baitz’s memory during the years he spent growing up in Durban. And MSNBC host Tucker Carlson is charged with one key step – adding “liquid hickory-smoke flavor” – to the industrial process of making canned baked beans.

Besides the one grand similarity in all the pieces – the use of food to summon, structure, or in one case, repress memory and longing – there are a few other coincidences. French cuisine is key to many of the essays, an essential aspiration of the would-be chef and the eager eater, particularly in Manil Suri’s attempt to satisfy his spice-besotted Bombay clan with a French meal. Even a movie about French food, Babette’s Feast, makes two poignant appearances. The other, less-expected coincidence is sauces. One writer frets over gravy, others attempt (of course) the French cream sauces, and James Salter trades “a pair of drugstore eyeglasses” for a recipe for figs “bathed in a smooth, faintly alcoholic liquid.”

Perhaps it’s simply because sauce is to food what food is to these tales.

Excerpt: Colson Whitehead on before he hated ice cream: “I was once like you, always quick with a ‘Two scoops please’ and a ‘Whipped cream, damn it, whipped cream!’ I loved a Breyers vanilla-chocolate-strawberry rectangle straight from the freezer. Never mind if it was a bit long in the tooth, nestled in there next to a half-empty bag of carrots-and-peas medley – scrape off the icy fur and it was good to go. Orange sherbet? Cool.”

Further Reading: The Art of Eating and My Life in France