Choice Cuts

A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History

Edited and illustrated by Mark Kurlansky (Ballantine)

Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts is like a snack bar of the world's great culinary literature. The astute editor serves just enough to tantalize our taste buds while never going far enough to ruin our appetites. A nugget of Plato might be followed by a handful of George Orwell and washed down with a sip of Ernest Hemingway.

While the book is quite literally A Moveable Feast and, in fact, tells Hemingway's fish tales from that classic along with additional well-known tidbits from other celebrated authors, it is also stacked high with rare bites such as "Ernest Hemingway on How He Likes to Eat" from a 1951 letter the author wrote:

Hemingway

"What I really like is good fresh fish, grilled, good steaks (not these comic steaks they have bred for slobs to eat so they have no taste but only size) but good steaks with the bone and very rare. Good lamb, rare. Elk, mountain sheep, venison and antelope in that order and grouse, young sage-hen, quail and teal, canvasback and mallards in that order. With mashed potatoes and gravy. For vegetables I like celery and artichokes best; artichokes cold with sauce vinagreat (misspelled). Brussels sprouts. Swiss chard, broccoli and all fruits. To eat when you write is just a stupefying bore unless they have some of the above. So don't worry about me down here eating nothing and making an ass of myself. I have had strange eating habits since I was a boy. It is nothing to be proud of, ashamed of nor alarmed about. Bears don't eat all winter and Harry Wills fasts a month of each year."

If there is anyone skilled enough in both the kitchen and the library to take on this almost 500-page recipe and infuse it with equal dashes of thoughtfulness, irony, humor and brilliance, it is Kurlansky, whose scholarly food books (Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History) have raked in awards and accolades during the last decade. Fans of legendary food writers like James Beard or M.F.K. Fisher who pull their chairs up to this table, might just find themselves pushing away from the table a new fan of Kurlansky's.

More than edit, he wittily begins many of the entries with priceless information and observations. And his own musings at times appropriately take center plate, as when Kurlansky, a short story author and award-winning food writer who is a columnist for Food & Wine magazine, kicks off his "Gourmet and Gourmands" chapter with a published piece of his own:

"No one ever knows when he is well-off. Whenever I was called a gourmet, I suspected I was being accused of something at least slightly unpleasant. But that was before I heard the term 'foodie.' I am still not sure that a gourmet is a good thing to be, but it must be better than a foodie.

Fisher

Although I cannot say exactly what a gourmet is, like Justice Stewart said of pornography, I know it when I see it, and I am slipping into contemplation of the meaning of the word 'gourmet' because I am clearly in the company of a couple of them. The two gourmets who have invited me to lunch in a rural Basque restaurant in the green mountains of Vizcaya province are a small, red-faced and energetic author of a popular Spanish food guide and an enormously round and well-fed man of unclear profession whose business card labels him as 'gastronomic adviser.'"

While by no means a cookbook, Kurlansky does fittingly include a number of "choice cuts." Some are in the form of directions like M.F.K. Fisher's habit of wrapping thick baguette sandwiches tightly in plastic wrap and having guests sit on them during conversation to warm and compress them; others are merely descriptions like this Arabic egg dish from a 1373 text:

"Cut up onions well, then strain away their juice, then throw them in the tajine and pour over them a sufficiency of fresh sesame oil, then fry them in that sesame oil. Then pour eggs upon them, after beating them well until the yolks are mixed with the whites. Put a little salt and spices with them and do not stop observing the fire and stirring until it is pleasing."

Still others are in the recipe form most of us have come to know:

Recipes
-HUSH PUPPIES
-POTATO CHARLOTTE

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