Can the subaltern cook?*

Hesser fluffs the new Alford and Duguid jawn in the NYTM. The first sentence sounds like a setup for the world's most obscure joke:

Over the holidays, Naomi Duguid and her husband, Jeffrey Alford, invited three of their sons' friends — a Tamil, a Pakistani and a Jehovah's Witness — to celebrate with them at their farmhouse outside Toronto. "For Christmas morning," she recalled earlier this month, "Jeff and I heated up the iddlis so they were a little toasty and crisp and wonderful, and we had iddlis and sambhar and coconut chutney for Christmas breakfast."

"A kris? That's not a kris!" Cue rimshot. Even as it verges towards self-parody, the breakfast does telegraph the ethos of this team. As Hesser puts it:

If you have not heard of Duguid and Alford, it is time to get acquainted. Together they have been the authors and photographers of five cookbooks, each a splendid travel diary and recipe log that takes readers by the wary hand into remote villages throughout the world.

True enough, but my frustration with their work has always come out of a sense that "travel diary" and "recipe log" are not compatible. Travel writing is an effort to convey your experience to a reader, while cookbook writing is an effort to enable a reader to do something for him or herself. To that respect, the better the book as travel narrative, the less tempting it is as a cookbook. "We woke before dawn, hiked for two hours, and breakfasted on yams the gauchos roasted over an open fire as the sun came up over the pampas. Here's how you can roast yams in your oven at home!" Thanks.  I'll make myself some Chef Boyardee, watch the Discovery Channel, and silently curse my fate instead.

Alford and Duguid have an MO of taking up the cudgels for one corner of the developing world or another:

"Our whole work life has been a constant campaign," Alford began. "Against Europhilia," Duguid said, finishing his sentence. One of their pet peeves: editors who, before bidding on a book, ask if there is a New York City restaurant that serves the food they are writing about.

The restaurant thing is an understandable lament, but the push and pull between travelling and cooking is inherent in any book that considers the food of a particular region. A pitfall of semi-good food writing a narrative that is just compelling enough to make you wish you were there instead of the writer. Much of Waverley Root's putatively classic Foods of France falls into this trap--for my money, Liebling's much less comprehensive Between Meals is a much better book because he is graceful enough not to make the narrative feel like watching slides of someone else's vacation. For whatever reason, A&D's War on Europhilia manifests istself in producing books, that while beautiful, are scarcely viable in the kitchen. Mangoes and Curry Leaves, and Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet are both roughly 10" x 11" and a festive 5 lbs apiece. More to the point, they are pretty and expensive--a book that size, and one that lists for $45, is more at home on a coffee table than in the kitchen. Considering the availablity of better cookbooks, ( instead of HSSS, Ruth Law's Southeast Asia Cookbook, for instance),  the A&D enterprise seems dubious. Puttamayoesque would be overstating the case, but it is hard to shake the sense that they are targeting consumers who have become too old and too rich for Lonely Planet. Despite Hesser's assurances  that "their Toronto kitchen [contains]  a world-class array of cookware, none of it from Williams-Sonoma," it's not hard to imagine one of their books as an accent in a Pottery Barn catalog.

*FWIW, Cinetrix and I thrilled to the sight of Spivak herself gesticulating avidly with a French fry at recent professional meeting.

Comments

[Fesser]

A caveat-- I have no qualms about dragging pretty, expensive cookbooks into the kitchen, but most of them are not proportioned like one of Helmut Newton's later works.