You don’t have to read food books to encounter fine writing about food. Or so it seems from the following savory passages I’ve come across in the last two days:
• In “The Man Who Loved China,” Simon Winchester offers a bit of sage advice: “Harsh words butter no parsnips.”
• Job 6 6-7: “Is tasteless food eaten without salt, or is there flavor in the white of an egg? I refuse to touch it; such food makes me ill.”
• In V.S. Naipaul’s “A Writer’s People,” he describes his mother’s first trip to her ancestral homeland of India. She was a bit afraid to eat any of the food, because she didn’t know how cleanly it was prepared. Instead, she opts for a cup of tea. When it is presented, someone wipes the outside of the cup with a hand that might not have been washed recently. Sugar was presented by hand, too, and it was stirred into the tea with a bare finger. His mother’s journal entry ends there, apparently, as the writer says, because she had no words to describe the situation.
• The following is from Marilynne Robinson’s “Home”: “How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, this house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.”
— John Griffin