Between Meals

"This is the male version [of the MFK Fisher]. To me, they have always walked hand in hand, Mary Frances and AJ. What I love is the contrast to Mary Frances. He is an unabashed glutton. His famous phrase is that the primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. But what he is not saying is that, really, the primary requisite for writing well about food is the ability to write. He had both. He’s such a beautiful writer that you can pick this book up at any point and there’s something wonderful that you want to quote. It’s an old man’s yearning for the joys of his youth. It’s also about women – that wonderful last chapter, “Passable”. It’s about being able to appreciate the small things in life. For me, all these books – with the exception of Diet for a Small Planet – are really an exhortation to pay attention to the little things in life, to get pleasure out of this thing we all do every day, three times a day. That’s what attracts me to them. Yes. He talks about how much he loved Paris in the 1920s, but he later finds out that in fact he missed the golden age, which was before World War I. He laments that he didn’t get to see that. There’s also a wonderful passage in there about how glad he is that he didn’t have a lot of money. When I first read it, I didn’t have any money either. Liebling did not go to Paris as a rich person, eating three-star meals, and he says that helped his appreciation. That’s an important point. This isn’t about eating caviar and truffles. MFK Fisher does a whole passage on eating a tangerine. It’s one of the most beautiful passages in food writing – about taking these sections of tangerine and putting them on the radiator, until they almost crystallise on the outside, and the burst of flavour, the warm juice in your mouth. That’s a very important thing to me. You don’t have to be rich to eat well. The person to go to for that is really Pellegrini, who goes on and on about offal and eating the guts of chickens and is appalled by what Americans don’t eat. Yes, and he trapped rabbits. There’s also a wonderful passage about his father taking the intestines of chickens and washing them very carefully and leaving them to soak overnight. His Sunday morning ritual was cutting them into little pieces and frying them crisp and then folding them into an omelette. He talks about how Americans won’t eat these things. It’s still one of the really high hurdles for Americans. I happen to love tripe, but getting Americans to eat tripe or kidneys or even sweetbreads… When I was at Gourmet , we once counted how many offal recipes there were in the 1940s. There were lots of them. In our last year [2009], I think we printed just two."