Final Book List 2011
Books I have read in the Christian Year 2011
32 books, 8221 pages (256.9 avg. pp./book)
(December)
32. Restraint of Beasts, Magnus Mills (214 pp.)
31. The Silent Miaow, Paul Gallico (159 pp.)
30. Giants in the Earth, O.E. Rolvaag (468 pp.)
(November)
29. The Food of a Younger Land, Mark Kurlansky (397 pp.)
28. Why We Eat What We Eat, Raymond Sokolov (240 pp.)
27. The Curious Cook, Harold McGee (329 pp.)
(October)
26. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (213 pp.)
25. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer (207 pp.)
(September)
24. Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (520 pp.)
23. Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin (254 pp.)
(August)
22. The Mote in God’s Eye, Larry Niven (537 pp.)
21. Great Science Fiction Stories, Ed. Cordelia Titcomb Smith (288 pp.)
20. Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven (244 pp.)
19. The Tribe of Tiger, Elizabeth Marshall(238 pp.)
18. Consumed, Benjamin Barber (381 pp.)
(July)
17. Broken Heartland, Osha Gray Davidson (217 pp.)
16. Man Meets Dog, Konrad Lorenz (202 pp.)
(June)
15. Bright Earth, Philip Ball (360 pp.)
(May)
14. The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (283 pp.)
13. When Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (291 pp.)
12. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (348 pp.)
(April)
11. The Clean House and Other Plays, Sarah Ruhl (411 pp.)
10. Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen, trans. Rolf Fjelde (290 pp.)
9. Beyond the Fields We Know, Lord Dunsany (299 pp.)
(March)
8. Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis (430 pp.)
7. What’s the Matter With Kansas, Thomas Frank (296 pp.)
6. The Ethical Slut, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy (282 pp.)
(February)
5. Why Cats Paint, Heather Busch and Burton Silver (96 pp.)
4. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce (251 pp.)
3. 77 Dream Songs, John Berryman (84 pp)
(January)
2. “May the Farce Be With You,” David Rogers (96 pp.)
1. The Perfect Cup, Timothy James Castle (235 pp.)
.McGee
9
These days we easily forget that the natural world invented us and feeds us. It is our home, and it is an astonishing place. Our best efforts to understand it, the sciences, are a form of homage to its fascination. They can do much to enrich the experiences of cooking and eating, and living.
194
It’s easy to accept the idea that serious disease are caused by virulent microbes, by the poisonous chemicals in cigarette smoke, and by debilitating deficiencies of essential nutrients. But common, everyday amounts of a common, everyday nutrient, one that our bodies were designed to exploit, and arguably the one that contributes most to the appeal of our foods? Not fair. Also, after decades of basic and clinical research across the globe, not really disputable. It turns out that animal fats and some vegetable oils increase the concentration of cholesterol in our blood, and cholesterol in turn damages our blood vessels. Nearly half of all deaths in the industrialized West-almost a million a year in the U.S.-are attributable to diseased arteries. Of these, it’s estimated that about half are caused in large part by fat consumption, and could have been avoided.
220
Heart disease is often called a disease of affluence or of civilization. That lets nature off too easily. Instead, I would call it on instance of the incongruity between civilization and the quirky biology that gave rise to it. Our mastering of nature has been driven in part by bodily hungers and desires that were formed in the usual condition of nature: namely, scarcity. Now we find that our bodies aren’t designed to handle abundance; that although it’s more pleasurable, abundance can be just as lethal as famine. Having succeeded at adapting to nature by controlling it, we now need to adapt to the consequences of our success, and answer a different hunger: the hunger for a pleasurable life that’s also long and active. Our mind must lend to the arteries and liver and palate a foresight and prudence that they lack. It will take the continuing, civilizing efforts of physician and biochemists, farmers and cook, to make the good life better for us.
279
To introduce the pleasures of the table as a means of partial, inadequate compensation for all the ills the flesh is heir to, from toothache to warfare, is to attribute to them both a certain emotional dignity and a certain futility. Similarly, meditation 26, “On Death,” begins: “The six most important necessities which the Creator has imposed on mankind are to be born, to move about, to eat, to sleep, to procreate, and to die.” The point of this meditation is to show that, just as fulfilling the other necessities is accompanied by feelings of pleasure, so too is death. But to place dining in this company is to affirm at one and the same time its relative prominence and its ultimate insignificance. In the light of such passages, gastronomy appears to be an effort to make the best of a bad situation; and two of the opening aphorisms stand out in stark relief:
The creator, while forcing man to eat in order to live, tempts him to do so with appetite and then rewards him with pleasure.
The pleasures of the table . . . can be a part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest, to console him when he has outlived the rest.
Sokolov
15
Two ideas seem beyond doubt: Cuisines evolve almost instantly when two cultures and their ingredients meet in the kitchen, and old cuisines never die, they add new dishes and ingredients to old recipes and slough off the losers, and evolutionary dead ends (remember creamed chipped beef on toast). The net quantity of culinary diversity probably remains the same, and of course we now take cooking seriously enough to write down recipes for the dishes that are in danger of disappearing.
44
What we perceive today as typical of one island or another is often a dish that, after four hundred years, has emerged as a local favorite rather than an exclusive local invention with a pedigree that can be clearly established.
228
Over the 150 years that stretched from the time of Carême in the early nineteenth century until the dawn of nouvelle cuisine, French chefs refined a closed system of dishes whose basic unit was a serving platter filled with a main food item, say a roast, tricked out with its prescribed garnishes. Nouvelle cuisine not only subverted the old culinary code, it also abandoned platter service and substituted for it an equally intricate method of service based on individual plates arranged in the kitchen.
These attacks on the structure and meaning of the old style of dining are the truly revolutionary part of nouvelle cuisine, but the threat to the old order was masked in many ways. Nouvelle cuisine was marketed as the cuisine of modern slim people who valued fresh food or food presented with streamlined simplicity and provocative ingredients. All those elements were present and important, but they fronted for the real revolution that transformed the old code by using it as material for a most elaborate system of culinary parody, punning, and metaphor. Nouvelle cuisine looks at Escoffier through the wrong end of the telescope. It puts ironic quotation marks around Carême and sets the old code in italics so that the old words all mean something else, are metaphors for new ideas for which no names previously existed.
Nouvelle cuisine itself is a kind of metaphor. It does not actually mean a new cuisine. When the adjective precedes the noun in French, it takes on a figurative sense. So nouvelle cuisine is new in a figurative-and problematic-sense, like New York or New Orleans (Nouvelle Orleans). Just as these cities of the New World (nouveau monde not monde nouveau) are reflections of York and Orleans, not re-creatives or renovations of them, so nouvelle cuisine refers back to classic French haute cuisine, neither as a copy nor as a radical reform. It is instead a parody or perhaps a pun based on the old culinary code of Carême and Escoffier.
230
It is this “literary” aspect that saves nouvelle cuisine from being merely a collection of outrageous novelties. The nouvelle cuisine’s greatest failures always have been the entirely new dishes, concocted with no reference to the past. Its greatest triumphs have sprung from tradition seen through a glass brightly.
232
It took most of the rest of the century for Russian service to sweep away French service. With French service perished the simultaneous profusion of dishes, the architectural table decoration, and the sculptural set pieces that had marked the grandiose age of the first and greatest modern chef, Carême. Russian service, championed in the 1860s by the influential chef Felix Urbain Dubois, allowed people to eat one dish per course.
As a result chefs turned to perfecting each individual dish instead of concentrating on an array of dishes. This led to multiple garnishes and platters bristling with ancillary foods that were minidishes in themselves. In less than a century, dissatisfaction with these overdone platters led to a further reduction in the scale of food presentation. The nouvelle cuisine restricted itself to the individual plate.
One stage builds on the next. There is no discontinuity, no revolution that obliterates the past. Nothing arises from nothing. Every so often the chefs clean house in the name of simplification and then find new ways to complicate their task.
233-234
What is afoot in our land is not the birth of a vernacular cuisine in the traditional sense. That would be impossible. With the exception of Native American recipes (including Aztec dishes that may have been eaten here before geopolitics converted them into Mexican food), nothing we consume has evolved in the autochthonous, slow manner that produced the cuisines of traditional cultures. We lack, furthermore, the standard focuses of cuisine formation; we have no court and no peasants. It was in the American analogues of royal and peasant kitchens, in fact, that our regional dishes did develop-in the briefly creative moments of princely wealth in colonial cities and southern plantations and when pioneers adapted European cuisines to the natural world of the frontier. But these short periods of culinary invention did not survive the homogenizing forces of settlement. Regional dishes survived as relics, endangered items on a menu trotted out mostly for visitors.
235
The main interest of postmodern American cuisine, at this early stage, is its free but informed attitude toward the rich world of possibilities open to American cooks. Perhaps a vocabulary of new “American” dishes will ultimately shake out from all the fervid experimentation. But for now it is the process that counts. The manipulation of local ingredients with culinary ideas inherited from many national pasts is a sensible extension of the notion of the melting pot-and an intrinsically American way to go.
Kurlansky
241
“I he samples Barbecue on the highway, he has eaten it at tits worst. True Barbecue is seldom to be had, and is worth driving many miles to eat. In the strict definition of the term, Barbecue is any four footed animal-be it mouse or mastodon-whose dressed carcass is roasted whole. Occasionally it is a hog, often it is a fat sheep, but usually and at its best it is a fat steer, and it must be eaten within an hour of when it was cooked. For if ever the sun rises upon Barbecue its flavor vanishes like Cinderella’s silks and it becomes cold baked beef-staler in the chill dawn than illicit love.
“This is why it can never be commercialized, for no roadside stand could cook and sell a whole steer in a day. This is why true Barbecue, like true love, cannot be bought but must always be given, and so is found only as a part of lavish hospitality in the cow country.
Rolvaag
37-38
After they had milked the cow, eaten their evening porridge, and talked awhile to the oxen, she took the boys and And-Ongen and strolled away from the camp. With a common impulse, they went toward the hill; when they had reached the summit, Beret sat down and let her gaze wander aimlessly around. . . . In a certain sense, she had to admit to herself, it was lovely up here. The broad expanse stretching away endlessly in every
direction, seemed almost like the ocean--especially now, when darkness was falling. It reminded her strongly of the sea, and yet it was very different. . . . The formless prairie had no heat that beat, no waves that sang no soul that could be touched. . . . or cared. . . .
105
. . . In the window lookin toward the east a woman's face, tear-stained and swollen with weeping, watched his figure grow less and less in the dim grey light o the breaking day, until at last it had disappeared altogether. . . . To her it seemed as though he were sinking deeper and eeper into an unknown, lifeless sea; the sombre greyness rose and covered him.
197
During the first day of October a few white, downy snowflakes hung quivering in the air . . . floated about . . . fell in great oscillating circles. They seemed headed for nowhere; they followed no common course; but finally they reached the ground and disappeared.
The air cleared again. There came a drowsy, sun-filled interval . . . nothing but golden haze . . . quiet bereft of all life. . . .
279
But Per Hansa could not sleep; his mind was numb with weariness yet he could not sleep. Every nerve of his body was twitching; little spasms passed over him, like ripples on the surface of a smooth, glassy sea. It was very hot in the cabin; the blanket grew so heavy that he had to throw it off. Something remained still frozen, deep down in the centre
of his being.
32 books, 8221 pages (256.9 avg. pp./book)
(December)
32. Restraint of Beasts, Magnus Mills (214 pp.)
31. The Silent Miaow, Paul Gallico (159 pp.)
30. Giants in the Earth, O.E. Rolvaag (468 pp.)
(November)
29. The Food of a Younger Land, Mark Kurlansky (397 pp.)
28. Why We Eat What We Eat, Raymond Sokolov (240 pp.)
27. The Curious Cook, Harold McGee (329 pp.)
(October)
26. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (213 pp.)
25. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer (207 pp.)
(September)
24. Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (520 pp.)
23. Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin (254 pp.)
(August)
22. The Mote in God’s Eye, Larry Niven (537 pp.)
21. Great Science Fiction Stories, Ed. Cordelia Titcomb Smith (288 pp.)
20. Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven (244 pp.)
19. The Tribe of Tiger, Elizabeth Marshall(238 pp.)
18. Consumed, Benjamin Barber (381 pp.)
(July)
17. Broken Heartland, Osha Gray Davidson (217 pp.)
16. Man Meets Dog, Konrad Lorenz (202 pp.)
(June)
15. Bright Earth, Philip Ball (360 pp.)
(May)
14. The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (283 pp.)
13. When Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (291 pp.)
12. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (348 pp.)
(April)
11. The Clean House and Other Plays, Sarah Ruhl (411 pp.)
10. Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen, trans. Rolf Fjelde (290 pp.)
9. Beyond the Fields We Know, Lord Dunsany (299 pp.)
(March)
8. Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis (430 pp.)
7. What’s the Matter With Kansas, Thomas Frank (296 pp.)
6. The Ethical Slut, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy (282 pp.)
(February)
5. Why Cats Paint, Heather Busch and Burton Silver (96 pp.)
4. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce (251 pp.)
3. 77 Dream Songs, John Berryman (84 pp)
(January)
2. “May the Farce Be With You,” David Rogers (96 pp.)
1. The Perfect Cup, Timothy James Castle (235 pp.)
.McGee
9
These days we easily forget that the natural world invented us and feeds us. It is our home, and it is an astonishing place. Our best efforts to understand it, the sciences, are a form of homage to its fascination. They can do much to enrich the experiences of cooking and eating, and living.
194
It’s easy to accept the idea that serious disease are caused by virulent microbes, by the poisonous chemicals in cigarette smoke, and by debilitating deficiencies of essential nutrients. But common, everyday amounts of a common, everyday nutrient, one that our bodies were designed to exploit, and arguably the one that contributes most to the appeal of our foods? Not fair. Also, after decades of basic and clinical research across the globe, not really disputable. It turns out that animal fats and some vegetable oils increase the concentration of cholesterol in our blood, and cholesterol in turn damages our blood vessels. Nearly half of all deaths in the industrialized West-almost a million a year in the U.S.-are attributable to diseased arteries. Of these, it’s estimated that about half are caused in large part by fat consumption, and could have been avoided.
220
Heart disease is often called a disease of affluence or of civilization. That lets nature off too easily. Instead, I would call it on instance of the incongruity between civilization and the quirky biology that gave rise to it. Our mastering of nature has been driven in part by bodily hungers and desires that were formed in the usual condition of nature: namely, scarcity. Now we find that our bodies aren’t designed to handle abundance; that although it’s more pleasurable, abundance can be just as lethal as famine. Having succeeded at adapting to nature by controlling it, we now need to adapt to the consequences of our success, and answer a different hunger: the hunger for a pleasurable life that’s also long and active. Our mind must lend to the arteries and liver and palate a foresight and prudence that they lack. It will take the continuing, civilizing efforts of physician and biochemists, farmers and cook, to make the good life better for us.
279
To introduce the pleasures of the table as a means of partial, inadequate compensation for all the ills the flesh is heir to, from toothache to warfare, is to attribute to them both a certain emotional dignity and a certain futility. Similarly, meditation 26, “On Death,” begins: “The six most important necessities which the Creator has imposed on mankind are to be born, to move about, to eat, to sleep, to procreate, and to die.” The point of this meditation is to show that, just as fulfilling the other necessities is accompanied by feelings of pleasure, so too is death. But to place dining in this company is to affirm at one and the same time its relative prominence and its ultimate insignificance. In the light of such passages, gastronomy appears to be an effort to make the best of a bad situation; and two of the opening aphorisms stand out in stark relief:
The creator, while forcing man to eat in order to live, tempts him to do so with appetite and then rewards him with pleasure.
The pleasures of the table . . . can be a part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest, to console him when he has outlived the rest.
Sokolov
15
Two ideas seem beyond doubt: Cuisines evolve almost instantly when two cultures and their ingredients meet in the kitchen, and old cuisines never die, they add new dishes and ingredients to old recipes and slough off the losers, and evolutionary dead ends (remember creamed chipped beef on toast). The net quantity of culinary diversity probably remains the same, and of course we now take cooking seriously enough to write down recipes for the dishes that are in danger of disappearing.
44
What we perceive today as typical of one island or another is often a dish that, after four hundred years, has emerged as a local favorite rather than an exclusive local invention with a pedigree that can be clearly established.
228
Over the 150 years that stretched from the time of Carême in the early nineteenth century until the dawn of nouvelle cuisine, French chefs refined a closed system of dishes whose basic unit was a serving platter filled with a main food item, say a roast, tricked out with its prescribed garnishes. Nouvelle cuisine not only subverted the old culinary code, it also abandoned platter service and substituted for it an equally intricate method of service based on individual plates arranged in the kitchen.
These attacks on the structure and meaning of the old style of dining are the truly revolutionary part of nouvelle cuisine, but the threat to the old order was masked in many ways. Nouvelle cuisine was marketed as the cuisine of modern slim people who valued fresh food or food presented with streamlined simplicity and provocative ingredients. All those elements were present and important, but they fronted for the real revolution that transformed the old code by using it as material for a most elaborate system of culinary parody, punning, and metaphor. Nouvelle cuisine looks at Escoffier through the wrong end of the telescope. It puts ironic quotation marks around Carême and sets the old code in italics so that the old words all mean something else, are metaphors for new ideas for which no names previously existed.
Nouvelle cuisine itself is a kind of metaphor. It does not actually mean a new cuisine. When the adjective precedes the noun in French, it takes on a figurative sense. So nouvelle cuisine is new in a figurative-and problematic-sense, like New York or New Orleans (Nouvelle Orleans). Just as these cities of the New World (nouveau monde not monde nouveau) are reflections of York and Orleans, not re-creatives or renovations of them, so nouvelle cuisine refers back to classic French haute cuisine, neither as a copy nor as a radical reform. It is instead a parody or perhaps a pun based on the old culinary code of Carême and Escoffier.
230
It is this “literary” aspect that saves nouvelle cuisine from being merely a collection of outrageous novelties. The nouvelle cuisine’s greatest failures always have been the entirely new dishes, concocted with no reference to the past. Its greatest triumphs have sprung from tradition seen through a glass brightly.
232
It took most of the rest of the century for Russian service to sweep away French service. With French service perished the simultaneous profusion of dishes, the architectural table decoration, and the sculptural set pieces that had marked the grandiose age of the first and greatest modern chef, Carême. Russian service, championed in the 1860s by the influential chef Felix Urbain Dubois, allowed people to eat one dish per course.
As a result chefs turned to perfecting each individual dish instead of concentrating on an array of dishes. This led to multiple garnishes and platters bristling with ancillary foods that were minidishes in themselves. In less than a century, dissatisfaction with these overdone platters led to a further reduction in the scale of food presentation. The nouvelle cuisine restricted itself to the individual plate.
One stage builds on the next. There is no discontinuity, no revolution that obliterates the past. Nothing arises from nothing. Every so often the chefs clean house in the name of simplification and then find new ways to complicate their task.
233-234
What is afoot in our land is not the birth of a vernacular cuisine in the traditional sense. That would be impossible. With the exception of Native American recipes (including Aztec dishes that may have been eaten here before geopolitics converted them into Mexican food), nothing we consume has evolved in the autochthonous, slow manner that produced the cuisines of traditional cultures. We lack, furthermore, the standard focuses of cuisine formation; we have no court and no peasants. It was in the American analogues of royal and peasant kitchens, in fact, that our regional dishes did develop-in the briefly creative moments of princely wealth in colonial cities and southern plantations and when pioneers adapted European cuisines to the natural world of the frontier. But these short periods of culinary invention did not survive the homogenizing forces of settlement. Regional dishes survived as relics, endangered items on a menu trotted out mostly for visitors.
235
The main interest of postmodern American cuisine, at this early stage, is its free but informed attitude toward the rich world of possibilities open to American cooks. Perhaps a vocabulary of new “American” dishes will ultimately shake out from all the fervid experimentation. But for now it is the process that counts. The manipulation of local ingredients with culinary ideas inherited from many national pasts is a sensible extension of the notion of the melting pot-and an intrinsically American way to go.
Kurlansky
241
“I he samples Barbecue on the highway, he has eaten it at tits worst. True Barbecue is seldom to be had, and is worth driving many miles to eat. In the strict definition of the term, Barbecue is any four footed animal-be it mouse or mastodon-whose dressed carcass is roasted whole. Occasionally it is a hog, often it is a fat sheep, but usually and at its best it is a fat steer, and it must be eaten within an hour of when it was cooked. For if ever the sun rises upon Barbecue its flavor vanishes like Cinderella’s silks and it becomes cold baked beef-staler in the chill dawn than illicit love.
“This is why it can never be commercialized, for no roadside stand could cook and sell a whole steer in a day. This is why true Barbecue, like true love, cannot be bought but must always be given, and so is found only as a part of lavish hospitality in the cow country.
Rolvaag
37-38
After they had milked the cow, eaten their evening porridge, and talked awhile to the oxen, she took the boys and And-Ongen and strolled away from the camp. With a common impulse, they went toward the hill; when they had reached the summit, Beret sat down and let her gaze wander aimlessly around. . . . In a certain sense, she had to admit to herself, it was lovely up here. The broad expanse stretching away endlessly in every
direction, seemed almost like the ocean--especially now, when darkness was falling. It reminded her strongly of the sea, and yet it was very different. . . . The formless prairie had no heat that beat, no waves that sang no soul that could be touched. . . . or cared. . . .
105
. . . In the window lookin toward the east a woman's face, tear-stained and swollen with weeping, watched his figure grow less and less in the dim grey light o the breaking day, until at last it had disappeared altogether. . . . To her it seemed as though he were sinking deeper and eeper into an unknown, lifeless sea; the sombre greyness rose and covered him.
197
During the first day of October a few white, downy snowflakes hung quivering in the air . . . floated about . . . fell in great oscillating circles. They seemed headed for nowhere; they followed no common course; but finally they reached the ground and disappeared.
The air cleared again. There came a drowsy, sun-filled interval . . . nothing but golden haze . . . quiet bereft of all life. . . .
279
But Per Hansa could not sleep; his mind was numb with weariness yet he could not sleep. Every nerve of his body was twitching; little spasms passed over him, like ripples on the surface of a smooth, glassy sea. It was very hot in the cabin; the blanket grew so heavy that he had to throw it off. Something remained still frozen, deep down in the centre
of his being.