More books.

Over a recent trip & the requisite flights, I read Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy and J. Maarten Troost's Getting Stoned with Savages. The latter was an incredibly light read about the author's experiences living on a couple of South Pacific islands, and was exactly what I wanted for plane reading. It's fairly light stuff, which is fine.

But so The Tummy Trilogy is really quite interesting, as it's a collection of three of Trillin's short collections of stories (dating from 1974, 1978, and 1983). Trillin's a fantastic & hilarious writer, and most importantly, as a promoter of interesting & local food he's incredibly convincing--he's now made me intensely crave fried clams, smoked whitefish, and Cincinnati chili, for instance.

But what shocks me most about reading his stuff is how now, how current, a lot of it seems. Take the following passage, which sounds like it could be from any 2007 article or book about the qualities of local food (but which is actually from 1978):

A lot of vegetables at the Barnstaple market taste more like vegetables than shelf displays simply because they are the product of a kitchen garden rather than an assembly line. ... It is not unusual to come across a farmer's wife standing behind a table that holds, say, three dozen eggs, one chicken, three bunches of carrots, some beetroot, five turnips, six baby cabbages, a bunch of rhubarb, one marrow, a jar of apple chutney, and a jar of quince jelly. ... A preference for free-range eggs is based partly on the theory that a chicken that spends its life roaming around a barnyard instead of being crammed into the wire cages used for what are called battery or factory or deep-litter hens is a healthier fowl that is likely to produce a better egg.

I don't know whether to be happy or sad to fully realize how long people have been thinking & writing about these things. I think I'll settle on hungry, and leave it at that.

Comments

[Megnut]

For the best fried clams, you really need to go to New England. But there's a pretty decent place here in NYC. On your next visit, we can go there. I love fried clams and am happy to have found a good spot for them close to home. Smokes whitefish we can get you too, for sure. But I can't vouch for any Cincinnati chili in NYC.