I got to thinking about writing earlier today. Can't possibly imagine why. Usually the furthest thing from my thoughts. And intermittently I was thinking about fine food. Cafeteria ham sandwiches of dubious ham between slices of questionable bread will do that to you. Finally, I was also toying with doing a bio column on A.J. Liebling for either this Fear and Loathing page or the By the Book Reviews page. Handily, all of this came together in a neat package, served up for your dining pleasure in ... The Twilight Zone.
Sorry. I have no idea why the ghost of Rod Serling suddenly walked into our dining room/office uninvited and unannounced. Aha! Dining rooms. No wonder I've chosen food as a topic.
Here's my thought. Food defies writing. The most famous piece of food in literary history is Marcel Proust's damned madeleine and to this day no one can tell you if it was chewy, gooey or overly crisp. That is because, to repeat the theme, food defies writing.
Writing does the other senses and sensory stimulants quite well. It's the monotony of it that eventually turns us away from written porn, not the accuracy of the reporting. Similarly (or perhaps not similarly at all), I've seen the Cornish coast and Sir Thomas Malory did a fine job of it in his Arthuriad. So sex and sights and ... sounds too. I wrote music reviews for years and if you allow your writing fingers to be as free as a virtuoso's fingers on (say) the blues guitar, you can get the reader to imagine the music to at least the accuracy point of a small radio sitting on a cooler by the water on a windy day playing your favourite song. Or 85%. Some people like metaphors, some deal with numbers. We serve all.
But food is defiant. Even Leibling, the late food and boxing writer for The New Yorker was defied by it. By the way, I italicize boxing because it absolutely delights me that anyone can be equally eloquent about two men squishing their opposite number's heads into pulp ... and mussels. It makes my love of professional wrestling less absurd or at least defensible in polite company.
The point is, that as great as Leibling was in writing about the experience of dining - the chairs, the service, the plates, the scents even - or his reaction to the dining - the filled, the fine, the fish, the farts - I've never known what a single fork or spoonful ever tasted like. Because taste is so incredibly complex and inter-mingled with mood and memory and scent and I sincerely believe sight that what passes from the tongue to the memory and into the brain cannot emerge from the tongue or as written words.
Cat got your tongue?
No, but the pate has rendered me speechless.
This also creates the atmosphere wherein the popularity of cookbooks that are read, displayed yet otherwise ignored for their purpose is explained. We want great food. To taste, to feel, to fill. In our boastful moments we think we can prepare it, but if we're wandering off into unknown lands of cuisines Mom didn't make, we want to be sure that we'll like it too. Hence the cookbook:
Look, we'll just put all this stuff together - stuff that you pretty much know individually, right? Okay, so just imagine it tastes like all that stuff put together. Right? Bingo!
But we can't. So we buy another cookbook in search of the Rosetta Stone, and another and another. But no one can ever write what your taste will feel. Be seeing you.
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