{"id":76355,"date":"2014-09-05T14:32:05","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T18:32:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76355"},"modified":"2014-09-05T14:32:05","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T18:32:05","slug":"food-for-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/05\/food-for-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"Food for Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"INF3-179_Fuel_Economy_Keep_on_saving_coal..._(housewife_at_kitchen_sink)_Artist_Marc_Stone\"<\/a>

From the UK National Archives, 1939<\/p><\/div>\n

When you\u2019re traveling, you understand what you really need, or want, or find comforting\u2014what you can do without and what\u2019s essential. In my case, traveling illuminates an addiction to cookbooks.<\/p>\n

People have written beautifully about their love of recipe reading. Laurie Colwin\u2019s \u201cWhy I Love Cookbooks\u201d is a classic explanation of the genre\u2019s comforting appeal. Writing in The New Yorker<\/em>, Adam Gopnik explains it differently:<\/p>\n

\n

A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That\u2019s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dressup, we always end up making. We make b\u00e9arnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make b\u00e9arnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies. The herbs change; the hope does not.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whether the goal is comfort, aspiration, association, curiosity, research, it\u2019s clear; people love to read cookbooks. Even Gwyneth Paltrow has claimed to be a bedtime cookbook-reader; of this, make what you will. <\/p>\n

I have hundreds of cookbooks, and I love to read them. I especially enjoy reading about food while I eat, and keep a large stack of varied cookbooks on every surface where I might happen to set my plate. Some meals might call for Marcella Hazan, or Claudia Roden; other times you just want pretty pictures, or the American comforts of Lee Bailey. But all of this seems to me normal enough.<\/p>\n

I began to be worried by this habit a few months ago. I decided to tidy my apartment before a houseguest\u2019s arrival, and shelved all the many books I had lying around. For the first time in memory, my home was visibly cookbook-less; they were all tucked away in their boxes and cupboards in the kitchen. The sense of panic I experienced was visceral and immediate. I felt a real physical anxiety such as I have never known. Calm down! I told myself. They\u2019re just under the counter! You can grab one the moment you want to\u2014Edna Lewis or Nigel Slater or one of your old ones, or maybe some John Thorne, if you feel like essays! It\u2019s okay!<\/p>\n

And yet it didn\u2019t feel right. I was upset, restless. I remembered something my mother had once said. For years, the sound track of my childhood was the slap of cards on the Formica kitchen tabletop as my mother played game after game of solitaire, from dawn to late and night. And then, one day, she stopped cold turkey. \u201cNothing done out of compulsion is healthy,\u201d she said. I knew this to be true, and yet, I also remember the relief I felt when I pulled The Nantucket Open-House Cookbook<\/em> off the shelf and laid it on the coffee table, telling myself with an addict\u2019s dishonesty that it was just to get ideas for dinner.<\/p>\n

As habits go, this one seems fairly harmless. But it\u2019s also clear that the pleasures these other writers describe\u2014that of vicarious gratification, and imagination\u2014have morphed for me into something more. Simply put, I am not comfortable unless there are cookbooks around me, readily accessible. At the moment, I am in another country, beautiful and interesting, surrounded by good books. To stave off\u00a0my rising anxiety, I have been surfing food websites and blogs. It will do, for the moment. And yet, I plan to run to the nearest bookstore as soon as possible and get a fix. It doesn\u2019t need to be good. It doesn\u2019t even need to be in English. That really isn\u2019t the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you\u2019re traveling, you understand what you really need, or want, or find comforting\u2014what you can do without and what\u2019s essential. In my case, traveling illuminates an addiction to cookbooks. People have written beautifully about their love of recipe reading. Laurie Colwin\u2019s \u201cWhy I Love Cookbooks\u201d is a classic explanation of the genre\u2019s comforting appeal. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[8376,15198,15200,64,15201,53,15199],"class_list":["post-76355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-adam-gopnik","tag-addiction","tag-compulsion","tag-cookbooks","tag-gwyneth-paltrow","tag-reading","tag-traveling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFood for Thought<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on how traveling illuminates her addiction to cookbooks.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/05\/food-for-thought\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Food for Thought by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 5, 2014 \u2013 When you\u2019re traveling, you understand what you really need, or want, or find comforting\u2014what you can do without and what\u2019s essential. 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