Food

After twenty-three years in Japan, I have concluded that the much-lauded, worshipped even, cuisine is overrated. And I am getting a little tired of being told how awe-inspiringly wonderful Japanese food is, often by people whose only experience is high-end sushi or designer tempura in a showpiece Tribeca eatery, a world away from the standard fare available on the backstreets of Shibuya. Part of the problem is that much of what delights the Japanese about their food is unrelated to its actual taste.

There are some characters who infuse literature and life with disproportionate zest. The nature of their vocations is less relevant than the fervency they bring to the job, which is what makes them stand up off the page and sail through time. Lucius Beebe, who kept a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, favored bowler hats and evening dress and wrote a column for the old New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s and then for Gourmet until his death in 1966, sits high up on my list of zestful characters who go the distance: militantly old-fashioned, never out-of-date. The association with the estimable, sadly deceased Gourmet justifies talking about Beebe under the food heading as much as any other, even though he did not always write about food as such.

As one of eight children, I feel deep kinship with others who come from big families. Bunk beds, hand-me-down clothes, abject chaos at dinnertime — these are the staples of big-family life. Tieghan Gerard, the author of the food blog and cookbook series Half Baked Harvest, is one such kindred spirit. She comes from a family of ten, and began cooking as a tween to help with frenzied mealtimes. She soon started creating her own recipes for a food blog, which became three bestselling cookbooks and a four-million-follower Instagram. Her big-family backstory blends with her wholesome, rustic aesthetic: feeding a crowd, after all, involves creativity, resourcefulness and well-loved tools. I hoped I’d recognize some high-volume cooking tricks in Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple.

I recently got engaged. After the celebratory Champagne and indulgent restaurant meals my fiancé and I enjoyed in our month of post-betrothal bliss, reality set in: soon I must fit into a wedding dress. Of course, dresses come in all shapes and sizes, just like brides. But have you seen the price of a wedding photographer lately? I’d like to look my best. These days, the main weight-loss food trend seems to be the ketogenic diet. Like the Paleo and Atkins diets, eating keto means cutting carbs. Unlike these other diets, keto isn’t high in protein; it’s high in fat. The idea is that depriving yourself of carbs and protein will cause your body to burn fat for energy — starting with the bacon and eggs you ate for breakfast and ending with your thighs.

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called “CarnivoreMD” (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: “If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male... or alpha female.” Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer consigned to memories of the postwar school cafeteria, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word “offal” implies wastage — from the Middle Dutch for offcuts — but it can also be a delicacy. Foie gras is only the most obvious example. For the most part, though, the West has become squeamish about what was once called “variety meat.” But a new wave of offal-lovers is reviving an interest in organs.

Inflation having topped 9 percent this summer, Americans are looking for ways to cut their spending. Rising prices at the grocery store are impossible to avoid, but we can learn to adjust. There’s no better inspiration than M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher, a food writer who hung around with Julia Child and James Beard during her lifetime, felt the pain of wartime rationing acutely. Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf addressed the problem of hunger — “the wolf on the doorstep” — with a few clever recipes and a great deal of philosophy. Survival of the crisis, she predicted, would require first and foremost an attitude of abundance. Fisher ascribes virtues like honesty, dignity and nobility to simply prepared foods.

They were neighbors and friends. Harold Loeb, an economist, writer and heir to the Guggenheim and Loeb fortunes, and his wife Vera lived down the Saugatuck River from us on Snake Drive, at the end of Buttonball Lane. Harold was better known as having been betrayed by Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1930s — Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises was modeled after him. Harold got even in The Way It Was, published in 1959. He asked my father to sketch him for the book’s back cover. Among other things they had in common a gift for gardening. My father, known for his charcoal sketches of celebrated locals of Weston, Connecticut, planted a large, Walden-inspired plot surrounded by a white picket fence, where weeds were allowed as long as they didn’t interfere with the crops.

"Gelati, sorbetti e granite,” it said on the cover. We were in a little bookshop off the Piazza Duomo in Verona. Days of consuming Italian gelato in the hot afternoons had worked so wonderfully upon our imaginations that here we were purchasing a recipe book in a language we didn’t even understand, trying to capture a little of the magical glitter of the Italian summer before it slipped through our fingers. I still have the book — and I still don’t understand enough Italian to follow a recipe. But the pictures convey some of the original magic. Gelato al limone peers creamily out of a yellow bowl, garnished with bristling strips of lemon peel. Gelato allo Champagne is pink and melting, snuggled up to a strawberry. Sorbetto d’arancia is spooned into a hollowed-out orange.

You might expect Zabar’s, the world-famous “appetizing” store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have become a shadow of its former self. This seems to be the case for most of New York’s other independent specialty shops. Fairway, Balducci’s, H&H Bagels, Dean & Deluca: the food purveyors of my youth have gone kaput. They were bought, leveraged, expanded, overextended and oversold. They expired past their sell-by dates. But somehow Zabar’s survived. For the Upper West Sider, Zabar’s is our Yale College and our Harvard. Like many I make my way down to 80th Street and Broadway most weekends for continuing education. I head to the appetizing counter and take a number.

My wife and I live in Northern Virginia, in Fairfax County. Whenever we go out to eat, we almost always go somewhere in the suburbs. Fairfax, along with neighboring Montgomery County in Maryland, is home to a wealth of restaurants serving cuisines from all over the world. Just last January, Bon Appétit wrote that “to travel DC’s Beltway is to sample the flavors of the world,” and the New York Times declared that “America’s next great restaurants are in the suburbs.” You could argue that the suburban food scene in the DC metro area surpasses that of the city itself. Nonetheless, DC is widely seen as a “foodie city,” and its restaurants generally get more coverage and hype than their suburban counterparts.

It’s still amazing to me how Instagram photos can bring such unexpected responses. And instantly! It happily happened to me last May and my creative juices — green, yellow, orange — started flowing. I had just posted a photo of the nasturtium pesto I’d made from the flowers and leaves in a nod to the exigencies of Covid-19: self-quarantining, fear of food shopping and the constant barrage of advice for oldies like me to not mix or mingle. I was going to forage for food, fool about with flavor and fun. Within minutes, Caroline, the flower girl at my Swiss wedding fifty years ago, commented, “Do you remember that you and Maman would take me foraging in the meadows above Lausanne for wild nasturtiums for salads?