Mark Greif Guest Post!
Today brings a special treat: n+1 co-editor Mark Greif on food memories and reading rituals.
I was thinking of the match-up of books with foods, and why I conjure things to eat while I’m reading.
My mother said that when she was a child she liked to get a box of chocolates and pick through them while she was working her way through a novel and lying in bed.
That seems so standard a happy memory – but the pleasure of it was in large part her choosing, not just her munching. She had the habit of nibbling at the edge of each candy until she could taste its filling, then putting it back in place, and slowly rationing her favorites, and timing the worst, and absent-mindedly chewing through the standard just-okay ones to go with, I suppose, the dull middle passages and digressions of the book. Though I can’t say, right off, what the inner connection would be between praline and authorial interruption, or fudge and a cliffhanger, or a sugared cherry and the hero’s confession of undying love, I like to think that the kind of attention the book elicited, at its different points, determined the candy-pleasure she turned to.
I don’t think I match specific tastes to parts of books. I know I match foods to books, but differently. I tend to fixate on one foodstuff early on, or just from the point that the plot becomes really involving or the characters spark with life. Then I stick with that dish, with its aroma in my nostrils and its taste in my memory-fed mouth, to the very end.
I wish these foods were sophisticated. Embarrassingly, they only rarely coincide with foods actually featured in books, or even foods likely to be eaten by the protagonists, as a matter of historical or characterological accuracy. They’re dishes that come into my mind through some intervening stereotype kept in a back cupboard of the frontal lobes.
So, reading The Remains of the Day, I want to drink milky tea – that seems just fine. Reading anything by Philip Roth, no matter what he’s writing about – no matter if Zuckerman is in Israel or Sabbath is rooting through his friend’s daughter’s underwear drawer – I want to eat a corned beef sandwich. Kosher corned beef, on seeded rye, with mustard and a pickle. Isn’t that prejudice, or anti-Semitism, by some indirect route? Isn’t Roth as entitled to spaghetti and red sauce, or anything else? But I can taste that corned beef sandwich; maybe it’s his nostalgia for the Old World Jews in the New World, his father’s generation. (Spaghetti has its own dumb stereotypical associations: so when I read even Italo Calvino, I want Ragu.)
Through the couple of thousand pages of War and Peace, I craved blini and caviar, though there was nothing in the book to indicate they ate anything other than roast birds and carved meats. Then every book by Thomas Hardy requires cheddar and Branston Pickle. Herman Meville cries out for clam chowder. A surprising number of works, including a majority of novels written since World War II, call for French Fries, though Flannery O’Connor needs bar-b-cue. I think this suggests that the late 20th century was the era of the Fri-o-lator. Sartre calls for crepes.
Though if I go back through my bookshelves and fan the pages, by far the majority of the stains in the margins are tiny drops of soup. Not only because when you eat soup, you have to get so close to the bowl, sometimes, that it’s only fitting to have a book propped on the other side of it, since that’s where your eyes naturally focus. Also because soup splashes and splatters like nothing else when you eat it; frying grease is the only thing comparable, and easily beats soup on the pages of cookbooks, but not for volumes you read at table. I suspect most of the marks in the world’s books that were not made by pen, pencil, or coffee, are made by soup.
I wonder if other people agree.
Mark Greif is co-editor of n+1
