quislet

It must have been a year ago when I stumbled into conversation outside the White Hart that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

terribleturnip was saying something sexy and terribly wise about food, perhaps to

im_geva, and I interjected something charming and witty, some tidbit of foodie wisdom. I hadn’t meant to interrupt, merely to join in, still taking the first sip off of my fresh tankard of cider. What I didn’t know was that my interjection was going to turn the conversation in a new and uncomfortable direction. There was some adoration aimed at the foodies, generously lumping my amateur food-geekery into the same category as

terribleturnip’s full-on professional food-nerd. This is where the conversation halted. Was halted. Forcibly.

terribleturnip, ahead of me by perhaps a tankard, stopped everything to explain that the difference between our two flavors of foodiness was that she was like Calvin Trillin.

quislet, on the other hand, is much more like Jeffrey Steingarten.

I was distressed, horrified, wounded. I only knew Jeffrey as the Simon Cowell of Iron Chef America. How could I be the cranky curmudgeon that speaks with his mouth full of food, the critic that everyone is scared of, the man that can find fault in any chef’s food? I concealed my wincing behind my tankard, noting that

terribleturnip clearly meant this comparison in a positive way, probably even as flattery.

Jeffrey Steingarten is introduced on Iron Chef America as a Harvard-educated lawyer that quit law in 1989 to become the food critic for Vogue magazine, and as the author of The Man Who Ate Everything. That’s where I started, his first book. Like the more recent It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, his first book is a collection of his Vogue columns. His introduction opens with a telling of how he took to his new responsibilities with a unique dedication:

“As I considered the awesome responsibilities of my new post, I grew morose. For I, like everybody I knew, suffered from a set of powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime. I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness.”

He continues to create a six-step program for ridding himself of his food aversions:

Step One: Compose an annotated list of food aversions
Step Two: Immerse himself in the scientific literature on human food selection
Step Three: Choose a method for extinguishing food phobias from the list of brain surgery, starvation, bonbons, drug dependence and exposure
Step Four: Every day for the next six months, eat at least one food that he detested.
Step Five: Final exam and graduation ceremony (dinner in Paris)
Step Six: Relearning humility by not flaunting one's perfect omnivory

“In just six months, I succeeded in purging myself of nearly all repulsions and preferences, in becoming a more perfect omnivore.”

OK. She has a point. And that’s just by page 14.

I’ve never met anyone other than myself that set out with any sort of organized plan for eradicating food aversions. Meat? See these pointy canines? I’m an omnivore, as were all my ancestors for at least a few million generations. 'Nuff said. I managed to get my head around eating insects and rodents years ago. My opossum phobia was the next to fall on the chopping block. The opossum still looks to me like a grotesque, diseased, misshapen mutant rat from outer space, but I wouldn’t turn down a serving from an Appalachian grandmother. That left me with only aversions to olives and coffee, and the live consumption of animals that have defined backbones and spinal columns. I decided to keep the live vertebrate taboo, reclassifying it from an aversion to a moral choice. Olives and coffee were overcome through the assistance and participation of beautiful women, a strategy that I’m surprised Jeffrey didn’t include in his Step Three.

Jeffrey also makes a hobby of rooting out logical inconsistencies:

“The stunning woman seated next to me at the vast banquet table plucked the golden curls of Parmesan cheese from her salad, piled them up on the tablecloth, and stuffed the slimy greens into her perfect mouth. Once again, Fate had thrown me together with a serious food phobic – this time, a pitiful cheese-avoider – and once again, I felt a responsibility to attempt a cure. The Mother Teresa deep within me is always grateful for opportunities like this.”

I have the same impulse. I fight it, but I can’t always contain it. Outside of the food world, I once had quite a reputation for unintentionally ruining the Sunday School chorus “His Banner Over Me Is Love” for a lot of my college classmates. (Hint: In Song of Solomon chapter two, when his banner over her is love, she is faint with love and his left arm is under her head.)

And now for terribleturnip’s main point. In his second book, when looking into the tradition of wedding cakes, Jeffrey pens the following:

“Why should such passion surround a simple and ancient fertility symbol that could take the form of a large loaf of good, honest bread, I wondered. To discover the reasons, I bought every wedding magazine at my local newsstand – 11 in all; took a short course in suburban Connecticut in baking and decorating wedding cakes; visited one of the most famous practitioners in the country and interviewed several others; paid a visit to one of the grand wedding palaces in New York’s Chinatown; spent several hours lurking around the nearby New York Cake and Bake Supply, which carried everything from premade sugar flowers to edible spray paint; read Simon R. Charsley’s Wedding Cakes and Cultural History (the authoritative history of the British wedding cake) several times; and dipped into a few dozen other anthropological and historical treatises.”

Jeffrey approaches food with the rigor of his legal discipline, it’s a very “left-brain” approach. In order to understand a dish or ingredient, he delves into history, culture, food science, etymology, the full breadth of culinary usages, and anything else that might seem relevant. My own mental disciplines may come from math and logic, but much to the same effect. Alton Brown does much the same thing, but with the goal to educate. Jeffrey loves to educate, but his first goal is unquestionably to appreciate. That's me. The contrast that

terribleturnip was drawing was that Jeffrey and I will research all around a topic, while she and Calvin would immerse themselves in a specific topic to identify, for example, the single best barbecue joint in the Kansas City area. For me to fully appreciate, I simply need more information. I need to taste the food with every corner of my brain, every sense, every capacity of reason and appreciation. Call it a sort of “left-brain” zen.

Jeffrey’s writing style is even evocative of mine. He revels in precise vocabulary and a playful use of formality, spurning grammatical rules whenever it suits him. His clauses cascade much like mine, albeit with more art. We both place the same value on dry humor and an unquestionable economy of verbiage. Reading Jeffrey is always like discovering a note from my future self hidden in my jacket pocket, passing on tidbits of wisdom and technique that I haven't yet learned. Our language, tastes and methods are eerily similar. The cranky judge I’ve seen on television is really just one tiny facet of an endearing curmudgeon with rapier wit and a wealth of gastronomic wisdom.

The comparison no longer stings. Instead, having turned research and reason to bear on the subject, I have learned that in a way, I am Jeffrey Steingarten, after all. And proud of it.