|
|
September 6, 2002
A taste of our shared history
Seattle native writes a biography that is based on her memories
of food.
PAT JOHNSON REPORTER
Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures
in Food and Friendship
By Sharon Boorstin.
Reagn Books, 2002. 336 pages. $37.95
Los Angeles food critic and Seattle native Sharon Boorstin has
jumped on the bandwagon of writers who illustrate personal recollections
against the evocative backdrop of food. In Let Us Eat Cake,
Boorstin convincingly asserts that food provides a significant glue
in bonding families and friends.
She suggests, specifically, that male friends bond over sports,
while female friends used to bond, and perhaps still do, over recipes
and food.
Boorstin talks about the tradition of giving recipes on occasions
such as weddings or birthdays. In fact, she writes, the idea for
the book emerged partly from the discovery in an old desk of a bunch
of recipes friends had given her. Reminded of the times they had
shared, Boorstin used the new technology of the Internet to track
some of the friends down, renewing the relationships and continuing
the tradition of sharing food.
Boorstin also remembers departed family through food.
"The clearest memory I have of my Grandma Ann, who died when
I was 14, is of a short, stubby woman – no taller than five
feet, and all breasts – standing in her kitchen holding a butcher
knife.... At least one of my grandmother's fingers was usually bandaged
because she had cut herself while chopping onions for the chicken
soup she seemed to make on a daily basis. And there was often a
burn on her chubby forearm. My grandma was careless when cooking.
I'm convinced it was because when she was in the kitchen, she usually
engaged in a Yiddish shouting match with my grandfather, who sat
in the adjoining dining room, praying."
The first part of this book is laden with tales of mayonnaise, ketchup,
ground beef and mashed potatoes. It was a time when the idolized
chefs had names like Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker, not Wolfgang
Puck and Biba Caggiano.
If the first few chapters of the book had a sponsor, it might be
Kraft Foods or the Heart and Stroke Foundation. But for anyone with
a memory that goes back to the 1960s or before, the talk of canned
tuna casseroles and broiled steaks can't help but evoke fond memories.
Let Us Eat Cake is not an extended essay on cuisine in the
tradition of the great food writers M.F.K. Fisher or James Beard.
Rather, it is a biography of a fairly ordinary person using food
and recipes as a measuring stick (measuring cup?) of life's changing
epochs. The charm of the book comes directly from the fact that
we can identify so closely with the writer precisely because we
have shared, if not her life experience, at least her iceberg lettuce
salad with Wishbone brand dressing. It is part of a relatively new
phenomenon of "foodie" books, a beautiful example of which
is Mendel's Children, by the late Vancouver writer Cherie
Smith, which evocatively used food to draw in the reader and bridge
time.
Just as food styles change, though, Boorstin chronicles the progress
of the world around her from an interesting vantage point.
She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in the
1960s – a barometer of changing eras if there ever was one
– though she demurred on miniskirts, preferring the more modest
wool skirts of her Seattle upbringing. In the mid-1960s, she was
teaching English in the bleak Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts,
which would soon erupt in race riots and come to epitomize the plight
of urban race relations.
Like many of her generation, Boorstin travelled across Europe in
1966 with girlfriends and Europe on $5 a Day. The lessons
she learned there were not merely historical.
"I learned the profound difference between real Parmigiano
Reggiano cheese and the powdery stuff in the green Kraft container
that my mother sprinkled on spaghetti casseroles, and between a
salade Niçoise and my mother's tuna fish salad."
Hunkering down to work, Boorstin and husband Paul teamed up as a
screenwriting duo before she succumbed to her early love of things
culinary and branched into food writing and journalism. She became
a food critic in L.A., where the mingling consisted not just of
flavors on her palate, but socially, with the big names of Hollywood's
glitter.
Geography certainly plays a role in any cuisine and, though not
all recipes originate from her So-Cal domain, Boorstin's recipes
lean toward such fare as avocado soup, sundried tomato pasta and
mocha mousse. You've come a long way from ground beef blintzes and
"Husband-Catcher Cake," baby. Whether that's "progress"
is a matter of taste.
On the whole, though, the book is a pleasure to read and as comforting
as a pot roast. Boorstin is a competent writer and her memories
are, to a large extent, the shared memories of a generation.
^TOP
|
|
