Customer Reviews

Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The United States is a nation covering more than 3.5 million square miles, measuring nearly 2,800 miles from Battery Park in Manhattan to the Santa Monica Pier just west of Los Angeles. According to current Census Bureau figures, more than 290 million people live in the U.S., most of whom don't have to trace their roots back too far to find relatives who arrived on American soil from elsewhere. As a nation we are a diverse and interesting bunch. But if you look at what we eat, it is apparent that the great melting pot has been simmering for perhaps too long and is now yielding an increasingly bland porridge. From sea to shining sea, a nation populated by people from all points of the globe has become a gigantic, generic food court that threatens to erase the vast national cornucopia of ethnic eats and local treats. It's a creeping culinary crime that, if left unchecked, may one day turn the entire planet into an Applebee's. But all is not lost.

FEEDING A YEN, the latest effort from the prolific and always entertaining Calvin Trillin, offers an escape for those who have grown tired of food that has suffered a spectrum of indignities, from gentrification to generification. Each of the fourteen chapters in FEEDING A YEN covers a different local specialty, from pumpernickel bagels in New York City, to pimientos de Padron (a dish made with tiny green peppers) in Galicia, Spain, to boudin (a kind of Cajun sausage) in New Iberia, Louisiana, to ceviche (a cold fish soup) in Ecuador --- and plenty more along the way.

If you're looking for a book on pricey eateries, find something else to read. FEEDING A YEN is about simple, honest food, often made from recipes that have been passed down for generations. In describing these various treats and his efforts to find them, Trillin exhibits a palpable glee, particularly when skewering some of the more pretentious aspects of the business of feeding people.

In a chapter on Napa Valley wines, Trillin plays on his own ignorance of the vintner's art as he investigates a test that reputedly proves that even the experts can't really tell a red from a white. Another chapter deals with the good-natured squabbles within a Web community that has emerged via chowhound.com, a Web site devoted to ferreting out great ethnic food in the neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles.

If you're a fan of Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour on the Food Network, you'll enjoy FEEDING A YEN. Trillin and Bourdain share a passion for the food purveyed in small shops and by street vendors. But Bourdain, who apparently will eat just about anything, has the more adventurous palette. The various treats Trillin describes are often exotic, but never involve anything that you'd keep as a pet or that might buzz around your porch light on a warm summer night. Trillin writes about good, simple food, food rooted to specific locations by tradition as much as by the availability of the necessary ingredients.

Technology has made the world a much smaller place. Mere hours stand between the cargo of fishing boats and the dinner table and, by virtue of the same technology, the idea of a growing season is rendered a moot point. You can get nearly anything you want, anytime you want it. But that abundance and convenience risk the very essence of the local specialty. If you've had the good fortune to travel in the U.S. you've surely noticed that, with the exception of geography and climate, the differences that existed between various points on the map are eroding. And the same thing is happening around the world (for a different take on that issue read William Gibson's PATTERN RECOGNITION). Food is a basic and visceral expression of local and regional culture. If that expression is lost, if people no longer seek out unique dishes like those so vividly described in FEEDING A YEN, then the creeping blandness that has already claimed so much of what makes the world interesting will have achieved another milestone in mediocrity. But if Calvin Trillin has his way, that sad and flavorless day will never arrive.

--- Reviewed by Bob Rhubart

I began reading The New Yorker in college, back in the early `60s -- mostly for the cartoons, I admit, but it wasn't long before I discovered the often witty and always beautifully written essays of Calvin Trillin. As a food-lover, I especially enjoyed his culinary pieces, since collected in three volumes beginning with American Fried in 1974. The last, Third Helpings, appeared in 1983, so it's been along dry spell, but now he's back with a new series of adventures that will make you salivate. The chapter in which he tries to get his daughter to promise she'll move back to New York from San Francisco if he can find a dependable source of pumpernickel bagels makes him sound Manhattan-centric, but he also writes a paean to boudin (which, even living in south Louisiana, I confess I don't care for at all), and another to the posole found in Taos (which I like very much). And there's a chapter on nutria sauce piquante that's a real hoot (think sheep-sized rodents). And there's San Francisco burritos, and Casamento's oyster loaf, and fried fish in Barbados, and pimientos in Galicia, and a number of other foodstuffs to be considered. This is a great book to read when you're sitting in the staff room at work, munching mindlessly on a homemade tuna sandwich and a bag of Fritos.

I read this book on a recent trip to Los Angeles, where I regrettably realized that Nate and Al's in Beverly Hills had better whitefish salad than Murray's in NYC. When Calvin Trillin would visit his daughters in California, he used to take a dozen or two bagels with him from NYC, to tempt them back to the capital of authentic bialys and appetizing stores from the Southern California wastelands of sun dried tomato and bee pollen bagels. What can one make of a world where a London fish and chips salesman uses matza meal to batter coat his fish, San Francisco style burritos are sold in Manhattan, NY Bagels are in LA, and great Chinese food can be found in Paris? Calvin Trillin, in a series of essays ("Magic Bagel", "Grandfather Knows Best", "Chinatown, Chinatown", etc), takes the reader on a very funny and enlightening trip around the world, as he finds the best local foods. My faves were, he eats Chinese from Paris to Prague, he searches for the bagels of Hyman Perlmutter's Tanenbaum's bakery, and he explores the fish taco.

I have a soft spot for food writers. Maybe it's because I enjoy a good meal, perhaps too much, but I think it's because I've found food writers to be charming in their obsession with food related minutiae. No one is more charming than Calvin Trillin whose "register of frustration and deprivation" leads him to travel the world seeking those foods that he can't live without. the result of this is Feeding a Yen. I can't put this book down. He's like an adventurous and kindly uncle. It's a treat.

One of the things I like about Trillin is that he is not a cook. There are no recipes in this book. Although I do enjoy reading food books by people who cook, it's nice to get the view from an unadulterated eater now and then.

Trillin uses this book to highlight foods that he can't get at home in Manhattan, and that is a list that is getting shorter all the time. In fact, you can get exotic foods almost anywhere now. And that is just why he has a hard time luring his daughters back to New York from the West Coast. They can get New York bagels and anything else in California.

I love Trillin's dry humor and skepticism. This is my first Calvin Trillin book (although I have enjoyed his magazine essays) and I'm looking forward to reading his past works.

Trillin's latest witty and mouth-watering collection (mostly from "The New Yorker"), centers on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation, unpretentious local dishes unobtainable outside their place of origin, from the Galician pepper (originally from the New World, in fact, but now found only in Spain) to the pan bagnat of Nice (tuna salad like the French do) to Louisiana boudin ("Boudin means `blood sausage' to the French, most of whom would probably line up for immigration visas if they ever tasted the Cajun version")and his native Kansas City barbecue.

An avoider of fancy restaurants, Trillin loves to get his digs in: " `Peppers!' says someone at the table who has been itching to describe the exquisite pleasure of eating something drizzled with something on a bed of something else. `You're making all this fuss about some little green peppers cooked in oil?' " When he discovers that even experts can't tell the difference between red and white wine, well, you have to read it for yourself.

In this travelogue of eating, Trillin describes the difference between Tropical Isles and Actual Places while on his way to have Baxter Road fried fish in Barbadoes, is drawn to Queens for Ecuadorian ceviche by a New York taxi driver, and eats anything but French in Paris. He also spends some time rummaging around in New York, looking for finds worthy of chowhound.com and revisiting old haunts in Chinatown and new ones in the boroughs. Despite the loss of his wife and traveling companion, Alice, in 2001 (she is present through much of the book), Trillin maintains his high standards in humor, from dry and wry to laugh-out-loud, and his gratitude for real food, wherever it's found.

Easy to read; funny. Made me hungry and thirsty. I underlined some of the dishes and places to eat. Good reading!

I love this book. If your favorite types of food reviews are lengthy personal ones, then this book is for you. Calvin reviews the food from his heart, rather than with his brain, and I can't get enough of his stuff. :) It really makes me want to go hunt out the things he's had.

I really enjoyed this short book full of essays centering around food. I immediately picked up his "Tummy Trilogy" after this. While that was enjoyable, many of the stories were repeated, and more long winded. That book could have used some editing to make the stories more concise. I thought the essays in Feeding a Yen were perfect, and trimmed of excess fat. Ahem. Highly recommended, and a joy to read.

I have always enjoyed Trillin's books but with this one, he has not delivered his usual wit and advice. His poorest work to date and I hope he will do better in future writings. Much of this book is essentially what he has had to say in previous volumes but delivered in an almost bland way. First time readers of Trillin may like it but they should look to some of his earlier books.