Secret Ingredients Reading Response

The Dining Out section of our reading did not initially impress me.  The two pieces by Liebling, The Afterglow and A Good Appetite were both confusing and hard to read.  For one thing, Liebling has a tendency to stray off topic frequently, to the point where I would forget what the main idea of his pieces was about.  His use of French throughout his writing, in descriptions of food, place, and occasionally dialogue made it extremely difficult to stay focused and understand the situation.  I attempted looking up the names of dishes when I didn’t understand the French parts, but that soon became more disruptive than the struggle with the indecipherable language.  This was also an issue for me when reading Gopnik’s  Is There A Crisis In French Cooking?  I did understand this story a little better though. 

I was excited to get to Bourdain’s Don’t Eat Before Reading This; already knowing I like Bourdain’s voice and writing style.  He did not disappoint.  He was his usual cynical self, reminiscing about how cooking used to be and adding snide comments about vegetarians, “enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit” (p. 86).  Like always, I enjoyed his sense of humor, but what made me want to keep reading his piece was its relevance to me as a consumer of food.  I don’t often get to eat French cuisine, which made the other stories difficult to connect with.  I have never been to a French restaurant, and therefore when Gopnik compares the old French style of cooking with the new, I don’t have experience to base it off of.  Bourdain reveals many secrets of his trade in his writing.  As someone who frequently eats in restaurants, it is very interesting to know when to eat fish, or how poor quality meat is used (not ordering my burger well done again), or that the bread on my table is often reused.  These facts are useful to me. 

I liked the Eating In section much more though.  M.F.K Fisher’s three stories were interesting, and I enjoyed the personal essay aspect of them.  Her use of recipes in The Secret Ingredient and The Trouble With Tripe added an informative element to the two stories, which I enjoyed.  I learned a fair deal about tripe and casserole, two dishes I actually know very little about (my mother isn’t much of a casserole maker).

The story about Julia Child, though a bit long, was also really interesting.  I knew nothing about Julia Child when I started reading, except for what I picked up on in the trailer for the movie Julie and Julia.   When I finished the story I was smiling and kept telling my roommate that Julia Child sounded like a lovely lady and I wished I had watched her shows.  Her desire to create a cookbook that explained every step in careful detail so that even beginner cooks could make complex meals resonated with me, an extremely inexperienced cook myself, and prone to food related mishaps.  She is such a great character, and Tomkins captured her eccentric nature very well.

The last story in this section, Look Back In Hunger, was probably my favorite.  The first paragraph captured very clearly the situation I have been in before when trying to follow a cookbook (though my meal wasn’t nearly as complicated).  Like Bourdain, Lane has a cynical sense of humor that I connected with right away, such as his view of Martha Stewart and her “intolerance of ordinary mortals.”  Lane portrayed the anxiety and fear associated with cooking very well, but tried to explain it doesn’t have to be this way, which I appreciated.