Women Who Write about Food
I read cookbooks to relax. Last night, after a long stretch of two-year-old tantrums and teething babies, I reached for Italian Cooking. It's a 70-page yellowed and browbeaten book rescued from a box of throwaways in my grandmother's apartment. I moved from that to my jumbo-sized Williams-Sonoma Entertains to admire sparkly photos of well-set tables, dewy risotto, crisp canapés. An hour later, relaxed and worry-free, I went to bed - visions of steamed leeks and poached oysters dancing in my head.
I don't cook, you understand. I'm a food voyeur. I make meals for my family, and sometimes play clumsily with recipes from "Bon Apettit". But it is much simpler than that, my passion. I'll never whip, braise, cream or fold the way my books and recipes suggest, so I pick up Amanda Hesser while I preheat the oven for fish sticks.
And food writers, to my delight, are making a comeback. Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher must be beaming down on the road they paved for their best-selling contemporary counterparts. When you see Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdoin on the New York Times' best-seller lists, you know food writers are in "the show".
Amanda Hesser, while not quite a water cooler name, is the irrefutable star of the genre. She is the 30-something author of The Cook and the Gardener and the mensch behind The New York Times' wheel of food reporters. She is completely beguiling.
What is so appealing? Her writing reflects a sincere humility about food and the craft of transforming it from function to appeal. She depicts things we put into our mouths with a passion and reverence that will have you sniffing disdainfully at the next golden arch you pass. She plays a humble kitchen servant, dutifully passing along skills she has learned from her trade. But her writing belies her resume -- an impeccably trained chef, and rising celebrity on the Manhattan food scene, she reads like the girl next door (amplified by her fresh-faced and barretted head shot). Not only does she skirt condescension -- many 'celebrity' cookbooks reek of 'I'm lowering myself to write this because my agent says you dim-wits will buy it' -- she cheerfully leads her readers back stage through the daunting doors of haute cuisine. She seats us next to foodie colleagues, parades us by internationally-acclaimed chefs -- the Cindy Adams of food, she exposes pretension, praises sincerity, and isn't afraid to mention if someone has something stuck in his teeth.
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