2019 | Issue 104

Established Writers on Newer, Younger Writers

Where Are We Going from Here?

Caricatures by Gregg

Bonnie Benwick on Ronna Welsh —

Ronna Welsh rejects the brief-is-better trend in recipe writing in her new and first book, The Nimble Cook. This is not to say she adds verbiage for “voice” or merely returns an article to “preheat oven to…” sentence structure; rather, she offers cues that increase chances for successful outcomes.

Welsh explains what searing kale leaves under a heavy weight will accomplish — extrude their moisture and deepen their flavor — and why that is preferable to searing them unweighted. She roasts eggplant until the flesh is “brown, dry, and taut.” She tells us to check doneness by testing the biggest piece of braised potato, and not to pry it loose in a pan with little liquid left before the sizzling subsides. To identify al dente pasta, we should “taste for that identifiable bite of resistance at the center” instead of relying on package timing.

She teaches via prose that is comprehensible to insecure cooks. Here’s hoping they can access the patience to benefit from it.

Bonnie S. Benwick is deputy food editor and recipes editor of The Washington Post.

 

John Birdsall on Bryan Washington —

Even when he’s not formally writing about it, food is an intimate part of 26-year-old Bryan Washington’s reckoning of Houston. In Washington’s gaze, cooks in that city engage in an endless borrowing from divergent cultures, juxtaposing Middle Eastern, Thai, Mexican, Korean, and Filipino cadences and flavors. Washington’s Creole landscapes — strip malls of taquerias, banh mi cafes, and arepa joints sprawling out to a concrete horizon — are places where need and rapture merge.

John Birdsall, who was a cook for 17 years, is widely published; he is the co-author, with James Syhabout, of Hawker Fare, and he is at work on a biography of James Beard.

 

Barbara Damrosch on Vera Fabian and Gordon Jenkins —

I first met Vera Fabian and Gordon Jenkins in 2013 when they came to spend a year working for me and my husband, Eliot Coleman, on our Four Season Farm on the coast of Maine. Like many of our farm’s alumni, they eventually were able to start their own operation, Ten Mothers Farm, on rented land in North Carolina. And suddenly there they were in 2018, writing a blog about it for marthastewart.com. Their place looked gorgeous, but having hoed shoulder to shoulder with these two I also knew how hard and intelligently they worked. They’re the real deal. Their excellent writing celebrated the joys of farming month by month, but made no bones about the challenges young farmers face, from land access to apocalyptic weather to getting paid what your food is worth. The series ended happily as Vera and Gordon were able to start anew on their own land, and without “early-morning, sleepy-eyed writing sessions.” As I know from experience, the only thing harder than farming or writing is doing both at the same time. Still, I’m sure that Vera and Gordon have a book in them, and I’ll buy the first copy.

Barbara Damrosch is a horticulturist and garden designer, the author of The Garden Primer, Theme Gardens, and, with Eliot Coleman, of The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook. She is a former columnist for The Washington Post and was host with Eliot Coleman of the long-running Learning Channel series “Gardening Naturally.”

 

Naomi Duguid on Simon Thibault —

Simon Thibault, who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, does freelance radio work primarily for the CBC, and writes about food for newspapers and magazines in Canada and the US. In 2015, he made a wonderfully thoughtful podcast, “The Cajun Reconnection,” for the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Simon’s first book, Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food, explores with tenderness and appreciation, and an insider’s eye, the food traditions of the Acadians, primarily those of Nova Scotia. Simon is Acadian and grew up in a small community in Nova Scotia, which gives him an eye for historical continuities, and yet as an insider he is wonderfully free of sentimentality. His writing is strong and graceful. To his next project, about grains, I am sure he will bring his generous eye and thoughtfulness.

Naomi Duguid is the author, most recently, of Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran & Kurdistan.

 

John T. Edge on Rosalind Bentley —

For years, old heads wondered when America would wake up to the moral and cultural import of our nation’s rich and varied foodways. That time is now; a new generation of writers leads the way. Over the last five years, I’ve been lucky to mentor, edit, and read Rosalind Bentley. Born in Jackson County, Florida, she now lives and works in Atlanta. Her words lift up the voices of women and people of color whose knowledge and labor have always been the lodestars of Southern food culture.

John T. Edge is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and the foodways volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. He is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun, a columnist for the Oxford American, a former columnist for The New York Times, and he is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

 

Lolis Eric Elie on Osayi Endolyn and Tunde Wey —

Osayi Endolyn’s work sits at that intersection where personal reminiscence and experience resonates with universal connection. Her words are warm, generous, and pointed.

You’re not supposed to bring up politics at the dinner table. But whether on the page or on the plate, Tunde Wey is a constant reminder and irritant that this is all political and our food expresses our prejudice and inequality as surely as it expresses our flavor preferences and ethnicities.

Lolis Eric Elie’s books include Smokestack Lightning (photographed by Frank Stewart) and Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans; he has written widely for television, currently for “The Chi.”

 

Betty Fussell on Felicia Campbell —

Like everyone else I was knocked over by the brilliance of Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, but I was also intrigued by her Persian heritage, which her family brought with them to America where Nosrat was born and bred. Using the methods of Western culture, she analyzes and explains the scientific elements of good cooking. Her skill reminded me of an opposite kind of cookbook, Felicia Campbell’s The Food of Oman, in which a minister’s daughter born in Texas — while she was serving in the US army in Iraq — falls in love with the cultures of the Middle East. She learns Arabic and goes to Oman as a journalist, where she meets an Iranian whom she marries upon returning to the states. Campbell explores what feels like home to her, the Middle Eastern culture of the Arabian Gulf, rooted in the Ottoman Empire 500 years ago.

These are opposite but equal arts of acculturation, for which I’m particularly grateful at this moment of war-mongering tribalism driven by bully boys intent on imperial power. Too bad our president is one of them. Those of us who’ve lived through the 20th century know that the arts of violence are the opposite of the arts of eating and cooking, anciently focused on the human need to celebrate together the gift of life and our brief moment on earth as creatures that depend upon each other and on all the elements of the globe that we share.

Betty Fussell has written countless articles and is the author of 12 books, not all of them about food; they include the memoir My Kitchen Wars and a collection of essays, Eat, Live, Love, Die.

 

Jessica B. Harris on Nicole Taylor, Scott Alves Barton, and Osayi Endolyn —

This is a minefield. These days I am working on crafting my retirement projects and so much of what I am reading is research related to them. The fields of food studies and food journalism are growing, and many who work in them I consider personal friends. These three then are only some of the contemporary younger food writers that I reach for first.

Nicole Taylor, author of the UpSouth Cookbook, has written for a variety of publications ranging from her own zines to The New York Times. She is always well-informed about the happenings in the contemporary food world and weighted and timely in her opinions. She has also been a tireless advocate for more African American food in major publications. Her voice is one I listen to.

Scott Alves Barton is one who keeps me informed about the intersections of the African Atlantic world in food, culture, and the arts. A New York University Ph.D., his work is often scholarly, but always approachable. His writing on the African cultural survivals, especially those in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, is insightful and brings another African diaspora community into focus.

Osayi Endolyn’s work at Gravy and in other publications gives me a look into some of the other aspects of the contemporary food world beyond my personal food history bent.

Jessica B. Harris’s accomplishments include a dozen books about the food of the African diaspora and a memoir, My Soul Looks Back.

  

Evan Kleiman on Tejal Rao —

Tejal is a seriously gifted writer who has been doing the work long enough within traditional journalistic institutions, aka The New York Times, Bloomberg, that she is ready for national recognition. She writes with an immediacy of style that expresses sensual recognition of the food itself, often within a political or personal perspective. Reading her is always a combination of the pleasure of beautiful writing with the bonus of an informed perspective with surprises.

Tejal Rao is a bridge from a food media world of nearly no representation of marginalized communities to a landscape of global food media inclusion. There are many young writers working today who are deeply committed to representing their communities and who did not have the opportunity to express in direct voice their own food journeys, memories, and recipes in old-line food media. But many of these writers haven’t had the opportunity for mentorship and experience in institutional writing settings. I will be watching them.

Evan Kleiman, the chef and owner of the former Angeli Caffe in Los Angeles, hosts “Good Food” on KCRW and has written eight books about Italian food.

 

Francis Lam on Steve Hoffman —

It’s a rare and exquisite pleasure to come across a writer who is new to you, and probably new to most people, whose voice seems already fully formed and fully their own. Who are the last ones I recall? Mayukh Sen, whose criticism of food culture is fierce and penetrating. Michael Twitty, whose writing on African Americanness, Africanness, Jewishness, queerness, and food is totally his own and immediately relevant to anyone who chooses to listen. And Ligaya Mishan, whose way with language I can only describe as “poetic,” as hackneyed as that sounds: read one of her reviews and you’ll want to write down at least three of the lines to remember them forever.

But in the past year, I was introduced to the writing of Steve Hoffman. He’s a tax preparer from Minneapolis. He writes about food as a side gig, most often for a small, St. Paul-based beer and food magazine, The Growler. I heard about him because he hosted a panel discussion with my predecessor at The Splendid Table, Lynne Rosetto Kasper, on the subject of “Northern Food.” Then I saw he had written an essay titled, “What Is Northern Food?” How apt. I read it, and was floored by the beauty — of the language, of the ideas, of the curiosity, of the humility apparent in the writer while doing something as hubristic as attempting to define a cuisine of a place. It’s so good I want him to do my taxes, just so I could see how beautifully he can write an email about 1099s and W2s.

Francis Lam has been widely published in newspapers and magazines, including his “Eat” columns in The New York Times Magazine; he is host of the American Public Media radio show The Splendid Table and editor-at-large at Clarkson Potter.

 

Ed Levine on Osayi Endolyn, Kenji Lopez-Alt, and Stella Parks

Let’s start with Osayi Endolyn. She writes with such style and grace and courage about so many subjects, including the role that race plays in the food culture. As far as writers that also develop recipes, I greatly admire both Kenji Lopez-Alt and Stella Parks, and I would say that even if a lot of their best work hadn’t appeared on Serious Eats. It’s hard to write compelling recipe and technique posts that are smart (the reader learns so much in every story), original, funny, and grounded in ultra-solid culinary craft.

Ed Levine is the creator of Serious Eats and the author of books including Serious Eater, Pizza, and New York Eats.

Todd A. Price on Hanna Raskin —

You may believe we live in a golden age of newspaper food journalism, as the big names staff up and make bold hires, like Soleil Ho at the San Francisco Chronicle. Dig down to papers without national ambitions, and you’ll find that local food journalism is dying because newspapers can barely make a buck. (My own paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, was sold in April, and I was laid off along with the entire staff.)

When you have the resources and weight of a newspaper, you don’t need to worry about who you might piss off. That freedom can lead to great journalism. I don’t know anyone who takes better advantage of that privileged position than Hanna Raskin, the critic and food editor at the Charleston Post and Courier. She can, and does, cover the sexual politics of craft beer, write tender obituaries for well-loved restaurants and, when necessary, slap around the local chefs, telling them to grow up.

More food writers are recognizing today that we can no longer overlook the social consequences of eating. We’re lucky to still have newspaper journalists like Raskin leading the way. Even if we don’t work in a newsroom, we’ll all be better journalists if we uphold that institution’s values.

Todd A. Price is a former dining writer for The Times-Picayune and current Southern correspondent for USA Today Network.

 

Alan Richman on the very phenonomon of being a food writer today —

I am in awe of pretty much every food writer because I cannot believe any of them survive. How do they do it? There’s nobody at fault here, because we know the financial condition of most publications, but these days food writers don’t get paid much (if anything), they don’t have teams of editors behind them, and I’m sure they even have to pay for their reporter’s notebooks, assuming they can afford the pencils to go with them.  I remember coming back from a trip to Japan to write about the restaurants of Tokyo for GQ, and when I handed in an expense account of about $15,000 (not including airfare), my editor said to me, ‘Is that all?’

In my younger days I was in the military, and to me old food writers were comparable to regular army troops with mess halls and laundry service and all the comforts of war, whereas today’s food writers are the guerrilla forces, living off the land. I don’t know how they do it, and I am in awe. I reserve special praise for modern recipe writers, because most restaurant cuisine has become so incomprehensible I have no idea how they find a way to document it. About three years or four ago I did a piece for GQ about this new restaurant food, which I called “egotarian cuisine,” food that had nothing to do with honoring the past or even pleasing customers but resulted from the ambition of chefs. I believe this trend has gotten worse. How do you write recipes about food that exists only in the minds of cooks and has nothing to with the conventions of dining? Boy, did we have it easy in the old days.

Alan Richman, a correspondent for GQ magazine, has won 14 James Beard awards for journalism; he is the author of Fork It Over.

 

Molly Stevens on Ruby Tandoh — 

Railing against the “glossy, perma-happy lifestyle journalism” that pervades so much food media today, Ruby Tandoh (British food writer, author of three books, and contributor to The GuardianTasteVICE, Eater, and more) writes with verve, hunger, and openness. Unafraid to voice original opinion, Tandoh explores her subject matter against a larger cultural and historic backdrop. Whether she’s writing about M.F.K. Fisher, film, feminism, or the pervasiveness of moralizing around our food choices, her work is well researched, smart, and relevant.

Molly Stevens’ articles and recipes have appeared widely; she is the author of All About Roasting and All About Braising. ●

From issue 104
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