The joy of reading...about cooking

Despite my titular abstractness, it is a well know fact that here, at Abstract Citizen HQ, we don't survive on abstractions alone. A smarter and distinctly more German man than I - Bertolt Brecht - wisely had a character say, "Grub first, then ethics." Accordingly, here's a plug for a book that I recently came across.

One of the nice things about knowing a chef is that at some point during our visit, he will pull his most recent food-related books down from the shelf, and we get to come away with a long list of must-buy books. One such book was the Food Lover's Companion, currently in its 4th edition.

It's hard to overstate how much information this book contains. It's like the Norton Anthology of food. Of course, The Joy of Cooking is probably more essential, but I would argue that the Food Lover's Companion should probably take up permanent residence right next to it on your bookshelf.

Set up as a food encyclopedia, the FLC can probably answer any food-related question you might have. And despite the obvious pitfalls of trying to capture this much information in a concise and user-friendly format, the FLC is actually a joy to read - certainly much more so than The Joy of Cooking, which has all the actual joy of a Del Boca Vista salsa class.

The writing is crisp, with just the right amount of literary license. Anyone who has tried to describe flavors or odors in more than a passing way knows how hard this can be. Imagine describing a color without making references to other objects - how would you describe the color blue without referencing the sky? Flavor is sort of like that to me. Even really intelligent people on the teevee - your Bourdains, your Colicchios, your America's Test Kitcheners - fall into linguistic ruts, often repeating simlar variations of a stock phrase to describe flavors. (Colicchio: "This is under-seasoned" or, its corollary, "This was perfectly seasoned." Bourdain: "You know why this _____ is so good? It was made by someone who spent their entire adult life doing nothing but making ____.") Describing flavors with precision and originality is so hard that the existence of a fifth flavor category, which was only relatively recently established - umami - is often rendered as "tastiness."

Compare our general vagueness as a species to the entry for "martini" in the FLC - which tells you that the drink probably descends from the Martinez, created in the eponymously named city in California, and that it therefore belongs to the Manhattan family tree. But most elegantly,it tells you that over time, martinis have become drier and that this "replaces its predecessor's slight sweetness with an icy austerity." The entry for "mulligatawny soup" tells you that the name of the soup derives from the Tamil word for "pepper water." And the entry for "peppadew" tells you that these peppers are "purported to be the first new fruit introduced to the world since the kiwi's debut some thirty years ago."

The appendices include a pasta glossary, a wealth of technical information ranging from nutritional data to metric conversions and smoke-points for different kinds of oil, and lots more. So, don't sit around wondering what a "weakfish" is. Go get this book and find out.