MEMORIES or MEMOIRS?

My California Dish in the Grub Street Top 25 Must-Read Food Memoirs of All Time

“The food memoir is a dicey proposition for a writer: It takes real courage to sit down and decide that your individual eating experience is interesting enough for other people to care about. Will any readers care that you spent a week in Paris devouring caviar for breakfast? Or that a journey to Singapore resulted in personal discovery through street food?

The job is easier said than done, but when written well, a food memoir can touch on universal feelings of growth, understanding, and self-awareness. (Plus, you have to make the food sound really delicious.) As publishers gear up to release a new crop of memoirs this fall (2017), Grub Street decided it was time to look back and assemble a list of the all-time best food memoirs.

Here's how the list was assembled: Though plenty of food memoirs include recipes, there are no cookbooks on this list, only narrative memoirs. We also limited inclusion to one book per author so no single writer could overtake things. The list itself is comprised of picks from a number of chefs and writers, as well as Grub Street's own choices. When ranking, we factored in a book's originality, lasting appeal, influence on the genre, and — most important — how enjoyable it is to read.

The result is a collection of books that any food lover should tackle immediately, or, if you've already read everything on the list, revisit and enjoy once again.”

25. Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang
24. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
23. The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White
22. The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti
21. A Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
20. The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz
19. Born Round by Frank Bruni
18. Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen
17. The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin
16. Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey
15. Shark's Fin & Sichuan Pepper by Fuschia Dunlop
14. Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin
13. The Raw and the Cooked by Jim Harrison
12. The Man who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten
11. Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin
10. California Dish by Jeremiah Tower
9. When French Women Cook by Madeleine Kamman
8. Heat by Bill Buford
7. Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl
6. Between Meals by A.J. Liebling
5. My Life in France by Julia Child
4. The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher
3. Toast by Nigel Slater
2. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
1. Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton”

The First Interlude in my memoir California Dish.

“New to this memoir was made up memories. Events that never happened but should have. As I imagined them. I wrote them as Interludes between the chapters. Here is how I introduced them.

“Menus are liberally sprinkled through this book, and so that you do not find them silent, let me tell you how they speak to me.

To me, menus are a language unto themselves.

I have been collecting and reading them since I was ten, composing and acting them out since I was a teenager. They spoke to me as clearly as. any childhood fantasy novel. Reading an old menu slowly forms in my mind’s eye its era, the sensibility of the restaurateur or the chef, even the physical details of the dining room. I can picture the guests even when I don’t know who they were. Sometimes I can conjure up an entire evening, a three-act play orchestrated around the food.

And from my own past, it is the menus and the food that are the fixatives for the memories. When I think again about one of my mother’s summer garden party menus, the whole day is conjured up. My mouth waters as I see, taste, and smell the lovage-mayonnaise-covered poached whole salmons laid out in the tents.

I can see everyone who was there.

I have used the language of menus as the basis for dialogues with mentors, colleagues, and friends. And I had always assumed that this language was universal. When I began to write this book, I outlined it with menus. Some that had aroused my appetites, others that I’d designed and cooked myself, and eagerly passed them on to a few editors and publishers as a way of revealing my mission.

The silence was deafening.

Broken later by only a single comment poised in a question: What do they mean? After a long pause, that question was followed by two more: What were the stories behind the menus, and were any famous people present at the meals? I couldn’t have been more stunned. I thought the menus told their own stories. And eloquently.

The first menu I wrote in my culinary notebooks in the late sixties, knowing at that time only that a dinner was given by Cecil Beaton in a private dining room in Paris’s Lapérouse restaurant, for two dozen male friends, was probably in the early 1930s.

This is what I would have them eat. And the Burgundy, a 1915 Le Corton.

Fat of a turtle

Château d’Yquem

Cold foie gras

Truffles poached in champagne

Canard rôti Lucullus

Burgundy, a priceless one

Doyenne de Cornice pear, juste à point

Coffee

Crusted port

Cognac Napoleon

Romeo and Julietta Churchill cigars

At first glance it seems way over the top. But it has a discipline.

The kind created by Beaton in the horse-racing scene in My Fair Lady, with its miles and miles of extravagant ruffles and hats, but all in black and white, and die singing in a controlled chant about the perfection of the Ascot afternoon ... until, of course, Liza screams, “Move your bleedin’ arse,” to her horse, lagging in third place.

In this menu, that scream is the duck.

The mixed language suggests an Englishman wrote it, since a Frenchman would never use English with food, and with the same taste and delight in the language as in the food. Gras has an onomatopoeic ring to it. Using the English word for it, fat, tells you that in relishing the word, probably pronounced with the very upper gratin Oxford accent so that it sounded like fiat.

The dinner guests were undoubtedly rail-thin young things in perfect Boldini-portrait tailored frock coats and Charvet floppy bow ties, giggling at the irony of slipping so much of that fat between their tightly compressed lips. Otherwise opened only for the latest quip and gossip. Or fingernails-on-metal analysis of the most recent Brideshead Revisited-type scandal.

And I would automatically, without thinking, have used rôti once canard had been used, and slipped into French once the word doyenne had been put on paper.

It would just be natural, without affectation, in a bilingual company.

Following the turtle fat with foie gras tells me also that whoever ordered the menu was very securely a gourmand of deep appreciation for the art of dining: knowing how to push one’s guests’ sensibilities to the limit without embarrassing them with a troubling surfeit later in the meal.

Obviously, they all were aesthetes, and saw themselves that way. They were not unfamiliar with this kind of expensive living, and whoever was paying was wealthy. Maybe a younger Tennant or Devonshire son, if his rich father had him on a liberal leash.

I have never been in a private dining room at Lapérouse, but one can count on it having a rectangular table seating two at each end, leaving no room for dropped conversation.

And just as the meal was far more than a token, so the table decor would not have been one shrimp pink geranium in a vase—a degree of sophistication with which Beaton would have been out of sympathy. Rather there would have been an impression of enthusiastic spontaneity. Probably there was just a tulipiere filled with enough camellias so that after each guest was served one for the buttonhole, enough were left to make an impression on the room of expense but not extravagance.

Very likely there was a small sofa in the corner for spontaneous affection.

Somewhere off the room fur coats, top hats, and silver-tipped Malacca canes were stored, since it was obviously winter. It was the kind of scene Ken Russell portrayed in The Music Lovers, but with more restraint, at least until the port showed up, at which point the sofa was the scene of more intimate conversations, the waiters long since having ceased entering before knocking—after the “my dears” amongst the young men had become a bit thick.

And the food?

Our minds now might reel at a slab of turtle fat apiece. Even at this dinner the cold-blooded English, who would easily rip out the throat of a partridge with their teeth, might have thought twice to plunder further an even-then an endangered species so baldly.

The slab of fat in the Limoges soup plate in front of each of the two dozen guests must have given them a slight frisson. I had fat of a turtle in my youth, but only small cubes in turtle soup. Here it is obviously served hot, perhaps moistened with a little sherry-perfumed consommé (but only a little), since it is followed by cold foie gräs.

Well, not exactly cold, more like the temperature of the pantry off the dining room, which in those days clocked in at a bone-chilling (were it not for the embroidered silk waistcoats) sixty degrees. Obviously, Beaton knew that to stimulate the senses and keep them going is to sample something hot, then something cold, then something hot again.

To follow turtle fat with foie gras—100 percent more fat—is a heady statement in an already heady room. I remember the turtle fat texture as more foie gras than hot foie gras, and I love the knowledge here that, as the turtle should be hot, the foie gras should not. When heated until the fats are released, foie gras seems to me too slippery. The flavor is deeper and more satisfying when the fat melts slowly in one’s mouth. A reluctant companion in excess, rather than a dancer in your lap.

The whole truffle per person poached in champagne, served in a starched napkin, says again, ‘This is a person who knows the best of the best,’ and needs no ostentatious show of it.

The roasted duck Lucullus, however, gives one pause: What duck dish could be worthy of the name of ancient Rome’s most sumptuous banqueter? I don’t know what the preparation consists of, but need to believe it had no truffles, but perhaps coxcombs, testicles, or sweetbreads.

“Doyenne de Cornice pear”— housewife’s pear, a frivolous and funny label that could easily rev up the fragile conversation. The simplicity is pleasantly startling.

And then the “crusted” port: nonvintage, but to those in the know, a much more satisfying value for your money, all the while accompanied by Havana’s best cigars.

The waiter appears again for the last time, to crack open the windows onto the Quai des Grands Áugustins.”

Here is Auguste Escoffier in his Le Guide Culinaire. No mention of Lucullus duck, though some of the following might compete.

Caneton roti (roast duckling) English Style

Aylesbury duckling, which is equal to the Nantes variety, is generally stuffed with Sage and Onions before being roasted. Its most usual adjunct is Apple Sauce, which is sometimes replaced by melted, red-currant jelly or a Cranberry Sauce.

Caneton Glacé aux Cerises

Roast the duckling, and keep it underdone. When it is quite cold, remove the breast, and remove the bones in such wise as to form a case with the carcass. Cut each fillet into eight thin slices. Coat them with a brown chaud-froid sauce, and decorate with truffles. Fill the carcass with a mousse made from the remains of the meat, the duckling's liver, and some foie gras, and shape it so as to imitate the convex breast of the bird.

Glaze with aspic, and set in the refrigerator, that the mousse may harden. When the latter is firm, lay the chaud-froid coated collops [slices] upon it, and set the piece in a deep, square dish. Surround with cold, stoned, Morello cherries, poached in Bordeaux wine, and cover these with an aspic jelly flavored with duckling essence.

Caneton Glacé aux Mandarines

Poêlé the duckling, and let it cool in its liquor. When it is quite cold, set it on its back. Glaze it with aspic jelly, and place it on a low rice or carved-bread cushion lying on a long dish.

Surround it with emptied tangerines, filled with cold mousse made from ducklings' livers and foie gras. Alternate the tangerines with small timbales of aspic, combined with the cooking juices and the juice squeezed from the sections of the tangerines and serve immediately.

["Poêlé" is a French cooking method, often used for white meats and poultry, where the item is cooked with a matignon (aromatic vegetables) in a covered container and basted with butter”].

Soufflé de Caneton Rouennais

Poêlé the duckling, and only just cook it.

Raise [remove] the supremes [breast meat], and keep them hot, and cut the bones from the carcass in such a way as to imitate a case. With the duckling's liver, the raw meat of another half-duckling, the white of an egg, and three oz. of raw foie gras, prepare a mousseline forcemeat.

Fill the carcass with this forcemeat, shaping it so as to reconstruct the bird. Surround it with a band of strong, buttered paper, so as to avoid loss of shape, and poach gently, under cover, for twenty minutes.

With some reserved forcemeat, combined with an equal weight of foie-gras puree, garnish some tartlet crusts, and poach them at the same time as the soufflé.

Dish the piece; surround it with the tartlets; set a collop of supreme on each of the latter, and serve a Rouennaise sauce.

[Rouennaise sauce.

A Bordelaise sauce very briefly incorporated with a puree of the duck’s livers And perhaps some of its blood].

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