The omnivores remember
This is the anniversary of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, and in keeping with the day's Caledonian spirit, it is the traditional beginning of the marmalade-making season here in my kitchen. Proper Seville oranges having been secured, the process begins with revisiting stuck-together records of marmalades past, then to books, sometimes the Web, but inevitably to squandered hours just reading about food. This year I got a head start on the last step by way of an excerpt from John McPhee's 1967 book, "Oranges," included in "American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes," edited by Molly O'Neill (Library of America, paperback, $24).
That piece canters along briskly through countless facts about oranges, including one that I'd say is no longer true today, some 40 years later: that actual oranges are being replaced by frozen concentrated orange juice in the American diet. Though the book affords glimpses of trends and fashions in American food, certain preoccupations arise again and again, among them lament for the vanished food of the past. Most entertaining in this respect is H. L. Mencken on the delusion that Baltimore is still (in 1927) "a center of gastronomical debauchery." Shades of Mencken's tone, "arrogant, outraged, and hyperbolic," observes O'Neill, still remain in writing about the decline of food in America today. Another recurrent passion is that for nature over artifice. Here we find my old friend Henry David Thoreau maundering on, in an excerpt from "Walden," about making his own bread from his own grain and doing without yeast, maybe salt, and being pleased to hear of a person who ate only hard corn "using his teeth for all mortar."
Thoreau is nicely complemented by Jeffrey Steingarten, who reports 136 years later in "Primal Bread" on the harrowing process of conjuring up his own sourdough starter and attempting to make bread from it. His many disasters, fizzlings out, and eventual success do involve, however, such artifices as setting his air conditioner to "turbo freeze" and having specialty flour FedExed to him. Which brings up another theme in American writing on food: ridicule of preciousness and ostentation. Nora Ephron is very funny on the "back-biting, lip-smacking, and pocket-jingling" "Food Establishment" in 1970. In 1975, four days after the appearance of Craig Claiborne's New York Times piece "Just a Quiet Dinner for Two in Paris: 31 Dishes, Nine Wines, a $4,000 Check" (also included in the book), Russell Baker came back with his own "Lucullan repast." Beginning with "a 1975 Diet Pepsi served in a disposable bottle," he continues with, among other dishes, bacon and beans eaten from the pan ("when the beans have formed huge dense clots firmly welded to the pan, the bacon grease is poured in") and six slices of bologna "placed in an ungreased frying pan over maximum heat and held down by a long fork until the entire house filled with smoke."
The book includes a number of recipes, spanning over 200 years, from days of yore (Thomas Jefferson's for ice cream and Mrs. E. E.
Most writing on eating is celebratory; on drinking, less so. Drunks reel and crash about through literature destroying their lives and those of the people around them. Sometimes they're funny, as in Kingsley Amis's novels, but mostly they're not; mostly they're depressing or dangerous. "Bordeaux," by Paul Torday (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24), stands alone, I think, as a novel about a pitiful drunkard that is also moving and, strange to say, genuinely funny. I know it makes you uneasy to hear that: If it's even possible, which you doubt, it doesn't seem decent.
The elements of "Bordeaux" may be summarized baldly: Wilberforce is a math whiz and former computer genius who sold off his business for a bundle. He has inherited a cellar of wine from a friend, Francis Black, and has set out to drink it. His wife is dead; he is a pariah to his former friends; and he now lives for wine and is dying for it too, drinking three to four bottles a day. ("I only drink wine," he explains in dismissing the idea that he is killing himself, "and then always the same amount, of very good quality Bordeaux. I never drink spirits, of course, and I never drink excessively.")
But these stark facts are shown to have problematical antecedents as we travel back to trace events as they unfold from Wilberforce's pre-sot days to the present. His is the journey of a true innocent - one, however, who is innocent not only of the way of the world, but of honor too. I cannot reveal the story that emerges and the subtly cruel light it sheds on its terrible end, but denouement after denouement is brilliantly dealt out until we are looking at quite a different set of stark facts. Beyond that, the novel has a beautifully understated allegorical and philosophical dimension. The limits and ultimate sterility of pleasures of the senses haunt the book, as do mutability and the depredations of time as exemplified in the inevitable decline in a bottle of great vintage wine.
How exactly is this funny? The plot isn't, of course; but Torday, whose first novel was the wonderfully entertaining "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen," continues here to display his talent for portraying the hapless, oblivious male, the chilly world that surrounds him, and the banal idiom in which it expresses itself. It is also funny, if ghoulishly so, in the analytic manner in which this ex-computer geek confronts his own experience. Reflecting on his first encounters with wine, he says: "I had to admit that I could see why people sometimes drank wine. The taste was strangely interesting, certainly more interesting than Diet Coke. If I ever drank a second glass I felt, for a moment, disinclined to do any tidying up or count to very large numbers in my head. Oddly enough, the most readily identifiable feeling I had after drinking the second glass was that it might be nice to drink a third." One knows just what he means.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
