Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

ABCs of summer food reading

So many lovely books — so little time to digest them all
food_glenda1

Fiction and non-, I love reading year-round. Summertime is best, but with so many good books out there the picking is tough.

There's a fascinating little book story that surfaces once in a while, often in university circles, that points up our overwhelming book choices these days. It may well be apocryphal, but that doesn't make it any less intriguing. It goes like this: A man, usually called a "man of letters," once read every book, or every book in the English language.

It may have been Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Italian philosopher bestknown for his 900 conclusions in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. Or Francis Bacon, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Whoever it was, it seems much more likely that he — no one ever suggests it may have been a woman who did all this reading — would have ploughed through all the books in English or Latin or whatever the printed languages were, rather than every book on the planet. I doubt that any of these gentlemen read Sanskrit.

Still, I love the idea that the number of books in someone's time and culture was circumscribed enough for a single human soul to read them all and stake out their thoughts accordingly.

At least you could have discussed good contemporary reads with someone without having to join a book club because chances were you had read the same book. For if we trust Google's algorithms — and why not, since we rely on Google for so much, including précis of books so we can pretend to have read them for whatever reason — we now have more than 130 million book titles on Earth.

So if you want to draw a manageable line in the sand around summer reading choices, you could do worse than picking a theme — say, food, given this is a food column after all. Beside, food is a wonderful trope for discussing just about anything.

To chase up food in fiction, try Lionel Shriver's latest powerhouse. Ironically titled Big Brother, it's not about big brother watching you but rather a very big, obese brother being watched. In this case by Pandora, his sister, who, once she realizes he lies about almost everything, tries to get the 175kg. Edison back down to size.

On the non-fiction side, you won't go wrong with Michael Pollan's latest release, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. It builds on Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, venturing into cheese-making and fermenting as well as the more obvious applications of "cooked," but not before reminding us of one of the first ways men discovered to "tame" fire (in this case "men" is the correct application): peeing on it.

But for my food reading this summer, I've gone to classics suited more to grazing than the full meal deal. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's History of Food; Food: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Brigid Allen; and the Penguin Book of Food and Drink, also an anthology, one edited by Paul Levy, all make for pleasant summer holiday companions that illuminate food and drink.

To give you a taste, here's my compendium of A to Z food culled from these volumes:

A is for Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, considered by some to be the best.

B is for banquets. In ancient Greece they had two phases. In the second, called a symposion, ideas were exchanged as well as toasts.

C is for cereal, the staple food of so many peoples that Homer defined human beings as "eaters of flour."

D is for daffodil leaves, which can poison you.

E is for the ethics of food.

F is for fifty, the number of years cooking has moved toward simplicity.

G is for The Golden Bough, the 1900 classic in which a Lithuanian ritual is recorded of pulling one another's hair when new potatoes are served.

H is for Nathaniel Hawthorne, who described noonday dinners onboard a ship in 1858 as serving soup, roast mutton, mutton chops and macaroni pudding along with brandy, port and sherry.

I is for iced coffee, made in Vienna and served with whipped cream.

J is for Japanese noodles called harusame, which look like skeins of transparent silk threads.

K is for Kublai Kahn, who kept a stable of 10,000 horses and mares, all pure white. No one except his family could drink the mares' milk.

L is for lager beer, which barmen will consent to ice in Denmark, Germany and Holland.

M is for mustard seeds, white and black.

N is for nouvelle cuisine, a social expression of the modern ideal that people ought to contrive to be not only very rich but also very thin.

O is for oysters, first farmed in Gaul around 100 BCE.

P is for Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet as well as the technique of separating grain from harvested ears by laying sheaves on the floor and having oxen tread on them.

Q is for quince paste, which King François I of France loved and is said to have eaten with tears in his eyes.

R is for rabbits, which the "common people" of France were allowed to catch in 1776.

S is for soup, which needs to be thick enough and accompanied by something to make a meal.

T is for threefold pattern, the ancient pattern that still applies to the European dinner: overture, climax and sweet final flourish.

U is for James Joyce's Ulysses, which contains this remark: "God made food but the Devil made seasoning."

V is for vineyard. The first one in North America was planted in 1520.

W is for wine, which was mixed with plaster in ancient Greece to prevent it from spoiling.

X is for Xenophon, the Greek historian who described speeches delivered during nights of revelry in his Symposium.

Y is for yogurt, which may contribute to the longevity of people in the Balkans.

Z is for Pope Zachary I, one of two popes who issued edicts against eating horsemeat.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who hates getting food stains on books.