Books discussed in this essay:

Tender at the Bone
by Ruth Reichl
Random House, 282 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Julie & Julia
by Julie Powell
Little, Brown and Company, $23.95 (hardcover)

Kitchen Confidential
by Anthony Bourdain
HarperCollins, 302 pp., $14.00 (paper)

Is there any better metaphor for food than sex?  I don’t think so.  We lust after the chili cheese fries the waitress delivers to a neighbor table and regret having ordered an anemic little salad.  In the middle of the night, we crave Oreos or salt & vinegar chips or that last slice of pizza we so neatly wrapped in tin foil only hours before, having sensibly limited ourselves to just two slices.  Some of us even go into loud, moaning, table-slapping raptures over a deli sandwich – but maybe that movie reference has become overplayed.  And I don’t know about you, but I don’t lay awake in bed at night fantasizing about torrid love affairs, at least not with people.  I fantasize about love affairs with large slabs of 80 percent dark chocolate and rich cream-sauced pastas and smelly cheeses covered in mold.  I’m a sick, sick woman.

But then, so are Ruth Reichl, Julie Powell and MFK Fisher, three women guilty of the same unhealthy preoccupation with food.  Reichl, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and a New York Times restaurant critic, realized at a young age that knowing how to cook offered popularity where beauty, wit and charm failed to suffice.  Not that Reichl lacks in these qualities, as her prose attests to wit and charm at the least, but her love life relied for many years on that old adage about a man, his heart and his stomach.  You know the one. In one of her now three food-related memoirs, Tender at the Bone, Reichl unveils how the cooking skills she had cultivated in her efforts to get a man eventually served an unexpected purpose.  The culinary arts gave her a career, first reviewing hoity-toity restaurants in San Francisco in her mid-twenties, then off to Gourmet and the New York Times.  There may not be a lot of sex in Tender at the Bone, but there’s lots of deliciously described meals over which to fantasize.

Food provides the subtext in Reichl’s coming of age story.  She pays tribute to all of the people who introduced her to all of her favorite foods and taught her that loving food means loving life:  a childhood nanny, her grandmother’s cook, a college roommate, a French Canadian dignitary whom she met while studying in Montreal.  Reichl tells a good story.  And I’m sure she bakes a mean devil’s food cake.

Julie Powell also uses food as an excuse to talk about her love life and herself.  A failed actress living in a tiny apartment in Queens with her husband and two cats, Powell discovers the value of cooking-as-therapy as she faces life as a career secretary.  On a visit home, she filches her mom’s copy of Julia Child’s legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking and decides to cook every recipe in the book.  All 524.  In one year.  And, oh-so-cutting edge, she decides to keep a blog about it.  To her astonishment, people read it…and like it!  I liked it too.  Powell’s a gal’s gal – a foul-mouthed, self-mocking sass who’ll drink with you until 2 am, curl up on the couch to help you finish off left-over macaroni & cheese and then meet you at noon to laugh about the previous night’s exploits over a buttery stack of greasy spoon pancakes.  Her cleverly cooked-up theme allows for heaps of humorous anecdotes, such as her citywide search for beef marrow or her attempt to practice the art of flipping eggs on a Queens side street in lieu of, as suggested by Julia Child, a front lawn.  And there’s way more sex in Julie & Julia than Tender at the Bone.  After managing to extract and cook the beef marrow – a great scene in itself – she “could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex.”  But then she revises that thought.  “What it really tastes like is life, well lived.” Powell indeed does know how to live.  She knows how to eat.  And I’m sure she’d be a hell of a lot of fun to eat with.

Julia Child revolutionized home cooking when 1950s moms were serving their families canned Franco-American spaghetti garnished accompanied by cottage cheese-filled iceberg leaves, topped with pineapple slices.  (In fact, my grandmother still serves that crap.)  But before Julia Child, before Julie Powell, before Ruth Reichl, there was MFK Fisher.  The acknowledged Grande Dame of American food writing, she recognized the need for a revolution in how Americans ate during wartime.  In 1943, shortages and subsequent rationing inspired Fisher to write How to Cook a Wolf, something of a guidebook on how to improvise with what you’ve got when you haven’t got much.  She writes with missionary zeal and righteous indignation, commanding her readers to cook and eat well as though a drill sergeant preparing the troops for battle.  She bites:  “One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than the rich-bitches.  It begins to look as if that were a lie.”  Fisher turns up her nose at the then new concept of “balanced” meals.  She wants us to eat oysters and gazpacho and cheese soufflés, or just a salad for dinner if the mood strikes us.  She scorns the “vitamin” fad and discourages this insidious wartime trend of “being sensible.”  My grandmother prized good sense over all other virtues.  So, it seems, did Fisher’s.  I suspect I would have liked being Fisher’s granddaughter – all cake, no spinach.

Although home kitchens, both pre- and post-feminism, seem to be a woman’s domain, restaurant kitchens have long been, and continue to be, male dominated.  Women cook for families; men cook for a living.  We’re all familiar with celebrity chefs like Emeril, Wolfgang Puck and Jamie Oliver – that cute “Naked Chef” bloke from Essex (not to be confused with the creepy guy who cooks naked on cable access) – all of whom have capitalized on pre-existing notoriety with cookbooks and/or Food Network shows. But one primo New York chef gained his notoriety the other way round: as a celebrity writer first, then a celebrity chef (and now a TV celebrity). 

In the New York Times bestseller Kitchen Confidential, chef Anthony “Tony” Bourdain exposes the skuzzy backstage shenanigans of the kitchen staffs at some of New York’s finest (and worst) restaurants.  Like Reichl and Powell, Bourdain uses his life in the kitchen to talk about himself – his frenzied life, his ne’er do well friends, his drug habits. And yes, sex.  But not Julie Powell/Ruth Reichl romance-novel sex to be savored like chocolate or fine wine.  No, this is grainy porno-flick sex between a “well-toasted” ex-hippie cook and a drunken bride-still-in-gown up against the dumpster in the back alley.  The sex is sandwiched between anecdotes about fake severed fingers, drug benders and why not to eat seafood on Monday.  Bourdain writes with attitude and quick wit, two qualities integral for survival in the kitchens he describes.  He’s the guy you’d do tequila shots with after a grueling wait shift.  But even though I’m betting Bourdain is a superlative chef, Kitchen Confidential doesn’t make you want to eat.  At least not in a restaurant.

You can learn a lot about people based on what they eat.  Ruth Reichl made this observation in Tender at the Bone.  I can’t imagine I’d much enjoy the company of sensible eaters, balanced eaters, vegans, vegetarians, nutritionists or dieters.  I prefer meat lovers, carb enthusiasts, sweet-toothed gluttons and heavy drinkers.  Fisher, Reichl, Bourdain and Powell are four raunchy, smart-assed cooks in whose company I’d revel.  They eat well.  And to eat well, they show, is to live well.  They justify our love affair with food.  And with food writing.