The Table Comes First
Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
Ratings1
Average rating4
Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives? With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic, compulsive gastronomes. It is a journey that begins in eighteenth-century France—the birthplace of our modern tastes (and, by no coincidence, of the restaurant)—and carries us to the kitchens of the White House, the molecular meccas of Barcelona, and beyond. To understand why so many of us apparently live to eat, Gopnik delves into the most burning questions of our time, including: Should a Manhattanite bother to find chicken killed in the Bronx? Is a great vintage really any better than a good bottle of wine? And: Why does dessert matter so much? Throughout, he reminds us of a time-honored truth often lost amid our newfound gastronomic pieties and certitudes: What goes on the table has never mattered as much to our lives as what goes on around the table—the scene of families, friends, lovers coming together, or breaking apart; conversation across the simplest or grandest board. This, ultimately, is who we are. Following in the footsteps of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Adam Gopnik gently satirizes the entire human comedy of the comestible as he surveys the wide world of taste that we have lately made our home. The Table Comes First is the delightful beginning of a new conversation about the way we eat now.
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“In cooking you begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of the appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.”
Do you see why I love Adam Gopnik? He can take the simplest of activities—like cooking, for example—and he can find great wisdom there. Half the time I don't understand what he's talking about as I'm reading along; it's only later, when I'm looking over his words again, that his thoughts become clear to me.
Here's another example of Gopnik's wisdom that often goes over my head in a first reading, truth that is wiser than simple information about cooking and eating: “It seems to me that the real spirit of localism—the thing most worth taking from it—is the joke: the playful idea of the pleasure of adventure, the idea, at the heart of most aesthetic pleasures, that by narrowing down, closing up, the area of our inquiry, we can broaden out and open up the possibilities of our pleasures.”
And not only does he find deep wisdom in simple activity, but he shares his ruminations with a cleverness that few essayists display:
“Yes, of course, everybody's recipe is someone else's recipe, with the exception of those few rare new things that someone really did invent....But there is a recipe that has, so to speak, through suffering become yours, unlike those that you have simply copied out of a book. We recognize the concept of sweat equity in recipe writing: if you have labored nightly over a stove in a restaurant kitchen cooking the thing, then you can write it down, even if its origins lie ultimately not in your own mind but in someone else's cooking.”
“The good food of twenty-five years ago always looks unhealthy; the good food of fifty years ago always looks unappetizing; and the good food of a hundred years ago always looks inedible.”
“On the other hand, or in the other fork....”
And beneath his wisdom and his cleverness, Gopnik shares little tidbits of the craft that help us all:
Gopnik suggests that everything is better by adding a little saffron and cinnamon or bacon and anchovies.
He also shares the surprising truth that good cooks either go very hot or surprisingly cold. They have time.
