food books & food writing

[crnahg_yhor]

overly "vivid" writing is something of a shutdown for me; it's funny because it's meant to be immersive but instead it jolts me out. It seems to show up a lot in food writing in the first-person essay format.

Though I can understand why people like it, I'm very mixed-to-negative on the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. The style of the book really doesn't work for me; the hand-drawn pictures, the jarring writing, the exercises I can't do, ... but I'll admit that my cooking has improved from the influence of the 40% I was able to get through.

I had sorta expected a somewhat scientific approach - experimentation to see what works, but also getting into the how and why on a more chemical and molecular level - so the author's ?dislike? for that sort of thing surprised me.

(It's very possible, and in fact likely, that I'm not getting a good read on their voice. I'm reminded of a book reading I went to by accident a few years ago; the author read a few sections of their book, and I choked and cramped from how hard I laughed. I bought the book and read it that night, and the same sections that had been so absurd and funny at the reading were bleak, miserable, nihilistic at home.)

I got Cocktail Codex a few years ago, which aims to (teleologically, though it doesn't say teleology anywhere...) break down mixed drinks into a few categories - focusing on the spirit, balancing sweet & sour, etc. I had flipped through it but put it down because everything was so far beyond me at the time I got it.

I finally read it through yesterday. On a surface level, the writing has some similarities to SFAH - lots of vivid words. It bothered me less, though, maybe because it was entirely domain-specific idioms and cliches strung together? (To be clear, there's a very real sense in which it's not great writing. I don't think it's bad, it's just not great, but it's okay to not be great. The point is to transmit information, not to stun the reader with prose.) (...I'm pretty sure the authors aren't the origin of these cliches in cocktail writing; I'm pretty sure we've been saying these cliches for a while in food. Death & Co is influential, but I don't think they're that important.)