Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table
Edited by Amanda Hesser
W.W. Norton & Co., 2009
U.S. trade paper, reprint
ISBN 978-0393337464
208 pages; $15.95

This slim collection of gastronomic essays from the New York Times is like an hors d’oeuvre; not quite enough to satisfy your appetite, but enough to stimulate it for something more substantial later on. You might, indeed, run straight to your kitchen to experiment with one of the recipes included here, but you’re more likely to be seen scanning your bookshelves for something good and meaty like Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) or Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

Not that this book isn’t as enjoyable as a good artichoke dip with pita chips. It seems unlikely that Colson Whitehead will convince you to forgo dessert with his essay, “I Scream,” but you’ll certainly understand why he does after reading about his summers working in an ice cream shop at the beach. Dawn Drzal’s essay about an uncomfortable interview with M.F.K. Fisher, the doyenne of food writing, is a sad tale of the havoc old age wreaks on our bodies. Yiyun Li’s story about how Tang once seemed like a magical, unobtainable treat, “Orange Crush,” gives us a peek at life in China in the 1960s. George Saunders’s “The Absolutely No-Anything Diet,” about how he gained 10 pounds by eating and drinking nothing but water, made me think about how I can gain an inch around my hips just be looking at Haagen-Daazs in the freezer at the grocery store (and the recipe for Sanders’s “Light-As-Air Brunch” is even funnier). Allen Shawn’s “Family Menu,” the tale of his mentally-retarded sister’s annual birthday luncheon and the year the menu changed, will touch your heart.

The recipes sound good, too, though I’ve not yet tried my hand at any of them. John Robin Baitz, in “American Dreams,” his essay about teenage life in Durban, South Africa, concludes with a recipe for Durban lamb curry with tomato and mint sambal that sounds frightfully complicated but completely delicious. I’m not sure I’m up to attempting the recipe for cream of watercress soup with caviar that comes from Taillevent, a French restaurant that boasts two Michelin stars, but I wouldn’t mind trying it in Paris, as Ann Patchett did in “Paris Match.” I think the shrimp with garlic – gambas al ajillo – described in Gary Shteyngart’s “The Sixth Sense” sounds the most scrumptious, especially since I can sympathize with Shteyngart’s longing for garlic as a child: my mother never used the pungent and fragrant bulb in her cooking, either.

You could probably gobble up all these essays in a single sitting, as I did, or parcel them out for a little taste at a time over days in order to savor them more completely. Either way, though, you’re going to be hungry for more good writing about food than this book can provide. Maybe Frank Bruni’s memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater should be waiting for you when you finish Eat, Memory. Or maybe you’ll just be plain hungry, in which case I recommend that you go shopping with this book in hand. In either case, this book will unquestionably leave you wanting more.