AJ Liebling tells us early on that ‘the primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol’. For that reason, Liebling is out of step with the current time and for that reason alone the book seduces you into his life, lived steadfast true to his ethos while the world around him changed; he little cared.
AJ Liebling was food writer for the New Yorker magazine and the book deals mostly with his time spent in Paris during the period after the Great War. We hear of great feasts and great gourmands. He recounts the story of a friend who going to a restaurant for a ‘sensibly light meal’ of a dozen oysters and a thick chunk of steak topped with beef marrow is instead greeted by the proprietor who has set aside two portions of cassoulet (a rich slow cooked casserole) for him knowing his usual heartier appetite well. Should he turn away the cassoulet and hurt the proprietor’s feelings or forgo the steak? Solution, he ate the two portions of cassoulet first (eating one portion only might similarly have offended his host fearing the cassoulet to be sub-standard) and he then went on to eat the steak. We’re also told that ‘the oysters offered no problem, since they present no bulk’.
It will come as little surprise to most therefore that Liebling, a big man whose girth meant that others found it difficult to walk alongside him on the pavement died aged just 59. His memoirs nevertheless suggest it was a life worth eating.
The book though as you might expect from a New Yorker columnist has greater depth than just a food or restaurant guide as it charmingly chronicles the changes in food fashions and those derived there from. His cultural observations span the rise of vodka (no colour, no taste, no smell), the appearance of medical doctors in dictating dietary habits and that of women’s appetites driven by the shift in the figurine ideal, from curves to sticks.
Liebling himself was considered by women as ‘not handsome but passable’ which is clearly sufficient and when a local once suggested that ‘we Frenchman made love with our brains’ his retort that ‘we others utilise traditional material’ highlights him as an agreeable wit.
AJ Liebling was food writer for the New Yorker magazine and the book deals mostly with his time spent in Paris during the period after the Great War. We hear of great feasts and great gourmands. He recounts the story of a friend who going to a restaurant for a ‘sensibly light meal’ of a dozen oysters and a thick chunk of steak topped with beef marrow is instead greeted by the proprietor who has set aside two portions of cassoulet (a rich slow cooked casserole) for him knowing his usual heartier appetite well. Should he turn away the cassoulet and hurt the proprietor’s feelings or forgo the steak? Solution, he ate the two portions of cassoulet first (eating one portion only might similarly have offended his host fearing the cassoulet to be sub-standard) and he then went on to eat the steak. We’re also told that ‘the oysters offered no problem, since they present no bulk’.
It will come as little surprise to most therefore that Liebling, a big man whose girth meant that others found it difficult to walk alongside him on the pavement died aged just 59. His memoirs nevertheless suggest it was a life worth eating.
The book though as you might expect from a New Yorker columnist has greater depth than just a food or restaurant guide as it charmingly chronicles the changes in food fashions and those derived there from. His cultural observations span the rise of vodka (no colour, no taste, no smell), the appearance of medical doctors in dictating dietary habits and that of women’s appetites driven by the shift in the figurine ideal, from curves to sticks.
Liebling himself was considered by women as ‘not handsome but passable’ which is clearly sufficient and when a local once suggested that ‘we Frenchman made love with our brains’ his retort that ‘we others utilise traditional material’ highlights him as an agreeable wit.
But the main evocation is the decline of traditional food to what he terms ‘short order cooking’. Indeed, Alexandre Dumas, writer of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers who was also nevertheless an expert cook, gourmet and author of the Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine noted as long ago as 1869 that excessive haste was beginning to mar [French] cookery. Leibling’s return to Paris in 1939 after an absence of 12 years led him to observe ‘a decline in the serious quality of restaurants that could not be blamed on the war’ which he then traced back at least a further 20 years. Accordingly he notes that ‘what I had taken for a Golden Age was in fact Late Silver’. In turn, that most likely places us today at base metal and the beauty of the book is that it allows us to at least squint at the shine of what Late Silver might have tasted like. Written in 1959, the era already seems lost to Liebling; to us, for whom it never existed, we can only thank Liebling for letting us dream.
The wit flows readily, like the suggestion that society women ‘kissed as if they were sipping crème de menthe through a straw’ but it is ultimately the excess of eating that we read the book to secretly admire. One of Leibling’s own gastronomic heroes, Yves Mirande, is described as ‘one of the last of the great around-the-clock gastronomes of France’. He would describe M. Mirande as dazzling his juniors by ‘dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of Champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac’. In the battle of man versus food, in this round, man was the winner. Liebling, we salute you.
The wit flows readily, like the suggestion that society women ‘kissed as if they were sipping crème de menthe through a straw’ but it is ultimately the excess of eating that we read the book to secretly admire. One of Leibling’s own gastronomic heroes, Yves Mirande, is described as ‘one of the last of the great around-the-clock gastronomes of France’. He would describe M. Mirande as dazzling his juniors by ‘dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of Champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac’. In the battle of man versus food, in this round, man was the winner. Liebling, we salute you.
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