Feeding a Yen
Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco
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Publisher Description
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin.
Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continental cuisine” palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House—nor of their successors, the trendy spots he calls “sleepy-time restaurants, where everything is served on a bed of something else.” What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one.
As it happens, some of Trillin’s favorite dishes—pimientos de Padrón in northern Spain, for instance, or pan bagnat in Nice or posole in New Mexico—can’t be found anywhere but in their place of origin. Those dishes are on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation. “On gray afternoons, I go over it,” he writes, “like a miser who is both tantalizing and tormenting himself by poring over a list of people who owe him money.” On brighter afternoons, he calls his travel agent.
Trillin shares charming and funny tales of managing to have another go at, say, fried marlin in Barbados or the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Sometimes he returns with yet another listing for his Register—as when he travels to Ecuador for ceviche, only to encounter fanesca, a soup so difficult to make that it “should appear on an absolutely accurate menu as Potage Labor Intensive.”
We join the hunt for the authentic fish taco. We tag along on the “boudin blitzkrieg” in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying boudin and polishing it off in the parking lot or in their cars (“Cajun boudin not only doesn’t get outside the state, it usually doesn’t even get home”). In New York, we follow Trillin as he roams Queens with the sort of people who argue about where to find the finest Albanian burek and as he tries to use a glorious local specialty, the New York bagel, to lure his daughters back from California (“I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat-germ bagels you get your choice of a bee-pollen bagel or a ginseng bagel free”).
Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin “our funniest food writer.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These 14 essays which first appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines but have been reworked to form a cohesive whole nearly all grow out of Trillin's concept of a "register of frustration and deprivation." Recorded are the delicacies that have not taken root in his otherwise fertile home turf of Greenwich Village. For those better acquainted with Trillin's droll humor than his culinary predilections, it should be noted that Trillin is no snooty foodie. His abiding enthusiasm for various dishes is matched by a disdain for "review trotters," and the objects of his affection are more homey than rarefied: Louisiana boudin, Santa Fe posole, pimientos de Padr n and Kansas City barbecue, for instance. About these products, he crafts writing that meanders but always finds its center. The deadpan wit, deprecating himself as much as others, remains at a slow simmer throughout. Just as the theme of longing is in danger of becoming repetitive, Trillin throws in a couple of pieces that break the mold but not the rhythm of the book. For Trillin's many fans, it has been too long since a new collection of his food writing has made its way to market 1984's Third Helpings was the last volume strictly devoted to his gastronomic exploits. However briefly, this should sate their longings.
