July 31, 2013 · 3:10 pm

The Picaresque in the Kitchen

Blood, Bones & Butter

In the subtitle to the refreshingly unvarnished memoir, Blood, Bones, & Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton describes herself as “a reluctant chef.” This descriptive phrase refers only to her membership in the profession that has spawned a niche market in the publishing world that shows no sign of letting up: ‘celebritiy’ chef-writer. The details of Hamilton’s life story would make good copy in a number of other milieus, among them, as an insightful chronicle of alt-ac (alternative academic) career options for creative writing MFAs (she went to the University of Michigan), or as a behind-the-scenes exposé of the mind-numbing conditions endured by catering service temporary workers.

 

In this blog post, however, I would like to discuss the specific ways in which the memoir as it is structured parallels and corresponds with a cheeky literary genre from another date and time: the picaresque novel that emerged in Spain during the sixteenth century. By advocating a reading of Blood, Bones, & Butter as a twenty-first century female picaresque narrative, I acknowledge the sophistication of Hamilton’s writing style evident in the framing of this tale in three distinct and emblematic sections, which attests to her literary training in college and graduate school. Whereas in my post on Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat I advocated a male genealogy of bad-boy writing chefs and traced its origins to the Anthony Bourdain as the intellectual patriarch of this group and the runaway success of his ground-breaking Kitchen Confidential, here I suggest that Hamilton’s equally gritty urban chronicle grows out of a different literary lineage, one that begins with the Lazarillo de Tormes and which details the somewhat comic adventures of an abandoned street urchin (pícaro) as he makes his way through all levels of society, while in the employ of various cruel, corrupt, or abusive masters in an effort to survive his poverty.

 

In Blood, Bones, & Butter, two dissolved marriages, first her parents’ and later her own, book-end the events of Gabrielle Hamilton’s life, thus setting in motion a journey that is at times humorous, at other times troubling, and always a struggle for direction, guidance, and a steady source of income. She first occupies the urchin subject position the summer after her parents’ traumatic divorce, when all the members of her large family headed in different directions to nurse their wounds and no one paid any mind to the two youngest children:

 

that first summer after their divorce, my seventeen-year-old brother Simon and I were left alone—and this I remember acutely—for weeks.  This may have been an oversight, like leaving your cup of coffee on the roof of the car while you dig out your keys and then drive off. Or wishful thinking on my parents’ part that their two youngest children were old enough to fend for themselves. Either way, Simon and I were on our own. And we were better off, we seemed to agree without discussing it, each to fend for himself. (28-9)

 

Even before discussing the series of kitchen jobs the twelve-year-old talks her way into getting that summer in order to earn enough money to eat, Hamilton here resorts to food imagery to convey the isolation of her situation.  Comparing herself and her brother to a cup of morning joe, so strongly ingrained in one’s morning routine that it is brought out to the car but then forgotten on the roof when the keys prove difficult to find, Hamilton acknowledges the fact that she was not willfully abandoned by her family members but rather that the shocking realization of loss—not of keys but of the family’s way of life—disrupted the normal routines of filial duty. Although her father was somewhere in the periphery of her life during that summer, considering she and Simon had returned to the family’s home after a brief involuntary exile in the Vermont cabin to which their mother had retreated, so it is the abandonment of the mother that haunts the young urchin up until she finds a stable and reassuring emotional replacement in her Italian mother-in-law, Alda, decades later.

 

In her article analyzing the gender dynamics of the picaresque novel genre, Anne J. Cruz argues that maternal abandonment is at the root of this male arc of adventure and self-discovery:

 

The picaresque genre’s narrations of the misadventures of rogues have tended to privilege the masculine gender of its protagonists, and the male-centered plot of these canonical novels is further evinced not only in the maternal abandonment suffered by the young boy and his contact with a series of amoral father figures, but through the mature pícaro’s failed amorous relations with women.

 

Hamilton never recovers from her family’s disintegration, and angrily refuses to forgive her mother for bringing it about. The descriptions of her hungry, scheming and cavalier younger self call to mind the picaresque “rogue” protagonist, an “innocent” introduced to petty crime by a series of self-serving masters.  As she gains experience working on both sides of the professional kitchen —the back as a dishwasher or short order cook and the front as wait-staff—  she becomes more adept at performing the menial tasks expected of her by employers. Her fellow employees, however, teach Hamilton how to exploit the system to her advantage. By the time Hamilton had graduated early from high school and moved to New York city to attend NYU, she learned first-hand about the excesses of the 1980s by working as a waitress:

 

Obviously, I had learned to work my fucking tables. Everybody was working their fucking tables, I soon learned. The girl at the door was selling tickets for the show while keeping half the ‘sales’ for herself. The waitresses were not getting lost in the mayhem and accidentally not writing down drinks on their dupes and the bartenders were not supplying those unrecorded drinks unwittingly. They were in business together.  I too, learned to sell them at the table, to keep the cash from the sale of a drink that didn’t, on paper, exist, and to share that profit with the bartender, trough tipping.  (48)

 

Bartenders, fellow waitresses, and other employees introduced her to the various tricks of the trade. Hamilton was working as an underage waitress, a ruse she had first resorted to during the summer following her parents’ divorce.  This circumstance was the one of the key reasons she was able to avoid prosecution when she was caught stealing from the restaurant by working “her fucking tables.” The solution was for her to leave the state, and give college another try.

 

By this time, Hamilton had also followed in another of the pícaro’s characteristic traits, engaging in a series of “failed amorous relations with women” (Cruz).  Gabrielle mentions first “my gorgeous androgynous girlfriend” (67) with whom she lived in New York, and then the “big butch Michigander” with whom she moved back to the city after graduate school. Both of these relationships end, the last one disastrously, but thanks to the heterosexual affair that ended things with the Michigander, Gabrielle meets Alda, the woman who would become her mother-in-law and model the relationship Hamilton wanted to have with both food and children.

Blood, Bones & Butter’s narrative finally deviates from the arch of the picaresque novel when Gabrielle Hamilton decides to take a chance and see whether her mentor is willing to continue their relationship despite the fact of her divorce from Alda’s son.  The answer, luckily for both Hamilton and us readers, is a definitive yes. And, in bringing together her personal and professional lives, Hamilton finally has both the material and the emotional distance and wisdom to write down her life story and share it with the world.   

 

 

 

Gabrielle Hamilton. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. 2011. New York: Random House Trade Paperback, 2012.

 

Cruz, Anne J. “Figuring gender in the picaresque novel: from Lazarillo to Zayas.” The Free Library 22 September 2010. 23 July 2013 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Figuring gender in the picaresque novel: from Lazarillo to Zayas.-a0279462529

 

 

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June 26, 2013 · 8:24 pm

The Flavor of Global Blackness

Yes, Chef: a memoir By Marcus Sameulsson 27book

Marcus Samuelsson’s recent chefography, Yes, Chef, does more than serve up the usual coming of age story arch that characterizes the genre: child helps grandma cook and falls in love with food, goes to culinary school, slaves away at a series of windowless professional kitchens through the expected hang overs, until he catches a break and makes a name for himself. The book also chronicles Samuelsson’s gradual awakening into race consciousness writ large, a process set against a truly global landscape including stops in Scandinavia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the United States.

The literary merits of this autobiography lie in its thoughtful meditation upon the complex ways race develops as a social construct whose valences differ depending on geography and history. He discusses the effects of the linguistic terms people use to convey derogatory implications about “blackness” as an identity category, scrutinizes his own life when his actions appear to uphold stereotypes about black men, and examines how the attitudes of other kitchen professionals towards him as a person of color convey either institutional racism, active prejudice or some combination of both. As a transnational adoptee (born in Ethiopia and adopted by Swedish parents), and naturalized citizen of the United States, Samuelsson enjoys a degree of objectivity that makes him uniquely qualified to speak about the constructed nature of identity formation in general. This sense of belonging both everywhere and nowhere at once allows Samuelsson the narrator to portray the events in his life as a series of choices or decisions, though not all of these were of his own design, rather than interpreting the same as the inevitable result of either fate or history. This freedom to choose both who to become, and where to live, is made possible through the culinary skills he cultivates and develops over time. In what follows, then, I will pause to consider how Yes, Chef uses examples from the world of food or the kitchen to tackle stereotypes, handle racial slurs, and witness first-hand how people negotiate the experience membership in overlapping communities: diasporic (Habesha, African) and ethnic (African American).

“I have no big race wounds.” (36)

With this statement, Samuelsson warns his American reading audience not to impose their own sense of race relations in their national framework upon his very personal experience of growing up in Sweden as part of a mixed race family. In these early pages, Marcus describes his mother as someone attuned to regional and historical particularities, a caring person who wanted each of her three adopted children to grow up knowing something about the heritage they inherited from their birthparents. She used music to connect the kids to these larger communities—Jamaican reggae from Bob Marley for the oldest sister, Anna, and African artists as a nod to Marcus and his sister Linda’s, ties to the continent. For Marcus, his mother’s loving attention to detail affirmed his individuality and his membership in the Samuelsson family unit.

Years later, when he confronts the fact that he has fathered a child out of wedlock and chosen not to be an active part of her life, it is his mother’s unwavering commitment to make her granddaughter grow up knowing her family and, thus, her place in the world, that makes Samuelsson believe he can overcome his past neglect and forge a budding relationship with his daughter one day. Samuelsson eventually brings his mother along when he finally travels to meet his daughter in Austria. While there, he cooks for her every day of his stay, drawing upon a combination of the dishes from his own childhood, and the ones which helped him make his name as the chef of Aquavit, the Swedish restaurant in New York. However, this gastronomic display of riches comes at a cost; although he uses his skills as a head chef to impress his daughter, Samuelsson acknowledges that while he was paying his dues in the kitchen he hid all information about her from his employers and acquaintances for fear of the negative impact such information might have had on his career.

No one at work had any idea about my daughter Zoe. On one level, I didn’t want people to think I was nothing more than a cliché—the absentee black father. On another, I was afraid the information could somehow hold me back or limit my opportunities in a way that would, in the end, not only harm me but make it harder to meet the slim responsibility of financial support my mother had assigned me. (192)

Samuelsson’s willingness to bare so much of his private life before reading audiences, and to explicitly invoke the experience of double consciousness—his combined fear and awareness of the potential for others to dismiss him as a racial stereotype—in the larger context of his immaturity as a father and his professional ambitions, open up a textual space for rational conversations about race and its implications for interpersonal relationships. By admitting that the stereotype of the absentee black father resonates even with someone who did not grow up in the United States, Samuelsson’s autobiography attests to the global circulation of such rhetorical constructs about race, how they transcend regional boundaries and come to signify in other contexts.

“Negerboll” (38)

However, Marcus confronts the limits of such essentialism earlier in the narrative, when he recalls a painful childhood interaction in which a playmate used a racial slur against him. Samuelsson explains both the culinary pun—since the invective is also the name of a beloved Swedish pastry—and also the perils inherent in trying to understand the situation from strictly from an American set of assumptions about hate speech:

Although it sounded like nigger and Boje spewed it with that level of venom, neger was the Swedish word for Negro. There was even a Swedish cookie called negerboll, or in English, Negro ball: It was made from cocoa powder, sugar and oats. But Boje was not calling me a cookie. And he had thrown a basketball at me, which I took as its own kind of loaded symbol. It was the early 1980s, the dawn of the Michael Jordan era, and most Swedes associated that orange ball with dark-skinned men. (38, italics in original)

When narrating, Samuelsson is at his best as a cultural translator, mediating between his American readers and the Scandinavian, European, and African cast of characters that share his life story. His comments demonstrate the kind of sensitivity and nuance which has surely made him a success in the hospitality business. Unlike Eddie Huang, another chef/owner of a New York restaurant which I discussed in a previous blog, Marcus Samuelsson avoids the easy assumption that the audience shares the prejudice and racism he encountered along the way. His didactic comments are inclusive, rather than antagonistic.

Samuelsson’s behind the scenes reminiscences of working inside professional kitchens shed yet more light on the entrenched racism that pervades the world of gastronomy. As the newly promoted chef de partie (senior chef who manages a particular station) of a hotel restaurant in Switzerland, Marcus is thrown back when he hears the head chef use pepper his normal German with the colloquial French term for blacks when discussing how many runners they’ll need to staff a particular banquet.

“Twenty-one,” Stocker calculated. “We’ll need twenty-one nègres for this.” He used the French kitchen slang for underlings, which literally translated to “blacks,” and which also meant “negroes.”
I froze in my spot. I was the only nègre in the room. Not even the darker-skinned Tamils were represented in Stocker’s small office, not even an Italian. No one looked over at me. Was it good or bad that I was so invisible? Was it actually a compliment that no one made the connection between the term for a near-worthless employee and this newly promoted chef de partie who stood among the ranks? (129-130)

In the basketball/cookie incident of his youth, Marcus had felt hyper-visible since the down side of the popularity of African American sports icons was to reinforce the notion that all men of color should be able to demonstrate their athletic prowess. Here, the situation was the exact opposite. The language the chef used conjured up the idea of blackness but emptied it of all humanity; in this context nègres conveys a person’s lowly rank in the hierarchy of the kitchen staff rather than any particular skill s/he might possess. If the double consciousness Samuelsson experiences as a young chef trying to make it is a nod to W.E. B. DuBois, then this meditation upon the invisibility of black men calls to mind Ralph Ellison’s landmark novel. Because Samuelsson does not merely stop there, but pauses to consider whether the kitchen staff’s indifference to the chef’s reference to nègres might be the first signs of a post-racial future, the memoir foreshadows the key role that President Barack Obama would play later in Samuelsson’s professional development, when the White House chose him to prepare the first state dinner for the Prime Minister of India.

“I came to see my race as an opportunity rather than a burden” (215)

Samuelsson is careful not to anoint himself an expert on American race relations. Availing himself of the privilege of that most American of subject positions, that of the immigrant, he proclaims the limits of his own ability to weigh in in any meaningful way on the long history of oppression which preceded his own arrival in New York:

I’m very much an immigrant when it comes to American racial history: I come here from a European place, and don’t have the sophistication about race and identity that my American-born friends have; you can only learn so much from MTV. (213)

I contend that these allusions to literature, politics, and popular culture are not accidental, but the result of careful considerations on Samuelsson’s part. After all, the chef/owner of the Red Rooster Restaurant in Harlem has revived a beloved institution, and remade it in his own inclusive image, as a place where he could “guard the history of black cooks in America while starting new conversations in food” (283). This memoir does more than that; it expands the framework for substantive and necessary discussions of how blackness is performed and constructed around the world, and how those configurations enrich our understanding of the limits of race as an isolated framework through which to understand identity. Within its pages Yes, Chef gives us a glossary of terms through which to understand race and difference, racism and inclusivity, diaspora and nativism. The inclusivity of Samuelsson’s vision of the world as a kitchen—where men and women, straight and gay, culinary school graduates and those who have risen through the ranks due to their hard work and dedication, can cook and eat together as one—is worth sharing.

Samuelsson, Marcus. Yes, Chef: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012.

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Aside

Planting Roots: Farming memoir combines heritage, study abroad

The hauntingly beautiful memoir, Harvest Son (1998), is one of David Mas Masumoto’s many critically acclaimed meditations on contemporary farming life. The memoir opens with Masumoto admitting his own sense of in-betweenness, feeling torn between the present and the past. As he prunes the peach trees and grapevines which are his livelihood, Masumoto describes the sense of being haunted by the ghosts of his two grandfathers who died during the forced internment, as well as by the shadowy memory of the Japanese family who owned his land before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and who had to sell it in order to prove their fealty to the United States country by complying with Executive Order 9066.

Through a particularly effective use of flashback in the memoir, Masumoto pauses to recall his study abroad experience in Japan during college as a sociology major at UC Berkeley.  David’s decision was prompted by the love and admiration he felt for his aged grandmother, who farms alongside her son and grandchildren in California. Masumoto travels to the ancestral homeland to connect personally with his heritage and to try to reclaim the language skills he had used to communicate with his grandmother as a young child.  Masumoto readily admits that he had trouble learning the Japanese language and mastering kanji characters, partly because he is left handed and thus has trouble producing neat handwriting, but also because he had not received formal language instruction as a kid. After his Tokyo sensei tells David he “was failing kanji miserably” (61), Masumoto lowers his expectations and decides to have fun practicing the language outside of a classroom setting: “instead of daylong classes, we met for half-days, then explored the massive city and complex culture around us. Daily we made fools of ourselves out in the streets with our pathetic conversational Japanese” (61-62). This low-key confession of his lackluster linguistic performance while abroad is one of the ways in which David Mas Masumoto’s memoir challenges the model minority myth.

Masumoto’s linguistic woes are confounded when he finds out that his extended family speaks a dialect with which he is not familiar, Kumamoto-ben. Masumoto connects with his relatives by exchanging the fruits of his own agricultural labor with them: a pack of raisins grown, harvested, and dried in his parents’ farm. After sharing his bounty, David was permitted to help the family patriarch in the fields. Yet again, Masumoto confesses to naïve shortcomings as an American youth who harbored stereotypical assumptions of his
ancestral homeland when he recalls that during the journey towards his family’s region, he had expected to see the landscape dotted with rice paddies. Much to his surprise, het discovered he was in buckwheat country. As he watched his grand-uncle use farming techniques unfamiliar to him despite having grown up in a vineyard framed by peach orchards, David felt a sense of shock which marked the third of his uncanny experiences visiting family in Japan:

I had never sown seeds before.  . . . I copied Jichan Tanaka as we walked side by side, our arms swinging back and forth. The buckwheat looked like waves suspended in a comma shape before they hit the earth. As we trudged back and forth, the seeds arched into the air and plummeted downward, nestling in the soft dirt where next we’d rake and stir them in. (104)

The time he spends with his grand-uncle’s family in their farm in Kumamoto, Kyushu, an island in the south of Japan, is what makes him experience an epiphany or awakening: for the first time, he seriously contemplates making a living as a farmer upon graduation and one day buying his parents’ land. The recognition of a fundamental difference in the way each man, family, and country approaches agricultural labor does not make Masumoto feel insecure about the relative degree of authenticity of one or the other. Instead, his book celebrates the continuity across the diaspora of a family tradition of having a close relationship to and appreciation of the land, and valuing manual labor and hard work. This sense of sameness within difference, entirely brought about through the chosen displacement of studying abroad, fills David with peace as he later recounts his choice to make a living by working the land.

David had first recognized the presence of the local within the global when dining in Japan. He initially feels that dining abroad is a more “authentic” version of the Japanese food he grew up eating, although his comparison is inherently asymmetrical in nature, since the dishes he experienced abroad were prepared in restaurants rather than family homes. Nonetheless, Masumoto recalls how eating in Japan made the foreign country seem more familiar to him: “From the time I arrived in Japan, I felt the most comfortable during meals. I grew up with Japanese food—we had rice at every lunch and dinner, sometimes even for breakfast, and holidays were filled with sushi, teriyaki, sashimi, and manju” (66). At home, eating was one way through which Masumoto and his family performed their cultural identity as people of Japanese ancestry either privately as a family, or publicly at the gatherings of the Del Rey Japanese community in the local gathering hall. Abroad, eating Japanese food is a means through which Masumoto can honor his heritage and fit in with the locals more readily than when he tries to speak. However, though his physical appearance might fool the locals, including his sensei, the taste of food itself stands out as somewhat uncanny to Masumoto’s own palate:

in Japan, the flavors were different, familiar but not what I had anticipated. Most of the sushi had a tarter flavor, the yakitori and other noodle dishes seemed to use stronger seasoning, a bit more karai/salty, and the teriyaki sauce on chicken did not taste as sweet. When I first noticed the difference, I thought each restaurant had a regional flavor; perhaps I could not read the door sign or menu promoting a “southern-style” or “east coast” cuisine. Maybe Tokyo had its own style of stir-frying vegetables or making dashi/soup stock. Japanese food had subtle tastes and flavors that did not match my childhood memories. (66)

This first-hand experience of culinary and regional variation makes Masumoto develop an embodied recognition of “the local” that supports his intellectual understanding that cultural norms vary between the country of origin and the diaspora. Likewise, by spending time with his relatives away from Tokyo, the official location of his studies, Masumoto knowingly gives up his sense of U.S. privilege and avoids the perils of “academic
tourism” Marcus Breen warns so much about. As Breen defines it, “[a]cademic tourism is travel that occasions connections with academic programmes whose intended outcomes are the reproduction of existing perspectives on the state of things, against claims for the creation of critical thinking” (84). Because he stays with his family members, helps out with the farming and lives as they do without receiving college credit for it, Masumoto derives the intellectual and cultural benefits of an immersive experience.

Throughout the rest of his memoir, Masumoto often stresses the point that traditions must change in order to stay relevant; such a philosophy seems to have been rooted during the time he spent studying abroad in Japan in both urban (Tokyo) and rural (Kumamoto) settings. When he returns to Berkeley, he does so with an open mind that allows him to embrace first organic ingredients and, eventually, organic farming methods. He shares these new insights with his family by altering the character of the Japanese food they enjoy in a substantial way; he switches from white to brown rice and prepares sushi with his new favorite grain, much to the older generation’s chagrin. While he did not learn to eat this healthy way in Japan proper, his experience of culinary dislocalism abroad made Masumoto more eager to embrace change as a means of updating ethnic traditions for his own generation and for passing down to his own children.

Although David Mas Masumoto has made his literary reputation by singing the praises of the land he so lovingly cultivates, his experience of travel as an undergraduate student has deepened his appreciation of the sacrifices his immigrant grandparents made in order for him to enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities he has now as a fully enfranchised Japanese American farmer. Although local in emphasis, his vision of agriculture and locavorism is global in scope. Masusmoto’s personal account of successful and productive international education experiences should motivate others to consider such opportunities for personal, intellectual, and gastronomic fulfillment, to say nothing of the benefits this global outlook has had in furthering his career, as a high profile advocate of organic farming and mindful stewardship of the land in the global food system.

Works cited:
Breen, Marcus. “Privileged Migration: American Undergraduates, Study Abroad, Academic Tourism.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 26.1 (2012):.
Masumoto, David Mas. Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

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June 13, 2013 · 3:26 pm
May 21, 2013 · 12:12 pm

Cooking off the first

Describing Eddie Huang’s memoir, Fresh Off the Boat (2013), with the adjectives “culinary” or “foodie” would be to needlessly limit the scope of a text that seeks to speak for a generation of young adults of color who grew up listening to gangsta rap, and for whom pumped up kicks and street wear represent the height of fashion. Placing too much importance on the fact that this book grew out of Mr. Huang’s eponymous blog would likewise be ill advised, especially since such a comparison would have the unfortunate, but inevitable, result of implying that this raw, and urgent memoir has anything in common with Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes,1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (2005), the formulaic blog-to-book product that inspired the charming movie adaptation, Julie & Julia (2009), penned by Nora Ephron. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Huang is a proud heir of Anthony Bourdain’s brand of bad-boy-chef school of writing (which also includes the testosterone-fueled tone of most contributions to the food magazine Lucky Peach, published by David Chang, the Korean American chef and leader of the Momofuku restaurant empire, whom Huang sees as something of a nemesis). Whereas Chang and his literary ilk devote the majority of their waking hours to thoughts of food—how best to cook, eat, butcher, forage, prepare, and experiment with it–Eddie Huang is at pains to explain that his restaurant, Baohaus, is not the defining achievement of his life but, rather, represents one of his many driving passions. This becomes most obvious when, towards the end of the book, he declares in no uncertain terms that the topic that impels him to write is not his love of good food but, rather, something closer to home: race.

My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America. How can something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness.  It was race. It was race. It was race. (249)

This revelation appears in the closing chapter of the memoir, but it should come as no surprise to attentive readers, who will have noticed plenty of foreshadowing scattered throughout the preceding chapters. I read Huang’s choice to maintain the placement of this epiphany at the end of the memoir, where it fits in chronologically, rather than editing the entire manuscript so that it gains more cohesion as a treatise on the lived experiences of racialized subjects in America, as a reflection of his commitment to use a prose style that rings true to his peers. This quest for an authentic voice is yet another constant throughout the memoir. It belies Huang’s self-professed appreciation of canonical literary and philosophical texts such as Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Modest Proposal (1726) which, coincidentally, proposes cannibalism of children as a tongue-in-cheek solution to alleviating poverty in Ireland; his understanding of Hamlet and other Shakespearean drama; and his solidarity with W.E. B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison as fellow writers of color. Although Eddie Huang’s memoir aspires to an urban, rather than academic readership, he does give props to influential professors who took him to task for getting by on the substance, rather than the style, of his writing.  This book, therefore, reflects a conscious literary aesthetic that effectively conveys his anger, frustration, and, finally, the pride he finally takes on growing up as a Chinese American “rotten banana” in Orlando, and coming of age in New York.

More than anything, though, I contend that the kitchen still provides the most accurate vocabulary through which to understand the project that Mr. Huang is up to with the publication of his memoir. Despite his disclaimer, he often resorts to culinary or food imagery even when discussing race, as is the case when he describes arriving at a new school:

When I walked on to the school bus, I saw a bunch of preppy rich white kids, but there was also a Cuban girl; Neal, the big Jordanian; the Palestinians Maali and Muhrad; the Dominican Easy Eric; and me, “Chino.” From jump, I knew the diversity at Dr. Phillips would be good for me even if it came in the Sizzler Buffet one-of-each format. (92)

Thus, the title of this blog entry, which refers to the process of parboiling a piece of meat in order to remove any trace of what Mr. Huang calls alternatively its “funkiness” or its “stink”.  Huang first mentions this cooking technique when discussing his introduction to cooking at the hands of the Haitian cooks who worked at his father’s steakhouse restaurant in Orlando, Cattleman’s. He first acknowledges that he learned how to cook ribs from the (unnamed) Haitian cooks, then defines the cooking technique for his non-foodie readers in a footnote, citing it as proof of a shared set of assumptions or values across overlapping, but distinct, diasporas (Asian and African), before finally disavowing it altogether as “the wrong way” or “knowing there was something off, and then learning to do it the right way” (142).  Huang cites this particular insight as his first significant culinary epiphany.

He discusses the concept of preparing flesh for long cooking by getting rid of its gaminess again when trying to decide how best to prepare the skirt steak he wanted to braise à la Mao’s red cooked pork, a dish he then submitted for consideration to earn the chance to be featured Food Network’s Ultimate Recipe Showdown. In a paragraph that recalls Huang’s earlier description of the stark differences in his parents’ respective outlooks on life in general, Eddie contrasts each of their traditional approaches to making Mao’s red braise. Huang starts by describing his mother’s version:

My mom and her family were from the north so they’d do a braise that started by throwing out the first. The pork was always flash-boiled until gray, leaving behind bubbles of gray blood in the pot. (237)

Although more than once Huang acknowledges the immense debt he owes his mother for teaching him to cook at home, in this instance he actually chooses his father’s technique for red cooking, adapting it to skirt steak:

My dad’s side did Mao’s style red cooked pork since they were from Hunan. They would cook the first by searing the pork and preferred using pork belly over shank or shoulder. (237)

Long story short, Eddie comes up with his own twist to Mao’s favorite dish and, while not winning the “showdown,” he does find a career path as a restaurant owner that not only aligns him with his heritage—as the son of a restaurateur—but perhaps most importantly, it allows him to hire like-minded people who enjoy Taiwanese street food (baos) but do not necessarily want to work in the restaurant business forever.

The traumatic events preceding this professional epiphany— whether it was fighting over racial slurs, selling drugs, being thrown in jail, or hustling to keep his streetwear company afloat —constitute Eddie Huang’s own version of “cooking off” or “throwing out” his very own “first,” the anger and frustration he grew up with as an Asian American kid in the South.  While the events chronicled in Fresh Off the Boat may best be understood through this culinary metaphor, Eddie’s final realization that his personal calling is to start a national and frank conversation on contemporary race relations in an America that is most definitely not post-racial takes us all beyond the kitchen, and into the public arena of civics. Whether this gamble pays off by sparking a new national dialogue that goes beyond the use of empty slogans like “diversity” and gets to the heart of the matter in figuring out how to foster mutual understanding and appreciation of the cultural richness that people who are still “fresh off the boat” continue to impart upon us all, remains to be seen.

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May 16, 2013 · 1:27 pm

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book as the Fulfillment of the Couple’s Writerly Ambitions

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book

In what is arguably the best known expatriate culinary memoir of the twentieth century, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), Gertrude Stein’s widow offers a “mingling of recipe and reminiscence” for American readers to emulate. The California-raised daughter of Polish immigrants, Alice B. Toklas traveled to France after the San Francisco earthquake in 1907. Once she met and fell in love with Gertrude Stein, Toklas decided to make France her home permanently. The two women parlayed their romantic and professional partnership into a carefully crafted joint public persona as a couple, a phenomenon that has recently become more mainstream through the popular or celebrity media practice of blending the first names of partners involved in high profile or celebrity “supercouples” to arrive at a portmanteau word which serves as a joint moniker, such as Bennifer, TomKat, or Brangelina. While such naming conventions were not in vogue when either Stein or Toklas was writing, I argue that they nonetheless pioneered the concept of the supercouple by constantly referring to their status as domestic partners in public and private life, and using the first person plural “we” and “our” more often than the first person singular in their correspondence and published writing.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), may be the earliest, most intricate and most high-profile articulation of their joint identity; this text first suggests the possibility that Alice could earn a living as a writer at some future time. In a three paragraph sequence leading up to the book’s denouement, the revelation that Gertrude Stein, and not the titular character, is the actual author of the Autobiography, the “narrative voice” of Alice B. Toklas claims that, unlike American novelist Ford Maddox Ford, a family friend who takes turns being a “pretty good” writer, an editor and a businessman, she/the narrating Alice manages multiple obligations simultaneously:

I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author. (no pg #, Kindle version)

Interestingly, being a “cook” is not among the multiple occupations at which the narrative voice of Alice B. Toklas claims to be “pretty good”. This silence regarding her skills in the kitchen seems all the more striking for all the attention paid to the meals the couple consumes and feeds to their famous friends, both at their Saturday night salons in Paris, as well as in their summer place in Provence. Since Alice B. Toklas’ refined palate was legendary in its sophistication even at this early date, and especially given that gastronomy is an ongoing theme throughout the Autobiography, this omission is rather comical.
Such was the strength of Alice B. Toklas’ culinary prowess, that it even suffused their intimates’ sense of the couple’s household as being one large, extended kitchen instead of a grand atelier. In the chapter he dedicates to discussing Gertrude Stein in Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-11930 (1931), Edmund Wilson quotes novelist Sherwood Anderson, a frequent guest of the Stein-Toklas household, whose own “imaginative energies” lead him to conflate the two women into the one public persona of “Miss Stein”, in an interesting projection of a male fantasy of domestic bliss:

In the great kitchen of my fanciful world in which I[ see] Miss Stein standing, there is a most sweet and gracious aroma. Along the walls are many shining pots and pans, and there are innumerable jars of fruits, jellies, and preserves. Something is going on in the great room, for Miss Stein is a worker in words with the same loving touch in her strong fingers that was characteristic of the women in the kitchens of the brick houses in the town of my boyhood. She is an American woman of the old sort, one who cares for the hand-made goodies and who scorns the factory-made foods, and in her own great kitchen she is making something with her materials, something sweet to the tongue and fragrant to the nostrils. (Axel’s Castle 201)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar read this mouthwatering scenario as Anderson’s sexist reaffirmation of traditional gender roles, not only because he situates Stein, who does not cook, in an imaginary kitchen but also, presumably, because he explicitly compares her approach to writing to the manual labor of both hired cooks and of the unacknowledged Alice. I prefer to read this passage as an example of how successful these women were in promoting a joint public persona.

Stein returns to the idea that Alice B. Toklas should become an author with the publication of Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), the decidedly more experimental, less commercial follow-up to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Writing in her own inimitable voice, Stein recalls an exchange with a fellow traveler on board during the return voyage after the lecture tour of the United States during the mid-1930s. This passage constitutes the first reference to Alice B. Toklas’ alleged desire to write not just a book, but a cook book some day:

On the Champlain it was not exciting, we were still celebrated of course but we were soon across the ocean and back again, there was one nice American who told Alice Toklas that she was going to have a career that would soon be beginning, and that I would go on succeeding, we wondered what the career of Alice Toklas was going to be and when it was to begin and then it almost began she decided to write a cook book and if she did the career would begin and she will but she has not yet had time, naturally enough who can and of course this she would not let me do for her and with reason. (Everybody’s Autobiography 305)

This passage may be just another instance of what Gilbert and Gubar call Stein’s “lesbian doubletalk” which they claim she developed in the poem, “Lifting Belly,” where Stein deploys the couple’s collective voice to “re-enact yet ridicule the hierarchies that structure the heterosexual marriage even as they release imaginative energies” (No Man’s Land 188). However, in the passage I examine, Stein’s imaginative energy goes so far as to portray Alice as an independent, self-determining, desiring agent who not only “decided” to undertake such a project but also denies her lover the authority to act as literary ventriloquist a second time, “with reason”. The source of such confidence is not the stranger’s prognostication but, I would argue, the self-same culinary expertise to which the “narrative voice” of the Alice B. Toklas from the Autobiography lays claim. In any event, time is the ever-present foe which thwarts the writerly ambition of both Stein’s 1933 and 1937 literary projections of Alice B. Toklas; it is not until Gertrude Stein’s death in 1946, that the historical Alice B. Toklas takes steps to fulfill this joint ambition of having a career writing cookbooks.

When she does take it upon herself to put pen to paper and recreate the meals she and her beloved shared in France for the enjoyment and pleasure of her American (and British) reading audiences, Toklas contradicts the easy and confident tone which Stein ascribed to her fictional narrative voice early in the Autobiography. Stein’s version of Toklas takes ownership of her personal expertise in the kitchen; to her presumably lay readers, Stein’s Toklas defends her use of the culinary allusions to explain her understanding of how artists conduct their work: “I do inevitably take my comparisons from the kitchen because I like food and cooking and know something about it” (no page numbers, Kindle version!) Ironically, the historical Toklas herself addresses her American and British readers more complexly, simultaneously leveling the playing field by declaring herself an expert in the kitchen who is addressing an imagined community of peers “As cook to cook” (xi), while also confessing that her ascendance to that role coincided with her relationship with Gertrude Stein: “Before coming to Paris I was interested in food but not in doing any cooking. When in 1908 I went to live with Gertrude Stein at the rue the Fleurus she said we would have American food for Sunday-evening supper, she had enough French and Italian cooking; the servant would be out and I should have the kitchen to myself” (29). Toklas ascribes the rise of her interest in domestic matters to a double displacement occasioned by love: through her involvement with a beloved who is employed abroad (Gertrude Stein), she becomes separated from the United States, her country of origin, and cast adrift from her own identity as a professional except in relation to the beloved. Cooking or the task of overseeing the preparation of meals, thus, become acceptable ways through which Toklas and the women who follow in her footsteps perform their identity as “Americans” for and with their beloved.

Alice B. Toklas’ self-titled Cookbook displays a wealth of hard-earned, accumulated culinary knowledge, most of it hers, but not exclusively so but also serves as a work of mourning: it pays tribute to the long and happy union that was the inspiration for Toklas to finally fulfill the writerly aspiration her beloved envisioned for her.

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Filed under Cook Books, Culinary Kunstlerroman, Memoirs with Recipes, Modernism

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