Jeffrey Steingarten has a thing for detail. Open up to any page in his first collection of essays, and you’ll spot the book title at the top of one page and the chapter heading at the top of the other. Flip through the rest of the book though, and you’ll notice that pieces of the title are gradually bitten off, such that what started out as THE MAN WHO ATE EVERYTHING in Part I has progressed to THE MAN WHO ATE EVERYTH (even a corner of the H has been nibbled off) by Part III, until finally, it is just THE MAN WHO ATE by the end of the book in Part V. Steingarten documents his unwavering quest for authenticity and his insatiable appetite for astoundingly good food in The Man Who Ate Everything: And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes and Pleasurable Pursuits. His patience for detail, his childlike curiosity about everything around him and his rigorous standards for historic, cultural and scientific precision serve him well, even if they do occasionally become exhausting for those around him.
It was back in 1989 that Steingarten entered the world of food writing, when the one and only Anna Wintour recruited him away from his career as a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer to fill the post of food critic at American Vogue. He was initially reluctant: “I thought food was too frivolous to write about,” he said, but he could not resist the temptation and soon discovered that food “was the most profound subject you could possibly write about. There is no aspect of human activity it doesn't touch.”
Interestingly, Steingarten’s first assignment was to write about the less-than-profound microwaved fish, trendy at the time among those in the “fashionable world that the rest of us can imitate but never enter.” Three months, two new microwaves and twenty microwave cookbooks later, his piece was complete, published in the March 1998 issue of Vogue and also reprinted in the book, in the chapter entitled “Fish without Fire.” In addition to recounting his numerous attempts at achieving a satisfactorily microwaved piece of fish, the essay includes a history of the invention of the microwave, a scientific explanation of how wavelengths and frequency determine the microwaves’ depth of food penetration and a tip on microwaving your wet Nikes (he cautions, “If you try to get it bone-dry, the rubber parts will bubble up and the instep will smoke and smolder”).
Before beginning at Vogue, Steingarten, like many of his fellow Americans, was burdened with a multitude of “powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating” food phobias, including fears of chutney, coffee ice cream, cranberries, falafel, kimchi, lard, swordfish and the cuisine (he puts quotes around that term) of the entire nation of Greece. He takes it as his journalistic duty to overcome these fears, and so he embarks upon a self-prescribed Six-Step Program, exposing himself to each phobia at least eight to ten times (he read in his research that “most babies will accept nearly anything after eight or ten tries”) and in the process, successfully becoming “a more perfect omnivore.”
A changed man, he devotes much of the first half of his book to dispelling all of the food suspicions Americans use to justify their finicky, irrational eating habits, which, he mourns, have interfered with “the sense of festivity and exchange, of community and sacrament” at mealtime. He weighs the health risk of eating raw oysters against the much higher risk of skiing injuries, tests out rigid fad diets and veganism, explores the scientific research on appetite and hunger, disputes the link between salt and high blood pressure and rails against salad as “the silent killer.” Each topic that Steingarten takes on is thoroughly backed by exhaustive investigation, whether it’s familiarizing himself with the scientific literature, reading classic cookbooks, interviewing leading experts in the field or experimenting furiously in his Manhattan loft.
Following him through his scrupulous study of every food item is grueling at times; not everyone’s eyes can be expected to light up at the mention of the molecular composition of proteins or the parts per million of sulfates found in drinking water. If one does not approach this book as a loose compilation of assorted works, instead expecting, as I did, a coherent, logically-ordered narrative that starts where it began, one can very easily get lost in the first half of the book: Each essay is dated with the month and year but not arranged in chronological order, bulleted lists that Steingarten seems to think excuse him of the need for organized thought are littered throughout the chapters and an only tangentially-relevant essay entitled “Sweet Smell of Sex” is tossed in for good measure.
Luckily, with the first line of Part IV, my confused wandering was transformed into infectious wanderlust: “When I awoke, the morning air was as crisp as bacon and as sweet as liver sausage.” The encyclopedic entries of the first half are left behind as Steingarten embarks on his “Journey of a Thousand Meals,” breathing life back into his book. The wit, elegance and levity hinted at in his writing in the first half come through full force in the second.
In the chapters that follow, Steingarten takes us along as he hunts for truffles in Albaretto della Torre, walks through the Pescheria at the Rialto market in Venice and treats himself to brioche dunked in coffee granita for breakfast at a café in Palermo. The descriptions of the white truffles he experienced in the hill country of Italy alone are dizzying: “plates of tripe and fresh porcini and a tiny green the size of clover, all hidden under paper-thin slices of white truffle,” “a wild-duck breast […] flavored with a sweet sauce of chestnuts and white truffles, and a large onion baked on a bed of salt, scooped out and filled with white truffles, meat broth, pureed onions, and cheese.” The descriptions of the food are tantalizing, the scenery, captivating and the characters, endearing – it feels as if you are sharing every meal right there with him. The obscure facts, tidbits of history and occasional lists evocative of the book’s first half are still there, but these elements are incorporated much more fluidly and thoughtfully. Steingarten makes no compromises in authenticity either, traveling long distances to get to the source to research each gastronomic delight. The value that he places on firsthand experience and hands-on experimentation is apparent. He learns from the men and women creating their local dishes, and he brings the knowledge back with him to New York, tirelessly working on recipes in his home kitchen so that his readers may recreate authentic versions in their own homes.
As serious as he is about his food, Steingarten does not take himself seriously one bit, his self-deprecating humor evident throughout the book. His numerous trips to Paris for dining marathons in the culinary capital’s finest establishments have not put him above digging into succulent barbeque ribs in Memphis or baking the Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake recipe found on the back of the candy bar package. Ultimately, whether he’s frying potatoes in Austrian horse fat, disproving pop-nutritionists, crafting homemade ketchup or perfecting an all-American piecrust, Steingarten is trying desperately to remind Americans how to eat again – to value quality ingredients, to appreciate local cuisines and to preserve time-honored food traditions.
