Did exotic food literature just replace the summer novel?

The mescal night inspires you to get up on an early Sunday morning, hot Texas sun shining, making you crazier than the hangover. You hear yourself gasp, “¡Menudo! ¡Mama Menudo!” You must go to La Paloma Café and wave your pained face over a big steaming bowl of hot, quivering chunks of menudo. It is an emergency. Your soul calls for it, prays to it, waits for the red spirit of the menudo God to bless you and save you from the big mescal death.
-Ray Gonzalez, “Mama Menudo.”

The subject faces her doppelgänger in Edward Hopper's Chop Suey (1929).

He who eats alone chokes alone.
—Arab proverb

There is C.S. Lewis on Turkish Delight. Gabriel García Márquez on that cleansing scent of asparagus in urine. Dr. Seuss has an exotic dish called Green Eggs and Ham. And this week, our generation’s Archie Bunker went to China:

As far as I know there wasn’t a menu. Rather, the family worked at their convenience, with whatever was handy or in season. There was a rooster parading around the backyard and then there just wasn’t. After the cook had slit its throat, he used it as the base for five separate dishes, one of which was a dreary soup with two feet, like inverted salad tongs, sticking out of it. Nothing else was nearly as recognisable.

Thus another shot of exotic food literature is fired across the summer novel’s bow. David Chang and McSweeney’s have used the summer to introduce a new food quarterly called Lucky Peach. Kim Dickens seems to have left Treme for an ever-deepening parallel gastronomic rabbit hole in New York. There’s a strawberry on the cover of Lapham’s Quartlerly, which arrived yesterday in the mail.

In LQ Food, writers ranging from Homer to Hunter S. Thompson dine in ancient Sparta, tenth century China, and present-day LA. In 1876, Charles M. Doughty lit out upon the hajj with a caravan of Muslims, the first European to travel so far into the Arab world. (The precursor, perhaps, to David Sedaris’s China trip.) He recounts a feast of porcupine:

They find his earth like a rabbit burrow and with a stick knock him on the head. An equal portion of this (the Arabs’ religious goodness) was divided to all in the kella. The porcupine is not flayed, the gelatinous skin may be eaten with the flesh, which has a fishy odor. They boiled the meat, and everyone after supper complained of heartburning, I only felt nothing.

Twenty years ago, Jason Goodwin walked across Eastern Europe to Istanbul. The eating had been plain, until he reached the capital. He learns about a fifteenth-century grand vizier, who put real gold chickpeas in the pilaf (“like sixpence in the Christmas pudding”), and recounts the hazy origins of Ottoman cuisine:

Off the Eurasian steppe, where they lived as nomads, the Turks took yogurt and cheese, and many traditions of bread, brushing up against the Chinese empire to adopt manti, or dumplings. As they moved through the Middle East, they encountered the sophisticated cuisine of Persia, considered the France of the East. The cookery writer and historian Ayla Algar reckons the Ottomans’ meat and fruit stews, as well as their vegetable stews or yahni, to represent that inheritance. Kebab is a word of Persian origin, as is pilaf: it’s hard to believe that kebab was not already grilled by nomads, but rice was cultivated in Iran and the rest of the Middle East, not on the steppes; it is thought by some to have been a benign inheritance from the Mongols, who from the borders of China devastated much of the Middle East in the thirteenth century.

As always, LQ’s packed with palate perfect infographics, including a sampling of global dos and don’ts, present and historic. Do: arrive an hour late for dinner (Japanese), drink as much as possible at a banquet (ancient Mongols), smash a glass after a particularly strong toast (Russians), roll back your right sleeve and say “In God’s name!” before eating (Arabs). Don’t: wipe your hands on your hair after eating fish (Salish American Indians), allow a woman to eat with a spoon (Kagoro tribe, Nigeria), bring yellow flowers to a dinner (Bulgarians).

Yellow flowers symbolize hatred.

"The magazine doesn't assume you know who Juan Mari Arzak is, but it assumes the reader can make an informed guess that he's an über-respected, extraordinarily talented chef," said Chris Ying, Lucky Peach's editor-in-chief.

There are equal layers of cross-cultural symbolism in Chang’s new food journal. “Lucky Peach” translates into Japanese as “Momofuku,” which is the name of Chang’s East Village restaurant, and also the first name of the inventor of instant ramen noodles. Ramen is the theme of the inaugural issue. In the issue, Ruth Reichl (also in the current LQ) compares instant-ramen products. John T. Edge introduces a New Orleans dish called ya ka mein (“Seventh-Ward Ramen”). Anthony Bourdain (also in LQ) tackles Ramen Cinema:

“Observe the bowl,” says a noodle-obsessed master in of many near pornographically descriptive scenes of ramen in broth. “Concentrate on the pork.” Look at the “jewels of fat” on the surface, he advises a young acolyte. But do not eat the pork. Not yet. It “must stay modestly hidden” for now. “Caress the surface,” he continues, as the audience squirms with desire, “to express affection.” “Poke the pork. But do not eat it!” One must “apologize to the pork…put it on the side, say “see you soon!”

Bourdain is the intriguing connection point in all this. His journalism crisscrosses back and forth with Chang’s own emerging media identity. Bourdain even pitches in as a Treme guest blogger, explaining the arc that takes Janette Desautel (played by Kim Dickens) from New Orleans through several New York kitchens:

Desautel’s “breakthrough” dishes: the amazing fried chicken and, what will undoubtedly become her signature, “shrimp and grits” are in fact creations of Chang. Chang, too, is from the South, and he and Desautel seemed a good mix…Chang really pioneered the kind of fine-food-in-a-casual-environment thing in New York City — along with a fearless mash-up of low-end comfort with high-end techniques and ingredients and influences from all over. If the mission was to get Desautel to New York for a season, only for her to return to New Orleans at the end, we wanted to both “rough her up” a little bit and watch her learn important things. We wanted her to pick up something valuable from each chef and each kitchen she worked in in New York and synthesize her experiences into some kind of a breakthrough — a way to her own personal style — which she would, of course, then take back to New Orleans.

Chang’s acting highlight comes in a scene after a vegetarian “freaked out because the broth wasn’t totally veg.” In response, he decides to change the menu. “Fuck her,” he says. “Starting tomorrow, let’s put pork in every fucking dish.”

There is a strong possibility that Chang is not acting.

And if you still haven’t given Treme a try, consider the Vietnamese Fishing Community in New Orleans (as you caress your bowl of Seventh-Ward Ramen):

“More than 30 percent of Gulf Coast fishers are Vietnamese Americans. That’s true for various reasons,” Nguyen said. “Most of the Vietnamese Americans came to America as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War. Initially, the reason for them settling in the area was Bishop Dominic. He sent out an announcement saying he was going to build a church here. Most of the refugees left Vietnam because of religious persecution because they were Catholic. The Vietnamese community is at once integrated into and separate from New Orleans…to get a sense of how thoroughly the community has been integrated into the broader New Orleans community, consider the election of Joseph Cao, the first Vietnamese-American member of Congress; or take a walk on the campus of Xavier University, a historically black, Catholic college, which has see the numbers of its Vietnamese consistently increase; or note how often New Orleanians suggest Vietnamese food when the subject of dining options comes up.”

It all comes back to a more exotic dining. And what happens as that dining finds new contexts. Or as Sedaris concludes:

“… the rest of the world isn’t like America, where it’s become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn’t eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant, or can’t digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won’t touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.”

Tags: David Chang, Food, Lapham's Quarterly, Lucky Peach, Ramen, Treme McSweeney's