Gotham Gastronomy

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Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Book Review: History In A Glass

I am sucker for the impulse buy. For example, I arrived at a Memorial Day party bearing not just the prerequisite grillables, but also a cylinder of Normandy Butter because the latter is so tasty that I simply could not leave the market without it. Said lack of restraint manifests itself in the realm of books most frequently. So, when I stopped into Shakes & Co. to pick up a greeting card, it is was no surprise that exited with Ruth Reichl's latest.
Reichl is a grande dame amongst food writers, having served as restaurant critic for the New York Times in the nineties, before departing to helm Gourmet magazine. Unfortunately, her name's prominent positioning on the cover of History In A Glass was a bit misleading; in fact, Reichl did not pen the volume. Rather, she penned an introduction, and "edited" the work.
All the same, I was please with what I found. History In A Glass is a compilation of wine writing from Gourmet spanning the last sixty years.
The anthology offers all sorts of novelties which are delightful. A 1953 piece on dandelion wine by, scifi sultan, Ray Bradbury reads more like a short story from The Martian Chronicles than a n expository piece, but then again who cares? I really harbor no interest in making weeds into wine anyway! However, the writing is a joy to read. Likewise, many of the pieces within the book must be embraced as fun anecdotes or literary victory laps, not stared down as poor pedagogy.
However, historical significance is also quite present. The author list is littered with names like James Beard, Frederick Wildman, and Hugh Johnson, not to mention equally significant, but less familiar apellations such as Frank Schoonmaker and Gerald Asher. The volume presents the opportunity to understand why these titans became titans, not to mention the experience of reading some phenomenal food writing! The pleasure here is less a [product of education and more a sheer mastery of the language.
When one reads these writings, they realize how excellent our elders were especially compared with the crap in Wine Specullum (or in the blogosphere.) Here is a perfect segue to the last offering of the book which is a cross section of history. The act of reading American wine writing from such a long spectrum of time allows us to note how our nation's diction, as well as our views of wine have evolved... or how complex and non-impulsive our epistemology truly is!

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