Sanctuary from The Mad World
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch. - Orson Welles

by Julian Barnes

I guess the new kid in literary town currently is food writing. Used to be chick lit a few years back after the success of “Bridget Jones Diary” but now everyone is into writing about food and cooking. I was surprised when I read that Julian Barnes wrote about food. Even more amazed when, while browsing Amazon.com, I saw a recipe collection by Pat Conroy of “The Prince of Tides” fame. Now we have it all: literary writer cum food writer, lawyer cum food columnist, cook cum writer, captain cum restaurant reviewer.

This book is a collection of short essays written by Julian Barnes (www.julianbarnes.com) who is a well-known literary figure from England. He has tons of awards and nominations including the Somerset Maugham award and two Booker Prize nominations. To be honest, I’ve never read his books because I thought they were boring but Pedant in the kitchen is anything but.

Pedant, in Longman Dictionary, is defined as someone who pays too much attention to rules and details. Barnes discussed the various problems with cookbooks from the point of view of a pedant and, based on his obsessions with preciseness , he dispenses advices. Pedantic nature, I suppose, is actually common in untalented, amateur cooks or beginners who rely heavily in step-by-step cooking manuals. These people (eg. me) are never really sure of what to do and they have been spooked by horror stories such as how reversing step 2 and 3 can be a difference of a thick creamy sauce to a lumpy oatmeal-like sludge. So, I appreciate his sympathy and understanding of the perils of inexact measurements and imprecise instructions to amateur cooks. Read his two particularly useful advises as examples:

1. Tips on buying cookbooks:
page 28: “Never buy a book because of its pictures. Never, ever point at a photo in a cookbook and say, ‘I’m going to make that’. You can’t. I once knew a commercial photographer who specialized in food and, believe me, the post-production work that recently gave us a slimline Kate Winslet is as nothing compared to what they shamelessly do to food. “

2. when to say ‘enough is enough ‘ to instructions from your cookbooks:
page 46: “…. But I did first have to overcome the recipe’s opening sentence: ‘2.5 kg ripe cherry vine tomatoes, halved and seeded.’ So that’s well over five pounds of cherry tomatoes. And how many of the little buggers do you think you get to the pound? I’ll tell you: I’ve just weighed fifteen and they came to four ounces. That’s sixty to the pound. So we’re talking 300, cut in half, 600 halves, juice all over the place, flicking out the seeds 600 times with a knife, worrying about not extracting every single one. All together now: NO, WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO THAT. Leave the seeds in and call it extra roughage. “

Truly useful advices and sympathetic notes such as the above must be picked carefully between pages as they are not too many but do enjoy the writing style. It is superbly British: dry, witty, and a little sarcastic. The essays are written in chatty mode , making me feel as if I were sitting in a friend’s kitchen, a cup of coffee in hand, listening to him rambling about his various cooking disasters. Yet, true to his pedantic nature, the language and description of the events in the essays are crisp and precise.

In short, this is a good book to read for winding down after a hard day at work: it is funny and refreshing and light. It contains short essays so you can go to sleep whenever you are sleepy without feeling like you are waiting in suspense for the ‘who dunnit’. And it is one book about food which doesn’t make you grumble in hunger in the middle of the night.

Written in Feb 2005.