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miércoles, 19 de agosto de 2026
Daniel Mendelsohn on “Unrequited Love” Starts in Two Weeks
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‘The Perfect Little Chop’
Sponsored by University of California Press 
Niko Pirosmani: Still Life, ca. 1900s Of all the disputes in the letters page of the Review’s May 20, 1965, issue, on subjects that ranged from the state of contemporary poetry to the causes of the Baghdad Pact, the longest and most detailed was over the proper preparation of Swiss fondue. The previous month, in a review of several American cookbooks, the food writer Michael Field had excoriated Fannie Farmer’s niece, Wilma Lord Perkins, for expanding her aunt’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook with “technically inaccurate and historically incorrect” French dishes, including a Swiss fondue “made with one pound of Swiss cheese melted in 3/4 of a cup of white wine (or vermouth!).” That, he argued, was an entirely “excessive amount of cheese,” probably too much to melt into the wine in the first place. When a representative of the book’s publisher defended the recipe in a letter to the editor, Field responded by quoting, in full, the specifications of the Switzerland Cheese Association, which called for an extra clove of garlic and more than twice as much wine. (And, needless to say, no optional vermouth.) 
Advertisement Cookbooks, in the Review’s archive, have always been serious business. “With certain very rare exceptions,” Alexander Cockburn wrote in 1977, they “almost by definition try to appropriate the past, at least those bits of it that seem palatable. And so usually they become versions of pastoral, with the urban masticator being whisked into a world where kitchen and garden co-exist in harmonious union instead of being mediated by the Safeway, the can, the freezer, and the poison list on the back of every package.” Cockburn, a prolific journalist who three years earlier had written a long essay for the Reviewon the Senate Watergate Report, found a kind of great-power politics in the postwar competition for culinary hegemony between French and English rustic cookbooks; Julia Child’s ascendence in the US was, as he put it, “France’s revenge for the Marshall Plan.” 
Cornelis Dusart: Kitchen Scene, 1687 By the start of the following decade the byword in American cookbooks was “elegance,” as Diane Johnson wrote in 1982. “Why is it,” she asked, “that people suddenly want to eat elegantly rather than heartily or to provide aesthetic nourishment alone? More significantly, why do they wish to inflict elegance on their friends?” All these elegant, minimal, restrained recipes, she concluded, amounted to “a mood of conspicuous nonconsumption more akin, perhaps, to Proposition 13 or the Reagan vote, a reaction to abundance and indulgence. Sated by plenty, we search instead for perfection and control. The perfect little chop.” 
Advertisement In the Review’s food writing, ideology critique has always shared space with tributes to masters of the cookbook form. Elizabeth David, wrote Ingrid Rowland in 1996, distinguished herself by “the thoughtfulness and depth of her cookbooks…. Far more than collections of recipes, they are really treatises on human civility.” Jacques Pépin, wrote Danny M. Lavery in 2023, made an art of “overlooking nothing, ensuring that everything is turned to account, without ever reducing cooking to a joyless, utilitarian exercise.” Fuchsia Dunlop, wrote Leslie T. Chang in 2025, became “the voice of a more authentic past” for her readers in China by making it her mission to study “traditional ways of eating and living” from across the country and “to taste the dishes as if for the first time.” Periodically the Review’s food writers have entered a retrospective mode of their own. “Just because you grow up on bad food,” Tony Judt opened a short memoir-essay from 2010, “it does not follow that you lack nostalgia for it.” His mother, he went on, had “occasional encounters, via my father’s friends in the Socialist Party of Great Britain, with vegetarians and vegans,” which “taught her the virtues of brown bread, brown rice, green beans, and other ‘healthy’ staples of an Edwardian left-wing diet. But she could no more cook brown rice than she could have prepared ‘chop suey.’ And so she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.” 
Georg Flegl: Still Life, ca. 1625–1630 The East Village of the 1970s had its own share of overboiled cooking, but it was a fried dish that had a central place in the food critic Robert Sietsema’s memoir of the neighborhood’s bygone restaurant scene last December for the NYR Online. Standing “directly in the front window” of a focacceria on First Avenue, he recalled, would be an “old man in an apron…behind a flat-top griddle bubbling with grease,” frying slices of cheese and thin cuts of spleen. Then, Sietsema wrote, he would “take both and put them on a small round roll smeared with fresh ricotta, glowing white like new-fallen snow.” Possibly the most indelible food memory from the Review archives comes from M.F.K. Fisher. Into her 1980 review of Calvin W. Schwabe’s Unmentionable Cuisine, a guidebook for learning to eat “beasts and insects” usually off-limits in Western dining, Fisher slipped several anecdotes of her own encounters, over the years, with dishes that tested her fortitude:
George S. Harris & Sons: Dressed Beef/Ground Hog, from the Jokes series, ca. 1891 
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Michael Field
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