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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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martes, 18 de agosto de 2026
‘The Perfect Little Chop’
sábado, 15 de agosto de 2026
From the Horse’s Mouth
Sponsored by The Workers Circle In 2013, shortly after I gave birth to my daughter, the Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly sent me a copy of My Dirty Dumb Eyes, by Lisa Hanawalt. Her art and writing made me laugh out loud through the mire of postpartum depression, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. So this June I direct-messaged her to ask if she might draw the cover for our Summer Issue; to my delight, she accepted. In an early sketch, Hanawalt included some made-up coverlines, which I wished were real: Jessipa Jonesky: Talking to Ghosts at the Local Diner; Allain St. Brewing: Donkeys, Doorknobs, and Dubrivnik; Chilm Timbers: Where Did I Put My Car Keys?; Cindy Chomps: Ballet on the Playground; Santiago Biggle: Kafka’s Lost Poems; Bageta Suzsmith: Trick-or-Treat in Outerspace; Verily Spivak: I’m Too Cold to Go Swimming; Omar Meerkowtow: High School Dances and Broadway Revivals. 
Lisa Hanawalt Hanawalt’s genius, I think, is in her evocation of the bodily and disembodied absurdities of being human and animal at the same time. She is best known as the creator of the television series BoJack Horseman (2014–2020), about a depressed horse-man, which Adam Thirlwell called, enthusiastically, “an opioid version” of Ibsen in our August 20, 2020, issue. She followed BoJack with the series Tuca and Bertie (2019–2022), which makes my now teenage daughter crack up. In addition to My Dumb Dirty Eyes, Hanawalt has also written and illustrated the books Hot Dog Taste Test (2016) and Coyote Doggirl (2018), and she illustrated the children’s book Benny’s Brigade (2012). Hanawalt lives in Los Angeles, where she rides her horse, Juniper. Her graphic memoir, I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, will publish in October. I wrote to her last month to ask about writing, her childhood, and her sense of humor. 
Advertisement Leanne Shapton: What were you like as a child? What did you grow up looking at? Lisa Hanawalt: I was always daydreaming and drawing during class, fully embodied in my fursonas at all times, afraid to shit, shy, hyper, tomboyish, and crushing on boys. I grew up looking at Bambi, Garfield, Lisa Simpson, and the Guns N’ Roses music video for “November Rain.” Do you write as much as you draw, or do they happen simultaneously? I think it’s an even, fifty-fifty split, but I am more confident drawing. With writing, I never quite feel like I’m nailing it. It’s crazy to hear you say you don’t think you nail your writing. You’re so adept at folly and phrasing and dialogue. What are some books you’ve been reading or rereading? I’ve been having an attack of bad attention span (self- and Meta-inflicted) and need to lock in, but I’ve been slowly reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it’s a hoot! A gothic hoot! I have also been returning to Laurie Colwin’s books, especially Happy All the Time. I just love how she writes about crabby, weird, horny women. 
Lisa Hanawalt: Draft for New York Review cover So where did the image on the Review’s cover come from? I drew it in my sketchbook, lying on my couch, staring out the window at night, while watching The Truman Show. Your writing and dialogue tend to be sophisticated and sly—unselfconsciously funny—while at the same time sincere and heartfelt. Where does your sense of humor come from? My family is funny, I’m drawn to class clowns, and I watch and read a lot of comedy, so by osmosis I’m kinda funny too. Humor is also one of the best, least self-destructive coping mechanisms for pain and depression…not to get too serious. 
Advertisement What comedy have you been watching or reading? For example, I’m curious if you’ve read Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. I loved Rejection so much, I drew some fan art and mailed it to Tony (I never do stuff like that). He’s the king. He also wrote the funniest “Grub Street Diet” entry ever. Sam Irby recently wrote a blog post called “How to Stay Married” that I can’t stop thinking about. I saw the comedian Steph Tolev open for Stavros Halkias at the Wiltern, in LA, and my face hurt from laughing, she’s so wildly lewd. Both of them were incredible. Sandy Honig made a short film, The Weird Guy, last year that is so funny and also gorgeously shot. I also really enjoyed her episode of Caleb Hearon’s podcast So True. I love watching the improv show Make Some Noise, on the Dropout network. Brittani Nichols wrote a short substack post about how she doesn’t have writer’s block that made me laugh a lot. (Same here, I don’t have that.) Is there an animal pun you never found a use for in BoJack that you’d like to put somewhere? Punwise, I didn’t feel too reined in on BoJack. If I was champing at the bit to use a joke somewhere, I could usually find a place to trot it out! So, to answer your question…neight really. What traditions (visually and verbally) do you think your work follows, if any? Storytelling in the oldest sense, like people telling fables around a fire and drawing stuff on cave walls. What’s your relationship with the publishers Drawn and Quarterly like? I’ve done five books with them (including the upcoming I Can’t Stop Thinking About Sex and Horses! Out this Fall! Plug!!)—we have a lot of mutual trust and they give me a lot of creative freedom, and because we’ve signed a sacred blood bond. As a young, I didn’t pay much attention to or understand what comics publishers did, and I didn’t know their blood oath rituals required so much blood! (This is a joke, I’m joking) I’m interested in nonverbal communication. How do you communicate with the horses in your life? I talk to my horse, smell her breath, and scratch her back until I get manure under my nails. I feel disembodied from spending too much time on the internet, so this helps ground me and lift my mood. Her name is Juniper and I’m basically using her as an SSRI, so maybe I should have named her “Zoloft.” 
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