‘The Perfect Little Chop’

A Feast from the Archives ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

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: Mr. Schwabe says that cats’ eyes were served in the last century in China, and he gives a French recipe for stuffed calves’ eyes. Well, I’ve spent about twenty years in France, and the nearest I ever came to meeting an eye on the table was in 1930, when my penurious landlady presented her boarders with half a calf’s head, vinaigrette, and not a whole one. It lay palely on a white platter, and its one large sad faded eye looked upward, not at our human faces but far beyond us. We were not afraid, being young, and ate heartily. George S. Harris & Sons: Dressed Beef/Ground Hog, from the Jokes series, ca. 1891         Advertisement   The Review à la Carte Michael Field Gospels of American Cooking “Throughout the years these three books have sold millions of copies and might be considered the culinary trinity upon which, for better or worse, the gospel of American cooking has been built.” Alexander Cockburn Gastro-Porn “In keeping with the pastoral genre, many cookbooks are in fact moral tracts about gastronomic good behavior in which the reader-consumer’s best strategy is to fall into line without too much fuss. Sometimes, in a confusion of genres, amateur cookbook writers attempt a jocose tone, hoping to inveigle the reader into a shared ritual.” Diane Johnson The Flight of the Bumble Bee “Elegance implies stylishness, beauty, and expense; it has associations of status and social aspiration, but does not particularly evoke warmth, hospitality, delicious taste, or nourishment. Rather the reverse. An “elegant” diner is pictured wearing a fed-up expression. She is very thin. An “elegant” table is photographed before the food is placed on it. But why is it that people suddenly want to eat elegantly rather than heartily or to provide aesthetic nourishment alone?” Ingrid D. Rowland The Empress of Ice Cream If fire is the Promethean gift that first made us civilized, ice is a bewildering opposite; it has been tamed only by civilizations so advanced into decadence that they can warp the seasons. Daniel M. Lavery Coq au Pépin More than almost any other public figure, Jacques Pépin has followed the trajectory of twentieth-century cuisine, from the Hôtel Plaza Athénée to Howard Johnson’s, and from his Burgundy backyard to national television. Leslie T. Chang At the Chinese Table To understand the Chinese through their culinary history is to see them in their best lights—as inventive, adaptable, egalitarian, and open-minded. Robert Sietsema When the Spleen Ran Out Memories of East Village restaurants, circa 1977 M. F. K. Fisher Yuk! “A few people whom I’ve subjected to his book, an acid test of their stomachs and perhaps their minds, have said flatly that they hope they never have to meet the man. I myself would like to, in spite of my awe of real fanatics, especially if they also happen to be world-famous scientists. This one’s steady and extremely serious belief is that we are shunning and actually destroying valuable sources of high protein because of our regional and religious prejudices. And our private as well as conditioned revulsions rise to the top when we read his maliciously calm directives about the preparation, in other cultures, of things we have always thought disgusting, without ever asking ourselves who told us to.” Tony Judt Food I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other delicacies of British home cooking. These my mother scorned as somehow unhealthy…. So she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.   New Subscriber Benefit! Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles.   Special Offer Subscribe for just $1 an issue Get the deal Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. Update your address or preferences View this newsletter online The New York Review of Books 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305     Preferences  |  Unsubscribe