Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times

EAT, MEMORY: GREAT WRITERS AT THE TABLE; ed. Amanda Hesser; New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, 2008; 204pp. Nonfiction.

“Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table,” edited by Amanda Hesser, riffs on Nabokov’s
“Speak, Memory” to bring the reader stories by prominent writers about memorable food experiences. As Hesser suggests, “Food is the royal road to the unconscious” and “the most familiar and universal medium of our lives.” Some of these essays are sad, many are funny,
none is “sentimental,” as that was against the rules—in fact, it was the only rule. Julia
Child finds a prominent place here in “The Sauce and the Fury,” where she describes flunking her written exam at the Cordon Bleu because she skipped over the beginner’s pamphlet and went immediately to work on the high-end stuff (“Zut alors, and flûte!”). Ice cream lovers may
be undone by Colson Whitehead’s “I Scream,” where he tells the sad story of losing all interest
in that chilly dessert after three summers of making waffle cones and scooping “the nuclear green sludge of mint chocolate chip” at Big Olaf’s on Long Island. Although the texture and tone of each essay is different from the others, all are surpassingly well written. A tasty treat in more ways than one.

LW