»The Man Who Ate Everything

Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything, a collection of his essays on food (which have won him accolades and prizes, and prompted me to wish that I too were a food(ie) writer) is thought-provoking and workmanlike. His prose does not suffer from elegance, but has an abundance of fact as well as attitude. The combination may in party be due his audience: he is the food writer for Vogue magazine.

Several of his pieces on potatoes and frying made me think a lot (a lot more, I suppose) about frites, French fries, et al., and how I wish I had taken a photograph of the Sausmeester place in Amsterdam, because, gee, I take photographs of damn near everything anyway.
I cannot wait until Deep Friday at work, when we are going to sizzle everything in sight.

I eat everything (kind of). I draw the line at many packaged foods, especially those containing preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and similar branches of all evil (evil is so deracinated these days!). I think of prepared ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard -- perfunctory condiments, I suppose -- as the items I will not eat. I think that the one time I blanched at a dish for what it was rather than the quality of the ingredients was the afternoon I discovered that andouille is French for "tripe", not for "spicy Cajun-style sausage". More recently, I was unmoved by the ginkgos in a dish at the Slanted Door last week, and pushed them to the side of the plate. Although I have strong sentimental (and negative) associations with the