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Lourdes Otero holalou — Not really sure how I feel about this one.

Zeren Joy zerenjoy — A.J. Liebling wrote press criticism for the New Yorker in the 40s and 50s; I’m told that these writings are the apex of the subgenre, better than his writing on boxing and food. His writing in Between Meals, essays about his year spent in Paris in the 20s, learning how to eat and drink, is very good. He’s an excellent storyteller. His style is also crusty and quaint, like an artifact unearthed from an archeological dig. It is helpful in reading this book to suspect vaguely what a perihelion or prestidigitation might be, and to know that a Tuareg is a member of one of the tall, nomadic, Hamitic-speaking peoples who occupy western and central Sahara and who have adopted the Moslem religion, not just an SUV Volkswagen makes. Your reading will go more smoothly if you grasp allusions to Bithynia, the King of Nemi, Paul Dudley White, and bunco joints. The parts I enjoyed most weren’t the between, but the meals themselves. Many of them are orgies of consumption: Liebling’s friend the theater producer and playboy Yves Mirande dispatches “a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot – and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar….” followed by woodcock and truffles baked in ashes. Soon Mirande’s doctor is forbidding him to dine at restaurants, so a friend prepares them something light and healthful, beginning with “a kidney and mushroom mince served in a giant popover – the kind of thing you might get at a literary hotel in New York. The inner side of the pastry had the feeling of a baby’s palm, in the true tearoom tradition.” Liebling joins a rowing club which spends as much time at table as in the boats. There is “no time to waste on elaborate dinners,” apologizes the coach, as they sit down to an hors d’oeuvre of duck pâté, pâté of hare, tins of sardines, muzzle of beef, radishes, and butter. This is followed by “a potato soup, a buisson de goujons, a mound of tiny fried fish…a leg of mutton with roast potatoes, a salad, cheese, and fruit”, red and white wine, coffee, and brandy. On other occasions Liebling dips his shovel into canard au sang (pressed duck served in a sauce of blood and marrow), trout grenobloise, poulet Henri IV, and jambon persillé - parsley-flavored ham with mustard and pickles. Liebling gives us Dumas père’s description of the perfect pot-au-feu, in which a rump of beef must be simmered seven hours in the bouillon of the beef that you simmered for seven hours the day before, and there is a discussion of the disappearance of flavor from spirits as well as food: “The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago by the then Estonian consul-general in New York, and it accounts perfectly for the drink’s rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy - tomato juice, orange juice, chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.” Liebling eventually became a war correspondent, but you’d never know it from his writings here, where the two World Wars are brought up merely as events that impinge on restaurant culture and eating habits. The heyday of French cuisine was pre-World War I; Liebling finds out later that the golden age he thought he was living through was actually a gastronomic twilight, in part because gluttony had fallen slightly out of fashion. “Without exception, the chaps who emerged from the trenches at the end of the war had lost weight, and at such a time everyone wants to resemble a hero.” Along with wars, sad developments like child-labor laws and compulsory education prevented the young from entering the early apprenticeships that are the launching pads of great chefs. (Liebling should probably stop here, but he can’t resist noting that “when Persian carpets were at their best, weavers began at the age of four and were master workmen at eleven.”) He is skilled at tossing off one-liners. • When one considers the millions of permutations of food and wine to test, it is easy to see that life is too short for the formulation of dogma. • No ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. • He was thirty-eight, and I could not conceal my incredulity when he told me that he still had a sex life. • It was one of the fanciest beatings I ever saw a man take. • In a menu so unpretentious, the cheese must represent the world of mammals from which it is a derivative. • [on the extremely well-fed pre-WWI courtesans:] Waists and ankles tapered, but their owners provided a lot for them to taper from. Like any considerate friend, when Liebling happens to be in the company of a very pretty woman he rings Mirande’s doorbell “simply because I knew he would like to look at her.” Food, women – all pleasures along a spectrum, unless killjoys intervene. Currently [the book was published in 1959:] pleasure and women are held matters incompatible, antithetical, and mutually exclusive, like quinine water and Scotch. Mirande also gave women pleasure; many women had pleasure of him. This is no longer considered a fair or honorable exchange. Women resent being thought of as enjoyables; they consider such an attitude an evidence of male chauvinism. They want to be taken seriously, like fall-out. Quite, quite. No one comes out the winner when women want to be taken seriously, whether it’s seriously like fall-out, mustard gas, or bubonic plague. The groaners continue: “…in those days young men liked women. We did not fear emasculation. We had never heard of it.” (This guy had heard of Bithynia, but not emasculation?) Developing one’s tastes in women was somewhat like developing one’s tastes in food. But “it was trickier than that because a woman, unlike a navarin de mouton [lamb stew:], has a mind. A man may say, when he begins to recognize his tastes, “Legs, on a woman, are more important to me than eyes.” But he has to think again when he must choose between a witty woman with good eyes and a dull one with trim legs. Give the witty woman a bad temper and the dull one constant good humor and you add to the difficulty of the choice. To multiply the complexity the woman, unlike the navarin, reacts to you...” Liebling finds that his taste in girlfriends runs to hooker types. His steady sweetheart “was well-joined – the kind of girl you could rough up without fear of damage.” Meaning athletic sex, I wondered, or that you could safely chuck her down a flight of stairs? Seven pages later the answer: “In bed she was a kind of utility infielder.” As he writes his New Yorker columns, Liebling finds that he has retained little that she said, with the exception of a story she once told him about two other hooker types who got heaved down some stairs, over an argument about smelly feet. He then reminisces fondly about two little hotel maids who “allowed themselves to be trapped long enough for an invigorating tussle.”

Adil Charafi didokun — hard to describe in just a few words. If you can make some sense of it while you're reading, it will blow your freaking mind. Budget six weeks or so of daily reads. One of my top two or three books of all time.

闫 莹 buptyanying3aeb — Kind of bland, I have to say.