Repressed sexuality-of all kinds-ran like a river of hot lava throughout, now and then bursting into startling flame. The plot was dark and breathless and tumbling, the writing simple and clean and compelling, filled with images so beautiful they cleared the nasal passages. The book was infused with the thrill of the life of the mind, but its true secret was that its pleasures were visceral. Housman-and, just as easily, to TV, movies, and fast food. Until I read the novel in question: Donna Tartt's The Secret History.įrom the first sentence- The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation-I was drawn almost feverishly into what turned out to be, of all things, an intellectual thriller: a murder mystery whose core characters were a group of classicists at a small New England college, likely to break out at any moment into Latin or Attic Greek a page-turner that made easy reference to T.
And so when Vanity Fair assigned me, in the spring of 1992, to profile the author of that fall's big, hot novel, a first novel that had fetched an advance of close to a million dollars, my initial reaction, as a recent first-novelist myself who had garnered some moderately good reviews and sold a couple of thousand books, was envious and dismissive.
Funny and fascinating, The Secret History of Food is essential reading for all foodies.Writers, against all reason (and whatever we pretend), are competitive creatures.
The Secret History of Food is a rich and satisfying exploration of the historical, cultural, scientific, sexual, and, yes, culinary subcultures of this most essential realm. Siegel is an armchair Anthony Bourdain, armed not with a chef’s knife but with knowledge derived from medieval food-related manuscripts, ancient Chinese scrolls, and obscure culinary journals. He even makes a well-argued case for how ice cream helped defeat the Nazis. “As a species, we’re hardwired to obsess over food,” Matt Siegel explains as he sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths.” Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths-and realities-of food as aphrodisiac, to how one of the rarest and most exotic spices in all the world ( vanilla) became a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities, to the role of food in fairy- and morality tales. Is Italian olive oil really Italian, or are we dipping our bread in lamp oil? Why are we masochistically drawn to foods that can hurt us, like hot peppers? Far from being a classic American dish, is apple pie actually. An irreverent, surprising, and entirely entertaining look at the little-known history surrounding the foods we know and love
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