How does a dish come to represent a country, a region, a city, an identity? What does the workmanlike char of a Neapolitan pizza say about Naples? How does a smoky, beguiling mole precisely capture Oaxaca? Why does ramen belong to Tokyo?
It might seem abstract to contemplate these questions in poly-prandial modern America, where the fusion — hybridization? appropriation?— of recipes is commonplace and basically expected. There are sushi burritos, kimchi tacos, and cheeseburger pizzas. Most people order these things without a thought, and quite often, they taste really good.
But if you’ve ever contemplated the origins and iconography of classic foods, then “National Dish” is the sensory-driven, historical deep dive for you. Here, James Beard award-winning culinary writer, cookbook author, and memoirist Anya von Bremzen boils down epochal dishes to the barest essentials, uncovering their heritage and evaluating their significance. Whereas the current culinary landscape is a melting pot, she reduces it to stock, food capital by food capital, and often enchantingly so, toggling between ethnography and critique as she leaves Jackson Heights to travel and taste the world.
She starts her journey in Paris, tracing the origins of pot-au-feu, the humble, much-maligned French soup of boiled meat and vegetables. In Naples, she explores the ragged origins of Neapolitan pizza; in Tokyo, ramen and rice; in Seville, tapas; in Oaxaca; mole, maize, and mezcal; in Istanbul, the potluck; and finally back home to Queens and the borscht of her Soviet youth.
Von Bremzen immigrated to the United States from Moscow as an adolescent, and there’s a certain stoicism to her prose. While some writers might weave the sense of nomadic displacement and peripatetic exploration into their narrative as a revelation or cause for humor, von Bremzen treats it as a matter of course. She’s endearingly earnest and unflappable in her quest, though it’s never totally apparent how she got the free time or the funds to crisscross the world on this literary expedition. A little earthly candor might’ve been nice, a dash of levity in this intense stew.
She’s more comfortable writing outside of herself. She would make a formidable dinner party guest, offhandedly quoting Alexandre Dumas on Italian marketplaces or name-checking Joseph Brodsky about Istanbul’s “crooked, filthy streets.”
Her own writing, though, is just as vivid: She manages to make the choleric history of crowded, stricken Naples as compulsively readable as a description of pizza at La Notizia, one of the city’s most revered purveyors: “The pie practically levitated off the table, blistered to perfection and honeycombed with tiny air bubbles…. Eating it was an experience totally primal — bread and live fire.”
Or her painstaking pursuit of the most elemental Oaxacan mole: “I wrangled with this issue on an Oaxacan restaurant trail that veered from a coastal-style mole Amarillo of incendiary chiles costeños … starring (gulp) black iguana (tasted like chicken) to a luscious almendrado nutty with almonds and sweet-tart with raisins, capers and olives … back to a smoky ritualistic chichilo of the remote Sierra Sur highlands, a version hauntingly bitter and burnt because traditionally women made it for funerals while the coffin still sat in the house.”
Never will I scoop up mole in the same thoughtless way again. Her words are like a good recipe: spare, precise. Istanbul is a “water-lapped nostalgia factory”; Paris is a “stern, unwelcoming finger-wagging abstraction of European civilization.”
If Anthony Bourdain was GQ, von Bremzen is AP History. Fans of Bourdain-style travel and food writing — pop culture asides, sarcasm, jaded irony, a little bit of hero worship — might be disappointed. As I got lost in her descriptions of ramen and rice, I found myself wanting more glimmers of von Bremzen (and her faithful companion, Barry!) as people with quotidian woes, like travel delays and stomachaches.
The scholars, chefs, and locals she encounters along the way are vividly sketched but also cameos who exist in service of her narrative; I wish we could’ve spent a little more time with a high-topped Alain Ducasse at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée reflecting on changing Parisian dining mores or with her dramatic Sevillian leftie-journalist Airbnb host, Alejandro, talking politics while waving jamón. She has a gift for drawing characters, and I wanted more of it.
There are glimmers, though, such as when von Bremzen recalls her mom’s early enchantment with Paris in the grim confines of Soviet Moscow: “It was a mythical elsewhere…, a neverland desperately dear to her from Flaubert and Zola and her precious Proust, but so unattainable that it could have been Mars. She was a yearning, romantic Francophile stuck in our ghastly Moscow communal apartment reeking of alcohol and stale cabbage. When mom made her own thin cabbage soup, she’d call it pot au feu.”
We superimpose our own dreams, myths, and longings onto food, and that is the point here. Interestingly, cartoonist Roz Chast designed the book cover; her signature playful, accessible drawings of things like pasta al pomodoro and borsch are just the right juxtaposition for a book so complex and layered.
So often, food is consumed without thought or reverence. The intellectualization of gastronomy has its place — probably now more than ever, in an era of fusion and fast-casual, where authenticity is fetishized but maybe not fully understood. No doubt many chefs travel the world before translating their experiences onto tables wherever they land, but few can eloquently explain the sacred symbolism of maize the way von Bremzen does. “National Dish” is a sometimes intimidatingly evocative, gorgeously layered exercise in place-making and cultural exploration, nuanced and rich as any of the dishes captured within.
NATIONAL DISH: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home
By Anya von Bremzen
Penguin, 352 pages, $30
Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @kcbaskin.
Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @kcbaskin.
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June 30, 2023 at 05:11AM
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Anya von Bremzen, in ‘National Dish,’ explores how certain foods came to embody the cultures that created them - The Boston Globe
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