Montaigne and Emerson and Trillin may be great essayists, but they aren't verbs. "To visser," however, is the coinage of the realm for fans of Margaret Visser, the esteemed Toronto food writer. South African by way of the Sorbonne, ex-classics professor and essayist, since 1988, for the Canadian magazine Saturday Night, she has a singular attack. It's arch, quirky, far-ranging and pedagogic: Miss Jane Brodie meets Margaret Mead. "The Way We Are" includes 60 short pieces, each with a bibliographic chaser. A piece about spitting, for instance, primly lists ten sources, from Xenophon to Erasmus to an 1897 treatise entitled, "The Saliva Superstition in Classical Literature."

To visserize is to take the quotidian -- chewing gum, menus, gloves, stripes, the Easter Bunny -- and cast a little scholarly sunshine upon it. "I refuse to accept the ordinary as dull," Visser writes. Quite so. In her take on bells, we discover they were rung to "tell the townsfolk to cover their fires and retire for the night. (The word in French was couvre-feu, which becomes curfew in English.)" Or that men shake hands with their right hands because "it showed peace and benevolence: you had no intention of drawing your sword." Or that long ago, the wedding cake was broken over the bride's head. "This invoked fertility," writes Visser, "as where brides. . .are showered with rice, 'many small things,' signifying a fecund future."

Visser's essays don't always delight for their prose alone -- she often becomes so dazzled by these info-jewels that she forgets to make her sentences gleam. (Her endings, in particular, usually trail off instead of punch home.) One should sip "The Way We Are," not toss it down; reading the collection straight through would be like working down a Trivial Pursuit deck. Still, it charms. This is "The Joy of Facts," blessed by a distinct, warm and (it must be said) visseral glow.

--Katharine Whittamore