Literary offerings to the Gods of Gluttony 
The Ravenous Muse: A table of dark and comic contents, a bacchanal of booksBy Karen Elizabeth Gordon
Jacket illustration by Nikolaus Heidelbach
By DWIGHT GARNER
There is no subject -- not sex, not money, not even sports -- that has occasioned as much bad writing over the past decade as has food. It's not the food's fault; there's just something about the subject that flushes out the snobs and the hacks and the bores. Evidence of this, in case you haven't looked recently, is spreading across bookstore shelves and magazine racks like the Blob that Ate Barnes & Noble. Foodie magazines are indeed the signal form of fin de siècle pornography, and the prose that accompanies most of the moist, inviting photographs therein has a lonely, reheated quality -- it's as if the writers knew that whatever they'd dash off would be as irrelevant as the text in a crisp copy of Hustler.
Our oral obsessions have spilled over into the Fiction section, too. The success two years ago of Laura Esquivel's frothy "Like Water For Chocolate," which made bestseller lists after the film version became an art house hit, led to a small flood of novels where a busy kitchen serves as the warm, burbling soul of family life -- and the spot (forget the bedroom) where chests heave with giddy ecstasy. Not all of these books arrived underseasoned, either. This fall, both "The Invention of Curried Sausage," by Uwe Timm, and the more whimsical "Recipes From the Dump," by Abigail Stone, were complex, richly evocative books that weren't merely rewarding -- they had you racing to see what was left in the larder.
As good as these novels were, they left you hungry not only to reread some of this century's best food writers -- A.J. Liebling, M.F.K. Fisher, even Calvin Trillin -- but to snort around in some recent anthologies of writing about what we put in our mouths. Unfortunately, the most comprehensive of these in recent years, "Food: An Oxford Anthology" (1994), is so British and above-board and tasteful that despite many wonderful moments -- Hawthorne on macaroni pudding! Austen on apricots and apple tarts! -- it feels a bit like homework. "Nothing could be more delicious than dinners among friends," Alphonse Daudet once wrote, "at which people can speak openly, their wits alert and their elbows on the table." The problem with the Oxford anthology (besides that it doesn't include Daudet) is that it doesn't seem to allow elbows on the table -- everyone's sitting at attention, their salad forks and soup spoons in perfect order. Everything is just so.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon's new anthology, "The Ravenous Muse" (Pantheon), is a perfect corrective -- it's a wild, uneven, very personal collection of food writing from the past two centuries, and it doesn't pretend to any sort of completeness. In fact, it reads more like an old-fashioned literary chapbook; Gordon's selections are the fruit of decades of purposefully nonlinear reading, not the result of a deadline-driven cram session. Her oddball obsessiveness, in fact, once led her to be thrown out of Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale -- after she was caught absentmindedly inserting blinis between pages to mark her place. "I was hustled out," she reports, "my bliny and notebooks thrown after me into the courtyard." Quelle impolitesse!
Next page: Seeping kookiness and slurping sodas
