BON APPETIT. Gourmet. Food & Wine. Fine Cooking. Saveur. Cook's Illustrated. Taste. Is there really room for another magazine about food? Darra Goldstein, professor of Russian at Williams College, thinks so. Goldstein, MA '76, PhD '83, identified a vein as yet untapped and created Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture to exploit its riches. For readers who equate the depth and caliber of culinary writing with the Wednesday food section of their local paper, picking up Gastronomica for the first time is like picking up the New Yorker after having read only Parade.
Gastronomica (UC Press) goes where few (American) publications have gone. It examines the richness and importance of food in our daily lives and combines it with research and scholarly analysis more typically associated with anthropological texts. The quarterly's debut issue, published in February, runs a thick, dense, beautifully laid-out 122 pages yet contains just three recipes. There are, however, 160 footnotes, a poem by Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Glück, a song about scrapple (with music and lyrics), plus photos, engravings and paintings more typical of a coffee-table art book than a food magazine. Contributors include scientists, historians, an architect, a linguist and a performance artist.
What Goldstein has done is create a publication almost entirely new. From multiple perspectives, Gastronomica shows us that food is literally and literarily the stuff we are made of. It's demanding, it's engaging, it's a whopping ten bucks a copy, and it's great.
Judging by the way she has ordered the contents, Goldstein wants to keep her readers off balance, to push us to one point of view just before yanking us completely in the opposite direction. A compelling article on the potential dangers of genetically altered food is followed immediately by a paean to the benefits of biotechnology. Like the Atlantic in its recent incarnations, Gastronomica seems driven to pop bubbles of conventional wisdom. "A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food," by historian Rachel Laudan, relentlessly informs us, in more than 5,000 well-written words backed by 44 footnotes, how the good old days of rustic, "country" cooking were really the good old days of spoiled food, disease and culinary monotony. Tell that to your purist friends.
Political correctness finds few fellow travelers in the pages of Gastronomica. One of the journal's recipes is for arni gemisto me horta ke feta. (As an academic, Goldstein may hope that her subscribers will read Greek, but for those who don't, that's leg of lamb stuffed with greens, fennel and feta cheese.) Opposite the recipe--where in a traditional food magazine one would find a perfectly styled plate of the finished dish photographed in color with minimal depth of field--we're presented with a gritty black-and-white shot of a butcher in a blood-stained jacket shouldering two lamb carcasses, skin off and heads on, to their ultimate dismemberment. If you want to make this dish after seeing that picture, no one will ever doubt your qualifications as a carnivore.
What Gastronomica also makes clear is that history and food are inseparable. Everyone knows how the quest for spices motivated European explorers to do battle over trade routes to the East. Journalist and historian Charles Perry informs us that that trade was actually a two-way street, in an article titled "Sicilian Cheese in Medieval Arab Recipes." As with many of the pieces in Gastronomica, my initial reaction of "Who knew? Who cares?" was followed by "How interesting."
For example, having never tasted it, I never gave much thought to why turtle soup disappeared from the menus of most upscale restaurants back in the 1960s and '70s. According to writer Amy Trubek, the demise of turtle soup represents the convergence of two modern phenomena: the Endangered Species Act and changing tastes about what constitutes acceptable "fancy" food. As a trained anthropologist and chef, Trubek understands that the persistence of any dish depends on cultural traditions and convenience of preparation. Turtles had little of the former and none of the latter, as Trubek reveals by citing a time-intensive recipe from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, written in 1751 and considered the first formally published modern cookbook.
Gastronomica, though in effect a scholarly journal, is not without a humorous side. A section titled "Tongue in Cheek" wouldn't be out of place among departments called "Spilled Beans" and "Borborygmus." (For the uninitiated, borborygmus appears in Webster's dictionary and means "intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas.") A simple line drawing of young lettuce is titled "The Romaines of the Day." "My McDonald's," an article by émigré designer Constantin Boym, presents this American contribution to world food culture as a symbol more powerful to those yearning to be free than the Statue of Liberty. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Boym stumbled into a McDonald's. Completely thrilled, he raced back to his office to tell his colleagues about this "really great place to have lunch." When they were decidedly not thrilled, he realized that he still had a lot to learn about his adopted homeland.
It seems that the recipe for any Gastronomica article must contain unlikely ingredients, and in this sweet memoir of a first encounter with the golden arches, we also get mention of the Russian poet Pushkin and architects Le Corbusier and Saarinen. (If it's references to the Roman historian Pliny you crave, however, then you must read "Eat Your Words!"--an article on letterform pastries from the 17th century.)
For those who didn't take advanced degrees in philosophy, the classics and Western literature (while studying at the Cordon Bleu), reading Gastronomica can be an indictment of one's own educational shortcomings. For me, "Deconstructing Soup," a 13-page, 6,000-word article (with 39 footnotes) on Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, popped my bubble about any intellectual or culinary pretensions I might ever have held. Still, who can resist a publication that mentions Escoffier, Salvador Dalí, Jacques Derrida and the movie The Matrix in one article?
As Keanu Reeves himself might have said, "Way cool, dude."
Robert L. Strauss, MBA/MA '84, a Bay Area freelancer and frequent contributor to Stanford, has written about the Japanese cooking show Iron Chef for the Los Angeles Times and Saveur.
