Influence That!
The public food persona, and what might unlock it
How would you know if you’d “made it” in food? Would it be that you had your own cookbook deal or restaurant, a namesake dish reproduced all over the world, a long-coveted feature on the Grub Street Diet? (Guess which one I’ve dreamt about for myself?) And how could you know if your identity, your taste imprimatur, hadn’t been diluted in the process?
This week we’re going to dive into the question of whether anyone—or everyone—can be cookbook authors, by considering how the original formats of digital food-focused content are eventually translated to the printed page. We’ll look at the books and careers of Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen fame and Molly Yeh of Food Network and My Name is Yeh fame, two people whose work (and truly spectacular recipes) I devoured long before they ever got book deals and shot into publishing superstardom. Neither author received formal culinary training before they started writing and sharing their recipes—Perelman worked as an art therapist when she began writing, and Yeh was training to become a classical percussionist. Yet food, and the storytelling that chronicled their appetites and experiments, took hold of both women, both of whom came into adulthood in the Internet Age. (Perelman is a Gen-Xer, Yeh a Millennial.) Most notably, both of them started blogs after 2002, when the late great Julie Powell decided to start her online odyssey with Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Powell opened the door so authors like Perelman and Yeh could kick it down…or perhaps they never assumed there was a door in the first place.
Whether Perelman and Yeh both have the special sauce it takes to convert an online platform to a print profile is hard to say…in part because their blogs are so distinctly their own. Perelman is not a trained food photographer, yet her minimalist, sometimes moody food photographs produce dishes that feel lush in spite of their simplicity. (How she makes a basic toast look this good, I still don’t know.) The pairing of her intentionally dramatic, serious photographs—finished dishes and a multitude of process shots, all very helpful to the reader—and the funny, slightly off-kilter tone of her headnotes create the impression that this is a person who is simultaneously teaching and learning…a tightrope walk of self-effacing but opinionated pedagogy that makes you trust her taste, knowledge, and enthusiasm for the process of cooking. She doesn’t claim to have an enviable set of resources, and speaks with pride of her “tiny kitchen” in the city, “a place where the kitchens are barely usable but nobody complains because there’s no reason to cook when there’s a great restaurant on every corner.” Yet cook she did, because—as her only explanation goes—“I just like to cook.”
Yeh’s rise to food fame is eerily similar: she sbegan by eating her way through Manhattan, where the city “swallowed her whole” during her undergraduate years at Juilliard (where she was—as I was!—a member of the Gastronauts, a supper club that left no borough or protein source unturned.) After graduation, she followed her fiance-now-husband to his family’s sugar beet farm in North Dakota, and so her blog reads like a city mouse’s baking dispatches from Grand Forks, hitting that farmcore/cottagecore aesthetic that so many of us have yearned for. When I first came across her blog, I wanted to loathe her whole aesthetic, her adorable kitchen, her (to me confounding) love of marzipan…and yet I absolutely fell for her range of deliciously photographed recipes, often infused with unusual spices or ingredients such as a miniature za’atar babka, or expanding on the previously unknown-to-me world of hotdish. Yeh’s “global food wherever you are” approach also strongly resonated with me—she had somehow brought not only her own Jewish and Chinese ancestry with her to a new place, but also the many flavors she had come to love through her earlier edible adventures. Neither Yeh nor Perelman claim (or claim, even now) to be culinary authorities, yet their blogs and books resonate with me nonetheless—because what they lack in formal expertise, they more than make up for by leaping into the kitchen with gusto, game for anything.
It’s easy to denigrate what Perelman and Yeh have done as the work of mere “influencers”—as though having an impact, an influence on broader culinary culture is an easy thing to do. How do you steer a ship, or even a tiny tugboat, in the broader, unruly currents of the food world? Though it may take only a few minutes to snap a shot of an artful coffee cup, something different happens when a recipe is prepared for the purposes of public (print or digital) consumption. The author has to do a tremendous amount of work to ensure that her hard work looks just impressive and easy enough that the home cook wants to take it on for herself. Moreover, the reader is also projecting herself into that image, seeking a tasteful and temporal bridge to the author in order to believe that she can achieve what the author has offered to her. Though, as Emily Contois and Zenia Kish say that the “presumed feminization and superficial consumerism” of Instagram food content has “slowed its cultural legitimacy and its scholarly assessment,” it cannot be denied that the social media experience of food represents a food phenomena, a distinct way of connecting with and communicating to fellow food lovers no matter where they live. (Contois & Kish, 2.) Existing somewhere across and beyond the restaurant, the home kitchen, and the in-transit cupholder, the creation of the online food space represents a distinct transitional moment in culinary pedagogy, both for the author and the reader. As someone who has made several half-hearted attempts at cooking blogs, and only occasionally remembers to post her culinary victors and disasters to social media, I often ask myself “Who is this content for?” And more often than not, the answer is: “Me” but the answer could just as easily be “Me”. The open-ended digital food space allows us for to imagine an audience both bigger than and just like ourselves, one in which you only need to be as good as one dish demands. And then you’re onto the next—cooking, eating, learning and teaching all the while.
Recommendation: Another week where I’m behind on my overall cultural consumption, but I did start watching Beef, the utterly compelling Netflix show starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun (who I would watch in absolutely anything after Minari). Wong I’m less familiar with, but she’s so captivating in this show that I want to go back and revisit her film Always Be My Maybe, which deserves to be incorporated into the new food film canon. Just need to ensure I’ve got some great eats on hand before the rewatch…
The Perfect Bite: Another week of very few restaurant eats, but this weekend we took a short trip to hang with family in Gloucester, and oh boy, if you have to get pizza on the North Shore, Sebastian’s is the way to go, with a signature sweet tomato sauce. The standard cheese pizza is always great, but I think the pepperoni is actually the sleeper hit, as the heat of the topping nicely offsets the sauce (which I’d never be able to take over pasta, but on pizza is just right.)
Cooked & Consumed: We had a few 80 degree-days here in Boston last week, but somehow that didn’t stop me from making a pot of beans. (Something I fully expect to show up on my tombstone: “Made boeuf bourguignon in August, and lived to tell the tale.) I didn’t use an exact recipe, but here’s my general formula:
Soak 1 pound of beans (I used black Greek gigante beans) overnight in water
Drain and add the beans to a large pot with a good fistful of miscellaneous herbs, whole chiles, smashed garlic cloves, a small halved skin-on onion, and some meaty odds and ends. (We had a ham hock at the back of the freezer, but a few stockbones or even the ends of a slab of bacon would work great. The saltier/fattier that meat source already is, the less salt you need to add to the pot.) Cover everything with vegetable broth, chicken broth, or water.
Bring the pot to a boil, then lower to a simmer and partially cover. Let cook for 1 1/2-2 hours, stirring whenever you feel like it, until the beans are creamy and tender on the inside and the skins are just starting to peel back.
Strain the beans and solids and discard the cooking liquid; set the beans aside. Chop the softened herbs, chiles, garlic, onion, and any meat you can use together into a rough hash.
Spoon the warm beans and meat into tortillas or over a bowl of rice, and garnish with chopped radishes, cilantro, a spoonful of yogurt and a dash of hot sauce. Awesome.