The fast food of the future
And the best books of the past
This month the Art of Eating awarded its annual book prize (for which I was a judge) to Superiority Burger Cookbook: the Vegetarian Hamburger is Now Delicious. Not only was this one of the funniest and most entertaining cookbooks I’ve read in a long time, it was also the closest thing I’ve seen to a deliberate attempt to create a new culinary vernacular.
There’s strong scientific consensus (this is a paywalled report from The Lancet - scientific consensus is expensive) that our present foodways aren’t particularly good for our bodies or the planet, and that in a perfect world run by rational actors, we would be trying to change them. Thus far, the concrete suggestions for doing so have all been calls for austerity, written by people who cook with spreadsheets. One fifth of an egg per person per day might be what their proposals suggest, but how do you even measure a fifth of an egg, let alone turn it into breakfast?
It might help if the lobby for a different diet had someone like MFK Fisher to write about the simple beauty of toast and butter for breakfast instead of eggs and bacon, but it would also help if there was some way to frame this as anything other than a diet of deprivation. Selling a different diet, one less reliant on the mass production of meat and sugar, is in large part about changing habits and expectations, but you can’t change the fact that people like food that tastes good. And right now it’s not just that we don’t cook the way the Lancet report suggests we should, but that most of the global north literally doesn’t know how to. Most home cooks, and in fact most restaurants in America, cook what ConAgra and General Mills and Tyson and PepsiCo put in front of us, because it’s easy and it’s there and we have four hundred other things to worry about, the least of which is what to have for dinner (more on this next week).
The most likely outcome is that we are all going to continue ignoring the well-meaning scientists unless someone actually figures out how to cook without Cheez Whiz and bouillon cubes and an abundance of cheap meat. Since we have sequestered culinary innovation - the work of figuring out new things to cook and new ways to cook - in product development labs and high-end restaurant kitchens, it’s not clear who’s going to do this work. The labs are too busy working on new flavors of Doritos, or making shrimp from algae or beef blood from beets - throwing heroic amounts of technology at the problem of sustaining unsustainable patterns of demand. The restaurant teams are trying to make fish sauce from grasshoppers.
So I’m profoundly thankful for the chain of improbable events that brought Superiority Burger Cookbook into existence, precisely as, the book says, “a luddite response to the modern gaggle of vegetable patties that bleed and squirt and ape”. For those unfamiliar with the author’s earlier career, he was initially a hardcore punk rock drummer for bands with names like Universal Order of Armageddon, then a nationally-known pastry chef who made Fancy Desserts before deciding that he wanted to run a vegetarian fast food joint - because, make no mistake, Superiority Burger serves fast food.
It’s food designed to be delicious and appeal to some pretty basic gustatory instincts. His bread of choice is a potato bun. He likes dessert, and uses plain granulated white sugar in most of his recipes. There’s cheese, which is frequently of the sliced deli kind (though equally frequently not).
This isn’t a dispatch from a hippie utopia where there are no food conglomerates and everything is made by hand. Greens, at the restaurant and in the recipes, come direct from the farmer, but potato rolls come direct from the factory via at least one level of intermediary distribution, just like the ones for my last hamburger. One of the things I really like about this book is that it doesn’t apologize or try to resolve the complications in this situation. There’s no recipe for potato rolls, no suggestion that the ingredients have to be magic. There’s plenty of shredded iceberg going around, because there’s plenty of shredded iceberg on our supermarket shelves. It feels very much like a kitchen working with the world it’s got and trying to build the food system we ought to have, one burger at a time.
With thanks to my proof reader, Jen Thompson, and my animal wrangler, Diana Kudayarova. No animals were fed lentil burgers in the making of this photograph. The pile of cookbooks is several times taller than the dog.
I don’t have a television, so reading 60-something contemporary cookbooks in a month counts as tuning into the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist seems to be very much about books written by Instagram personalities, lifestyle gurus, and the chefs at new American restaurants serving the latest, greatest incarnation of beets and goat cheese but there were still a whole lot of others, in addition to Superiority Burger Cookbook, that I hoped would find a wider audience. All of which is a way of sneaking in a “best food books of 2018” list out of season, like a jar of summer tomatoes in January.
Eating NAFTA. A heartbreaking story about how NAFTA led to a second colonization of Mexico, specifically focusing on the Mexican food system. It’s an academic work, rigorous but eminently readable. Helpfully, since it is an academic work, you can get a fairly good sense of it by reading some of reviews and interviews online - the first two paint with broader strokes, this one is the most matter-of-fact and detailed.
The Food of Northern Thailand. Even if you leave Thai food to the professionals, this is a lodestar, a book by which you can judge both Thai restaurants and other cookbooks. I loved the transparency and the humility of the writing. Most recipes are attributed. Most of the cooks get quoted directly. You never forget that what you’re reading is really one person’s way of making a dish that has been made a million times, on each occasion by a different person in a different context and a different place.
Feast - Food of the Islamic World. The subtitle raises the question of whether it’s possible or advisable to try and write a single cookbook that ties an extraordinary number of divergent culinary traditions together. An ambitious and lyrical survey.
The Best Cook in the World is about a bunch of thoroughly dislikable characters teaching each other how to cook. It is notionally as much cookbook as memoir, though the recipes are written as they were told to the author, which is to say so vaguely as to be worse than useless. But you don’t read Jim Harrison or MFK Fisher for the recipes, and this was written with at least as much verve and wit as either of them could muster on their best days.
P.S. Ed, if you’re reading this, please encourage the publishers to send more fad diet books next year. I think the Keto Desserts Cookbook for Beginners or Great Vegan BBQ without a Grill would have made for great discussions.