Book
Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
Feeding a
Yen: Savoring Local Specialties from Kansas City to Cuzco by Calvin
Trillin Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
|
||
|
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Yummy When Calvin Trillin writes about food, I want
to read and eat. His latest collection of essays, Feeding a
Yen, satisfies my need for reading and eating quite well. Now that I’ve
read this book, when I go to Nova Scotia, I want to eat Lunenberg sausage,
and spread some of that Lunenberg pudding on crackers. Here’s an excerpt from
Chapter 5, Desperately Seeking Cerviche, pp. 54-9: On
a steamy afternoon during a particularly hot June in New York, I was standing
just off a curb in midtown Manhattan, trying unsuccessfully to get a cab to
La Guardia Airport. I found myself having thoughts about the city which would
not have pleased the Convention and Visitors Bureau—thoughts about the
weather, thoughts about the structural flaws of the New York taxi industry.
Then, still with no free taxis in sight, a Lincoln Town Car appeared in front of me. The
uniformed driver lowered the window, and I was hit with frigid air. "Where you going?" he said. "La Guardia," I said. "Twenty-five dollars." "Deal." I
got in. The driver identified himself as Jose. As we made it over the bridge
and hit the Grand Central Parkway, he told me that he was from Ecuador, a
country I had visited a few months before. I told him how much I'd enjoyed
Ecuador—the gorgeous mountains, the markets, the climate that some have
described as eternal spring, and, most of all, the ceviche. Ceviche in Ecuador, I said, is to American ceviche
what the seafood cocktails of Veracruz—oysters, shrimp, snails, octopus,
crab, avocado, onions, and coriander chopped in front of your eyes into a
liquid that in a just world would be what Bloody Mary mix tastes like—are to
those balsa-wood and ketchup combinations that people in country club dining
rooms get when they order the shrimp cocktail appetizer. (When I visited
Veracruz with Abigail, she noticed that the purveyor of a particularly
complicated seafood cocktail called Vwlve a la Vida,
or Return to Life, described its curative powers in almost precisely the same
terms as were used by a man who went from table to table in the outdoor cafes
of the central square, offering a shock from a contraption that looked
alarmingly like jumper cables. They could both be right.) Ecuadorian ceviche
starts out with fresh fish cured by being marinated in lemon juice and
enlivened by whatever else the chef has thought to add. It's liquid, like a bowl
of tangy cold soup. Roasted corn kernels (flicked off Andean corn, whose
kernels are sometimes the size of broad beans) are served on the side, to be
tossed in for both flavor and crunch. Some restaurants offer as accompaniment
not only roasted corn kernels but popcorn. Yes, popcorn—what less fortunate
humans eat at the movies! "You
like that ceviche?" Jose asked. He sounded pleased, but mildly
surprised, like an artist who has just heard effusive praise of a painting
that is actually one of his earlier works. "I love that ceviche, Jose," I said.
"I would probably kill for that ceviche." "When's your plane? "Jose asked. "Oh, I've got time," I said. I had left
myself a buffer for finding a taxi and grumbling about the city. Instantly, he swerved off the Grand Central, and we
were driving along a commercial street in Queens. Most of the signs on the
stores were in Spanish. Some were in Chinese or Korean. In five minutes, we
turned onto a side street, in front of a restaurant called Islas Galapagos. We asked for two orders of ceviche. I ordered a
cold Ecuadorian beer. We cleaned our bowls. Then we got back into the car and
drove to La Guardia. "This is a great city, Jose," I said, as I
hauled my baggage out of the icy splendor of his Town Car. "A little hot
sometimes, but a great city." On
the other hand, the sort of New Yorker who's confident that even a stroke of
good fortune can be complained about might point out that I had to go all the
way to Queens to find Ecuadorian ceviche. At the time I met Jose, I'd almost
never had a ceviche close to home. In New York, I had never even seen roasted
corn kernels—what Ecuadorians sometimes call tostados and Peruvians
call concha. (They are neither roasted nor toasted, of course, but
pan-fried, then salted, so that they're crunchy on the outside and soft,
almost powdery, on the inside.) A couple of ceviches I'd had in Manhattan
actually came accompanied by commercial C.0rnnuts, which, being approximately
the right size and color, serve as a substitute for concha about as
effectively as marshmallows, being approximately the right size and color,
would serve as a substitute for fresh Nova Scoria scallops. Eventually, ceviche became more widely available in
Manhattan. Around the rime of my La Guardia adventure, Douglas Rodriguez
brought it into the mainstream at Patria, and he later installed an entire
ceviche bar at Chicama, complete with popcorn. I've even read about a
Manhattan restaurant that offers a sort of pour la table
ceviche appetizer for fifty dollars—an amount of money that in Ecuador would
buy you enough ceviche to pickle your innards. Srill, as the years passed, I
thought more and more about another trip to serious ceviche country—which
could mean, of course, almost anywhere in Latin America. When FBI agents tapped
the prison phone calls of the former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, one
conversation that made them suspect that he was employing a devilishly clever
code concerned a ceviche recipe. Ceviche is entrenched in Mexico; Rick
Bayless, a scholar of Mexican food, has been serving it, usually made from
marlin, since he opened Frontera Grill in Chicago in 1986. There is wide
agreement, though, that the red-hot center of ceviche caring is around
Ecuador and Peru—two countries that, after several decades, more or less
settled their border dispute but continued to argue about who does the best
job with marinated fish. About
five years after that serendipitous journey to La Guardia with Jose, I
decided I had to go to Ecuador and Peru to get a booster shot of the real
article. A number of people asked me if I really intended to travel all that
way just to eat ceviche. Not at all. In Peru, for instance, I was looking
forward to sampling the stuffed pepper that many consider the signature dish
of Arequipa, and I fully intended to have my share of Andean potatoes. I
thought I might tuck away some churros—possibly some churros
with chocolate on them. I still remembered a couple of the soups I'd had
during my first trip to Ecuador while staying at a charming inn called Hacienda
Cusin, near the great Andean market town of Otavalo, and I thought I might
see about arranging a reprise. I was seriously considering guinea pig, which
is such a strong regional specialty around Cuzco that the most famous
seventeenth-century religious painting in the Cuzco cathedral shows it as
what Jesus and his disciples are about to eat at the Last Supper. I also had
visions of sitting in a comfortable hotel bar somewhere sipping pisco sours
while tossing down handfuls of concha and expressing sympathy for
travelers who were at that moment at other hotel bars all around the world
trying to make do with mixed nuts. No, I assured the people questioning my
trip, I wasn't going all that way just to eat ceviche. I like to think of
myself as a broad-gauged person. Abigail,
who persisted in living in San Francisco, agreed to meet me in Peru, and
Alice said she 'd link up with us in Quito. When I dropped into Chicama to
ask Douglas Rodriguez for some tips about where to eat down there, he said he
'd prefer to show us himself—actually, what he did was to get himself so
worked up with a description of the ceviche available in an Ecuadorian
seaside town called Salinas that he suddenly shouted, "I'm going with
you!"—and we arranged to meet him and his wife and his publisher and the
ceviche-bar chef from Chicama in Guayaquil for a couple of days of sampling. We had become the ceviche gang. When unable to find a food for which he
has the yen, Trillin adds it to the “Register of Frustration and Deprivation.”
Then, efforts intensify to feed that yen, one way or another. Pick up a copy
of Feeding
a Yen, and follow Trillin on his decades-old journey to feeding his yen. Steve Hopkins, June 21, 2003 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ă 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Feeding
a Yen.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
