Coming of age in a kitchen

A book about food and the making of it, but also about the agonising lives of the makers of it

August 20, 2016 04:15 pm | Updated 04:15 pm IST

Sweetbitter; Stephanie Danler, Oneworld Publications, Rs. 1,163.  Photo: Special Arrangement

Sweetbitter; Stephanie Danler, Oneworld Publications, Rs. 1,163. Photo: Special Arrangement

Never has a generation been more obsessed with food, since the early cave men, than ours is. Do you remember the food of your childhood, pre the fetishisation of it? Most days, my meals were what we called “home food,” ghar ka khana : everything from bhindi fried crisp to golden pumpkin, the flesh sweet and yielding, to all sorts of daals — yellow, green, black — pepper rasam so fiery that your nose ran the way it was supposed to. When we went out to eat, we had safe Indian versions of international food — Chinese with the obligatory table vinegar dolloped into the soup, pizza with small chopped onions and capsicum, burgers that were slender mutton patties with ketchup spooned over them and a cheese slice underneath all the shredded cabbage. But now, if you’re an eater(by this I mean someone who is “into” food, the lives-to-eat kind) you’ve had at least one conversation about organic produce, another about authenticity and you probably own at least one fancy cooking implement, most likely a chef’s knife.

And so with the rise of this new obsession comes the rise of new books about the kitchen. The first breakout hit was Julie and Julia by Julie Powell (2005) but rising to fame with the 2009 film. Despite Powell’s book shooting to the top of bestseller charts, people were still a little wary of food-memoir creative writing. And though Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking was a steady seller among home chefs, it was still seen as niche, of interest only to serious amateur cooks. Prior to Powell was chef Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential , that spurred a TV show of the same name, but food, it was safe to say, was still only of deep interest to food nerds.

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler is not the first food book out this year, nor will it be the last, but it has garnered great interest . Already making “best book of the year” lists, the novel features young Tess, a girl from small-town U.S.A., who has just moved to a big city and gets a job at one of the best restaurants in town. Tess, unlike most other protagonists of food books, is not a chef or even in training to be one. Instead she starts as a back-of-house person, refilling water glasses and fetching plates and so on. She slowly moves up until she’s one of the wine waiters, trailing the more experienced Simone, a woman she loves and is in awe of in equal parts. In all this, there’s also the story of Jake, a man Tess falls in love with a little, while she’s also falling in love with Simone, and with the idea of Simone-and-Jake, who are an odd clique-y twosome.

Tess is not a likeable character, and this makes the novel, written in the first person, a bit hard going, especially in the beginning. You want to like her, you really do, since the living-alone-in-the-big-bad-city is a narrative you relate to, and yet, she’s not someone you can see yourself be friends with, let alone be. However, as novelist Claire Messud said when asked if she’d be friends with her main character: “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.” The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?’

Is Tess alive? Vibrantly so. Going from being “the new girl” to one who goes to an after-hours bar with her colleagues, does cocaine off a key, hooks up with a man and then disappears before he wakes up becoming at once harder and cooler, the kind of girl who would trip you up and then smirk to herself, you begin to recognise Tess, even if you don’t like her. Out of a misty vapour, Tess evolves into a person so real, you could reach out and grab her arm, and watch her shake you off scornfully. Sometimes, the book reads like a fever dream, especially if you, like I, read it in sessions of three hours, all very late at night.

I’m not going to use that hackneyed term “stayed with me,” because the details of the conflict that drive the book are fuzzy at best for me. But as a person who goes out to eat, suddenly there’s a light shining on the behind-the-scenes, the back-of-the-book, the making of, the plate that goes in front of me, and the person who sets it down. I’m happy for those insights.

Sweetbitter; Stephanie Danler, Oneworld Publications, Rs. 1,163.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is a blogger and writer.

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