Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov Read Free Book Online

slippery elegance of the seafood. Having dewlaps myself, I winced for a minute but surrenderedto the brilliance of the conception and the resourcefulness of Spiaggia’s butcher.” I did not disclose my white-magical motivation for ordering
pagliolaia
, which was to learn a new word by consuming the thing itself.
    Did I realize back in 1960 or in the next two decades that I was approaching food in this way? Undoubtedly not. I thought I was ingesting cuisines, cultural artifacts frozen like the smiles on archaic Greek statues. And when the smile melted, when those gelid monoliths changed shape before my eyes, I continued to see the change as a systematic mutation, a wholesale revolution, which it was. But the revolution expressed itself through individual dishes, one recipe at a time. And that, of course, was how I experienced the nouvelle cuisine and every one of the later convolutions that have transformed the way we eat, and continue to transform it.
    After I passed my PhD orals at Harvard, in the spring of 1965, I got a chance to explore French food in great depth. Instead of supporting myself as a teaching fellow in Cambridge while writing my dissertation, I accepted a job as a correspondent in
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau. In the early mornings before the office opened, I researched the scholarly literature on Theocritus at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Later in the day, I researched the menus of French restaurants.
    Newsweek
had hired me because someone at the magazine believed it would locate abler staffers at America’s better college newspapers than it was finding among older journalists at professional papers and magazines. This turned out to be a false theory, in the sense that almost every one of the
Harvard Crimson
–hatched trainees except me left
Newsweek
for law school or other greener pastures after a short stint at the magazine.
    Fully expecting that I would return to academia, too, with a completed thesis, I went to work in the
Newsweek
offices off theChamps-Élysées. I ought to have been very busy, chasing news while simultaneously plowing through the scholarly literature on Hellenistic poetry of the third century b.c. In fact, I had almost no news to chase, and the Theocritus scholarship was almost completely irrelevant to my specific interest in the father of pastoral poetry’s creative reuse of rare Homeric words. Previous researchers had not spent much time on this question, which allowed me to flip through and discard hundreds of articles brought to me by disgruntled stack “boys” of advanced age every weekday morning. Soon there were no more tomes to check out. I had stumbled onto untilled ground, but by then I had lost interest in academic life and tabled the thesis.
    In the bureau, I was the fourth of four correspondents, and the youngest by far at twenty-four. In the French idiom, I was the office
benjamin
(after Joseph’s youngest brother in the Old Testament). In practice, this meant that, aside from reading seven daily newspapers and thirty magazines, I had almost nothing to do. The other three correspondents, better connected, more skilled and more aggressive, hogged all the available work. And there wasn’t much of that, considering the very small amount of its precious space that
Newsweek
would allot to a backwater like France in a normal week.
    Even French reporters didn’t have much of a story to follow then, because France under President Charles de Gaulle was essentially a benevolent dictatorship. De Gaulle had a chokehold on the news. In this quasi-totalitarian atmosphere, a very junior American correspondent had almost no chance of breaking stories major enough to interest a stateside editor. I had to plead to get the bureau to submit my name for accreditation to the only major event of my two years in France, a De Gaulle press conference, which one of the veteran correspondents would actually cover.
    Yet I was a full-fledged foreign correspondent with a veryofficial-looking