New York Review of Books

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“It is through the chicken that most American cooks acquaint themselves with the techniques of butchery,” writes Daniel M. Lavery in the Review’s October 5 issue, “and often it is through the work of Jacques Pépin that the introduction is made.” Prompted by Pépin’s 2022 book Art of the Chicken, a collection of poultry recipes, reminiscences, and watercolors, Lavery chronicles his remarkable career—from Burgundy to New York and Charles de Gaulle’s kitchen to PBS—and the many, many ways he has prepared chicken (including a whole chicken baked in bread dough, chicken cooked inside a pig’s bladder, chicken with false morels, and gizzards cured in sugar and salt).

Below, alongside Lavery’s article, we have collected from our archives seven essays about cuisine, haute and otherwise.

Daniel M. Lavery
Coq au Pépin

More than almost any other public figure, Jacques Pépin has followed the trajectory of twentieth-century cuisine, from the Hôtel Plaza Athénée to Howard Johnson’s, and from his Burgundy backyard to national television.

Jason Epstein
Food Tips for Christmas

“Superficially today’s apocalyptic alimentarians echo the Weathermen of the Sixties, but where the Weathermen blew up buildings and shot police officers, today’s radicals defy federal food laws, revel in unpasteurized milk, dine on fried grasshoppers, frog fallopian tubes, and Filipino balut—an unhatched duckling, cooked in its shell and eaten entire, beak, feathers, and bones.”

Masha Gessen
Russia: You Are What You Eat

“Recipes range from the dreaded gefilte fish to a particularly fanciful borscht—dishes that coexist only in this book and, so far as I know, at Veselka Cafe in the East Village, for only in these places can a quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish dish and a quintessentially Ukrainian one be united by their geographic origin rather than forced apart by their ethnic ones.”

Edmund White
A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar). In any event, perfect fruits in a wide variety and even off-season were available only in Paris. As a young man Balzac was so poor and abstemious that he was very thin; only later did his binge eating result in his big stomach.”

Tony Judt
Food

“I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other delicacies of British home cooking. These my mother scorned as somehow unhealthy…. So she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.”

Diane Johnson
American Pie

“Societies as a whole seem to have one of two basic ways of looking at food: either ‘if it’s good it must be good for you,’ or ‘if it’s good it must be bad for you,’ the puritanical American view, which Julia Child tried, and mostly failed, to refute. Having created or at least represented and codified the gourmet stirrings of the Fifties, Child has found herself, ever since the Sixties, in the position of someone attacking an excess of piety, deploring our tendency to connect eating to health and political correctness.”

Alexander Cockburn
Gastro-Porn

“Cookbooks with certain very rare exceptions…almost by definition try to appropriate the past, at least those bits of it that seem palatable. And so usually they become versions of pastoral, with the urban masticator being whisked into a world where kitchen and garden co-exist in harmonious union instead of being mediated by the Safeway, the can, the freezer, and the poison list on the back of every package.”

Michael Field
Please Pass the Parmesan

“Italian cooking as such means little to most Italians. They think of their cuisine in essentially regional terms. For them there is Florentine cooking, Venetian cooking; there are the dishes of Genoa, Piedmont, Romagna; of Rome, Naples, and the Abruzzi; of Sardinia and Sicily; of Lombardy, Umbria, and the Adriatic coast. What glorious creations they are, and how lucidly, elegantly, and poetically Elizabeth David writes of them!”

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