Read Online Best Food Writing 2014 by Holly Hughes - Free Book Online

general loathing for Pat and Lou, a disgust expressed through passive avoidance, active shunning, and the occasional high-pitched catcall? I discovered later that my mom, bless her, is a total fag hag. And my dad always hated bullies—it trumped his ambivalence about the gay thing.)
    Pat and Lou did cocktail hour nightly from a pair of velour bucket chairs, in their beam-ceilinged, ranch-style canyon house overlookingmasses of scarlet and purple irises under the oaks. They put on matching poplin jumpsuits and corduroy house moccasins to sip Gibsons, tossing nuts to Kurt, their sleek miniature schnauzer, from fingers studded with big-jeweled cocktail rings. On nights when my parents would go to the Iron Gate restaurant for shrimp scampi and saltimbocca, they dropped us boys off at Pat and Lou’s for babysitting.
    On those nights, Lou would cook us crazy shit our mom never fixed, food so rich no adult should ever serve it to a ten-year-old. There were casseroles that used Monterey Jack as a suspension medium for olives, ground veal, and button mushrooms from a can. And there were Lou’s famous burgers, so rich and salty, so crusted with a mixture of caramelized onions, Roquefort crumbles, and Grey Poupon—a thick impasto gilded beneath the electric broiler element—I could only ever eat half before feeling sick. I loved every bite.
    Looking back, I recognize in Lou’s burgers my first taste of food that didn’t give a fuck about nutrition or the drab strictures of home economics. They were calibrated for adult pleasure, acutely expressive of a formalized richness—exactly the type of thing James Beard taught Americans to eat (for all I know, Lou’s recipe was straight out of Beard). I see them now, those burgers, as unflinchingly, unapologetically, magnificently queer.
    By 1970, America’s interest in food had finally progressed from the stale international haute cuisine of the 1950s—we were more curious about the world, and were willing to spend more on food and travel than ever before. Three gay guys—Beard, Richard Olney, and Craig Claiborne—would become architects of modern food in America. You find their influence in the cooking of Thomas Keller and Daniel Patterson, and in the food Alice Waters has overseen in four decades of menus at Chez Panisse. It’s food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an assertion of politics or a human birthright, the product of culture—this is the legacy of gay food writers who shaped modern American food.
    I admit, it’s tricky pinning something as sprawling and amorphous as modern American cooking to anything as poorly defined as a queer point of view, and an exclusively male one at that. I first struggled with that task in the late ’80s, when I was writing about food for the Sentinel , a now-defunct gay weekly in San Francisco. My editor,the late Eric Hellman, would always ask, “Is there a gay sensibility? Can you see it in a work of art?”
    As I was falling in love with Lou’s Roquefort burgers, a gay activist in New Mexico named Harry Hay was launching a movement called the Radical Faeries—they’d go off for days-long Faerie Circles in the wilderness, like all-male mini Burning Mans, only with psilocybin-fueled circle jerks. Hay was a founder of the early gay rights group the Mattachine Society. By 1970, he’d come to the conclusion that gay men were spiritually different from straight ones—homosexuals had always been shamans and prophets, jeered, beaten dead or barely tolerated, living on the margins. (Hay, who died in 2002, was anti-assimilationist, meaning he would have been horrified to see the current struggle for gay people to achieve hetero marriage.) Gay guys were artists, form-givers, shapers of the broader culture that hated them.
    I don’t totally buy Hay’s theory of queer exceptionalism, but my editor’s question—is there a gay