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

sensibility?—became a kind of koan as I struggled to navigate life in the kitchens where I worked (I was a food writer part-time; my main gig was cooking in restaurants). Even in San Francisco, gayest city in America, homophobic dicks got all the prime line positions in the places I worked. In one kitchen, it was a running joke that the salad station was reserved for women and “effeminates,” meaning gay boys like me. On the outside, I laughed along with everybody. On the inside, I told myself, I’m fucking better than all of you .
    If there was a gay sensibility, you could find it on the cold line when I was cooking, where every plate I put up had a fierce edge born of imposed isolation. The fish stews coming off José’s sauté station might have been technically perfect, but they were also mechanical. My salades composées were thickets of yearning, drifts of leaves and flowers, sprigs of herbs and tiny carrots that looked like they had been blown there by some mighty force of nature. I was fueled by sublimated rage, the outsider with something to prove, taking the ingredients I was handed and making sure they transcended their limits.
    I recognize that same conviction in Olney. He grew up in Marathon, Iowa, and expatriated to Paris to become a painter, a decade or two after great gay expats like James Baldwin famously escaped America’s racism and prudery. Olney turned out to be a so-so painter,but in a way, his art played out in the details of daily life. He bought a broken-down farmhouse in Solliès-Toucas, fifty miles east of Marseille, and slowly scrabbled the life back into it. He carved a wine cellar out of limestone, gathered serpolet (wild thyme) on its hillsides in summer for drying, made vinegars and jams. And from the reminiscences of plumbers and stonemasons who showed up to work on his property, he collected details on the rough-edged regional daubes, terrines, and matelotes that even in 1960s France were teetering on the edge of extinction.
    Just as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass isn’t so much a single book as it is a living body of poetic theory, Olney’s Simple French Food (1974) has a heart that beats. Julia’s Mastering the Art reads like a technical manual you prop open when obliged to cook for your husband’s boss; Simple French Food is a manifesto for living. In 1974, you couldn’t just drive to the A&P and buy a bunch of ingredients to start cooking like Olney. You had to begin by changing your life.
    Olney mentored Jeremiah Tower, the first formal chef at Chez Panisse, and Olney’s lover for a time. Waters made pilgrimages to Solliès-Toucas, and the soul of it, the imperative to stand outside of a spiritless system, the immersive quality of the food, and the yearning for a personal cooking that begins with sourcing—they remain the model for every serious cook working in America today. Olney was the queer little quiet kid on the salad station who ended up making everybody want that spot.
    Claiborne was American food’s establishment figure, in blazers and tasseled loafers and an open table at Lutèce. Though he was officially closeted until 1982, the date of his rather strange, gimlet-soaked autobiography, A Feast Made for Laughter , Claiborne lived the life of the gay professional in mid-twentieth-century America: officially a “bachelor,” sexlessly flaunting his taste and discernment, the Mr. Belvedere of food. In 1957, he became food editor of the New York Times —a position without much cachet in the ’50s, when the Times ’ food section was as dull and service-oriented as the ones in every daily in America. But Claiborne elevated food to the level of cinema or the ballet and made food writing matter, setting the foundation for a far better writer-critic like Jonathan Gold to have a platform as an observer of American culture.
    I remember poring over my mom’s copy of Claiborne’s the New