Read Online Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Raymond Sokolov
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preserves my anonymity. ( illustration credit 2.1 )
Forty years later, I’ve been able to look back on my first thirty years of life and pick out strands and seams that connect with the person who jumped out into the public food arena in 1973 and stayed there from then on. But the embryonic gastronome I’ve been able to unearth with hindsight is a character no one back then could have predicted would remain anything but an intellectual with a side interest in food.
At a retirement brunch for an editor at the
New York Times Book Review
just after my appointment as food editor had beenannounced, Pauline Kael, the
New Yorker
’s movie critic, looked up from her bagel as I came into the room. “Since when did you become a food queen?” she asked.
If you had told me then that I would spend the rest of my life writing and reporting on food in major publications and in many books, I would have laughed at you. The real me was the guy checking citations in the library for his translation of
Imperialism Now
. I was the serious professional reviewer of books for
Newsweek
and the
New York Times Book Review
. The even more fundamental me was the Harvard and Oxford classics scholar, the polyglot, polymath culture maven, a journalist and man of letters, literally, a spelling champ.
My first-grade teacher, a charmless martinet named Smart, was the first to notice my gift. I had figured out how to read on the first day of school. It just hit me that the letters, which I’d already memorized at home, were clusters of sounds that made up words. But I quickly saw further that this was not always perfectly the case. Some letters were “silent.” Some combined in completely unphonetic groups, groups that themselves were not always pronounced in the same way. But unlike most beginning readers, I saw right away that the exceptions themselves usually formed patterns.
“Through” could not be sounded out if you relied purely on the basic sounds of its letters, but concluding that o-u-g-h always sounded like “oo” did not help you pronounce the words spelled t-o-u-g-h or b-o-u-g-h. One rule wasn’t enough, but three rules pretty much showed you the way to cope in this maze of muddling signs.
I saw this in a flash. I figured out, in an extremely exciting couple of days when I was barely six, that the apparently irrational business of spelling was not the chaos it seemed to everyone else struggling with it in my class. They were looking for a system to explain the deep mystery of Dick and Jane. I understood intuitivelythat there were many “systems” at work on those idyllically illustrated pages.
The more pages I read, the more little orthographic patterns emerged. So I read a lot, not consciously to bone up on spelling. I read because I could, and, because it was easy for me, I loved it. Mrs. Smart noticed and told other teachers. I had become what they thought of as a natural speller. This weird talent would not have been remarked upon if other children hadn’t needed classroom practice to improve their spelling. But I quickly emerged in those drills as some kind of prodigy.
Show me the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” and I could spell it right away, even though I had no notion of what it meant and couldn’t possibly have understood a dictionary definition without an hour of explanation of the history of the relations between church and state in nineteenth-century England. I doubt I had any firm idea of any of the parts of that phrase: century, nineteenth century, England, state, church. I was only a six-year-old, but I could spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” and a lot of other sesquipedalian jawbreakers, for the amusement and wonder of teachers and older children.
One day, I got taken into an eighth-grade homeroom to give a demonstration of my powers. The teacher was large and raven-maned, notorious in our school for, shall we say, threatening exuberance. Her students were giant thirteen-year-olds who looked
Forty years later, I’ve been able to look back on my first thirty years of life and pick out strands and seams that connect with the person who jumped out into the public food arena in 1973 and stayed there from then on. But the embryonic gastronome I’ve been able to unearth with hindsight is a character no one back then could have predicted would remain anything but an intellectual with a side interest in food.
At a retirement brunch for an editor at the
New York Times Book Review
just after my appointment as food editor had beenannounced, Pauline Kael, the
New Yorker
’s movie critic, looked up from her bagel as I came into the room. “Since when did you become a food queen?” she asked.
If you had told me then that I would spend the rest of my life writing and reporting on food in major publications and in many books, I would have laughed at you. The real me was the guy checking citations in the library for his translation of
Imperialism Now
. I was the serious professional reviewer of books for
Newsweek
and the
New York Times Book Review
. The even more fundamental me was the Harvard and Oxford classics scholar, the polyglot, polymath culture maven, a journalist and man of letters, literally, a spelling champ.
My first-grade teacher, a charmless martinet named Smart, was the first to notice my gift. I had figured out how to read on the first day of school. It just hit me that the letters, which I’d already memorized at home, were clusters of sounds that made up words. But I quickly saw further that this was not always perfectly the case. Some letters were “silent.” Some combined in completely unphonetic groups, groups that themselves were not always pronounced in the same way. But unlike most beginning readers, I saw right away that the exceptions themselves usually formed patterns.
“Through” could not be sounded out if you relied purely on the basic sounds of its letters, but concluding that o-u-g-h always sounded like “oo” did not help you pronounce the words spelled t-o-u-g-h or b-o-u-g-h. One rule wasn’t enough, but three rules pretty much showed you the way to cope in this maze of muddling signs.
I saw this in a flash. I figured out, in an extremely exciting couple of days when I was barely six, that the apparently irrational business of spelling was not the chaos it seemed to everyone else struggling with it in my class. They were looking for a system to explain the deep mystery of Dick and Jane. I understood intuitivelythat there were many “systems” at work on those idyllically illustrated pages.
The more pages I read, the more little orthographic patterns emerged. So I read a lot, not consciously to bone up on spelling. I read because I could, and, because it was easy for me, I loved it. Mrs. Smart noticed and told other teachers. I had become what they thought of as a natural speller. This weird talent would not have been remarked upon if other children hadn’t needed classroom practice to improve their spelling. But I quickly emerged in those drills as some kind of prodigy.
Show me the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” and I could spell it right away, even though I had no notion of what it meant and couldn’t possibly have understood a dictionary definition without an hour of explanation of the history of the relations between church and state in nineteenth-century England. I doubt I had any firm idea of any of the parts of that phrase: century, nineteenth century, England, state, church. I was only a six-year-old, but I could spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” and a lot of other sesquipedalian jawbreakers, for the amusement and wonder of teachers and older children.
One day, I got taken into an eighth-grade homeroom to give a demonstration of my powers. The teacher was large and raven-maned, notorious in our school for, shall we say, threatening exuberance. Her students were giant thirteen-year-olds who looked
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