Opinions
Amanda Hesser, Mr. Latte, and Me
A new cookbook arrives in the mail, and with great surprise, ROSECRANS BALDWIN discovers that its author, Amanda Hesser, has included a cryptic footnote just for him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Things We're Denying Ourselves (Of Recent Note)
- The Last Great Thing You Downloaded (Of Recent Note)
- Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down (Letters From Paris)
Also by Rosecrans Baldwin
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- Culture Shake (June 8, 2005)
- Frequently Asked Questions About the Toyota Prius (June 2, 2005)
- Mr. Ugli Fruit or: How I Stopped Being Nice and Learned to Hate Fairway (May 25, 2005)
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The astral connection between The New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser and me became clear this afternoon on page 157 of her new book, in the last breath of a sentence describing Rome: ‘We could compare carciofi alla romana among restaurants, squeeze in a few visits to Giolitti, the famous gelateria, and stop in for pizza bianca at the Antico Forno in Campo dei Fiori.’
Four years ago I suffered some type of epiphany at the bakery Antico Forno. My friend Graham and I were tired of leading our classes of high-school students around the mangy city, and snuck off from work for a second lunch. Graham lived in Rome for a few months during college, and spoke semi-fluent Italian. His memory of the city’s layout was still precise, and he had us in the busy Campo dei Fiori in minutes.
On our way there, jogging and sweating in the August heat, Graham bragged about the pizza, and how stunned I would be by its flavor, that something apparently so plain (simply olive oil, salt, and rosemary over a bubbling plot of tender bread) could be so satisfying. I told him I didn’t buy it—Graham is a tad prone to melodrama, even when he’s sober, so I had a right to be suspicious. If this pizza bianca was the best in the world, as he claimed, then I was a worthless judge: I had never tried pizza bianca before. But calling it the best pizza in the world seemed ridiculous. In high school I delivered and made pizza for three years at a self-proclaimed ‘gourmet’ pizza restaurant (though later I learned that pizzas cooked on a conveyer belt are perhaps not the most gourmet) and I was very certain then about my standards for excellence in pizza-making. The idea that plain bread greased with oil could be called pizza sounded inane and smacked of conspiracy; and by what right could Italy claim mastery at America’s ancestral foods?
The store was dusty with flour, crowded, and like the rest of Rome, hot and loud. A thick audience mulled around the counter. I did not speak any Italian besides the phrases molto bene and doppio macchiato, which mean respectively I like your dress and I am too weak and small to drink espresso straight, so Graham shooed me outside and ordered for both of us. We had already eaten lunch that day, but the pizza was good enough, he said, to compensate for any indigestion. A few minutes later he emerged with two gleaming squares of bread, folded in half, wrapped in paper. He had already finished most of his own, and seemed to be eyeing mine.
It was incredible, this strange golden cheese-less pizza, though not at first. We were squatting in direct sunlight, in 90-degree weather. Refusing to seem even slightly American, I had worn pants and a long-sleeve shirt that morning, and I was dying, so the pleasures of cramming my mouth full of hot salty bread and oil were missed. I grimaced and chewed on. I would have shot someone for a beer. We left the square and found a bench down a street covered by shade. Graham asked me excitedly, as if he already knew the answer, ‘Well, what do you think?’
In fact, I loved it. The bread was crisp but also chewy—there were air pockets to breathe in, and a delicious, scratchy, and charred crust on the underside. This was focaccia on wings. The aroma was a knockout. In a square inch there were only a few flavors, but each had resonance and depth; the bread smelled of rosemary but the flavor was less pronounced; from the first bite to the last swallow there was butter and light and color, and I intensely regretted my first lunch that had stolen so much capacity from my stomach. (Though later that day I would participate in, and win, a gelato-eating contest with a student that left me nauseous but happily smug; who can say ‘no’ to beating 16-year-olds at anything?)
That afternoon with Graham was not the precise moment my sloth toward eating and drinking turned to ardor, but it was one of them. Later I would discover oysters, scotch, North Carolina BBQ, and Thai dishes without noodles. Recently I was introduced to a snapper with caramelized persimmon and coconut-candlenut foam; we may see each other again soon. So the idea that Amanda Hesser included her detail about the Antico Forno in her story as a cryptic, personal footnote to me is, at the very least, possible.
But I won’t ask her. I don’t have time. I’m only on page 157, and her new book, Cooking for Mr. Latte, is 324 pages long, and I have no choice but to ignore other deadlines and finish it this afternoon.
* * *
Cooking for Mr. Latte (W.W. Norton & Co.) is a collection of Hesser’s articles for the New York Times Magazine when she wrote the ‘Food Diary’ section, and these short articles are, in fact, diary entries, only the kind that are first scrutinized by editors, then by the general public, then gourmands. It’s not unusual for a food writer to include her personal life in her articles: writing about food, even for the most scientifically alpine and dull reporters, requires the writer, at some point, to examine the sensual, lonely experience of eating. But there are two filaments to Hesser’s stories: a love for food, already established before the first article, leading her to adventure and embarrassments, and a love for Mr. Latte, aka Tad Friend, staff writer for The New Yorker, that begins on page 17 and was certainly adventurous, and probably led to embarrassments for both of them in the small publishing and food circles in New York.
Asking any reporter to detail the sensual, lonely experience of falling in love for her readers is certainly asking a lot, if not for at least a few ugly comparisons to Candace Bushnell.
So Hesser combined her two great affections in a bi-weekly column, offering recipes for the foods she sampled or cooked, and as often, recipes for surviving the small catastrophes of any new relationship. Like many, I imagine, my girlfriend and I followed her progress from Sunday to Sunday, and claiming first rights on her column became part of unpacking the paper. Shortly after I proposed to my girlfriend (and, generously, she accepted), Hesser winningly and subtly ended a story about planning menus with news of her own engagement.
‘Look,’ I said to R., ‘The Food Diary woman got engaged!’ She laughed. ‘Just like us!’
Hesser’s charm lies in her sincerity—never a smug or sarcastic moment—while baring her personal life and all its anxieties, and her willingness to be shown as foolish, wrong, or corrected is the open gate for her readers. Sincerity, however, is often mistaken for earnestness, and, as a blind component of sentimentalism, it will attract attackers. Last week I took a pasta-making class at the Institute for Culinary Education, and after hearing I was reviewing Hesser’s book, my teacher asked, ‘Yes, but Mr. Latte—it was a little much, don’t you think?’ I said no, but didn’t have time to explain—my tortellini were dismantling themselves. She had suspected Hesser of preciousness, perhaps not knowing that Tad was so nicknamed because of his taste for lattes after dinner instead of the foodie-approved single or double-espresso, but the nickname, if a tad (I’m sorry) cheesy, is still right and appropriate.
Much like her regular reporting for the Times Food Section, Hesser’s diaries are precise (though in the early columns sometimes too spare) and never conceited. In fact, she is constantly charming, a winsome bumbler both at cooking and love, and so becomes loveable (for me, at one point, for refusing to cook from one book because she couldn’t stand the typeface; Jamie Oliver’s Happy Days With The Naked Chef similarly drove me away). And as we’re convinced to like what she likes, or at least consider liking what she likes, the pleasure from reading her stories under a single cover is part in finding frequent references to those things she clearly appreciates in her life (radishes, cognac, crème fraîche, Jeffrey Steingarten), and by these things, and others, knowing her better. Hesser’s voice grows with exertion, especially when the columns are darker: her willingness to confront sour topics in the later stories, to leave the reader on a down note before the recipe, makes her more human in the way we appreciate hearing about her failed experiments with walnut cake. None of us are ever the lovers or cooks we would like to be.
The author of a proper—never mind, fair—review of a cookbook will prepare several of the included recipes several times, and then comment on their merits and shortcomings. With great journalistic pride, my properness disappeared with a second glass of sherry, and I have never been accused of being fair. The recipes are, however, well-written, and the wide survey of cuisines makes the book more valuable. And though I haven’t cooked any of them, yet, I have read the book cover to cover and can say I haven’t read anything so fun about food since I gorged on Steingarten’s It Must Have Been Something I Ate. And, as a slightly demented altar boy at Steingarten’s church, that is a nearly religious confession. (Has anyone claimed themselves as a Steingartenian? If not, let me be the first without cringing.)
As I write this, I have a third small glass of Osborne cream sherry next to my laptop. It’s just as terrible as the last two glasses: milky, almost rancidly sweet, and too warm. With the temperature outside at 86 degrees, shocking for April, I would much rather have a beer, or a gin and tonic, or a glass of ice-cold fino, but sadly, this cream sherry is the only alcohol we have left in the apartment, outside the medicine cabinet. Still, it will be finished in a few minutes along with this review, and then I’ll leave for dinner with two friends who are moving to Los Angeles in two days. They’ve found an apartment near West Hollywood and are excited and scared for the trip. We probably won’t see them for a long time, and tonight’s restaurant will certainly be the last they show us in Hell’s Kitchen, their now-former stomping grounds.
We’re having Thai. Thai and I are not close. I have to convince myself each time that I may like Thai food—there were too many plates of bad pad thai in college—like I fought my reluctance to have pizza that day in Rome, but there is a good chance I’ll eat a great meal tonight if I buck up and try something new and strange. And that’s a lesson, writ large, that Hesser gets right, and has contributed, in some way, to teaching me: The pleasures of eating and drinking well, with friends or alone, are as much about being brave enough to seek them out, as being wise enough to enjoy them. Dinner tonight will be good, I’m sure of it.
Four years ago I suffered some type of epiphany at the bakery Antico Forno. My friend Graham and I were tired of leading our classes of high-school students around the mangy city, and snuck off from work for a second lunch. Graham lived in Rome for a few months during college, and spoke semi-fluent Italian. His memory of the city’s layout was still precise, and he had us in the busy Campo dei Fiori in minutes.
On our way there, jogging and sweating in the August heat, Graham bragged about the pizza, and how stunned I would be by its flavor, that something apparently so plain (simply olive oil, salt, and rosemary over a bubbling plot of tender bread) could be so satisfying. I told him I didn’t buy it—Graham is a tad prone to melodrama, even when he’s sober, so I had a right to be suspicious. If this pizza bianca was the best in the world, as he claimed, then I was a worthless judge: I had never tried pizza bianca before. But calling it the best pizza in the world seemed ridiculous. In high school I delivered and made pizza for three years at a self-proclaimed ‘gourmet’ pizza restaurant (though later I learned that pizzas cooked on a conveyer belt are perhaps not the most gourmet) and I was very certain then about my standards for excellence in pizza-making. The idea that plain bread greased with oil could be called pizza sounded inane and smacked of conspiracy; and by what right could Italy claim mastery at America’s ancestral foods?
The store was dusty with flour, crowded, and like the rest of Rome, hot and loud. A thick audience mulled around the counter. I did not speak any Italian besides the phrases molto bene and doppio macchiato, which mean respectively I like your dress and I am too weak and small to drink espresso straight, so Graham shooed me outside and ordered for both of us. We had already eaten lunch that day, but the pizza was good enough, he said, to compensate for any indigestion. A few minutes later he emerged with two gleaming squares of bread, folded in half, wrapped in paper. He had already finished most of his own, and seemed to be eyeing mine.
It was incredible, this strange golden cheese-less pizza, though not at first. We were squatting in direct sunlight, in 90-degree weather. Refusing to seem even slightly American, I had worn pants and a long-sleeve shirt that morning, and I was dying, so the pleasures of cramming my mouth full of hot salty bread and oil were missed. I grimaced and chewed on. I would have shot someone for a beer. We left the square and found a bench down a street covered by shade. Graham asked me excitedly, as if he already knew the answer, ‘Well, what do you think?’
In fact, I loved it. The bread was crisp but also chewy—there were air pockets to breathe in, and a delicious, scratchy, and charred crust on the underside. This was focaccia on wings. The aroma was a knockout. In a square inch there were only a few flavors, but each had resonance and depth; the bread smelled of rosemary but the flavor was less pronounced; from the first bite to the last swallow there was butter and light and color, and I intensely regretted my first lunch that had stolen so much capacity from my stomach. (Though later that day I would participate in, and win, a gelato-eating contest with a student that left me nauseous but happily smug; who can say ‘no’ to beating 16-year-olds at anything?)
That afternoon with Graham was not the precise moment my sloth toward eating and drinking turned to ardor, but it was one of them. Later I would discover oysters, scotch, North Carolina BBQ, and Thai dishes without noodles. Recently I was introduced to a snapper with caramelized persimmon and coconut-candlenut foam; we may see each other again soon. So the idea that Amanda Hesser included her detail about the Antico Forno in her story as a cryptic, personal footnote to me is, at the very least, possible.
But I won’t ask her. I don’t have time. I’m only on page 157, and her new book, Cooking for Mr. Latte, is 324 pages long, and I have no choice but to ignore other deadlines and finish it this afternoon.
Cooking for Mr. Latte (W.W. Norton & Co.) is a collection of Hesser’s articles for the New York Times Magazine when she wrote the ‘Food Diary’ section, and these short articles are, in fact, diary entries, only the kind that are first scrutinized by editors, then by the general public, then gourmands. It’s not unusual for a food writer to include her personal life in her articles: writing about food, even for the most scientifically alpine and dull reporters, requires the writer, at some point, to examine the sensual, lonely experience of eating. But there are two filaments to Hesser’s stories: a love for food, already established before the first article, leading her to adventure and embarrassments, and a love for Mr. Latte, aka Tad Friend, staff writer for The New Yorker, that begins on page 17 and was certainly adventurous, and probably led to embarrassments for both of them in the small publishing and food circles in New York.
Asking any reporter to detail the sensual, lonely experience of falling in love for her readers is certainly asking a lot, if not for at least a few ugly comparisons to Candace Bushnell.
So Hesser combined her two great affections in a bi-weekly column, offering recipes for the foods she sampled or cooked, and as often, recipes for surviving the small catastrophes of any new relationship. Like many, I imagine, my girlfriend and I followed her progress from Sunday to Sunday, and claiming first rights on her column became part of unpacking the paper. Shortly after I proposed to my girlfriend (and, generously, she accepted), Hesser winningly and subtly ended a story about planning menus with news of her own engagement.
‘Look,’ I said to R., ‘The Food Diary woman got engaged!’ She laughed. ‘Just like us!’
Hesser’s charm lies in her sincerity—never a smug or sarcastic moment—while baring her personal life and all its anxieties, and her willingness to be shown as foolish, wrong, or corrected is the open gate for her readers. Sincerity, however, is often mistaken for earnestness, and, as a blind component of sentimentalism, it will attract attackers. Last week I took a pasta-making class at the Institute for Culinary Education, and after hearing I was reviewing Hesser’s book, my teacher asked, ‘Yes, but Mr. Latte—it was a little much, don’t you think?’ I said no, but didn’t have time to explain—my tortellini were dismantling themselves. She had suspected Hesser of preciousness, perhaps not knowing that Tad was so nicknamed because of his taste for lattes after dinner instead of the foodie-approved single or double-espresso, but the nickname, if a tad (I’m sorry) cheesy, is still right and appropriate.
Much like her regular reporting for the Times Food Section, Hesser’s diaries are precise (though in the early columns sometimes too spare) and never conceited. In fact, she is constantly charming, a winsome bumbler both at cooking and love, and so becomes loveable (for me, at one point, for refusing to cook from one book because she couldn’t stand the typeface; Jamie Oliver’s Happy Days With The Naked Chef similarly drove me away). And as we’re convinced to like what she likes, or at least consider liking what she likes, the pleasure from reading her stories under a single cover is part in finding frequent references to those things she clearly appreciates in her life (radishes, cognac, crème fraîche, Jeffrey Steingarten), and by these things, and others, knowing her better. Hesser’s voice grows with exertion, especially when the columns are darker: her willingness to confront sour topics in the later stories, to leave the reader on a down note before the recipe, makes her more human in the way we appreciate hearing about her failed experiments with walnut cake. None of us are ever the lovers or cooks we would like to be.
The author of a proper—never mind, fair—review of a cookbook will prepare several of the included recipes several times, and then comment on their merits and shortcomings. With great journalistic pride, my properness disappeared with a second glass of sherry, and I have never been accused of being fair. The recipes are, however, well-written, and the wide survey of cuisines makes the book more valuable. And though I haven’t cooked any of them, yet, I have read the book cover to cover and can say I haven’t read anything so fun about food since I gorged on Steingarten’s It Must Have Been Something I Ate. And, as a slightly demented altar boy at Steingarten’s church, that is a nearly religious confession. (Has anyone claimed themselves as a Steingartenian? If not, let me be the first without cringing.)
As I write this, I have a third small glass of Osborne cream sherry next to my laptop. It’s just as terrible as the last two glasses: milky, almost rancidly sweet, and too warm. With the temperature outside at 86 degrees, shocking for April, I would much rather have a beer, or a gin and tonic, or a glass of ice-cold fino, but sadly, this cream sherry is the only alcohol we have left in the apartment, outside the medicine cabinet. Still, it will be finished in a few minutes along with this review, and then I’ll leave for dinner with two friends who are moving to Los Angeles in two days. They’ve found an apartment near West Hollywood and are excited and scared for the trip. We probably won’t see them for a long time, and tonight’s restaurant will certainly be the last they show us in Hell’s Kitchen, their now-former stomping grounds.
We’re having Thai. Thai and I are not close. I have to convince myself each time that I may like Thai food—there were too many plates of bad pad thai in college—like I fought my reluctance to have pizza that day in Rome, but there is a good chance I’ll eat a great meal tonight if I buck up and try something new and strange. And that’s a lesson, writ large, that Hesser gets right, and has contributed, in some way, to teaching me: The pleasures of eating and drinking well, with friends or alone, are as much about being brave enough to seek them out, as being wise enough to enjoy them. Dinner tonight will be good, I’m sure of it.
—Published April 23, 2003
