Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History

by Mark Kurlansky

“Every once in awhile a writer of particular skills takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight.” That’s how David McCullough described Mark Kurlansky’s A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, a work that revealed how a meal can be as important as it is edible. A World History, its successor, did the same for a seasoning, and confirmed Kurlansky as one of our most erudite and entertaining food authors. Now, the winner of the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing shares a varied selection of “choice cuts” by others, as he leads us on a mouthwatering culinary tour around the world and through history and culture from the fifth century B.C. to the present day.

Choice Cuts features more than two hundred pieces, from Cato to Cab Calloway. Here are essays by Plato on the art of cooking . . . Pablo Neruda on french fries . . . Alice B. Toklas on killing a carp . . . M. F. K. Fisher on the virility of Turkish desserts . . . Alexandre Dumas on coffee . . . W. H. Auden on Icelandic food . . . Elizabeth David on the downward march of English pizza . . . Claude Lévi-Strauss on “the idea of rotten” . . . James Beard on scrambled eggs . . . Balzac, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Chekhov, and many other famous gourmands and gourmets, accomplished cooks, or just plain ravenous writers on the passions of cuisine.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, History, Food Writing, Essays, Food and Drink, Cooking

502 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and author who has written a number of books of fiction and nonfiction. His 1997 book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997), was an international bestseller and was translated into more than fifteen languages. His book Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006) was the nonfiction winner of the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Reviews

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

about 500 pages, so lots of exceprts that span gourmets, sex, meals, restaurants, markets, egss, veggies etc etc and leans heavily on mfk fisher, galen, lydia child, james beard , a j liebling, dumas 1 and 2, etc ec and lots lots more. here's a short one, the talmud on garlic
"five things were said of garlic:
1. it satisfies your hunger
2. it keeps the body warm
3 it makes our face bright
4 it increase a man's potency
5 it kils parasites in the bowels

some people say that it also encourages love and removes jealousy."
babylonina talmud, a.d. 500

author kurlansky too does very fine job of transitions, facts, and anecdotes, and picking all these out too.

[Stephen Robert Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This great non fiction history of food from around the world in classic food from First century A.D ,1600s,1800s,& lots more.
Mystery of eggs, bread,vegetables,salad to bugs.We have famous people like Dickens,Orwell,Hemingway, to Wilde if enjoy good taste of interesting book on food this brilliant book.

[Perrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful, wonderful compilation of essays. I laughed, I cried (well, not exactly CRIED but some parts were rather bittersweet), and I got hungry.

Edit: I just realized that I made a pun by using the adjective "bittersweet". To describe a book about food. Get it??

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

--------THE LAYOUT---------

This book is more or less organized into four sections, which each have subsections. The first and fourth sections contain general thoughts on food or cooking. The second section contains passages on specific foods, grouped into chapters. Finally, the third section includes essays on various cuisines.

[By the way, I’m offended that there’s an essay on “chicken intestine omelettes” and an entire chapter on bugs (three essays!) but there’s not a single essay on cheese. Cheese should be the largest chapter. Other than wine.]

--------THE WRITERS---------

There’s a healthy mix here. You get dedicated food and cookbook writers, like Jean Brillat-Savarin and M.F.K. Fisher and Hannah Glasse and Isabelle Beebe and Auguste Escoffier.

You get famous literary authors— for instance, you’ll hear from Pablo Neruda on French fries (were you expecting something sexier, like chocolate or strawberries? I was), Charles Dickens about his favourite restaurant, WH Auden on Icelandic food (“Dried fish is a staple food in Iceland. It varies in toughness. The tougher kind tastes like toenails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one’s feet”), Ernest Hemingway on his favourite foods, Emile Zola on his favourite market, John Steinbeck on starvation, Galen on bread, Pliny the Elder on onions, Alice B. Toklas on carp, Anton Chekhov on oysters, Alexandre Dumas on crabs, Henry David Thoreau on fruit, George Sand on eu-de-vie, and so forth.

Finally, you hear from a huge variety of writers whose names you’ve never heard.

All that said, this book definitely skews hard for Western writing. It didn’t seem like Kurlansky made much of an effort to find food essays that didn’t originate in Europe or the US. (Also, more Basque writers than you’d expect, not by accident; Kurlansky has a strange obsession with the Basque. Not only has he written a full book on Basque culture, he devotes entire pages or even full chapters to the Basque people in every book I’ve read by him, no matter how seemingly remote the connection).

--------THE VERDICT---------

There’s a ton of historical food writing here (Herodotus, Cato, Pliny the Elder, Galen, and even excerpts from a cookbook by Apicius from first century Rome). In a lot of ways it reveals history and location like nothing else quite does. For that reason, it was pretty entertaining (particularly when you try to synch up your meals to the dishes you’re reading about).

Some examples of the rather unusual food opinions:

--Cato says that the urine of someone who eats a lot of cabbage is a panacea; it cures weakness, blindness, and yeast infections
--The Babylonian Talmud says that garlic satisfies your hunger, warms your body, brightens your face, increases sperm, kills parasites, encourages love, and removes jealousy (somehow, they forgot the obvious: warding off vampires)
--Platina (15th century) says that if you grind up basil and cover it with stones, a scorpion will spontaneously generate. Sounds legit
--Along those lines: some people thought truffles spontaneously generated. Others thought they were formed when lightning struck the soil. And still others thought they were marks of the devil.
--Recipes for calf-brains in rose-flavored custard, sow’s udders, and baby eels aka “elvers” were memorable indeed (I dare you to Google Image search “elvers food.” You will never forget it)
— “[Before eating it] one should hang a pheasant until the breast meat turns green.”



~~~READ HARDER CHALLENGE 2020~~~

#13: Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before [this isn't technically about a specific cuisine, but I couldn't think of any cuisines that I haven't tried, and there are certainly dishes here that I've never tried before]

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

It takes some chutzpah to make the first piece of writing in a food anthology filled with Brillat-Savarin, Waverley Root, M.F.K. Fisher, Alexandre Dumas, Escoffier, Elizabeth David, A.J. Liebling, Hemingway, Woolf, Dickens, Chekhov, Balzac, Zola, Orwell, Alice B. Toklas, Plutarch, Rabelais, Plato...your own piece of writing. That's what Mark Kurlansky does here, with a fairly long excerpt from Food & Wine magazine. He also illustrated the book. The illustrations are nothing special. It's hard to tell, but it looks like they might be watercolors, and would benefit from a color presentation. It was also a trite choice to call the Introduction "Better than Sex." Because we haven't exhausted that cliche sufficiently.

I read it cover to cover, which mostly felt like a chore, with Kurlansky's heavy editorial hand guiding me. There's a ridiculous typo in one of the large-fonted headers, Tamlud for Talmud.

I hate popular "microhistories" (books like Salt, Cod) so I can't imagine I'll be reading any of his other efforts. I picked this off the remainder table at Powells. I think another reviewer mentioned that this was probably all, or mostly, obtained via research for his other books, and that sounds about right. Pan drippings.

[Neko~chan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection. Really comprehensive for Western food writing. Good coffee table book. I’m shelving it as own but I really mean I need to buy it once I have a more permanent place.

Need to read more MFK Fisher.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptually neat. It's a compilation of excerpts from famous writers throughout history on food; the authors range from Maimonides to James Beard to George Orwell to Alice B. Toklas, the topics from food of the Americas to the origin of chocolate to how to disguise other meats as venison. I didn't read it start to finish, but skipped through a fair bit of it. I'd have loved to see even more primary source pieces like the first European descriptions of pineapple.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Audio] It took me twelve years to listen (multiple times) to this 14-disc audiobook. I picked it up for a song at Tuesday Morning, a closeout retailer. It became a go-to when I had no current audiobook in progress. Choice Cuts sits esconced in what I call the bathroom book genre: easy to open, easy to close.

The book contains abstracts from food writing across the continents over the last millennium. I wouldn't recommend it unless you carry within you a spark of curiosity.

I think it is Kurlansky's commonplace book on all things food. Frequently noted and quoted are M.F.K. Fisher*, Ludwig Bemelmans, A.J. Liebling, Brillat-Savarin*, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and James Beard. (*authors who have perched patiently, unread, on my shelves)

Extracts of Galen, Chekhov, Tacitus, Martial, Plutarch, Hemingway, Orwell, Woolf, Dickens, Auden, and Steinbeck are included. Subjects range from Egyptian dining to Icelandic food to the evening market in Nigeria. Some are on the charming side, others: meh.

It's quite fun to read through the Table of Contents (which you can do for free on Amazon's Look Inside! feature). And you'll most likely be able to read a section that strikes you as savory.

[Popup-ch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eclectic collection of delectable quotations.

Extracts from a wide variety of writings related (sometimes only tangentially) to food or eating. There are snippets by authors from a very wide variety of genres, from Plutarch to Margaret Mead and from Herodotus to George Orwell, on subjects as varied as the correct way to prepare laver (a seaweed, once common in Celtic cuisine) and how to cook crabs to the role of food in seduction, and starvation as a political tool.

There are some introductory texts by Mark Kurlansky, but overall it reads more like his clipbook of references than an edited text.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hrm. Some of the selections are great fun, and serve as a sort of anno'd bibliography of food writing, making me want to run out and get the entirety of the excerpted work.
Some of the selections are
Seems like it might have been a bit of a vanity project for Mark Kurlansky, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

More than a more treatise about food, Mr. Kurlansky digs through history and articles about people whose business it was to write about food: how it tastes, the best places to eat, the proper ways in which it should be prepared. We read how famous food writers and food lovers waxed rhapsodic about their favorite dishes, making our mouths water and wishing we too could have sat beside these people and hear their comments about the delicious morsels they’ve consumed in their time.

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this - I'm a massive food fan and really like food writing. In reality this is a collection of snippits from the research Kurlansky has undertaken to write his brilliant food histories. If I had read it as a supporting material I probably would have enjoyed it more, not sure it really stands up on its own as a book.

[Almost · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, I was disappointed with this book. Felt a lot like the sort of college freshman copy-shop tomes assigned for a 101 course. Relied a little too heavily on well-known, prolific writers whose texts most serious food writing readers would have already discovered. And in the end, I skipped over most of the last 1/4 of the book due to lack of interest.

[Kirsti S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

MCL. I only read the essays that interested me. It's a hard book to rate because there is such a variety of subjects and authors.

My favorite essay was the one by Brillat-Savarin which began "Every thin woman wants to grow plump: that is an avowal which has been made to us a thousand times." The basic plan involved eating plenty of bread, baked fresh every day.

[Colleen]

You know, I think you really have to be in the mood to read this book. While there are some interesting facts and info within this book, I still found myself thinking that I would rather be listening to something else. So I will try reading this again another time.

[Marina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting idea. I didn't read all the essays, but I liked the way they are organized. Some a few sentences, others several paragraphs. Columbus describes pineapple. Thoreau discusses watermelon. James Beard reviews the restaurant at Meier & Frank.

[Maryanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the choices were a little odd and there was nothing really modern to speak of but it was an entertaining book to flip through. Can't say I read it cover to cover but that's why essay compilations are nice.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skimmable at points, but filled with fascinating food writing from the 6th Century to present day. If you ever wanted to know the secret of how to pass off beef as bear meat, you need look no further!

[Randy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book made me realize that though I like food, I don't like reading about it. Uninspired.

[Novi Bobby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is interesting, if you are interested in food in general. Lots of interesting trivia about food.

[Faby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love to talk about food. This book is right up my alley.

[Aja Marsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were a few things that I skiped in here, but there were lots of bright moments, and overall I enjoyed it!

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a foodie I wanted to love this, but I didn't. Some of it was ho-hum, some of it was okay, but most of it could have been better.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just delicious.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read several of this author's books and enjoyed them. I also enjoy reading books about food and cooking. I figured this would be a combination with some other writing about food thrown in. While that is not an unfair description of this book, it doesn't really reflect it's substance. This covered everything from Food and Sex to Recipes for cooking spiders to poems about specific meals. Most of it was okay and broken into small enough bites that I could stretch out the reading and not be bored. Some of the glimpses of historic cookbooks were fun and a few of the excerpts from great literature were enjoyable. But the whole thing is not one I would ever revisit or recommend even toy friends who read mostly nonfiction and love cooking (my original plan for when I finished reading it).

The final section of the book did address the reason for books like this and the place of food and food writing in the world. Included is a piece by Margaret Mead from 1970 talking about the moral and ethical implications of the gulf between the haves and have-nots in the modern world. She spoke of how for years the haves (including the have-too-much) were able to remain ignorant of the level of need in other parts of the world and of how much they had compared to others. With the advent of industrial agriculture and world media (in her case glossy magazines and some television) the have-nots were able to see how much better off others were and the haves no longer could excuse their excesses. It therefore becomes a matter of morality and ethics whether rich nations ignore the plight of poor nations. This discussion takes on an extra poignancy in present times when the richest person in the world (possibly in history) is gleefully destroying benevolent giving by the richest nation on earth and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people for kicks and giggles.

[Dominique King · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this one in one of those Little Free Library Book boxes, and picked if up because I recognized Kurlansky's name from his books on Salt and Cod, which were fun reads with a lot of history of things like Cod fishers through the ages and things that the cod fishers in Newfoundland and the Basque people had in common.
Read this one over time because it was an easy-pick-up and put-down book that I could read in parts while I was reading other books (a good break from a lot of the political books I'd read the past year).
If you like food writing through the ages, and seeing how food and the relation of folks with it over time, this is a very worthwhile read.
As with compilations of writing from various authors, it can be a little uneven, depending on your interest in the chapters' subject and your mood...but reading it over a long period of time in parts really worked for me!
With more than 200 pieces of writing, you're sure to find something interesting!

[Dr Susan Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great and enjoyable read! I found this one on a bookstall in the University of Tuebingen Mensa and like the other Kurlansky books, I couldn't put it down - his own drawings add a delightful touch to the history and art of gourmet food

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

So good

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its tough to review this book as a single piece of work, as it is actually a compendium of food writing from throughout the centuries. The author organized each chapter under a theme (fat, fruit, dessert), provided short introductions, and in some instances, translated the works into English. The best thing about a compilation such as this is that because it features so many voices from across time and place, it stays fresh. From the Ancient Romans, through 15th century Italy, into present day America,
there is a different experience with food, even if the ingredients are the same. The chapters are short enough that they do not drag, and the selections themselves are for the most part tantalizing. I was even inspired to purchase one of the cookbooks (Cross Creek Cookery), loving the narrative style of the writer, and not owning any books that highlight Floridian cuisine. If you are someone who enjoys food writing and food history, this is a book worth checking out.