|
BY VICTORIA ABBOTT RICCARDI BROADWAY BOOKS, 282 PP., $23.95
Ethan Gilsdorf is a writer and poet who lives in Paris.
That Victoria Abbott Riccardi is a food writer (for Bon Appetit, Cooking
Light, the Globe, and other publications) is immediately apparent a few
pages into her first book, "Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn
in Kyoto." She appears to revel in all the intricate and painstaking steps
necessary to the mastery of tea kaiseki, the refined cuisine that accompanies
traditional Japanese tea ceremonies. Take this passage, selected more
or less at random, from one of her descriptions of a typical feast:
"After I steamed four giant clams over a skillet of sake, Stephen ripped
out the meat and hacked it into chunks. With cupped hands, he scooped
up the chewy bits and threw them in a bowl. Then he stirred in spicy red-and-white
radish wedges and a warm dressing of wasabi, sugar, and sweet white miso
that I had stirred in a small saucepan over a low flame until it became
thick and shiny. Following his directions, I spooned the golden clams
back into their shells. Stephen garnished them with a pink-and-white `congratulatory'
flower of spongy wheat gluten. `Precious,' he said, winking at me."
Hungry? The book includes not only a sportscast-like play-by-play commentary
on the food Riccardi prepares in the various courses and tea ceremonies
she attends, but each chapter ends with a handful of recipes you can try
at home (assuming amateur chefs can rustle up some of the harder-to-find
ingredients).
There are almost 30 recipes in all, loads of information on the history
and evolution of tea kaiseki, and a glossary of terms concerning meals
and customs. "Untangling My Chopsticks" makes a fine primer on this rather
specialized and refined gastronomical subset that most sushi eaters have
never encountered.
Though not fiction, it fits rather comfortably into the recent fad of
non-cookbooks that embed recipes directly into the prose: "Like Water
for Chocolate," "She Flew the Coop," "The Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery
Series."
But in her eagerness to describe each eel "gleaming under a varnish of
sweet soy glaze" and every "platter resplendent with gossamer slices of
raw beef, shiitake mushrooms, cauliflower florets, and loamy-tasting chrysanthemum
leaves," Riccardi has forgotten to tell a compelling story.
Sure, the bare bones are there: Disgruntled office worker leaves big city
job and boyfriend to pursue food fantasies in foreign land. Awe and respect
compete with cultural misunderstandings and sense of outsider status.
Ultimately, living abroad teaches wise life lessons. But very little of
Riccardi's prose brings any insight or reflection to her experience.
Each chapter is a disconnected, almost epistolary narrative of an episode
or typical day. (In fact, the trip took place 17 years ago; in her author's
note, Riccardi says diaries and letters home were her primary sources
in retelling her year abroad.) There's scant opinion, and no driving force.
We strain to hear a voice, a position, some bite taken out of what she
has accomplished or overcome.
The prose is often shapeless, sometimes monotonous. It hasn't been selected
or framed; everything is described with equal weight. Instead, we are
treated to irrelevant details like what everyone wore on a particular
night, or a tedious account of cooking a chicken without a roasting pan.
Her modest literary talents are strained by the need to recount yet another
ceremony, to invent another string of descriptive adjectives: succulent,
subtle, creamy, fresh, rosy. The lists begin to feel arbitrary. The reader
is saddled with unfortunate cliches such as "the poetic beauty of Japan's
maple leaves" and "I was filled with a deep sense of gratitude and love."
The story picks up when her boyfriend arrives for a visit, and the tales
of trying to teach English can be amusing. But for the most part, hungry
readers must make do with such meager observations as "appearances could
be so deceptive in Japan." There is some genuine belly-button gazing in
the final chapters, including some apt cultural analysis about technology
and convenience usurping the significance of some food-related holiday
traditions. But for the reader, it's too little, too late.
The essential structural problem that "Untangling My Chopsticks" is a
food diary may not stop readers whose fascination with a little-known
food tradition lets them forgive Riccardi's literary faults. But the rest
of us, who expect some attention to well-crafted storytelling, may have
reservations. It is, after all, supposed to be a memoir.
At one point during yet another elaborately prepared feast, Riccardi complains:
"So many details, I thought, watching Stephen stack the mushrooms with
his chopsticks." Indeed, the devil is in the details.
|