recommended reading

This week, the New Yorker featured an article by Adam Gopnik about cooking in novels. He speaks about the evolution of food in novels, arguing that cooking is to current novels what sex was to novels in the sixties and seventies: "the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to speak, with the reader." He also considers the use of cooking as a vehicle for contemplation, arguing that cooking and thinking (at least broad thoughts about the nature of life, etc.) are incompatible. He references a scene from Ian McEwan's Saturday where the protagonist is cooking bouillaibase and thinking. Gopnik argues that one cannot think and cook a bouillabase. There is just too much concentration involved in the cooking.