Writing about food

Part autobiography and part Barlett's Familiar Quotations, The Upstairs Delicatessen (2023) is also Dwight Garner's tribute to his favorite things (not counting his wife, Cree) — literature and food.

Garner goes meal-by-meal through the day — breakfast, lunch and dinner — and tells us what various writers have had to say about these meals and the foods commonly eaten. He also has chapters on drinking and shopping for food. It turns out that food and drink are a favorite topic of writers great and not so great.

John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley about making coffee "shine" by dropping an egg white and the shell into the coffee pot. Garner tells of David Sedaris abandoning a lavish lunch to step outside and buy a hot dog from a vender. Charlotte Bronte wrote in a letter, "I have had a hideous dinner of some abominable, spiced-up mess, and it has exasperated me against the world at large." And you thought you once had a bad meal.

Garner shifts quickly from one reference to another. In a single paragraph about oysters, he quotes, or at least mentions, Vladimir Nabokov, Pat Conroy, Roy Blount Jr., Samuel Pepys, Padgett Powell, P.G. Wodehouse and Edward St. Aubyn. One marvels at his ability to accumulate these hundreds of references to food and drink. With a career as a book critic, of course, he has read a great deal and no doubt took many notes along the way.

Much of this book is fascinating. Much of it is deadly dull. But reading it is something like a buffet — you can take what you want and ignore the rest.