Life after butter

Housekeeping: Next Long Play Presents is on September 9 at the Stout Irish Pub, featuring Tara Henley. I’ll see you there. There’s still a chunk of summer left though, which I command you to enjoy.

I was sad to learn last year that one of my favourite journalists, Rachel Cooke, died at the age of 56. Bylines that you read no matter the topic aren’t many, and Cooke was one such name for me. She was a staff writer at the Observer in the last however many years, where she covered books, graphic novels, and food, but I also remember reading her TV reviews in the New Statesman. Whatever she wrote it was worth my time. She’s probably the only one who not only made me read reviews of graphic novels but made me read graphic novels too. Thanks to her I discovered Helen Garner who’s now in my Pantheon of writers. Cooke’s was the only accurate review of Lauren Oyler’s ‘24 book No Judgment which made a splash on the internet among Oyler’s fans and friends, and made Oyler, presumably a fearless critic, appear thin-skinned. (There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, internet-ly.)

Her food writing however had largely passed me by. A catch-up was overdue so I ordered her 2023 collection Kitchen Person from Blackwell’s and a couple of weeks later the beautifully illustrated (by Holly Ovenden) hardback tome was here.

Now, I find food writing generally boring. I cook regularly and still buy cookbooks now and again but skip the pages of Nigella’s garrulous prose - and the detailed history of the transatlantic salt cod trade in this recent cod book that I bought in Newfoundland - and however many paragraphs Jamie Oliver’s staff wrote to match his speaking tone before caponata is introduced in Jamie’s Italy - to get to the recipes. Probably the only food-related book that held my attention from beginning to end was Clarissa Dixon Wright’s (of the Two Fat Ladies) first memoir. I never read restaurant reviews. I used to only skim chef profiles (wasn’t Jen Agg in every other issue of the Toronto Life that one year) and I refuse to stay abreast of chef drama. I will watch Tony only because Matt Johnson directed it.

But Cooke’s writing about food, restaurants, and even chefs, is a delight. (With great writers, it really doesn’t matter what it’s about or what their politics are.) Kitchen Person is a selection of some two decades of food columns, each presented here with a longish 2023 endnote which might contain an update, a change of mind, or an oft-used recipe by Cooke. I’ve already made two of those casually told recipes and crossed town to find the Lebanese manouche bread of which Cooke writes so persuasively. The bookmarked pheasant in a Dutch oven awaits Christmas.

There is so much love of life in this collection. Cooke sees love of food, curiosity about it, knowledge of its history, geography, political economy, and a discerning taste in matters culinary, as an essential feature in a civilized human, male or female. Cooking for those we love she also rates highly, and at various points she comes close to arguing that lacking interest in food and a capacity to enjoy it signals a moral-intellectual failure of sorts. To be clear, this is not snobbery and most of the book is about affordable culinary pleasures such as bread, anchovies or chicken liver. Cooke is also big on honoring the old (outmoded) English culinary practices and quirks. Good food writing comes with a terroir.

Reading this collection inspired me to attempt to write about food in that way. Let me give it a go.

A routine physical checkup with blood works last year revealed bad cholesterol amounts so high and iron so low that I experienced the privilege of a call-back. “Let’s schedule another meeting,” the message came from the young resident at the WCH. Four weeks later on a Thursday morning as the only option (for Canadian GP availability is such) it was alas confirmed that doctors don’t know anything about nutrition. The young woman asked about family history (yes, everyone), eating habits (correct, I’m no stranger to deep fried carb-coated animal protein nor supermarket cake), and if I’d consider taking statins (and hook myself on pharma aids till the rest of my life?). Do I have insurance that covers a nutritionist? Would I like to talk to one?

Another doctor that I saw shortly after at a walk-in on Adelaide where they have my file printed three pages of advice off the internet. With cute illustrations. Thanks, I guess? Glad you put your medical degree to good use. I kept the page with the diagram of the two blood vessels - one almost clogged with accumulated inner coating of cholesterol cells, the other normal - for weeks. Then I tossed the damned thing to recycling, and decided to take things seriously.