Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic and author of The Man Who Ate Everything, explains why he can't afford to be choosy. By Tamasin Day-Lewis. Portrait by Victor Schrager.
It is mid-morning, and I am in Jeffrey Steingarten's Manhattan loft. Pukka and slightly portly, his immaculate Huntsman blazer is gradually getting dredged in the flour he is scattering across his wooden work surface. He is not making any old focaccia, he is making focaccia de Recco, and amid a distillery-sized clutter of bottles banked up across a section of floor, exercise bike in their eyeline, he is searching for the Ligurian olive oil: "It won't taste right without it." Eventually, authenticity is minutely compromised, and he settles on one from Nice. As we talk, he shows and describes the process in which he is engaged in the meticulous detail normally the province of a forensic pathologist or Harvard lawyer, the latter, his original career.
Without American Vogue, he would probably still be prosecuting. There is no other magazine I know of that would pay to indulge a food writer's every culinary fantasy. Jeffrey has been let loose in Japan to discover the secrets of their hand-massaged beef, wagyu; imported tubs of horse fat, after lengthy legal negotiation, in search of the finest frites; had laboratories in America and Italy analyse flour and water in pursuit of the ultimate loaf; and scaled the sides of Mount Etna in search of the 'Mother of all ice cream'.
As we talk, he works the dough, and puffs at a cigar that looks Viagra-enhanced, all at once. And as I watch, I thank God that Freud's analytical genius was responsible for at least one major oversight. "Freudian analysis rid me of all my neuroses except food phobias," Steingarten says. "HE DIDN'T DEAL WITH FOOD." Without this omission, he would not be the legendary food critic he is. In uncomprehending tones, Jeffrey continues: "If I'd said, 'I avoid dill', my analyst wouldn't have cared. So I had to write down lists of foods I would avoid. Part of my ethical responsibility was to see it as a serious, serious flaw to have aversions. One food writer picked cilantro out of her food with tweezers. She probably dashed the careers of several future Elizabeth Davids.You can't be an art critic and not like yellow. The Tibetans train themselves to like everything equally. Being unable to get pleasure from a large variety of foods is akin to only being able to have sex in strange circumstances."
To prepare for his new life, Jeffrey embarked on a Buddhist-like training. Traversing the great highway of enlightenment, in search of the perfect state, omnivorousness, he forced himself to eat foods that he felt phobic and fetishistic about until Nirvana was attained. He was then able to eat anchovies without gagging, fermented Korean pickle without a murmur, lard without breaking out into a mucksweat, and so on down a list of ingredients that ranged from the "wet darkness" of clams to slimy-innarded okra.
Puffing on his cigar and breaking down the dough, he asks me where I want to eat. "I'd like you to declare a preference for once," I say, remembering the bit in his book where, having achieved his Zen-like omnivorousness, and confronted by a menu in Paris, he is totally unable to order. He wants well... everything. "I'm assuming this will be the best meal I eat in New York," I continue. Jeffrey looks stricken. "If I'd known you wanted the best food in town, I'd have booked Le Cirque." I hope it is clear from reading this that that is not what I meant. I'm not the kind of high-maintenance woman who demands this sort of treatment. And it is too late to book Le Cirque.
One of Jeffrey's gripes is inexcusably bad cooking. "Alain Ducasse makes the best tuiles. The recipe is in his book, all you have to do is look it up. Maury Reubin makes the best tart pastry. He has the City Bakery, and he's written a book. It is so tender, so good. It is every baker's obligation to buy the book, or go into a different line of work if his pastry isn't as good.
"Technique is the hardest thing to describe. When I wrote my piece on the ideal American pie, it ran to eight pages. I read every scientific article and made up a foolproof recipe. It was disgusting. The scientific method didn't work," recalls Jeffrey. So he rang Marion Cunningham, the doyenne of American baking, a "just beautiful" septuagenarian. "I asked her to tell me what I'd done wrong. She came and made me a pie, the best pie I've ever had. She talked, I watched. 'It's all in the fingers,' she said. I couldn't get it all in one, so I rang her, and asked her to do it again, five or 10 times. She was pleading for mercy," Jeffrey says proudly.
"God, you're sadistic," I venture.
Meanwhile, a deliquescent lump of stracchino faces us. Jeffrey makes a muslin-thin nun's veil of the dough and thumbs the gooey whiteness onto it. Then a second tier of dough, and into the oven.
I've got as far as discovering from Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, how it all began. "I asked him to write a piece about microwaving fish, which was a hot subject then. I waited. And waited. Three months later it arrived. Jeffrey had written about every kind of fish you could possibly buy." He'd also carried out his trial using nine different microwave ovens, believing it irresponsible not to if he was going to recommend anything. Anna clearly didn't want a typical food writer.
Before the commission, Jeffrey had given himself six months to become a writer. If by the end of that time he hadn't made giant strides toward his goal, he would forget about it. Anna rang him 10 days after the deadline expired. "I thought food was too frivolous to write about. It was only my gluttony, my deadly sin, that made me think okay, I'll do it. It may be fun, and it may lead to something. I discovered it was the most profound subject you could possibly write about. There is no aspect of human activity it doesn't touch."
Touchingly never truer than in the case of the first 'serious' dish Jeffrey ever cooked. "It was the day of my Mother's funeral. I was 20. It was a complicated chocolate mousse. I was replacing her, competing with her." He continues: "I can remember every meal I've ever had, probably from birth."
"I won't challenge you," I interject.
He is snipping the hot focaccia into triangles, and we are folding them with their melting middles into our mouths as speedily as he can cut. "The French have five food contacts a day, the Americans 27," he offers as we munch, the cultures of two nations summed up in a sound bite.
It is the French who have provided Jeffrey with his most contentious and gloriously politically incorrect thesis of all: The French Paradox. Staggered by the discovery that the French have the second lowest incidence of coronaries in the world, he realised that the accepted wisdom on saturated fats and cholesterol was distinctly dodgy. "For every 315 deaths from coronaries in the US, there are only 143 in France." His glee is unconcealed (it has to be remembered that he 'browses' through government reports like a child at a sweet counter). "Within France, the lowest rate of heart disease is found in the southwest, an earthly paradise of goose and duck fat, sausages and foie gras... And the average Frenchman drinks 10 times more wine than the average American." Thus, the magazine that worships at the shrine of svelteness tells its readers that American nutritionists are a bagel short of a picnic. "They hated the challenge to 20 years of orthodoxy on cholesterol, but it's never been refuted."
It is 3.30pm. As we leave for lunch at Joe's Shanghai, Jeffrey points to a picture of his proudest possession, his dog Sky King. It is the only time that I swear there was no twinkle, no underlying irony. "My wife has gone to live in California now WITH MY DOG. Who knows what'll happen."
Sky King has just been immortalised in the Vogue column. "I do not eat canned food, desiccated pellets or chew on rubber bones." After exhaustive trials, Jeffrey concludes that, "in an ideal world, man and dog would eat the very same food every day."
Knowing this, I don't feel so badly about what befell me when I left Jeffrey. He had insisted on buying me four exemplary tarts from the City Bakery, and on returning to my cousin's house where I was staying, I was unable to resist trying a triangle of each. Crème brálée, chocolate, apple and cinnamon, and Milky Way. Ten minutes later, my cousin shouts upstairs: "Sandy has eaten the tarts." Jeffrey would have been thrilled at this example of canine good taste.