Hannah Goldfield talks about Anthony Bourdain’s book Don’t Eat Before Reading This

I’m not laughing when I say that I remember exactly where I was when I first met Anthony Bourdain. It was the summer of 2002, two years after he published “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in Culinary Adventures,” an essential and brutal account of life as a chef in restaurant kitchens. I was fifteen years old, and I was on vacation with a friend and her family on Long Island. My friend’s father was reading the paper book and shared out loud one of the dirty secrets in the book, which we all took, immediately, as gospel: one should never order fish on Mondays.

Bourdain’s detailed clip explaining why this is true was first published, on The New Yorkerin a 1999 article titled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which he quickly expanded into “Kitchen Secret.” (The short answer is, “Many fishmongers don’t deliver on Saturday, so the tuna you wanted on Monday night has probably been languishing in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God-knows-what-good-conditions”; the long answer takes you deeper into the culture and psychology of the restaurant business.) He originally wrote it for an alternative weekly magazine called New York. He presseswhich she lined up as a cover story before the editor killed it at the last minute. Bourdain imagined his audience would be insular and small: “I thought I’d write something that would entertain other chefs, and maybe I’d get a hundred dollars, and my fry cook would find this funny,” he recalled in 2017, during an appearance at the New Yorker Festival. When the material found its way to… The New Yorker– After Bourdain’s mother proposed marriage to New Yorker times My colleague, Esther Finn, suggested that Finn’s husband, David Remnick, the magazine’s new editor, might want to take a look — “It changed my life in two days,” he said.

You can explain this surprise by pointing out the revealing nature of the article, and the invitation it offered into an exciting, abnormal world that was under everyone’s radar. The chefs cooking your meal do not wear gloves or hairnets; Our service staff recycles your bread basket scraps; On average, you probably consume a stick of butter for every meal at a restaurant: “Sauces are enriched with smooth, emulsified butter. Pasta is stirred with it. Meats and fish are browned in a mixture of butter and oil. Leeks and chicken are caramelized with butter. It’s the first and last thing in almost every pan: it’s called the final stroke.”Monterre or bourre.’ “But Bourdain was much more than a whistleblower, even at the beginning of what would become his highly significant second career. The sometimes chilling way in which he told the story of the essay’s writing and publication belied the years he spent pursuing his literary ambitions, even while working on the line and maintaining a heroin addiction; in 1985, he took part in a workshop with the famed editor Gordon Lish, and before he hit the literary world.” The New Yorker He had published two novels, including a crime thriller, and was sitting on a novella based on his experiences in the kitchen.

The voice he presents in Don’t Eat Before You Read This isn’t just a gruff, arrogant one; It resonates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is about blood and organs, cruelty and decadence. It’s about sodium-laden pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheese, thin thymus glands, and the swollen livers of young animals. It’s about danger — risking dark forces and the bacteria in beef and chicken and cheese and oysters.” Although it was Bourdain’s TV documentaries that made him extraordinarily famous — the kind of celebrity whose face ends up on new votive candles and bicep tattoos, and who convinces a sitting president to eat roast pork and noodles and drink beer on a plastic chair in Vietnam — “Kitchen Confidential” became standard, and everything he did was scripted, clearly noted, and rigorously interrogated.

As Bourdain himself pointed out, before his death by suicide, in 2018, the no-fishing-on-Monday rule expired many years ago, thanks to improvements to the supply chain. What will long outlast him is the example he set, his uncommon ability to show thorny things exactly as they were without making them look ugly at all. ♦

Don’t eat before reading this

A New York chef reveals some trade secrets.