HOME / food: What to eat. What not to eat.

Hey, Fromage ObsessiveThe right food-snob reference book for you.

By Sara DickermanPosted Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007, at 6:23 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

For the truly aspirational snob, one must look at the late enlightenment reference works by historic epicures. Kamp and Rosenfeld rightly mention Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "the French lawyer-statesman (1755-1826) whose obsessive interest in eating well compelled him to write the Snob urtext The Physiology of Taste," in the FSD. One should not overlook, however, his contemporary, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reyniere, who, in his eight-volume Gourmand's Almanac (1803-12), sounds like a contemporary regional-food fetishist as he describes the education of a young gourmand: "[H]e (the elder gourmand) teaches him Geography through gourmandise, which is truly enchanting. Thus instead of asking what is the capital of Alsace, he asks him what town is famous for its carp, its salmon, its goose liver pate, and its crayfish? The young man responds Strasbourg, in fact the only town blessed with all four of these specialties." Famed novelist Alexandre Dumas also left behind the gargantuan manuscript for his Dictionary of Cuisine, which was written with a novelist's eye for atmosphere: "In Rheims, before the first table napkins came into use, hands were wiped on hanks of wool that were neither new, nor newly washed." Excerpts from all three gourmands are provided, in English, in Denise Gigante's Gusto: Essential Writings in 19^th Century Gastronomy (with extra snob points for its intro by Harold Bloom).

The mother of all contemporary food reference books—an opinionated encyclopedia rather than a dictionary, comes from Oxford as well—The Oxford Companion to Food from the late, great Alan Davidson (who's strangely missing from the FSD) and his cohorts. In his many scholarly projects, Davidson helped make arcane food knowledge a respectable academic and high-amateur pursuit. Though his writing is eager and sensualist in tone, rather than outwardly lofty and snobbish, the OCF provides invaluable trivia to the working snob—entries on obscure meats "the cane rat may reach a length, not including tail, of nearly 60 cm, and provides a substantial amount of good meat," to near-forgotten cookery writers like Hannah Wolley, "the first woman to author a cookery book in English." While the 1,000-plus-paged OCF is broad-ranging, the true snob can appreciate the micro-focus of Davidson's seafood dictionaries, Seafood of South-East Asia, Mediterranean Seafood, and North Atlantic Seafood, which are essential for piscine one-upmanship among food snobs. They catalog the fish of each region with unremitting diligence and also rate each fish on its subjective culinary quality.

Overall, the most snob-useful reference books are, like Davidson's seafood dictionaries, narrow in their focus. In order to truly distinguish oneself as a food snob today, it helps to specialize. Food is too big a subject and has become too popular to simply know a little bit about everything. At your disposal, then, are books like Kazuko Masui and Tomoko Yamada's revered illustrated field guide to French cheeses, which obsessively documents the terroir and mating calls of the most obscure fromages in the country. Its photographic palate of ivory, cream, and tan is a minimalist's dream. For the historical food enthusiast, there is Kitchen Utensils: Names, Origins, and Definitions through the Ages, by Phillips V. Brooks, which, through pictures and definitions, helps you tell a sugar nipper (for cutting loaf sugar into lumps) from a muffineer (a perforated container for sprinkling salt or sugar on muffins). And for food snobs who like to maximize their scientific input, there is Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, a compendium of encyclopedic entries by Hervé This, one of the prime movers and shakers in the molecular gastronomy movement (and mentioned in the Food Snob's Dictionary). It's rich material for the snob: In one essay, he describes an experiment that demonstrates how different reblochon cheeses taste, depending on whether they're made from the milk of cows on a north- or south-facing meadow.

It may seem absurd to think that anyone would want to know such minutiae, but in any erudite world, specialized knowledge is the stuff of authority. Years ago, I learned this when I started innocently attending meetings of the Culinary Historians of Southern California. I met a man in, yes, a bow tie, who asked me about my area of expertise. I told him I cooked at a restaurant and liked learning about food. He responded, perhaps a little amused by my blockheaded generalism, "Oh. I smoke meat." I felt incredibly bland as I soon realized other members of the group included a medieval Arabic cookbook specialist and a junior league cookbook expert.

Kamp and Rosenfeld's own snobbery, like mine, I must admit, seems to range toward the Berkelified, farm-centric Northern California food world—the galaxy consisting of past and present Chez Panisse suppliers like Acme Bread Company—and rotates around Alice Waters. The California turf might be pretty crowded territory, but there is still plenty of other snob glory to be grabbed—in the distant past, in the outer reaches of Asia, and the street foods of Latin America, even in the less-storied regions of Italy. Go narrow and go deep, and you'll find your own snob universe soon enough.