Hamburgers, Pizza, Pancakes: reception report. 18 November 2008 9:27 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books,geekery,history , trackbackOn Tuesday, 18 November 2008 I went to “Hamburgers, Pizza, Pancakes” — a reception and presentations at The National Arts Club. The occasion: a book release party for the launch of The Edible Series by Reaktion Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. As previously mentioned, it was so much fun I bought the first three books in the series:
Andrew Smith’s Hamburger, Carol Helstosky’s Pizza, and Ken Albala’s Pancake.
Each of the books is subtitled “A Global History,” but the authors took different approaches to their research and writing. These are cute little books, you see, weighing in at maybe 20,000 words, and so a lot of the work of their writing was choosing what to include. Smith, a professor of culinary history at the New School here in New York, chose to examine only beef patties on buns, explaining, “I defined it that way, which solved the problem” of narrowing down his topic. That’s necessary “when you only have 20,000 words,” he said, adding, “I need 100,000 to get started.” I can sympathize. Also, wonder if there’s anything I can contribute to the Edible series — they’re still accepting proposals. Christen, Smith already has dibs on their book on the potato (I was thinking of you when I asked at the signing after the talks), but I still want to read your epic take on our beloved spuds. For more from Smith on his beloved burgers, check out his interview in last Sunday’s Washington Post.
Helstosky, a professor at UC Denver, started her work on pizza with a similar “must narrow down the topic” vein. Her academic specialty is Italian history, where she found enough material about the original Neapolitan dish that she didn’t need to include flatbreads from other cultures. She told about presenting the book to her daughter’s second-grade class by letting them “eat their way through history” with five different pizzas, and shared some of the thank you notes she received. One enthusiastic student wrote, “you are the best mom anyone can have” — but not Helstolsky’s daughter, who chided her mother for omitting the best pizza: chocolate-chip brownie, and ended: “Maybe in your next book.” The most popular pizza with the second-graders was a Japanese-inspired pie with hot dog slices and French fries — “If any of you are thinking of opening a pizzeria near a school, French fries are the way to go.” At least one audience member was disappointed by the narrowness of Helstosky’s focus — during the question and answer session that followed the presentations, he asked about Ottoman flatbreads and was reminded that since those didn’t go by the name pizza, they were outside the scope of the book.
Ken Albala of the University of the Pacific, on the other hand, was nearly all-encompassing in his approach, and had clearly had a lot of fun with it. “Pretty much every single place in the world has a pancake,” he noted towards the end of his presentation, which ranged from Alexander the Great and Vikings to Alexander Fleming, Watson and Crick, Neil Armstrong, and back to William Shakespeare. According to Albala, Jacques’ original monologue in As You Like It began with the line “‘All the world’s a pancake’” He looked like he was trying not to laugh at his own joke as he went on, “He rewrote that, but what a loss to humanity.” Albala’s pancake book seems to have crossed over into Helstosky’s pizza territory a few times (in fact, he contributed a pizza recipe) but there’s one famous flat round food he didn’t touch: “Not tortillas. Those are not pancakes. Don’t even say it.” In the Q & A session, he pointed out that whereas the other two authors had real individual foods, his topic covered about 800 different foods — anything made of batter poured onto a hot surface to cook. Albala cooked many of the recipes he discovered in his research, and included pictures of his home cooking among the illustrations in his book. Speaking of the books’ illustrations, which Marion Nestle praised as “gorgeous beyond belief,” the writers sourced many of them from Flickr in addition to the usual historical sources. Way to inspire my amateur photography, team!
So. Hamburgers, pizza, pancakes. A good time was had by all.
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Linley
