Mouth Wide Open
A Cook and His Appetite
by John Thorne
North Point Press, 2007
$26.00, cloth
410 pages
John Thorne is one of the most thoughtful men to ever enter a kitchen. He is connected to emotion, able to call on history, and inspired by almost every tool, technique, or ingredient that crosses his cutting board. This collection of his essays are by no means leftovers.
But with appealing stringency, he resists flights of fancy in favor of a straightforward attitude. The cover photo of the author shows him in a kitchen that might look like yours - jumbled counters and well-worn cabinets - not the chic showplaces we are supposed to aspire to.
He writes in partnership with his wife, and his culinary essays most regularly appear online and his more than twenty year old newsletter, Simple Cooking He also occasionally participates in food conferences, like the one he describes in an essay on the cook and his books where he posits that you don't need to test recipes to judge a cookbook. A good cookbook should be a companion, an entry into a different world, an inspiration.
And cooking, he believes, happens when the cook begins with a recipe, and uses his own common sense, tools, and ingredients to create a dish. Personality and the contents of the pantry will determine dinner, not the exact measures of a recipe.
This essay most catches Thorne's approach, and he comes closest to the sudden turns and switchbacks that an engaged cooks will follow to dinner. And here's how engaged Thorne is, despite what he might think of cookbook recipes, his appear, indexed and sorted in the book's first six pages.
Thorne is also a mindful cook. He enters no dish without knowing its provenance. He charts the authenticity of bagna cauda by comparing cookbook recipes for this hot bath of garlic and oil, a kind of Italian fondue (the kind of facile comparison that Thorne would never make). Before opening the refrigerator, he conducts an internet searches for sources, and once he's finally in the kitchen Thorne provides conversational recipes, describing how he cuts up vegetables or the changes he's observed as ingredients cook.
And Thorne takes on the tough ones. Bagna Cauda is a recipe adaptable to glossy magazine standards of stylish chic. But what about Philadelphia Pepper Pot that calls for veal knuckle and two kinds of tripe, with a side trip into funky Menudo (the Mexican soup/hangover cure, not the 1980s boy band). He uses that essay not only to tackle a historic and all but forgotten recipe but also to trace what he calls "the complex strands of motivation that make us decide what to cook." He was inspired by the high price of canned supermarket Pepper Pot (if you can even find it).
Sandwiches, grits, Greek salad, a not too fishy Pasta with Anchovies, Thorne investigates the dishes that send us on personal odysseys. Thorne has harnessed his hunger, using it to drive curiosity and enjoyment, making himself a useful and pleasant companion for cooks in their armchairs and their kitchens.
© 2007 Claudia Kousoulas
