The essays in this book focus on single ingredients or single dishes. Many good cooks now understand that with fantastic ingredients, one need do little more than show them at their best. These cooks are learning to find quality producers, to hunt out artisans doing things the old, and often more flavorful, wayand they are encouraging home cooks to do the same. Many people are still coming to this philosophy, but it's something Ed has been teaching for sixteen years in his magazine.
He emphasizes taste and sensation; when you read these pieces you feel jealous that his job is to think about food so thoroughly. He is passionate about these topics in a way that few people really are, and evokes the ingredients and dishes so powerfully that your own experiences with them seem like dim shadows of what they could have been. Reading the sorrel chapter, I thought that if we ever do install window boxes in our apartment, we should have sorrel, even though I've rarely cooked with it. After his tomato chapter, I thought that perhaps I had never done proper justice to this fruit/vegetable. My favorite chapter, on roast beef, made me feel as if I've never cooked anything worthy of the passion he conveys, channeling Richard Olney and Elizabeth David to produce text that mingles directives with exaltation.
His essays can't help but make you feel cheated to some extent. Why is it so difficult to get true cream? Why does no one make true country hams anymore? We are being deprived of these ingredients, and we are the worse for it. Since many of us have never tasted these items, their memory will fade and there will be no impetus to produce them anymore, and something precious will have been lost. This is an underlying motif in the book, and it is an important one.
Ed's guiding principle is taste and sensation, but the pieces in this book (and the magazine) are heavily researched, and this is part of their appeal. His research is so extensive that the articles could serve as primary sources for other writers. The diverse citations in these essays suggest that Ed has a sprawling research library at his farm in Vermont, the same feeling you get when reading John Thorne's essays. This knowledge gives him facts to back up his strong opinions.
Simple prose conveys all this passion and knowledge. But don't confuse "simple" with "simplistic". The text is direct, and unadorned, the result of a lot of work and a diligent editorial eye. The tone is somehow both scholarly and conversational.
The book occasionally dates itself; Ed made minor corrections to the earlier text and simply re-released it, though he thoroughly updated the list of sources in the back. A reference to West Germany in the vanilla chapter jumped out at me. In the preface he mentions that when he wrote it, Starbucks was a handful of great coffee stores in the Seattle area. The salmon chapter touches on environmental concerns with farmed salmon and doesn't say too much about the debate that has raged for the last few years. However, it's worth noting that Ed's article gives a preview of this debate, even though the original predated the public discussion by several years. For the most part, the text is still very relevant, and he touches on his updates in his preface to this edition.
This book is what food writing should be. It is about a deep understanding of where your food comes from, its history, and why the version you eat today may be different than what you would have eaten in the past. It is about respecting all that food has to offer and appreciating it at new levels of understanding. It is truly, eating as an art.