Villas Revives Food Writing, Regurgitates Food
By Amy McDaniel
A&F Editor

American journalism has undergone a sea change in the past several decades in its orientation toward food writing. Formerly, in a country with little regard for classic cuisine, homemakers composed the main audience for books about food. In the 1950s and 1960’s, early pioneers began writing about food as a pleasure rather than simply a necessity; these authors, like Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard, have attained only belatedly – and often posthumously – the status as masters of their genre.

Now food literature, both books and magazines, crowd the shelves, but the quality has declined markedly. Magazines like Bon Appetit and Food and Wine often pander to the same dilettantes who demand fusion cooking, celebrity chefs and intimate details about the hottest “vintages”; glossy pictures try to elevate the culinary craft to a fine art.

James Villas, longtime Town and Country food editor and author of the new Between Bites: Memoirs of a Hungry Hedonist, both rejects the current trends and stands as a lone beacon of hope for current food journalism. As a good Southerner and later, student traveler to France, he recognizes the eminence of eggs and butter in proper cooking. He quotes Elizabeth David: “One of the main points about the enjoyment of food and wine seems to me to lie in having what you want when you want it and in the particular combination you fancy.” Villas, recalcitrant, refuses to eat raw fish or parmesan ice cream.

For Villas, food, eating and cooking serve more as a starting point for his writing than as a central obsession on which to pontificate. The first chapter describes his first weeks in France on a Fulbright grant, where he stumbles by accident into what he much later finds out was the most famous restaurant in the country at the time, the Hôtel de la Côte d’Or, where he is personally fêted by its brilliant chef, Alexandre Dumaine.

While Villas does provide an extensive description of le coq au vin à l’ancienne, made traditionally with chicken’s blood, the heart of the section lies with his episodic recall of the characters that surround this experience: Monsieur Dumaine and Madame Dumaine, his dining mates. In the rest of the book, these faces are replaced by others–some famous, like James Beard; others not, such as particular waiters.

The best of these portraits is of M.F.K. Fisher in the chapter “How to Tame a Wolf.” Villas is a clear descendant of Fisher, the unquestioned doyenne of food literature. Villas rhapsodizes, “She always manages to transform and transcend the subject so that the art of living takes supreme precedence over the more subordinate act of nourishing our bodies.”

On the day in the mid-1960’s that Villas arranged to interview the already elderly writer, he suffered from an extreme case of food poisoning from last night’s oysters. Left with no choice but honesty, he confessed his problem to Fisher: “I’m sick as a dog…frankly, Mrs. Fisher, I’m mortified to say that I might have to use your bathroom and may not even make it through this interview.”

With mounting hilarity, the chapter recounts the incredible soberness with which the legendary Fisher dealt with the much younger Villas. First, she calmly instructed him, in the most polished terms, to properly regurgitate. He complied, and, before preparing him the perfect palliative of milk toast and Coca-Cola, Fisher conducted the interview. She explained, “You just keep resting, and if you’ll show me how to work this contraption, I’ll simply read the questions out loud and give my answers. Then you’ll have everything on the machine and can do with it what you want when you’re back in perfect form.” Fisher concluded reflectively, “I think it’s a brilliant idea and makes a lot of sense.”

The other highlight of the memoir finds Villas in a similarly humble position. As a restaurant critic, he decided in 1977 to experience life at the other end. Villas went undercover at a top Chicago restaurant as a table captain and began to understand the trials of the waiters and bussers that he formerly picked on for poor service. Commonly, people who wait tables become better tippers; this, however, only reinforces quality service after the fact. Villas provides invaluable insight on how to become a better diner to ensure being served well, like, for instance, by showing interest in the menu.

Villas concludes with “An Optimistic Rebel,” an earnest treatise calling for a return to “the exciting, often brilliant interpretations of both classical and regional fare” that he hopes will again rule both restaurant and home kitchen. Similarly, the example of Villas offers hope for a return to the compelling, even illuminative food-writing of times past.