From his mouth to our eyes
Calvin Trillin feeds our hunger for good writing with his books about food, family and more
If you are what you eat, then no wonder Calvin Trillin is such a fascinating guy.
For 50 years now, he’s been “feeding a yen” as he titled one of his books, enjoying a freestyle excursion through edible delights around the world.
He brings it home to us, in several senses of the word, on Sunday at 11 a.m. when he sits down at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in conversation with Adam Gopnik. They’ll discuss “the highs, lows and distinct qualities” of our native cuisine in an encounter called “Canadian Comestibles.”
“I love eating in Toronto,” Trillin said from his home in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “It’s one of the few cities in the world that thinks of multi-ethnic food as a necessity, not an oddity.”
The 76-year-old Trillin is best known for his writing in The New Yorker, where his “U.S. Journal” series set a very high bar for in-depth examinations of various local scenes from 1967 through 1982.
“That’s how the whole food thing started,” he explains. “I was on the road so much of the time that I had to learn how to eat decently to survive.”
And “eating decently” to Trillin meant never uttering those fatal words “Why don’t we just have dinner in the hotel?” or listening to the local Chamber of Commerce recommendations.
“They always wanted to send you to the kind of restaurant I christened ‘La Maison de la Casa House,’ where they would try their hardest to pretend to be a pretentious bigcity continental restaurant, when there was damn fine chili around if only you knew where to look.”
Trillin started to evolve techniques of learning what he needed. “I’d ask the hotel clerk to recommend a restaurant, but not the one where he took his parents on their 25th anniversary, but the place he went back to on his first night home after he spent 18 months in Korea.”
His discoveries were eventually collected in a series of three books now called The Tummy Trilogy ( American Fried, Alice Let’s Eat and Third Helpings), which began the shift toward “comfort food” and “local dining” that have become such crazes.
“It’s a different world out there today,” Trillin admits. “What a travelling man could get for dinner after the U.S. passed its1965 immigration law was pretty grim. They allowed unlimited British subjects, but excluded Chinese. In culinary terms, that’s suicidal and it resulted in an onslaught of grey meat and soggy vegetables, but no garlic or ginger.”
Still, Trillin kept fighting the good fight. He would wave the banner proudly for Arthur Bryant’s, the barbecue shack in his native Kansas City that he insists is “the single best restaurant in the world.”
His in-depth historical research on the history of the discovery of the Buffalo chicken wing comes down firmly on the side of Teressa Bellissimo at the still-thriving Anchor Bar, resisting the tempting renegade claim of John Young at a now-defunct place called Fat Man’s Got ’Em.
He made early trips to Montreal to prove that Quebecois cuisine wasn’t just “French food with frostbite,” and gave relief to an entire generation of tourists by proving you could eat your way through any Asian street market by simply pointing confidently at what you wanted.
But then things started changing. “It’s always hard to pinpoint the start of these things, but I think it happened around the time that people got interested in restoring old parts of their cities instead of tearing them down, and creating their own regional theatres instead of bringing in road shows. “And as for immigration? They come in a blessed variety of ways these days and you can now find more Bosnians in St. Louis than there are in, well, Bosnia, and Dodge City is over 50 per cent Latino. These are all good things for someone who likes good food.” While Trillin is best known as the Johnny Appleseed of non-franchise dining, he has several other impressive arrows in his quiver. From 1990 through today, he has been writing the hilarious “Deadline Poet” columns for The Nation, immortalizing the famous and infamous in poems like “Exit, Santorum,” “Ron Paul, Still Standing” and “Adieu, Sarkozy.” When asked if he ever gets tired of the pressure, he quips, “Not at all. Every Sunday, I just set the shower to iambic pentameter.”
But in a more serious vein, he admits that the current electoral campaign has been “a horn of plenty” for his comic muse, “with so many miscreants to write about. I’ve been able to get mileage about the way the Republican candidates kept dropping by the wayside.
“At one point, I penned a piece called ‘The Lamentation of the Late Night Comics,’ ” and he quotes from it:
“While Jimmy Fallon tears his hair,
Bill Maher laments, ‘It’s just not fair.’ Dave Letterman begins to pout. They’ve heard that Herman Cain is out.”
Such satirical japery is still not the limit of Trillin’s talent. He has also pursued the path of true crime in America, coming up with an amazing collection called Killings, which is like a dozen miniature versions of In Cold Blood, without the sentimentality.
“Murders attract me as stories,” Trilling explains. “The murder itself is just the McGuffin, as Hitchcock used to call it, the excuse for telling the tale and finding out about the people behind it and the world they lived in.
“I love eating in Toronto. It’s one of the few cities in the world that thinks of multi-ethnic food as a necessity, not an oddity.” CALVIN TRILLIN
“Alice used to say I’d go anywhere there was a transcript.”
There’s a bit of pause after Trillin speaks that name. Anyone who is a fan of Trillin’s work knows Alice. She was his wife from1965 until her death on Sept.11, 2001, and her presence perfumed every page of his work, even when she was never mentioned directly.
To most of the world, Alice was the warm, humourous presence who would diffuse Trillin’s suggestion for eating several dinners on the same day by suggesting that a stop for fried clams en route to the main event might fit what he called “her generous view of what constituted an hors d’oeuvre.”
Her bemused exasperation on their European travels was legendary as Trillin kept reading the Guide Michelin looking for restaurants while she wanted to explore cathedrals.
He mentions these stories again fondly, rubbing them like smooth stones in his pocket, not wanting to dwell on the past, but not willing to deny its importance, an importance he eventually celebrated in his beautiful memoir, About Alice.
But when I mention to him our family’s favourite Alice-ism, where she insisted “any money not spent on a luxury you can’t afford is the equivalent of windfall income,” a doctrine Trillin christened “Alice’s law of compensatory cash-flow,” his voice grows even a bit raspier than usual.
“I hadn’t thought of that one in a while,” he says.