Gastronomic journalist Nika Makhlin about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today the journalist and co-founder of Sputnik food and travel lab Nick Makhlina shares her stories about favorite books.
As a child, I especially appreciated, like my grandfather, a former press attache of the GDR, did three things: he folded hiking hats from a newspaper, fried cheesecakes and gave me books. Besides him, no one in the family was particularly involved in my literary education, but my grandfather had a peculiar approach: he gave me only encyclopedias and dictionaries, and for all my life I had an applied attitude to books - I open any of them as tools .
When it was time for school to read fiction, it was wildly interesting for me to investigate what turns the author uses, what style and rhythm he uses, what useful information one can learn from the book and what facts from the story are there. Only in the second place could I embrace the whole picture: to think about the fate of the heroes, about the genre of the book, and about the problems - and with much less trepidation. When I was taking exams in literature, it was more convenient for me to take a sheet of paper and redraw there what was read in the form of a tablet or infographic with characters and events in order to better understand the essence.
When I enrolled in journalism, I began to read a lot and everything: Bradbury, Orwell, Eco, Allen, Dovlatov, Murakami, Strugatsky, Brodsky, Hoffmann, Fried Green Tomatoes in the cafe Polustankok and Mayakovsky. I did not like the latter as a propagandist, but as an ideally folded object: I adored all these paragraphs, line breaks, and how he emphasizes individual words using visual techniques, what illustrations everything accompanies, and how the illustrations themselves can also perform the role of the text. I even singled out a single trick at Mayakovsky, to which I gave some name, as if I had opened a strait or an insect, and wrote a paper about it - the teacher went to meet my heated imagination, although this had nothing to do with the topic of the task.
In addition, the works of Mayakovsky and all the others I analyzed as donor organs, which I can use in the future. Since I already worked in magazines, I wrote out for myself some separate words that need to be applied. When I had to write formal texts for work, for example, about cars or cameras, I amused myself by using the style of a particular author I am reading now: no one noticed, but I was pleased to know this inner joke. Programmers call such blotches "Easter eggs" - for example, when a dinosaur appears in a Moscow park on the panoramas of Yandex.
At the same time, I was always worried when I could not hold a conversation about literature with representatives of the intelligentsia. Until now, sometimes it seems to me that I perceive books, like many things in life, as a foreigner or an alien - I cannot integrate them into the system, but I can study along and across as an object in itself and find something that others did not think to look. Of course, I was also worried about the fact that the journalist, according to the general idea, should read much more and in a completely different way. Therefore, when the fashion for non-fiction came, I breathed a sigh of relief - after all, it was these books that were perfect for me.
For my first non-fiction, I rushed to the store "Moscow" almost at night, after hearing a short retelling of a book at a lecture by Ivan Zassoursky - it was Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. It meant a lot to me: a whole book about how printing, advertisements, roads and other media gradually changed the world. And with theories like the one that “isn't it time to stop guessing, the egg or chicken came first, and wonder if the chicken is the way to breed eggs?”.
At the same time, I was very fond of biographical books. I once came to the Andy Warhol exhibition in Moscow and got into the wrong building of the Tretyakov Gallery. To smooth a senseless trip, bought it "From A to B and vice versa." There was practically no useful information in it, but there was a sea of bright revolutions and images like the one when it wakes up and advances in cherry. I was delighted that such a thing can be published. About how in one of the first Esquire numbers I was delighted with a longrid dedicated only to bookworms - this is such a cool insolence! Of the latest biographical books that I really liked, Pivovarov's "Duck standing on one leg on the bank of philosophy." It is built in the same way as Warhol’s dialogue — a collection of letters from Pivovarov to the philosopher Olga Serebryanoy and back in which they discuss everything: from the revolution in the Czech Republic to what color it was at different times to draw shadows in pictures .
Then I began to write texts about food - and, accordingly, look for a new toolkit. I didn’t even think that books with recipes are just the tip of the iceberg, one of the many genres of gastronomic literature, and that actually books about food can be at the same time exciting travel stories, guidebooks, biographies, and history books, and encyclopedias. It is even more pleasant for me to read them than it is - in no other area has a person come up with so many beautiful names anymore. Food seems to be created to write about it. A good food book is a rich catch of vocabulary that can only compete with my grandfather's cheesecakes in rolling in the language.
Alexander Grimaud De La Renier
"Almanac gourmet"
This book was presented to me by a friend, a photographer, after we were together preparing the material about opening a restaurant, and I complained that I didn’t want to write a boring actual text about it. He said that the book should help me. And so it happened, and even more: Grimaud became for me an ideal example of how to write about food. He first began to do it not as authors of cookbooks. What Grimaud created was called “gourmet literature”: these are revolutions like “cheese — drunk sponge cake”, “you can easily eat your father with such a sauce” or a restaurant description in which oysters are eaten so much that only shells form real the rock that rises above the tallest houses on this street. " He managed to weave all this style organically into practical advice: the world's first gastronomic criticism and guidebook to Paris came out, from which it was possible to learn that the Biennes tavern cooks the best roasts in the city, and the famous Rouget has unmatched pies and pies.
Nina Gomiashvili, Georgiy Totibadze, Konstantin Totibadze
"Georgia: first, second, third"
Everyone who was in Georgia knows what kind of baroque food there is and how powerful hospitality there is. So, this book is absolute Georgia. Instead of just dumping the recipes in a row, the Totibadze brothers staged a real feast between the first and fourth covers: they accompanied the recipes with local parables, touching comments, their own drawings and photographs of Nina Gomiashvili: Imeretti dogs and Megrelians similar to Mexicans on them. For this book, the brothers and Nina, who live in Moscow, went on their own to gastrotrip across Georgia and turned into “recipe hunters” for a while. The preface reads: "We have not been hungry or sober for a single minute," honestly, like the whole book.
Julian barnes
"The Pedant in the Kitchen"
This book, like many others from the list, was given to me by Ivan Bolshakov when we first started living together. He still cooks more than me, but then I experienced real horror before cooking. The narration is conducted on behalf of the hero, who, like me, was not taught to cook in childhood, and so he was eventually forced to start using crutches - recipes for confidence. It was then that he found a pedant in himself, on which the world berates the authors of these recipes for negligent attitude to numbers, volumes (“What is the average pinch ?!”), because they often do not check what they themselves advise and that can give the task to weigh, for example, 30 grams of yolk. This is a very funny book. Every time I re-read it, I imagine such a gastronomic stand-up - it's a pity that nothing of the kind exists.
Elena Kostyukovich
"Food - Italian happiness"
The book, written by the translator Umberto Eco, with his preface. I bought it right there, when I saw it in the store: and this is not about Italy, but how perfect it is: it is a hybrid of an encyclopedia with a guidebook. It seems that the book is about food - and in fact the book is about the way of life in the country through the prism of stuffing from capon, parmesan peels and marzipan figures. I like very much that a lot of attention is paid to the etymology of products and dishes, and also that Elena incidentally recalls other existing literature about food. For example, the work "On the origin and dignity of pasta", whose heroes are fighting forks for the attention of Mrs. Pasta.
Katya Kalina
"Restaurant Phrasebook"
I love dictionaries that reflect the spirit of their time. These were once done by Big City and Afisha, and this is an occasional rare specimen about food that Globus Gourmet has produced. You open it on any page and read what "shabu-shabu" means, and what is "throw out", and how it relates to Moscow. Very enjoyable - I use it for work, and sometimes I take it with me and just read it during the day.
Giovanni Rebor
"The origin of the fork: the story of the right food"
There are a lot of similar books: about the history and customs connected with food. I also like, for example, Olga Nazarova's Travels to the Edge of a Plate with a preface by Viktor Pivovarov. Such reading changes the daily picture of the world, allows even to look at the sausage in the context of history - and the sausage appears in volume. Reading such books is the same as reading Gilyarovsky about Moscow: only in this case you begin to know better not the city, but what you eat. And now, having reached the shelf above the stove, you remember that olive oil was used for icon lamps, ordinations and coronations, and opening a refrigerator — that the Celtic civilization was a civilization of cheese and sausage.
Ursula Sedgwick
"Lying Fingers: My First Cookbook"
Someone left this book with us in the stairwell. Not just recipes for children, but a masterpiece of naive and culinary arts: the kitten and the dog tell you how to cook zoo, fruit chips, mint pellets, apple snow and other amazing dishes. I would like to have such a book in my childhood or give it to my child. This is incomparably stronger and more correct, in my opinion, than all these sickening "Books about food for little housewives", from which the desire to cook only disappears.
Peter Mail
"France - a journey with a fork and a corkscrew"
Would I ever write something like this about Russia. In fact, this is a collection of stories about how the author travels around France, studying local gastronomic customs - what we ourselves try to do in the framework of our project "Sputnik Food and Travel Laboratory." In Russia, however, there are not all these fairs of snails and other food festivals with spicy sausages under powdered sugar and tribal rabbits, as there are no Russian tasters or truffle fraternities in Russia, but I hope there will be something equally interesting.
Irina Glushchenko
"Public catering: Mikoyan and Soviet cuisine"
The book I'm reading right now. The fascinating biography of Mikoyan: how he chose the most personal and the most common thing in the world to be the subject of his work — food — and because of this he retained his position at different periods of Soviet power. I find out a lot of new things: about how Mikoyan himself controlled all the products up to the package, about the nuances of creating the “Book about tasty and healthy food” and about how kitchen factories influenced the emancipation of women in the USSR.
Gastronomic encyclopedia "Larousse Gastronomique"
Any person from the world of gastronomy will say about this book as a mandatory read. This is such a "Soviet encyclopedia", only in the world of food. Besides the fact that this is objectively a great work, I have very warm personal feelings for her - today it is the apogee of my love for encyclopedias. I don’t know if they’ll come up with something better ñ while I take a volume from the shelf at every opportunity and read at least one article at a time so as not to lose my keen interest in the topic I’m doing now.