Hip Tastes Blog

Hip to Be Stained
filed under: Goods & Gadgetry, Ramblings

I love this funny little book I'm reading right now - Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure. It's a real foodie's memoir of growing up in Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and it traces his life events through, fantastically enough, his meals.

Joseph Wechsberg is the author who published the book for the first time in 1953. Apparently the bulk of the book is dedicated to the vineyards and restaurants of France, and I'm sure I'll love that part when I get there, but 88 pages in I'm loving his personal and hilarious accounts of the dining culture in Western and Central Europe.

Such as, as the title of this post alludes, "The Sausage Millennium" chapter, in which the foodie recounts the passion with which pre-WWII Czech citizens devoured little sausages called vursty.

Here's an excerpt: "The quality of the vursty was tested by sticking in the fork. If the vursty were fresh and properly made, the juice would spout into the eater's face. Vursty-eaters recognized one another by the fat-stains on their ties and lapels. They wore them proudly, like campaign ribbons."

The book delights with its faux serious take on all things epicurean. The author is at once deeply passionate about food and able to poke fun of people's obsessions with it. But because he's a foodie himself, he's not laughing at them, he's laughing with them.

The book also fascinates with references to the two world wars that ravaged Europe, both of which are treated in a semi-lighthearted manner, as if they really just served to get in the way of everyone's eating well.

But coming from a generation in which those monumental events seem light years away, it's nice to hear about them from a personal perspective, especially one with no political agenda (like I said, he's mostly concerned about where his next meal's coming from).

Also tickling me thus far: the foodie's account of Vienna's famed boiled beef, his first time at a restaurant, his sojourn in Paris as a 19-year-old. Absolutely perfect: his telling of arriving in Paris for a stint at the Sorbonne, and the taxi driver taking him to Montmartre rather than Montparnasse, and his taking a room for a month on the Place Pigalle (the underbelly of Paris: this is where the Moulin Rouge is), only to realize that night when the neighborhood came to life that he had taken up residence in Paris's equivalent of Sin City.

Unable to get his money back, he makes a go of it, takes a position playing violin for the Folies Bergere, forgets about the Sorbonne, and has a generally fabulous time until his rich relative discovers him living amidst drug pushers and hookers and sends him away.

Ahh, The Peregrinations of an Epicure.

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Posted by Courtney on January 28, 2006 08:52 AM