Alice, Let's Eat

Synopsis
Calvin Trillin writes of his two great loves - his wife and his appetite.

My thoughts
Trillin wrote one of my favorite pieces in The Best American Travel Writing 2009 - a delightful piece on finding the best Texas BBQ restaurant that I loved despite the fact that I know about as much about barbeque as I know about quantum physics.

Alice, Let's Eat is simultaneously a series of humorous vignettes about food and a love letter to his long-suffering wife. Trillin conveys their playful affection for each other - she always trying to restrain him from overeating, he insisting that she's the abnormal one for trying to limit him to three square meals a day. It's bittersweet knowing that Alice passed away in 2001.

There's never a dull moment with the Trillins. To compensate for going solo to a private dinner for "grown-up food writers" concocted by a French chef whose cooking Alice desperately wants to try, Trillin gets tickets for a church fair where the food may or may not include polecat.

This is food writing at its best. You need your sense of taste to enjoy food, and it's nearly impossible to render a meal into an interesting story. Trillin succeeds because he focuses on the pursuit of the meal and the characters he meets along the way. Every single story has laugh-out-loud moments. "I spent an embarrassing number of years in the belief that marshmallows grew on bushes," Trillin confesses at one point in one of my favorite lines. Some of the funniest passages concern Trillin's strong opinions on matters ranging from his love for his home city of Kansas City to his outright hostility to any food that might be healthy.

By the end of the book I felt like I knew the Trillins. I'm not a foodie, but I'd love to have eaten a meal with them. Definitely a meal cooked by someone else, though. I tried to make one of my husband's favorite dishes this week. He commented, "Well ... it would probably taste like croque monsieur to someone who'd never had it before." And then he made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Bottom line
Hilarious, as Trillin always is.

Fine print
Alice, Let's Eat, by Calvin Trillin
Genre: food, humor
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library. It was one of those lovely old hardcovers from that era when a hardcover cost half as much as a paperback does today and there was a slip on the inside back cover with due date stamps from the '70s and '80s.