Life in the food lane

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, cooking

Moira Hodgson is presently a food critic. I tend to think of critics as professional complainers. However, at least in her book It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food, Ms Hodgson appreciates more than she condemns. Having grown up all around the world—her father was in the British Diplomatic Corps—and having learned to enjoy a range of food most folks would find astonishing, she has the taste buds to fairly evaluate just about any cuisine.

When one's earliest memories include being served fine food aboard a cruise ship upon which the family must spend a few weeks traveling half across the globe, one's standards get set quite high, quite early. Growing up multilingual tunes the ear to words as the food trains the palate. Thus, the author's primary vocation has been writing, and much of that writing has been about food, from cookbooks to a recipe column to restaurant reviews.

Growing up as she did, just a few years older than the leading edge of the baby boom, she experienced the forefront of the various revolutions we tend to lump together as "the 60's", societal, sexual, political. She seems as ill-attuned as I am to politics, but social upheaval seemed like home country to her: she'd already lived in Beirut, Saigon and divided Berlin (a few among many), so when Western society seemed to flip upside-down, the skills one applied to moving between countries applied equally well to one's country becoming a very "other" place.

Her relationships with men were as various and fraught as her culinary gyrations. Though she has now settled down with a husband and son, there seemed little likelihood of domestic tranquillity in the first thirty-plus years of her life. Serial monogamy (without benefit of clergy), spiced with side affairs was as much her style as her men's.

Her extraordinary life story is wrapped around food, however, and this is her life's love and life's work. The book includes 28 recipes, the most eclectic collection I've seen, from Steak Tartare or Chilled Lemon Soufflé to Lamb Tajine with Green Olives or Wonton Soup (of a sort quite different than you'd make from the recipe on the Wonton skin wrapper). The earlier privations of postwar England are reflected in recipes for Wartime Sponge Cake (which contains dried egg) and Wartime Cream (which contains no cream).

When I'm asked where I grew up, I usually reply, "All over the place," though the "place" I mean is the United States. Ms Hodgson really did grow up all over the place, that place being the Northern Hemisphere. She has some statement about being south of the Equator in Saigon, but that city is firmly North, by almost eleven degrees. Singapore, a port of call if not a residence, is quite a bit closer, being one degree North. Such quibbles aside, it is an extraordinary and enjoyable read about an uncommon life.