Al Drinkle asks Ed Behr 10 Questions
In November, 1986, Ed Behr released the first issue of The Art of Eating. Ever since, the publication has been a tireless authority on flavour, and few familiar with Ed’s work would deny that he’s among the most important living food writers. An equally true claim is that he’s also one of the world’s most thoughtful and insightful wine writers.
Ed's a curious guy, and his exploration of innumerable topics has been a benefit to lovers of deliciousness and authenticity everywhere. If you haven't checked out The Art of Eating, I urge you to do so (it's been an online publication since 2015). He's also the author of four excellent books, of which 50 Foods and The Food and Wine of France are indispensable.
As a result of my own curiosity, and Ed's generosity of time, we proudly present to you the following interview:
1. For almost 35 years, you’ve been publishing highly in-depth articles on food and wine. Sometimes your pieces seem borderline exhaustive in detail (which must be intimidating to some potential readers), and you’ve never taken on any advertising. What have been the most difficult and the most satisfying aspects of this pursuit?
I did once write and publish a 16-page article on small Provençal goat cheeses, then unobtainable in North America (well, possibly there were one or two in Montreal, but I don’t think so), an article with minimal illustration, unbroken by ads or sidebars or even subheads or typography. But at the time, I didn’t think of it as just a crazy-long linear flow about the unobtainable. I was trying to be clear and accessible. As a writer and editor I’m driven by the idea of being clear and accessible. Most of all with that Provence article I thought — and still think — that those cheeses are one of the essential topics that anyone who loves food would want to understand. That was the whole idea. (The cheeses are still essentially unavailable in North America, because they’re raw-milk and most are meant to be eaten young, before they could likely reach a trans-Atlantic consumer. One of them, Le Gardian, should really be enjoyed within 24 hours.) In terms of the need to make a living, I’ve probably always suffered from a lack of realism. To answer your actual question, the most satisfying part has been focusing on really substantial content and working closely with smart writers who really care. The most difficult part has been finding enough readers to run the business properly and then, five years ago, making the transition from a print publication to an all-digital one.
2. In regards to farming, winegrowing, cheesemaking, etc., what are the greatest virtues of a small-scale operation?
Most food and drink should come from large-scale, not to say massive-scale, businesses that can offer low supermarket-style prices — low prices compared with what North Americans once spent on food. But production on a larger scale means an extreme degree of control, so as to avoid waste and be maximally efficient and so the consumer knows what to expect and will experience the same taste and texture every time. Control eliminates lower-quality and defective food, but it also eliminates really high-quality food. Perfect control is the enemy of greatness. If you want all your fermentations to be over in ten days, you have to intervene, and when you intervene by controlling temperature or by adding selected yeast (or sulfur or sugar or doing who knows what), you interrupt a natural process, and so far all the greatest results, rare as they may be, come from some uncontrolled aspect of nature. Not the most consistent results, just extraordinary ones.
A small-scale business, often one owned by an individual or family, can choose to use less-expensive, lower technology that allows a more natural process and can lead to those great results. That kind of operation tends to have more sense of responsibility to its customers. A large corporation is more focused on profit than on less easily quantified achievements such as personal satisfaction. It’s hard for a corporate business, especially one in the thrall of the Friedman doctrine, to be sincere about anything other than providing shareholders with the highest rate of return on investment. And small-scale producers are often kinder to animals and care more about leaving the environment in better shape than they found it. Even short of soaring to greatness, there’s more likelihood that small-scale food or drink will taste more authentic — like what it is (to paraphrase Curnonsky’s famous observation: “La Cuisine?… c’est quand les choses ont le goût de ce qu’elles sont”). And small operations these days benefit from scientific knowledge. We know enough, particularly about the process of raising wine grapes and turning them into wine, that a small operation can normally avoid big mistakes. The limit then becomes the quality of the terroir.
3. For longtime readers of your work, many of your influences from the culinary world quickly become apparent (though feel free to list a few if you’d like). Anticipating some crossover, I’ve always been curious as to who some of your more significant literary influences might be.
The three writers about food and drink that I’ve most admired are Richard Olney, Elizabeth David, and Patience Gray, although if I were starting to write now, another trio would surely take their place. But I’m a very different person from any of those three, and their literary influence is almost always indirect. (When I write a recipe I do often think of Olney, but recipes are their own category of writing.) I like a simple, clear, careful style. I hate the idea of imposing on readers by making them pause to try to understand, by placing information out of order, by failing to cut an unneeded word. I’m most influenced by authors of fiction. The books I’ve read and reread were perhaps too often written well back in the 20th century. They include Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, Alice Munro’s volumes of short stories, various writings by James Baldwin, James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I also like lots of others — Jhumpa Lahiri, Colin Whitehead, Romesh Gunesekera, Naguib Mahfouz, R.K. Narayan. In the realm of nonfiction, I love Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which stands at the summit of clarity and insight.
4. Over the years, has it ever surprised you when obscure topics that you’ve covered have become popular, or even trendy? As an example, I have younger colleagues who may not be aware that there was a time when wines from the Jura were unknown and unobtainable, yet when you devoted the better part of an issue to the subject in 2006, they were as esoteric as can be.
I’ve spent so much time thinking about food from the point of view of taste that I’ve often become aware of something really interesting before it became widely popular, though I haven’t always been quick to write about it. The most significant good thing I’ve accomplished was to explore why more naturally raised pork tastes so much better than industrial pork. I did that in 1999 in a long article that Steve Ells, founder of the Chipotle chain, read, and it caused him to switch to naturally raised pork. That created the first significant US market for naturally raised meats — meaning the first significant market after traditional pig farming in the US had been almost completely replaced by inhumane confinement operations. I don’t know how many Chipotle outlets there were back then, but a lot; today in the US there are more than 2,600.
With Jura wines, I dug in and wrote about them at a time when they weren’t widely available or appreciated in North America. David Schildknecht once said to me that I started the whole fashion for Jura wines, which seems hard to believe, and in fact exports to the US were already increasing, but I must have had some influence. I was first drawn to the Jura because in France Château-Chalon was always considered one of the small handful of the country’s greatest white wines, and seeing photos of the village perched on its cliff made me really want to go. I love the Jura reds too, but the traditional whites in particular are impressively flattering to a wide range of foods. And they form an unusual synergy with Comté, the cheese made in the same region.
5. Let’s discuss pizza. Everybody loves it, but you’ve given it particularly careful consideration. In terms of ingredients, flavour, ideology and tradition, what constitutes a great pizza?
A half-Sicilian, half-Neapolitan New Yorker once told me that the real way to eat pizza is to fold a slice in half and then, as you bite in, the grease should drip down to your elbow. She was making a statement about being a New Yorker, or at least an Italian-American New Yorker, and about New York pizza. There was no upscale pizza anywhere then, apart from a few fancy places in California, but regular North American pizza was sometimes very good, especially if you were young and needed calories. It may be needless to say that no one in North America was making or talking about Neapolitan pizza. But pizza struck me as a really elemental food, including in its popularity, and I thought there must be a reason it had come from Naples. In the winter of 1992 I went there and devoted an issue of The Art of Eating to the city’s pizza.
Pizza is a food of the poor — it’s bread, really basic. Naples was once the most populous city in Europe (apart from Constantinople, if you want to get picky), and lots of people were living on the street. Pizza in a form we’d recognize may have come into being in the 1700s. It was sold mainly on the street, including to the homeless. It cooks quickly because it’s thin. For economy, the physics of the Neapolitan ovens make efficient use of fuel; the fresh cheese, when used, was and sometimes still is mozzarella di bufala, the only form of mozzarella that used to exist (it was made outside Naples and the city was its chief market); the leavening was sourdough (no reason to spend money on yeast, which in commercial form didn’t exist yet anyway until relatively recent times); the first fat was lard and then later, often, more expensive olive oil from surrounding Campania. For economy, whatever went on top was cheap and there wasn’t a lot of it and it was raw and it all cooked at once in about 90 seconds. That kind of pizza is all about fresh bread, about inflating a small piece of dough so it seems more than it is.
Noble Pie, Calgary
Still today, anywhere, great pizza has a great, beautifully fermented, beautifully baked crust. For condiments, for the happy reverberation with the past and for a sense of place, maybe the greatest pizza is topped with tomato, garlic, olive oil, and mozzarella di bufala, grating cheese, a little salt, and maybe a few fresh basil leaves to flatter the tomato. But tomato is a latecomer as a topping for pizza. And I’m ecumenical. In wide open terms, no matter what’s on it, if a pizza tastes great, it is great. But I respect anyone who works within the original concept: nothing luxurious, highly savory flavors, everything raw and cooking at once in a really efficient wood-fired oven.
6. Ed, you seem to have a duality of approaches in regards to pairing wine with food. You advocate the capacity of light, fresh wines of any colour to carry one through almost any meal, and yet some of your pairing suggestions are highly calculated and very specific. Why are both approaches important?
Not to tell you what you already know, but the better a wine is, the more individual character it has — the more it tastes of the vineyard it came from — and the narrower the range of foods that it complements, and that complement it. (There are, I think, a few rare exceptions to this rule, but that takes us down a side path.) Those “highly calculated” combinations involve better wines, and not many people can afford to drink like that every day. In fact, it’s hard for anyone but a sommelier really familiar with her restaurant’s deep cellar and with her chef’s work to get those high-end matches just right; the rest of us can have a lot of near misses. Also, if you drink only top-tier wines, you lose a sense of just how good they are. In a blind tasting of outstanding wines, it’s natural to dismiss a really good bottle that normally would make you very happy. If, like you and me, you think the primary idea of drinking wine with meals is refreshment, and you don’t want to be drinking always at the high pitch created by special bottles that demand attention, then most of the time light and fresh is the way to go. You’re a lot more likely to have a successful pairing. Of course, a simple wine is a good way to open a bigger meal and lead to a more special wine.
7. You and I share a skepticism of the utility of high alcohol wines. What are the most significant disadvantages to you? And during your wine-drinking lifetime, have you lost any previously beloved regions to the advent of elevated alcohol levels?
When alcohol rises to 14 percent and higher, rarely is the taste balanced: the alcohol sticks out. Even 13.5 is on the edge. And with food — back to wine as refreshment — you end up drinking less of a higher-alcohol wine because it’s not as refreshing, because the flavors at that level of ripeness complement a narrower range of foods, and because you’re wary that the alcohol will go to your head. It’s a plus that some formerly cool regions can now count on having ripe grapes every year, but overall for wine drinkers, climate change has been challenging or devastating. And the effect is compounded by an outdated vanity associated with producing higher-alcohol wines. Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Barolo are to me lost. Southern Europe, apart from mountainous places, is extremely difficult. I hardly ever buy a wine now without checking the percentage of alcohol on the label. People like to say the label claims aren’t accurate, but in my experience they’re pretty close. I’m talking about usual dry table wines. Vin doux naturel, vin jaune, Marsala, and other wines that have always been very high in alcohol are something else again. I love them, but their balance is constructed differently and we don’t drink them in the same way.
8. You’ve got a column in The Art of Eating entitled “Why This Bottle, Really?” in which a particular wine is discussed in great depth. In addition to information regarding the vineyards, winemaking and flavour profile, readers might also find stemware recommendations, ideal serving temperatures, food pairing suggestions, personal information on the winegrower, points of cultural relevance or many other details. Was this in direct response to a field of writing where vapid tasting notes and fatuous point scoring are the standards? Why is it important to you that a particular bottle be explored in such detail? (Full transparency: I’m an occasional contributor).
For a long time I heard the use of numbers debated, and I criticized them sometimes myself; I noticed the adjectives in reviews were often repeated and as a rule didn’t clearly evoke a wine. In response, I was drawn to the idea of ignoring reviews and getting to know the wines of a small number of individual producers year after year (I’m no longer so much drawn to that), and then it occurred to me that AoE should do a more ideal kind of review, albeit we cover only a tiny number of bottlings out of the great sea of wine in existence. My idea was that numbers tell you nothing about how to get pleasure from a wine, whether a costly bottle or a humble one. Pleasure comes so much from context and from already knowing something about a wine. I wanted the column to tell people what kind of occasion, what to eat, what temperature, what to look for in the taste, and something about the way the taste reflected the producer and the place. But also, since a particular bottle might be hard to find, the producer should be one all of whose wines generally give pleasure.
9. In 2013 you published a book called 50 Foods: A Guide to Deliciousness. There are certain works that have struck me as being brilliant to the point where one can sense the sacrifice of sanity in order for it to have been brought to fruition — to me, 50 Foods is one of these on both an artistic and academic level. That’s a huge compliment, but I’m curious as to the process of its inception in regards to what must have been a maniacal research strategy and the ultimate test of your organizational skills.
Of the four books I’ve written, that’s my favourite. It doesn’t tell stories, but it represents exactly what I set out to accomplish when I began to write about food; it’s the book I would have wanted to buy and read before I ever began to write about food myself. And in that case I might have done something else. My book of stories, The Food & Wine of France, is more entertaining, I think — though it’s equally rigorous about facts — but 50 Foods has a lot more information and was a lot more work. I had gathered much of the information on the topics, which are largely raw materials, anything from green beans to truffles but also bread and key cheeses, over a period of years, and I had written something about most of them. But I’d never written about them in such an organized way, and there were so many holes, so much more to research. Fifty foods is enough to cover the range that I had in mind, but if I really push my sanity, there will be a revised edition called 100 Foods.
10. When are you at your most content?
In the context of this interview, the answer must be that I have a complete feeling of content after a meal in a comfortable restaurant in France or Italy where the cooking is really precise and there’s wine to match and the service is that warm, friendly, unobtrusive ideal that expresses a true feeling of hospitality, including just the right level of information as needed — a very long digression could follow here. But those relaxed places have been in retreat for a long time, and who knows what transformations will be wreaked on them by COVID-19? Lately, I’ve been most content hiking the nearby low mountains of northern New England, from which we can see the low mountains across the border in Canada, though for good reason we can’t visit. I’ve always been more relaxed and happy outdoors.
