A Cook's Tour
by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, £7.99)
Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential was a hard act to follow. In that book, Bourdain made explicit the behind-the-scenes mania of the professional kitchen. Not just the hard work involved, but the kind of dysfunctional wretches who make the environment so heated, so crazy with testosterone. A sequel might have been beyond a lesser man, but Bourdain is not simply a cook who can write a bit - he's a proper writer, too. He's written novels and everything.
The wafer-thin excuse for this book is his search for the perfect meal. He also wants to travel the world, revisit his childhood and have hair-raising adventures in some of the world's grimmer places. The snag is that he has a camera crew in tow - a modest one, for some US cable channel, but it's enough to make him feel interestingly awkward about the honesty of the enterprise.
First up is a trip to Portugal, where his boss's family has been fattening a pig for slaughter. The slaughter, it turns out, is a kind of performance-art spectacle; and Bourdain, who has had harsh words to say about vegetarians, accepts that while he may order animal death on a grand scale in his restaurant, he has yet to see the actual killing part of the business. One is primed for some Hemingwayesque posture, but Bourdain is revolted by the scene, while at the same time knowing he shouldn't be. (He makes things harder for himself throughout the book by operating with a near-permanent hangover.)
It is not a parade of gross-outs, though. He may have a deep-fried Mars Bar in Scotland, eat the still-beating heart of a cobra, and consume lamb's testicles in the Merzouga dunes, but throughout he attests to a kind of dissatisfaction, a conviction that the exercise is doomed to futility. This is endearing, and honest: honesty is the house speciality here, so to speak. In Vietnam he is beside himself with the quality of the food, the people, the way of life: even being serenaded with old combat songs by Viet Cong veterans doesn't faze him. But when he runs into a beggar in Saigon whose entire body is scarred by napalm delivered by Bourdain's countrymen, he all but has a breakdown. "What am I doing here? Writing a fucking book? About food?... Everything I eat will taste of ashes now."
Well, it doesn't, or the book would have ended right there; but it shows that this is as much a travel book as a book about food. It's a celebration of ingredients, an anti-blandness tract, a love-letter not only to grub but to the ambience it is served in. Settling down in a Scottish pub, he announces "I'm never leaving". He is beautifully scathing about Ainsley Harriott and "a young blond lad named Jamie Oliver... As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots about on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'." (He likes Nigella, though. Who doesn't?) His attitude is infectious, and very welcome in the kitchen. He's funny, robust, and not nearly as crazy as he makes out.
