The Devil in the Kitchen

I'm a fan of the gastronomic memoir genre, particularly Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" and Ruth Reichl's "Tender at the Bone," "Comfort Me With Apples," and "Garlic and Sapphires." So, I had high hopes for acclaimed British chef Marco Pierre White's "The Devil in the Kitchen," especially after reading the following jacket quote from Bourdain:

"Marco Pierre White was the original rock-star chef, the guy who all of us wanted to be. From the moment my chef pals and I got a look at his first cookbook and at photos of the Man Himself, in all his haggard, debauched-looking, obsessively driven glory - we dreamed of nothing more than to be just like him."

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Sorely disappointed. Indeed, I couldn't bring myself to finish the last few chapters. White's account of his life behind the stove got off to a (semi) promising start, but then devolved into a trudge through "How I Earned Each Michelin Star and Nearly Worked Myself to Death in the Process." Bourdain came off as somewhat of an ass in Kitchen Confidential, but at least he was an entertaining ass, with plenty of fun, ribald tales to tell. Oddly, the descriptions of the dishes White prepared (and such descriptions were pretty sparse, far from Reichl's eat-off-the-page prose) mostly sounded unappetizing (perhaps because of my general aversion to organ meats).

The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden

I first heard about William Alexander's gardening memoir on NPR. Intrigued (and in the throes of heirloom tomato gardening myself), I could easily imagine how a lovingly grown tomato might ultimately cost $64 (but be worth it). And calculating the exact unit cost of an otherwise immensely fulfilling activity is just the sort of thing that my husband would do.

Nearly a year later, I finally read the book, thoroughly prepared to like it. A lot.

Alexander and I are obviously different kinds of gardeners. For example, the visibility of irrigation faucets would never be an issue in my garden. (Merely having irrigation versus self-operated hoses and sprinklers would be cause for celebration, never how they look.) And plastic-bagging each individual baby apple to keep bugs off of them? WAY too much work for this laissez-faire gardener. Seeing an overgrown field as an area that needed to be tamed? Wouldn't happen at my house. Again, too much work. Yes, Alexander is the type-A gardener while I am the sort who can ignore weeds until they obscure the pepper plants.

I was both gratified and disappointed. Like a book of short stories, each chapter stands alone. While some chapters succeed brilliantly and a few even made me laugh out loud (i.e., the chapter where Alexander is outwitted by a series of determined rodents), others fall as flat as composting pumpkins. Alexander's old house project presents a lot of literary opportunities, but most of them remain untapped. Given the title, I expected some detailed rhapsodizing about heirloom tomato varieties, but Alexander went no farther than the mundane (if tasty) Brandywine. All in all worth reading, though!