I Like Food, Food Tastes Good
by Kara Zuaro
Hyperion Books
Many of life's most meaningful affairs are also among the stormiest, as anyone who's ever truly loathed somebody and wanted them all the more for it can testify. Gourmet cooking and rock music are similarly entangled and at odds. While both mix gut instinct and calloused hands with artistic grace, the average punk rocker isn't dealing with molecularly gastronomic foam and coulis-graced filets, what with the abject self-imposed poverty and road food and fighting the system and all that kind of goings on.
But whatever the past incompatibilities might be, 2007 seems to be a banner year for the food/music tryst. Anthony Bourdain welcomed Queens of the Stone Age to his program No Reservations, Elvis Presley was (dis?)honored by a Reese's chocolate/peanut butter/banana confection, and the frontman for Franz Ferdinand released a surprisingly well-informed book of (world) tour-food essays entitled Sound Bites. It's increasingly understood that one can be a really respectable musician and a really skillful cook or restaurant nerd. The cutting edge of indie rock and the cutting edge of a santoku appear to be increasingly compatible.
Thus, just in time: I Like Food, Food Tastes Good, a compendium of recipes submitted by the likes of Mick Cooke from Belle and Sebastian, Sam Fogarino of Interpol, and RJ "RJD2" Krohn. The book takes its title from a Descendents song, and it approaches its topic matter with a similarly unpretentious aura of nonchalant cool.
Author Kara Zuaro (a colleague of mine from CHOW's Grinder food media blog) is uniquely positioned to pull the collection together; in addition to being a widely published food journalist, she's a Brooklyn-based fan par excellance, attending piles of shows and cooking for musicians whenever possible.
The recipes are aggressively eclectic, and range from the truly sophisticated (Rachel Goswell of Slowdive's chicken filo pesto parcel with puy puy) to the charmingly crude (Judah Nagler of The Velvet Teen's unapologetic suggestion that you should dump canned clam chowder over pasta). The bands are more of a type; the book's spectrum ranges from "indie" through "alt" to "cult" with nearly no room for the mainstream or rockers from previous generations. Its contributors are largely young, hip, hailed by Pitchfork and mixing it up in medium-sized venues.
There's no shame, though, in restricting the playing field. If you like one of these bands, you probably like many of them; the book is more appealing because of its sense of focus. And while the recipes do appear to range wildly in terms of sophistication, witty and perceptive tasting notes help a home chef see the foods' various strengths and weaknesses, thereby serving as a crucial filter between the diseased minds of struggling musicians and the easily confused end-level consumer.
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Moreover, the book is studded with interview quotes, concert notes, and the performers' own recipe instructions, a kickass pastiche of observations from the stage and insights from the kitchen. Zuaro (and/or her editor) deserve praise for keeping a potential Fibber McGee's closet of a project elegantly focused.
The trimmings around the recipes actually provide much of the book's appeal,
and whether you ever actually make the Hold Steady's beer-boiled bratwurst is beside the point. I Like Food is a cross-section of the modern rock universe as deliciously polyglot as Maplewood's 14-ingredient Night-Before-Tour Mac and Cheese. A recipe, incidentally, that rocks pretty hard.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
