Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Words, especially when written, contain a certain magic. Take a pen and paper. Write something down—a thought, a memory, an anecdote, a brief essay about Nutella^®—and tuck it away somewhere. Then, months, years, even centuries later, if someone else finds it, reads it, they may (depending on the craft in the writing) see not only what you saw, what you described, but feel what you felt. Your words can show them more than what was, more than what you experienced, but how it affected you, how it changed you forever. The reader can feel it too, whether it’s the frisson of shared excitement or the rage of injustice or just the ineffable longing of a recognized moment of transformational beauty. It’s there. Caught in the amber of your writing.

All readers have likely had such moments. Whether it comes as a critical moment in a novel or from the heart of a poem, it’s something that sticks with us for a long time. It’s a rare thing, and to be cherished, because it’s absolutely unique to who we are and when we are. It is a human connection without connection, an ephemeral and intangible thread linking one mind and one time to another.

That . . . that is magic. Nothing less.

I had one of those moments today, from an unlikely source: Alton Brown’s collection of essays, Food for Thought: Essays and Ruminations. 

I’m not one for biographies, auto- or otherwise, because to be honest, most celebrities aren’t good writers. And while Brown is a clever guy, witty and mildly acerbic, I would never have picked up this book if my adoptive brother—a talented memoirist in his own right—hadn’t loaned me his copy with a “Read this; you’ll love it” assurance. And he was right. I am loving it.

I never would have expected to have one of those moments, though. I expected fun. I expected to chuckle and smile. I did not expect magic.

And you shouldn’t either, because while Brown’s essay, “Meals That Made Me, Part II” (his recollection of eating pizza in the Tuscan hills outside Cortona, Italy), deluged me with a flood of memories of my own days as a young man alone in a foreign land, there’s no guarantee it’ll strike you in the same fashion.

But if you have an affinity for cooking, for family culinary history, if you like your humor served wry and with a dash of the absurd, and especially if you appreciate the mixture of science and art Brown uses in his approach to educating us about food and cooking, I expect you will gobble this up. It covers a broad spectrum of his life with a scattershot of brief pieces, from his earliest days to current times, bouncing back and forth through his years in seeming random fashion, but with each piece his writing is focused and bright and funny and often beautiful in its clarity and appreciation of the life he has had.

Maybe you’ll find some magic in it, as well, but even if you don’t, you’ll have fun reading it.

k