'A Rasher of Celery Fritters?'

“Fun” doesn’t rank high in the lexicon of literary critics, yet fun is a precious virtue among writers of poetry and prose, and certainly more in demand among readers than, say, political sermonizing. Fun need not be childish or trivial. P.G. Wodehouse is fun. So are X.J. Kennedy and R.S. Gwynn. They offer easy pleasure and uncomplicated (though not insultingly shallow) amusement. They are never didactic. They are the opposite of whatever Noam Chomsky is. Only fatuous and oh-so-serious twits are immune to having, creating or sharing a bit of fun. As Ira Gershwin put it: “Funsters, punsters, / Charming son-of-a-gunsters—/ Minstrels on parade!”

 

Perhaps the most reliable of fun-givers is H.L. Mencken. Sure, he could be stupid about Jews and Germany, but for me he epitomizes at his best a distinctly American strain of intelligent irreverence. While looking for something else I happened on the review he wrote in 1930 of Fannie Merritt Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook-Book, originally published in 1896. By 1930, the first year of the Great Depression, more than 1.4 million copies had been sold. A well-thumbed, updated edition sits on our shelf. Mencken begins with an endorsement, praising the cookbook for its “clarity, comprehensiveness and common sense,” but warns that it was written by a woman for women: “What male with a normal respect for his pylorus, even in America, would actually eat a rasher of celery fritters?”

 

Pylorus, for the anatomically uninitiated, refers to “the opening between the distal end of the stomach and the intestine (duodenum), which is surrounded by a sphincter muscle.” Glad you asked? Mencken gets down to business:

 

“The other defect of the book apparently flows out of the fact that it was hatched in Boston, where lower middle class British notions of cookery still prevail. Thus it deals very badly with the great dishes of more cultured regions. The récipé for terrapin à la Maryland, with its use of flour, cream and eggs, would make a true Marylander howl, and so would the récipé for fried soft crabs—not soft-shell crabs, but simply soft crabs—, which prescribes frying them like doughnuts in deep fat, with a coating of crumb batter. This last is an obscenity almost beyond belief.”

 

The little Mencken-esque touches: “hatched,” “more cultured regions,” the finicky use of accent marks, the faux regional outrage. He's having fun. Baltimore’s native son goes on to prescribe the proper method for preparing soft crabs à la Maryland. He piles on more complaints, most rooted in the use of euphemisms and the attendant absence of authenticity, but concludes:

 

“[T]here are merits to balance these defects, and so I recommend it. If it were followed as widely as it seems to be read American cookery would improve—not a great deal perhaps, but still some. And in that field any improvement, however small, is a national boon.”