Galloping Gourmand

By Paul Gray

ALICE, LET'S EAT by Calvin Trillin

Random House; 182 pages; $7.95

A gourmet is someone who would not fly from New York to Nebraska simply to check out a steakhouse rumored to serve beef in the rough shape and size of a softball. A gourmand is someone who would. Author Calvin Trillin did. His conclusion: "I've tasted worse steaks." Trillin, however, has an edge on his fellow gluttons, whom he describes as Big Hungry Boys. A peripatetic correspondent for The New Yorker for the past eleven years, he has an excuse to roam the country at will, eating, sometimes quite literally, off the fat of the land. A writer who has appetite, will travel, could hardly ask for a tastier assignment.

This collection of 15 pieces, Trillin's second book on food, is subtitled "Further Adventures of a Happy Eater." Understatement is at work here. When barbecue is being dished up at Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, or when Dungeness crabs are moving smartly from Pacific to pots in San Francisco, Trillin is not just happy, he is beatific. He is also remarkably free of guilt. Reminded by his wife Alice that he weighed 180 lbs. at his last checkup, Trillin instantly reduces that figure: "I always allow fourteen pounds for clothes."

Descriptions of food, music, sex and the funny remark made around the office water cooler have one thing in common: you really had to be there. Trillin manages to convey his appreciation for what he eats without straining after poetic equivalents of the taste. After a generous helping of crabes farcis, he simply notes that "chefs on Martinique tend to use as stuffing what I suspect a crab would have chosen to stuff himself with if only he had been given the opportunity." He has high praise for the cooking of a Manhattan neighbor and adds: "Alice claims that when we are walking there for dinner she is often forced to grab me by the jacket two or three times to keep me from breaking into a steady, uncharacteristic trot."

Trillin has little in common with what his wife calls "grownup food writers" like Craig Claiborne. His specialite might be termed basse cuisine. During the course of the book, he partakes of not one but two meals prepared by the legendary French chef Paul Bocuse and musters, at best, a joyless respect. The most positive thing he can say shows where his heart and stomach truly lie: "The truffle soup I ate as a first course could be honorably compared with the andouille gumbo turned out by the Jaycees of Laplace, Louisiana."

While conceding a place for authentic French cooking, Trillin gleefully trashes the bad imitation found at "Continental restaurants that are modeled, an unwary traveler can discover, on the continent of Antarctica, where everything starts out frozen." He characterizes the food served at such places as "a trout stuffed with a shrimp stuffed with an olive stuffed with a pimiento." He regards undue attention to wine as pretentious and a waste of good eating time. He also abhors fast-food emporiums everywhere (which is where they now seem to be) and meals featuring too much chatter about natural, healthful ingredients. He recalls some dinner conversations "so dominated by talk of how to prepare stone-ground flour or where to buy the true fig that I found myself imagining a cook pure enough to grind her own cleanser."

Ideally, all those who travel and eat a lot should have Trillin in person as a guide and companion. They would be the better and the heavier for it. Unfortunately, one man, no matter how ravenous, could not sustain such a regimen, but Trillin does offer his experience as a model for the uninitiated: "For years I have gone around the United States assuming that good food is available if the careful traveler sticks to regional specialties and the cooking of ethnic groups strong enough to have at least two aldermen." Stay-at-homes, too, can find ample satisfaction in Alice, Let's Eat. It is possible to read Trillin and laugh out loud and to come away from his high-caloric prose without feeling fat in the head. -- Paul Gray

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