Far Flung and Well Fed: The Food Writing of R.W. Apple, Jr.
R. W. Apple was one of my newpaper heroes; I read every story with his byline with great interest and pleasure and was lucky enough to spend an hour learning about the world during a conversation in a bar in Teheran just before the fall of the Shah. His columns and books are a great pleasure to read, even years later. This extract from his last column gives you a flavor of his approach and appetites:
Extract:
"AFTER half a century of assiduous eating in restaurants around the world, first avocationally and more recently professionally, I have become accustomed to certain questions: "What's your favorite restaurant?" "What will you order for your last meal on earth?" "Which is best -- French cuisine? Italian? Chinese?" All unanswerable, of course. Now comes a more modest proposition: Name 10 restaurants abroad that would be worth boarding a plane to visit, even in these fraught days.
"O.K. Here's my list. Please note, this is neither an enumeration of my favorites (though some of those are included) nor a ranking of the world's best (like those fatuous lists put out each year by Restaurant magazine in London). Rather than reciting a long list of two- and three-star gastronomic temples, I have chosen purlieus both grand and small, better to reflect my own eating habits. And rather than loading up my list with French and Italian addresses, I have arbitrarily restricted my choices to one per country, for much the same reason. I would expect no one else to choose the same 10, but on the other hand, I would be astonished if many of my nominations disappointed.
"FLEURIE, FRANCE Auberge du Cep, Place de l'Église; (33-4) 7404-1077; [web link deleted]
"French country cooking -- or bistro cooking, as its urban variant is called -- deserves, but is not often accorded, a place among the world's culinary glories beside French haute cuisine. Based on regional products, honestly handled, "unfoamed and unfused" in the words of my friend Colman Andrews, late of Saveur magazine, it is the specialty of this small restaurant on the main square of a prettily named village in Beaujolais. It is a specialty unflinchingly embraced by its proprietor, Chantal Chagny, who five years ago banished lobster and truffles from her menu and turned her back on two Michelin stars in favor of the simpler dishes she adores, like herb-crusted, perfectly fried, never-frozen frogs' legs, crisp-edged sweetbreads, soup made of garden herbs, roast wild duck from a local river and rosy tenderloin of regional Charolais beef, France's best.
"Love and skill are lavished on the simplest dishes -- tiny, tender lamb chops, neglected freshwater fish like perch and pike-perch (sander), eggs poached in red wine (oeufs en meurette), toothsome squab, black currant sorbet, even snails -- great fat ones, bubbling happily in their shells, bathed in garlic, parsley, butter and Pernod. Here is the food most of us travel to France to taste, and who can resist it once tasted? Here, too, are the little regional wines we search for -- especially Beaujolais, 60 of them, including 30 from Fleurie itself, one of the 10 designated crus known for excellence."
Apple's range is remarkably wide -- politics, wars, international affairs, travel [he carried his own pepper grinder], bourbon and bacon, potatoes and tomatoes, langoustines and mangosteens, barbecue and Bouillabaisse, New Orleans and New Zealand -- and his other books are equally rewarding for anyone interested in travel:
[[ASIN:0865476853 Apple's America: The Discriminating Traveler's Guide to 40 Great Cities in the United States and Canada]]. An excellent brief introduction to 40 cities together with additional sources of information.
[[ASIN:0689707215 Apple's Europe: An Uncommon Guide]]. The predecessor volume to "Apple's America".
Calvin Trilling quoted Mr. Apple's attitude toward his 70th birthday party, and [from "The Times" obituary] "toward the rich, long life and career that produced it: 'It's my understanding that Apple has simplified what could be a terribly difficult choice by telling them to bring everything.'
If you love great food and great writing, this book will satisfy both yearnings.
Robert C. Ross 2009
Addendum:
Apple's obituary in "The New York Times" is an excellent summary of his life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/nyreg ... lecnd.html
Extract:
To the end of his life, Mr. Apple kept a small black bag packed with essentials, including a personal pepper mill, ready to be whisked away on a moment's notice for a big story, or for a little one that caught his fancy. Even when his knees began to wear out from years of carrying the surplus pounds that were a by-product of his adventures, Mr. Apple lost none of the "legs" that define the best reporters.
"Newspaper people love impossible dreams," he once told Lear's magazine. "I suppose we're reckless sentimentalists. If we didn't love impossible dreams, we would not still be working in an industry whose basic technology was developed in the 16th and 17th centuries."
Mr. Apple was no manager, and he could be cruelly short-tempered with hotel clerks, copy editors and political aides. In his days as Washington Bureau chief, in the mid-1990's, his editing might involve bursting out of his corner office to declare that one reporter had "misspelled fettucine Alfredo!" or that another had referred to Ann D. Jordan, the consultant, corporate director and wife of the Washington super-lawyer Vernon E. Jordan, as a "socialite."
But he was a natural role model, and his colleagues and competitors all watched what he asked, and what he wrote, and what and where and when he ate and drank, and they did their best to follow suit, albeit with much less apparent ease, capacity or zest. When, in an Indian restaurant in Uganda, he warned his dining companions, "No prawns at this altitude!," they listened up.
"I used to say that Johnny grew into the person he was pretending to be when we were young," Joseph Lelyveld, a contemporary who rose to become The Times's executive editor, told the writer Calvin Trillin in a 2003 profile of Mr. Apple in The New Yorker. "Now I wonder whether he actually was that person then, and the rest of us didn't know enough to realize it."
Drama, and a lot of dash, followed Mr. Apple as night follows day. He was the pool reporter sent to the deck of the U.S.S. Forrestal in 1967 when a fiery accident nearly killed one of the ship's pilots, Lieut. Commander John S. McCain 3d. From that incident he formed a lifelong friendship with the pilot, who went on to become a United States Senator.
It was Mr. Apple, or so the legend goes, who told Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. It was Mr. Apple whose relentless questioning elicited from Ronald L. Ziegler, Richard M. Nixon's press secretary, the admission that his previous explanations about the Watergate affair were "inoperative."
Mr. Apple's dinner guests - at his Georgetown house, his farm near Gettysburg, Pa., or his English cottage in the Cotswolds - were apt to include not only leading politicians but also prominent figures in architecture, cuisine and the arts. He thought nothing of beginning a sentence by saying, "The first time I made lunch for Julia Child ... ."
Mr. Apple joined The Times as a brash and ambitious recruit from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. He quickly became one of the highest-paid reporters on the local staff. In his first year at the paper, his byline appeared 73 times on the front page. A citation for an early publisher's award, an in-house prize, described his impact:
"In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with automatic elevators, a Centrex switchboard, a two-faced Universal Jump clock, a Goss press with magnetic amplifier drive, a jam-proof Jampool conveyor belt and a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr."
*****
My Amazon Review appears at
http://www.amazon.com/review/R277AP9SKB ... hisHelpful