Eat the Document

If you're anything like me, you're currently suffering from a post-election attention surfeit, and you're looking for things to occupy your time that are not news, polling, or election analysis. However quickly Mr. Obama may assemble his administration, it can't actually start until Jan 20th, which leaves us with just over two months of free time.

Today, I offer you recommendations for online reading, a DVD documentary, and at-home reading (and local bookstore spending), all of which will help you reconnect with family and perhaps kick-start the economy. All three pieces of media have to do with Kenny Shopsin, proprietor of Shopsin's General Store in NYC. While I've never been to Shopsin's restaurant and will likely never have the opportunity, I've become a fan. (I knew a girl from New Hampshire who was a devoted Francophile but who had no aspirations to actually visit Paris. This is kind of like that.)

The first I heard of Shopsin was through a 2002 Calvin Trillin article in the New Yorker. Trillin pretty well pioneered, for me anyway, the genre of armchair gastronomy. (His Tummy Trilogy begins "The best restaurants in the world are, of course, in Kansas City. Not all of them; only the top four or five.") This article introduces the cantankerous, particular, and still lovable character of Kenny Shopsin and his seemingly boundless gifts a short order cook. Trillin had been a regular of Shopsin's restaurant for years, but was not allowed to write about the place (due to Shopsin's aversion to publicity) until it was on the verge of closing.

I Like Killing Flies, a documentary which covers the same closing of Shopsin's first location that comes into play in Trillin's article, is one of those documentaries like The Devil and Daniel Johnston or Vernon, Florida that delve beyond individual eccentricities (or idiosynocracies, as my grandmother would have said) to reach towards some sort of philosophy of humanity. Shopsin, in this film, is at his crankiest and possibly most thoughtful, and its particular interesting in light of the version of him that appears in the Trillin article and his own book below, where he seems more earthbound.

I'd like to see the documentary again, now that I've read Eat Me, which is ostensively a cookbook but includes quite a bit of Shopsin's view of his business, customers, and family (and often enough these things are all one thing). I appreciate cookbooks that pay as much or more attention to matters of process and technique as they do to lists of ingredients and directions on what to do with them. (Alton Brown's books and TV show do much the same thing.) This approach to process -- explaining, for example, the purpose behind preparing egg salad in a certain way, or a perspective on dicing a green pepper -- syncs with the way I think (or the way I think I think), and is as interesting to me as any actual recipe in the book. As Shopsin is essentially a highly creative short-order cook, the recipes here tend towards the speedy and the simplified (not to say "simple," which is different), which appeals to this particular parent of young kids. Shopsin's character -- someone who is clearly devoted to his family but also neurotic and somewhat vulgar -- comes through here in a somewhat softer light than in I Like Killing Flies, but those harsher (and interesting) shadows are still apparent. I doubt there's any other cookbook out there that so approvingly compares bacon to a particular part of female genitalia.

Also, the book design (by Shopsin's daughter Tamara, who also does some design work for the New York Times) includes a pop-up-book-like pull tab that is highly appealing to two-year-old boys. Despite some dirty words, it's a family book.