Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

by Calvin Trillin

Series: Tummy Trilogy (Continuation 4)

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304	5	86,167	(3.94)	11
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the "continental cuisine" palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House--nor of their successors, the trendy spots he calls "sleepy-time restaurants, where everything is served on a bed of something else." What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of Trillin's favorite dishes--pimientos de Padrón in northern Spain, for instance, or pan bagnat in Nice or posole in New Mexico--can't be found anywhere but in their place of origin. Those dishes are on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation. "On gray afternoons, I go over it," he writes, "like a miser who is both tantalizing and tormenting himself by poring over a list of people who owe him money." On brighter afternoons, he calls his travel agent. Trillin shares charming and funny tales of managing to have another go at, say, fried marlin in Barbados or the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Sometimes he returns with yet another listing for his Register--as when he travels to Ecuador for ceviche, only to encounter fanesca, a soup so difficult to make that it "should appear on an absolutely accurate menu as Potage Labor Intensive." We join the hunt for the authentic fish taco. We tag along on the "boudin blitzkrieg" in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying boudin and polishing it off in the parking lot or in their cars ("Cajun boudin not only doesn't get outside the state, it usually doesn't even get home"). In New York, we follow Trillin as he roams Queens with the sort of people who argue about where to find the finest Albanian burek and as he tries to use a glorious local specialty, the New York bagel, to lure his daughters back from California ("I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat-germ bagels you get your choice of a bee-pollen bagel or a ginseng bagel free"). Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin "our funniest food writer."… (more)

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The author is after the sublime experiences of authentic food that only a very limited group of people have the longtime experience with to cook and serve properly. I get it. As a native of New Mexico (one of the 14 stops on Trillin's essay tour), our Hatch chile peppers are iconic to the outside world and legitimately enjoyed by us even without visitors. But this was a little heavy-handed, reducing a lot of people to one-dimensional purveyors of food for his tourist benefit. It was enjoyable to hear about his family and how their relationships were lubricated with seeking out good food. I only wish we'd heard more about the book's subjects in that light. (

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jonerthon | Dec 27, 2021 |

Trillin is amazingly dogged and single-minded when hunting down what he wants to eat. In his Manhattan neighborhood, he tries to find the pumpernickel bagels of his daughter's childhood, in Santa Fe, it's the best of posole and chile, New Orleans is sampling every boudin he can find and in Spain, a dish of peppers called pimientos de Padron.
Traveling and eating with Trillin is a fun and comfortable read. He doesn't care much for museums or tourist attractions, but he knows a local just about anywhere he goes, so he's often finding great dishes at dingy little establishments that wouldn't be featured in a guidebook, and his cravings for a certain dish are strong enough to bring on humorous frustration. (

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mstrust | Sep 5, 2016 |

This is a short but very enjoyable read. Calvin Trillin was one of my favorite writers, and here he examines the idea that certain foods can only be found in their native location, making them candidates for entry on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation. And so he travels to Spain to savor pimientos de Padrón or fried peppers, and to Nice in France to gorge himself on pan bagnat, which is essentially a tunafish sandwich. In South America he makes a careful comparison of the relative merits of the kinds of ceviche served in Ecuador vs. Peru, and waxes poetic over the cuisine of northern New Mexico and in particular the posole he fills up on whenever he's there. And of course no book about food written by a native of Kansas City would be complete without a look at the issue of barbecue.

Throughout the essays that make up the book, Trillin keeps us a running report on his attempts to persuade his grown daughter Abigail, who now lives in San Francisco, that she needs to move back to New York, and of course he uses food as his primary motivation. One essay has him searching for the particular pumpernickel bagel she loved as a child, because she has promised if he can find it she will move back (though his wife Alice warns him she may not be entirely serious, you can tell that Trillin knows that but persists anyway). As in the other Trillin books I've read, what comes through is his gentle humor and his love for his family and his food.

I consider myself to be a fairly picky eater, so it's a good bet I would not eat many of the things Trillin finds irresistible. But through his eyes and his writing, he's made me think I could. And now I'm hungry, dang it. (

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rosalita | May 12, 2016 |

Light, journalistic foody writing. Chasing down unique edibles available only in select locations, our intrepid food-lover traipses all over the globe. At times the author seems a tad too obsessed with these hard-to-find delicacies. I suppose some people really do get all worked up about the perfect bagel and such, but do we need to go on and on about it? (

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dbsovereign | Jan 26, 2016 |

Fourteen stories of pursuit of foods, long yearned for, at food festivals, like pimientas de padron in Galicia, like a daughter's childhood bagel in New York, home. The sad part is to realize in the last half of the book that Alice is missing, but somehow you think she might be watching over Calvin as he soldiers on with Abigail, Sara, and a grandchild. One story -- A Very Short History of the Fish Taco -- San Diego brought me back to Ensenada in 1981 where I had my first fish taco, a wonderful surprise, from a street vendor near Hussong's Cantina.

grheault | Jan 5, 2011 |

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Not long after the turn of the millennium, I had an extended father-daughter conversation with my older daughter, Abigail, on the way back from a dim sum lunch in Chinatown.

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BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the "continental cuisine" palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House--nor of their successors, the trendy spots he calls "sleepy-time restaurants, where everything is served on a bed of something else." What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of Trillin's favorite dishes--pimientos de Padrón in northern Spain, for instance, or pan bagnat in Nice or posole in New Mexico--can't be found anywhere but in their place of origin. Those dishes are on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation. "On gray afternoons, I go over it," he writes, "like a miser who is both tantalizing and tormenting himself by poring over a list of people who owe him money." On brighter afternoons, he calls his travel agent. Trillin shares charming and funny tales of managing to have another go at, say, fried marlin in Barbados or the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Sometimes he returns with yet another listing for his Register--as when he travels to Ecuador for ceviche, only to encounter fanesca, a soup so difficult to make that it "should appear on an absolutely accurate menu as Potage Labor Intensive." We join the hunt for the authentic fish taco. We tag along on the "boudin blitzkrieg" in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying boudin and polishing it off in the parking lot or in their cars ("Cajun boudin not only doesn't get outside the state, it usually doesn't even get home"). In New York, we follow Trillin as he roams Queens with the sort of people who argue about where to find the finest Albanian burek and as he tries to use a glorious local specialty, the New York bagel, to lure his daughters back from California ("I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat-germ bagels you get your choice of a bee-pollen bagel or a ginseng bagel free"). Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin "our funniest food writer."

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