I first read a piece by the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten some years back, in a splendid anthology, The Penguin Book of Food and Drink. An account of his obsessiveness with creating a perfect sourdough loaf, it was droll, delirious with obsession, and mighty fun.
So, when Steingarten's pieces from American Vogue were collected in a book, entitled The Man Who Ate Everything, I looked forward to a few hundred pages of a smart, canny writer who didn't take himself too seriously and who had, I hoped, all the attributes of a good food writer, namely a sharp syntax and a manic disposition.
Steingarten's book reveals him to be a man who will travel to the ends of the Earth to eat whatever takes his fancy, but it suffers from one, crippling, problem: while the subject matter of his obsessiveness may change - from the perfect granita made in Sicily to the most expensive beef cooked in Japan, to low-fat cookbooks, - he essentially writes the same piece every time. Smart, yes. Witty, yes. Well-informed, yes. But after reading the same style in piece after piece, you find yourself wishing that he would play another tune. Instead, we get a one note threnody on whatever subject is under discussion, and one tends to feel that certain truths about the subject are being subjugated by Steingarten's search for style at any cost.
The Man Who Ate Everything, by Jeffrey Steingarten (Headline u14.£14.99 in UK)