Macaroni and Cheese/Patrick Modiano

Parasocial cooking and novels of vibes

I like making macaroni and cheese a lot because it includes a lot of stuff that is pretty undeniably great (cheese, butter, pasta) and combines it in a way that is also great. People will comment that this is a common thing, but I don’t agree with that. There are plenty of dishes that combine great things that are just so-so. A caprese sandwich is worse than mozzarella or bread alone, let alone the margarita pizza that you would really want. One bite of fettuccine alfredo is amazing; the remaining hundred are revolting, and your heart won’t stop racing all night if you take them all.

This is why I think that macaroni and cheese is done dirty by complexifying it. That’s a theme of this newsletter - that most recipes, in the interest of differentiating themselves from whatever else is on the internet, are overly complex, and there’s not a lot of value in the added complexity other than a shade of difference between that recipe and whichever other one exists slightly down the SEO ladder. Put another way, I suppose that, read as a whole, I’m hoping this can be a kind of rebuttal to the entirety of the New York Times cooking section.

The NYT cooking section, and most organs of contemporary cooking, are post-modern in their orientation (this is a kind of meta-thesis). They collate other sources, removing the authorial hand of the chef, and bring these sources to some kind of contemporary intermediary of expertise - at Bon Appetit there is a lab of some sort, America’s Test Kitchen has it in the title, Serious Eats gave birth to Kenji Lopez-Alt’s vision of science in cooking. These scientifically authoritative sources use some version of the scientific method, plus a dose of parasocial jocularity, to produce one text, which can jockey among other elite-coded magazines’ cooking sections to be the definitive statement on a dish.

I think that this orientation towards cooking is wrong, and objectionable enough to make it a spare-time straw man for me to fume about as I work in my kitchen, usually with my son strapped to my chest with a wire cutter-recommended ergobaby harness. This approach denudes cookery of context and location, which is antithetical to a positive experience of cooking. Cooking, and specific cuisines, are natural outgrowths of particular contexts. Italian cucina povera was created in the context of limited access to protein and exotic ingredients; something similar could be said about nearly every national dish in the world, from sarmale to fufu to apple pie.

The NYT cooking section, and other similar outlets, attempt to make cooking into a lab-tested, smoothly sanitized procedure, rather than a natural outgrowth of a life lived with others (who we cook for). In the NYT version, cooking is yet another solvable problem. How can it be solved? Through a complex recipe, which involves contorting one’s day-to-day life to procure the freshest produce, the most obscure spices (which must be replaced monthly) and the nichest ingredients.

Anyway, macaroni and cheese is a rich example of the complex-ifying that many recipes will do to an extremely simple dish. There is some debate about where in the historical record it was developed, but it’s mentioned in most early modern European cookbooks (I referenced Pellegrino Artusi’s magnificent Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well from 1891, but is also noted in the much earlier British Forme of Cury and others) in some form or another, probably just because it’s almost inevitable that people would combine noodles and cheese in some way or another. Some recipes get very specific about the type of cheese that you need to include, and some (cough, cough, NYT cooking) include some arcane blends of cheese (their flagship recipe recommends cottage cheese and extra sharp cheddar). Any cheese you have is probably going to be good, as long as you can get it into a tolerably well-integrated bechamel sauce. I often toss in a few squares of American cheese.

MACARONI AND CHEESE

About 2 cups cheddar or other cheese(s)

A handful of flour

Butter

Noodles

Milk (or oat milk, or almond milk, or honestly water would probably work)

Make a roux by melting butter in a pan and then mixing in a roughly similar amount (to the butter) of flour. When that has combined, slowly add milk (about a cup) until slightly thickened. Add cheese in handfuls while stirring. Cook pasta until al dente and add to sauce. Stir to combine. Add breadcrumbs, meat, peas, or broil in the oven if you want, but keep in mind that the sauce can easily dry out.

READING

Patrick Modiano, Missing Person

I haven’t been reading a lot lately. Partially this is due to the holidays, partially it is because I am off work on parental leave and caring for a baby, which is much more an all-day affair than working at an office. In any case, I haven’t completed anything new this month, but I have read a lot of substack criticism that I really liked, and that made me want to revisit a book that I disliked that I read last year, Missing Person by Patrick Modiano.

I picked up the Modiano book in a bit of a reading slump. I had come off trying to read something absurdly abstract, I think Jon Fosse’s Septology. I had, with Septology, an experience I’ve had reading a lot of books like that. I read about 150 pages, and liked what I had read, but felt no desire to go further. I felt that I got the gist. There’s no plot, there’s no real reason to read the book to the end. There’s no expected payoff, no twist or turn. There is gentle spirituality, a rippling bath of words and observations and spirituality reminiscent of a deserted catholic church. And from 150 pages, I feel that I get the gist. Certainly I would have gained something from finishing the book, but since I could not articulate what that would be, I did not do it.

I’ve felt this way for many of the contemporary novels I’ve read, and it’s created a bit of a crisis for me in my reading economy. I find myself interested in a lot of books, but rarely enough to finish them. And it’s hard to articulate to myself why I would finish them. I’m not really concerned about missing out on a patch of particularly luminescent prose, or some cutting observation about a character. There has to be some reason to finish a book other than “I want to move on to the next book”. That’s putting a hell of a lot of pressure on the reader.

On to the book at notional hand, Missing Person. This book is considered, or at least in my cursory research, to be the best entry into the work of Nobel prize winning French writer Patrick Modiano. The jacket copy is alluring, and led me to believe that this could be a way of enticing myself back into reading literary fiction after my failure with Septology:

On one level, Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafes, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano’s spare, hypnotic prose…draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

This is, I assure you, not the case. The book contains lots of skeins of dialogue, parsimonious descriptions of intriguing locations - but none of it has any context. The excerpt below is an entire chapter:

This novel is vibes with no structure, no reason to continue. The protagonist does not remember who he is, and he will not find out. He will move from terse interaction with a Central European man to terse interaction with a Central European man until the book glides to a halt, more out of inertia than resolution.

I don’t need any kind of neat resolution, I’m not looking for a European Red Harvest. But in this case, there is nothing to leave ambiguous - there is no distance travelled between the first and last page. The book is a decent place to hang out, but doesn’t demand participation in the whole ride. For that reason, it’s just as authentically experienced as a series of snippets, or some small subset of the book, as it is in its entirety. If you believe that novels are an important and coherent form, that’s a problem.

I was heartened to find several other people writing on the internet about their experience of Rachel Kushner’s recent novel, Creation Lake. I haven’t read this book (I’m currently 858th in line for the ebook at my local library) but read a post from Naomi Kanakia about it, as well as a great review from Sam Kahn in the Mars Review of Books. While Kahn is able to draw out the confusing experience of reading this kind of book, comparing reading it to being “a sports fan who suddenly switches allegiance to a losing team, [ ] rooting for Kushner the flailing writer, started trying to find alibis for her,” Kanakia notes the essential and global problem in her broader essay:

I've observed that there is a crop of recent awards-nominated literary books that draw heavily from commercial fiction, but are seen, by critics, as elevating or transcending the commercial elements they supposedly embody.

The problem is that this transcendence often manifests through techniques that slow down the reading experience and break the novel’s implicit promises to the reader. You see, if you're writing high-brow fiction, then you need at all times to maintain that separation between your work and popular fiction. You have to aestheticize these ostensibly-commercial elements. The reader must always be reminded that it's the form of this book that's truly important, rather than the content.

Throughout her essay, Kanakia notes that the stylistic features that are rewarded in highbrow fiction, even highbrow fiction which is, for instance, ostensibly concerned with a trans-European detective story, is inertness. Resolution and movement connote lower forms of fiction, whereas stasis and observation suggest abstraction.

The literary novel seeking to maintain an elevated separation from ostensibly-commercial elements can use three major tricks: objectivity; misdirection; and subversion.

Essentially all three tricks are the same. They seek to create an object that must be high art, because it doesn't give nearly as much pleasure as the 'low' novels that it resembles. The message "You are reading an important work of art" is baked right into the form, because the only reason to read something boring is because it's art!

I think this is correct, and I found it interesting that many of the reviews of the novel refer to it as a “novel of ideas”. I think this term is, perhaps, a bit of a backhanded compliment for a book that lacks characters, plot, or forward momentum, which is to say any component that would make the ideas work better as a novel than as an essay. I think that, more than novels of ideas, these particular contemporary works are (back again to the Modiano book) novels of vibes, canvases defaced by technically proficient but ultimately incoherent doodling. Unfortunately, I do not think that the novel as a form is well-suited to this pursuit.