Oswald Rivera, The Pharaoh's Feast: from pit-boiled roots to pickled herring, cooking through the ages with 110 simple recipes (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
A meal can be a sensual joy that becomes a treasured memory, or a horrifying disaster followed by days of vomiting. Similarly, food writing that is good is very very good, but when it's bad, it's horrid.
I regret to write that The Pharaoh's Feast is horrid. It may be that its 110 recipes are delicious. I'm not much of a cook, and none of them sounded appealing enough to try. I hope they are, because anyone who buys this book hoping for an accurate, well-researched, and well-written history of cooking will be woefully disappointed.
Rivera's prose style is not merely uninspired but embarassingly bad. It's so casual that it becomes contemptuous, relies heavily on stale and unfunny humor, and is peppered with grammatical errors, historical errors, typos, and misused words.
You know you're in trouble when the first paragraph begins like this:
"When did it all begin? To which some would reply, "Who the hell cares?" Well, I, for one, care. And so do a lot of others, I'd like to think."
This is not the voice of authority. Nor does it suggest wit, erudition, or an instinct for the well-chosen detail -- attributes essential to a history of cooking. Rather, it's the voice of the windy old bore.
Here's another sample, from Chapter Three:
"It was at P.S. 25, in East Harlem, where dear old Miss Robinette first introduced us to the heroes of classical Greece. We were forced to read portions of Homer's Iliad -- a long, turgid poem for adults let alone unctuous sixth-graders. Thank God in those days we had Classic comic books. Remember those? If a kid was assigned a book report on some notable work of fiction, all he had to do was get a Classic comic book, which gave you the gist of the story. I may be wrong, but I don't think those comic books are around any more."
From the cloying familiarity of "dear old Miss Robinette" and "Remember those?" to the misuse of the word unctuous (which means oily or insincere, though the context suggests that Rivera thought it meant young or impatient), to the last sentence pointing out that he's too lazy to check his facts, there is nothing good about that paragraph. And the entire book is written like that.
Rivera includes a bibliography, but does not footnote or include many cites within the text. This makes it impossible to judge the accuracy of his facts. In the few parts of the book which dealt with subjects I already knew something about, I noticed two misspellings ("udom" instead of "udon," a Japanese noodle, and "Jians" instead of "Jains," followers of an Indian religion) and one major factual inaccuracy. Rivera states that India's ancient Harappa civilization left "no ringing archaelogical record." Only if you don't count an entire buried city. These errors did not give me confidence in the accuracy of the rest of his facts.
The recipes are sometimes accompanied by the original one with notes on variations, but are sometimes modern recipes with no explanation of where they came from. Some were even borrowed from the author's friends.
In Rivera's own words, "Now comes the denouement (I love them twenty-dollar words)."
This I-can't-be-bothered approach to a book which purports to be a history of cookery accompanied by historic recipes adapted for the modern kitchen makes it read like it was written by a middle-aged Beavis or Butthead.
