COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY, Austrian woman's storyteller reaches Anglophones at last

COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY
TERESA PRÄAUER (tr. Eleanor Updergraff)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An irresistibly witty satire about a dinner party where the foodie guests have a grand amount of taste but no social clue at all.

For the hostess, food has always been about growing up. From the pancakes your grandmother made, dolloped with jam, to the salty glug of your very first oyster. Now, poised at the brink of midlife, the hostess prepares for a dinner party in her new apartment, desperate for the envy of her cultured friends. With a hunger for the finer things in life, she folds linen napkins into neat triangles, arranges wildflowers for the table and puts on a playlist that projects effortless cool.

But her composure begins to falter when her guests arrive drunk and late, downing bottles of her perfectly cooled wine and trailing water over the floor. Here comes the chain-smoking professor who never says the right thing, the husband glued to his smartphone, the wife who makes a secret pass at your boyfriend.

As small talk and social preening give way to sexual tension and lost inhibitions, the hostess struggles to maintain control over an evening far beyond her wildest imaginings. Outrageously funny and keenly observed, this is the first novel by Austrian powerhouse Teresa Präauer to be translated into English, and a delectable feast of social satire for readers of Perfection and The Anthropologists.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Maybe it's just me relating to "the hostess" so deeply and personally...maybe I'm feeling a little wistful for the times when asking people to your home for a home-cooked meal was not weird or unexpected.

That, however, is not remotely what's on Author Präauer's mind. This is a super-sarcastic snarkfest of skewered bourgeois pretensions. She gets after every conceibable subset of our brittlest chit-chat, puts a big ol' flensing knife under the scrotal skin of her (formerly) male characters, spraying narrative mace in their eyes since they weren't using them to see what's in front of their faces anyway.

The women! ZOMG What a collection of prunes, determined to out-smug each other in their certainty of opinions...most especially about food. In its deeply felt rage, it was Babette's Feast for the dining discourse of Ibnstagram meets The Women for the self-conscious class skewering.

It's not clear to me there is not only one dinner party, though it seems the characters aren't the same people...? But believe you me, they're indistinguishable...examining more closely than is comfortable people from the same background so I was left with one idea of what we-the-reader are supposed to think and feel about them. Our narrator occasionally addresses us through the broken fourth wall on the subject of how we perceive food; how food as a cultural touchstone came to exist in our minds.

So you know I was right there. I was fully engaged in every bit of this admittedly slight narrative. I don't think the story being told quite merits the 176-page count...It feels more like a 150pp novella would've done better justice to the exploration of the hostess's purpose in feeding her friends (only her friends) and her new Swiss...fella, let's say. Maybe I didn't really need the oddly angled ending, but rather a simpler one of a door just closing...?

Whatever my cavils, this introduction to Author Präauer, well-known and established in Austria, and her interests and writing style, was a genuine pleasure. I was entertained, amused, and drawn in to this social commentary on Instagrammable foodies, women with axes to grind but no courage to let loose and do it already, and the men who completely misunderstand them.

Very much a "give this one a try" shove to your bookstore from me.

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, Dr. Spock has a LOT to answer for

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
HELEN ZOE VEIT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An eye-opening investigation into why American kids no longer eat broadly and with gusto

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren’t children incapable of liking “adult foods,” and don’t parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?

But Americans in the past didn’t think any of those things. They assumed that children could enjoy the same foods as adults, and children almost always did. They loved spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, and bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee. So how did modern kids become such incredibly narrow eaters? The story is fascinating – and about much more than rising abundance. Picky shows how fussy eating came to define "children’s food" and reshape American diets at large. Maybe most importantly, it explains how we can still use the tools that parents used in the past to raise happy, healthy, wildly un-picky kids today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I wasn't a picky eater because I was raised by parents who loved food. I'm so grateful to them for the lesson they each taught: "try it, if you don't like it you don't have to finish it."

I'm also old. This message was more common among the Depression-era denizens who raised me than postwar-boom kids who raised the picky eaters we're discussing in this book.

As "experts" got hold of the conversation around food (author's scare quotes), the wheels came off. We know from decades of research findings being reported and then challenged, the "experts" (remember, not my scare quotes!) have been tarred by the backlash that keeps growing against expertise in general. It feels kind of justified to me, in this case, because there are no real reasons that the advice the "experts" gave should have been heeded as none of them made any sense at all. But, well, expertise needs to be respected. It's the world now that does NOT respect expertise that's in terrible trouble.

Author Veit has researched the question "is a generation of US-born kids pickier in their food choices than earlier generations?" and presented findings and posited reasons for the findings. It is a fascinating topic. The sources are broad-based and wide-ranging; cited in line which I appreciate; and to the extent I randomly sampled credible. What they aren't, and what the book itself isn't, is prescriptive. Nowhere in the text is there a solution to a problem identified. It was not promised, it was not suggested in the research sources to be intended; I bring it up because I don't want to give the impression there is anywhere anything about addressing the behavior being studied.

I get the impression that the title led previous readers down that garden path. Don't be one of them! I'm interested in the subject of picky eating because it seems so absurd to allow it. I was glad to read Author Veit's study because I feel much less...superior...about the realities of the issue. I think there's a lot of value in this lens on our present social moment's roots and results. I felt there was genuine curiosity, a real "I need to know" on the author's part, and I resonated with that feeling. It gave me a four-star reading experience. I was impressed with her research, her cogitations on the research, and convinced by her conclusions based on them. I was perhaps less drawn in than I might have been by the shifts I felt between the presentation of her digests of research and the chattier tone of her presentation of her conclusions drawn from it...this was more like feeling some charming cocktail-party acquaintance was suddenly taking me into the lecture hall.

Entirely irrelevant to the value I received from the read. It was a factor that impacted me on a reading-pleasure level alone. You might feel entirely differently. I hope you will get the book to find out for yourself.