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Book ReviewsTales from the Tummy Trilogy |
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Book: Tales from the Tummy Trilogy
Written by: Calvin Trillin |
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Average Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5
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Made me gain weight
Rating:
4 / 5
THE TUMMY TRILOGY consists of three collections of essays about traveling and eating: AMERICAN FRIED, ALICE, LET'S EAT and THIRD HELPINGS. And Trillin is a prodigious eater indeed. Whenever he travels, which he does frequently, his primary purpose, it seems, is to eat -- and to discover the best places to eat wherever he happens to be.
Trillin is not satisfied with the pseudo-Continental fare found in those restaurants he calls "La Maison de la Casa House." No, he wants the authentic barbecue that can only be cooked over a hickory fire, even if he is reduced to driving around with his nose out the window to catch a whiff of hickory smoke. He wants the kind of food you have to eat standing up at a local festival or the kind you eat at long tables covered with paper at Baptist wives' dinners or fisherman's suppers.
If you aren't a prodigious eater, you may find Trillin's writing difficult to take in anything other than small helpings. Reading an account of one meal can leave you feeling engorged, as if you had gained five pounds from the text alone. But the writing is light and humorous and pulls you along, the observations are witty and always tinged with truth, and the eaters Trillin meets along the way are worth getting to know. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to plan a trip to New Orleans and see if Trillin has left anything worth eating behind.
Eat your way across America
Rating:
5 / 5
Okay so I'm late at reading Calvin's books, but what a yummy way to write. I would have read the book in one sitting, but I kept getting so dang hungry, I would have to stop and go eat something! A person could get fat reading this book. Of course all his talk of barbecue, and crawfish festivals, left this East-Texas gal longing for home. He's right in the south 'eat anywhere' is the goal of many. This book was delightful and delicious! A great book for the cook in the family. Margie Toone-author The Country Gourmet
Saluting America with coleslaw
Rating:
5 / 5
What qualifies the author to write this book is concisely summarized in a quote from his daughter: "Daddy likes to pig out." In the grand history of American gluttony (dating back to the first Thanksgiving dinner, I suppose), no one has ever pigged out with more demonstrable relish and native lack of hauteur than Calvin Trillin. His ode to the glories of Arthur Bryant's Barbecue - The Single Best Restaurant In The World - is a dithyramb worthy of Whitman. He is, in short, a true patriot - albeit one whose vision of multiculturalism is expressed in Italian fried-pepper sandwiches and Polish pierogies. There are lots of laughs in this volume but I value it more for its whole-hearted embrace of our authentic appetites. In a time of spiralling culinary pretention (whose standard bearer is Charlie Trotter and his dishes with paragraph-long names), "The Tummy Trilogy" is a palate-cleansing dish of sanity.
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