another eye opens

The annual Food Issue isn’t one I look forward to with particular relish, but I gorged myself on this year’s, starting with a uniformly excellent Talk of the Town section, especially the pieces on dragonflies and Aimee Mann. Calvin Trillin’s piece on Mexican food includes this hilarious description of mole as “a thick sauce made from as many as thirty ingredients, in a process so laborious that it puts most complicated Continental dishes into the category of Pop-Tart preparation by comparison.” Among the food pieces, I found myself engrossed by Mimi Sheraton’s piece on sausages and Lauren Collins’s profile of Apollonia Poilane, who took charge of her family’s famous bakery in Paris after her parents died in a helicopter crash when she was 18 years old. And I kept being strangely moved to tears by Jane Kramer’s loooooong, intimate profile of Yotam Ottolenghi (below) and Sami Tamimi, two gay Israelis (ex-lovers now with other partners) who have apparently revolutionized the way food-conscious Londoners eat. At the very end of the article, she describes an enviable evening she spent cooking, eating, and drinking wine with the two of them, their partners, and Ottolenghi’s ex Noam Bar and his partner.
Also delicious: Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Deidre Bair’s biography of Saul Steinberg, whose love life was remarkable, to say the least. I haven’t read Antonya Nelson’s short story “Literally,” but I’m about to chill out and listen to her read it aloud on the magazine’s iPad app.