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Book Review: Speaking in Cod Tongues
Dec. 20th, 2016 08:52 amLenore Newman’s Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey suffers from the same problem as Kelsey Osgood’s How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia: both books have theses that undermine their own existences. How to Disappear Completely is an eating disorder memoir that hypothesizes that eating disorder memoirs actually help spread eating disorders (because girls who are already sad read them and go “Hey, this is a culturally acceptable way to express my sadness! And meet unrealistic standards of feminine beauty and self control! AND possibly get a book deal! SCORE.”), while Speaking in Cod Tongues is an attempt to construct a theory of Canada’s national cuisine while simultaneously contemplating the fact that the very idea of a national cuisine is a hegemonic nationalist construction.
And in both cases I found the authors’ theories convincing and went “Hey! Yeah! ...but if your thesis is correct, doesn’t this mean that your book is part of the problem and shouldn’t exist?”, which makes for a weird reading experience.
In Newman’s case, this is especially sad because it seems so unnecessary. She has the makings of an interesting food history/memoir about Stuff We Eat in Canada, and if she weren’t so determined to make a national cuisine of it she could have focused more on the areas where she had plenty of information and not tossed in the obligatory (surfacey and dull, although mercifully short) sections about provinces where she’s clearly spent less time.
Also Newman is not that good at describing the way food tastes - she seems averse to saying she dislikes anything, presumably because saying something tastes bad is an expression of hegemonic domination - okay, honestly, I think this is the core flaw of the book. Newman is so afraid of saying something problematic that she often shies away from saying much of anything.
But despite these rather core flaws, I did enjoy the book. She’s got a wonderful set of food facts to share, especially if like me you know very little about Canadian cuisine. The titular cod tongues, for instance, aren’t tongues at all, but one of three fatty pieces of meat in a cod’s head (the other two are called cod cheeks). It's too bad you have to wade through all the theorizing to get there.
And in both cases I found the authors’ theories convincing and went “Hey! Yeah! ...but if your thesis is correct, doesn’t this mean that your book is part of the problem and shouldn’t exist?”, which makes for a weird reading experience.
In Newman’s case, this is especially sad because it seems so unnecessary. She has the makings of an interesting food history/memoir about Stuff We Eat in Canada, and if she weren’t so determined to make a national cuisine of it she could have focused more on the areas where she had plenty of information and not tossed in the obligatory (surfacey and dull, although mercifully short) sections about provinces where she’s clearly spent less time.
Also Newman is not that good at describing the way food tastes - she seems averse to saying she dislikes anything, presumably because saying something tastes bad is an expression of hegemonic domination - okay, honestly, I think this is the core flaw of the book. Newman is so afraid of saying something problematic that she often shies away from saying much of anything.
But despite these rather core flaws, I did enjoy the book. She’s got a wonderful set of food facts to share, especially if like me you know very little about Canadian cuisine. The titular cod tongues, for instance, aren’t tongues at all, but one of three fatty pieces of meat in a cod’s head (the other two are called cod cheeks). It's too bad you have to wade through all the theorizing to get there.
