Alton Brown
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
Brown reads and signs Feasting on Asphalt. $29.50. Thurs., May 8. 7 p.m. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. 404-681-5123. www.variety-playhouse.com.
Alton Brown is as famous for the visual style that permeates his Food Network show, “Good Eats,” as he is for his manic energy. But what becomes surprisingly apparent in thumbing through the pages of Feasting on Asphalt: The River Run, the book version of his TV road show’s second season, is what a talented wordsmith Brown is. Photographer and former chef Jean Claude Dhien’s photos vividly capture the spirit of a food journey, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen Brown’s TV work.
But at some point, you have to put your travels down on paper, and here Brown proves as meticulous with words as he does with recipes.
“I wrote it for myself,” Brown says via cell phone from his latest foray, which he says is somewhere in Mississippi. “With the photography, I wanted to let the people gaze on those photos. But it was also part catharsis. It was a different style for me.”
The writing comes off as part diary-style ranting on the evaporation of family-owned dining establishments and part celebration of what is left. His keen eye for observation serves him well at stops such as Baton Rouge, La.: “Out back, Lionel Key reaches into a burlap bag of dried sassafras leaves and deposits them into the hollowed center of a hunk of cypress stump. The device is as ancient as the matching four-foot pestle, which was passed down to Lionel by his great-uncle, who taught his nephew his craft. That is how to pound filé powder (aka gumbo file), the mystical spice … used to thicken soups and stews alike.”
“We wrote the whole thing from memory, because I found it more meaningful,” Brown says. “I’d read Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck … I wanted to hear that sense of grandeur. I wanted to write in a sense that evokes another time period.”
