Are You A Food Snob?

We’re very much looking forward to reading The Food Snob’s Dictionary. The satirical book is authored by David Kamp (who previously wrote The Rock Snob’s Dictionary and The Film Snob’s Dictionary along withThe United States of Arugula) and Marion Rosenfeld and contains a plethora of entries about the minutia of food elitism, including this excellent description of heritage turkeys:

Heritage Turkey.Wattled-fowl equivalent of HEIRLOOM produce, denoting old-line indigenous breeds of turkeys that have approached extinction during the tyrannical, Butterball-fueled reign of the big-breasted hybrid freak known in the poultry industry as the Large White. Propelled by such organizations as SLOW FOOD, heritage turkeys, with such J. Crew-catalog names as Bourbon Red, Standard Bronze, Narragansett, and Jersey Buff, have been reintroduced in limited quantities to the market.

The heritage turkey we prepared for Thanksgiving was so dark-meated and intensely flavorful that Gramma wept as she said, “This! This is what turkeys tasted like in my girlhood in Vermont!”

We’re assuming that any regular reader of this blog is at least a low-grade food snob (personally, we had a humiliating moment while watching The Next Iron Chef last weekend when we turned to our roommate and sagely commented that Michael Symon’s dish sounded like “a really nice, classic flavor profile”), but in case you’re unfamiliar, Kamp is kind enough to define the term: “Part groupie, part aesthete, part stark raving loon, the Food Snob is someone who has taken the amateur epicure’s admirable zeal for eating and cooking well to hollandaise-curdling extremes. He wears Bastad chef’s clogs even though he works in publishing or property law. He owns an $8,000 gas range with six burners and a griddle. … He considers Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, and Fernand Point his greatest influences, in particular the latter’s masterful Ma Gastronomie, in the original French, which— What’s that? You don’t know who these people are? Then…then shame on you!

The excerpts from The Food Snob’s Dictionary are so enjoyable largely because Kamp and Rosenfeld are clearly writing from the perspective of those who have more than a touch of food snobbery themselves. Serious Eats has an excellent interview with Kamp, in which he reveals that he grew up in a “New Jersey family that did everything the New York Times weekend section told us to do.” The interview is great and the book looks fantastic. We’re very excited to get our hands on a copy.

The Food Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Gastronomical Knowledge [Amazon]
Food Snobbery Explained [Snobsite]
David Kamp: The Serious Eats Interview [Serious Eats]

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Are You A Food Snob?