The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

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The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

Free PDF Ebook The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

A richly illustrated culinary tour of the United States through fifty signature dishes, and a radical exploration of our gastronomic heritage.

Following his critically acclaimed Preparing the Ghost, renowned essayist Matthew Gavin Frank takes on America’s food. In a surprising style reminiscent of Maggie Nelson or Mark Doty, Frank examines a quintessential dish in each state, interweaving the culinary with personal and cultural associations of each region. From key lime pie (Florida) to elk stew (Montana), The Mad Feast commemorates the unexpected origins of the familiar. Brazenly dissecting the myriad intersections between history and food, Frank, in this gorgeously designed volume, considers politics, sexuality, violence, grief, and pleasure: the cool, creamy whoopie pie evokes toughness in the face of New England winters, while the stewlike perloo serves up an exploration of food and race in the South. Tracing an unpredictable map of our collective appetites, The Mad Feast presents a beguiling flavor profile of the American spirit. 50 illustrations

The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

• Amazon Sales Rank: #535799 in Books
• Published on: 2015-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.40" w x 7.40" l, .0 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

Review “This is potent stuff, a demi-glace, if you will, that has been reduced down, unnecessary words struck from the page to offer prose akin to poetry, dense and evocative…. A bravado performance…. [The Mad Feast] is a very good book, and one that provides the sense of literary adventure that struck me when I first read the opening lines of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer…. Mr. Frank is not ‘mad’ as the title might imply, nor is he perversely calculating. He feels his way along his travels and connects one notion to another until he develops a literary skein that vibrates with passion. That, I suppose, is a pretty good definition of writing, the good kind.” (Mr. Kimball - Wall Street Journal)“It is the off-the-wall blend of memoir, travel, history and fiction that makes the book unique. This is the cookbook David Foster Wallace might have written…. If you enjoyed J. Ryan Stradal’s Kitchens of the Great Midwest and appreciate the style of writers like Geoff Dyer, Maggie Nelson and Will Self, this should be your next food-themed read.” (Rebecca Foster - BookTrib.com)“Never has a country-spanning food romp felt this subversive. Frank’s essays―which dissect signature dishes from all 50 states―are nothing short of brilliant…. [A]n exploration of humanity, life, and tastes, the book is delicious. A-” (Entertainment Weekly)“[A] raucous gastro-crawl through regional American cuisine.” (Jeffery Gleaves - The Paris Review Daily)“[Frank]’s produced a surprising, entertaining look at what Americans eat and why.” (Kirkus Reviews)“The Mad Feast is the ideal gift for your closest traveling companion, a self-guided tour crafted with a native’s intuition and panache…. Using quirky historical anecdotes that echo a nation’s motley coming-of-age, Frank has found a way to serve each state’s beating heart on a platter. At turns spunky, wise, and melancholic, The Mad Feast is essential reading material for your next cross-country road trip.” (Ploughshares)“This crazy culinary cruise through America is as messy and wonderful as Iowa's Loosemeat Sandwich. …This is no cookbook with practical recipes or a patronizing tour of backwoods eateries, but a meditation on our nation''s strange history that stares up at us from the plate, as tart as a Key lime and dense as Mississippi Mud Pie.” (Andrew Lawler, author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?)“Matthew Gavin Frank’s The Mad Feast is like a baby who wants to learn the world by putting everything in its mouth. If eating means bringing everything we’re not into our bodies, then this book―rich, exuberant, unexpected―explores how we’re contained within everything we bring into ourselves. It’s messy and playful; it pushes association to the brink of absurdity and then sits at that border, munching on a slice of cake or spooning some chowder. Every chapter reads less like reportage and more like incantation, assembling from local materials the particular ingredients necessary to cast a singular spell.” (Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams)“In The Mad Feast, Matthew Gavin Frank is our Merry Prankster of literary food writing, taking his readers on a mind-bending trip through the pork-belly of America. Lush, exuberant, and manically associative, this book is so much more than a collection of recipes (but it is that, too); it’s an ecstatic and essayistic exploration of culture, community, history, and philosophy. I could not put it down, and I keep going back for more.” (Steven Church, author of Ultrasonic: Essays, founding editor of The Normal School)

About the Author Matthew Gavin Frank has previously written about everything from wine-making in a tent in Italy to the social hierarchies of a pot farm in California. He teaches creative writing and lives in Marquette, Michigan.

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Most helpful customer reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful. More for the readie than the foodie By Graig Stettner I checked out this book from my local library after having heard author, Matthew Gavin Frank, interviewed on NPR. After hearing him describe the Upper Peninsula of Michigan's iconic pasty and the making of the "crab" in ersatz-sushi California Rolls, I was convinced this would be a fascinating book. Indeed, I suppose it is, if you're more into flowery prose than food. I wasn't and found the book painful to read. Here's an excerpt: "Violence is geology, is eating, is turning one fish into another [that's violence?], is whipping our bodies through the air. Gravity whimpers, but wins. Here ocean commingles with desert. I wonder which the rice, which the avocado, which the imitation crab...Here, is the sort of environmental cassoulet that evokes an identity crisis and shift, dueling regional banjos plucking their dissonance in the same case. California."I toyed with ending this brief review with some literary extravaganza of words, but I'll leave it at this. Read this because you enjoy flowery, somewhat unconventional writing rather than because you want to learn about iconic state foods.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Waiter -- Send this Back to the Chef! By David C. Klinger Instructions: re-heat this common and not-very-unique recipe for yet another book on food regionalism (a state-by-state selection of the most "characteristic" or stereotypical local foods and specialty cuisines). Mix in a healthy dollop of questionable history. Fold in generous portions of generalities, over-simplifications, irrelevancies, and personal biases. Sprinkle throughout with gratuitous profanity and unnecessary vulgarities (to taste). Wrap the entire mixture in a puff pastry of over-inflated writing and pompous pontification. Bake in a lukewarm oven. Serve to the unsuspecting.If you're looking for a cookbook, a serious book on food, or an accurate history of food in American culture, "The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food" is one Cook's Tour short of a Happy Meal. Over-written, under-researched, and poorly presented for the discriminating reader's plate. I thought the author's section on my own native state (North Carolina) was both inaccurate and offensive. A subsequent read through a half-dozen other states and the author's food selections confirmed the book's three primary ingredients -- an over-used premise, annoying verbosity, and feeble attempt to amuse or offend.Savor "The Mad Feast" with a healthy glass of bicarbonate of soda.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. I feel like with lots of books By Wordplaysam This book is INSUFFERABLE. I feel like with lots of books, if you don't like it, it's easy to put down--but this book goes beyond that and creates active frustration. The problem is, you can still flip to the last page of each chapter and use it as a kind of cookbook (certain recipes would be nearly impossible to make, given that they are based around items available only locally, but I feel like that is completely expected for a book of this type) and it's cool and interesting. However, as I browse the recipes, I am left curious about the history of the dish, why it was chosen, who eats it, etc. Unfortunately, the chapter that precedes each recipe is an overwritten, confusing mess, written more like a personal therapy diary than a look at regional food. If the answers to my questions are in each chapter, I get frustrated and give up long before I find them. And it just keeps tricking me. I keep wanting to cook something from the book, and get mad about the prose all over again. Don't get sucked in like me! I read these reviews and though "Oh, they're exaggerating, it'll be fun, and I can still use it to cook," but that's the problem. The recipes aren't worth it, you'll be left frustrated and with more questions than answers.

See all 14 customer reviews... The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food, by Matthew Gavin Frank

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