Book Review: Third Helpings

Title: Third Helpings

Author: Calvin Trillin

Date: 1983

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields

ISBN: 0-89919-173-8

Length: 184 pages

Quote: "[A] Frenchman who goes by the name of Monsieur Mangetout had been hired to entertain...by eating several cocktail glasses, a few dozen razor blades, and about a third of a queen-size waterbed...he once consumed fifteen pounds of bicycle in twelve days...[C]ompared to somebody like M. Mangetout...I am someone of moderate appetite...I have never eaten somuch as a pound of bicycle."

Though Calvin Trillin's first claim to fame was serious reportage;  what he liked writing was mildly snarky humor and satire columns, some in verse form. He often snarked about news items and politics. (In his day there were moderate Democrats; he was one.) He wrote a couple of comic novels. He also wrote enough humor columns about food and restaurants to make up three complete books, which were published together in the 1990s as "The Tummy Trilogy." American Fried was volume one; Alice Let's Eat was volume two; Third Helpings finished the Trilogy.

Trillin frequently mentioned his Jewish heritage in his writings. It can seem ironic in the context of his confessions that he regularly ate whatever kind of pork, shellfish, meat-combined-with-dairy, or even animal-blood-based food any goy offered him. The payoff was that, by flouting traditional rules designed to form a little cultural wall between Jewish and non-Jewish people, he seems to have been regularly invited to the sort of clubs that, he admitted he'd always thought, had been formed just to exclude "people like me." Food bullies dislike and distrust anyone who doesn't eat what they eat. Food bullies may not be conscious of holding any religious prejudices, or even religious beliefs, and they do in fact distrust relatives with food sensitivities in the same way, and for the same reason, they distrust people of different religious backgrounds...Trillin apparently embarrassed his family by not upsetting food bullies. He felt a need to assure people that he wasn't going for the world's record of "Eats Everything," that at least he didn't eat glass and metal.

He didn't like everything he did eat, either. He was curtly dismissive of chimichangas, harsh about anything overcooked or underseasoned, and apt to laugh at super-elaborate "stuff stuffed with stuff." He frustrated wine snobs by growling that, with a lot of meals, he enjoyed coffee--or beer. He ate some very expensive meals and liked them, but he never fell into the trap of praising meals or restaurants merely for being expensive; he enjoyed cheap snacks sold from roadside wagons as much as the traditional annual feast at a snobby club.

"The only thing we know for sure about what the Pilgrims ate is that it couldn't have tasted very good. Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth."

"A scholar who makes no priggish distinction between knowledge of phonology and knowledge of latkes is obviously my sort of scholar."

"When I go back for visits to Kansas City, my hometown, and I'm asked...how I possibly survive in New York, I tell them...I only eat sausage sandwiches standing up."

"Friends of the Desert began picketing the market­place, claiming that the Zacatecas nopales 'would inevitably lead to clear-cutting of cactus.'..Moishe's was threatening to pull out if Richard's did not agree to stop serving...shellfish."

"[I]n New York...fried-chicken deprivation can cause some­one who was raised in the Midwest to go feverish with poultry nostalgia."

Trillin delighted his fans, and frustrated other readers, by refusing to print any recipes in detail. No matter how much livelier, funnier, more literary and historic his descriptions of restaurant meals were than a typical restaurant review column, they were intended to steer visitors to restaurants. (In Buffalo, New York, he meets lots of local people actively campaigning to get the name of their city identified with fried chicken wings instead of Buffalo's other claim to fame: frequently reporting the coldest temperatures in the contiguous States.) Or, when Trillin was invited to a memorable meal at a private club, to inspire people who liked to cook to make similar things at home or in restaurants. Trillin described the part of the cooking process that defined a special recipe, but left cooking time, seasonings, etc., for cooks to work out. If you already have recipe books and cooking experience his "Tummy Trilogy" can be considered as cookbooks.

If you merely like travel, history, wisecracks, and/or reading about rich unhealthy meals as "food porn," Third Helpings and the rest of the Trilogy are just fun reads.

Trivial? Maybe, if you don't intend to cook clams or pork. I read the omnibus edition of the Trilogy when it came out as a new reprint, laughed copiously, copied a few recipes for future experiments, did not keep the book. Having acquired a copy of Third Helpings as an old book, I laughed almost as much at the image of edible cactus being "clear-cut" as I had the first time around; I revelled more than ever in Trillin's success in having added "Buffalo Wings," meaning spicy fried chicken wings, to the dialect and menus of at least the Eastern States. I can imagine first-time readers enjoying this foodie memoir as much as they did Under the Tuscan Sun. 

To buy Third Helpings, with or without the rest of the Trilogy, send $5 per book, $5 per package, + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. (Salolianigodagewi is not a Paypal address; it's a mail-sorting address from which you get the appropriate Paypal address.) All three books will fit into one package, bound separately or together, whichever is currently cheaper unless specified, and leave room for one or two of Trillin's other books (or your choice of books that have or have not been reviewed at this web site).