R.W. Apple, Jr. has died. Though lauded for his political writing and editing over a long career at the New York Times, Mr. Apple's appreciative food writing, barely mentioned in today's obit, will long remain with me.
The blog Take Back the Times featured this a year ago: "Apple is not one of these restaurant critics who sneaks into the restaurant, wearing a false beard and no one knows who he is. No, his arrival is often set up well in advance, and he goes, as he did at Uglesich's, for a special meal where the proprietor has put on all his best efforts.
Apple does not appear at lousy restaurants. He only goes to the best, and the NYT sends him and his wife, Betsy, who is usually present, all over the world at its expense. It falls into the category of a public service of the first water."
On a trip to Shanghai that Apple wrote up for the NYT in October 2005, he reported that after a morning sampling goodies from food stalls, "...I felt fat as a Strasbourg goose, but my eating buddies insisted that we stop at a 24-hour noodle shop on Shandong Zhonglu, behind the Westin, to watch a particularly deft cook do his stuff. "No need to eat," said Mr. Leung, a Hong Kong-born Chinese. "Just watch." Sure. We watched, all right, as a huge ball of dough was kneaded and rolled and tossed and hacked into ragged little squares that reminded Mr. Vongerichten, an Alsatian, of spaetzle, and twisted and stretched and flipped and folded into long, supple noodles. But of course I had to sample a bowl of beef noodle soup, lightly curry-flavored, before we left, and of course that spoiled my lunch."
This detail of Apple's packing was in today's NYT obit: "To the end of his life, Mr. Apple kept a small black bag packed with essentials, including a personal pepper mill, ready to be whisked away on a moment’s notice for a big story, or for a little one that caught his fancy."
(Ah, this touches my heart--- my mother, too, never traveled without her black pepper, along with coffee-making gear and decent wattage light bulbs.)
Another favorite of mine, Calvin Trillin, profiled Apple in The New Yorker in 2003.
( Top: Gerald Scarfe's Falstaffian caricature of Mr. Apple.)
I believe that he had a home in the Cotswolds. I remember reading a travel article he wrote about it. Sounded like heaven.
Posted by: KathyF | October 05, 2006 at 01:31 AM