Overview

Sudi Pigott’s fun little book, How to be a Better Foodie, is a tongue-in-cheek look at high foodie-ism. Bulging with tips, advice and foodie facts, in an extreme level of detail, it’s entertaining and informative in parts, but laughably bad in others. Pigott’s boundless enthusiasm comes across as pretentious numerous times, which often makes for painful reading.

Full review

Structure of the book

How to be a Better Foodie comprises 304 pink and chocolate pages, “conjuring up delectable thoughts of… langoustines and hot chocolate fondant”. It seemed more 1970’s bedspread to me, but perhaps I’m just not foodie enough. It is high on text, with some cartoons for illustration. It is divided into the following chapters:

Introduction
1 – Getting Started
2 – At home with the better foodie
3 – How the better foodie entertains
4 – Culinary fashionability
5 – Out and about with the better foodie
6 – The festive better foodie
7 – Intricacies of foodism
8 – The better foodie almanac

The introduction includes a fun quiz entitled “What kind of Foodie are you?”, which sets the light-hearted tone of the book. In addition, the book is peppered with food-related quotes, and between each chapter there are a couple of pages of random foodie trivia questions & answers, e.g. “What flower does saffron come from?”, or “What are Saturn peaches?”.

Because of the fractured nature of the book, it is probably best read in sections, depending in your own interests. If read all at once, the density of text and facts can be rather overwhelming.

About the author

According to her website, Sudi Pigott is a London-based food writer, restaurant consultant, and hosts gastro-tours and foodie-centric quizzes for corporate and private clients. Come to think of it, these trivia nights must be the times when Pigott whips out those foodie questions dotted throughout the book. She is, quite obviously, passionately obsessed with food. She has a blog as well, but sadly this hasn’t been updated since May 2008.

How is this book interesting/special/new/useful?

Despite its light tone and small size, Better Foodie is a veritable compendium of foodie facts. I don’t think there would be a single reader who doesn’t walk away with some new knowledge, or who wouldn’t be inspired to improve their culinary knowledge and experiences.

In the first chapter, the section “How to be Truly Greedy Without Appearing So” is funny, and includes tips for getting more food. Useful, even if I wouldn’t want to admit it to myself.

The book covers many aspects of the Better Foodie experience – from househunting to entertaining, to culinary trends, to eating out, festive holidays and overseas travel. As a keen home cook and avid traveller, I found the chapter on festive holidays and travel to be of most interest, particularly her mini-guides to culinary hotspots around the world (including my home city Melbourne!), and the Better Foodie Almanac. Pigott’s Almanac is a month-by-month guide to global foodie festivals and seasonal produce. With one month to two pages, naturally it can’t provide more than the briefest summary, and doubtless many significant festivals, countries and products will have been missed. However, it makes a great starting point for interested foodies to begin their own research and plan their own trips.

What problems/flaws are there?

As mentioned, Pigott’s enthusiasm veers into pretension many times throughout the book. Take, for instance, what she suggests feeding children coming for a sleepover: “homemade ice cream with Canestrelli (artisan thick wafers sandwiched with dark chocolate and hazelnut gianduja) to accompany a movie”. I don’t know any child who would actually appreciate such an extravagant treat. My (admittedly limited) experience with children tells me that children like sugar. And fairy bread. And cordial. Kids, in general, seem to prefer food from a packet to a proper Better Foodie treat, no matter how lovingly made, expensively bought, or how exclusively single-origin it is. Sudi’s Better Foodie in the making has obviously been better trained than the average child. It took a while for me to realise that she was being serious when she said: “Organise a chocolate tasting for their friends – they will really appreciate the subtle nuances of red fruit and leather”.

For newer foodies looking to increase their knowledge, Pigott’s lyrical insistence on only the best single-origin dark chocolate and rare-breed, organic bacon of the most impeccable provenance can be off-putting rather than encouraging.

Pigott has a laughably poor knowledge of Asian food – for someone who takes such pride in her culinary fashionability and gastro credibility, it is surprising just how many errors there are with regards to Asian cuisine. This made it difficult for me to take seriously any facts or advice she gave about cuisines with which I wasn’t quite as familiar.

Her suggestion that you order prawn toasts at yum cha made me laugh, as deep-fried prawn toasts haven’t been eaten at any serious Chinese restaurants I know (in Australia), except in the deepest, most Anglo-suburbs, since the mid-80’s. I realise that London doesn’t have as large an Asian influence as Australia does, but I would have thought that a dedicated and well-travelled foodie like Pigott would have a better knowledge of Chinese food.

The word “umami” pops up numerous times, as you might expect, given that it is one of the most incredibly overused buzzwords amongst food writers and bloggers. This overuse is irritating enough in itself, but in the book, it is misspelt as “unami” on more than one occasion.

Other errors include her referring to yuba (tofu skin) as “yoba”, or calling sukiyaki “sukiyuki… as served at cutting-edge Masa in New York”. Or at any little suburban Japanese restaurant, where, most of the time, it will be spelled correctly. (I’ll just add here that when you type “sukiyuki” in Microsoft Word, the automatic spell-checker changes it for you to the correct spelling).

I found her Orientalist, Eurocentric attitude particularly grating, with phrases like: “The Japanese New Year is customarily celebrated at the end of December/early January”. Japanese New Year has been celebrated on the 1st of January every year since 1873.

Or her advice that rice should “emphatically not” be rinsed. This of course holds true if you’re making a risotto or a pilaf, but certainly not if you’re making plain white rice, like billions of people do every single day. Thai food master David Thompson washes his rice in several changes (4-5, if not more) of water, until it runs clear and the chalk starch is gone. It’s quite obvious that he knows his rice.

I do not have a great knowledge of many of the more exotic European or African cuisines, but given the sloppy attention to detail towards the Asian sections, I found it hard to take her other foodie facts seriously, and would definitely do some fact-checking before quoting anything from Better Foodie amongst my foodie friends.

Who might enjoy/use this book most?

Foodies, unsurprisingly. The book is aimed at the high earning demographic who read publications such as Epicure, Gourmet Traveller or Vogue Entertaining & Travel, and who have a high disposable income for eating out and entertaining. Are you willing and able to purchase a copper bowl solely for beating egg whites? Then this book is for you. I do think that most dedicated food lovers would find something to appreciate in the book, although it’s important to take what Pigott writes with a grain of (Himalayan crystal) salt. I wouldn’t recommend this book as a gift unless you are absolutely sure the receiver would appreciate it. Or if you just want to show your food snob friends how much of a bore they really are.