A Bourdain Book You’ve Likely Missed

After reading Kitchen Confidential this summer I decided to add all of Anthony Bourdain’s books to my To Read pile. Given my slightly OCD nature I went immediately to Goodreads to figure out which book was next by publication date, not knowing which came first, A Cook’s Tour  or Medium Raw (it’s A Cook’s Tour for those equally as worried about these things as I am). While looking for that information I came across another book Bourdain authored.  This one wasn’t an autobiographical work and its publication date preceded A Cook’s Tour. It looks as though in 2001 Mr. Bourdain spent some time researching the infamous Typhoid Mary, and that I would be reading all about it.

I read this book quickly (a few hours over two days), its short (only about 140 pages) and Mr. Bourdain is many things, but a historian is not one of them (he knows it too, and refers constantly to looking at Mary’s life through that of their shared experiences as cooks in New York) but it was certainly a pleasing look into a life I thought I knew a lot about, but it turns out I knew very little. Bourdain chronicles, in an almost diary fashion, the events of 1904-1915 and the rise and fall of the specter of Typhoid Mary. All told with the now easily recognizable Bourdain delivery familiar to those who have read his books or watched his television shows.

This is not a definitive work on the subject, and shouldn’t be looked at as such. It is instead an appetizer of a larger story. It highlights what the culinary world was like at the turn of the last century, hints at the Irish immigrant experience, pulls back the veil about the beginnings of the health commission, and gives a glimpse at the life of Mary Mallon, the woman who would become known the world around as Typhoid Mary. This is a succinct, adroit, and relatable biography about a seemingly unrelatable public persona.