TYPHOID MARY.
By Anthony Bourdain.
Bloomsbury, $19.95.
ONE of the stranger forces in the universe is that which pairs authors and subjects, especially if the force is external rather than internal and conceives the proposed marriage with no deeper thought than, "Wouldn't that be cool!"
Publishers never admit to such uninspired inspiration in dust-jacket copy, but one gets a sense of casual marriage when reading Anthony Bourdain's short new book Typhoid Mary, a mildly hip personal meditation on the turn-of-the-century travails of a New York cook named Mary Mallon. Since Mary was a cook, and a clearly downtrodden Irish immigrant to boot, someone felt she could have no better chronicler, no better blue-collar champion, than the author of Kitchen Confidential.
A best seller, Bourdain's memoir of his own coming of age in a restaurant business mostly about sex, drugs, alcohol and theft was a passionate, entirely profane opera aria devoted to people so beaten-up-on that their world seldom crosses dimensions with the fine folks dining out front. Some of this new book's best moments are Bourdain's angry tangents, clearly reminiscent of his larger, more commercial work: blasts at what generally comes down to man's inhumanity to cook -- or at least man's tendency to slice and burn the hand that feeds him.
As one such cook, Mallon emerges from the screaming tabloid visions of 1906 as a contemporary figure indeed. As Anthony Bourdain with hair in a bun.
Mallon was cooking for a wealthy Oyster Bay, Long Island, family when typhoid broke out, making many people sick and killing several. Health officials were puzzled (Bourdain is almost spiteful in his presentation of how much these men thought they knew about medicine, compared to how little we now know they knew). Typhoid was considered a disease of the past -- until suspicion settled on Mary in the kitchen.
She was found to have a form of typhoid that bothered her not at all but could be spread inadvertently via food. In the clipped, sloganized headlines of that simpler day, Mary Mallon became "Typhoid Mary."
To his credit, Bourdain looks deeper than these headlines, filling in with his own brand of social outrage when facts can't be found. We catch brief glimpses of Mallon's dreary personal life before, during and after her infamy. We follow her through the halls of medicine and justice, through chase, capture, institutionalization, release and finally chase again. And we join in simply wondering what must have gone on in the mind of a poor, tough-as-nails Irish immigrant driven from the kitchen and caught in a system neither her ethnic background nor her education level had prepared her to understand.
For better or worse, this book is all about Bourdain's raspy, streetwise, ever-confrontational voice. You'll love it or hate it. There is no guarantee that Mallon felt even remotely the feelings Bourdain has her feeling, since people's reactions to life are formed at least partly by their world. Mallon's world was not Bourdain's world, even if he would have us believe it so. And sometimes Bourdain's thoroughly modern lingo, kitchen and otherwise, makes us forget that we're talking and thinking and reading about a time nearly a century ago.
The publishers clearly wanted "Kitchen Confidential in a Time Machine." And they got what they wanted, with the proper sauce and the desired internal temperature, from the angry guy in the kitchen. We'll probably never know what Mary Mallon wanted.
John DeMers is the Chronicle's food editor.
