Now, sugar cream pie may be delicious, but there’s nothing delicious, nothing delectable, in that description. Compare that to the one Matthew Gavin Frank offers in his new book, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour through America’s Food (Liveright, 2015): “Our Hoosier Cream Pie is so soft we can cut it with our pinkies. So sweet, we can think only of how it moves us, speeds our hearts, allows us to run from towns called Amboy and Amo, Trafalgar and Troy. Running, we can think of all our dead aunts and uncles, all of the filled-in quarries, their ceilings waiting to collapse, the kinds of state histories buried beneath rock and dust and tablespoons of sugar we allow to burn, harden, lacquer the tops of our Hoosier Cream Pies.”

Frank’s description is no historical tidbit or bland factoid. It’s something more like a tribute, though only if a tribute can embrace the sadness of what it celebrates, the troubled soul beneath its shinning surface. And, like the rest of Frank’s book, it’s wonderfully written.

Here’s a food writer who cares as much about the words on the page as the food in our mouths. And the result of Frank’s attention to both is a book that gives us a fresh look at America and its food. Frank takes up fifty signature dishes from fifty states in fifty essays, each as surprising and engaging as a dish cooked up by a half-crazed, half-genius chef who’s determined that the best tastes make the familiar strange, but no less enticing.

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