Product Description

In 1906, at a prosperous Long Island summer home, a family falls ill and typhoid is diagnosed. When Dr George Soper is called in to find the source of the contagion, he notices that the household cook has gone missing. She is Mary Mallon, the woman who would become known as Typhoid Mary. Soper, sanitary engineer turned sleuth, sees Mary as his Moriarty. He finds there has been an outbreak of typhoid fever in every household she has worked in over the past decade. Mary is a 'carrier', a seemingly healthy individual who passes on her dangerous germs, sometimes with fatal consequences. Now Soper must hunt the cook down before she can infect more unsuspecting victims. A poor Irish immigrant, Mary refuses to believe that she can harbour typhoid in her strong and healthy body, and she doesn't intend to go quietly. In this fascinating true story Bourdain, in an homage from one cook to another, follows Mary through the kitchens of New York, putting a human face to a desperate and unintentional murderer, and examines a time, and a life, with his inimitable style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #176116 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
'What Jean Genet was to the prison, what Tom Waits is to the lowlife bar, Bourdain is to the restaurant kitchen: a charmingly roguish guide to a tough, grimy underworld with its own particular rules and rituals ... a tale of hot pursuit, with the rude gusto and barbed wit that made Kitchen Confidential such a full-bodied pleasure' New York Times Book Review 'Raw, readable prose' Entertainment Weekly 'Bourdain's prose is utterly riveting' New York Magazine 'A juicy drama ... Bourdain creates a varied historical portrait of Mallon's time' Seattle Times

New York Times Book Review
‘A charmingly roguish guide to a tough, grimy underworld with its own particular rules and rituals’

Seattle Times
‘A juicy drama … Bourdain creates a varied historical portrait of Mallon’s time’

Customer Reviews

A Sympathetic, Chef's-Eye View of Mary Mallon
This book adds much useful and interesting color to the history of Ms. Mary Mallon, the woman who became known as Typhoid Mary. Mr. Bourdain takes his experiences as a chef and extends them into imagining what life was like for Ms. Mallon. He also tries to look at circumstances from her perspective, rather than the authorities who hounded her.

If you don't know the story, you should be aware that Ms. Mallon was a cook. She was a poor, single Irish immigrant who had to depend on her own efforts to make her way. Apparently, she was an above average cook, because she had an easier time staying employed than most cooks of the wealthy did at that time.

In the early 1900s, typhoid fever was a common disease. About one in ten who contracted it died. There was no treatment for it. You just got very sick. Antiobiotics and vaccines eventually became available, but not until the 1940s.

Some people who have the disease never get very sick, but never totally get over it. They continue to carry the bacteria in their intestinal system. The discharge of that system can then cause healthy people to become ill if they ingest the bacteria in their water or food. Cooked food is not usually a source, but ice cream can be. Many of Ms. Mallon's diners fondly remembered her peach ice cream.

She was discovered as the possible source when a wealthy family in Oyster Harbor came down in typhoid in 1904. The investigator looked into the fact that the cook had disappeared. Checking her employment history with an agency, he found that every family she had cooked for during the past several years had experienced typhoid. A new scientific theory was developing that some people could be continuous carriers. He wanted to find her and test her blood.

He eventually found her cooking on Park Avenue for a family with typhoid in 1907. The book details the unpleasant way that he treated her. Eventually, she was arrested after a tussle with five policement following an afternoon of hiding in a privy. The samples confirmed that she was a carrier. The health department incarcerated her for several years. Due to the efforts of her attorney and favorable press coverage, the health department relented and let her out if she promised not to cook again.

That was a mistake. How else could she earn a living? Someone needed to provide her different employment and supervise her.

After five years, there was a tremendous outbreak of typhoid among the doctors, nurses and patients at a hospital for pregnant women and newborns. Yes, Ms. Mallone was the cook. She spent the rest of her life in isolation at a hospital on an island, and worked in a laboratory there. She was allowed day trips away from the hospital, so it wasn't totally awful. She left bequests totally $4650 when she died in 1938 from the money she saved while working in the laboratory. Ironically, her disease may have protected her from the worst of the Depression.

The best parts of the book detail what goes on in a busy kitchen, the psychology of how cooks think about patrons, and the role that cleanliness plays (or usually doesn't play) in all of this. I was particularly impressed by the argument that cooks (and chefs, apparently) always work sick. There is also a lot of intersting material on how cleanliness in the kitchens of the rich had become the rage around 1900.

You will get a clear sense of Ms. Mallon's frustration. She appears to have genuinely felt that she had done nothing wrong. From a civil liberties point of view, she was kept isolated under health odinances without so much as a court hearing. The book needed to explore the civil liberties issues more in order to make this a five star book. The book also would have benefited from a look at how else her case might have been better handled.

I was struck that there were only three confirmed deaths traced to her employment. I'm sorry that there were three, but for her notoriety I would have thought the number would have been much higher. Certainly, it was a matter of life and death whether or not she cooked for others.

What do you think should be done if someone has a communicable disease that cannot be treated? Would your answer change if you were the person who had that disease?

See all sides to find better solutions!

Not very good at all
I'm a huge fan of a Cooks Tour, and Kitchen Confidential, but this book is not very good at all.

The actual story of Typhoid Mary is very simple, and the author clearly struggles to expand it over 145 pages (with large margins and a pretty big font). This is nothing personal, anyone would.

Bourdain takes his "cooks are great and can do no wrong" attitude to the limit, and most of the book reads like a character assassination of the man who tracked her down (there's no reason for this, other than he was chasing a cook). Mary's bad hygiene is excused by telling us that no cook washes their hands properly, and always avoid the Caesar Salad. Gee, thanks Anthony!

Really, this book does not justify being written. The information should have been condensed into about 40 pages, and included as a chapter in a book on a wider subject.

Typhoid Mary
I have an interest in epidemiology and was researching Mary Mallon for a presentation. Mr Bourdain's book caught my eye and since I'm an admirer of his journalism, fiction and food writing I though this might be quite good. It is however disappointing and includes only some of the material to be found in Judith Walzer Leavitt's excellent Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Heart If you want a brief and quite entertaining account of Typhoid Mary's life this book is OK but Ms Leavitt's work will give you the full picture of a fascinating incident in the annals of infectious disease.