Ruth Reichl
ASK MOST modern American food writers why they’ve chosen food as their subject, and you’re likely to get a quote from Mary Frances Fisher. It comes from the introduction to The Art of Eating.
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?
They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and it is all one.
I used to quote that myself when I was trying to explain why I write about food. Now I wonder what possessed me to do that. They are lovely sentiments. They are also an apology.
Over the many years that I knew Mary Frances Fisher she often told me, “I am not a food writer.” Indeed, if you read between the lines you realize that she was a bit embarrassed by her passion. And so in this famous passage she insists that food is not her true subject. “I am really,” she promises, “writing about bigger things. . . .”
To understand why Fisher considered food too small a subject, why she worried about being “unfaithful to her craft,” it helps to read her words in the context of her time. Food and cooking do not exist in a vacuum, and the way people write about what they eat always reflects the society in which they live. For that reason the changing language of food can be extremely revealing.
Consider, for example, the first piece of food writing that ever moved me.
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today,” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.
I must have been six when I first read those words, and they hit me with such force that I stopped to read them a second time. They were so different from the fairy tales to which I was accustomed. The others were also about food, but they contained witches who wanted to cook you, wolves who wanted to eat you, or apples that turned out to be poisoned. In Pooh’s tale, food was your friend, and as someone who has always liked to eat I appreciated that. It wasn’t until I grew up that I began to wonder why this particular story was so different from the ones that came before.
Alan Alexander Milne wrote Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, and if you look at the England of the time, his attitude toward food becomes completely clear. The First World War had ended, the middle class was rising, and the entire country was beginning to liberate itself from the confines of a rigid Victorian culture that made the enjoyment of food almost impossible for almost everyone.
For poor people there had never been enough. The wealthy, on the other hand, suffered from the opposite extreme: there was too much of everything. Guests at a formal Victorian dinner were forced to wrangle with thirty-one different pieces of flatware, each with a specific purpose. Even those sitting down to lesser meals found themselves confronted by two large knives, a tablespoon for soup, three large forks, and a small silver fish knife and fork. Using the wrong utensil would instantly label one as an uneducated lout who did not belong in polite company.
You were meant to know when to use each fork and knife, and in what order to drink the liquids that filled the many glasses surrounding your plate. You needed to know that the large plate in front of you was for meat and the crescent one for salad, and that they were to be used at the same time. Should you end up with an unused implement at meal’s end, your social life was over.
This wasn’t dinner: it was an exam. And that was precisely its purpose: in the Victorian era food was a means of keeping the classes separate and preventing social mobility. It’s easy to understand how a roly-poly little bear who considered eating a happy adventure turned into a national hero. Winnie-the-Pooh may be a children’s book, but those few little lines about breakfast offer us a window into a rapidly changing society.
The truth is that you can enter history at almost any point and find out a great deal merely by listening to writers describing their meals.
Here’s the Greek poet Philoxenus, around the year 400 BC—as quoted in The Classical Cookbook—telling his lover about a great feast he has just attended.
A casserole full of a noble eel with a look of the conger about him,
Honey glazed shrimps besides, my love,
Squid sprinkled with sea-salt,
Baby birds in flaky pastry,
And a baked tuna, Gods! What a huge one, fresh from the fire
and the pan and the carving knife,
Enough steaks from its tender belly to delight us both as long as
we might care to stay and munch.
Clearly these were happy eaters, people who enjoyed simple food and consumed it without a lot of fuss. Archestratus, who lived around the same time, was kind enough to leave us his recipe for preparing hare: “. . . bring the roast meat in and serve it to everyone while they are drinking: hot, simply sprinkled with salt, taking it from the spit while still a little rare.”
Move forward a few centuries and you instantly see how much things had changed. Marcus Gavius Apicius was the great epicure of the first century. Of a mousse containing minced fish, eggs, oil, pepper, and rue, pressed into a pan and topped with a sea anemone before being steamed, he noted happily: “At table no one will know what he is eating.”
And that, of course, was the point: by the time of Apicius, food was no longer simply roasted and sprinkled with salt. The Greek world had grown larger, and along with it, Greek appetites. When Alexander the Great went off on his journeys of conquest, he took botanists with him. It had the same explosive effect as the journey of Christopher Columbus: it changed the way the world ate. Just as Columbus introduced tomatoes to Italy, potatoes to Ireland, and chiles to India, Alexander returned bearing the hitherto unknown citrus, peaches, pistachios, and peacocks. All you need to do is read descriptions of the food to understand how profoundly Greek life had changed.
A similar cultural shift took place in Islamic society. Writers of the time tell us that Mohammad Mohammad would eat just about anything (except lizards, which he loathed), and that his followers did not presume to eat more elaborately than the Prophet. During his lifetime, food in the world of Islam was extremely simple. But as the center of the Muslim universe moved east a deeply epicurean tradition developed around “poems of the table.”
At first these poems were simply meant to be recited during banquets, but they soon evolved into something much more complicated. The invitations to one famous banquet given by the caliph instructed each guest to memorize a famous poem praising a particular dish. As the meal progressed each guest stood to recite his poem. As he did so, the cooks rushed off to prepare the dish in the exact manner described in the poem.
The chefs were, apparently, unfazed; at the banquet describe by Al-Masudi in Meadows of Gold, the only poem that stumped the chefs was one in praise of asparagus. It was out of season; they had to send runners off to Damascus, and by the time the runners returned the banquet was over.
Reading the description of these feasts tells you more than any history book about the transformation of Islamic society. Clearly it no longer resembled the one in which Mohammad sat in the desert eating the simple dishes that were put before him.
The sheer unself-consciousness of these historical food writings is extremely appealing. The portraits they paint are almost accidental, but that does not reduce their power. This anthology offers a short but telling romp through the edible history of the world, beginning with the Bible and coming right up to the present day.
But fiction writers use food in an entirely different manner. They know there is no more effective means of telegraphing class, caste, and character. Put your heroine to bed with a couple of cream puffs, and people instantly make assumptions. Have her pop a pizza into the microwave for her kid’s dinner, and we understand exactly who she is. To fiction writers and to poets as well, food is a marvelous tool, a quick verbal shortcut that can say a great deal in a very few words. Melville and Proust and Chekhov, and poets such as William Carlos Williams and Seamus Heaney—their selections in this book demonstrate how they have used food to devastating effect.
But writing about food does more than merely reflect culture and act in the service of art; it also has the ability to transform society. Nobody has ever recognized this so clearly as the French, who captured the haute cuisine high ground early on by writing about their food, publicizing their food, and using it as a kind of marketing strategy. They gave their food a national identity and sent it off to conquer the world.
The earliest French cookbook was the Cuisinier français. Published in 1651, the book proudly staked its claim to national identity. Plenty of previous cookbooks had been published in Europe—from the English Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook of 1588 to the Italian Il Trinciante (The Carver) of 1581—but none of them was stamped with a nationality.
The Cuisinier français was to have an enormous influence on cooking throughout the Western world. The English translation, which was published two years after the French version, remained in print for almost two hundred years. By then the French had claimed the language of cooking so effectively that we’re still under its influence. Flip through any American cookbook (or walk through any supermarket), and you’ll be stunned by how many of our foods have French names.
But we Americans have been slow to adopt the language of food. Even our best-loved national dishes—hamburgers, French fries, and pizza come immediately to mind—pay tribute to other tongues. Where are the American words?
Which brings us back to Ms. Fisher and her reluctant embrace of food writing. In her time, food was not considered a respectable subject. It was relegated to what were then called “the women’s pages” of the newspaper. As recently as the seventies, Jacques Pépin, who was studying for a PhD in philosophy and literature at Columbia, proposed writing a doctoral thesis on the history of French food presented in the context of French literature. His adviser turned him down flat. “Cuisine,” he pontificated, “is not a serious art form. It’s far too trivial for academic study.”
But as this book proves, things were about to change. Much of the wonderful writing you will find here was written in the past thirty years by people who took it extremely seriously. What does this say about our own society?
At first it might seem that this reflects a more benign attitude toward food. Look again; much of this writing, whether it is on culture, politics, or identity, reflects a deep malaise about what is taking place at our table. And with good reason: there has never been a time in human history when a population was so profoundly disconnected from its food supply. America was once an agrarian society, but the modern industrialization of food and farming has made us increasingly dependent upon others for our sustenance. We no longer grow our own food, and every year we rely more heavily on others to prepare what we consume. We now eat out so often that many people consider cooking an endangered art.
And yet the less we cook, the more we read about food; it as if we are desperate to reconnect in the only way we can. As a result, we are living in the golden age of food writing. I’m fairly certain that if Mary Frances Fisher were alive today, she would no longer feel the need to apologize. She might even be willing to call herself a food writer. And I’m sure that she would understand that in the modern world, food writing has become as necessary as food itself.