THE EXTENT TO WHICH we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives. The knee-high chair, the four-pronged fork, the corridor or hallway which enables us to walk into a room without having to pass through another room to do so: these determine (among other things) how and where we sit down, the manner in which we approach our food, and the thoroughness with which we live separately from others and respect the privacy and autonomy of their lives. None of these objects is necessary; many cultures eschew them altogether, and there was a time when our own ancestors lived very happily without them. We invented them, however, to fill needs: chairs, forks, and hallways were required by the sort of people we have become; having them now prevents us from being different.
The shape of chairs has kept changing over the centuries, and so have the number of prongs in and the general shape of forks, as well as the width, length, and decoration of corridors. These “accidents” or forms of things are a kind of language, speaking the logos of our culture, and they are a record of its life history. One of the great eye-openers of the twentieth century (like every discovery it springs from our need) is the realization that the use of humble everyday objects is not only habitual—which is to say that we cannot do without them—but that these things are “ordinary” in the earliest and fullest sense of the word also: they embody our mostly unspoken assumptions, and they both order our culture and determine its direction.
Food is “everyday”—it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting, working, and fighting to obtain it, than we have in any other pursuit. As soon as we can count on a food supply (and so take food for granted), and not a moment sooner, we start to civilize ourselves. Civilization entails shaping, regulating, constraining, and dramatizing ourselves; we echo the preferences and the principles of our culture in the way we treat our food. An elaborate frozen dessert moulded into the shape of a ruined classical temple can be read as one vivid expression of a society’s view of itself and its ideals; so can a round ground hamburger patty between two circular buns. Food—what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it—is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies. Changing (or unchanging) food choices and presentations are part of every society’s tradition and character. Food shapes us and expresses us even more definitively than our furniture or houses or utensils do.
I think this realization first dawned on me (it is a common discovery in our day) while I was chopping onions for sauce soubise, a recipe which my husband and I were carefully following from Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking, one day about fifteen years ago. Chopping onions is not an occupation which favours dreaming. Perhaps it was boredom or annoyance or simply that when you chop onions you had better keep your mind alert, and my concentration spilled over, but I started wondering about onions. Ever)’ time anything savoury was “cuisiné” it seemed to require onions. They smelled strongly and stung my eyes (Why?), some were quite hard to peel and others easy (Why?), others again were red (What made them so? Where did they come from?). I had a dim memory that someone had said (Who?) that onions were the chief sustenance of the people who built the Pyramids (Was it true? Were they the same onions?). I knew that onions were used in various ways in folk medicine (What ways, and were they efficacious?).
The next day I was at the library, supposed, I remember, to be doing research for an essay on the causes and results of the Battle of Arginousai, as background to the Frogs of Aristophanes. Stuck for inspiration, and abstractedly flipping through the catalogue of what happens to be the largest library in Canada, I looked under the subject-heading, “Onions.” There were three books listed on onions: T. Greiner, The New Onion Culture (1911); H. H. Laughlin, Duration of the Several Mitotic Stages in the Dividing Root-Tip Cells of the Common Onion (1919); and H. A. Jones and L. K. Mann, Onions and Their Allies (1963). All three were on the other side of the campus, in the Science and Medicine Library: it had clearly been decided that onions could in no way interest someone in “arts” or in “social sciences.” (I have just checked the catalogue again, and these are still the University of Toronto Library’s entire holdings of books on onions.)
A week later I walked across the campus and looked at Onions and Their Allies. (I had doubtless eaten onions several times since the first glance through the catalogue; presumably preparing those dinners jogged my memory.) The work, with its pleasantly punning tide, is an excellent and useful one, all about breeding, planting, storing and classifying not only onions but also garlic, leeks, chives and “other alliums.” There was, in 1963, no agreement among scientists about how onions make eyes weep. (During the following decade the complex chemistry of this process was to be explored and explained to those whose knowledge of chemistry equips them to understand the explanation.) There is in Onions and Their Allies some information, but much less than I wanted, about the great “alliaceous odour.” Nothing is said about the various lusts for and prejudices against the eating of onions in our, or in any other, culture. The history and social mythology of onions takes up just three pages of the second chapter of the book. It includes a couple of paragraphs each on ancient Egypt, on India, and on Greek herbalists.
I was soon to find that in order to answer the questions I had about onions, and to clear up all the uncertainties which would subsequently arise, I would have to search in at least eleven different collections of books and read articles in scientific periodicals, journals of anthropology, sociology, and folklore, histories of religion, culinary-historical writings in various journals, business and trade magazines, and so on. There was no such problem with my essay on the battle of Arginousai. All in one section of the library, in a day or two and with relatively little trouble, I had a pad full of notes and a bibliography of books and articles in French, Italian, German, and English going back nearly two centuries, which could have kept a conscientious scholar occupied for years. I am not one of those who despise the study of ancient battles, but I am a child of the twentieth century and surely I had a right to know at least as much about the history of a troublesome but eternally useful vegetable which I personally chopped and fried several times a week? (The French call frying onions “making them come back”: I must find out why.)
By the time I was ready to write this book, after years of enjoyment digging for answers to my questions about food and other “ordinary” things, it had become obvious to me how the material, in all its motley variety, should be organized. I would describe a meal, devoting a chapter to each ingredient on the menu. The meal I have chosen is almost as simple and as universally recognizable as could be—nothing “gourmet” about it.
| HORS D’OEUVRES: | Corn with salt and butter | |
| ENTRÉE: | Chicken with rice | |
| SALAD: | Lettuce with olive oil and lemon juice | |
| DESSERT: | Ice cream |
It will be quickly observed that I have left out bread, cheese, wine or beer, and coffee or tea, milk, and sugar. I have allowed no sauce for the chicken and rice, hoping that my guests would be satisfied with more butter, salt, and perhaps the chicken drippings. I could also have included the wildly improbable saga of pepper. Chapters on the minimal “extras” and the drinks I have mentioned would have produced a book more than twice the size of this one. Each food, of course, deserves book-length treatment. But even concentrating the material into a single chapter per ingredient as I have done, a meal by Escoffier or Carême, or just a modern wedding banquet or Christmas dinner, would require many volumes to do it justice.
A meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organizes actions and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dialogues, entrances, and exits, all in the sequences designed for them.However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate, and satisfy. Let us briefly analyse the simple dinner before us.
Firstly, it is a dinner, not a snack or a scries of tidbits to be sampled between drinks. It is home-cooking too, for invited guests: there are no multiple choices such as a restaurant would normally offer. It has a messy, dexterity-demanding prologue, a hot central episode, and a dessert which, served in a dish instead of a cone (we do not normally cat ice cream in cones at home), is rich and formal enough fittingly to close a dinner. “The true elements of the idea” of a dinner, De Quincey wrote in “The Casuistry of Roman Meals,” are “1. That dinner is that meal, no matter when taken, which is the principal meal; i.e., the meal on which the day’s support is thrown. 2. That it is therefore the meal of hospitality. 3. That it is the meal (with reference to both Nos. 1 and 2) in which animal food predominates. 4. That it is that meal which, upon a necessity arising for the abolition of all but one, would naturally offer itself as that one.”
I have chosen a meal which represents the very least I could offer guests who are not intimate friends, that easily-contented group who claim that they would be prepared even to accept what we call “pot luck.” This meal, as politeness to friends who are still relative strangers demands, is pre-planned and makes certain gestures towards decorum. Because it is dinner, those eating it will refrain from other pursuits while it is in progress. No one will knit, watch television, or read a newspaper. The possibility of physical violence of any sort will not even cross anyone’s mind; and neither will such rudeness as leaving the table before absolutely everyone has finished eating and all agree to rise. During the meal everyone will adhere to a code of behavioural ethics called “table manners”—a set of rules far too complex to discuss in detail here.
The ingredients which make up our dinner have been chosen for their acceptability to people in as many different cultures as possible. The meal itself, nevertheless, has a broadly British structure—although this is a modern, that is, abbreviated, version of it. As David Pocock reports in his introduction to Arnold Palmer’s book Moveable Feasts, a British dinner in the 1890s might ideally have offered: hors d’oeuvres, soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweets and savouries. A modern English hotel typically serves grapefruit or soup, chicken or meat, potatoes or rice, vegetables (often two), and stewed fruit or ice cream or pudding or melon. Our menu clearly keeps to the pattern of the English hotel meal, even though the latter is designed to count as a substantial and fairly ceremonial affair. A recent conference luncheon to which I was invited in Canada offered the following menu: balls of fruit (melon mostly) in a tall coupe, an entrée consisting of chicken, rice, and two vegetables (broccoli and small carrots) all on one plate, with a thin non-coating gravy, and baked Alaska. The construct is palpably a relative of the one I offer here, although there are differences.
Corn is an American vegetable, but eating it at the meal’s beginning is more common in England than in the States or Canada. A liking for corn devoured “straight,” and especially right off the cob, is thought of in Europe as an Anglo-Saxon idiosyncrasy. The French, for example, still have a tendency to class corn as mainly chicken-feed; the Italians like it ground into something resembling the porridges which were the staple of the ancient Romans. The corn on our menu plays the role of a first course of spaghetti in an Italian dinner: it is filling, so that hunger can be assuaged before we reach the heights represented by the entrée; our appreciation then will depend on more complex responses than simple famished desire. Both corn and spaghetti require dexterity in the eating: many small things have to be dealt with expeditiously. (The fruit shaped into multi-coloured balls at the conference meal I attended, or artichokes requiring to be stripped leaf by leaf and dipped in sauce, are both intended to lift the spirits as well as to whet the appetite.) Corn or spaghetti can provide a stimulating, vivacious, and amusing overture—on condition that the guests are not solemn with hunger, in which case the corn or the spaghetti can equally well be consumed with fierce and silent concentration. (Our meal being, as we shall see, rather on the genteel side, guests in our culture would probably pretend not to be too hungry, even if they were. We prefer, as De Quincey’s essay says, “to throw the grace of intellectual enjoyment over an animal necessity.”)
Typically Anglo-Saxon, of course, is the butter served with the corn; the dairy theme in our meal will be repeated with the cooking medium for the chicken, and reach its final crescendo in the ice cream. I have removed the traditional two vegetables from the centrepiece and placed them before it (the corn) and after it (the salad). Rice is a starchy staple, and as such does not, in Anglo-Saxon meals, or in Germanic and northern European meals generally, count as a vegetable; rice or potatoes are more important than a vegetable, and an all but indispensable adjunct to meat. My chicken might be roasted or fried, depending on how formal the occasion is to be: roasted is far more prestigious than fried.
The English (and hence the American) tradition with roasts is still to bring in the whole bird or joint and carve it up in front of the guests—an extraordinarily old-fashioned procedure. Ever since the Middle Ages most European cuisines have been moving steadily away from such confrontations with the cutting of carcasses; the kitchen is in most cultures the place for such indelicacies, while the guests are protected by being seated safely in the dining-room. Even in Anglo-Saxon countries, however, modern capitulations to smaller joints, to convenience, and to the custom in hotels, often result in the less grand carving of a joint or a bird into pieces in the kitchen. The meat is then served, like fried portions, already on the plates. Large joints are less popular than they used to be because families are smaller; added to which, North Americans in particular tend to classify “left-overs” with garbage, so that remainders of meat are wasteful. The result has been that joints and whole birds (huge turkeys, for example) have become especially festive in connotation: they are for relatively rare large gatherings, when almost all the meat will probably be consumed at a sitting. (A whole aspect of household management—one hesitates to call it a cuisine— has in this process been largely eclipsed: that of What to Do with Left-Overs, how to present them at another meal in a form which the family will accept.)
Whether roasted or fried, my chicken and its accompaniment of rice without gravy would sit clearly differentiated on the plate. This is very American in outlook: it is totally unlike, for example, the famous poulet basquais, where the rice can be cooked in the same pot as the chicken, together with tomatoes, onions, garlic, sausages, and paprika, and the whole is served with considerable overlap among ingredients. North Americans usually hate being served several foods mixed together, unless they have consciously chosen to eat an “ethnic” dish. Many will actually eat all of each portion of meat and vegetables one after the other, so keeping the constituents even more obsessively separate, although everything is to be found on the same plate. Some culinary sociologists attribute this to the famous “puritanical” heritage of North America: the desire to be clean and clear. It is a relatively modern taste, however, depending as it does on the household’s possessing lots of pots and pans. Huckleberry Finn complained because the widow who adopted him (puritanical as she was) cooked everything by itself: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.” Another frequently expressed desire is to “know what it is I am eating.” This must have some roots in English tradition: British cuisine has always despised and rejected frivolous, dishonest, or merely confused Continental concoctions; the ideal has always been “the best ingredients, undisguised.”
My lettuce salad is placed where the French would put it—after the main course and before the dessert. (Utterly un-French, of course, is my omission of cheese.) Americans traditionally like salad to open a meal; they might even place the salad on the same dish as the chicken and rice (on the “everything on one platter” principle). But in this matter, especially given the overture of corn, Americans might let the lettuce in this position pass. The rationale for it is to provide a pause, to refresh the palate before we launch into the dessert, to get our systems used, after the hot central course, to things at room temperature before we take on something frozen. The ice cream is marvellously modern: a technological feat, rich, formal, and semi-solid in its dish, something which most people in our culture like, but which the host is free either to buy ready-made (this is perfectly acceptable, especially if the host has an absorbing and time-consuming, therefore “important” job) or grandiloquently to make from scratch. In middle-class circles few gifts are as generous or as complimentary these days as the taking, on one’s friends’ behalf, of time and culinary trouble.
Let us consider the structure of our meal in a little more detail. The core of it is the comfortably traditional schema, M + S + 2V: Meat, Staple, and Two Vegetables. The Meat and Staple are definitely the centre of attraction, the whole point of the meal, the married couple, as it were, at the wedding. The two vegetables (the English like referring to them with cosy familiarity as “two veg”) resemble bridesmaids; theirs is a decorative but wholly subordinate and supporting role. This structural principle is foreshadowed by the twin attendants upon the corn (salt and melting butter) and taken up again with the double ornamentation of the salad (more seasoning plus oil and lemon dressing). Subordination, as in the clauses of an English sentence, is still one of our cultural trademarks, in spite of a new tendency to display, in part in order to save time, everything at once on one platter—a whole meal, even, on one TV-dinner tray or airplane dinner package. Equality, plurality, and choice still have to battle with hierarchies of size and value.
Our meal requires several culinary techniques in its creation, for we are not only complex but also competent. We have employed boiling, roasting or frying, tossing raw in a prepared dressing, and freezing. In our meal we use teeth and hands, followed by napkins and perhaps fingerbowls to clean ourselves up (for the corn), a knife for cutting, together with a fork to spear the meat and hold it still (the chicken), the fork held supine, prongs curving up and the knife as a sweeper (the rice), the fork with prongs piercing as primary implement (the salad), and the smooth and comforting, infantile spoon (the ice cream). The use of all these implements, each in the right way at the right time, is something we have had drummed into us since childhood until it has become utterly effortless: a valuable opportunity for a demonstration that we have been Well Brought Up, and are therefore the kind of people who will unquestionably Do.
Again, we should be aware that our meal is almost totally female in connotation. Corn is the American Indian “mother and nourisher”; chicken (pale meat, no red blood, and little fat in evidence) is for us a typically “female” choice; rice, a delicate grain—especially when it is “fluffy,” as we like it—white like chicken, and in its mythical origins (though not in our culture) a girl-child; lettuce is light and unfattening, but also cold, green, and (therefore) female; lemons nippled, olive oil virgin, ice cream cold, milky, and served in definitely womanly, rounded shapes. Salt is the one exception, but even it is neuter and not masculine; butter from cream is again female.
Chicken, furthermore, is traditionally festive in overtone, in spite of everything modern factory farming has achieved in making the bird cheap and constantly available. Barbara Pym’s novels are full of sly insights into culinary anthropology; in them, “a bird” is for when clergymen are invited for dinner: elevated, not too fleshly, and with a skin “gold-embroidered like a chasuble,” as Proust put it. Nowadays chicken and salad are both “chic” for not being fattening and ice cream has prestige because it is luxurious yet democratic and triumphantly modern. Dessert ends the meal on a “high” note, for, notwithstanding our modernity, we are Romantics still, determined to end our works of art with a climax, in spite of the classical centrality of the main course.
My exceedingly simple yet slightly pretentious meal, then, can mean for us a good many things, and entertain us like a well-constructed play in which the partakers are both actors and audience. But equally importantly for my purposes, the construction of a meal requires close attention to variety and contrast among the materials used. All the continents on earth and a good many countries are represented in the ingredients for this particular dinner, and all the types of food: vegetables; staples; meat; raw leaves; fruit; milk and sweetness; vegetable oil; butter, the dairy essence; and the strange, worrisome mineral, salt. (I chose lemon, not vinegar, for my salad dressing for several reasons: I usually prefer it and lemon goes well with chicken; vinegar entails a discussion of wine, which is far too large a subject to undertake in the space available; and finally, I needed a fruit to make my panoply of foods reasonably complete.) The subject matter has also been chosen because it provides appropriate contexts in which to discuss modern social and institutional phenomena such as fast foods, supermarkets, advertising strategies, food fads, and the mythologies on which they batten. Each of the foodstuffs I have chosen has a weird, passionate, often savage history of its own; each has dragged the human race in its wake, constrained us, enticed us, harried, and goaded us in its own particular fashion.
These nine foods among them require the consideration of mighty problems which especially afflict the modern world. Some of these are: the dangers and the triumphs of crop uniformity and genetic engineering; the salting and pollution of the desperately precious fertile areas of the earth; the destruction of cultural tradition and the replacement of it by—what else?—replaceability; democratization being turned into an enemy of culinary excellence; farm mechanization and the loss of human livelihoods; cheap meat versus animal rights; food irradiation, additives, antibiotics, herbicides and pesticides, and the angry distrust they can arouse in us. When I began this book I meant it to be primarily amusing; often, however, I wrote it in outrage and in fear.
Boredom is the twentieth century’s version of social miasma; we bear in addition, of course, our speciality in natural miasma, which is pollution. Boredom arises from the loss of meaning, which in turn comes in part from a failure of religio or connectedness with one another and with our past. This book is a modest plea for the realization that absolutely nothing is intrinsically boring, least of all the everyday, ordinary things. These, today, are after all what even we are prepared to admit we have in common. We have recently discovered in ourselves a determination to consider nothing to be beneath consideration, and a willingness to question passionately matters which used to be thought too basic for words. I think the reason for this is that we are fighting back with an altogether healthy urge to recapture ancient but pitifully neglected, thoroughly human responses such as participatory attention, receptivity, and appreciation. We have learned well the lessons about the stupidities of superstition, of misplaced, because ignorant, wonder. It is time now to think about whether we have leaped from the trivial to the vacant. Boredom is an irritable condition, and an exceedingly dangerous one when it is accompanied by enormous destructive power. “The old warnings,” W. H. Auden wrote,
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.