Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating

192 Pages·2008·0.58 MB·English

by  Dan Halpern

NOT FOR BREAD ALONE
WRITERS ON FOOD, WINE, AND
THE ART OF EATING
Edited by
Daniel Halpern

Contents
Introduction / Food as Gesture 1
Rose Macaulay / Eating and Drinking 5
Wendell Berry / The Pleasures of Eating 10
Charles Simic / On Food and Happiness 17
Joyce Carol Oates / Food Mysteries 23
Judith B. Jones / A Religious Art 36
M. F. K. Fisher / One Way to Give Thanks 40
Barbara Kafka / Tempest in a Samovar 45
Colette (tr. Derek Coltman) / Wines 49
Michael Frank / The Underside of Bread: A Memoir with
Food 53
James Seay / Our Hands in the History of It 61
William Corbett / To Carol Braider’s Kitchen 68
Michael Dorris / The Quest for Pie 73
Evan Jones / Delmonico’s 81
Alice Waters / The Farm-Restaurant Connection 94
Paul Schmidt / What Do Oysters Mean? 103
Francine Prose / Cocktail Hour at the Snake Blood Bar: On
the Persistence of Taboo 110
Betty Fussell / On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine 118
Harry Crews / On Food 123
Alexandre Dumas (tr. Alan and Jane Davidson) / Mustard 129
Madeleine Kamman / Of Gardens, Herbs, and Wines 136
Harry Mathews / Country Cooking from Central France:
Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double) 139
Charles Lamb / A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig 152
Edward Steinberg / The Vines of San Lorenzo: A Proposal 159
About the Editor
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Food as Gesture
There are ways to think about food and its preparation beyond its actual
consumption: thus the essays in Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food,
Wine, and the Art of Eating. My idea was to put together a collection that
celebrated both the nourishing (and necessary) act of eating, as well as
that part that goes beyond merely eating to live—that is, the various
social, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical gestures in
the non-consuming aspects of food and rituals of eating. Eating our
slice of daily bread, but not for the intake of that slice alone.
I entered the resplendent realm of cooking one very early Sunday
morning in Seattle, circa 1952, at the age of six or seven, when I served
eggs I had poached for an hour or two to my sleeping parents. I had
watched my mother poach eggs and understood the technique perfectly:
the poaching trays, the arrangement, the proper allotment of water.
However, the notion of time was yet to enter my burgeoning culinary
repertoire. Even then, or especially then, it was gesture that made an
impression on me: the act of serving “the prepared” to another.
But to me cooking did not truly matter until I used food to do my
bidding in the court of women. It was the late sixties and I was under-
going a post-puberty period in Los Angeles, a Valley Boy living in a
cheap but rustic apartment rented from Apache landlords in Laurel
Canyon, just down the street from “the log cabin,” where Frank Zappa
and The Mothers of Invention posted rent and held extravagant parties,
where I turned up many of the young women I nourished during that
time. My small kitchen had a square table with a plastic checkerboard
tablecloth, two wicker chairs, and a view of what I liked to describe
solemnly as “deep forest.” My intention was to give the view a kind of
eerie mystery—to set my guests on edge, but to what end I now wonder?
I had rehearsed a number of good-looking, if moderately accomplished
dishes, but settled on two that seemed to win for themselves the neces-
sary regard. The meals began with spicy corn fritters. I served these
with a little crème fraîche and,
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depending on the intensity of my feelings, a splash of red lumpfish
caviar. I followed with a leg of lamb, shank half, injected with garlic
splinters and rubbed with olive oil and rosemary. And throughout,
plenty of inexpensive zinfandel from Napa, finishing with a simple
dessert that would not unduly prolong the evening.
A short time later, I found myself living in Tangier, Morocco, where I
taught English and began cooking with a certain earnestness. I lived in
the apartment below Paul Bowles, who served as a sort of post-graduate
mentor to me. On our afternoon walks through the covered food markets
of the Socco Grande, where we shopped for our dinners, we discussed
music, literature, stateside gossip, and the mysterious Moroccan culture.
It was in Tangier that I was first seduced by the richness of the dark
spices—cumin, clove, cinnamon, turmeric, paprika, cardamom—and
one fresh herb in particular, kosbour (coriander), whose aroma still
conjures up those intense, profuse, and honest markets, where nothing
was masked or disguised.
Paul and I often ate together and one of the dishes he most enjoyed
was a chickpea dish I made with my two favorite ingredients: cumin
and coriander. We ate this with our favorite tagine, a stew of chicken
rubbed with freshly ground cumin, prunes stewed with ginger, and
onions sautéed with cinnamon and topped with toasted almonds.
When I left Tangier for Italy, to visit my mother and sisters in
Florence, Paul suggested I stop in Venice to see Peggy Guggenheim.
As her guest at the Guggenheim palazzo/museo, it came to pass that I
had the opportunity to help her, using the few culinary skills I had
managed to acquire. It was one of those languid, mid-summer days on
the lagoons of Venice; we were looking at various obscure churches in
the small back canals in her chauffeured gondola, talking about her
support of Djuna Barnes, one the expatriate stars of the twenties, and
of Italian food. She mentioned she had invited a number of friends to
dinner, but was going to have to cancel because her chef had taken ill
suddenly. Naturally, in a gesture of foolish generosity, I asked if I might
help out by preparing a modest meal for her friends.
She and I then put together a list and, via gondola, “shopped.” This
meant we went from hotel to hotel, where Peggy was friendly with the
head chefs who happily supplied her.
2 / Daniel Halpern
An hour after the appointed hour, the guests began to arrive: local
artists and politicians, exiled Brits and Americans, a banker, a beautiful
Eastern European jeweller, and (Peggy had neglected to prepare me, a
hopeful writer of verses), Ezra Pound. Later in the evening, after a
quantity of Veneto red (an Amarone produced by Quintarelli), I re-
minded him that we had met once ten years earlier on a vaporetto plying
through a rainy December night from San Marco to Accademia. I had
asked, innocently, if he might be the poet Ezra Pound and he had
replied, “Nope”, in perfect English, keeping things simple. He now
said, quietly, “Yes, but you see that wasn’t me.”
I prepared the meal. Red and yellow peppers stuffed with a purée of
tuna and various aromatics and followed by simple but enthusiastic
fusilli tossed with sausage and three kinds of tomatoes. For a meat dish,
I grilled pork tenderloin (the kind that in this country comes packaged
in cellophane) marinated, à la Tangier, in a blizzard of brown spices.
To close, I presented with immodesty a local thigh-food specialty known
as tiramisu.
Peggy told me the dinner was well-received. She knew by the invita-
tions at meal’s end—gesture for gesture. I left the next day after a lunch
on her terrace overlooking the Grand Canal, sitting in the shadow of
Brancusi’s Bird in Flight. As we ate (leftovers), Peggy told me the story
of its painful acquisition from the artist himself. They had been “seeing
each other in a serious way,” as Peggy put it. When the moment even-
tually arrived for them to break up—which I gathered, from the stories
she told me about her many close encounters with the most important
men of the first half of this century, was something she got rather used
to—she agreed to purchase his Bird in Flight. At the appointed hour,
she went to fetch the piece. Brancusi came out of his house carrying it
in his arms. I asked Peggy if it weren’t too heavy for him to carry alone
and she replied, “Oh no, he was an extremely strong man.” And she
added, “You know, he had tears in his eyes, it was very moving. But
to this day I don’t know whether those tears were for me because I left
him or because he was losing his beloved Bird in Flight.” I like to think,
these many years later (and given this context), their final encounter
was like a last supper, bird in hand—betrayed first by his love-in-flesh,
who in turn robbed (albeit purchased) him of his love-in-silver, both now
in flight.
But this is not the gesture I wish to end with. Not with a gesture of
parting, but one of arrival. As in introduction. It is reported that Genghis
Not for Bread Alone / 3
Kahn said the first thing one man gives another is his hand. I’m thinking
of gatherings of friends and relations, and how the hand and cheek are
certainly the first to be put forward. But we expect this gesture of
formal greeting (among friends) to be quickly followed by the question
that makes coming together such a welcome thing, that pregustatory
interrogative we have come this distance to be offered by our good and
thoughtful hosts: “What can I get you?”
DANIEL HALPERN
4 / Daniel Halpern
ROSE MACAULAY
Eating and Drinking
H
ere is a wonderful and delightful thing, that we should have fur-
nished ourselves with orifices, with traps that open and shut, through
which to push and pour alien objects that give us such pleasurable,
such delicious sensations, and at the same time sustain us. A simple
pleasure; a pleasure accessible, in normal circumstances and in varying
degrees, to all, and that several times each day. An expensive pleasure,
if calculated in the long run and over a lifetime; but count the cost of
each mouthful as it comes, and it is (naturally) cheaper. You can, for
instance, get a delicious plate of spaghetti and cheese, or fried mush-
rooms and onions, for very little; or practically anything else, except
caviare, smoked salmon, the eggs of plovers, ostriches and humming-
birds, and fauna and flora completely out of their appropriate seasons,
which you will, of course, desire, but to indulge such desires is Gluttony,
or Gule, against which the human race has always been warned. It was,
of course, through Gule that our first parents fell. As the confessor of
Gower’s Amans told him, this vice of gluttony was in Paradise, most
deplorably mistimed.
We shall never know what that fruit was, which so solicited the
longing Eve, which smelt so savoury, which tasted so delightful as
greedily she ignored it without restraint. The only fruit that has ever
seemed to me to be worthy of the magnificently inebriating effects
wrought by its consumption on both our parents is the mango. When
I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
Satiate at length,
And hightn’d as with Wine, jocund and boon,
Thus to her self she pleasingly began.
O sovran, vertuous, precious of all trees
In Paradise, of operation blest….
And like both of them together:
As with new Wine intoxicated both
They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel
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