The culinary imagination : from myth to modernity

153 Pages·2014·2.441 MB·English

by  Sandra M. Gilbert

As Editor
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (with Susan Gubar)
Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader (with Susan Gubar)
Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies
The House Is Made of Poetry: On Ruth Stone (with Wendy Barker)
MotherSongs (with Susan Gubar and Diana O’Hehir)
Shakespeare’s Sisters (with Susan Gubar)
THE CULINARY IMAGINATION
FROM MYTH TO MODERNITY
Sandra M. Gilbert

For my grandchildren, Val, Aaron, Stefan and Sophia—with a toast to the future!
I have discovered that there is romance in food when romance has disappeared from everywhere else. And as
long as my digestion holds out I will follow romance.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, “GASTRONOMIC ADVENTURES”
I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on haddock and sausage by writing them down.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, DIARY
The galaxy is in the shape of an eating mouth.
—WILLIAM DICKEY, “KILLING TO EAT”
Contents
Foreword: Romance in Food!
PART I. DIGGING IN: TASTES OF PAST AND PRESENT
1. Add Food and Stir: Life in the Virtual Kitchen
Eating Words
Burgers and Mâche
Tales of American Culinary Transformation
Firing Up the Stove in the Sixties
2. Black Cake: Life (and Death) on the Food Chain
What We Eat—and What We Are
Cooking—and Coping
The Funeral Baked Meats
The Pulse of the Kitchen
3. All That Is Toothsome? Sacred Food, Deadly Dining
The Powers of the Cook
The Powers of Food
4. Master Belly and Our Daily Bread: A Brief History of the Literary Kitchen
Transcendental Gastronomy?
The Morality of Renunciation
The Morality of Celebration
PART II. TODAY’S TABLE TALK: RECIPES OF THE MODERN
5. The Kitchen Muse: The Modernist Cookbook and Its Sequels
Changing Times and Tables
Spaghetti and Beans?
A Rape of the Icebox
The Modernist Fruit Bowl
A Sudden Slice Changes the Whole Plate
Sculpted Meat
6. Tastes of Clay: The Many Courses of the Culinary Memoir
Feeding the Foodoir
A Portrait of the Transcendental Gastronome as a Young Woman
Two Portraits of a Hunger Artist as a Young Woman
7. Bitter Herbs or the Spices of Life? The Ambiguities of the Transnational Foodoir
How I Ate and Who I Am
Ubi Panis, Ibi Patris?
The Redeemed Kitchen
8. Hail to the Chef! The Cook, the Camera, the Critic, and the Connoisseur
Soup Operas: Mysteries of the Kitchen Unveiled
We Love Julia
Viagra in the Kitchen
Lights! Camera! Eat!
Molly, Miriam, Brenda, Chloe, Betty, Toni, Emily
9. Cooking the Books: Cosiness, Disgust, Desire, Despair
In the First Kitchen
Mealtime Mayhem
Just Desserts
Nausea
Plenitude
Ghost Milk
PART III. FOOD FOR THOUGHT: BLESSINGS AND CURSES
10. The Poetics of Ice Cream: Eating Art at the Table, in the Gallery, and in a Grownups’ Garden of Verses
Eating the Body of Art
The Meat of the Matter
Blessing the Ice and the Cream
The Imperatives of Pleasure
The Flesh Made Word
11. Food Chained: Food Fights, Fears, Frauds—and Fantasies
Diets and Diatribes
Dystopias
Disorders and Diseases
Postmodern Pastorals
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index
Forword
Romance in Food!
I
n “The Wild Gastronomic Adventures of a Gourmet,” a piece he published in the Toronto Star Weekly in 1923, the
young Ernest Hemingway boasted of his dining prowess. Not only had he cheerfully consumed poison ivy in his
boyhood, he bragged, but as an adult “I have eaten Chinese sea slugs, muskrat, porcupine, beaver tail, birds’ nests,
octopus and horse meat,” along with “mule meat, bear meat, moose meat” and such other exotic items as hundred-
year-old eggs and snails. And he would continue to follow his yearnings! For, he concluded, “there is romance in food
when romance has disappeared from everywhere else.”
I’ve used that last statement as an epigraph for this book because its straightforward passion may help us
understand why and how we read, write, work and play with food in the gastronomically obsessed twenty-first century,
especially in industrially developed countries. Throughout this volume, as I explore many modes of food writing—what
we might call the eating words of novelists and memoirists, poets and polemicists—along with representations of food
in cooking shows and movies, paintings and art installations, I’ve tried to contextualize our culinary imaginings with
investigations of the cultural history that has shaped them, giving ever-increasing urgency to our search for romance,
and sometimes even redemption, in kitchens of the mind.
My organization of the materials I cover reflects my effort to balance discussions of texts and investigations of
contexts. The first section of the book, “Digging In: Tastes of Past and Present,” focuses both on the philosophical
meanings of the food chain to which all mortal beings belong and on the social and political dynamics that, from myth
to modernity, inform our eating habits. “The galaxy is in the shape of an eating mouth,” wrote the late poet William
Dickey in another of my epigraphs for this book, and he was summarizing what might be considered the metaphysic of
food. We eat but can be eaten! We love our dinners but don’t want to become dishes on the cosmic menu. We delight in
the powers that transform the raw into the cooked, yet we also fear our vulnerability at the table. We long for the
delicacies that the chef broils and bakes, stews and simmers, but dread the dangers of unknown edibles. We savor
festive meals, yet resolve to renounce gluttony. As I show in these first four chapters, poets from Homer to
Shakespeare, Keats and Rossetti, along with storytellers from Rabelais to Alcott, Joyce and Woolf have mused on the
powers of the cook and the powers of food while examining moralities of renunciation and celebration.
Despite the long history of literary fascination with food, however, I’ll argue in the next section of this book
—“Today’s Table Talk: Recipes of the Modern”—that by the early twentieth century changing times had led to
transformed aesthetic tables. Poets and novelists increasingly meditated on the dailiness of the kitchen, and
memoirists began to organize autobiographical writings through culinary memories. “One gains a certain hold on
haddock and sausage by writing them down,” declared Virginia Woolf in one of the last entries in her famous diary.
Thinking food had become a way of thinking about life, even while literary enterprises had become ways of thinking
about food. The self that the great M. F. K. Fisher defined as “the gastronomical me” became a central figure in the
culinary memoirs that have come to be called “foodoirs,” and the cook emerged from the kitchen to perform in TV
studios and to star in movies featuring what the starved orphans of Oliver! called “food, glorious food!” “Let’s eat” is
now a category in my local video store, and restaurant critics too are celebrities along with the chefs whose
productions they evaluate. The genre known as “the recipe novel” has countless aficionados, and it’s paralleled by the
menu poem and the gastronomic Gothic.
But of course the issues raised by food and hunger have always been as political as they are poetical. Vegetarianism
and the more austere veganism have roots in the writings of theorists from Pythagoras to Shelley, and current
proponents include such literary figures as Jonathan Safran Foer and J. M. Coetzee. Diets and dietary diatribes have
long preoccupied readers, writers, and eaters, while, as I show in the last section of this book, “Food Chained: Food
Fights, Fears, Frauds—and Fantasies,” eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia) and food-related diseases are equally
important to the contemporary culinary imagination. Yet even while many commentators portray the twenty-first
century gastronomic culture produced by industrial capitalism in dystopian terms (Fast Food Nation; Food, Inc.) their
works are balanced by what I’m defining as the “postmodern pastorals” outlined in the writings of, say, Wendell Berry
and Michael Pollan.
As I reflect on the topics I’ve listed here, I realize I’ve been thinking about this material for a long time, not just
because of a personal fascination with kitchen mysteries but also from the perspective of a cultural historian. Some
thirty years ago I noticed that throughout the twentieth century poetry had increasingly savored not just exotic edibles
but our daily bread. “Add food and stir,” the injunction I explore in the first chapter of this volume, seemed to me to
have flavored much contemporary verse, even while it had deep historical origins. Together with my good friend the
poet–novelist Diana O’Hehir, I assembled a delicious collection of poems, tentatively called “Eating Words,” in which
we represented tasty works by Williams and Stevens, Lawrence and Hughes and Plath and countless others. We
shopped the prospectus around for a while before understanding that its moment hadn’t yet come. But in the
meantime, as both a poet and a feminist critic, I myself was over and over again drawn to the glamour of the hearth,
and to the domesticity that we in women’s studies were striving to reimagine as a source not of female enslavement
but of feminist empowerment.
Needless to say, both as activists and theorists we feminists had always struggled to address the patriarchal politics
and poetics that have so long chained women to sink and stove. Yet the lives and words of the foremothers whom the
French sociologist Luce Giard so resonantly calls “the kitchen women nation” were newly fascinating to many of us. At
least three of my own collections of verse had titles enlivened, or so I hoped, by culinary allusions to this ancestral
“nation.” The Summer Kitchen celebrated the second, basement kitchen to which my Sicilian aunts withdrew in hot
weather, and sought to mythologize the mysteries that bewitched and bewildered me in that subterranean place.
Emily’s Bread drew on my fascination with the two Emilys—Brontë and Dickinson—who were both bakers in their
families. Kissing the Bread brooded on my Sicilian mother’s strange habit of kissing a loaf of bread before throwing it
away and became a metaphor for the poignant farewells to the quotidian that inflect all our lives.
Even while I was completing Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, the project in cultural studies
that preceded this book, I knew I wanted, finally, to turn to an examination of the central place that food had lately
come to occupy in all the arts. When I went to Cornell in the spring of 2007 as the first M. H. Abrams Distinguished
Professor in the English department on that campus, I talked about my ideas with the teacher who has throughout my
career done the most to shape my thinking, Mike Abrams himself, and benefited from his wise advice to begin my
analysis of culinary modernity by investigating the history of food writing. After that, I was helped on my journey into
gastronomic culture by numerous other colleagues, friends and institutions. Here I must thank three organizations in
particular for their encouragement of my work. During a month’s residency at the American Academy in Rome, I
researched the foods of Rome and learned on the spot about the Rome Sustainable Food Project, designed by Alice
Waters and implemented by former Chez Panisse chef Mona Talbott. During a three-month residency at the Camargo
Foundation in Cassis, I benefited from the hospitality of Connie Higginson and Leon Selig, and shared my ideas with
other fellows—especially Barbara Weissberger, Michele Longino and Jo and Douglas Kibbee—whose works were
inspiring to me. Throughout six weeks at the Bogliasco Foundation just outside Genoa, I profited from the support of
Alessandra Natale, the friendship of Suzanne Branciforte and Massimo Bacigalupi, and countless dinner table
conversations with other residents.
My work on this project, however, began in Paris, where I lived for part of every year with my late partner, the
mathematician David Gale, who was never so immersed in his own theorems that he couldn’t read and comment on my
writings. As I’ll explain later in the book, it was he who guided me through the local marchés, he who introduced me to
the wonderful restaurants and bistros he had come to love throughout many francophilic years, he who accompanied
me on most of my researches, helping me find the romance in food and the food in romance. Without him this book
wouldn’t exist. And without him I would never have come to know the lively community of Parisians—French and
American—whose friendship and encouragement have energized me for so long. Here I must especially thank Penny
Allen, Marta and Maria and the late Rebecca Balinska, Michel Balinsky, Margo Berdashevsky, Jonathan Birt and
Graham Ingham, Shehira Davezac, Jerry Fleming, Monique Florenzano, Guiguitte and the late Joseph Frank, Linda
Gardiner, Marilyn Hacker, the late Anne and Russell Harris, Ken Johnston and his late wife Ilinca Zafiropol Johnston,
Annie Mouton, Roger and Ginette Roy, and Joan Schenkar for Parisian meals and mentorship, comfort and
companionship over the years. I’m particularly grateful to Diane Johnson and John Murray for the thirty-year
friendship that perhaps more than any other helped me settle in Paris, and to David Downie and Alison Harris for
introductions to the professional world of food, not just in Paris but in Rome, Liguria and California; and I’m equally
grateful to Jean and Marie-Françoise Maurin for generously opening their homes in Paris and Normandy to me.
I have also been lucky enough to have a circle of supportive friends and colleagues on this side of the Atlantic as well
as a loving family endlessly tolerant of a researcher’s foibles. Among the friends who have in one way or another
supported and encouraged my writing, I must thank Leah Asofsky, Ben Bagdikian and Marlene Griffith, Wendy Barker,
Jacqui Brogan, Martin and Virginia Davis, Shelley Errington and Leo Goodman, Joan Finton and Shelly Baumrind,
Martin Friedman and Elena Servi Burgess, Danny and Hilary Goldstine, Dorothy and Melvin Lemberger, Herbie and
Claire Lindenberger, and Alan Soldofsky, along with all the members of my poetry group (Dan Bellm, Chana Bloch,
Jeanne Foster, Diana O’Hehir, Peter Dale Scott, Phyllis Stowell and Alan Williamson, as well as, intermittently, Anne
Winters) and a host of others for ideas and dinners. And I offer special gratitude to Joanne Feit Diehl and Dorothy
Gilbert for always being there at the other end of the telephone or in my kitchen.
I’ve also been especially privileged to form new friendships with others in the field of food studies, notably Katharina
Vester, of American University, and my Berkeley food group: Susan Griffin, Alice McLean, and L. John Harris. A key
culinary colleague has been Roger Porter, of Reed College: as coeditor of Eating Words, the anthology of food writing
that we are currently preparing for W. W. Norton, Roger has been crucial in helping me engage with culinary
philosophy while drawing my attention to texts that I’ve found compellingly important to my work on this volume too.
In addition, I should note that Susan Gubar, my longtime collaborator on numerous other projects, has as always
helped me think through all my ideas and offered nourishing feedback, to use yet another food-related metaphor.
Starting with the incomparable Augustus Rose and up to and through Seulghee Lee, a series of assistants have
provided course after course of information, and to my amazing current assistant, Jeff Blevins, I’ll be eternally grateful
for work above and beyond the requirements of his job. Once again, too, I’m deeply thankful for the warmth,
encouragement, and abiding good sense of my agent, Ellen Levine, and my editor, Jill Bialosky, along with the support
of their assistants, Alexa Stark and Rebecca Schultz, respectively, and the incisive interventions of my copyeditor,
Allegra Huston.
My partner, Albert Magid, has lovingly provided care and concern as I completed this book, and from his family,
Bonnie and Rachel and especially Daniel and Robinn Magid, I’ve learned the laws of kashrut and the pleasures of the
seder. My late husband, Elliot Gilbert, presided over our stove for many years and made my writing possible, and my
old friend, the late Bob Griffin, nurtured me in a time of great loss. I like to think that both would have relished the
subject matter of this new work. My son, Roger Gilbert, a professor at Cornell, joined with Mike Abrams in advising me
on the structure of my project, and along with my daughters and daughters-in-law, Kathy Gilbert-O’Neil and Susanna
Gilbert, Gina Campbell and Robin Gilbert-O’Neil, he cooked, consoled and encouraged throughout the years in which I
devoted myself to the culinary imagination. Susanna, in particular, has researched images and evaluated titles, while
Kathy has seen to it that I can even pay my taxes in the midst of literary chaos. But it is to my grandchildren—Val
Gilbert, Aaron and Stefan Gilbert-O’Neil, and Sophia Gilbert—that I dedicate this book. They have lightened my life in
dark times and enlivened my kitchen with their joy in the scrumptiousness of our daily bread.