What She Ate Read online

  The next chapter introduces Rosa Lewis, the British caterer and social striver, and a food story riddled with the pressures of class. Cooking and eating are always ruled by a tangle of social and economic realities that define a woman’s place in her particular world, and in Rosa’s time the class implications lodged even in a sandwich could be formidable. According to a food column in The New York Times in 1894, only a “day laborer” should be eating a sandwich made from thick slices of bread and stuffed with hefty chunks of meat. For ladies, an appropriate sandwich would measure no more than half an inch, “and its flavoring or filling is delicate and dainty, a suggestion rather than a substantial reality.” Nuances like these made sense to Rosa, who grew up in the servant class but escaped it by mastering the rarefied cuisine demanded by her rich and titled clients. White grapes and truffles went into her champagne ices, she told an interviewer; and she used to forage the markets for young, tender vegetables—“What you call ‘premier,’” she said, or at least that’s how the word was transcribed in the interview. In truth she was using the French term for those baby vegetables—primeurs—but the difference had been swallowed up in her brash Cockney accent. These were complicated jousts: the food could climb the social ladder, but sometimes the cook was left behind.

  Eleanor Roosevelt comes next, with a food story dominated by her marriage—like class, a persistent theme in women’s relationships with food, though clearly Eleanor’s marriage was public to a degree that most couples don’t have to endure. She and FDR built what many historians have described as a grand political partnership, but it was also a union marked by culinary discords that reverberated into every corner of Eleanor’s life. Numerous references to their meals are scattered throughout the voluminous Roosevelt papers, and none speak well for the power of food to bring two hearts together. So far apart were their appetites that when FDR relaxed with a cocktail and a few smoked clams at the end of the day—a ritual he cherished—Eleanor often stayed away. She rarely touched alcohol, and the idea of spending money on a luxury like tinned clams, especially during the Depression, appalled her. George Eliot once remarked that men seemed to get a great deal of pleasure from the “dog-like attachment” of their wives, but this was not Eleanor’s approach to marriage. “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical,” she admitted. On many nights, dinner in the White House was served in two different rooms.

  Eva Braun’s food story, generated as it was by her devotion to Adolf Hitler, might appear to take place strictly within an appalling realm of its own; and to an extent, it does. But despite the moral distance that separates her from everyone else in this collection, there are elements in her relationship with food that we’ve seen in other chapters. Like Dorothy, she always had her gaze fixed on the man she loved. Like Rosa, she was thrilled by her access to a higher social rank. What emerges most vividly in Eva’s relationship with food, however, is her powerful commitment to fantasy. She was swathed in it, eating and drinking at Hitler’s table in a perpetual enactment of her own daydreams. For propaganda reasons, she was not allowed to appear in public with Hitler, which meant that she had no truly gratifying forum in which to show herself off as the Führer’s chief consort. Only the lunches and dinners he took with members of his immediate circle allowed her to bask in a role for which she had trained by studying movie and fashion magazines. At these meals, her glory visible and her status secure, she treated food as a kind of servant whose most important job was to keep her thin. Indeed, the only aspect of Hitler’s life that she found repulsive was his heavy vegetarian diet. When the mashed potatoes with cheese and linseed oil came around, Eva said a firm no.

  After Eva, you may be relieved to move on to Barbara Pym—I certainly was—and the warm, jovial relationship with food that she carried on all her life. “Today finished my 4th novel,” she wrote in her diary in 1954. “Typed from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. sustained by in the following order, a cup of milky Nescafe, a gin and french, cold beef, baked potato, tomato-grated cheese, rice pudding and plums.” No, it’s not gastronomy. This is friendship. Food was a steadfast companion that nourished everything in Barbara, especially her creativity. If she so much as glimpsed a well-dressed woman in a café eagerly pouring ketchup over a plate of fish and chips, she came away with a character, then a plot, then a novel. Barbara was aware that modern fiction demanded heroines who were having passionate, tormented affairs, not ordering more pots of tea, but she couldn’t help herself. All she knew how to do was turn out brilliantly witty novels in her unique style, and when critics lost interest in her books, she just kept going. Barbara loved food and she loved love, and most of all she loved the connection between them, which was writing.

  Last we meet Helen Gurley Brown, the only woman here whose life extended into the twenty-first century. Helen’s relationship with food, like all her relationships, was dominated by men, or more precisely by what feminist art historians have called “the male gaze.” As the editor of Cosmopolitan she promoted full equality for women, but she did so in a spirit better exemplified by Playboy. Yes, women could be senators, stockbrokers, cabdrivers, and firefighters, but there was no higher calling for any woman than to attract a man. And Helen was adamant on how to attract men: it started with being thin. Rigorous self-denial at the table was the first of her ten commandments for women; in fact, it was all ten of them. The reward would be love and marriage, she promised, and she always displayed her own story as proof. Nevertheless, when she and David Brown were at home in the evening, they ate the way the Roosevelts did—separately.

  • • •

  Pursuing these women through their own writing, through their biographers, through the archives, pouncing on every clue that might help me figure out what they cooked or ate or thought about food, has been just the sort of research I love. It’s like standing in line at the supermarket and peering into the other carts, but with the rare privilege of complete freedom to pry. (Quinoa, miso soup, and four cans of tomato paste? What on earth are you making?) In the archives, happily, there’s no such thing as a rude question. Now that I’ve assembled each of these portraits, however, I can see that even though I’ve always worked within the facts, the facts alone are just the scaffolding. It’s the writer who comes up with the story. And I’m quite sure that none of these women would have written her food story the way I did. This became clear when I began assembling the epigraphs that appear at the top of each chapter. The idea was to introduce every woman with a meal that I found in the records of her life—a meal that summed up for me the complications inherent in her story. I can already hear the six of them objecting to my choices.

  Dorothy is wondering a little nervously why I didn’t focus instead on one of those nice gooseberry tarts she used to make.

  Rosa is demanding a rewrite: she wants an elegant French entrée that will assure her the place she deserves in gastronomic history.

  Eleanor is lecturing me, patiently, on the progressive rationale behind her luncheon menu.

  Eva is insulted that I’m describing her life in terms of food instead of, say, showcasing one of her handsome evening gowns.

  Barbara, who loved finding out what people ate in real life, can’t imagine why I didn’t use one of her own recipes, especially since there were several among her papers.

  Helen alone understands why I chose her particular meal, but she’s making it clear that a better writer would have recognized it as a triumph.

  Ladies, I’m listening. What I’ve learned is that everyone’s a critic, even after death, and that any biographer who dares to think she’s getting the last word is sure to end up eating it.

  Dorothy Wordsworth

  (1771–1855)

  Dined on black puddings.

  —Diary, January 13, 1829

  Ever since the publication of the Grasmere Journal, a luminous record of some three years spent keeping house for her brother William in one of the loveliest regions of E
ngland, Dorothy Wordsworth has been a cherished figure in the history of Romantic poetry. As a person separate from her famous brother, however, she’s been notoriously difficult to assess. Here was a smart, spirited, well-read woman who threw herself into a life of ardent service to her brother—so ardent she came to resemble one of those present-day political wives whose gaze is permanently fixed on a godlike husband. Then William married, and Dorothy withdrew any claim on his heart except the appropriate one of a sister. Yet she passed out cold on his wedding day, and her profound distress on that tumultuous morning leaps from the Journal like a frightened animal. Scholars have been wondering for years what to make of it.

  There have been countless warring interpretations of the Grasmere Journal and of Dorothy’s life. Was she as happy as a robin in the sunshine of family love? Or was she tormented by incestuous passion for William? Does the Journal prove, tragically, that she might have become a great writer if she hadn’t dedicated herself to William and then his family? Or does the Journal prove, triumphantly, that she became a great writer anyway, working within the modest scope available to her? It’s a murky life with an uncertain moral, but it’s also a life that beautifully demonstrates the way food speaks up even when a very private, very conflicted woman prefers to say nothing.

  As I noted in the introduction, it was Dorothy’s encounter with a dinner of black pudding that prompted me to start my search for the food stories in women’s lives. But it was her writing—the spark in her perceptions, the great washes of emotion, the pleasure she took in the mundane—that made it clear why she belonged in this book, indeed right at its front door. By virtue of her wide-open senses and a passion to record, she was creating a perfect context for the idea of culinary biography. To be sure, she kept a great deal of herself hidden even when she was being effusive, and it’s impossible to know how much of her own silent editing went into her journals and letters. Thomas De Quincey, who met her at Dove Cottage in 1807, five years after William’s marriage, was struck by her eyes—“wild and startling”—but said she seemed nervous in company and spoke with a slight stammer. He attributed this to what he called “self-conflict”—an ongoing struggle between her instinctive intelligence and the sense of social propriety that quickly clamped down on it.

  I thought about De Quincey’s reaction to Dorothy when I came across a letter she had written thirteen years before they met. Dove Cottage, her journals, William’s marriage—all of it was still ahead. Here was Dorothy at the very beginning, a twenty-two-year-old woman who had fled convention to seize her own future in a blaze of love and poetry. I’ve gone back to that letter many times in the course of pondering Dorothy and her well-kept secrets, and I’m introducing it now, at the outset of her story, because I can’t imagine a stammer in this prose. She was writing in a powerful, deliberate voice quite different from the more impressionistic Grasmere Journal. Dorothy wanted to be understood in this document. It was her declaration of independence. And she chose the language of food.

  A miniature portrait by an unknown artist showing Dorothy Wordsworth as a young woman.

  It was the spring of 1794, and she and William had embarked on one of those arduous, exhilarating walks across country that he loved and Dorothy was just discovering. After years spent apart and months of secret plotting—secret for reasons that will be clear in a moment—the two of them had finally managed to meet, and they were determined to live together as soon as they could assemble some kind of home. Now they were tramping side by side in rain and mud, with Dorothy in bliss at every step. They passed Grasmere, where years later they would settle, and then stopped to visit friends in a mountainside farmhouse overlooking the town of Keswick. There, gazing at a landscape so spectacular she exclaimed that it was “impossible to describe its grandeur,” she received a letter from an aunt she particularly disliked, scolding her for “rambling about the country on foot” in the face of dreadful but unmentionable risks.

  She didn’t have to spell out the dangers; Dorothy knew what she meant. During a recent stay in France, William had had an affair with a Frenchwoman and fathered a baby girl. Now he was in disgrace with his family, and nobody considered him a fit companion for his maiden sister—nobody, that is, but Dorothy herself. She had been stunned by the news, but a conflict between conventional morality and the actions of her brother was no conflict at all; her loyalty never wavered. She even pulled together her French and took over the necessary correspondence with his ex-mistress. “I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection,” she told her aunt coolly, and she added that spending time with William was turning out to be a fine way to expand her education. “I have regained all the knowledge I had of the French language some years ago.” Her aunt would not have missed the subtext.

  But when she picked up her pen to compose this rejoinder, the first thing Dorothy wanted to establish—even before she launched into her defense of William—was what she was eating. “I drink no tea . . . my supper and breakfast are of bread and milk and my dinner chiefly of potatoes by choice,” she wrote. It was a diet practically biblical in its simplicity, a perfect stand-in for the dignity of her new commitment. Dorothy maintained strong family ties all her life, but the food of this trek—inscribed in the letter as if it were a placard to be carried overhead—proclaimed her allegiance. She was William’s sister, and it was not just a relationship, it was a calling. She would live as she chose.

  The Grasmere Journal is full of food; in fact it’s so voluble on the subject that Dorothy has gained a culinary reputation as well as a literary one. Today, when tourists visit the Wordsworth home that’s come to be known as Dove Cottage, they can see where Dorothy kneaded bread and rolled out pie dough; they can envision the large open fireplace with pots and pans hanging above it (the space is now occupied by a Victorian-era range); they can go into the garden and imagine her gathering broccoli, potatoes, radishes, and spinach. Afterward they can wander through Grasmere and stop at the very shop, more or less, where Dorothy went on a cold Sunday looking for the “thick” gingerbread that William preferred.

  Unfortunately for culinary sleuths, however, the trail grows cold here. Apart from the Grasmere Journal, surprisingly little in Dorothy’s extensive written archive—letters, travel journals, more diaries—touches on what she cooked or ate. There are enough scattered passages, especially in her travel writing, to remind us that she was in the habit of paying attention to food. But only during the Grasmere Journal years did she make a point of writing about it regularly. At first glance, then, her food story seems to begin and end in those pages. But if you look more closely, and take into account some of her later journals, which have never been published, it turns out that Dove Cottage gives us only the first act of her food story. There was a second act, which took place twenty-five years later in a distant village called Whitwick; and a third, back in the Lake District, during which she gradually, sometimes cheerfully, lost her mind.

  • • •

  Dove Cottage was a whitewashed house on the busy road between Ambleside and Keswick, a cluster of six dark rooms that were cold and nearly empty when Dorothy and William moved in just before Christmas of 1799. He was twenty-nine, burning to be a great poet; she was a year younger and burning to help him. They examined the place as best they could without much light. The main sitting space downstairs lacked a proper ceiling—it was merely the floorboards of the room above—and the room they thought to use as an upstairs sitting space filled with smoke as soon as they tried to light a fire. Privacy was going to be impossible; the slightest noise bounded from room to room. Dorothy had never seen inside the house before she walked through the door, but she had been dreaming for years about finding a simple dwelling where she could make a home for William. She used to furnish it in her mind; sometimes she set the table for tea and planned what they would talk about. Now she knew exactly what she was looking at: here was paradise.

  And it was, but the
re’s always a serpent. This one bore the much-loved face of a family friend from Yorkshire named Mary Hutchinson. She arrived for a visit two months after they moved in, stayed five weeks, and by the time she departed William knew he was in love with her. In the middle of May he set out on a walk to her home in Yorkshire, taking his brother John with him. Dorothy, who normally relished these marathon treks across country, stayed back this time: she didn’t want to be there when William proposed. On the day he left, her emotions were on such a rampage she burst into tears the moment he was out of sight; and that evening she opened a notebook.

  May 14 1800. Wm & John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at 1/2 past 2 o’clock—cold pork in their pockets. I left them at the turning of the Low-wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W when I gave him a farewell kiss.

  She cried for a long time, she wrote, and then went out for a chilly walk by the shore of the lake, which looked “dull and melancholy.” She described the berries and wildflowers she had seen, and she named them. She remarked on the stirring views, she said she had encountered a blind man “driving a very large beautiful Bull & a cow,” and she recalled that she kept stopping to sit down despite the cold. Her eyes had always been sharp, and she had an artist’s instinct for focus; now she would put those gifts to work. “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W & J return, & I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, & because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again.”