Women and Gastronomy by Michael Symons

Review essay inspired by Alice L. McLean’s Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing: The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David (2012)

By the 1980s, the social science of food had been broadly charted by the likes of Drummond & Wilbraham (English food history), Salaman (potatoes), Tannahill (world history), Chang et al (Chinese cuisine), Goody (theory), Mintz (an essay or two), and Mennell (British and French comparison).

Another early academic work, Steven L. Kaplan’s two-volume, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, would also share pride of place on the bookshelf, if it hadn’t cost hundreds of dollars, although the good news here is that a second edition with a ‘significant’ new introduction and slightly less significant price is announced for August 2012.

Over the next two decades, the flow of scholarly food books rose from that occasional trickle, characteristic of an Australian creek, to something approaching a New Zealand torrent. Complementing established industry specialisations, such as agriculture science and nutrition, almost all academic fields finally discovered eating and drinking. Such became the intensified interest that some valiant souls have imagined ‘food studies’ as a meeting-point, although others have already moved towards the narrower ‘food systems’, and any scholar claiming to keep up is bound to have missed a relevant stream in cultural studies, eighteenth-century studies, social geography, theology or somewhere.

Yet, gastronomically speaking (and I seldom do any other), despite all that scholarship, I find sadly few books appearing of any note. Too few arrivals have got me excited, not like the important authors - Brillat-Savarin, Launcelot Sturgeon, Thomas Walker, Abraham Hayward, etc.

When I say ‘gastronomic’, I am thinking of books that take the diner’s position. Their principal interest is meals rather than food. Not many academic works unapologetically do that. Even writing about gastronomic writing, scholars still distance themselves by, in effect, reducing gastronomic discourse to some other historical, cultural, colonial or chauvinist reality. Brillat-Savarin is really just helping create consumer society, say.

Among all that flood of books since the 1980s, the main gastronomic stand-out has been Rebecca Spang’s Invention of the Restaurants (2000). This might be a personal pick, because I confess a near obsession with restaurants, and yet this work has, importantly, replaced the mythical restaurant founder Boulanger with a real person, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, who has a much more interesting story. Anyone with gastronomic interests needs that book.

Another, more recently, is the first collected sampling of those nineteenth-century authors, Denise Gigante’s Gusto: Essential writings in the nineteenth-century gastronomy (2005). This is useful for those readers who haven’t over-spent in the antiquarian market, and also especially useful for its translations of 16 essays from Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach des gourmands (1803-1812). Publishers presumably cannot see much market for translating 200-year-old Parisian food guides in full. Gigante’s introductions are good, too, including a suggestion that the amusing and insightful ‘Launcelot Sturgeon’ was actually Charles Lamb.

And now, along comes Alice McLean with Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing: The innovative appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas and Elizabeth David. It’s not often that anyone summarises the contributions of the aforementioned Grimod, Brillat-Savarin, Sturgeon and their like, but McLean provides that service, and that’s only the beginning.

With no apology, McLean presses page-after-page the importance of dining, and so the literature about it. As with any work, hers has its own prejudices and scholarly tics (including using the tautological ‘self-reflexive’ several times, pp. 140-142). But being so genuinely gastronomic makes the book a pleasure to read.

McLean says that gastronomic literature worked to define ‘the gourmand as an artist in his own right’ (2). Gastronomers sought, quoting Abrahamson, ‘the poetic transformation of food into discourse’ (4), or in her own words, ‘the aesthetic pleasures of eating have the capacity to transform food into language’ (50).

McLean also gives at least three slightly varying lists of the common characteristics of gastronomic writing, which include ‘reverence for the pleasures of the table’; crisscrossing between genres, such as anecdote, historical reference, literary allusion and witticism; cosmopolitan flair; an interest in dining as a social event; elegant writing ‘nourished’ by dining; and an ‘undomesticated appetite’(4, 8 and 102)

You might have noticed that nearly all the authors mentioned at the top of this essay were men. By contrast, the three more recent – Spang, Gigante and now McLean - are women. That’s what McLean investigates. Only men, and privileged men at that, used to be permitted to celebrate gustatory pleasures. As she repeatedly notes, food writing had ‘developed along rigid gender lines, with women authoring domestic cookbooks and men authoring professional cookbooks and gastronomic literature’ (1).

The three authors - Fisher, Toklas and David - are among those who broke down the ‘gendered divide between gastronomy and domesticity’ (6). The effect of McLean’s case is at last to officially liberate gastronomy from masculine, club-like constraints with French vintages and port and cigars to follow.

As well as their gastronomic intent, the three main writers share the inspiration of significant sojourns in France, and also world wars intruding harshly on their lives. Their dates are broadly comparable - Fisher (1908-1992), Toklas (1877-1967) and David (1913-1992), but McLean does not present them in that order. Their first books were 1937, 1954 and 1950, so that’s not quite her order either, although I will accept M.F.K. Fisher as ‘first’.

I particularly enjoyed reading about Fisher, who is the most ‘Savarinist’ of the trio - ‘Savarinist’ as in Brillat-Savarin. You must love an author whose first words were: ‘To Begin. There are two kinds of books about eating: those that try to imitate Brillat-Savarin’s, and those who don’t’ (Fisher, 1990: 5). Later in Serve it Forth, she records that The Physiology of Taste ‘is as near perfection as we yet know it, and a constant wonder’. Even better than quoting from it, she wrote, is ‘the companionship of the book itself’ (93). Of course, she went on to provide an even greater tribute, her occasionally errant but utterly devoted translation, whose notes rival the original in charm. That translation is my constant companion.

According to McLean, Fisher not only followed Brillat-Savarin in engaging gastronomically with politics, national character, civilisation, aesthetics, art of conversation, sexuality and much more, but she ‘delves further into the subjective realm than any previous gastronome’. As well as examining moments when ‘physical pleasure nourishes intellect’, she ‘studies those instances when gastronomy nourishes and fulfills emotional hunger’ (McLean, 2012: 69-70).

Fisher often addressed the Victorian era repression of especially women’s appetites, McLean finds (72). In her first book, Fisher described ‘complete gastronomic satisfaction’ as involving both spirit and body in ‘a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted in one chord of well-being’ (1990: 83). In The Gastronomical Me of 1943, which McLean sees as ‘[i]nfused with hunger for warmth and love and hunger satisfied’ (85), Fisher recalled a picnic at age ten. ‘That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person … I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity’ (1990: 358). Reading McLean reminded me forcefully how cooking can be solitary and eating never should be.

McLean goes along with others who read the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book as a ‘queer’ text that ‘challenges, questions, and disrupts heteronormativity’ (92). The book is ‘[p]art domestic cookbook, part gastronomic travelogue, part modernist war story’ (116). That might be expected from Toklas, who set sail from San Francisco for Paris in 1907 and within 48 hours had met Gertrude Stein, with whom she lived on the Left Bank, often summering in Brillat-Savarin’s home province of Bugey, until Stein’s death in 1946 (none of Fisher nor David’s heterosexual partnerships reached anywhere near ‘till death do us part’).

Where Fisher said she included recipes ‘like birds in a tree – if there is a comfortable branch’ (1990: 6), Toklas gave them a ‘more foundational role’, McLean decides, offering readers a way to taste the ‘gustatory pleasures that enriched her life with Stein … they also enable the reader to literally ingest Toklas’ culinary aesthetic’ (109).

Elizabeth David’s story was already more familiar to me – she who brought new life to English and also to my eating as a teenager; and she who ‘shared with male gastronomes a heavy reliance on food scholarship, travel writing, elegance of self-expression, and the aesthetic pleasures of gastronomy’ (3). Not that I had realised until McLean that David was so strongly visual and textural, and somewhat more cursory about aroma and flavour (140).

McLean sketches the contributions of numerous other writers, and I resolved to catch up one day with Elizabeth Robin Pennell’s Feasts of Autolycus: The diary of a greedy woman (1896), Gladys Bronwyn Stern’s wine tour of France, Bouquet (1927), and America’s ‘first work of culinary autobiography’, Della Lutes’ The Country Kitchen (1936). McLean’s final chapter covers Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed, Vertamae Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking and Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, which is a novel filling out the story of a cook only glimpsed in Toklas’ work.

McLean is more literary than sociological and so does not devote much attention to explanations for women being permitted from the kitchen. She might, for instance, have spent more time contrasting her women with the leadership of the temperance movement, strong in the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Women were expected to provide a punctual workforce for the food factories and distribution systems.

Conversely, she might have looked at the rise of consumer society, often seen as beginning in eighteenth-century Paris at the moment that restaurants appealed to individual diners’ desires, and with Grimod publishing an early series of consumer guides. While workers were not meant to enjoy themselves, consumers were to be continuously desirous.

Even before a copy of McLean’s book arrived, I wondered about New Zealand parallels. Duncan Galletly wrote approvingly in the first issue of The Aristologist about Isobel Broad’s relative sophistication back in the nineteenth century. She appears to have taste, and was not afraid to express her culinary preferences and her enjoyment of eating. Broad was ‘in direct conversation with the reader’ (Galletly, 2011: 80-81). Mélanie Primmer’s Up-to-Date Housewife supported gastronomic values: ‘The aim of hosts and hostesses should be to give enjoyment’, she wrote (1926: 209). Tinned foods were not recommended except in an emergency (22). ‘Good cooking is of course the essential’, but work on ‘table beauty’, too (211).

McLean observes that ‘resistance to women authoring gastronomic literature … would remain commonplace enough in the 1960s’ (128). This accords with my findings that the major shift in New Zealand occurred around 1963, the year of Madeleine Hammond’s A Taste of France: French cuisine for New Zealanders, one of the brave new books from Wellington-based publishers A.H. & A.W. Reed (Symons 2006). Our great-grandmothers’ cooking gave way to that of gourmets, who tended to glorify French cuisine, encourage wine with meals, admit men into the kitchen and women to the feast.

Hammond could not contain her anger at the local mistreatment of fish: ‘I resent ... “fish and chips”’ (49). Vegetables were let ‘grow too big. Where have our delectable French beans gone?’ (115). The cover painting of A Taste of France shows a small table against Wellington harbour at dusk and displaying a brimming pot, pan, chaffing dish and a prominent glass of white wine and bottle in an ice bucket.

The most explicit goal of earlier authors had often been reliability, so that their books boasted “tried”, “tested”, “proven” and “successful” recipes. The central issue for the new writers became taste and pleasure, as in the title of Patricia Harris’s Accept with Pleasure: A book about food written for those who like to share the good things of life with their friends (1969). The careful, French-based recipes, along with fine wine and conversation, were aimed at dinner parties. The age-old sexual division of labour was crumbling. And then there’s the both pleasure-giving and taking Lois Daish, who introduces Dinner at Home: ‘All day I look forward to the evening when I can pull out a chair and sit down to dinner at home’ (1993: ix).

My study of the changing titles of NZ cookery books (Symons 2009) confirmed that the word ‘eating’ only showed up in titles from 1963. The many appearances of ‘taste’, ‘tastes’, ‘tastefully’, ‘tasty’ and ‘tastier’ only started with Madeleine Hammond’s A Taste of France (1963). Also then appearing, ‘dine’, ‘diner’ and ‘dinner’ usually suggested a serious approach to eating, along with ‘entertaining’, the earliest being another landmark, Entertaining with Kerr (1963).

Stephen Mennell, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Rebecca Spang are among scholars to have discussed the historical rise of gastronomy, but I struggle to think of any comparably extended discussion of the literature on its own terms. McLean’s intelligent and fascinating account provides unmatched delectation for the meals-into-words tragics among us, people who might entitle a thesis something like, ‘Eating into thinking’, as I once did.

If I hesitate to recommend rushing out to purchase a copy, it is only because of Aesthetic Pleasure’s price. Amazon recently quoted (I think it must have been in Australian dollars) $133.00 or Kindle $106.40; bookdepository.co.uk was a bit cheaper, and included postage. Among local sources, trademe.co.nz had a copy for $NZ198.99, while fishpond.co.nz quoted $NZ164 and fishpond.com.au was strangely a little cheaper at $AUD116.

Bibliography

Daish, Lois (1993), Dinner at Home, Wellington: Bridget Williams

Fisher, M.F.K. (1990), The Art of Eating, New York: Collier [five works, including Serve it Forth and The Gastronomical Me]

Galletly, Duncan (2011), ‘A New Zealand girl and her cookery book’, The Aristologist: An Antipodean journal of food history, 1: 78-103

McLean, Alice L. (2012), Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing: The innovative appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas and Elizabeth David, New York & London: Routledge

Primmer, Mélanie S. (1926), ed., The Up-to-Date Housewife: Recipes, food suggestions and family hints for all occasions, Dunedin & Wellington: Coulls Somerville Wilkie

Spang, Rebecca L. (2000), The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and modern gastronomic culture, Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press

Symons, Michael (2006). ‘Grandmas to gourmets: The revolution of 1963’, Food, Culture, and Society, 9(2): 179-200

Symons, Michael (2009), ‘From modernity to postmodernity: As revealed in the titles of New Zealand recipe books’, Food & Foodways, 17(4): 215-241

Symons, Michael (2010), ‘Cooking on a dais: From Daisy to Daish’, pp. 155-177 & 201-203, in Helen Leach, ed, From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen—New Zealand culinary traditions and cookbooks, Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2010