What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro

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      Food talks—but somebody has to hear it. William Knight, the philosophy professor who was one of the first and most dedicated scholars of the Wordsworths, read through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals early on and decided they should be edited for publication. Dorothy had been a close observer of William as he worked, and the two of them were at the center of a swirl of family and literary relationships important to his poetry. Unaccountably, however, the journals were also littered with what Knight called “numerous trivial details” of Dorothy’s housekeeping. He couldn’t think of a single reason why posterity would ever want to know what Dorothy cooked or sewed, and it certainly didn’t occur to him that the prose devoted to such chores might be worth reading for its own sake. One gets the sense from Knight’s brief preface to the journals, which he published in 1897, that he was a little irritated by all the meals and domestic doings that Dorothy insisted on telling him about, possibly at the expense of providing more information about the great Romantic. “There is no need to record all the cases in which the sister wrote, ‘To-day I mended William’s shirts,’ or ‘William gathered sticks,’ or ‘I went in search of eggs,’ etc. etc.,” Knight explained wearily. He assured readers that he had snipped out only the material that plainly lacked “literary or biographical value.” Later editors put the shirts and the eggs right back in; and to this day the Grasmere Journal is recognized as a classic of intimate prose, with a charm that has outlasted a fair amount of her brother’s verse.

      This dismissive attitude toward women’s domestic lives continued to flourish for another century or so. Indeed, the very term “trivial” would come to haunt the post–World War II British novelist Barbara Pym, who loved nothing better than to include a mention of tinned spaghetti when she was constructing a character, though she knew such homely references were considered unworthy of serious fiction. “People blame one for dwelling on trivialities,” reflects one of her heroines, who can’t figure out why the lemon marmalade is taking so long to jell. “But life is made up of them.”

      Dorothy Wordsworth and Barbara Pym, both irresistible to me precisely because of those “trivial details,” were the first two women I chose for this book. Over the next few years they were joined by an Edwardian-era caterer, Rosa Lewis; a First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt; a notorious mistress, Eva Braun; and an editor, Helen Gurley Brown. Obviously none of these women represents anyone but herself: each stood out dramatically from the female world into which she was born, and each has attracted enough scholarship, journalism, anecdotes, gossip, and downright fantasy over the years to win a secure spot in history. But what struck me as I followed the paper trail through each life was that while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable. If the emotional substance of these food stories rings familiar, it’s because they tend to be as messy and discomfiting as our own.

      It’s easy, it’s practically automatic, to associate cooking and eating with our warmest emotions, and to keep that image on permanent pause, with a family forever beaming as Norman Rockwell carries the turkey to the table. Perhaps there are women whose food stories really do land them in such a cozy domestic category. To me it seems more likely that we’re just not accustomed to scrutinizing the food as vigorously as we scrutinize a woman’s education, or her marriage, or the poetry she writes. What I saw on the surface of each woman’s culinary life was never the whole picture. Digging deeper into her food story took me to a more tenuous emotional realm—sometimes I thought of it as the underside of the Rockwell painting—where all those feelings that we’re trying not to notice start dribbling down the sides of the bowls and crawling out from under the platters. I don’t mean to imply that these women were unhappy; they weren’t. By most measures they experienced quite a bit of contentment and success. But in every instance, opening a window on what she cooked and ate cast a different light on the usual narrative of her life. It turns out that our food stories don’t always honor what’s smartest and most dignified about us. More often they go straight to what’s neediest.

      Every life has a food story, and every food story is unique. As we move from chapter to chapter in this book, however, we’ll find that the themes emerging from each woman’s relationship with food not only reflect her own moment, but reach into ours as well. Dorothy Wordsworth, for instance, who starts off the book, appears at first to be something of an outlier, for she was born in the late eighteenth century—so much earlier than the other women that they would have regarded her culinary world as impossibly primitive. But apart from her spelling and capitalization, which of course reflected habits of her time, I found nothing old-fashioned about her descriptions of the meals she shared with William. It’s true, she practically ignored the flavor and texture of the food itself, which no food writer today would dream of doing. This is far from the heavy-breathing school of culinary reportage. But the mere presence of William at the table, sometimes lost in poetry as he sat there, was enough to send a wave of ecstasy through her account of the meal. “While we were at Breakfast that is (for I had Breakfasted) he, with his Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & butter he wrote the Poem to a Butterfly!” she scrawled in her diary, so excited she lost track of the pronouns. “He ate not a morsel,” she added, “nor put on his stockings but sate with his shirt neck unbuttoned, & his waistcoat open while he did it.” Later in life, too, she exposed her appetites more nakedly than anyone else in this book, at least until we reach Helen Gurley Brown, whose prose also radiated adoration for a man but gave it rather a different spin.

      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.

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