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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 England, 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. СКАЧАТЬ