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

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СКАЧАТЬ was determined to want no more. William was going to marry, she told herself; his bride would join their household, and Dorothy would give her whole heart to the new configuration—she would, she would, she would. “Arrived at home with a bad head-ache … Oh! that I had a letter from William!”

      Writing the journal, which she kept on doing even after her brothers returned from Gallow Hill, was what sustained her during the two and a half years of William’s engagement. All day she gathered up impressions as greedily as a bird pecking about in a newly planted field. Then she opened her notebook and filled page after page with her quick scrawl, describing the crows and ravens, the colors of the lake, the twigs and catkins and clouds and moonlight. She recorded the walks she and William took, their visitors, their illnesses, their quiet evenings, their work in the garden and orchard. And, continuing as she had started with her very first sentence, she wrote about food. Assembling the ingredients and preparing their simple meals was a process that went on continually, and it comes up in these pages over and over like the gently recurring rhymes in a sonnet. She picked peas from the garden, she took apples from the orchard. Their neighbors brought them gooseberries and she turned out pies and tarts and puddings. She bought bacon from another neighbor and gingerbread from the blind man down the street. They caught fish from the lake. She baked bread, she made broth, she bottled rum, she boiled eggs. After years in which her letters and journals said little about food, now it’s everywhere.

      Why this sudden attention to their meals? They hardly constituted a novelty: Dorothy had been cooking for William for years. But the notes on food served a different purpose from the other jottings in her journal. When she wrote about the clouds and flowers, the beggars and the gypsies, she was writing for William. She liked to feel that she was his companion, perhaps his inspiration, anytime he might need a bit of support in the lonely work of writing poetry. Her observations on the world around them were there for him to use as he wished. The notes on food, by contrast, spoke directly to Dorothy herself. They reminded her, though she was hardly in danger of forgetting, that everything about Dove Cottage mattered. It was all sacred. She had eaten gooseberry tarts before living in Dove Cottage and she would eat them afterward, but to eat them there was to feed on the very time, the very place, the very love that sustained her.

      Cooking, moreover, was wifely. Far more than a chore, in Dorothy’s world it was an aspect of identity. Even if a married woman didn’t do the cooking herself, she was judged on her ability to manage the food of the household. Dorothy was no amateur: she had kneaded and chopped and stirred in many kitchens before she began preparing meals in Dove Cottage. But only now did she seem intent on keeping a written record of how she fed William and their guests, as if to shore up her right to a role she wouldn’t dream of claiming openly.

      More than two centuries later, it’s impossible to gauge the quality of Dorothy’s cooking. We’ll never know, alas, whether William used to get up from the table hungry and go out hoping to find a couple of fallen apples in the orchard. Dorothy’s habit of jotting down only cursory notes about the food makes it difficult to analyze the success of her efforts. But inadequate cooks generally know all too well how inadequate they are, especially if they have to cook every day, and there’s nothing in the Journal to suggest that Dorothy lacked confidence in the kitchen. On the contrary, those brief, habitual notations sound as though she accomplished her cooking with practiced efficiency. If she suspected that William didn’t like what she was serving, she would have noticed—he was the object of her intense daily scrutiny—and the anxiety would have pursued her from page to page the way she was pursued by her various illnesses and, occasionally, “my saddest thoughts.”

      What we do know about the food of paradise is, first of all, that it was practical. She and William were trying to live as stringently as possible on their small income, and she was accustomed to setting a thrifty table. In the morning they liked a bowl of mutton broth, with bread and butter. For dinner, the most substantial meal of the day, there was often a savory pie filled with veal, rabbit, mutton, giblets, or leftovers. Supper was pretty casual—broth again, or else they just ate whatever appealed to them. One evening that meant tapioca for Dorothy, an egg for Mary, and cold mutton for William.

      But there was something wonderfully idiosyncratic about the way they approached mealtime itself. She and William arranged their days exactly as they pleased, and meals took place when they felt like eating them. Nobody was ever dragged in from a beautiful lakeside ramble merely because it was the proper hour for tea. One day she stayed in bed, just because she wanted to, until one p.m.; then she went down to breakfast. Dinner was understood to be a midday event, but in actuality it wandered across the afternoon, sometimes happening as late as five p.m. Tea and supper had to fit into whatever time was left before bed. And if a meal disappeared entirely, nobody seems to have missed it. “We had ate up the cold turkey before we walked so we cooked no dinner,” she reports. On another occasion, “We got no dinner, but Gooseberry pie to our tea.” Home cooking in this era meant that somebody was going to be home, cooking, much of the time; and Dorothy noted more than once that she stayed behind at the oven while others went outdoors. But she wouldn’t allow the steady march of mealtimes to exert any more control over the day than necessary.

      What springs most vividly from Dorothy’s food writing is her tone of voice. If the words themselves tended to be dispassionate, there was a glow about them that belied their brevity. “Writing” is almost the wrong term for what she was doing; it seems too effortful. Whenever a pie or a roast or a bag of peas from the garden rose to her consciousness, she simply dropped the image into place among the rest of the day’s incidents, as if she were adding a tiny square of marble to a boundless mosaic of the quotidian.

      Wm was composing all the morning—I shelled peas, gathered beans, & worked in the garden till 1/2 past 12 then walked with William in the wood.

      Coleridge obliged to go to bed after tea. John & I followed Wm up the hill & then returned to go to Mr Simpsons—we borrowed some bottles for bottling rum. The evening somewhat frosty & grey but very pleasant. I broiled Coleridge a mutton chop which he ate in bed.

      I baked pies & bread. Mary wrote out the Tales from Chaucer for Coleridge. William worked at The Ruined Cottage & made himself very ill. I went to bed without dinner, he went to the other bed—we both slept & Mary lay on the Rug before the Fire.

      Priscilla drank tea with us—we all walked to Ambleside—a pleasant moonlight evening but not clear. Supped upon a hare—it came on a terrible evening hail & wind & cold & rain.

      We had Mr Clarkson’s turkey for dinner, the night before we had broiled the gizzard & some mutton & made a nice piece of cookery for Wms supper.

      We had pork to dinner sent us by Mrs Simpson. William still poorly—we made up a good fire after dinner, & William brought his Mattrass out, & lay down on the floor I read to him the life of Ben Johnson & some short Poems of his which were too interesting for him, & would not let him go to sleep.

      I made bread & a wee Rhubarb Tart & batter pudding for William. We sate in the orchard after dinner William finished his poem on Going for Mary. I wrote it out—I wrote to Mary H, having received a letter from her in the evening.

      I threw him the cloak out of the window the moon overcast, he sate a few minutes in the orchard came СКАЧАТЬ