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

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СКАЧАТЬ was inextricable from her life with William: to serve him food was to reinforce all the emotions that bound them. We can almost feel the way the air around them takes on color and sensibility when she sets down the bread and butter or gazes at him as he sits over his bowl of broth. Food transforms the two of them, at least in Dorothy’s mind, to a single glowing entity. Once, when he was away from Grasmere for a few days, she tried frantically to fend off despair by throwing herself into housework, working in the garden, and sending herself on long walks. It was difficult for her to believe in the relationship unless they were together, and the symbol of their shared presence was always food. “Oh the darling! here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the fire.” On that occasion he returned a day earlier than she expected—“How glad I was”—and she gave him a beefsteak while they sat at the table, “talking & happy.”

      Thursday, July 8, 1802, was Dorothy’s last day in paradise. She spent much of it copying out 280 lines of William’s recent work on “The Pedlar,” and in the evening the two of them went out to gaze at the moon. “There was a sky-like white brightness on the Lake. The Wyke Cottage Light at the foot of Silver How. Glowworms out, but not so numerous as last night—O beautiful place!” The next morning they embarked on a three-month journey that would culminate in Yorkshire, where Mary was arranging the wedding. Dorothy scribbled frantically in her journal as long as she could, recording each blessed sight around her. Everything would be there when the three of them returned, but everything would be different; this was a painful good-bye. “The horse is come Friday morning, so I must give over. William is eating his Broth—I must prepare to go—The Swallows I must leave them the well the garden the Roses all—Dear creatures!! they sang last night after I was in bed—seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to rest for the night. Well I must go—Farewell.—”

      The Grasmere Journal was discreet on many topics, but when she wrote about the wedding, Dorothy tore her heart open. She and William arrived ten days before the ceremony was scheduled to take place. Dorothy took note of the garden, with its asters and sweet peas, and reported, not very convincingly, “I looked at everything with tranquillity & happiness.” The next day she fell sick and remained sick right up until the morning of the wedding when, she wrote, she woke up feeling “fresh & well.” Just before he left for the church, William came upstairs to see her. “I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before—he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.” There is some debate about Dorothy’s exact wording here. In her definitive edition of the Grasmere Journal, the Wordsworth scholar Pamela Woof points out that the wedding-ring passage has been heavily inked over, probably by Dorothy. Examined under infrared light the words are fairly legible, and Woof believes that instead of “and blessed me fervently” Dorothy may have written “as I blessed the ring softly.”

      Fervently, or perhaps not, then, William went off to the ceremony, while Dorothy stayed behind in her room, fighting off her agitation. “I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything.” Mary’s sister, who had been downstairs preparing the wedding breakfast, came up to tell her that the newlyweds were approaching the house, and Dorothy swam back to consciousness. “I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William & fell upon his bosom.” With the help of one of Mary’s brothers, William got Dorothy back into the house, “& there I stayed to welcome my dear Mary.”

      After breakfast, all three departed on a wedding trip home to Grasmere. Dorothy filled page after page of the Journal with details of their sightseeing—“Dear Mary had never seen a ruined Abbey before except Whitby”—and wrote with passion about how her own heart “melted away” as they neared Grasmere, traveling through a landscape she had first encountered with William three years earlier. Only upon reaching home did she suddenly fall silent. “I cannot describe what I felt, & our dear Mary’s feelings would I dare say not be easy to speak of.”

      In the weeks following their return Dorothy recorded several cozy scenes. She and Mary baked cakes and had all the neighbors in for tea; Mary read Chaucer aloud one cold day; the three of them went off on their usual rambles. But Dove Cottage was not an ideal home for newlyweds plus one. Everything was audible everywhere, and William worried that the noises of lovemaking were distressing to Dorothy. She never made so much as an oblique reference to any such tensions, but as the months passed she seemed to lose her zeal for the Journal, and by January she was writing hardly at all. On January 11 she took note of the date—“Again I have neglected to write my Journal”—recognizing how thoroughly she had fallen away from the practice of daily observation and note taking. From that day forward, she resolved, she would write more regularly, and she would even try to improve her handwriting. It was a new year and a new life, she was determined to make the best of both, and she would open a “nice” clean notebook as soon as the current one was full.

      It never happened. Less than a week later, she made what would be the last entry in the Grasmere Journal. “Intensely cold,” she began. “Wm had a fancy for some ginger-bread.” She went on to describe how she had bundled up and gone to visit Matthew Newton, the blind man who sold gingerbread from his house. William liked thick pieces of gingerbread, but Matthew Newton had none that day, only the thinner sort, baked in slabs. She decided to make her own instead but couldn’t bring herself to tell this to Matthew and bought sixpence’ worth of the slabs just to be charitable. The next day, while she was baking, his wife appeared at the door—she had managed to obtain a supply of thick gingerbread. Dorothy felt obliged to buy some, despite the fact that her own was under way, and took two pennies’ worth. She always enjoyed telling stories about their encounters with the locals, and this one had a mix of generosity and misunderstanding that appealed to her. She also liked what Matthew Newton said about trying to obtain more thick gingerbread for her and transcribed his exact phrase: “‘We’ll endeavour to get some.’” The next day she opened the notebook and started to write the date—Monday, January 17—but something distracted her and she put down her pen even before finishing the word. The Journal ends, disconcertingly, with “Monda.”

      Dorothy continued cooking, of course, even when she wasn’t writing about it. But the emotional ingredients that went into each meal changed, now that she was no longer the only woman who broiled a steak for William or gathered the scraps of leftover dough to make him a wee tart. The domestic center of gravity in Dove Cottage shifted to Mary. Talented cook, efficient housekeeper, diligent copier of William’s drafts—she could do everything Dorothy was doing and quickly topped her maiden sister-in-law by becoming a mother. John was born eight months after the wedding, Dora a year later, then Thomas, Catharine, and finally William Jr.

      Now we come to the second act of Dorothy’s food story, which unfolds during the winter of 1828–1829. By this time she had been the all-purpose spinster in the Wordsworth family for a quarter century, and what was once a hectic round of domestic responsibilities had largely disappeared. William had become prosperous, and the family was living in one of the grandest houses in the area: Rydal Mount, just down the road from Grasmere. Servants took care of the spacious, well-appointed rooms; there was a full-time cook; the children had grown up. At fifty-six, Dorothy was as energetic as ever, but she was СКАЧАТЬ