by Adam Gopnik
Yet all of this is couched not, as a man’s writing might be, as detached “Epicurean” revelry but, as even an aesthetic woman’s must be, as spurs to shopping and cooking. Her greed is productive. Her recipes are makeable, but they are also offered as prose poems (even those of us allergic to the prose poem can like these)—for example, on turbot au gratin:
In Turbot gratin, the ecstatic possibilities are by no means limited. In a chaste silver dish, make a pretty wall of potatoes, which have been beaten to flour, enlivened with pepper and salt, enriched with butter and cream—cream thick and fresh and adorable—seasoned with Parmesan cheese and left on the stove for ten minutes, no more nor less; then let the wall enclose pieces of turbot, already cooked and in pieces, of melted butter and of cream, with a fair covering of breadcrumbs; and rely upon a quick [i.e., broiler hot] oven to complete the masterpiece.
Elizabeth Pennell had extremely, almost scarily, good taste: she loved Burgundy, Cognac, strong coffee; she wanted simple food that wasn’t too simple—roasted spring chicken, a ragout of mushrooms—and subscribed to the enduring truth that “the secret of good cooking lies in the discreet and sympathetic treatment of the onion.” “And after,” she adds, “if you still hanker for the roast beef of old England, then go and gorge yourself at the nearest restaurant.” She wants you to accompany this with a good Beaune, and then with coffee, “a mix of Mocha and Mysore.” “Forgo feminine liqueurs, but rely on cognac,” the “immortal liquid,” and then “lean back and smoke in silence, unless speech, exchanged with the one kind spirit, may be golden and perfect as the dinner.”
The Pennells must have had a very good sex life.
Elizabeth Pennell was brave and eerily modern. She recommended salad as a meal, while deploring the “salad cream” that was still an alarming feature of British meals just a generation ago. She loved Italian food, long before her postwar heir Elizabeth David, and put it on the same level as the French. Pasta she especially adored—she calls it, generically, “macaroni,” and introduces her readers to the delights of spaghetti, the “smaller daintier variety” of macaroni—in exactly the tones that a contemporary writer would introduce them to traghetti or chitarra or some other obscure and newly trendy noodle. (She has the sense to insist that the best way to eat it is cooked al dente and served with grated Parmesan and butter.)
I feel about Pennell as A. J. Liebling felt about Pierce Egan, his favorite chronicler of early-nineteenth-century prizefighting: that here at last is a friend at court, a source of wisdom, an ally. One of the hard-to-tell truths about even the best food writing before our time is that we often have to learn to read past the food, which we don’t quite “get,” on our way to the hunger, which we do. Almost all descriptions of dinners past reveal something weird and Martian in the choices—you bounce along happily enough with Brillat-Savarin or even La Reynière eating truffled turkey, and then suddenly you have long inscrutable stretches of boiled lamb and larks on brochettes and sweet Sauternes served with boiled salmon in anchovy cream. But there is nothing on Pennell’s menus that is not delicious, like the menus themselves. Where, reading old recipe books, you usually say, “Huh?” as often as “Ummm,” with Pennell it’s all just right. Her ideal dinner is indeed ideal: onion soup soubise (with cream), tournedos with wild mushrooms, and a winter root salad—carrots and cauliflower with a vinaigrette—followed by a single ripe tangerine, all served with a good Beaune, very strong coffee (that preferred Mocha and Mysore blend), and a glass of Chartreuse after.
Reading Pennell’s recipes makes you think of what you’d want your last meal to be. Mine is probably roast chicken with lemon, cubed potatoes, cooked with a white wine reduction of the jus from the chicken—this poses a danger since the cubed potatoes will absorb the juices, so I might do a gratin instead—and then mustard cream sauce, broccoli purée with crème fraîche, carrot circles with cumin and orange. An apricot soufflé for dessert, and for wine a rosé champagne to start, then a great Burgundy—a Vosne-Romanée or a Vougeot or Volnay—concluding with a glass of Calvados. Alternative menu: Filet of beef with béarnaise sauce and plenty of shallots and wild mushrooms; pommes soufflées; green beans with more shallots; and a tarte tatin and a glass of Calvados to end. Chocolate pot-au-crème for dessert. A stronger wine to drink, like a California Syrah. Or, not to be too finicky: a well-brined pork chop—you can keep the filet, which is too vapid—with gray shallots and white wine mustard sauce, and roasted carrots and brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar and bacon, and a tarte tatin with (again) a glass of Calvados for dessert (some things are not negotiable). But as I order these perfect suppers, I remember that the best meal our family ever shared was in fact a milk-fed leg of lamb, a gigot, from the Pyrenees, with a Beaune wine, and a purée of potatoes and green beans, I think; the sauce was a magical, improvised combination of a garlic cream and the white wine reduction from the lamb drippings that I’ve never quite been able to re-create. (And what was dessert that night? I think we had French strawberries, and then took the children out for ice cream.)
Yes, I digress. Elizabeth Pennell is the rare kind of food writer who makes you digress, turn from analytic scrutiny to ardent fantasy.
Pennell’s recipes are all usable still, and her advice on seasonal dining is the best before Richard Olney. (She likes only light desserts, and insists on steak with shallots and chicken with mushrooms. I spent a weekend cooking from her diary, and it was all good, and the sequence of dishes impeccable.) A defining and presciently original aspect of all her work: she assumes that the reader is the cook, and also the shopper. The “Ladies, bless ’em” tone of much wine and food writing of the period is alien to her; that cozy clubby sound of George Saintsbury, for instance, for whom good wine and food is an extension of the college high table into private life is not hers. She writes of markets and stoves as one who knows, not as one who urges someone else on, and she assumes, with a minimum of melodrama, that woman is equal to man as a subject of the sensual life—so much that it still startles to read her easy use of “she” in this connection. She breezily assumes sexual equality, and her proof of it is the common pleasure men and women take from eating and drinking: “Love may grow bitter before cheese loses its savour,” she counsels. “Therefore the wise, who value the pleasures of the table above tender dalliance, put their faith in strong limburger or fragrant Brie rather than in empty kisses. If only this lesson of wisdom could be mastered by all men and women, how much less cruel life might be!”
However new her sentiments, she is still writing in the form of the cookbook, reproducing, in her own English aesthetic, Chelsea-and-Whistler way, the mock-epic microcosmic sound of the first great generation of food writers, of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod. I have called their tone the tone of accepted defeat, the deep wisdom of loss, and Pennell, though writing from the triumphant seat of Victorian Britain, duly partakes of this tone, though she adapts it for the same reason that moves all English (and American) food writers until our own day: the assumption is that the good food is all over there, across the Channel, and that we over here can get to it only on holiday and in memory. Her cookbooks are an anthology of evocations: breakfasts by the Loire, supper in Naples, a bouillabaisse from Marseille, or a dish of simple pasta from outside Rome. “In a dish of macaroni lies all of Italy for the woman with eyes to see or a heart to feel… olive clad slopes and lonely stone palms; the gleam of sunlit rivers winding with reeds and the slim tall poplars; the friendly wayside trattoria and the pleasant refrain of the beaming cameriere, ‘Subito, Signora, ecco!’—a refrain ceaseless as the buzzing of the bees among the clover.” Thinking of “the creamy subtle little Suisse cheese” recalls “a vision of Paris, radiant in Maytime, the long avenues and boulevards all white and pink with blossoming horse chestnuts, the air heavy laden with the fragrance of flowers; a vision of the accustomed corner in the old restaurant looking out towards the Seine and of the paternal waiter holding the fresh Suisse on a dainty green leaf. Life holds few such thrilling inter
ludes.” (Proust’s famous use of food to evoke memory is perhaps the least original thing in that most original of writers: it was a commonplace of the fin-de-siècle aesthete. The genius of Proust was to substitute time for place: he didn’t eat his crushed strawberries, as Elizabeth Pennell and every other aesthete did, to recall his time in Paris. Already there, he used them to recall his lost youth spent nowhere else. It is the homeboy’s advantage.) She laments the philistine North she calls her home, even as her heart inclines toward the Elysian fields. Her advocacy of strong drink and stronger coffee, in a nation of tea-drinkers, is amazing, and she writes, all too accurately, that “over the barbarous depths into which the soul of the inspiriting berry has been dragged in unhappy Albion, it is kinder to draw a veil.” (It would be another half century at least before Ian Fleming could, in Goldfinger, have James Bond, another Francophile gourmand, but a man with a license to kill, denounce tea with similar disdain, as a “cup of mud.”)
* * *
As every Canadian knows, there are no springs so sweet as those that come a week too soon, and then fade back into winter. The delight in sharing recipes that Pennell’s writing stirs was ended by a frost of educational necessities; the budding possibilities of the personal cookbook were nipped by the need to teach. The form would break in two: food writing, the cookbook improper, an offshoot essentially of travel literature, as in M.F.K. Fisher, preserved some of Elizabeth’s tone: meanwhile, the cookbook proper evolved into something big and impressive, and took on the coloring of the books of authority. The standard kitchen bible, the book you turn to most often, has evolved from dictionary to encyclopedia, from anthology to grammar—a discernible progression if you compare the classics of the past century: Escoffier’s culinary dictionary, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins’s The New Basics, and Mark Bittman’s recently revised How to Cook Everything.
Escoffier was pure dictionary: quick reminders to clarify a point or make a variation eloquent. He lists every recipe for tournedos and the medley of variations. His entries are summaries, aide-mémoires for cooks who know how to make a thing already and need only be reminded what’s in it. (Is a béarnaise sauce tarragon leaves and stems, or just leaves?) This was the way all cooks cooked once. (In the old, railroad B & O cookbook, one finds this recipe for short ribs: “Put short ribs in a saucepan with one quart of nice stock, with one onion cut fine, steam until nice and tender. Place in roasting pan and put in oven until they are nice and brown.” That’s it. Everything else is commentary.)
In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as in Waverley Root’s The Food of France, which came out at around the same time, the age of elliptical assumption is over, and the turn is toward the encyclopedic: here’s everything—all ye know on earth and all ye need to know—on a particular kind of cooking, which you can master by reading this book. Things are explained, but as in an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. The abundance and depth of information are scaled to the importance of each particular thing. Julia gives you not every recipe for tournedos, but only the recipes that count. Marcella Hazan would, later on, do the same kind of thing for Italian food. In this way cooking became not a sequence or catalogue of discrete moves that you used as you liked; it was a discipline with its own wholeness, a wholeness you mastered.
You wouldn’t have wanted to bother mastering the art of French cooking unless you believed that it was an art uniquely worth mastering. When people did “master” it, they realized that it wasn’t—that no one style of cooking is really adequate to the variety of our appetites. So the cookbook as anthology arrived, open to many sources, from American Thanksgiving dinner and Jewish brisket through Italian pasta and French Stroganoff—most successfully in the New Basics cookbook, which was the standard for the just-previous generation. The anthology cookbooks assumed curiosity about styles and a certainty about methods. In The New Basics, the tone is chatty, informal, taking for granted that the readers—still women, mostly—know the old basics: what should be in the kitchen, what kinds of appliances to use, how to handle a knife.
It was the dawn of a new answer to the question “What’s a cookbook for?” The anthology cookbooks left behind the now stodgy-seeming encyclopedia and led toward what might be called grammatical grounding: the idea that what the cookbook should supply is the rules, the deep structure—a fixed, underlying technical grammar that enables you to use all the recipes you find, in this book or in others. This grammatical turn is clear in the popular “Best Recipe” series of Cook’s Illustrated, and in The Cook’s Bible of its editor, Christopher Kimball, in which recipes begin with a long disquisition on various approaches, ending with the best (and so brining was born), as well as in Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, with the allusion to Strunk and White’s usage guide, and, most of all, in Bittman’s indispensable new classic How to Cook Everything, which, though claiming “minimalism” of style, is maximalist in purpose—not a collection of recipes for all occasions but a set of techniques for all time.
The cookbooks of the confessional turn suggest that we are all in this together; cookbooks of the grammatical turn assume that you don’t know how to do the simple things, but that the simple things, once mastered, will enable you to do it all. Bittman assumes that you have no idea how to chop an onion or boil a potato, much less how chopping differs from slicing or dicing. Each basic step is tenderly detailed. How to Boil Water: “Put water in a pot (usually to about two-thirds full), and turn the heat to high.” How to Slice with a Knife: “You still press down, just with a little more precision, and cut into thick or thin slices of fairly uniform size.” To sauté: “Put a large skillet on the stove and add the butter or oil. Turn the heat to medium-high. When the butter bubbles or the oil shimmers, add the food you want to sauté.” Measuring dry ingredients, you are told to “scoop them up or use a spoon to put them in the cup.” And that “much of cooking is about heat.”
This all feels masculine in tone—not too many pretty side drawings, a car manual’s systematic progression from recipe to recipe—and seems written with an eye to male readers who are either starting to cook for friends or are just married and learning that if you don’t cook she’s not about to. The old New Basics, one recalls nostalgically, was exclamatory and feminine. “The celebration continues,” reads a blurb, and inside the authors “indulge” and “savor” and “delight”; a warm chicken salad is “perfection when dressed in even more lemon,” another chicken salad is “lush and abundant.” The authors’ perpetual “we” (“We like all our holidays accompanied with a bit of the bubbly”), though meant, in part, to suggest a merry partnership, was generous and inclusive, a “we” that honest-to-God extended to all of their readers.
Bittman never gushes but always gathers up: he has seven ways to vary a chicken kebab; eighteen ideas for pizza toppings; and, best of all, an “infinite number of ways to customize” mashed potatoes. He is cautious, and even skeptical; while Rosso and Lukins “love” and “crave” their filet of beef, to all of animal flesh Bittman allows no more than “Meat is filling and requires little work to prepare. It’s relatively inexpensive and an excellent source of many nutrients. And most people like it.” Most people like it! Rosso and Lukins would have tossed out any recipe, much less an entire food group, of which no more than that could be said. Lamb is a thing they “fall in love with again every season of the year,” and of pork they know that it is “divinely succulent.” Bittman thinks that most people like it. His tone is that of Ed Harris in Apollo 13: Let’s work the problem, people. Want to thicken a sauce? Well, try Plan A: cook it down. Copy that, Houston. Plan A ineffective? Try Plan B: add roux. This progressive pattern appeals to men. The implication, slightly illusory, is that there’s a neat set of steps from each point to the next, as in a Bill Walsh pass pattern: each pattern on the tree proceeds logically and the quarterback just has to look a little farther upfield.
Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman’s a
pproach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is working through a grammar book really a way to learn cooking, let alone to speak French? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone wrote a book called How to Play Catch. (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian shrimp one night and penne all’amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason.
The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as something learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like a national constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.
That’s true, and yet the real surprise of the cookbook, as of the constitution, is that it sometimes yields something better in the space between what’s promised and what’s made. You can follow the recipe for something exotic—green curry or paella—and though what you end up with would shock the natives, it may be just as good as or even better than the thing intended. Before I learned that green curries were soupy, I made them creamy, which actually is nicer. In politics, too, where the unwritten British constitution has been turned into a recipe—like the constitutions of Canada and Australia—the condensation of practices into rules can make for a rainfall of better practices; the Canadian constitution, for instance, wanting to keep the bicameral vibe of a House of Lords without having a landed gentry, turned it into a senate of distinguished citizens by appointment, an idea that might rebound toward the mother country as a model for the new House of Lords. Between the rule and the meal intervenes the ritual, and the ritual of the recipe is like the ritual of the law; the reason the judge sits high up, in a robe, is not that it makes a difference to the case but that it makes a difference to the clients. The recipe is, in this way, our richest instance of the force and the power of abstract rules. All messages change as they’re re-sent, but messages not sent never get received. Life is like green curry.