Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  But hasn’t it almost always seemed so? Henry James, in the 1880s, speaks of wishing to get to the Uffizi well in advance of the crowds composed, in his witty phrase, of “my detested fellow pilgrims.” Jacques Barzun, in a different context, has remarked that art, once the handmaiden of religion, has now become “the pimp of tourism.” This, too, has long been true. Part of the snobbish pleasure of travel is in having someone down upon whom to look: that busload of thick-legged Germans; those gaggles of Japanese, cameras slung round their necks; best of all for deploring are one’s easily detested fellow Americans.

  Yet it can be more than exasperating, it can be genuinely crazy-making to hear these same dear detested fellow Americans attacked by others. Some years ago, planning a trip to Israel, I was called near the last moment by one of the managers of an artists-and-scholars hostel in Jerusalem where I was planning to stay, informing me that my reservation had been canceled and was being put ahead by three weeks. I complained of the difficulty this caused me to an Israeli I knew who was then teaching at the same university I do. He replied that the hostel dealt with “so many vulgar Americans” that there probably wasn’t much to be done about it. Vulgar Americans, I repeated silently to myself, and made a mental note to run this man over if ever he should step in front of my car.

  I have also been “privileged,” as the literary theorists say, by some Europeans who have complained to me about the lack of refinement and culture of Americans—all those McDonald’s, that wretched television, ugly shopping malls—unlivable, hideous, ghastly! As a man of obviously deep culture, or so they pay me the halfhearted compliment of assuming, I must share their contempt for the grotesque American scene. When this happens, I find myself wanting to defend American culture to the last animal-fat-saturated fast-food french fry, and thus the jingo in me wins out, however briefly, over the snob.

  22

  Setting the Snob’s Table

  WHEN DID my dentist begin using the word pasta? When did anyone? I have checked this with friends who grew up in Italian families, and in their memory the word of choice was inevitably spaghetti, sometimes macaroni. I’m not sure I can nail down the exact date when pasta came into currency, but around that time, my guess is, one can discover the beginning of food snobbery in America.

  Sometime in the 1970s, among the enlightened classes food replaced movies as the subject of passionate interest on social occasions. Instead of people chattering away ardently about what Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, thought about the most recent Robert Altman or Arthur Penn movie, they were buzzing about the latest Ethiopian, Madagascan, or Corsican restaurant. At their homes, one would be served what can only be called the results of ambitious cooking. Limits removed from pretensions as easily as the tops of salvers from warm dishes, meals would run to six or seven courses. At one such dinner I attended, bits of ginger were provided between the fourth and fifth of seven courses to refresh “a tired palate.” Not an easy thing to live with, a tired palate, surely I don’t have to tell you.

  As readers of this book by now cannot mistake, no subject, apart possibly from podiatry, is impermeable to snobbery, but for a long while food in America seems to have been kept relatively free of it. Food was fresh or not, plentiful or not. There were good and bad cooks. Upper-class Americans, or at least some among them, ate extremely well. In her description of the food served at her parents’ table in the middle-late nineteenth century, Edith Wharton, engaging in a fine bit of gastronomic nostalgia, remarks of the cooks of the era, “Ah, what artists they were!” Simple yet sure were their methods, she says, working with plain good foods: “Who will again taste anything in the whole range of gastronomy to equal their corned beef, their boded turkeys with stewed celery and oyster sauce, their fried chickens, broiled redheads, corn fritters, stewed tomatoes, rice griddle cakes, strawberry short-cake and vanilla ices.” She goes on to describe the fare for a large dinner party, which is more of the same but richer, at the close of which she writes: “Ah, the gourmet of that long-lost day, when cream was cream and butter butter and coffee coffee, and meat fresh every day, and game hung just for the proper number of hours, might lean back in his chair and murmur, ‘Fate cannot harm me’ over his cup of Moka and his glass of authentic Chartreuse.” No snobbery here, I would say, just damn good vittles hugely enjoyed.

  Complaints about the low quality of food in America were entered by such official snobs as Lucius Beebe, who wrote about travel and food for the old Holiday magazine and who was once described by Wolcott Gibbs as “menacingly well-groomed.” (A woman, hearing that Beebe was to go in for exploratory surgery, is said to have remarked: “I do hope the surgeon has the decency to open Lucius at room temperature.”) Excitement about food, especially in the France of his youth, was exhibited in delicious prose by A.J. Liebling in his book Between Meals. Some American novelists who had put in time in Europe—Mary McCarthy comes to mind—rattled on in the most patently snobbish way about the horrors of the American supermarket, making American white bread seem nothing less than poison to the soul.

  But food in America was no big, certainly no very complicated, deal. Plain fare was pretty much the order of the day, with ethnic dishes, if one happened to be of an ethnic group, served at home. Beef—steaks, roasts, hamburgers—held primacy in American cookery. The ideal, nonregional meal at an American restaurant might consist of a shrimp cocktail, a salad (iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing), steak and a baked potato and a vegetable as a main course, pie, cake, or ice cream for dessert. One might have a strong appetite for oysters or lobster, or the perfect hot dog, or Italian sausage, but for the most part the American diet was steady and solid, if a little dull in its want of variety. Then Americans began to develop complicated attitudes toward food, and cooking became a serious matter, so that a few months ago, an acquaintance whom I was to meet for lunch suggested a place that, he assured me, has “a fairly reliable risotto.”

  Several things gready widened the American menu over the past thirty or so years, among them increased foreign travel, the happy acceptance and rising interest in ethnic food, the growth of supermarkets, the spread of vegetarianism, the national preoccupation with healthful eating, the endless worry about nutrition and diet. Suddenly a groaning sideboard of gastronomic possibilities was on offer. I recall, in 1951, at the age of fourteen, having tasted my first piece of pizza, at a restaurant on Broadway Avenue in Chicago called Gabriel’s, and thinking I had gone to heaven. But pizza, to avail myself of one of those goofy mixed metaphors of the kind known as a punafor, was only the entering wedge. Over the next twenty or so years everyone not only began saying “pasta” but could tick off ten different kinds, with breath enough left over to say “pesto,” “Marsala,” and “infused white-truffle oil.” Turns out—who would have thought it?—there were more varieties of balsamic vinegar than American states, possibly more virgin olive oils than actual virgins.

  As with Italian food, so, soon enough, with the help of Julia Child and others, Americans of the enlightened classes became gastronomically literate about French cooking. The chop-suey-and-egg-foo-yung level of knowledge about Chinese food rose greatly, and Cantonese gave way to Mandarin and Szechuan. If one lived in a gastronomically sophisticated city—New York, San Francisco, Toronto—Eritrean, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and other once unknown cuisines become de-exoticized. As just about everyone in America was an expert on the movies, now, quicker than you could say quiche Lorraine, almost as many people began to think themselves food experts, if not in the preparation of food then in its consumption. Which sounds fine: as in language, so in food; the more variation and distinctions to be made the better.

  Except that such proliferation, such an extension of possibilities, brought novelty, trendiness, exclusivity, finally snobbery in its wake. I once went to dinner in Washington, D.C., with a man who asked the waiter what kind of water—the astonishing phrases “designer water” and “still water” had not yet come into being—he had available. The waiter named six
different brands, and my companion, obviously disappointed at not finding his favorite among them, shook his head, saying, “Never mind.” On another occasion in the same city, in a French restaurant called Jean-Louis at the Watergate, I asked a waiter for salt for a female friend, only to be told, in a slightly suspect French accent, “I am sorry, sir, Jean-Louis does not permit salt at the table.” With such behavior, on the part of patrons and restaurant owners alike, we know we have arrived in the dense and humid jungles of snobbery.

  Restaurants have long been the scene of social exhibitionism and anxiety. In Sister Carrie, a novel of 1900, Theodore Dreiser sets a scene at the famous Sherry’s restaurant in New York, where “there began that exhibition of showy, wasteful and unwholesome gastronomy as practiced by wealthy Americans which is the wonder and astonishment of true culture and dignity the world over.” But even the sophisticated could be made edgy by posh restaurants, and anxiety in this realm has not been felt by Americans alone. “In restaurants,” writes Martin Amis, “my father [the novelist Kingsley Amis] always wore an air of vigliance, as if in expectation of being patronized, stiffed, neglected, or regaled by pretension.” In the contemporary age, not an entirely paranoid point of view.

  Snobbery sets in when much more seems at stake than the taste of the food on the table. It has arrived when guests will later talk about a host’s having served iceberg lettuce as the gastronomic equivalent of having made a serious grammatical slip or even an alimentary miscue. It’s there when, at table, one is put to the torture of listening to a discussion of the relative merits of various types of fennel, capers, and arugula, and someone brings out a truffle shaver he recently purchased from Dean & Deluca for only $18.95. It was there with the actor Richard E. Grant, in the middle 1980s in a New York restaurant, seated among “new money [and] old flesh” and served “child-sized portions of pasta [that] clock in at thirty dollars.” It’s there when, as is recounted in an Ann Beattie short story, at a dinner party for twenty, sashimi is cut at table from a live fish.

  In gastronomy, snobbery rubs up against decadence, charlatanism, and high if often unconscious comedy. Decadence, usually passing under the more elevated name of epicureanism, has always been around. One reads of those Roman meals in which a number of birds are stuffed inside larger birds, in the manner of Chinese boxes, to be prepared for emperors, usually after a nice starter of nightingale tongues. Today’s decadence usually has more to do with the size of the bills people are willing to pay for not very good food—and in the restaurant of Alain Ducasse in New York one is offered a selection of expensive pens with which to sign for them. For a time, during the sad siege of the food regime called nouvelle cuisine, people paid more for receiving less food, as minuscule portions prettily displayed made for some of the most expensive dining on two continents. Nouvelle was replaced some years later by vertical, or Viagra food presentation, in which food was piled high on the plate. The past twenty-five years have seen lots of those places, as the restaurant-anxious Kingsley Amis puts it in his novel The Biographer’s Moustache, “whose pleasure is small and whose cost is great.”

  One knows one is in the presence of decadence, with a reverse snobbish twist, when people begin ordering in restaurants food that would almost certainly disappoint them if it were served to them at home. At the Tavern Club in Chicago a popular lunch is corned beef hash served with a fried egg on top, an old working-class dish, as the word hash implies. Some restaurants began tarting up old favorites, pot pies but with lobster instead of chicken for the filling. More recently, a few New York restaurants are serving what is called comfort food, which includes macaroni and cheese, rice pudding, and, in one instance, Swanson’s TV dinners (at $6 a throw).

  William Grimes, the restaurant critic of the New York Times, calls this “slob food” and regards it as a fall from the heights of adult eating. He considers it a regression from all the efforts to educate American palates fearlessly to chomp on such delicacies as sea urchin and andouillette sausage (chitterlings got up in French costume). “Learning to eat is a kind of education,” Grimes writes. “It rewards the adventurous.” He sees this desire for the mediocre food of childhood as a setback, but it may be that this new decadence—it’s the high prices that make for the decadence—comes about through fatigue with food endlessly gussied up, overseasoned, fiddled with, mounted and presented as if in an art gallery. Some people have had enough of Mr. Grimes’s notions of educated and adventurous eating, and with all the snobbery implicit in both; they just want to chow down, man.

  Good food is one of the world’s great blessings, but, as with sex, one of the quickest ways to take the edge of it is to talk about it too much. The novelist Mary Renault nails the point when, after having been visited by a gastrolator who Was to be her publisher, she wrote: “He is one of those Food and Wine kings. Food is nice but to make a career of it is a bit much. He sniffs a lot. It was a tacky evening, I can tell you.”

  One knew that food had entered the domain of snobbery when it became all right to announce that one’s son or daughter was studying to be, or already was, a chef. This, as noted earlier, is one of the few downward-mobdity jobs that is deemed—more than acceptable—positively meritorious. (True, chefs at upmarket restaurants were also earning six-figure salaries, so the mobility hasn’t been entirely downward.) During the past thirty or so years, the young began to dominate the restaurant business. Now waiters and waitresses not only frequently announce themselves by their first names, but, when reeling off the list of (often) goofily ambitious “specials” on offer that evening, make plain that they had tasted them all; and then, after one has ordered, exclaim, if one were lucky, that one had “ordered very intelligently.” (“What, may I ask,” I can hear my mother saying, on being told by a waiter forty years younger than she that she had ordered well, “is it his business how I ordered?”)

  One might say that one was paying for the sizzle and not the steak, a metaphor greatly weakened by the paucity of steak on most upscale menus. (Upscale is of course a thin euphemism for expensive, or, as the English used to say, pricey.) For along with the snobbery of adventurous and expensive eating has gone the snobbery of healthful eating, which brings our old friend the virtucrat to the dinner table, and with his politically correct palate he’s not, as will scarcely surprise you, the most expansive of guests.

  If one nowadays gives a dinner party, it is understood that serving steak is a serious error, veal an unforgivable sin. A politically correct diner concerns him- or herself with what are currently called food miles; that is, the number of miles it has taken to get the food to market and thence to the table, and if the fuel output is too great, the food is disqualified. The organic-food movement has grown to the extent that, in England, one can now buy organic gin, by which, presumably, one can get three organic sheets to the doubtless somewhat polluted wind. “Sweet,” runs the caption of a New Yorker cartoon showing one enlightened-class couple driving off after a visit to another such couple, “but a little more organic than thou.”

  Healthful eating took two forms, both tinged with snobbery: vegetarianism was one, fear of death before age 106 the other. Sometimes toward the end of the 1970s, vegetarianism began to spread among university students, and one would hear such statistics as that a fourth of all students at one or another time tried a form of vegetarianism while at college. Vegetarianism itself turned out to have all sorts of subdivisions, variants, schools: from the pure vegan, who along with not eating meat won’t eat any fish or dairy products, to the selective vegetarians, some of whom won’t eat anything that has eyes—potatoes of course excepted—and at least one of whom (reported to me very recently) won’t eat any cute animals: she’ll eat chicken (uncute) but not duck (cute).

  The Vows section featuring unusual marriages in the Sunday New York Times, always good for a social laugh or two, recently discussed the coupling of two middle-aged people whose vegetarianism is at the center of their marriage. Along with the obvious things, he won’t eat tomatoes
, eggplant, anything with artificial flavors or with wheat or dairy products in it. He impressed her by teaching her to make soy milk kefir (a yogurt-like drink); when he visited her, he brought his juicer along, knowing her pleasure in carrot juice in the morning. May they have a happy marriage, these two people, during the long course of which I hope never to be invited to their home for dinner.

  In Ann Beattie’s story “The Women of This World,” a hostess reflects: “What hadn’t seemed fussy and precious before now did, a little: people and their wine preferences. Still, she indulged the vegetarians in their restrictions, knew better than to prepare veal for anyone, unless she was sure it wouldn’t result in a tirade. Her friend Andy liked still water, her student Nance preferred Perrier. Her mind was full of people’s preferences and quirks, their mystical beliefs and food taboos, their ways of asserting their independence and dependency at table. The little tests: would there happen to be sea salt? Was there a way to adjust the pepper grinder to grind a little more coarsely? A call for chutney? That one had really put her over the top. There was Stonewall Kitchen’s Roasted Onion and Garlic Jam already on the table.” Fatigue sets in at the contemplation of all these little demands that, though constituting a claim for individuality of taste, are at bottom and in their essentials deeply, almost aggressively snobbish.

  Not all vegetarians are snobs or virtucrats or even left wing in their politics (I know a vegetarian who publishes articles against gun control). Some are genuinely repulsed at the prospect of eating animals, which is honorable; others claim simply to feel much better for not eating meat at all, which is believable. But there is something about dining with a vegetarian that is a touch off-putting, and what puts one off has to do with snobbery, even if there is not the least snobbish intention on the vegetarian’s part. It’s the feeling that somehow he or she is living at a more advanced stage of culture, is more highly evolved than a mere carnivore such as oneself. “Vegetarianism is harmless enough,” Robert Hutchison, a former president of the Royal College of Physicians, has said, “though it’s apt to fill a man [and woman] with wind and self-righteousness.”