A wife! Doomed creature from a bygone era, wrapped in somebody else’s name, committed to somebody else’s dreams, humbly contributing her mite to the vast female substructure that kept the patriarchy flourishing. Away, away! But apparently I had invited her in. Readers of a certain age will recognize the 1970s. The women’s movement was in flower, and I was a glad devotee, but these were early days, and we really hadn’t figured it all out. Getting married seemed harmless enough: Jack and I would simply reinvent the ancient institution, just as we had come up with our own wedding ceremony. And in most regards, we did manage to arrange domestic life along lines that suited both of us. I was the cook, while Jack took over dishwashing, laundry, anything outdoors, anything to do with the car, all the heavy lifting, and later on a lot of child care—a pretty equitable division of labor, we both felt, in light of centuries of female oppression. Possibly I held this view more strongly than he did. At any rate, the arrangement has lasted a good long time, but it was no help in the beginning, especially after we moved to India.
I had known, of course, that married life was going to snatch me up from my job, my friends, and my beloved Cambridge apartment and drop me in a town some ninety miles from Delhi, and I hoped I was prepared. Jack, a graduate student in religion who was studying Hinduism, would be doing the research for his dissertation; and since I was a writer, surely I would write. I packed books, notebooks, and a portable typewriter. But I wasn’t the only one packing for a year in India—my diabolical familiar was getting ready for the trip as well, and her list was longer than mine. I wish now I had kept it, if only to see what the handwriting looked like. She and I pushed a grocery cart around the Star Market, collecting provisions for the wildly irrelevant vision of domesticity that was clawing its way out of my subconscious—namely, life in a split-level suburban home, circa 1955. Up and down the aisles we went, filling the cart with cake mixes, bouillon cubes, lasagna noodles, giant plastic bottles of salad oil, and bags of a dry, soy-based product that looked like dog food but was meant for vegetarian cooking, which I planned to use in pasta sauces and faux sloppy joes.
The thing is, I didn’t make sloppy joes, faux or otherwise, before I got married. Before I got married I cooked with meat, not soy chunks, unless I was cooking for vegetarians, in which case I made pesto. Before I got married I was so viscerally opposed to cake mixes I was certain I would be struck by lightning if I ever so much as reached for one. Bouillon cubes? Before I got married I bought a chicken if I wanted broth for a recipe, and if the recipe called for anything more elaborate by way of a liquid, I looked for a different recipe. Most of these totems of midcentury American kitchen life, which I lugged ten thousand miles and unpacked in an apartment near where the god Krishna spent his childhood, had never appealed to me in any way, at least when I was in my right mind. Clearly I wasn’t.
Moving to a foreign country had undone me; and I don’t mean India, I mean marriage. That’s the foreign country that should have required a visa and a phrase book. There was nothing in wifedom that was familiar. I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t know the customs, I didn’t know what to wear. Did wives travel in blue jeans on a sixteen-hour flight to Delhi, or did they go out and buy polyester bell-bottoms with a matching top suitable for Mother’s Day brunch in a retirement community? My guess was wrong. What did a wife do when the clerk at American Express in Delhi refused to issue half the traveler’s checks in her husband’s name and half in hers, because this could be done only for married couples, and the proof of marriage was a shared name, which ours wasn’t? Perhaps a wife was supposed to step back from the window with a polite nod, acknowledging the existence of cultural differences. Or perhaps she was supposed to grab the bars separating her from the clerk and shriek in despair, “Do you think I’d even be here if I weren’t married?” Again, I guessed wrong. India was hardly irrelevant to my anomie as a wife, but most of the reasons why I seemed to be inhabited by another person could be traced directly to the ring on my finger. Sometimes I was surprised to see it there, since to my knowledge I didn’t own any gold rings. One of our first errands in India was to go to the jeweler’s, to get my ring made smaller, because for a few heart-stopping minutes during our honeymoon it had gotten lost in the sand.
All I knew for certain about being married was that the two people involved were supposed to have dinner together, and this portentous meal soon became the focus of my fretful days. What did married people eat if they lived in India? I didn’t have the slightest idea. Please understand: we ate lots of Indian food everywhere we traveled in India, and I loved all of it without exception—I loved the food in restaurants, I loved the street food, I loved the meals we were served in people’s houses, I loved the alley storefronts where a cook dished out scrumptious little mixtures of vegetables and a boy handed them around on saucers. In Delhi we went to a Chinese restaurant, which was also Indian except for the names of the dishes, and I loved that, too. But it was hard to become comfortable with the notion that because we were making our home in India, this was a cuisine that qualified as home cooking. At some mysterious level of propriety, Indian food didn’t count. Those abundantly flavorful meals with their unfamiliar scents and textures seemed irrelevant to the project that my diabolical familiar was directing from her perch in the kitchen: to understand myself as an American wife.
So I made spaghetti with soy-chunk sauce, and I made toasted cheese sandwiches using tinned, processed cheese and the flabby white bread called “double roti.” I cut up cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes, soaked them for hours in an iodine solution to kill the bacteria, and made them into big salads that tasted of iodine. I made soup with the bouillon cubes, though every time I used a bouillon cube I had to be extremely careful about disposing of the tiny foil wrappers, because each one had a minuscule picture of a chicken on it. We lived in a compound surrounding a busy temple, where the faithful were going in and out all day and everyone was a vegetarian—as were we at the time, except for the bouillon cubes. My husband was terrified of getting caught and would have much preferred plain water in the soups, but I had a dim sense that if I gave up the bouillon cubes, and the acrid, chemical flavor they imparted, I would be lost forever. I used to shred the wrappers into slivers and deposit them one by one in the garbage bag, trying to keep them separate so that nobody could possibly get the idea that they once belonged together. The bag was destined for the courtyard downstairs, where a cow would eat the garbage, but often she left scraps of food and paper scattered across the ground, and I didn’t want to take any chances. Sometimes I thought about waiting in the courtyard to make sure she finished off all the foil—we occasionally saw part of a blue air letter from home hanging from her mouth—but I never did. I was a little afraid of her.
I studied Hindi, I tried to write, but the prospect of making dinner hovered over each day like a thundercloud that refused to break. I didn’t know if I should be proud of my accomplishments in synthetic cuisine or apologize for them. Jack never complained—he was raised to appreciate other people’s cooking, and he loyally did—but I noticed we were both eating large quantities of applesauce. This I made all the time, since it was easy to do on the kerosene burner that was my stove, and the accompaniment was always Gluco biscuits, a packaged cookie with an oddly addictive lack of flavor. Thanks to Glucos and applesauce, which stood in for either dessert or a side dish, the meals I was turning out did have the patina of dinner; but if this was dinner in wifedom, I wondered if we would be better off elsewhere.
What rescued me, and possibly us, was the fact that we had no refrigerator. Every day I had to restock our supply of butter, milk, and fresh produce, which meant that every day I had to go to the bazaar. These excursions into unmediated India could be nerve-racking—I had to speak Hindi in the bazaar, as well as dodge the cows and monkeys—but open-air food markets are powerful places. They can break down your resistance like a smile and a wave from a baby. The arrays of fresh produce were modest in this one, f
or it was a small bazaar, and its practicality appealed to me. No towering displays, just a scattering of the very local fruits and vegetables brought in that morning. The women selling produce sat alongside their eggplants and tomatoes and cauliflowers, listening impassively as I stumbled through my request, and always tossed a big bright chili into the bag as a lagniappe. The spices were the most aromatic I had ever used, the yogurt tasted better than any I had ever eaten, and over time this delicious bounty edged its way into my imagination. I stopped making the pallid soups and salads that had become my tormented specialty and started to cook real food.
Cautiously, I made a vegetable curry; even more cautiously, a pot of chickpeas for which I had to soak the dried beans—something I thought happened only in communes in Vermont, but there I was doing it. And perfectly! I was elated by my success. The recipes came from the Time-Life Cooking of India, which I had packed in a rare moment of optimism, and Time-Life was very good at writing recipes that worked. That’s what I wanted, something that worked—not necessarily authentic, just something that didn’t pick too many fights with India. I never tried the tricky ones, not the homemade cheese or the deep-fried breads or the syrupy, pretzel-shaped sweets called jalebis. I didn’t want to fail. It was as if India, marriage, and I were wobbling into the future on a unicycle, and I had no wish to threaten our precarious sense of balance.
What I appreciated most about the Time-Life cookbook was that it was written for women who bought their eggplants and cauliflowers in American supermarkets and were unlikely ever to set foot in an Indian bazaar. This made me feel a little superior, which was a nice change from my usual state of confusion and defeat, while at the same time allowing me to identify with those busy, faraway women back home, heating their ghee and measuring their spices. We were all American wives, we were all using the same cookbook, we were all making the same dinner. It was very reassuring.
Food talks, and that’s when I heard it for the first time, standing over the kerosene burner in my Indian kitchen. The cake mixes and bouillon cubes chattered away in a language I never understood, but my semi-Indian cooking spoke up in elementary Hindi, exactly my level. I made Time-Life’s “Mung ki Dal” and “Dahi Vadda” again and again, and they always assured me that wifedom wasn’t really a new planet, it was more like a new neighborhood. By contrast I could sense that my chapatis, the whole-wheat flatbreads that are a staple in North India, were sneering at me. The ones I made were leathery, and although I tried and tried—I even took a lesson from a chapati expert—I never caught on. We ate them anyway, but they were emblems of failure, and I didn’t want anything to do with failure. I quit trying and started buying half a dozen chapatis to go at the Shyam Hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all but an extremely humble storefront with five tables and a rat; it was the only restaurant in our part of town. “To go” was not a concept the cook had heard before, but he made chapatis for me, and I kept them warm in the tin box that sat on the kerosene burner and passed as an oven. Problem solved.
Shortly before leaving India, I astonished myself by mastering the little deep-fried jumbles of vegetables called pakoras, popular everywhere in India. I was so thrilled with this achievement that I served them to an Indian neighbor, who came back the next day with a batch of her own. These, she explained, were pakoras. Of course she was right. I was happy to eat them; they were infinitely better than mine, and I wrote down the recipe, though I knew I would never use it. If I ever made pakoras again, they would have to come from Time-Life and my own two hands, as best they could. I was starting to understand home cooking. The important word was “home.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began during a fellowship year at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. My experience with paradise has been limited, but it’s hard to believe there’s another realm quite like the Cullman Center, which Jean Strouse and her staff run as if it were an organic farm, tending each crop of fellows with labor-intensive care until at the end of the year we are harvested, gently but firmly, and sent to market. It is a pleasure to add my own expressions of gratitude to the many already heaped up in honor of the CSW. At the heart of the fellowship, of course, are the library’s incomparable holdings, and I’m grateful to curators and librarians across the building who helped me take advantage of the collections, including Jay Barksdale, Elizabeth Denlinger, Anne Garner, Isaac Gewirtz, Matt Knutzen, and Maira Liriano. Throughout this project I’ve drawn on Rebecca Federman’s deep knowledge of the NYPL and the skill and imagination she applies to opening up its resources.
The Jerwood Centre in Grasmere, next door to Dove Cottage, holds the preeminent archive of materials relating to the Wordsworths and their circle. With the help of the curator, Jeff Cowton, and the assistant curator, Rebecca Turner, I spent blissful days there puzzling over the handwriting in Dorothy Wordsworth’s unpublished journals and studying the family’s manuscript recipes. Two renowned scholars of British cuisine, C. Anne Wilson and Peter Brears, kindly responded to my queries with valuable information on Lake District culinary practices and how to track them down. I’m also grateful for the long-distance help supplied by Frances Lansley in the West Sussex Record Office of the National Archives and Janice Bailey at the Whitwick Historical Group.
Every visit to the Schlesinger Library is revelatory, and I’m always glad for the chance to thank its librarians for their ideas and guidance. Thanks as well to Virginia Lewick at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, Karen Kukil at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, to the staff in the Archives and Modern Manuscripts division of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, and to the very patient staff of the copy center in Humanities Reading Room I at the British Library, whose quick help with baffling technology pulled me back from outright hysterics on several occasions.
Rosa Lewis’s cooking—indeed, all the high-end cooking in the Edwardian era—posed a number of mysteries, and I’m grateful to Cathy Kaufman for a discussion early on that helped me start working my way through them. A series of enlightening e-mail exchanges with Stephen Schmidt, whose scholarship is known for its depth and precision, was a highlight of my research. With his help I was able to correct errors and reconsider crucial points in both the Rosa Lewis and the Dorothy Wordsworth chapters. The culinary historian Ivan Day, legendary for his hands-on understanding of the English kitchen across centuries, welcomed me to his home in the Lake District and responded to a torrent of questions about Dorothy Wordsworth and Rosa Lewis with an even greater torrent of fascinating insights and references. It was like sitting across the table from the British Library, except that the British Library never took me to lunch and drove me well out of its way to my B&B, all the while explaining fine points of local history, geography, botany, and literature.
Yvonne Cocking, who has spent more time in the Barbara Pym archives than anyone except maybe Barbara Pym, has been an unfailing source of wisdom on all aspects of Pymiana. Tom Sopko, North American Organizer of the Barbara Pym Society, came to my aid several times with his wide-ranging knowledge of Pym’s life and work. Katharine Whitehorn, author of the bed-sitter classic Kitchen in the Corner (1961), treated me to a cascade of memories from that era; and Luke Gertler walked me through Pym’s last London residence, now his home, beautifully evoking her years there as well as his own.
Although I ended up differing from the late Angela Lambert on the question of Eva Braun’s character, Lambert’s scrupulously researched biography, The Lost Life of Eva Braun, was one of my most trusted sources for the Braun chapter. Through the kindness of Deirdre Bryan-Brown—whom I first met in the Barbara Pym Society—I was able to contact Lambert’s daughter Carolyn Butler, who did me the enormous favor of gathering her mother’s research notes, packing them into a huge suitcase, and allowing me to borrow them. Anja Schüler offered many thoughtful suggestions for the Braun chapter, and the tireless Carla Stockton took on a slew of rese
arch tasks for both the Braun and the Helen Gurley Brown chapters. Many thanks to Ingrid MacGillis for quickly delivering an expert translation of Therese Linke’s memoir. Dr. Axel Drecoll at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich graciously drew from his deep, detailed knowledge of Obersalzberg to answer my questions and offer numerous suggestions for further research. My pursuit of Eva Braun was aided in a thousand ways by Ursula Heinzelmann, who shared with me her own work on German culinary history and helped me across many barriers of language and culture. I’m especially grateful for one particular mitzvah, performed in July 2015, when she accompanied me through Munich and into the library at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, advising and translating at every step.
In the last few years I’ve delivered papers airing some of the ideas in these chapters at meetings of the Barbara Pym Society and the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery. My thanks to the generous and very knowledgeable members of both these organizations for their feedback.
As always, I count myself the luckiest of writers to be guided by a peerless agent, Amanda Urban, and an editor who somehow manages to be brilliant, relentless, and endearing all at once, Wendy Wolf. My husband, Jack Hawley, has been the guardian angel of this project since I dreamed it up nearly a decade ago. He never objected to the constant, ghostly presence of my six ladies at the dinner table; on the contrary, if they sat there silent and infuriating, as was often the case, it was he who invariably persuaded them to open up and reveal a few secrets. Our daughter, Nell, who knows me pretty well by now, quickly discerned what I was going to need in order to survive the writing of this book and set me up with Netflix and her favorite online exercise videos. Finally, I want to thank some world-class listeners—Rebecca Federman, Melody Lawrence, Sara Paretsky, Susan Pelzer, Susan Riecken, Jean Strouse, and Barbara Wheaton—for the gift of being there.
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