by Simon Schama
It won’t take much prompting, for any number of these gastro-dialectics to come to mind, so many of which were expressed in self-conscious choices of linguistics. It wasn’t just what Marinetti had to say when he spat in the eye of la cucina di nonna, but the way that he said it. But you can’t beat the pioneers of ‘fooding’ – Alexandre Cammas and Emmanuel Rubin – for exploiting the implications of language to communicate their version of an eating and cooking revolution.
Le style est l’homme même . . . the very neologism of ‘fooding’ is of course not accidental. Using franglais not just casually, but as the masthead of a manifesto, is a gesture comparable to Marinetti’s choice of diction but perhaps even more aggressive, since it confronts not just the classicism of haute cuisine and its langue, but even more particularly of course the romance of terroir, over the past decades something of an obsession on both sides of the English Channel. In this sense ‘fooding’, the mot, attacks the presumptions of two sorts of assumed superiority: the hierarchy of the old school and the fables of provincial authenticity; the mysteries of the earth that are said to be the antidote to die-stamp globalisation (though dico does actually praise terroir and the slow-food movement). Cultural nationalism in France has such a high stake in its food regimes that of course, as Cammas and Rubin well know, to overturn it in favour of a kind of promiscuous cosmopolitanism is to reach for the most transgressive strategy imaginable, in thinking of not just gastronomy’s but France’s place amidst the cultures of the world and in particular those of the Anglo-Saxon world; the sense that France is somehow holding out the promise of regional richness against the debased thinness of globalisation.
Fooding practices – the shameless embrace of the snack, the brief, intensely concentrated hit of food before moving on to somewhere and something else, preferably from an absolutely different food culture – intentionally violate much of the holy writ of gastronomie: concentration, slowness, uniformity, coherence, meditative pleasure and even, or rather especially, the hierarchy of courses beginning with savoury appetiser or hors d’oeuvre and ending with sweet dessert. (That deconstruction also operates, of course, in the programme of Ferran Adrià and his followers in the United States, like Grant Achatz.) But what strikes me about fooding now is how much the lingo effect is crucial to their subversion. In 2004, Cammas and Rubin published Fooding, le Dico. Classically French in wanting to create a lexicography of a moment and a manner, it violated for a start the definition of what a dictionary was, at least by relatively modern standards, following the spectacularly brilliant ‘Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française’ of Charles Dantzig in being ‘dictionnaire totalement subjectif’; though it’s the kind of subjectivity that in a way recalls pre-Encyclopédie Voltaire.
In the dico you’ll find potted biographies of the new heroes, Adrià, Moreno Cedroni and Victor Arganzonis – ‘Che Guevara du barbecue’ – along with shout-outs to those who, like Anthony Bourdain, have at some point violated the protocols. But there are also entries on ‘crumble’; Duralex glass; ‘jerk chicken’ (à consommer sans modération sur fond de steel bands déchaîné, au célèbre carnaval londonien de Notting Hill); and ‘sardines à l’huile’ (les sardines en boîte ont perdu leur image trash cabanon pour devenir une nourriture éminemment bobo, symbole du retour aux plaisirs simples).
The overthrow of ‘gastronomie’ for ‘fooding’ is the most dramatic instance, I suppose, of normative proclamation in the remaking of food culture, but all these examples are instances where language-acts are not just incidental to, but inseparable from, the constitution of food universes. It may be that right now we are suffering from lexical gourmandism; have become too logorrhoeic for our own good, whether it’s the almost unimaginable proliferation of food journalism and cookbooks; the multiplication of television food programmes (I plead guilty as an accomplice to some of this); the appalling habit (marked in the United States) of training waiting staff to deliver lengthy disquisitions and sermons on their specials – often, and inaccurately, with the personal pronoun attached (as in ‘my seabass today comes with wild rice and a stuffing of celery root and rutabaga’); or even a verbalised explication de texte on how to construe the menu and its philosophy (this happens in Tom Colicchio’s Craft and, I’m sorry to say, in one of my favourite places in the world, Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where the tableside lecture reaches almost the point of theology). Then there is the menu itself – a work, all too often, of faux-literature minus any obligation to obey the basic rules of syntax. In exasperation I’ve made it my own rule of thumb – and I recommend it to you – never to order any item described with more than one verb. And the redundancies I’ve never been able to get, but which get lodged in the repertoire – ‘pan-fried’ for instance. Where else are they going to fry it – in a bucket?
Could it even be – and I hesitate to mention this at the food symposia – that, as Michael Pollan has recently suggested and I’ve long thought, we have got to the point of diminishing returns, of an inverse relationship between the second-hand consumption of words about eating to the first-hand experience of cooking it, or even reflectively eating it? A kind of ersatz gastronomy has arisen (the so-called ‘gourmet’ kitchen) in which cooking and eating experienced in restaurants and in journalism are . . . about celebrity chefs – but never taking the culture home. This may be because too many restaurant critics aren’t themselves cooks.
The sheer ubiquity and quantity of food-wording has also lowered the bar of quality (‘Best Food Writing’ anthology, most of the writing was feebly anecdotal) to the point of almost complete depleted exhaustion. So that there are, in effect, two food-word cultures operating side by side; one empty and ephemeral, the language itself casually or reflexively set down, and then a surviving remnant of a different genre – that presumably we are all here to honour – which sees the experience of food as a way of illuminating the nature of human behaviour, habit, mindset; to set out what exactly it is that humans do, not only when they feed, but when they register their feeding on the speaking tongue and the writing mind. What in the end is that language reaching for that I argued earlier was somehow behaviourally, if not actually biologically, wired to cooking and eating – and, for that matter, farming and butchering, or hunting and gathering? The answer surely is fixing through a kind of verbal re-enactment; which means it’s an act of translation from one sort of experience to the other, in the sure knowledge that much – perhaps the essence – will indeed be lost in translation, as it is indeed lost in comparable verbal exercises when we try to speak or write about music or sex, but without any diminution of the compulsion to try. At its most egregious is the negotiation made in wine description in which complex perfumes are rendered as what they are not and could never have been, but the approximation of which makes a kind of olfactory shorthand – thus ‘cedar’, ‘blackberries’, ‘leather’, and many more nonsensically summoned aromas.
That’s a mere matter of convenience, the more improbable the sensory allusion – Roquefort, gunpowder – the more prodigious the reputation of the nose in question. But real seekers after translation are trying, however futilely, something different, for at some level we are all enticed by the possibility that encoded within the fix established by even inadequate re-enactment is the promise of perfect repetition (which also seldom happens in music or sex). And sometimes, what gets lost in actual translation has its own unmistakable richness.
Take this wonderful item, for instance, supplied from Z. Guinaudeau’s Fez, in the recipe for Mchoui kindly given to me by my friend, the brilliant cook and cookbook writer, Alice Sherwood:
Choose a young sheep, fat but not too big. Bsmillah. Plunge the knife into the carotid and let the blood spout out to the last drop. Wash the gash in the throat seven times. Make a hole with the point of the knife just above the knee joint of one of the back legs between flesh and skin. Put a stick through this hole and turning it round, start to loosen the skin. Through this opening blow till the air get
s to the forelegs and makes them stick up. The sheep will then swell and stiffen as though it had been a long time in water . . . Quickly while an assistant stops up the hole cut the skin between the legs and skin the sheep like a rabbit. Be careful not to cut the trotters or the head and respect the horns . . . Hang up the hide to clean; put aside the liver and heart and hang them up. Give the tripe to the women who will scrape, rinse and put it to dry.
Or the wonderful and related Choua:
Divide the head in two having first cut with scissors and singed the wool which still remains stuck on the skin. With a chopping knife dig out the horns. Tap and shake this pitiful mask to oust any worms that may still remain in the mouth and nose of the animal. Take out the brains, clean them with ashes then plenty of water . . . The part much appreciated is the eye. You insert a finger delicately in the socket; a quick turn of the nail and the orb will fall out, extricate it and eat, well seasoned with salt and cumin.
Now what these passages do, it seems to me, is to succeed through the sheer clumsiness, you might say the sheer failure, of translation. Put another way, the translation of the experience survives or is owed to the mistranslation of the idiom. The original language – which is richly rhetorical, Muslim, tribally poetic – preserves the social totality of the experience; the union of butchery and cookery – without the inevitable flattening, the cultural dilution that happens when a cross-idiom translation goes more smoothly; the rough original. What we have here is the whole picture untouched; the crawling worms in the nose.
This rich description of what it is we do when we plant, harvest, slaughter, butcher, knead, bake, roast and consume ought not, of course, to be left to the inadvertent payload of inadequate translation. The strongest food writers aim exactly for that wraparound translation effect. It’s seldom that they are restaurant critics or recipe collectors and publishers. The philosopher Michael Oakshott was much given to saying that while you could reduce cooking to a recipe, you couldn’t do the same with politics. Many of us, as my friend Adam Gopnik pointed out, would reverse that truism: it’s cooking which defies reduction to recipe; politics, alas, is reduced all too easily.
So how to convey that socially inflected rich description without always sounding like an anthropology seminar? The very best writers – those in a class of their own – have embedded their cookery – and their recipes – in remembered experience; part memoir, part re-enactment. And when I say embedded, in Elizabeth David’s case, at least in the most prodigious of all her books, French Provincial Cooking, this is literally true – in the layout of her best books, ingredients and cooking procedures are – deliberately, I’m quite sure – made to disappear inside the text of the essay in social recollection or the gastronomical archive. David had a famously liberating, free-and-easy attitude towards recipes as strict instructions, asking the British to try stripping down a dish to its essentials, a ‘primitive’ version, or to experiment with flavour augmentations if the simplified version lacked savour. To get at a recipe, say, for an anchoïade, you have to go by way of M. Caramelo at La Réserve in Beaulieu . . . ‘expensive, solid, elegant in an old-fashioned way . . . the anchoïade here was outstandingly good and I remember, in spite of the immense portions served, ordering, much to the amusement of the head waiter, a second helping. When I returned to the restaurant a few days later he was ready with my double portion of anchoïade even before I had even asked for it.’ Or to get to the wonderful passages on daubes you have to go via Pierre Huguenin, Les meilleurs recettes de ma pauvre Mère . . . ‘During the holidays at Gemeaux . . . when we arrived at my grandmother’s dark kitchen on Sunday after Vespers it was lit by a ray of sunshine in which the dust and the flies were dancing and there was a sound like a little bubbling spring. It was a daube which since midday had been murmuring gently on the stove, giving out sweet smells which brought tears to your eyes . . .’ The effect of David’s heaped remembrances is to turn any individual dish into a kind of archive of social experience and its record – so that companion figures show up through her pages – Pomiane and the ubiquitous Curnonsky; Abdre Croze, an obscure mayor of Saint-Rémy for the bouillabaisse; a gathered company through time. And it was this Proustian act of poetic fusion, along with the invitations – which (unlike Julia Child) often lived up to the cult of simplicity (invoking Escoffier) that Elizabeth David constantly advertised – which first really got me and some of my generation cooking in the 1960s. What we felt truly translated in her paragraphs was remembered sensuality.
Which cues up and leaves the best for last, I suppose, the greatest food writer who has ever lived, or at least written in English: Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, whom even the supercool authors of ‘le dico’ revere for the sublimity of her prose. In MFK, Elizabeth David’s tendency to embed the recipe within memory, archive and ethnography became even more completely dissolved. You don’t, I think, really go to her for the recipes – I’m not sure I have ever actually cooked one. What you do go to her for is the exactly rendered experience of human hunger, passion, devouring; and for an as yet absolutely matchless, poetic talent (and I use this term carefully, because it seems to me that Mary K did actually have that enviable talent for conjuring sharp and sensuously registered precision out of thin air that is the poet’s forte). Here, for instance, from a justly famous (or it had better be), tiny essay, called cleverly ‘Borderland’, which finds her in Strasbourg with Al Fisher in February, in a freezing, ‘cramped dirty apartment across from the sad zoo, half full of animals and birds frozen too stiff even to make smells’. Now there is a recipe – of a sort – buried in this essay, but MFK sets up the bleakness of the place she’s in (at a polar extreme, you’ll note, from Elizabeth David who never wrote about cold, grim places), in order to introduce her ‘dish’, if we should call it that: ‘tangerine sections warmed on the radiator’. ‘My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only describe how they are prepared.’
Now listen to the way this ‘recipe’ is communicated: a kind of literary seduction, a thing done with mind and eye and tongue, absolutely self-conscious – again in the poetic vein – the seductive effect of alliteration, with all kinds of details that have not a lot to do with the tangerine treatment, but everything to do with the material presence of the woman herself who is fingering them:
In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently, do not bruise them as you watch soldiers pass, and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of ‘l’intérieur’. While she mutters of seduction and bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.
You are then supposed to lay out a newspaper on the hot radiator and lay the sections on them so that they plump up in the heat. They perfume the room. Night comes on and ‘the soldiers stump back from the Rhine’.
The sections of tangerines are gone and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl that crackles so tinnily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.
There must be someone, though, who knows what I mean. Probably everyone does because of his own secret eatings.
Here, next to nothing is lost in translation and, because of the perfect word-play, the shell crackling under one’s teeth like Chinese enamel followed by its opposite, the rush of cold pulp, we are, for a moment, in MFK’s body, indeed in her mouth. Which is as good a place as anywhere to end.
Remembering
Omaha Beach
Financial Times, 13 June 2009
For the integrity of democracy, t
his was the worst of weeks and the best of weeks. Fresh-cut flowers laid on the graves of D-Day heroes were barely beginning to wither when the misbegotten whelp of Mosleyism got its first seats in the European parliament. In London, Gordon Brown was shedding ministers like leaves from a tree attacked by death-watch beetle. I was in Dublin beside the oily Liffey for the Writers’ Festival. There, I quickly discovered, the Irish were confronting their own demons, every bit as corrosive to public faith in their governing institutions as the expenses scandals in Britain.