by Luke Barr
“I am not old and famous,” M.F. wrote, “with friends whose names sound like the guest-lists of all the diplomatic receptions held in all the world capitals since 1872. Nor am I young and intellectually gastronomic on a bicycle.”
Actually, M.F. was young when she wrote Serve It Forth; she was still in her twenties. But already she had managed to invent a new voice in American literature, one that was irreverent but never acerbic, witty, feminine, casual, sexy, direct, impatient, the very opposite of stuffy—in a word, modern. It was both effortlessly authoritative yet confiding and personal. Serve It Forth ranged amusingly through history and gastronomy, from the honey of ancient Greece to the invention of the modern restaurant in nineteenth-century France, and then, without warning, presented the most intimate of scenes. A cold February morning in Strasbourg:
It was then that I discovered how to eat little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.
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 pour past and past the corner 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.
Al was Al Fisher, her husband, whom she had married at the age of twenty-one and then followed to France, where he was studying for a degree in literature. She described setting the tangerine pieces on a newspaper, which she placed on the hot radiator for hours and then, later, out on the icy cold windowsill. She ate them alone.
The sections of tangerine 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.
The writing was liberated and intoxicating—it was, at the time, even a little shocking for a woman to write this way. To embrace sensual pleasure so openly. But it was more than that. There was a streak of fearlessness in M.F.’s writing, a willingness to reveal herself. There is, for example, a chapter in the book describing a long dinner with her friend Dillwyn Parrish, an artist and young cousin of Maxfield Parrish, at her favorite restaurant in Dijon, Aux Trois Faisans. She and Al had spent many evenings there six years earlier, when they lived in Dijon, and the chapter is ostensibly about her fear that Dillwyn will be disappointed in the place, that it won’t live up to the glamorous, idealized version she has described for him. This would become a recurring topic for M.F.: the nostalgic past as viewed from the unsentimental present. And indeed, the first thing she notices when she is there with Dillwyn is a strange, faint smell (bad air), and her suspicions of degradation and decay follow her through the entire meal. Taking their order for glasses of Dubonnet, the old, favorite (and possibly drunk) waiter Charles remembers her of course. Dillwyn (called Chexbres in the book) says, “You are known, my dear! You should be much flattered—or I for being with you.”
He smiled, the sweet-tongued self-mocker, at me and at the table, and I looked with less haste at the tall crystal tulips to hold wine, at the napkins folded like pheasants, at the inky menu big as a newspaper …
On the little serving board beside us, Charles fussed clumsily with a new bottle of Dubonnet. Finally it was open. He poured it with a misjudged flourish. Purple spread on the cloth. I looked quickly, without meaning to, at Chexbres, but he was watching the quiet color of his glass. Perhaps he had not seen, had not realized, the fumblings of my perfect waiter?
He raised his aperitif. His eyes were wide and candid.
“I drink to our pasts—to yours and mine. And to ours. The wine is strong. Time is strong, too.” He bowed slightly. “I grow solemn—or sententious.”
I laughed at him. “I’m not afraid of time.”
“Don’t boast.”
“I’m not boasting. Really, I’m glad six years—oh, it’s too complicated. But this tastes good. I’m hungry.”
It was 1937 and M.F. was still married to Al Fisher at the time of this scene, and when Serve It Forth was published. But not for much longer. M.F. and Dillwyn had fallen in love.
The 1940s saw the publication of four more of M.F.’s books—Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet for Gourmets—as well as her translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. It was in writing about herself, something she would do in all her books, by turns brazenly and obliquely, that M.F. found a way to the emotional core of her nominal topic, food and eating. The atmospherics of desire and betrayal, the seductive pleasures of a shared glass of marc, the fleeting ripeness of peaches and zucchini flowers: the human appetite for food and for love were one and the same in her writing. This was a philosophical joining, an alchemy, that could only have happened in France, where an anti-puritanical attitude about both prevailed. And yet as much as France was at the heart of her writing, it was her directness and humor that made it American, made it new. She had not invented Francophilia, but she’d come up with the mid-century modern version and made it her own.
M.F. had opened a door to pleasure, to a serious and literary consideration of everything from shellfish to freshly picked green beans to the pre-departure glass of champagne at the train station café, and Julia Child, James Beard, Judith Jones, and, later, Richard Olney, all walked through that door after her.
“Why is it that each year our bread gets less and less palatable, more and more flabby and tasteless?” Beard asked in 1952. And bread was the least of it: the 1950s were a time of awful food in general in America. There was the convenience-driven rise of canned and processed foods to accompany increasing prosperity and suburban living—the “Station Wagon Way of Life,” as House Beautiful referred to it. Quick and easy cooking was celebrated. There were time-saving gadgets, premade salad dressings, instant and powdered soups, and Swanson TV dinners. And there were, to cite the usual suspects, tuna casseroles, sloppy joes, fish sticks, and numerous dishes involving melted marshmallows, canned mushroom soup, and Lipton dried onion soup mix. The dominant cookbooks were vast, practical compendiums of busy-housewife-friendly recipes: Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, Poppy Cannon’s The Can-Opener Cookbook, The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, and many more.
Beard’s cookbooks, and then especially Child’s, led postwar America to better, fresher, and more sophisticated cooking. Like M.F., Beard and Child had experienced France and Europe as a revelation of taste, and they would bring those flavors to America in their recipes. Beard published Paris Cuisine in 1952, at the age of forty-nine, and the seminal James Beard Cookbook in 1959. His books made the case, in an accessible way, for fresh ingredients and ambitious home cooking. Beard wrote about food for House & Garden and Gourmet magazines, appeared on television to demonstrate recipes, and in general embodied the idea of cooking as an art form, something that transcended mere home economics.
There was a growing interest in cocktail-and dinner-party entertaining, and in French cooking, both because people were traveling to Europe in larger numbers and because French chefs were setting up shop in America—most notably in the White House, where Jacqueline Kennedy had installed René Verdon in the kitchen. Classic French cooking was of course the very definition of haute cuisine, as prepared at the best restaurants in New York. Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon had long set the standard, and starting in the 1960s, so had André Soltner’s Lutèce.
But it was Julia Child—with the spectacular popularity of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, when she was in her late forties, and the even more spectacular popularity of her TV cooking program, The French Chef, launched in 1963—who made the biggest change to the culture. The book, written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, was clear, detailed, and accessible. In the foreword, the authors wrote:
We have purposely omitted cobwebbed bot
tles, the patron in his white cap bustling among his sauces, anecdotes about charming little restaurants with gleaming napery, and so forth. Such romantic interludes, it seems to us, put French cooking into a never-never land instead of the Here, where happily it is available to everybody. Anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere, with the right instruction.
Child demystified French cooking with her disarming personal style, and became a celebrity in the process. She also upheld a certain rigor in the face of the shortcuts and packaged foods popular at the time:
One of the main reasons that pseudo-French cooking, with which we are all too familiar, falls far below good French cooking is just this matter of elimination of steps, combination of processes, or skimping on ingredients such as butter, cream—and time. “Too much trouble,” “Too expensive,” or “Who will know the difference” are death knells for good food.
Mastering was a landmark, and The French Chef was a pop culture phenomenon. Nora Ephron (years later the director of the film Julie and Julia) described the scene in New York magazine in 1968. The so-called “Food Establishment” (as she anointed it in the piece) was an easy target for her amused sniping about its various camps and cliques, each more self-important than the next. Her larger point was that cookbook authors, food writers, TV cooking show hosts, and restaurant critics comprised a bona fide cultural movement, influencing how and what Americans ate. Ephron reeled off a litany of 1950s and ’60s dinner party food fads—“the year of curry,” followed by the “year of quiche Lorraine, the year of paella, the year of vitello tonnato, the year of bœuf bourguignon, the year of blanquette de veau, the year of beef Wellington.” She went on:
And with the arrival of curry, the first fashionable international food, food acquired a chic, a gloss of snobbery it had hitherto only possessed in certain upper-income groups. Hostesses were expected to know that iceberg lettuce was declassé and tuna-fish casseroles de trop. Lancers sparkling rosé and Manischewitz were replaced on the table by Bordeaux …
Before long, American men and women were cooking along with Julia Child, subscribing to the Shallot-of-the-Month Club, and learning to mince garlic instead of pushing it through a press. Cheeses, herbs, and spices that had formerly been available only in Bloomingdale’s delicacy department cropped up around New York, and then around the country. Food became, for dinner-party conversations in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties. And liberated men and women who used to brag that sex was their greatest pleasure began to suspect that food might be pulling ahead in the ultimate taste test.
Food and cooking were now part of the popular culture, as much as fashion, art, or rock ’n’ roll.
Even as gourmet food and cooking gained broader acceptance and attained an air of chic in the late 1960s, even as a flotilla of cookbooks reached bookstores, more of them every year, even as Child and Beck worked on their highly anticipated sequel, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II—the ground was shifting once again. Indeed, the very same cultural impulses that had fueled American interest in authentic French recipes and fresh, high-quality ingredients (and had rejected The Can-Opener Cookbook and everything it and the 1950s represented) were now beginning to point people in a variety of exciting new directions.
The utopian idealism and anticommercialism that defined the moment led quite naturally to the organic food movement, to health food, to baking your own bread. Berkeley communes were planting vegetable gardens, natural food co-ops were opening. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, had set in motion a new awareness and activism around environmental and food safety issues. Euell Gibbons’s books on natural food and foraging (Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, and others) had introduced a kind of romance to the topic.
The nascent changes in the food world reflected the politics of the era—they were taking place in the context of the Vietnam War; the civil rights, environmental, and free speech movements; and sexual liberation and feminism. But more broadly, it was the sense of freedom from the old ways, of creating something entirely new, that inspired cooks and connected them to the moment. Cooking was essential, elemental, and, increasingly, local. The sensuality that M.F. had long associated with food took on a new currency and meaning in the late 1960s.
It was a time of discovery. There was an expanding interest in ethnic food and international cooking—Chinese, Indian, regional Italian. Judith Jones, the editor at Knopf who had discovered and championed Mastering, was looking for similarly definitive books about other national cuisines.
All this was percolating just as M.F., Child, Beck, Beard, and Jones gathered in Provence in December 1970. They would be joined there by Richard Olney, a self-trained American cook who had long lived in France and had just published The French Menu Cookbook, outlining a bohemian version of the French ideal. Olney maintained an aura of authenticity—his recipes were uncompromising, pure, and exacting—yet he rejected Cordon Bleu formality and restaurant traditionalism. He was an outsider to the American food world, a position he treasured, and he was also a snob, sure of his ultimately superior taste.
During the time they all spent together, Olney’s sharp-edged, angular personality would bring underlying conflicts to the surface: the democratization of taste versus the hard-earned judgments of snobbery; the new culinary freedom, informality, and experimentation versus doing things the old way; America versus France, in other words. Child and Beck had been increasingly at odds during the writing of their new Mastering book, over these very issues of authenticity and accessibility, tradition and innovation.
It was the question of France that loomed largest, and meant the most, for all of them. The very idea of transcendent cooking, of cooking as an art form, the rituals of haute cuisine, the luxury and decadence of a béarnaise sauce or mille-feuille pastry, the wit of the seminal gastronome Brillat-Savarin, the knowledge of chefs Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier—that was all French, and always had been.
But a seismic shift was in the offing. And there was no better place to see it coming, to feel the sudden, moving fault lines, than in the steep, rocky hills of Provence in late 1970.
This book is a history, a narrow slice of it, but also a personal story. It is the story of my great-aunt, trying to decide at age sixty-two what to make of her life thus far, and what to do with the rest of it. And that had everything to do with the events in Provence that winter, and with the future of American cooking, its debt to France, and M.F.’s role in that trajectory. France had been her ideal for decades, and that was changing. She was changing.
I know this because I found her diary.
I had started my research at Harvard, at the vast culinary collection of the Schlesinger Library, to which M.F., Child, and Beck had donated their personal papers. Mostly, I read their correspondence. M.F., Beard, and the Childs (both Julia and her husband, Paul) were prolific, elegant, amusing, and all-around brilliant writers of letters, and wrote one another frequently. Beard’s letters were archived at New York University; Olney’s were stashed in a box under a bed in Provence. Taken together, the letters formed a resonant picture—immersion in an echoing, ongoing conversation—and they are the basis for much of this story. I also spoke extensively with the very few people who were there at the time and are still alive, including my grandmother Norah; Judith Jones, who edited M.F., Child, and James Beard; and Raymond Gatti, the French chauffeur they all regularly hired.
But it was in a storage unit in Hayward, California, where I found what turned out to be the most intimate record of the period. My cousin Kennedy is M.F.’s younger daughter, and it was she who drove me to the one-story warehouse attached to a strip mall where she keeps our family archive. It was a room filled with boxes, stacked all the way up to the ceiling. There were a few old chairs and, along one side, vertical stacks of paintings leaning against the wall, many of them by Dillwyn Parrish, who became M.F.’s second husband.
I realized immediately that I would have
to open every box. There was no other way of knowing what might be inside: books, magazines, letters, family photographs, medical records, legal documents, M.F.’s passport. I spent a day sorting through it all, looking for material relating to the Provence trip of 1970. It was thrilling work, a kind of treasure hunt, and never more so than when I came across a pale green spiral-bound notebook with the year “1970” written on the front in ballpoint pen. It was stashed in a manila folder along with the page proofs and edits for M.F.’s book As They Were, published in 1982.
In the notebook was the story of M.F.’s time in Provence that winter, written during the final weeks of the year. It was a daily journal, but as I read closer, what I found was something else: a minutely observed account of her changing relationship with France, and, finally, a kind of existential reckoning and break with the place where it had all begun for her, the place of her own writerly self-invention. The diary was almost stream of consciousness at times; it was moving, and revealing, and I soon realized it was also an inside-out version of the very story I was researching, about American food and cooking finding its way from beneath the shadow of France.
As I read it, I knew: I had found the key to my story, and to this book.
1
ALL ALONE
December 20, 1970
M. F. K. FISHER WALKED INTO THE LOBBY AT the Hôtel Nord-Pinus in Arles trailed by a bellhop.
Famously beautiful in her youth—she’d been photographed by Man Ray and peered out glamorously from book jackets—M.F. was still a striking woman. Her long gray hair was pinned up in an elegant twist at the back of her head, her eyebrows were pencil thin, and she was dressed in a tailored Marchesa di Grésy suit and a wool overcoat. She made her way to the front desk to check in. The decor was Provençal rustic, almost cliché, with tiled floors and wrought-iron chandeliers. She’d been here years ago, and it hadn’t changed a bit. Her heels made echoing noises in the empty lobby. It was the week before Christmas 1970, and the weather was unusually cold. She had the distinct impression of being the only guest at the hotel. The place was a tomb.