Mrs David’s journalism consists of discursive meditations upon food and foreign parts, but, in the course of An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, one learns a discreet but enticing amount about her private life, enough to appreciate that her deftness with the pans is not a sign of domesticity but of worldliness. She is obviously the kind of woman before whom waiters grovel when she arrives alone at a restaurant. One imagines her to be one of those tall, cool, elegant blondes who make foreigners come over all funny, and it is plain that she is the kind of Englishwoman who, like the heroines of Nancy Mitford, only fully come to life Abroad. Her recipes are meticulous, authentic, and reliable, and have formed the basic repertoire not only of a thousand British late twentieth-century dinner parties but also of a goodly number of restaurants up and down these islands. She has been the conduit whereby French provincial cooking and French country cooking, of a kind which in France is being replaced by pizzas and hamburgers, may be raptly savoured in rural England.
The eponymous ‘Chez Panisse’ of the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook is directly inspired by Mrs David, who now spans the globe. The cook-proprietor of ‘Chez Panisse’, Alice Waters, says in her Introduction: ‘I bought Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking and I cooked everything in it, from beginning to end. I admired her aesthetics of food and wanted a restaurant that had the same feeling as the pictures on the covers of her books.’ It seems an unusual desire, to create a restaurant that looks like a book-jacket, and most of the cooks from whom Mrs David originally acquired her recipes would think it even more unusual to learn to cook from a book instead of from Mum. But all this must spring naturally from the kind of second-order experience that lies behind the cult of food. Alice Waters is a girl from New Jersey who earned her culinary stripes by resolutely cooking her way through a compendium of French recipes assembled by an Englishwoman, using ingredients from Northern California and serving them up to the me-generation in a restaurant named after an old movie. The result is a Franco-Californian cuisine of almost ludicrous refinement, in which the simplest item is turned into an object of mystification. A ripe melon, for example, is sought for as if it were a piece of the True Cross. Ms Waters applauds herself on serving one. ‘Anyone could have chosen a perfect melon, but unfortunately most people don’t take the time or make an effort to choose carefully and understand what that potentially sublime fruit should be.’ She talks as if selecting a melon were an existential choice of a kind to leave Jean-Paul Sartre stumped.
Behind Ms Waters’ wincingly exquisite cuisine lies some post-hippy Platonism to do with the real and the phoney. ‘Depersonalised, assembly-line fast food may be “convenient” and “time-saving” but it deprives the senses and denies true nourishment,’ she opines. Like anorexia nervosa, the neurotic condition in which young girls voluntarily starve themselves to death, the concept of ‘true nourishment’ can exist only in a society where hunger happens to other people. Ms Waters has clearly lost her marbles through too great a concern with grub, so much so that occasionally ‘Alice Waters’ sounds like a pseudonym for S. J. Perelman. ‘I do think best while holding a tomato or a leg of lamb,’ she confides. For a person of my generation, there is also the teasing question: could she be the Alice, and ‘Chez Panisse’ the real Alice’s Restaurant, of the song by Arlo Guthrie? And if this is so, where did it all go wrong?
(1984)
This review provoked the following interesting correspondence.
SIR: It is better to think while holding a tomato or a leg of lamb than not to think at all, and Angela Carter (LRB, Vol. 7, no. 1) might have been wise to heed Alice Waters’ advice. I thought I had been unlucky when motherhood got in the way of her perpetually forthcoming LRB notice of my The British at Table 1940–1980 a year or so ago, but now I am not so sure. A woman capable of splashing blame for the Ethiopian famine on Elizabeth David is scarcely to be trusted with a baby’s pusher, let alone a stabbing knife, and it would not have needed a very long session with the tomato to realise that victims of ecological disaster in Africa have more to fear from worshippers of power or money or both, in Downing Street and Addis Ababa, than from simpler souls like Paul Levy, whose god is their belly.
However, all these authors can look after themselves, and my own claim to a crumb of the action is as editor and for that matter initiator of the Guardian’s food and drink page, to which Angela Carter also alludes – forgetting perhaps that the paper has published weekly pieces on wine as well as on cookery and restaurants for many years past, and that her own debut as a contributor to it arose from an experience of waiting at table, circa 1967.
Just to set the record straight, food and drink does not occupy as much space in the paper as either movies or books, if you count related feature articles and interviews as well as straight criticism, and if you remember that the food page reviews Elizabeth David, for instance, leaving the book page to get on with Angela Carter. Not that I would think a reverse ratio between these different cultural topics disproportionate, whether in terms of pleasure or of public concern. And I know which of those two authors I would take to a desert island, too.
Christopher Driver
London N6.
SIR: I see small reason to entrust the review of three cookery books to Angela Carter (LRB, Vol. 7, no. 1): a woman who obviously has a Puritanical contempt for decently prepared food, and considers eating a rather nasty necessity for staying alive. She shoves aside her subject with a panegyric on the Ethiopian famine: a situation largely brought about by a Leftist government which recently spent fortunes on entertaining a Third World Conference in grand style. If she is a crusader, she should go down there and help fight the circumstances, which have more to do with the plight of the natives than with someone trying to make a proper salad in their own kitchen.
She derides those who consider that cooking can be an ‘art’, yet she is a novelist, and many a serious scholar would consider the reading and creating of fiction a frivolous pastime; it is, perhaps, a matter of degree. She takes exception to someone who goes on about selecting a melon carefully, and calls it ‘genuinely decadent’. What actually is decadent is to take products which cost quite a lot and to turn them into something both disgusting to eat and bad for the health: a specialty both in England and Scotland, whether on British Rail or in working-class homes bulging with sausages and fat, or whether one messes it up all on one’s own. She knows about ‘fast food’: let her stick to it, and spare the rest of us.
Peter Todd Mitchell
Sitges, Barcelona
SIR: Fascinating as it is to learn that Angela Carter considers herself morally superior to anyone interested in eating good food (except maybe Elizabeth David), I found the general tenor of her argument difficult to follow. She sneers at those of us who buy expensive foodstuffs while Ethiopians starve. Does she think not buying these things will bring about beneficial changes in that country’s political turmoil? This suggests belief in some very strange conspiracies. Perhaps she only thinks self-righteous priggery a more appealing posture than self-indulgent piggery when confronting the woes of the world. But that kind of hauteur seems a bit rich coming from her, a novelist – what occupation could be more frivolous or useless in helping out the hungry . . . and with as much pretention as cookery to being an art? But I write to point out an error of suggestion (given that Ms Carter is free to imagine Elizabeth David’s appearance and manner in any way she wants, even if a moment’s research could have set that fantasy straight): Alice Waters is not Alice Brock, the Alice of Alice’s Restaurant.
John Thorne
Boston, Massachusetts
• 15 •
Redcliffe Salaman: The History and Social Influence of the Potato
Eighty-odd years ago, when my father was a little boy, he would ask: ‘What’s for dinner?’ And my grandmother might reply: ‘Potatoes and point’. That is, she would point to the hook in the rafters where the ham, if they’d had one, would have hung. Then they’d eat potatoes. This didn’t happen often: the family
was relatively prosperous petit bougeois and, besides, the coast of North East Scotland, where they lived, had never become as totally dependent on the potato for nourishment as other communities in Europe, most notably Ireland. Even so, it happened.
The trouble with the easily grown and plentifully cropping potato is that it is so good for you, especially if you eat it with the skin on. It contains carbohydrates, protein, minerals, and sufficient vitamin C to ensure that the general use of the potato amongst urbanised communities did much to abolish scurvy. Potatoes and milk, taken together, form an adequate if monotonous diet, provided the potatoes are eaten in sufficient quantities. If you add leeks, butter, and cream to your mess of milk and potatoes, it turns into potage bonne femme and if you then chill it (vichysoisse) you arrive at haute cuisine, but the indigent poor of Europe rarely aspired so high and the Irish of the nineteenth century were often forced to skip the milk. They also preferred to eat their potatoes only partially cooked (‘wid be bones in ’em’): that way, they stayed longer in the belly.
Redcliffe Salaman’s monumental book was first published in 1949, though it bears the mark of many long years in the making. A revised edition now appears with a new Introduction by J. G. Hawkes. This account of the causes and effects of European potato-eating is also a history of poverty and of the manner in which the potato, ‘the root of misery’, helped to confine the poor within their poverty. Salaman describes the process as it operated, with the most classical simplicity, in Ireland: ‘by reducing the cost of living to the lowest possible limit, it caused the value of labour to fall to a corresponding level.’ Marie Antoinette thought the flowers of the potato plant were so pretty she could not resist tucking them in her hair. This was a precise visual equivalent of saying: ‘Let them eat cake,’ an innocent, ignorant, provocative act.
The origins of the potato in its native South America are unimaginably ancient but, for Europe, it is a modern vegetable, uniquely suited to the economics of the modern period. It was brought from Peru in the sixteenth century by the Spanish Conquistadores who, says Salaman, ‘immediately recognised its economic importance and at once relegated it as a food for slaves’. The tuber formed part of the booty of Spanish imperialism, a part with as far-reaching a significance as syphilis. How it got to Britain is a mystery. The legend that Raleigh brought it home from Virginia does not hold water: Raleigh never visited Virginia, where, in any case, the potato did not grow. Another legend persistently posits a shipwreck – a remnant of the Armada with potatoes amongst it stores foundering off the coast of Ireland, or Wales, or Lancashire, or all three.
It was a godless vegetable. It wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. The Old Believers, who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1667, regarded potatoes, along with sugar and tobacco, as abominations. The Irish surrounded the planting and harvesting of their crops with ritual and superstition, with good cause, as it turned out. Planting traditionally took place on Good Friday. The new vegetable soon acquired a good deal of old folklore. At Epinal, in France: ‘The woman who carries home the last sheaf, or the last basket of potatoes, is known throughout the year as the “corn” or “potato dog”.’ It must be the relative newness of the potato that makes the ‘potato dog’ seem a little incongruous; the potato is not a numinous vegetable. It is, literally, of the earth, earthy. One Spanish name is turma de tierra, that is, ‘earth testicle’, bringing to mind Max Miller’s celebrated appearance with a couple of potatoes – ‘King Edwards!’ – at the Royal Command Variety Performance.
The potato became with great speed a staple food throughout Europe. It was greeted with especial enthusiasm in Ireland, where the moist climate is largely unsuited to the growing of wheat, and the people had been reduced to penury. The exemplary tragedy of the Great Hunger of 1845 and 1846 lies at the core of Salaman’s book and he arrives at it step by dolorous step, tracing the entire history of the English in Ireland and the systematic destruction of the Irish economy and domestic agriculture until, by the early nineteenth century, there survived a peasant class more miserable than any other in Europe, ‘a social order’, as Salaman says, ‘in which the distinction between the amenities of human life and those of the beasts of the field had become blurred’. In their turf cabins, the enormous families, six or seven children, eight or nine children – from the evidence Salaman amasses, the English were haunted by the spectre of Irish over-population – these feckless, ever-increasing, ragged families would gather round the cauldron hanging over the smoky peat fire, the interested cow or pig (should they be lucky enough to have one) looking on. Each, including the domestic animals, took his or her potato from the common pot. Salaman demands rhetorically: ‘What pride could be taken in the home, or what call was there for ceremony, however elementary, to welcome a meal that was about to be shared with the pigs and the poultry and from the same cauldron?’
Potatoes excepted, it would have been an ambience in which Langland’s Piers Plowman would have felt at home. It was one of Ireland’s misfortunes that much of her rural population found themselves helplessly locked in the late Medieval period, as in a time-warp, whilst England was bustling busily through the nineteenth century. There was scarcely any coin circulating in those villages: what there was went on rent. Otherwise, no need for cash! The family potato plot provided all the food and the potato does not take much in the way of cultivation. Neither do boiled potatoes take much of the cook’s time and attention. No washing-up, either. There was ample leisure. Indeed, some of Salaman’s sources exhibit a sharp moral dismay that the poor should have it so easy. He quotes Sir Charles Trevelyan:
The Irish smallholder lives in a state of isolation, the type of which is to be sought for in the islands of the South Sea, rather than in the great civilised communities of the ancient world. A fortnight for planting, a week or ten days for digging, and another fortnight for turf-cutting, suffice for his subsistence; and during the rest of the year he is at leisure to follow his own inclinations, without even the safeguard of the intellectual tastes and legitimate objects of ambition which only imperfectly obviate the evils of leisure in the higher ranks of society.
One might almost think Sir Charles envied the Irish smallholder, so bitter is his resentment. Even Redcliffe Salaman himself, impregnably decent as he is, can see only a degraded peasantry sunk in sloth and intellectual darkness, locked in a hopeless symbiosis with the tuber. But, in spite of the most vicious inducements to abandon it, these peasants retained their impenetrable language, concealed within it a vast and continually refreshed tradition of oral poetry, and continued to make music of a beauty and complexity to be found nowhere else in Western Europe except Spain. They married young and sought to drive out the English by outnumbering them.
All the same, even if a way of life based exclusively upon the potato may be richer than Sir Charles Trevelyan suggests, when the root fails, all is lost. It is estimated that up to a million people died, either from starvation or from disease that came in the Famine’s wake. Emigration, to the United States and also to Australia, that followed the Famine robbed Ireland of another million or so, and dowered those nations with a rich strain of ineradicable Anglophobia. To live habitually on the cheapest food is to leave yourself without resources – ‘except’, as Malthus said, ‘in the bark of trees like the poor Swedes.’
The History and Social Influence of the Potato is an extraordinary book, like no other, a vast compendium of curious fact and passionately recounted social history that calls to mind an unexpected but completely satisfying fusion of The Anatomy of Melancholy and Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life. In its inflamatory humanitarianism, the book may now also stand as a monument to the sensibility of the period of welfare socialism voted in at the end of the Second World War: possibly the only time in the history of Britain (excepting 1649) when the great majority of British people actively demonstrated that they knew what was good for them, that potatoes were not sufficient fare.
In an article in the current Tatler, Mr
s Elizabeth David laments that Salaman did not include recipes: in fact, he includes several. This is one, for the soup served in Epping Workhouse in the last years of the eighteenth century: ‘4lbs pickled pork, 6 stones of shins and legs, 6lbs of skibling (meat waste), 28lbs of potatoes, 20lbs of Scotch oatmeal, 21lbs of salt, 1lb of whole pepper and 1/4lb of ground pepper, a dozen carrots and a handful of mint, to 56 gallons of water.’ He notes: ‘The Epping soup was designed on more generous lines than was usual in such cases.’
(1986)
• 16 •
Food in Vogue
Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings Page 10