Viands, wines and spirits : nourishment and (in)digestion in the culture of literacy : essays in cultural practice

Viands, Wines and Spirits Nourishment and (In)Digestion

in the Culture of Literacy

W ydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Katowice 2003

Viands, Wines and Spirits Nourishment and (In)Digestion

in the Culture of Literacy

Essays in Cultural Practice

Prace Naukowe

r

Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach

nr 2114

Viands, Wines and Spirits Nourishment and (In)Digestion

in the Culture of Literacy

Essays in Cultural Practice

Edited by

W ojciech K alaga & Tadeusz R achw ał

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Katowice 2003

Editor of the Series: Historia Literatur Obcych A leksander Ablamowicz

R eview ers

Elżbieta H. Oleksy, M arek W ilczyński

6 6 ^ 3 1 8 4 8 3

Contents

Introduction (Wojciech Kalaga & Tadeusz R a c h w a t ) ... 7 Gaye Poole

Reel Meals: Food and Public Dining, Food and Sex, Food and Revenge . . . . 9 Stephen Tapscott

“You’ve had Worse Things in Your Mouth”: Recipes and Their Narratives . . . 30 Bradley C. Kadel

The Pub and the Irish N a t i o n ...43 Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski

Provide, Provide: Food in the American S o u t h ... 52 Rafat Dubaniowski

“I’ve Tasted a Hot Spring.../A nd Foods a Man Remembers till He Dies”: the North’s (Un-)Palatable Delights in Letters from Iceland by W. H. Auden and Louis M a c N e i c e ...58 M arta Wiszniowska

From Cold Meats to Floating Signifiers. On Food in D r a m a ... 65 Helen Day

The Purity and Danger of Food in a Genetically (Co)Modified Britain . . . . 77 John Gilliver & Małgorzata Nitka

E. M. Forster’s Tea-Table ... 89 Ewa Borkowska

The True (and Untrue) History of the “Food of the Gods” ...100

Paweł Jędrzejko

The Appetite for the S e a ... I l l Anna Maria Tomczak

Simplicity and Solitude by the Sea? - Food in Iris Murdoch’s Novel The Sea, The S e a ... 119 S tre s z c z e n ie ...130 Résumé...132

Introduction

This volume, in the most general sense, deals with what is transient in culture and what thus opposes the dominant tendency towards permanence, manifested through the operations o f inscription and archivization. Viands and spirits - as existents o f a rather limited duration - constitute the do­

main o f unstable necessity, o f disappearance and reappearance, thus remind­

ing us o f the Nietzschean eternal return, the concept which itself, as Herbert Marcuse claims, nourishes the elements disturbing the order o f permanence.

One o f the strategies, then, o f maintaining order, is the preservation o f food through its transference into the sphere o f iteration and repetition via reci­

pes, the narrative strategy o f which is analysed by Stephen Tapscott in his paper ‘“ You’ve Had Worse Things in Your M outh’: Recipes and Their Narratives.”

The carnality o f food constitutes, according to Gaye Poole (“Reel Meals:

Food and Public Dining, Food and Sex, Food and Revenge”) a certain elo­

quent space o f the articulation o f meanings, whose dramatic potential she analyses through her discussion o f the various uses o f culinary aesthetics in the contemporary cinema. If a kitchen (for instance) remains a private sphere invaded only from the outside by the ideology o f contemporary con­

sumerism, the space o f the Irish pub, scrupulously examined by Bradley Kadel (“The Pub and the Irish Nation”), turns out to be the space o f po­

litical rituals and gestures. The significance and the political role o f access to nourishment in the colonial discourse is exposed by Krzysztof Kowałczyk- Twarowski (“Provide, Provide: Food in American South”), who also dis­

cusses the mythical function o f food in the American South o f the nineteenth

century. Rafał Dubaniowski (‘“ I’ve Tasted a Hot Spring.. ./And Foods a Man

Remembers till He Dies’: the North’s (Un-)Palatable Delights in Letters from

to the North, to the cold landscapes of Iceland, where Auden and MacNeice search for the Other, while heroically (dis-) tasting unpalatable dishes.

The semantic relation o f cold meat to the coldness o f a corpse is one of the topics of Marta Wiszniowska’s paper devoted to the metaphoric func­

tion of food in drama (“From Cold Meats to Floating Signifiers. On Food in Drama”). Death and food, or better, death in the context of food, is also among the main themes of Helen Day’s article (“The Purity and Danger of Food in Genetically (Co)Modified Britain”), in which the author ponders over the annihilation of nature through an objectification of food in the discourse and rhetoric of genetic engineering in Great Britain. That latter country, by many associated with the ritual o f tea drinking, is also a country in which the ritual seems to dominate over the “food,” i.e., tea itself, whose elusive presence in E.M. Forster’s writings is foregrounded by John Gilliver and Małgorzata Nitka (“E.M. Forster’s Tea-Table”). Tea in this volume is accom­

panied by chocolate served by Ewa Borkowska, who demonstrates how the food o f gods turned - thanks to the capitalist efficiency - into the food of the masses (“The True (and Untrue) History o f the Food o f Gods”).

The last two papers in the volume are devoted to the sea. Paweł Jędrzejko (“The Appetite for the Sea”) takes up - with reference to Herman Melville’s

(over one’s existence), and ultimately - for power, with its irresistible taste and appeal. Anna Maria Tomczak (“Simplicity and Solitude by the Sea? - Food in Iris Murdoch’s Novel The Sea, the S e a ”) examines the cultural and social aspects o f the consumption o f food among those who give up trav­

elling and decide to cherish the simplicity and peace o f living by the sea.

The goal o f this book is by no means to exhaust the issues raised by the culinary in culture; many a volume would have to be written to achieve such a task. Our objective is far more modest: it is rather to bring to light the significant in the trivial, to defamiliarize the commonplace, and thus per­

haps to encourage further cultural explorations into the taste of the ordinary.

Wojciech Kalaga & Tadeusz Rachwał

Gaye Poole

Lancaster U niversity

Reel Meals: Food and Public Dining, Food and Sex, Food and Revenge1

At Laguna Guest House, Noosa Heads, where I grew up, food was certainly the setting for some gastronomic politics. This guest house child­

hood gave me first hand exposure to many a culinary crisis, precipitated mainly by a succession of temperamental cooks whose power to jeopardise the contentment of the proprietor (my mother) and her hundred guests (at peak) was never underestimated. Salad plates forming a porcelain grid on the marbled pink laminex table top, large quantities o f home made beetroot cooling, the Dandy small goods man calling, the cold milk frosting stain­

less steel jugs - everything seemed to revolve around providing pleasing food punctually. I can’t dismiss this atypical exposure to food as service, as escape, as part of the medicine of holiday renewal and re-creation; it is an indel­

ible, though initially unconscious, influence.

Food uncovers and reveals unconscious attitudes; it is the key to immanent qualities, and writers and scenarists may incorporate food instinctively precisely because o f its ability to distil and show forth ind­

welling meanings. Anthropologists, philosophers and gastronomists have documented the significance o f food in decoding the patterns o f a cul­

ture. In 1825 the expression “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell what you are” (frequently expressed as “you are what you eat”) was coined by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in his treatise The Physiology

1 This keynote paper was adapted from my book Reel Meals, Set M eals: Food in Film and Theatre (Sydney: C urrency Press, 1999).

o f Taste.2 In The Raw and The Cooked, Claude Lévi-Strauss identified the

importance o f food as a means of civilising and defining humans.3 The food process, raw to cooked, provides a model for the movement from savage state to civilised state. Formation of individual and collective identities, such as national and ethnic, arises partly out o f the way in which food and diet are understood. In all cultures food and drink are full o f social significance in that they symbolically refract the ideology o f the social world in which they are consumed.

Anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas and Margaret Visser, semiologist Roland Barthes, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and oth­

ers - clearly acknowledge that “taste” is culturally shaped; their work pays attention to the aesthetic and pre-eminently social patterning o f food preferences.4

Food is a polysemous signifier that articulates in concrete terms what is very often internal, vague, abstract. Food provides a matrix, a language that allows us a way to get at the uncertainty and the ineffable qualities o f life. Food and eating, instead o f being incidental to the mediated ex­

perience of theatre and film, is often employed as a crucial barometer of the attitudes, stability and psychological well-being o f characters. Food is chosen to illuminate aspects o f human existence - I think, partly because it focuses and facilitates so many social transactions, providing a reliable form o f “social cement.” Prerequisite for all human enterprise, the gain­

ing, preparing, and sharing o f food is the primary human activity. Because the preparation o f food requires thought, labour, time, and in some cases love, it is an ideal conduit for emotional language. It is possible to “say”

things with food - resentment, love, compensation, anger, rebellion, with­

drawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor o f subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit, but surprisingly varied, strong, and sometimes violent or subversive.

Food is a remarkably concentrated signifier in another way too. Food’s physicality, its corporeality makes it such a versatile and eloquent site for the articulation of meanings. Food is fundamental to our lives and therefore ideally adaptable for theatre and film, loaded as it is with messages about survival, class, power, obligation, prestige, loss of control, restriction. Food is also something that is separate from the body but becomes the body;

2 Jean Anthelm e Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology o f Taste (San Francisco: N orth Point Press, 1986) (1st ed. 1825).

3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Harm ondsw orth: Penguin 1986) (1st ed. 1964).

4 See for exam ple M ary Douglas, Im plicit M eanings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) and M argaret Visser, The Rituals o f D inner (New York: G rove W eidenfeld, 1991).

menstrual blood, breast milk, excrement, spittle and food are all at one time the body, then no more the body; they are also all substances which tap into anxieties and taboos concerning shifting body boundaries.

Historical Perspective

Food consumption, feasts, banquets and dinners have functioned as conspicuous dramaturgical markers in varying ways at different times: from an early celebratory, ritualistic function in festivals to a pronounced emblem­

atic one in Renaissance drama through to a spectrum embracing both de­

tailed, obsessive naturalism and stylised and iconic functions by the late twentieth century. In broad terms, food in drama has undergone a change from the generic to the particular.

The various ways food is used in contemporary theatre and film are part o f a continuum rather than merely a reflection o f an increased conscious­

ness o f food issues. Both continuities and discontinuities are apparent. In the Shakespearian and Jacobean theatre food on stage was expressive of a fusion o f religious and secular, moral and emblematic connotations. In contemporary drama and film the religious and emblematic qualities o f food as stage property have become vestigial and it is the secular and culturally particular meanings which predominate.

Film directors were quick to grasp and exploit the dense shorthand o f food as a bearer o f meanings. In December 1895, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, inventors o f the Cinématographe, projected a program o f about ten films to a paying audience. One of the films on that program was Déjeuner

fictitiously named Lucie. “Lucie eats her porridge” may be the first food film!

Early film directors seized on food’s comic capabilities. Keystone plots often used food locales - restaurants, bakeries - as hooks for comic episodes, and Keystone pie throwing is today considered a staple o f the era. Across Charlie Chaplin’s entire body o f work, his films are remarkable for their frequent and ingenious food scenes: passengers eating from sliding soup plates in the violently rocking boat scene in The Immigrant (1917); Charlie munch­

ing hanging paper streamers mixed in with his spaghetti in City Lights (1931).

Food so completely pervades our lives that it is almost impossible to

remember a time, a relationship or place without some food memory attach­

ing itself. Just as food has the capacity to become an integral part o f your holiday map, or your everyday map, equally it has the capacity to become a vital part o f the dramaturgical strategy o f a play or film, most obviously as a structuring principle.

Food as Structuring Device

The enduring ritual of eating together is a persuasive demonstration of the human pleasure in patterned activity. The meal derives its power from being a repeated social act and as such assumes a stabilising and socially cohesive function which is seriously endangered when a meal is interrupted, let spoil or rejected. At one end of the gastronomical spectrum, anthropophagy is inextri­

cably bound up with possession and incorporation of our own species. At the other end of that spectrum eating disorders can be read as a kind of self-directed violence. Somewhere in the middle lurk the meal time tensions and dinner table arguments which erupt apparently out of nowhere, giving credence to research that finds most quarrels in the home take place at the table.

Food gives pattern and structure. Whenever an event has a ritual, cel­

ebratory, emotional, or commemorative significance, food plays a part. Food is used to provide dramatic focus because playwrights, scenarists and au­

diences instinctively understand it and its cultural patterns, from real life food situations. Food is not merely an inescapable “noise,” but a language, ca­

pable o f immediately connoting opulence, poverty, security, or obsessive­

ness. Food can provoke tensions - when there is not enough, or too much;

when it is unfamiliar, or too familiar; when it is overcooked or raw; when it is too plain or too rich; when too much is eaten or too little; when it is late or does not appear.

Food in First World countries is an important analogue o f the self; it

“places” and defines individuals as certainly as does their clothing. In a fundamental way, food determines meaning as a focus for activity and a context for dialogue. Food scenes provide the rationale and the conven­

tions for characters to confront each other. Such enforced physical intimacy

often enables implacable family ghosts o f the past to revisit. It is a truism

that people reveal more while engaging in the vulnerable act o f eating

together.

* * *

A sequence o f dinners shapes Stacy Title’s first feature The Last Supper (1995). The film is structured entirely by means o f a series o f ceremonial Sunday dinners with a new invited guest each week. When the first unin­

vited guest breaks the pattern (he is killed by the hosts for his red-neck beliefs) the purpose o f these dinners is altered. Instead o f being bleeding heart liberals who never take action the household decides to embark upon a campaign to rid society o f the more deplorable, bigoted, racist members by killing their dinner guests.

Food, cuisine and the satisfaction o f hungers are also organisational principles o f Woody A llen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) or Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), but in those films hunger may better be thought o f as part o f a wider political critique. They are also overlaid and complicated by other dominating concerns - gluttony, satiety, sex, cruelty, humiliation, disgust, excess. Similarly, in Alfonso A rau’s Like Water fo r

incidental; they determine the peripeties o f the film’s narrative.

Dinner plays an unambiguously structural role in Louis Malle’s philosophi­

cal autobiography My Dinner With Andre (1981). The dinner provides the structure, the context and pretext for the conversation between Wallace Shawn and the more loquacious Andre Gregory. As a director, Louis Malle often acknowledged the uniquely valuable proxemics the dinner table affords ac­

tors; as he said, “[...] it is at meals that people look at each other and react.”5

Eating in Restaurants

Meals and performances are both consumed in stages: course by course or scene by scene. Usually they are shared experiences. Neither lasts. They are both ephemeral and sensual pleasures possessing form, structure, patterning, balance, contrast and resulting, ideally, in satisfaction.

The notion o f meals as staged events and the performative aspects o f the staging o f dinners is fascinatingly developed by Margaret Visser in The

5 M alle On M alle, ed. Philip French (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 142.

R itu a ls o f D in n e r,6

In this schema, the dining table is a stage and the host a casting agent who must engage the right cast. The Western dining room table raises food waist-high and the individual seating both unites and separates the diners. Diners are evenly distributed and on view, while the table is a stage upon which the dishes enter and exit. In the past where banquets were theatrical events with processions and non-dining spectators, and seating was on one side of the table only (the other open to enable diners to watch the performance) the metaphor o f tables as stages was even stronger.

Gastronomists and chefs have frequently noted the theatricality o f the public dining room and kitchen. Parallels with onstage and backstage sug­

gest themselves. There are three necessary and focal elements of performativity: doing, behaving and showing. Food preparation, presenta­

tion and dining in public encompass all three o f these focal elements.

Doing pertains to the technical elements - all that governs the produc­

tion presentation and disposal o f food. To perform in the sense o f making and serving food involves materials, tools, techniques. Behaving refers to the social dimension. Erving Goffman’s notion of the presentation of self in everyday life or the dramaturgical model o f human behaviour is a useful touchstone here.7 Social life has a script, habits and customs: etiquette books, taboos about purity and pollution, proximity of diners, licensing laws, health regulations. The social conventions that govern food behaviour are seen in more visible and codified form in the world o f public eating places. Show­

ing refers to the overtly theatrical nature of food in the public arena. Public dining is and must be conscious o f itself as performance, as show.

Peter Greenaway pushes the nexus between performativity and public dining to the theatrical limit.

performs dining. The kitchen - backstage - is a church, a place of worship (the cook sits at a kind o f altar in a rounded apse area and the kitchen boy has a nimbus around his head and sings the 51 st Psalm) and the restaurant - on stage - is a place o f obscene display and ravening consumption.

The performative aspects o f timing and preparation are foregrounded in films like

and

which take us backstage into the kitchen. In restaurants, timing becomes performative the closer the food comes to the diner, that is, when the most elements are in suspen­

sion. The preparers must have each dish properly assembled and delivered in perfect condition and in synchrony with all the other dishes for the same table.

6 Visser, The Rituals o f Dinner, p. 130.

7 Erving G offman, The Presentation o f S e lf in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday &

Co., 1959).

On film, the pressure this creates energises a scene with a nervy edge, as in the late Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1986). This quest film takes Tampopo and Ooro on the search for the perfect noodle, to achieve high repute for Tampopo’s noodle house. Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) undergoes noodle preparation training - lifting large cauldrons of boiling water, jogging - coached by her

necessary to produce the ultimate bowl of noodles in record time. The noodle training involves exacting precision in such matters as the width of the sliced pork, the temperature of the soup, and the serving time. To reach the ideal time of less than three minutes Tampopo must increase her stamina and dexterity. Ooro times her with a stop-watch as she performs the drill repeat­

edly. This rigorous regimen is a measure of how seriously the Japanese noodle- eaters take their noodles. Snappy editing and short takes convey pace and pressure.

Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) calls atten­

tion to the theatre o f food in a film about the generational issues and dif­

ficulties between Taipei master chef Mr Chu (Sihung Lung) and his three daughters. The restaurant scenes demand finesse, perfection; but the chefs are growing jaded, old. Mr Chu has lost his sense o f taste and his taster, old Wen, dies one night in the restaurant. Chu is often called upon to solve culinary crises such as a potential disaster with the abalone soup during the Grand Palace banquet. In the food preparation scenes there is a heightened sense of performativity. The food handlers, especially Chu, are seen as highly competent performers - the camera captures their speed, skill, dexterity and precision - the cutting, filleting, basting are all elements crucial to the meal’s final appearance. The Grand Hotel scenes were filmed while an actual wedding banquet was being prepared. This location increases the sense of performance and pressure induced by such high prestige occasions. Lee shoots these scenes on steadicam, giving them a hectic documentary feel.

Restaurants

Whereas the domestic menu is integrally linked to the social structure

of the family, the menu in a restaurant lies outside the ordinary daily round

of food-taking. Quite apart from the food and the menus, the transactions

and negotiations that occur in restaurants are much more elaborate than anything to be found in the home.

In Dining Out, Australian sociologist Joanne Finkelstein argues:

The artifice o f the restaurant makes dining out a m annered exercise dis­

ciplined by customs that locate us in a fram ework o f prefigured actions.

Dining out allows us to act in im itation o f others, in accord with images, in response to fashions, out o f habit, w ithout need for thought or self­

scrutiny.8

In this book, Finkelstein expands on the theme o f the inordinate plea­

sure derived from the consumption o f food in the public domain. She believes that by dining out individuals show a “willingness to transpose the act of eating into a more socially complex and meaningful activity.”9 Going out to dinner is an event dominated by social images and the constraints o f fash­

ions and this makes the activity vulnerable to the commodification o f emotions.

Waiters

In a democratic society, the exchange between diner and waiter reveals a great deal about the expression of power between individuals. Whatever the level o f hotel or restaurant, waiters must always aim to meet the expectations of their customers. They do this, Gerald Mars and Michael Nicod explain in

involves concealing or underplaying activities, facts and motives which are incompatible with the impression they are attempting to put over.”10 The waiters are actors putting on a performance, but the need to disguise the discrepancy between what the audience (clientele) expects and what it gets varies according to the prestige scale of the hotel or restaurant.

Local ethnic restaurants are patronised because o f their food, low prices, undemanding protocol and also for the confirmation o f ethnic identity as

8 Joanne Finkelstein, D ining O ut (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), p. 5.

9 Finkelstein, D ining Out, p. 2.

10 Gerald M ars & M ichael N icod, The World o f Waiters (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 35-36.

either different or shared. In Proof (1990) Martin (Hugo Weaving), a blind photographer, is a regular at a Melbourne suburban Italian restaurant where no great effort is made to disguise the discrepancy between customer ex­

pectation and service received. The staff appear to use his blindness as an excuse not to “see” him or serve him. The reason for this is never explained, but becomes a source o f complex comedy which underlines the film’s pre­

occupation with manipulative cruelty.

Martin’s difference is explored through this dining episode. One night, he sits alone at a central table. He receives no service, until he positions the glass near the edge o f the table, lifts the bottle o f wine quite high and pointedly begins to pour his red wine onto the cloth. Noticing M artin’s

“mistake,” the waiter rushes to apologise profusely. While she is occupied, Martin orders “minestrone soup followed by fettuccine with cream and mushroom sauce and a side salad.” The service doesn’t improve.

Evident in more upmarket restaurants are commonly two kinds o f be­

haviour between waiter and diners noted by Mars and Nicod - “boundary- closed” and “boundary-open” transactions. The boundary-open transaction includes the waiter in the relationships at the table, while the boundary-closed kind essentially excludes the waiter. The most blatant version o f the bound­

ary-closed transaction is an “exclusion signal.” 11

Diners in restaurants give a special kind o f reading or performance to waiters in order to establish the kind o f transactions they wish to enter into.

Waiters are trained to pick up on these cues and signals. The performative and subtly motile nature o f such transactions makes them ideal material for scenarists and directors.

The Italian restaurant scene in the film Betrayal (1983) takes place in a high quality restaurant, a crucial marker in the scene’s repressed rage. The structure o f Betrayal, based on Harold Pinter’s play, is o f a love story told backwards. At all moments in the story the audience is in possession o f more information than the characters are. Jerry (Jeremy Irons) is a London liter­

ary agent. His best friend Robert (Ben Kingsley) is a publisher. At the time o f the restaurant scene Robert’s wife, Emma (Patricia Hodge) and Jerry have been having an affair for five years without Robert’s knowledge. Robert has just learned o f this long-standing affair when he meets Jerry for one o f their regular luncheons. Jerry has no idea that Robert knows about the affair and this discrepancy in knowledge is exploited by Pinter.

This public setting provides a partial rationale for Robert’s contained fury.

Robert displaces his anger at Jerry onto the waiter and in doing so they come close to outright confrontation. Jerry can only make sense o f Robert’s

11 Mars & N icod, The World o f Waiters, pp. 55-56.

2 - V ian d s...

peculiar behaviour by assuming he is drunk. The audience, but not Jerry, knows that Robert is projecting his anger onto this Italian waiter because he learned o f their affair his recent holiday in Venice with Emma. The Venetian American Express employee was the conduit o f bad news, since it was he who unwittingly handed to husband Robert, Jerry’s love letter to Emma. By an elaborate process o f displacement, Italian inefficiency is held responsible for the disclosure o f the affair.

In this context, silence and verbal outpouring are equivalent ways of masking strong unstated feelings. There are several factors at work here; the type o f restaurant does not lend itself to an unrestrained explosive outburst;

and the British reserve o f the characters also restricts their ability to vent fury. Display o f overt hostility is suppressed and the real agenda is at no time disclosed, although subtextually the topic remains Jerry and Emma (“It gives you both a thrill”). The diatribe against Italy, the waiter and the ser­

vice conceals his real anger against Jerry.

Peter Richardson’s Eat the Rich (1987) also features the theatre o f public dining, although the diners in Eat the Rich display none o f the restraint or sensitivity to the dictates o f protocol or atmosphere evident in Pinter’s setting, but then this is a very different kind o f restaurant. This is a black comedy about a black waiter, Alex, who gets fired from a restaurant appropriately named Bastard’s, an establishment catering for an obscenely rich clientele.

The film revels in the excesses it critiques. Bastard’s menu revels in its own tasteless prodigality, with dishes such as Leopard s head â la surprise and

Bastard’s customers thrive on waiter abuse - “We hate polite restaurants”

- and they match the menu in gross excess - “The baby panda - is it fried in honey?” Public regurgitation is acceptable Bastard’s etiquette; the cam­

era swishes to give us glimpses o f diners vomiting into their napkins. At one point we spot a passing trolley bedecked with a leopard’s head; at another we see a kitchen hand carry a “live” panda past ready to be cooked. After Alex is fired, he determines to get even with the rich Alex by organising a people’s uprising. They take over Bastard’s, rename it Eat the Rich, and start charging customers a fortune to do just that.

As Peter Greenaway observed to Marcia Pally “Food is a very good way to critique the people who eat it. Today’s dining critiques a society where consumerism has run riot.” 12

12 Marcia Pally, “Cinema as the Total Art Form: an Interview with Peter Greenaway,”

in Cineaste, Vol. xviii, No. 3 (1991), p. 45.

Failed Restaurants

There are few more disconsolate sights than an empty restaurant with staff eagerly awaiting their first customers. The men in Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) are full o f schemes and plans which are never realised. The ambi­

tions o f porcine and lecherous Aubrey (Timothy Spall) drive him to open a desperately underprepared French restaurant in Enfield (north London), aptly named the Regret Rien. Charisma-free and labouring under a miscon­

ception of his own image and talents, Aubrey plays the role o f genius eclectic chef. Kind-hearted friend Wendy (Alison Steadman) volunteers to help at the last minute since Aubrey hasn’t organised any staff. As they discuss his absurdly pretentious menu, Wendy is daunted by the fact that she will have to memorise so many implausible, preposterous dishes.

My favourite line in the film occurs as the evening wears on; still no customers have appeared, but Wendy and Aubrey try to bolster each other’s spirits. Then, with a desperate optimism that reinforces our sense o f her character, Wendy reassures Aubrey: “People like to have tea and then go out to dinner.” The restaurant fails to attract a single customer and Aubrey drinks himself into a stupor and smashes the place up.

These film makers, though different in cinematic style and aesthetic practice, all employ food as a primary organisational principle. The films discussed all show a consciousness o f the role of restaurants in the com­

mercially motivated structuring o f behaviour and emotions: the orchestrated, operatic public dining in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the

“try-hard” food combinations and alcoholic deflations o f Life is Sweet, the calculated ignorance o f the waiter and the attention-getting blind diner in

displacements and suppressions in Betrayal. Arlie Hochschild’s notion of

“the managed heart” and the commercialisation of human feelings is highly relevant here.13 All the scenes above show an awareness that in restaurants we manage ourselves socially and emotionally in order to match our aspi­

rations and fantasies to our managed commercial dining environments and our similarly managed companions.

13 A rlie R. Hochschild, The M anaged H eart (Berkeley: U niversity o f C alifornia Press, 1983).

Sexing Food on Film

The need for gastronomic completeness is articulated in Tampopo, a comedy about the endless perfecting o f just one dish, a bowl o f noodles.

Tampopo (1986) unravels as a series o f vignettes concerning a young

woman’s quest to research and perfect noodle-making and establish an excellent noodle house. There are interspersed scenes o f a gangster and his girl friend who are first encountered in a framing cinema scene, complain­

ing about a noisy potato crisp eater. The two are initially presented as members o f the audience for a film which then becomes Tampopo, and into which they are inexplicably transposed as characters enjoying a sexual relationship. Food plays a crucial role in their sexual encounters. The pair has an interesting repertoire o f foods for the purpose: they pass a raw egg yolk intact back and forth from open mouth to open mouth. After some time, the egg yolk “comes.” It spreads and oozes down the sides o f the lover’s cheeks. The breaking o f the yolk coincides with and signifies their mutual orgasm. No nudity, no explicit sex, and yet this scene is undeniably erotic.

At another point he covers his lover’s breasts in cream and licks it off; he applies a clear glass bowl - inside which is an Odori (dancing) shrimp - to her stomach. These live quivering blue shrimps are eaten in Japan, downed more or less whole and intact so that their movement may be felt “dancing”

in the stomach. In Tampopo the live shrimp performed its contortions under the glass dome; it obviously tickled.

When food, sex, and film are mentioned in the same sentence most people above a certain age still immediately think o f Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). Jenny Waters (Joyce Redman) tilts her head back, fixes Tom Jones (Albert Finney) with a Fieldingesque ogle, tips the oyster shell on her tongue, takes the oyster into her mouth but doesn’t swallow immediately. She brings it back onto her tongue so that it remains visible in a profile shot before she swallows it. Food on tongues is not always sexy (manners tell us to eat with our mouths closed), but the Tampopo and Tom Jones scenes are mouth wateringly sexy.

In both Tampopo and Tom Jones the “food sex” is mutually enjoyable

and in both there is an engaging lightness o f tone. Interestingly, in John

Osborne’s screenplay for Tom Jones Mrs Waters admires while Tom eats,

as in Fielding’s original. In the film they arouse each other’s curiosity, then

pace each other’s sexual interest by their parallel consumption o f a wide

range o f sensual or erotically coded foods. This tremendous eighteenth

century meal consists o f soup, shellfish (lobster), chicken legs (then the

wishbone), leg o f lamb, oysters, ripe pears, various wines. Richardson has translated the entirely verbal effect o f Fielding’s novel to an entirely visual scene by a series o f cuts between close-ups. The scene cuts back and forth between the two actors so that the mutuality and rhythm is built and sus­

tained.

Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally... (1989), is possibly the eighties comedy which did most to popularise associations between food and sex.

In the scene, Meg Ryan’s character Sally Allbright demonstrates to Harry (Billy Crystal) in a crowded diner how women fake orgasm. When an older female customer at the next table orders, her request, “I’ll have what she’s having,” connects the experience o f eating and sexual pleasure in a drily direct manner.

A close connection between food and sex is not difficult to explain if it is assumed that early in the evolution o f the human species males and females were brought together by the two basic necessities for survival: food and procreation. Today many people eat without feeling hungry and have sex without procreating, so this fundamental connection between eating and sex is obscured. The conjunction o f food and sex may have a physiological as well as a psychological basis. Peter Farb and George Armelagos find a close parallel in the way the nervous system deals with both hunger and sexual excitement:

A particularly sensitive nerve structure known as “K rause’s end bulbs”

is found in the sex organs (the clitoris and the tip o f the penis) and in the m outh (the tongue and the lips). Some neurophysiologists see a cor­

respondence between the sensory surfaces o f the sex organs and the taste buds in the m outh, w hich m ay explain w hy sexual desire and a delicious arom a both cause the m outh to w ater.14

* * *

Old-fashioned, heterosexual wisdom held that the way to a m an’s heart is through his stomach. Vicki-Ann Hurley, the desperate elder sister in Australian director Shirley Barrett’s Camera D ’Or winner Love Serenade (1996), takes this adage seriously. New arrival to sleepy, rural Sunray, DJ Ken Sherry (George Shevstov), no sooner slams the boot o f his personal­

ised number-plated car than Vicki (Rebecca Frith) appears on his doorstep with a fresh fish which he rejects, a chicken casserole which remains uneaten while he eats out, and finally oxtail stew which does the trick. Meanwhile

14 Peter Farb & G eorge A rm elagos, C onsuming P assions (Boston: H oughton M ifflin, 1980), p. 87.

Ken Sherry encourages Dimity Hurley (Miranda Otto) in regular “loneliness easing” sessions, frequently by inviting her to “breakfast.” “Odd,” fish- obsessed Dimity is no cook but she competes by bringing Ken Sherry late- night take-away Beef in Black Bean Sauce, his favourite dish from the local Chinese restaurant where she works. As Ken Sherry meaningfully observes

“Everyone seems very concerned that I eat.”

Love Serenade exploits food as sexual bait. For Vicki-Ann, a woman’s

success or failure in marriage comes down to a well-stocked trousseau and an ability to cook. Vicki-Ann fabricates an ex-wife who couldn’t boil an egg as the reason for the failure o f Ken Sherry’s previous marriage. She fan­

tasises to her junior at the salon about the extravagant praise Ken lavished on her chicken casserole, a triumph she coyly underplays by admitting that she “just opened a couple o f cans.”

* * *

In films espousing or enacting forms o f sexual experimentation food no longer appears as a meal but is broken up into discrete iconic items - raw egg, cream and Odori shrimp in Tampopo, and ham bones in Jamón

Jamón Jamón (1991) is an erotic black comedy-melodrama about sex and

food, intended to mirror Spanish society in transition. Directed by José Juan Bigas Luna, the film parodies the eroticising power o f consumerism. De­

spite a landscape dotted with Spanish machismo billboards covered in black bull’s giant cojones or post-Franco images of a crotch shot of sexy Samson brand briefs, this fast-paced melodrama is actually driven by female desire.

Its combination o f vast improbabilities and lurid melodrama, satire and raunch situates it close to Pedro Almodovar’s anarchic spirit: sex shows the ridiculous in human nature.

In Jamón Jamón Spanish sexual and eating habits are closely linked.

Luna’s couples sample each other’s anatomy and comment on the flavour.

Silvia, who cooks omelettes, worries about the taste o f her breasts and wants

José Luis to reassure her that they don’t taste like potato omelettes. Later,

she asks Raul “What do they taste like?” To Raül, her breasts taste o f “Ham,

omelette, onion, garlic,” but there are other compensations. Ungovernable

hungers, gastronomic excesses, and other scatalogical diversions (a nude

bullfight, garlic up the bum o f a pig) prepare the way for the final ironic

ending, a battle to the death with sides o f ham as cudgels. In this violent

climactic duel, Raül and José Luis, rivals for Silvia, substitute ham bones

for clubs in what Marsha Kinder sees as a parodie reproduction o f Goya’s

famous painting “Duel with Cudgels.” True, the men in Jamón Jamón are

mostly “the sum total o f their stomachs and genitals,” 15 but the film’s una­

bashed conjunction o f the appetites o f food and sex is one o f the liberating qualities o f the film.

Bulimic Nicola (Jane Horrocks), the grating-voiced daughter o f Wendy and Andy in Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet has an aversion to anything she perceives as conventional - she labels everything, but always schematically or hyperbolically. Nicola’s slogans are scattergun and unsynthesised - “Tory,”

“capitalist,” “sentimentalist,” “fascist,” “sexist pig” - part o f her screen to keep meaningful communication with others at bay. In order to enjoy sex she must have Nutella chocolate paste smeared all over her torso and breasts.

Nicola’s lover (David Thewlis) is a reluctant participant. When Nicola appears with her scarf (so she can be tied to the bed) her lover looks sin­

gularly uninterested. They begin, but he has soon had his fill: “I ’m full up, I can’t eat any more.”

Unlike the enthusiastic food-sex scenes in Tampopo, Tom Jones or

boyfriend and an agitated act o f self-alienation by Nicola. Nicola is inauthentic, so too is her insistence on the chocolate smearing ritual.

Nicola’s taste for chocolate - smearing sex and the rejection o f “boring”

normal sex is an extension o f her bingeing self-abuse. Even her voice seems connected to her bingeing and sexuality; as she gags on her candy bars but continues to stuff them in, so her voice sounds as if it is choking on itself, afraid to be a voice.

Nicola will only engage in “normal” sex as a trade-off for her lover’s participation in the smearing and eating ritual. The lover does not enjoy the smearing and eating - he calls her a “pervert” - but grudgingly participates, in the hope that he will connect with her. This is not to imply that her boyfriend is completely “centred” either; he “chews gum ceaselessly and almost manically,” a habit which, for Linda Kouvaras, indicates “his own difficulties in the oral/verbal realm.” 16 We never see these two communi­

cate - the last scene shows the two sisters on the back steps in a tentative but open conversation, a hint that Nicola may lower her screens, a qualified Mike Leigh ending.

The title Like Water fo r Chocolate implies a sexual readiness; choco­

late is added to boiling water. The sexual consummation o f Tita and Pedro’s relationship, when it finally happens, burns down the house with them in it. The image o f simmering, burning sexuality, a state o f arousal produced

15 M arsha Kinder, “Jam ón Jam ón (review ),” Film news, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1993), p. 21.

16 Linda K ouvaras, “Two sw eets-sm earing scenes in the film Life is Sw eet and the contem porary fem inist opera Sw eet Death, ” a paper given at the M usicological Society o f A ustralia XIX N ational Conference, U niversity o f M elbourne, A ustralia, 1996.

specifically by food, is integral to the film. On the anniversary o f Tita’s position as the household’s head chef, Pedro presents her with a bouquet o f roses. Mama Elena orders her to get rid o f them. She crushes the roses, pricking her fingers on the thorns; her blood drips onto the petals. Tita cannot bear to waste the roses so she adapts an old recipe to produce Quail in Rose Petal Sauce. Mama Elena, Pedro, Rosaura, Tita and Gertrudis consume the meal, and, as the voice-over narrator informs us:

A strange alchem ical phenom enon seem ed to have occurred. N ot only Tita’s blood but her whole being had dissolved into the rose sauce, into the quails and into every arom a o f the m eal. T h at’s how she invaded Pedro’s body, voluptuously, ardently fragrant and utterly sensual. They had discovered a new way o f communicating. Tita was the sender and Pedro the recipient. Gertrudis was the lucky one within whom this sexual en­

counter was synthesised through the m eal.17

Everyone who eats Tita’s dish is seized by sexual desire, but only Gertrudis, Tita’s other sister, actualises the desire. She tries to cool herself, but her body exudes so much heat that the wooden panels o f the outdoor shower burst into flames. A villista, distracted mid-battle by the scent, gallops in, sweeps her up, and Gertrudis is carried off in an erotic encounter on horseback. Meanwhile Pedro and Tita have had to settle for sex by osmo­

sis. The intensity o f the bond between eater and eaten in Like Water fo r

Food Taboos, Pollution and Revenge

Food is in such intimate contact with the body - we take it from the outside world into our bodies - the alimentary canal is a site o f receptivity for food’s flavours, smells, textures. We trust the people whose cooking we eat; we trust their hygiene, their judgements about hot and cold, spicy and bland, sweet and sour, raw, cooked, and putrid.

l?The film ’s voice-over narration is very close to the w ords o f the novel, Laura Esquivel’s L ike Water f o r Chocolate (London: Black Swan, 1993), p. 49. The significant difference is that instead o f “ G ertrudis w as the lucky one,” in the novel it is “and poor G ertrudis the m edium

When food is deliberately destroyed or defiled the product o f effort is spumed, a basic social contract between preparer and eater is transgressed.

The link between food preparers and those who eat their food regularly is seen by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power as creating a sufficiently strong bond as to constitute a definition o f family.18 When this strongest o f all possible links is perverted or rejected, the person responsible is making a statement on the most fundamental level.

Food and Revenge

The everyday and real physical presence o f food makes it ideal as a medium of revenge. So, too, do food’s protean qualities, its ability to trans­

form or mask certain ingredients. Food is often enlisted to represent other things. Its inherent malleability and capacity for semiotic confusion hints at a slipperiness, an untrustworthiness, an alchemical side o f the food person­

ality which again make it ideal for a person intent on creative revenge through everyday means. Food is no longer a pleasure, a sensual delight; food is dangerous.

Revenge involves being satisfied through retaliation or to exact retribu­

tion for an action, perceived wrong-doing or insult. Acts o f food revenge are frequently characterised by the conflation o f taboo breaking with the desire for revenge and retribution. The very nature o f revenge evokes the notion o f taboo-breaking - the rupturing o f social sanctions intended to protect individuals from danger, threat and pollution, and the group from outsiders. Fouling, polluting, or contaminating poisoning food or failing to observe the rules about what may be eaten and what may not all constitute taboo breakage and therefore make the perfect means for revenge.

18 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962), p. 221.

Revenge by Recipe

Tears are a form o f excreta, but not as repellent or as polluting as saliva, spit, snot or phlegm. Tears are freely running as opposed to slimy and therefore do not provoke the same repugnance as spit. Tita, the main char­

acter in Like Water fo r Chocolate is bom in a flood o f tears on the kitchen table and subsequently learns the culinary secrets from the servants. Food becomes both a magical gift and a weapon in her hands. She falls in love with Pedro, a young neighbour who asks for her hand. Elena, Tita’s mother refuses and offers him her eldest daughter Rosaura instead. He accepts so that he can remain in the same household as Tita. Forced to make the wedding cake (Chabela Wedding Cake with Fondant Icing) for Pedro’s marriage to her sister Rosaura, she cries into the mixture: those who eat the cake cry uncontrollably and are seized by nausea and vomiting in public, which causes humiliation and embarrassment to the afflicted.

Only Tita escapes the effects o f the cake. Rosaura is forced to abandon her place o f honour and, worse still, slips over in vomit fouling her dress before spewing out noisy mouthfuls o f vomit before Pedro’s horrified eyes.

Both Rosaura and Mama Elena are convinced that Tita had deliberately ruined Rosaura’s wedding by adding an emetic to the cake.

There is no suggestion either in the novel or film that Tita’s power over her ingredients is consciously intended to sabotage the wedding. Rather she seems capable o f involuntary culinary possession, or alchemy. In cooking true to her heart, she infuses her cake and her eaters with the same mel­

ancholy, frustration and yearning for the loves o f their lives as she is being sentenced to endure forever. The manifestations o f these yearnings in the wedding guests, however, are sudden, instantly debilitating and publicly humiliating. Tita transmutes the form and impact o f her culinary combina­

tions. By means o f spontaneous sympathetic magic she transforms the “ter­

rible aching in her heart” into an ingredient as potent and essential as the

180 eggs, the apricot paste or the granulated sugar.

Intercultural Revenge

In Australian film Ay a (1991) directed by Solrun Hoaas food is the concrete correlative o f Aya’s difference and otherness as a Japanese war bride married to an Australian soldier Frank (Nicholas Eadie) and living in Australia in the fifties and sixties.

There are two intercultural characters in Aya, Mac (Chris Haywood) and Aya (Eri Ishida) - intercultural tensions are explored by means o f food. Aya is a border citizen; to Australians she is Japanese; to her family she is something o f a traitor (she does not return to Japan for a visit, even after she has a son). The film charts the disintegration o f Aya’s and Frank’s marriage, and ultimately the literal and figurative scars Aya bears.

We first see the sea-urchin as a benign image when Aya is walking on the beach by herself at the beginning o f the film. It becomes an important element in the final confrontation. There is a menacing electricity when Frank tells Aya that the sea urchins would not taste as good in Japan, that she would be disappointed back home. Frank is trying to kill any o f Aya’s remaining illusions by suggesting that things were better in the past, under the Occu­

pation when he was in charge. Now, unemployed since his car accident, and with Aya supporting the family, the power balance has shifted.

Much as their friend Mac tries to defuse the explosive situation between Aya and Frank, the intention is thwarted when Frank’s bitterness overflows onto Mac, a long-standing friend, and fluent Japanese speaker. M ac’s knowl­

edge and insider status in Japanese culture - once a source o f admiration - now distances and alienates the two old friends. Mac has bought them special treats: sea-urchin and snapper for dinner. In an irrational rage Frank throws the sea-urchin at Aya’s face as she works at the sink. Aya picks up the stainless steel toaster and looks at her wound - a bloody reflection in the shiny appliance.

The characters o f Aya and Mac are reminders that within every ethnic or racial group, there are many people living difficult multiple identities.

These people enact and express cultural fractures, ideological contradictions,

and crumbling ethnic myths. They engage the intercultural not as something

settled or as, hoped - for panacea, but as a problematic.

Gourmet Revenge

The final revenge in Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her

out the idea that revenge, a kind o f wild justice, is one way o f making sense o f the world. The ultimate revenge act, forcing the husband to eat the penis o f her lover - “after all you know where it’s been” - is performed. Peter Greenaway has often referred to the cannibalistic tendencies o f late twen­

tieth century existence, as a kind o f logical extension o f the obscenities of consumerism. One’s “gut reaction” to the film is nausea and disgust - which for me it increases with every viewing. The character Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) disgusts all the other characters and the audience is disgusted by the boundlessness o f his linguistic, behavioural and scatalogical excesses.

It is a film which confronts us with corporeality, violence and excrement.

There are two revenge killings in the film - Albert’s killing o f Michael and Georgina’s killing o f Albert. They are very different kinds o f revenge, though both connected with food. The lovers Georgina and Michael are bonded by food - though seated at different tables they are served the same dish, whereas Georgina and Albert never eat the same dish.

When Albert and Mitchell eviscerate Michael in the archive they cram his favourite book down his throat page by page. At a suggestion o f Mitchell eating Michael’s bollocks, Albert baulks:

I don’t w ant this to look like a sex m urder - it’s what it is - a revenge killing - an affair o f the heart, a crime passionel. I want no evil gossip spread around about me. They are going to say this was a dignified re­

venge killing - th ey ’re going to adm ire the style: “He was stuffed and A lbert liked good food.” They might even smile. “He was stuffed with the tools o f his trade — he was stuffed with books.”

Later, degouging soft flesh from shell fish as he associates himself with history’s famous seafood gourmands, Albert insists that he doesn’t want the evidence destroyed; he wants Georgina to see it. It is significant that Albert is so concerned that it be perceived in the public sphere as a crime o f passion.

Albert, the boorish bullying husband and thief, roars and rants up to the

moment o f his own extinction. The silence o f the last scene is strange indeed

after his unremitting verbal and physical bullying. Georgina reenacts a

revenge tragedy and recuperation o f honour. It is an annihilation, but a

moment she must have in order to achieve retribution. Georgina’s final

success is two-fold: she forces Albert to eat her dead lover’s cooked flesh

but also makes Albert eat his own words. That is to say she at last reduces him to silence. With “Knowing how you like to eat. Knowing how you like to gorge yourself,” she is inviting him to share her lover - a seemingly companionate gesture. This time, however, Albert will eat alone. The hor­

ror o f it reduces him to a grunting preverbal state.

Georgina has chosen Richard as the cook because he has a reputation for a wide range o f experimental dishes. She unveils Richard’s work with a heightened sense o f staging. Albert vomits. At last, after humiliating and brutalising others, he experiences the full horror o f abject disgust. Then, shaking pale and sweaty, takes a small fork full o f flesh. As the camera pans around the viewer is at eating level; there is no safe distance here. Georgina has tolerated all manner o f humiliation, violence, bullying and terror; in approving o f her extreme vengeance, we are rehearsing our own. From the moment o f her interview with Richard to convince him to cook Michael, to the film ’s end, we see her simultaneously in states o f mourning and revenge - both ways o f making loss significant.

Food is not merely the medium o f contamination and retribution - it is the terrain over which these primal impulses and wars rage. Revenge is both a retrieval o f the past, suggests John Kerrigan throughout his book Revenge

characters use food as their means o f attempting to retrieve the past in either a spontaneous, unconscious or extravagantly deliberate and staged fashion.

Common to all - Tita’s wedding cake, the projectile sea-urchin and Georgina’s roasted, garnished lover is the fact that revenge, like cuisine, is essentially aesthetic: it has to be composed, arranged and performed.

19 John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy (Oxford & N ew York: C larendon Press, 1996).

Stephen Tapscott

M.I.T., Cam bridge, M A

“You’ve had Worse Things in Your Mouth”:

Recipes and Their Narratives

A “recipe” is transactional; the name comes from the same word as

“receipt,” something given and something “received” - information about ingredients and method, one assumes - and the information stored.' Older Americans still pronounce the word as “receipt”: what we accept when we accept the “gift” is the information - or, in some less direct way, the fact of the information, the sensual-memory or anecdote for which the “receipt”

is a metonymy or summation.

But what information? Cookbooks in America tend to be o f two types, those that don’t tell stories and those that do - those for which the infor­

mation is data and those for which the informative impulse is anecdote, or narrative.

It might be more germane to say that the first type is an order o f books that “tell” stories indirectly, or inadvertently. The French model derives, for our genealogy, from Escoffier (“the great codifier,” Julia Child calls him) who in Le guide culinaire (1903) and L'aide-memoire culinaire (1910) classifies dishes, describes them even as a function o f their architectonics, and gives instructions for how to prepare - to “create” - them. What we read these days when we read Escoffier, or Antonin Carême (1875), tends to be cultural history deflected: we can see patterns o f economic, social, tech­

nological production and consumption; in the distribution o f luxury and labor

1 See M. F. K. Fisher, A Cordiall Water (New York: Little, Brown, 1981) [North Point, 1981],

we examine class-assumptions; in the distribution o f ingredients we learn who in this culture got how much protein, and in the spices we learn pat­

terns o f trade and a history o f “taste.”

But the American encounter with French models has always been some­

what mediated. We rely on the inventions o f William Kitchener, the British physician who in his 1816 cookbook was the first to measure ingredients specifically; we trust Eliza Acton, the first to estimate timing and oven- temperature exactly (1845).2 Throughout the nineteenth-century at least, American cookery has tended toward the functional, the non-narrative, as if a political “democracy” resisted “aristocratic” formations. American domestic culture, o f course, was strongly influenced by movements o f “lo- cal’Vdomestic political economy (Mrs. Breton’s Book o f Household Manage­

ment, 1861), “domestic science,” and “home economics”; there’s a streak

of moralism in earlier American cookbooks, a Puritan functionalism. Con­

sider the recipe for Eggs Gruel from Lydia Child’s The Frugal Housewife (1832) (Appendix 1). Typical o f early American cookery books, the format is that o f a single paragraph o f unstoried prose: it is language used referentially, functionally, as befits the functionality o f the dish itself, in a collection that is a handbook o f recipes and remedies. The Joy o f Cooking (1st ed. 1931), renders recipes as processes: a list of ingredients, a sequence o f steps to recreate the same results. (Later editions o f the JofC begin by locating food groups by nutritional value - a subchapter on proteins, one on carbohydrates, and so on.)

For recent American cultural history, the great model o f the unstoried recipe book is Julia Child’s Mastering the Art o f French Cooking, the book that located, demystified, and “translated” French cooking for the Ameri­

can palette - and the American kitchen. The practical charm, the earthy pleas­

ure, and the no-nonsense approach o f her subsequent cooking-series on television were there from the start; when Child, a native Californian, ac­

companied her American husband to France, in the foreign service. The an­

ecdote o f her enlightenment has taken on a kind o f mythic status for Ameri­

can amateur cooks - the encounter when, on first landing in France in November o f 1948, Julia and Paul Child had their first French meal, at La Couronne in Rouen (oysters on the half shell, sole meunière, a decent Chablis), and the romance began. “Intrigued, challenged, astounded by the sensual experience and also by the attention to technique, by the technol­

ogy o f cooking gadgets, by the intelligence and attention paid the prepara­

tion and consumption o f food and drink, she began to learn French in order

2 See Betty Fussel, M asters o f American Cookery (New York: N ew York Times Book Co., 1983), pp. 60-67.