GASTRONOMICA THE JOURNAL OF FOOD AND CULTURE

10:1

W I NTE R 2010

W I NTER 2 010

celebrat ing

10

years

of gast ronomica

$ 13 US A $ 14 CA NAD A

Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat. Gertrude Stein

Winter 2010 | Volume 10 Number 1 | Published Quarterly From the Editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v
borborygmus

Rumblings from the World of Food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

cartoons

Something Tastes Funny: Toasting Ten Years of Gastronomica | David Sipress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

orts and scantlings

Gastrobamica | Mark Morton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

feast for the eye

An Apt and Noble Gift: Gorhams Rebekah Pitcher | Amy Miller Dehan . . . . . . 14
poem

On Curing Images and Pork | Tung-Hui Hu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

memoir

Eating White | Geoff Nicholson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

gender

Why Are There No Great Women Chefs? | Charlotte Druckman . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

rituals

Rites of Passage in Italy | Carol Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

forum

Food Porn | Anne E. McBride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

slice of life

Sweet Tooth Nation: Fabrico Prprio and the Portuguese Pastry | Frances Baca. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
fashion

Another Form of Her Genius: Lee Miller in the Kitchen | Becky E. Conekin . . . 50

editor in chief

Darra Goldstein, Williams College

managing editor

Jane Canova, Williams College

advisory board

Warren Belasco, University of Maryland Darrell Corti, Corti Brothers Grocers and Wine Merchants Daphne Derven, New Orleans Food and Farm Network Barry Estabrook, Food Writer and Editor Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Sociology, Columbia University Carol Field, Culinary Historian Paul Freedman, History, Yale University Susan Tax Freeman, Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Performance Studies, New York University Rachel Laudan, Food Historian
investigations

Im sorryit seems were out of the poularde demi deuil avec souf aux pinards. May I offer you instead a fascinating article about that dish in Gastronomica?

Harvey Levenstein, History, McMaster University Jan Longone, Clements Library, University of Michigan Harold McGee, The Curious Cook Sidney Mintz, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University Anne Murcott, Sociology of Health, South Bank University Marion Nestle, New York University Jill Norman, Publishing Consultant Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University Joan Reardon, Culinary Historian Phyllis Richman, The Washington Post Deborah Rothschild, Williams College Museum of Art Laura Shapiro, Historian and Food Writer Jim Stark, Film Producer Ardath Weaver, North Carolina Arts Council
design director

Jean-Baptiste Labat and the Buccaneer Barbecue in Seventeenth-Century Martinique | Suzanne Toczyski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Conviviality in Catalonia | A.F. Robertson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
archive

Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food | Lynda K. Bundtzen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
consumption

Like Your Labels? | Michele Field. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

americana

Moxie: A Flavor for the Few | Robert Dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

identity

Culinary Nationalism | Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Silver Lining: Building a Shared Sudanese Identity through Food | A.V. Crofts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
futurism

Frances Baca, www.fbacadesign.com

www.gastronomica.org

Losing the Space Race | Kay Sexton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

photographs

The Color of Hay: The Peasants of Maramures | Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin and H. Woods McLaughlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

prose

A Pinch of Finch | Toni Mirosevich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

terroir

Discovering Terroir in the World of Chocolate | Bill Nesto. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

design

Guinomi | Allen S. Weiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

chefs page

Executive Pastry Chef, Washington, D.C. | Bill Yosses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

review essays

Aesthetics and Alchemy in the Contemporary Kitchen | Joanne Molina . . . . . . 145 Food Enigmas, Colonial and Postcolonial | Sidney W. Mintz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
the bookshelf

Books in Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155

lagniappe

Collard Leaves for Misery | Ardath Weaver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Cover: Farhad Moshiri, Blood Fountain, 2006, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York.

Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (issn 15293262, e-issn 1533-8622) is published quarterly by University of California Press, Journals and Digital Publishing, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, ca 94704. Periodicals postage paid at Berkeley, ca, and additional mailing ofces. Postmaster: Send address changes to Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, University of California Press, Journals and Digital Publishing, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, ca 947041223. E-mail: customerservice@ ucpressjournals.com. Instructions for authors can be found at www.ucpressjournals.com. For submission guidelines see www.gastronomica.org/contribute.html. See www.ucpressjournals.com for single issue and subscription orders, and claims information. Domestic claims for nonreceipt of issues should be made within 90 days of the mail date; overseas claims within 180 days. Mail dates can be checked at: www.ucpressjournals.com/ucpress.asp?page=ReleaseSchedule. University of California Press does not begin accepting claims for an issue until thirty (30) days after the mail date. Inquiries about advertising can be sent to adsales@ ucpressjournals.com. For complete abstracting and indexing coverage for the journal, please visit www.ucpressjournals.com. All other inquiries can be directed to customerservice@ucpressjournals.com. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy article content beyond fair use (as specied in Sections 107 and 108 of the u.s. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specic clients, is granted by The Regents of the University of California for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specied fee through the Copyright Clearance Center (ccc), www.copyright. com. To reach the cccs Customer Service Department, phone (978) 750-8400 or write to info@copyright.com. For permission to distribute electronically, republish, resell, or repurpose material, and to purchase article offprints, use the cccs Rightslink service, available on Caliber at http://caliber.ucpress.net. Submit all other permissions and licensing inquiries through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp, or via e-mail: journalspermissions@ ucpress.edu. Printed by Allen Press, Lawrence, ks on Forest Stewardship Council-certied paper. 2010 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

from the editor darra goldstein

Feast in a Time of Famine

As Gastronomica embarks on its tenth year of publication, I reflect with pleasure on all it has become.

As i sat down to write this , Gastronomicas tenth anniversary letter, news of the terrible earthquake in Haiti reached me. And I faltered. Estimates of fty thousand dead. No food or water or medicine. Misery on a vast scale. How could I celebrate a journal about food in the face of such devastation? Devastation not only in Haiti but throughout the world. Isnt it wrong, or at least frivolous, to feast on gorgeous images and prose when others are suffering? The answer is complicated, as I hope that Gastronomica has shown. Depriving ourselves of food and food for thought does not reduce world hunger. Food magazines can and do celebrate the good life, but they really ought to do more, especially now, when food issues are among the most pressing global concerns. Thinking deeply about food allows us to think more deeply about the world, and from its inception that is what Gastronomica has sought to promote. We try to make readers aware of the power of food, its social and cultural relevance, its enormous emotional weight. But at the same time we dont want to overlook foods sensual attributes, its colors and textures, its beauty and memory-stirring tastes. We wish equally to celebrate and investigate, to relish and rail. Through vivid imagery and evocative writing, we hope to show how food remains at the core of human community, even in times of political turmoil and disaster. If you think about it, sharing is one of the least explicable behaviors, at least in Darwins or Adam Smiths terms. When food is scarce, why give any away? If we are all competitors, why waste time sharing stories or valuable information? Sharinggiving of ourselves, celebrating or commiserating together, breaking bread or news, reaching out across bordersthat is what a food magazine, particularly a nonprot journal, should be about. Gastronomica launched in February 2001, at a time of unease in the world, the beginning of a new millennium when wars both cultural and actual raged across the globe. Perhaps because the rst issue appeared amid such disharmony, Gastronomica has always sought to consider the ways in which food can unite. Over the years we have also examined the myriad means by which food is manipulated and manipulates usall too often to ill effect. While food is necessary to

sustain life, it is also crucial to understanding how we live. By giving voice to writers and artists who think about foods complex meanings, Gastronomica has, in its own small way, helped to establish food studies as an important mode of inquiry. Each issue has, I hope, also demonstrated the centrality of food in our lives and suggested ways in which food can be a force for positive change. Anniversaries are a time to think back to beginnings. I remember Gastronomicas conception, the moment when I decided to create a publication that would unite the worlds of academic and popular writingin part to pull together the disparate strands of my own life. I hoped to establish a place where all of us with an interest in foodscholars, professionals, and passionate amateurscould enter into dialogue and nd release from the isolation of our own particular patterns of thought; where the twain between the cerebral and the sensual, the disturbing and the silly, could nally meet. Now, as the journal embarks on its tenth year of publication, I reect with pleasure on all it has become. And Im grateful. As I write this letter, I look out on the snowy, isolated landscape of my remote New England town. But thanks to Gastronomica, my world has grown large. The journal carries me around the globe, at least guratively. Through this issue alone I have traveled to Sudan, Romania, Catalonia, and Martinique, Japan, France, Italy, England, and Portugal. I have met, and often befriended, the most interesting people. I get plenty of thanks for all that Gastronomica provides. Now it is my turn to thank all of you for the gifts that editing the journal has bestowed upon me: great writing, beautiful artwork, wonderful new acquaintances, and blessed encouragement. It is my hope that as Gastronomica approaches its teenage years, it will continue to offer striking images and prose, to explore moments both joyous and dark in our encounters with food. I offer this special tenth anniversary issue and photo supplement (put together by Gastronomicas brilliant design director, Frances Baca) as both a culmination of our rst decade and a taste of things to come. I hope you will join me in raising a glass to our good fortune.g

Contributors

frances baca is Design Director of Gastronomica. After completing an mfa in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, Frances established her own studio specializing in book and publication design. A selection of her work can be viewed online at www. fbacadesign.com. She lives and works in San Francisco, California, an excellent place in which to indulge both her eye and her appetite. lynda k. bundtzen is Herbert H. Lehman Professor of English and Womens and Gender Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is the author of two books on Sylvia Plath: Plaths Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process and The Other ARIEL . She is currently nishing a book on Ted Hughes, tentatively titled The Reluctant Confessor: Ted Hughes Before and After Birthday Letters. becky e. conekin holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center, Yale University. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is the author of numerous publications, including The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain. Conekin is currently writing Pretty Hard Work: A History of Fashion Modelling in London & Paris, ca. 19471970, with grants from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Foundation. a.v. crofts, a regular contributor to Saveur magazines The

charlotte druckman writes about food and design. After editorial

work at Town & Country and Food & Wine, she opted for freelance living, which allows her to wander the world and discover new restaurants, ingredients, and culinary talent. Her work has appeared in Gourmet, T: The New York Times Magazine, Departures, Domino, and Travel & Leisure.
priscilla parkhurst ferguson teaches sociology at Columbia University, where she is especially happy teaching a course on Food and the Social Order. She is the author of Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (2004), articles on topics ranging from boiled beef and chocolate to the Guide Michelin, and an edition of Les Bons Plats de France (2008) by Pampille. Ferguson is immensely pleased to have joined Gastronomicas editorial board. carol field has been writing about Italy and Italian food for more

than thirty-ve years. She has written six prizewinning books about Italy, including In Nonnas Kitchen, Italy in Small Bites, Celebrating Italy, and The Italian Baker, and has won international prizes in Australia and Italy for her journalism and books. In 2005 Field was named a Cavaliere of the Italian Republic.
michele field writes about cradle to cradle protocols in both

Daily Fare, showcases her interest in gastroethnography in the blog Sneeze! at www.pepperforthebeast.com. She holds a clinical faculty appointment in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses on strategic communication, storytelling, and digital media.
amy miller dehan is the Associate Curator of Decorative Arts

food and manufacturing cycles. Her most recent essay investigated the environmental dangers created by sweeteners like sucralose; she believes that labels explain far less than consumers need to know. Her previous writing for Gastronomica explored some likely ways that climate change will affect familiar tastes.
tung-hui hu is the author of three collections of poetry: Greenhouses, Lighthouses (forthcoming), Mine (Ausable, 2007), and The Book of Motion (University of Georgia, 2003). He teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is working on a sound installation titled The Last Time You Cried (lasttimeyoucried.com). tonwen jones studied illustration at Central Saint Martins College and recently graduated from Brighton University with an ma in sequential design and illustration. She has an extensive collection of magazine supplements dating back to the 1960s that she uses to create her imagery by cut and paste. She also likes to draw intricate pen-and-ink trees, shrubbery, and abstract patterns, which often appear in her collage work.

and Design at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Her publications include Outside the Ordinary: Contemporary Art in Glass, Wood, and Ceramics from the Wolf Collection (Ohio University Press, 2009) and contributions to Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors (Ohio University Press, 2003) and The Magazine Antiques.
robert dickinson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he works

for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, writes, runs, and plays the banjo. He also enjoys the occasional sip from a frosty glass of Moxie. Dickinson graduated from the University of Notre Dame and holds masters degrees in both English literature and public administration from the University of Tennessee.

anne e. mc bride is the director of the Experimental Cuisine

mark morton is the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of

Collective at New York University and of the Center for Food Media at the Institute of Culinary Education. She is working toward a Ph.D. in food studies at nyu, focusing her research on the interrelations among nation, profession, and cuisine. With chef Franois Payard, she wrote Chocolate Epiphany and Bite Size, and with ices Rick Smilow, Culinary Careers (Clarkson Potter, 2010).
kathleen laraia mc laughlin received her mfa in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University. At the turn of the millennium she began photographing peasant life in the Iza and Mara valleys of Maramures , Romania. Her photos have been exhibited nationally and won many awards (see www.klmphoto.com). She teaches photography in Los Angeles. h. woods mc laughlin holds an mfa in Screenwriting from the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. The recipient of the Sloan Award for his screenplay on Archimedes, McLaughlin now melds his skills as a computer programmer with Machinima, a type of cutting-edge lmmaking. He collaborated with his wife on The Color of Hay: Maramures , Romania (forthcoming, 2010). sidney w. mintz is the author of Sweetness and Power (1985),

Culinary Curiosities (Insomniac Press, 2004) and The Lovers Tongue: A Merry Romp through the Language of Love and Sex (Insomniac Press, 2003). He teaches at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he specializes in early modern literature and learning and teaching through technology. More information about his books is available at www.wordhistories.com.
bill nesto is a Master of Wine and a senior lecturer at Boston University, where he teaches about wine and gastronomy at the School of Hospitality and at Metropolitan College. He is a contributing editor to Sant magazine and a regular contributor to Massachusetts Beverage Business. Nesto lectures widely and judges wine competitions; he also writes and lectures about chocolate. geoff nicholson is the author of numerous books of ction and

nonction, including The Food Chain, Gravitys Volkswagen, and The Lost Art of Walking. His food writing has appeared in GQ , the New York Times, and the London Daily Telegraph; he has also worked as a cook, a waiter, and a garbage man. Nicholson lives in Los Angeles, where he runs a food blog called Psycho-Gourmet about the weirder and wilder shores of gastronomy: http://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/.
a.f. robertson taught Anthropology at Cambridge University for

Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1997), and a contributing co-editor of The World of Soy (2008). His newest book, Three Ancient Colonies, will appear in Spring 2010. Mintz is Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
toni mirosevich is the author of Pink Harvest (Mid-List Press, 2007; First Series in Creative Nonction Award) and four poetry collections, including Queer Street and My Oblique Strategies. Her multigenre work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing, Kenyon Review, Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. Since writing A Pinch of Finch, she has continued her investigation into what ight tastes like. joanne molina is the editorial director of The Curated Object (www.CuratedObject.us). She did her graduate work in philosophy and aesthetics, focusing on the history of taste and French philosophical and psychoanalytic theory. Molina is interested in exploring how aesthetic theory, design, and art criticism offer critical vocabularies for thinking about objects, architecture, and space. As senior arts and culture editor at Interiors magazine, she works with internationally recognized chefs to craft their personal essays on cuisine.

twenty years before moving to University of California, Santa Barbara in 1985. He is currently an Honorary Professor at his alma mater, Edinburgh University. His research on politics, economics, and family life draws on extensive eldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. Recent books include Greed and Life Like Dolls, a study of dolls collected by mainly older women.
jeanne schinto is the author of Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), a memoir of the ten years she spent in the old textile-mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. She has also published a story collection and a novel. Since 2003 Schinto has been a reporter for Maine Antique Digest, covering auctions, antique shows, and trends in the trade. She lives in Andover, Massachusetts. kay sexton is a British writer whose ction has been chosen for over thirty anthologies in the ve years she has been writing. Her unpublished novel, Gatekeeper, was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize; she won the Fort William Festival Contest. Sexton is currently working on a second novel about pornography and rivers in 1920s Hampshire, as well as blogging about food, gardens, and growing things.

Contributors

david sipresss cartoons appear regularly in The New Yorker and

allen s. weiss is a writer, editor, translator, curator, and playwright.

numerous other magazines and newspapers. He has authored eight books of cartoons and is the writer, producer, and host of Conversations with Cartoonists, a series of performances featuring cartoon-based humor and interviews with the great New Yorker cartoonists. Sipress is also a ction writer; his rst published short story appeared in 2009, in Narrative.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
suzanne toczyski is professor of French at Sonoma State

He has authored or edited forty books in the elds of gastronomy, landscape architecture, performance theory, and sound art, including Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime (suny Press), and Comment cuisiner un phnix and Autobiographie dans un chou farci (Mercure de France). Weiss recently published his rst novel, Le Livre bouffon (Le Seuil). He teaches in Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at nyu.
bill yosses is executive pastry chef at the White House in Washington, D.C. Before assuming that position in 2006 he served as pastry chef at The Dressing Room Restaurant in Westport, Connecticut. His early career included stints at Fauchon, La Maison du Chocolat, and LeNtre in Paris, and Bouley Restaurant and Josephs Citarella in New York City. Yosses has worked with the New York City school systems Dinner Party Project to help guide children in making healthy food choices. The views he expresses are his own and do not represent those of the White House or the Obama Administration.

University and the former editor of the journal French 17. She has published extensively on seventeenth-century theater, womens writing, and travel narratives and has been enjoying her recent foray into the early modern Caribbean. Her passions are books and chocolate; she shares both with her family and students as often as possible.
ardath weaver is research director at the North Carolina Arts

Council, where she applies her art history degree from Brown University to documenting arts and culture. Her essay Creativity and Connectivity: Learning the Language of the Creative Economy recently appeared in the premiere issue of The Arts Politic. After nearly forty years in the South she still isnt fond of collards.

borborygmus

Rumblings from the World of Food

To the Editor
I just read Mark Mortons piece White Noise (Summer 2009) and it made me cry. Thank you for voicing in such a straightforward yet arresting way how ignorant hatred pervades our society. Food is, unfortunately, a convenient vehicle for people to push their own agendas. I look forward to reading more of Mark Mortons words.
Johanna Lowe, Buchanan, mi

Pop! Cherries in Taiwan

lola milholland

What if you had never tasted a dark, sweet cherry? That was the situation u.s. cherry growers encountered in the early 1990s, when they determined to build an export market in Taiwan for Northwest cherries, mainly dark-red Bings and blushing yellow Rainiers. Though cherries have grown in greater China for millennia, the native varieties are as different in look and avor from Bings as long, slender eggplants are from their massive, globular cousins. Twenty-ve years ago few Taiwanese had tasted the plump, maroon cherries; even fewer were willing to spend what amounted to eight dollars a pound to buy them. But the Washington State Fruit Commission saw this lack of familiarity

Above: eVonne with cherries.

northwest cherries, 2004

1
as an opportunity. Eric Melton, their international promotional director, and Chris Lin, their marketing representative in Taiwan, conceived of a campaign to cast cherries as youthful and sexy. In 1997 Northwest Cherries, one of the Commissions promotional arms, arranged for a Taiwanese record company to y the budding pop star Gigi Leung to Yakima, Washington, to lm a music video. Northwest Cherries spokesman, Andrew Willis, describes that rst Cherry Girl deal: We ew over her whole entourageher manager, hair and makeup, parents; the director, his cameraman, light, sound, and gear. Wed take them around to places of beauty in Washington. Together, wed weave together a narrative, meet a few times about concepts. Wed eld their requests for, say, a vintage red
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convertible. The Commission paid for all production costs but did not pay Leung or the record company any fees. Their only stipulation was that some portion of the video be shot in a fruiting cherry orchard. The video was a success. Gigi became a superstar in Taiwan, explains Teresa Baggarley of the Commission. With that came a price tag beyond the budget of our growers, so we sought new stars. Next came Jessica, then Lillian Ho, and, most recently, eVonne, currently one of Taiwans biggest pop sensations. Over the past decade the Commission sponsored roughly a dozen music videos, all featuring beautiful, young, female singers. Seven of the songs have made it to the number one spot on Taiwans pop charts. (It helps that mtv Asia plays the videos every hour.) Each year the Commission released the videos to coincide with the peak of the Bing and Rainier cherry harvest from late June through early August; the singer participated in signings, interviews, and shows at grocery stores. For a yearly investment of approximately one hundred thousand dollars, the Commission estimates that it received annual advertising exposure worth roughly four million dollars. The marketing campaign has worked. Taiwan, which imports 100 percent of its cherries, is now the second largest export market for Northwest cherries. In 1996, before the rst videos release, Taiwan imported 293,000 twenty-pound boxes of Northwest cherries; by 2001 the amount had grown to nearly eighthundred thousand of these boxes. Export value also rose, increasing from less than eight million dollars to more than $31.5 million at its height. Thanks in part to the videos, the cherries have become more expensive, despite their greater availability. As

Baggarley notes, cherries are now a status symbol, not unlike diamonds. In Taiwan, she says, cherries are a girls best friend. The pop stars imbue the cherries with sexiness and youth, but the cherries themselves offer the allure of something exotic and foreign. The videos often depict an exaggerated, romanticized vision of America. In one recent video by eVonne, the star is shown driving along an open country road in a souped-up classic car; her journey is interrupted by shots of a couple smooching on a carousel and little blonde girls dressed up for church playing in an orchard. Here is rural America at its most idealized. Several directors borrow heavily from American mythology. In one video Lillian Ho is driving through the barren, eastern Washington desert when her car breaks down. A handsome Native American man in face paint, wearing a leather shirt adorned with bones, talons, and white feathers, comes to her rescue by sweeping her onto his horse. Next she nds herself in a canoe with a team of Native American men paddling in unison. This video, like many others, ends with the singer triumphantly reaching an orchard where clusters of red Bing cherries glimmer in dappled sunlight amid emerald-green leaves. From the Native American men to this image of Shangri-la, the cherry experience is portrayed as fantasy. Eating this succulent morsel from the Northwest, the video implies, will transport you to a world of unimaginable pleasure. With the recent downturn in Taiwans economy, cherry sales have slumped, and Andrew Willis believes that the videos may have reached their saturation point with young audiences. So the Commission has stopped its mtv video campaign and is focusing marketing efforts on the healthfulness

of cherries. It is also putting more energy into the nascent Mainland Chinese market. Nevertheless, last summer the Commission contracted with three Taiwanese modelsMimi Liu, Novia Lin, and Tiffany Huito serve as cherry spokespersons. At a July press appearance they seductively ate cherry after cherry while talking about antioxidants and low-calorie count, their red-and-white ginghamlined picnic baskets in hand. I recently e-mailed my Taiwanese friend Yi Pan to ask about the impact of the early mtv videos and their glamorous stars. She responded: they are sweet girls! haha. maybe if i eat cherries like they do i will be pretty like them!! Yi Pan was being tongue-in-cheek, I know, but her answer leaves no doubt: the marketing campaign worked its magic on her generation. For a montage of the cherry videos by Zak Margolis, courtesy of Northwest Cherries, go to gastronomica.org and click under Extras.

The State of the Art

On the occasion of Gastronomicas tenth anniversary, ten distinguished voices speak out about food culture today. Over the last decade , restaurants have carried me on a trip to the future. Actually, its been two trips, in opposite directions. First I went back to the future, to the rst Slow Food Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy. In order to keep traditional food culture alive, the Salone introduced treasured, handmade, small-production foods to the wide world. Everything was in the thousands. People. Food purveyors. Cheesemakers. Salamis. This exhibition and tasting of regional

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food products was so enormous that we gave directions as the street of smoked sh or halfway down the Italian sheep cheese road. Sure enough, these samples of the past ignited an international passion for such culinary throwbacks as lardo, the slabs of fat (just fat!) cured by hardy peasants in the mountains of Italy. The wave of the future, it seemed, was not innovation, but preservation. Local was the watchword. That might mean sh smoked no farther than ten miles away from where its taken on shore, or cheeses wrapped in leaves and buried in their home ground in an ancient Italian village but served on a cheese plate in Manhattan. A decade later, modern restaurants in Baltimore and Minneapolis are featuring charcuterie plates and cheese courses with products that have never before ventured more than a few miles. This is not the own-in turbot that 1950s continental restaurants boasted, or tropical fruit picked in its adolescence and shipped to international markets. This is food avored with its culture. The other direction I traveled to the future was by way of Spain, where a restaurant as inaccessible as the most tradition-bound country salami maker was experimenting with temperature and texture, form and avor, to create twenty-rst-century innovations. El Bullis food labs in Catalan set off reworks with foams and warm gels, encouraging budding deconstructionists and abstract expressionists in kitchens around the world. While Slow Food was campaigning against additives, star chefs worldwide were transforming familiar ingredients with gases and liquids, doing their shopping at the pharmacy. Lardo was so last-century. In Chicago, Grant Achatz presented butterscotch-infused bacon on a

mini-trapeze, while Englands Heston Blumenthal whisked bacon and eggs into instant ice cream. In Washington and Los Angeles Jos Andrs melded high and low, rst course and dessert, as he wrapped foie gras in cotton candy.

Diners responded with gusto, catching on to the new freedom. The three-course meal was too conning. A bite of this and a slurp of that better suited the new millennium. In the olden days the elegant table presented rows of silverstart with the outside fork and knifeand clusters of glasses. Imagine that table set for a tasting menu at The French Laundry, threedozen courses long. No, the preset table had to go. In fact, rst courses began to be served already on their spoons. One quick bite and off you go, to the next mouthful of invention. As the ever more dramatic parade of savories threatened to upstage dessert, dessert fought back with a tasting menu within the tasting menu. Caramel tastings, mango tastingsthe Inn at Little Washington introduced its Seven Deadly Sins, a dessert assortment piped with colorful streaks of sauce to mimic the chefs coat ready for the laundry. But one course wasnt going to be enough. First came the

The first ten years of Gastronomicas life have been good ones for kitchen science, the subject Ive been writing about since the late 1970s. It has developed enough of a following to support regular newspaper and magazine columns and a steadily lengthening shelf of books. It provides

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Phyllis Richman, who retired as the Washington Post restaurant critic after twentythree years, is the author of three restaurant mysteries, including The Butter Did It.

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pre-dessert, to get your mouth ready for the onslaught. Then came a small gift of sweets to take home for tomorrows breakfast. Rules are no longer relevant. Today a tasting menu might be fortyve courses long, yet nobody even inches if you order just two appetizers as your whole meal, or share three dishes between two people. You can micromanage your dinner, choosing from ve sauces, a dozen toppings, and four cooking methods for merely a hamburger. Or you can surrender to the kitchen for the chefs menu, even have your wines chosen for you. Anything goes, as long as it is personalized. At the haughtiest levels, waiters are introducing themselves. (Hi, my name is Doris. Ill be your waiter this evening.) The chef makes a point of touring the dining room. Even your green beans and your pork chop are presented with their biographies. Daily life is full of anonymous encounters: the Internet, the airport, the subway, the supermarket. Crowds to jostle, forms to ll out. E-mails greet you with mass-produced individuality. Dining out is the antidote: the host, the waiter, the chef with his pat on your shoulder, the seasons rst acorn squash grown by farmers closer than your commute. You sit down to dinner and you have joined a community, a gastronomic Facebook.

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much of the material for a popular cable television show. It has even glittered with the reected celebrity of chefs who brought lab equipment and materials into their experimental restaurants. In its own way, kitchen science has become fashionable. This new prominence has come with a tasty side of irony. Kitchen science has practical value. It replaces unexamined lore about foods and cooking with facts arrived at through scrupulous background research and experiment. But the language of kitchen science now has its own value, independent of any facts. Its a token of being in the know and at the cutting edge. And its sometimes deployed for that value alone, not to enlighten but to simulate enlightenment. The result is token kitchen science, a new form of lore disguised in the language of ne-grained analysis. Molecules and their maneuvers are frequently invoked in food writing and food talk these days. But its often in order to rationalize the technique of the day rather than to examine and understand it, and often without the considerable trouble it can take to get the facts right. In the parallel universe of token kitchen science, sugars evaporate from roasted meat, and the roasts water molecules seek refuge from the heat by gathering at its center. Pressure-cooker steam passes right through the densest foods. Cocktails made with special ice thrill the tongue because their molecules jump into motion from a near standstill just this side of absolute zero. Such confabulating can be interesting in its own right when theres more to it than carelessness or opportunism. I like that bartenders imagination! And I sometimes sense hunger in the mix, hunger for intelligibility and for community that trumps hunger for the truth. During an

online Q&A session I held at the New York Times in 2008, I let a dozen questions accumulate without responding. Then up popped a massive post from a reader identied as Elizabeth, who had taken the time and trouble to answer them all for me, at great length, with apparent sincerity, and with hardly a single accurate sentence. So fans of kitchen science need to be on their guard. Look at whos

purveying the science, whether it goes any deeper than a token term or two, whether theres any evidence offered. Real nourishment takes some chewing.
Harold McGee is the author of On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen and the monthly Curious Cook column in the New York Times.

In the united states a decade of increasing renement in sauces and edible exotica has kept pace with a vertiginous decline of competence in our home kitchens. Be not misled, Gastronomica readerswe are a nation of nearly three hundred million. Talented and sophisticated chefs refashion for us Thai, Japanese, and nearly every other cuisine known to humankind. We are exhorted to try new foods and are served up unending

choices, as if the aim of eating were never to eat the same food in the same way twice. The results of this intense experimentation are about what one might expect: one or two interesting innovations, and many novelties that are not really so hot. And by the time the foam gets to Des Moines, it is either too foamy or not foamy enough. The American food system, meanwhile, assisted by its many friends in Congress, has continued to deliver farm bills that reward corporate farming at the cost of the taxpayers and small farmers, while showing a princely disregard for the health consequences. So far, outbreaks of food-borne disease have not yet been deadly enough to make a decisive political difference. Still, that day may be coming nearer. Though readers and tv viewers have grown tired of the grossly obese, a quarter of those jaded readers and viewers are now overweight themselves, and their numbers are growing. It is nearly gallows humor to observe that we Americans are growing fatter at a slower rate. The unmistakable links of childhood obesity to our food system on the one hand, and to matters of health on the other, cannot be hidden. Oddly, perhaps, the two most important culinary events in the decade were last years economic crash and the arrival of a new national administration. Our newspapers and magazines are full of food-related stories tied to these big changes. We are told that people who must now adapt to declining means are cooking both more and more economically. They are probably eating out, eating take-out, and ordering in less often and more thriftily. If cooking at home does improve, the health benets could be real. Consumers may tire of their roles as part-time,

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involuntary, and unpaid health inspectors for the fast-food and frozenfood companies. If they do, they may yet discover that actually cooking potatoes and carrots can be fun, as well as economical. Perhaps the national annual per capita caloric intake will decline. If only by one meatless meal per week to save money, it would be a salutary sacrice. Over time it might lead to a new grasp of the idea that value added does not always improve food, even if it is good for the food companies. What a wonderful discovery that would be! The new administration, while seizing initiatives for family gardening and healthful eating, has also made some smashing appointments at the Centers for Disease Control, the u.s. Food and Drug Administration, and the u.s. Public Health Service. Although it may never be able to tame the food industry enough to push Congress into an agriculture bill for all Americans, its actions so far represent a decisive break with the recent past. But so far, the big guys remain unshakably loyal to technological solutions, resolutely ignoring the way some problems stay insoluble unless there are changes in the social arrangements of production. Instead, were getting a new generation of brilliant advertisements, artfully grounded in a conception of science that is deliberately narrow enough to convince us that yes, they can. The problem seems to be that while yes, they could, no, they wont. Will the next ten years be truly different? Our grandchildren hope so.
Sidney W. Mintz is Research Professor in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming Three Ancient Colonies.

Imagine! A mere decade ago I went to a book to look up a recipe and to a stove to cook a meal. Now I need neither book nor stove. And who needs real food? I can stuff myself with thousands of images of food on FlickR, share them with thousands of new friends on Facebook, and critique them with millions of strangers on Twitter. Its as if food were the new sex, a hot connection, a fantasy of nger-lickin porn. But watching somebody screw or cook is not at all the same as actually screwing or cooking some hot dish yourself. We dont watch sexy Rachael or Bobby on the boob tube because were hungry for food. They seduce us with Fast Food for the imagination, as illusory as the vitamins and minerals in sugar and fat. But if our bodies grow fat from conditioned hypereating, dont our minds grow abby from conditioned hyperviewing? Digitalized food, like

digitalized sex, is without context. Who is sending out the signals, from what place, at what time, and above all why? Place and time are annihilated by digital abstractionon, off. Its as if all the richness of human experience were reduced to binary

Betty Fussell is a culinary historian and the author of The Story of Corn, My Kitchen Wars, and Raising Steaks.

As someone who has come relatively recently to the eld of food history, Ive learned a lot from Gastronomica over its ten-year history. Well, anyone would, given its range, wit, and particular

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data, as if there were only the one way to plug in and turn on. I resent that all our physical senses are reduced to sight alone through Windows Vista. What a paltry narrowing of arousal. Watching a YouTube of someone cooking breakfast, I dont smell the bacon frying or hear the sizzle of eggs or feel on my ngertips the crispness of freshly toasted bread. Nor do I savor on my tongue the creaminess of butter melting, the chewiness of pork muscle countering the fat, the liquid explosion of a yolk after the silkiness of the white. Its not too much information that seduces us, but the reduction of all experience to information of only one kind. Its as if all sex were a one-night stand. E.M. Forster would laugh aloud if he knew what had happened to his preachment, Only connect. By hyperconnecting, weve shortcircuited our bodies from our computerized brains. I used to feel that food grounded us in our animal selves, in the earthy reality of creaturehood. Now I feel ever more distanced from my own hearty appetites and from the lusts of others. Dont Twitter me what you ate for breakfast, but sit down on a real chair at a real table over a steaming cup of coffee and tell me what you desire and why. Tell me who you are at this particular time and place. Tell me what you long for, tell me about your hunger for power or fame or riches or comfort or revenge or love. Please just tell me in person and dont link me in.

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combination of attention to food and its cultural context. Although my academic eld is medieval European history, Ive often found the articles about modern food and especially restaurants the most fascinating. Among my favorites is Giles MacDonoghs study of the elegant Madrid restaurant Horcher and its previous (before 1943) incarnation in Berlin (Otto Horcher: Caterer to the Third Reich, February 2007). Its a particularly disturbing example of the restaurant as a location for elite sociability. The last ten years have seen two developments that intrigue me, one within the academic world and the other a more general American cultural phenomenon: greater attention to food among historians and a rediscovery of the actual quality and taste of what we consume. Social historians were always interested in nutrition and subsistence in terms of how ordinary people were able to survive, but they tended to dismiss the history of cuisine (i.e., the preferences of the relatively comfortable) as frivolous. The impact of fashion and consumer behavior on economic and social change has recently been explored but food is now also seen as the intersection of a number of historical factors and conditions, from environmental conditions to globalization to gender. Teaching courses in the history of food has been surprisingly gratifying, in part because I used to think of college students as rather phobic about diet, health, and body image. Binge eating, cycles of avoidance of certain foods, Cheerios 24 / 7 were my background notions, but I found among students in my classes a concern to nd out where what we eat comes from as well as delight and uninhibited enjoyment of food. The rediscovery of taste might seem an exaggerated way to describe shifts

in attitudes, but from the nineteenth century on, foreign observers have consistently commented on Americans preference for variety, luxurious display, and new gimmicks over the actual quality of food. Whatever their excesses and peculiarities, the locavore and seasonal movements have reoriented the experience of dining toward freshness, depth, and complexity and away from texture, color, and blandness. How much further progress will be made remains to be discovered. Will people who claim sophistication about food actually cook at home? How far away from the urban greenmarkets will the preference for the local, sustainable, natural, and avorful spread? Will restaurants in New York City ever value quiet and tranquility? I look forward to the next ten years of Gastronomica for both answers and more questions.
Paul Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University and the editor of Food: The History of Taste.

I started studying food as a graduate student in the 1970s. The subject seemed well suited to my ambition to be a scholar/activist. The scholarly opportunities were clear: virtually no one had studied food so far,

so it was full of the mysteries and surprises that attract researchers. (To be sure, the eld was so surprising that stunned deans would blurt, Food, for Gods sake! and, perhaps the kiss of death among sober academics, Sounds like fun!) As for activism, what could be more immediate, compelling, motivating, troubling, and relevant than food? Thirty years later, the subject no longer surprises deans, for good food scholarship abounds. And so does activism. But I will now admit that Im not so sure that the two go together. The activist wants to be useful; the scholar wants to be accurate. In the former role I nd myself primarily as a public speaker and source for journalistspushed to simplify research insights for a nonspecialist audience that often knows less than my undergraduates. Yet as a teacher/researcher I try to complicate life for students. The activist values succinctness and accessibility, while the academic values lengthy, often inconclusive arguments indeed, the less conclusive the better, as the scholars job is to resist simple answers. In the public advocacy role, however, the goal is answers and usually no more than can be accommodated in a single PowerPoint slide, sound bite, or elevator pitch. How to nd a balance, especially when the public-advocacy opportunities are growing for us in food studies? Some of us have even written bestsellers and are asked to formulate clear rules for eating. I cant think of anything more relevant than that, but is it right? My own inclination at this point is to be wary of advocacy. Its too easy for us academics, especially in the lowly humanities, to be seduced by the star treatment, which may tempt us to believe that we really know

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the answers, which is anathema to the process of scholarly inquiry and contradiction. And yet Im not quite comfortable retreating to the more conventional safety zone of pure research and theory, however important that is. I still feel some need to reach out, to be inuential, even if only in a cautionary way. I especially feel a commitment to the sustainable food movement, which Ive been tracking for a long time. In over forty years of discussion with activists, Ive come to see myself as something of a cranky corrective to radical exuberance, a friendly fellow traveler who wants to make sure that the countercuisine doesnt go the way of other leftwing movements, which is to crash and burn. I think, in particular, that those of us who are scholars have something to share about the dangers of party lines, leftwing paranoia, and the tendency to tar opponents as guilty by association. We need to try to expand the vocabulary of analysis beyond words that are so overused as to be meaningless, e.g., industrial, junk, commercial, conventional, healthy, chemical, natural, organic, and sustainable. The mass-culture indictment of American food needs a rest. If activists can learn to love American television and music, they can also learn to respect American food, along with the people who produce and consume it. And we need to declare a moratorium on nostalgia. At the same time we need to invent better stories, better myths to live by. Finally, perhaps we need to decide if theres a difference between a public intellectual and a public advocate. Following the ne example of Gastronomica, are there ways to bring the best of the scholarly process to a wider public without watering it down or compromising its subversive ambivalence?

Warren Belasco is professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Food: The Key Concepts.

Ten years ago it was just a dream, a vision, that one might be able to create and sustain a serious journal on matters gastronomic that would interest both scholars and the general

public. But Darra Goldstein, supported by friends and colleagues, pursued this, her dream, her vision. At rst, the question was whether there would be enough scholars who could and would write well enough and on diverse enough subjects to sustain such a journal. And could nancial backing be found? Now, ten years later, these questions have been answered in the afrmative. Gastronomica has become the journal of record. All would agree that it is beautiful to look at and that its diversity of subject matter is astonishing. Many new scholars have been introduced in its pages, and many new avenues for culinary research have been opened. Bravo to all involved. When Gastronomica rst appeared, popular and academic interest in food and foodways had

already begun to blossom. Over the last ten years, it has, perhaps, become overblown. Blogs, television, radio, the Internet and all its new permutations, conferences, symposia, specialized journals and magazines present an overwhelming array of choices. In many cases serious culinary history seems to have been overtaken by celebrity, glitz, and frivolity.* I hope this trend may have run its course. For one thing, all over the world people are becoming more interested in their culinary heritage. They want to learn more, and to share what they learn. Interest in our work at the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigans Clements Library has grown exponentially. We have welcomed the extra workload, as it reects what is increasingly clear: culinary history has been accepted as another wayan important and toolong-ignored wayto view history. Universities, museums, publishers have all come to the table. The table is bountiful and copious. I trust that the future of culinary history is bright.
*Frivolity: Of little or no weight, worth or importance; not worthy of serious notice; characterized by lack of seriousness or sense.

Jan Longone is curator of American culinary history at the Clements Library, University of Michigan.

Ever more safe treyf . To my eye, thats the most noteworthy change in American foodways over the last decade or two. The reason for the increase is simple: the fewer foods that qualify as kosher to believers in one or another of the myriad contemporary food dogmas, the greater the demand for safe treyf. But before I get to that, a word about the term, which I borrow from a study that sociologists Gaye

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Tuchman and Harry Levine undertook in the 1980s in response to an oft-repeated joke in the Jewish community: Why did the Jews starve for the rst thousand years of our existence? Because, according to the Jewish calendar the year is 5700-something, and according to the Chinese calendar, its 4700something. For a thousand years, Jews went without Chinese food. From their analyses of interviews and archival materials Tuchman and Levine developed an explanation for the immense popularity of Chinese food among New York Jews dating back to the early 1900s. Chinese food functions, they suggest, as safe treyf. Although some dishes contain treyf, these nonkosher ingredients like pork and shrimp are minced and blended during cooking so that they lose their distinctive taste and texture. And in line with another of the laws for keeping kosher, Chinese dishes do not mix milk and meat.* Their interviewees told Tuchman and Levine that Chinese food is close enough to kosher that they could eat it without feeling guilty. A range of marketers, food activists, and individual eaters say much the same about foods they hawk to others or consume themselves. Perhaps the best-known example from the food industry is the Pork Boards other white meat campaign, a brilliant ruse to turn the ultimate nonkosher food into safe treyf. The ongoing campaign, which associates pork with chicken rather than beef, dates back to the late 1980s, when a host of health writers and food activists were singling out red meat as particularly heinous. More recently, organizations as diverse as Jenny Craig and the Chefs Collaborative have promoted an extraordinary range of safe treyf:

Sweets sold as low-calorie, low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt, or low-carb (or any pair or trio of these). Grassfed, free-range, antibiotic-free meat. Troll-caught, dolphin-safe, low-on-thefood-chain sh. Produce grown, if not

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in the locality where it is being sold, close enough to be labeled local. Coffee identied as fair trade, shade grown, or organic. Depending upon ones dietary ideology, some or all of that list is either heaven sent or demonic, but one thing is certain. Part-time adherents to the ever-expanding list of secular dietary laws have more and more options for feeding themselves.
*Gaye Tuchman and Harry Levine, New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern, in The Taste of American Place, ed. Barbara Shortridge and James Shortridge (New York: Roman & Littleeld, 1997), 163184.

Barry Glassner is professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and the author of The Gospel of Food.

On the whole this has been a pretty good ten years for the world of food. Its taken us a while, but weve nally begun to gain a little perspective on the culinary craze that spawned in the sixties, owered in the seventies, and exploded supernova-

like in the eighties. The excesses that come with any fad have surely not disappeared, but some encouraging signs can be seen: Our foodies, bless them, are beginning, mercifully, to abandon many of their gaudy displays of erudition and kitchen virtuosity, settling for social acclaim in greener, more fashionable elds. Dates and mates are less often sought for such prestigious qualities as their knife skills or exhaustive knowledge of wine vintages. The food ction pandemic (has all the poetry, all the brilliance of Like Water for Chocolate!!) is beginning to lose its grip (although food memoirs, alas, continue to appear more reliably than ants at a picnic). The big-money think tanks and institutes of higher education in food popping up around the world are being cut down to size and have begun to offer something more than uffy courses and posh but empty conferences. The eld of food studies has begun to appreciate that producing and delivering the food we eat is a good sturdy trade and that arcana and jargon may help win higher degrees but do not always add much to making us better and more wisely fed. And, to all our credit, the designation Celebrity Chef, while still very much in use, is now not invariably a sign of unmitigated admiration. But the diminution of glut and pretence is surely not the only happy sign. There have been other positive changes. The broader understanding of food as a lynchpin component of culture has given it a new and much-needed standing in many areas of study, ranging from history and anthropology to medicine and environmental studies. Food history in particular has exploded as a subject of interest, some of the best work being done by motivated amateurs who ask

new questions and learn what they learn by fresh thinking, not necessarily by adhering to the methodologies and vocabulary of any specic discipline. Our new awareness has also opened our minds to adventurous thinking about which foods and food habits are acceptable and which, perhaps, may no longer be. We have begun to produce and handle our food in more intelligent ways, ways that are better for our bodies and kinder to the earth. We have been introduced to a whole range of new looks, new avors, and new textures, which challenge the cook and broaden the palate and enliven the eating experience. Some of the innovations are, to be sure, extreme, the product of play and experimentation. As with radical innovation in any eld, from fashion to music, most will fall by the wayside, but a few will stick, becoming part of the permanent repository of choices we draw on as we dene and redene our food culture. It has been an exciting, richly active ten years, characterized by many excesses, which, all for the good, have been softening, but also by some rewarding giant steps that will continue to reshape the way we get and consume our food for years to come.
Nach Waxman is the proprietor of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in New York City.

The population seems to be leadingor pushingthe politicians, with demands to know about animal welfare, the provenance and sustainability of food supplies. The state of sh stocks comes up regularly in the media, supermarkets name suppliers and increasingly offer locally produced fruits and vegetables, farm husbandry is examined, breeds are named, and rare breeds once neglected in the push for cheap meat are again bred more widely. Small independent cheesemakers have multiplied in the last ten years; orchards are being replanted with traditional varieties of fruit formerly scorned for their low cropping or uneven shapes. Some local foods are once again being made more scrupulously to traditional recipes. Food miles for transporting organic food are under scrutiny, and the local is nding favor. This is shown in the increase in farmers markets up and down the country and, since the economic downturn,

In britain the beginning of the decade was marked by bse and footand-mouth disease, the unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of animals, scare-mongering journalism, and muddled government statements. The short-term, shortsighted policies to provide cheap food that led to this situation have not improved signicantly, and the need for a responsible long-term food strategy is still not fully addressed by government.

in the number of applications for allotmentsgarden lots rented from the local counciland of families growing food in their gardens, terraces, or window boxes. There are many

Jill Norman is a London-based food and wine writer, whose books include Herbs & Spices, Winter Food, and The New Penguin Cookery Book.

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references to how the British coped during World War ii, when lawns were turned into vegetable patches. Grow your own is the current slogan; garden centers and gardening writers devote space to salad, vegetable, and soft-fruit plants; tomatoes, lettuces, and herbs sprout on London doorsteps. Breadmaking is on the increase for the rst time since the 1970s, and decreased spending power has led to a move away from ready meals to more frequent home cooking. Provenance, sustainability, and ethics are now topics on a number of the United Kingdoms tv food shows, at last following the lead of bbc Radio 4s inuential Food Programme. Upscale restaurants have got the message, too, with details of source and breeding on their menus. Lest this should all seem a shade utopian, I must point out that the widening poverty gap over the last decade means that many families nd it even harder to feed themselves, and to do so healthily is an enormous challenge. Obesity and related diseases are not decreasing. A lot of low-quality fast food is still consumed. For those of us in the food community, in the last decade Gastronomica has provided a welcome means of exchanging news and information; it has brought in many new readers. The journal has broadened my perspective on many aspects of food and food culture, and I thank Darra for that and wish her and Gastronomica success for the next ten years.

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cartoons | david s ipress

Something Tastes Funny

Toasting Ten Years of Gastronomica

What would you like to drink with your Gastronomica?

Sorry, I cant answer your question check with our wine guy.

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They sent this back. They say its too interesting.

I hear they do amazing things with testicles.

Chicken feet or beef jerky?

I see that you studied in France.

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Our sandwiches are also available as smoothies.

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orts and scant lings | ma rk morton

Gastrobamica

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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I dont find it interesting that last year someone on eBay tried to auction off the leftover breakfast of Barack Obama. The future President had eaten most of his meal at the Gilder Diner in Pennsylvania, but his unconsumed scrapsa hunk of sausage and wafe, along with his cutlery were snatched up by a server and given to a friend who advertised the relics online, with bids starting at ten thousand dollars. His dna is on the silverware! promised the item description. I dont nd this interesting, because its a mere cash grab. The lengths to which people will go to make a buck might be surprising, but theyre usually not compelling. Likewise, I dont nd it interesting that some corporations have crassly tried to prot from Obamas election by associating their food products with him. Brooklyns Sixpoint Craft Ales, for example, brewed up a beverage they called Hop Obama (till they were forced to cease and desist by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms). Ben and Jerrys honored the President by changing the name of their butter pecan ice cream to Yes, Pecan for Obamas rst month in ofce. Sprehe, a German company specializing in frozen foods, came up with Obama Fingers, morsels of fried chicken served with a dipping sauce. The Russian company Duet put a caricature of Obamagrinning maniacally and standing in front of the United States Congresson an ice cream bar called Black in White, a mixture of chocolate and vanilla. Depressing, yes, but not very interesting. What is interesting, I think, are the foods named after Obama by owners of small diners and neighborhood delis who do so not to boost their sales but because they are passionate supporters of their new President. Mr. Bartleys Burger Cottage in Boston, for example, serves up an Obama

Burger, while Paia Fish Market, a ve-person operation in Maui, Hawaii, makes an Obama Fish Sandwich. In Columbus, Ohio, Katzingers Deli offers up an Obama Club Sandwich featuring turkey, roasted pineapple, and roasted red peppers. Seventy-six-year-old Ray Alvarez, owner of Rays Candy Store in New Yorks East Village, goes even further with a roster of presidential foodstuffs, including Obama Fries, Obama Cones, Obama Cheeseburgers, and Obama Coffee. Invoking the President on the menu isnt limited to the United States. Across the Atlantic, YK s Deli in Leeds sells an Obama Sandwichbeef, lettuce, and tomatofor 2.35. In Cairo, Egyptian fruit sellers gave the

If it were somehow possible for Obama to share a meal with every one of his millions of supporters, there would be, I suspect, no profusion of homespun foods named after the President.

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name President Obama to their best fresh dates during the month of Ramadan. The honor is not trivial, considering that Muslims believe the Prophet Mohammed ended each day of fasting by eating dates. Back in the United States, Brooklyns Royal Fried Chicken, a neighborhood diner serving halal food, didnt just name an entree after the Presidentthey changed the name of their business to Obama Fried Chicken. In short, over the past year, in hundreds if not thousands of small diners and delis across the United States and around the world, Obamas name has appeared on signs and menus.

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.1213, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.12.

Cynics might dismiss this grassroots phenomenon as a naive version of the large-scale corporate exploitation of Obamas name and image previously described. However, I think theres more to it than that. I actually believe the manager of Royal Fried Chicken when he insists that the restaurants name change wasnt for commercial reasons but because the owner loves Obama. He loves him seriously. He supports him. In fact, I would suggest that most of the restaurant owners arent trying to gain anything from Obamas name but rather are trying to invest him with something by reinventing a familiar custom: namely, the gathering of a community around an individual in order to bestow their collective support as he or she begins a new stage in lifes journeyand at the center of this custom is food. An easy example is seen at most birthday parties, where a cakeoften with the name of the birthday person written on it in frostingis shared among the friends and family members in attendance. Cake is also shared among guests at a wedding reception, the difference being that the cake is decorated not with the names of the bride and groom but rather (traditionally) with miniature molded versions of them or (more recently) with their images rendered in airbrushed food dye. With both the birthday and the wedding reception it is the person (or couple) at the center of the event who receives something from the community namely, an implicit promise of new or renewed support. Indeed, on some such occasions, the promise of community support is made explicit at other points during the event: We accept responsibility for supporting them in the new relationship they are about to enter is a phrase uttered by the congregation at many wedding ceremonies. The same custom can also be seen in the centuries-old British practice of sin-eating, whereby a member of a community eats a biscuit that has been placed on the corpse or cofn of someone who is about to be buried. By doing so, the sin-eater takes on the sins of the deceased, so that he or she can proceed unencumbered into the next life. Variations on sin-eating have existed across Europe. In the

Balkans the biscuit is shaped to resemble the deceased, while in Holland the biscuitknown as the doed koek or dead cakeis inscribed with the initials of that person. In some places the tradition persists in a mellowed form: in Ireland, for example, a glass of wine and a funeral biscuit are handed across the cofn to guests as they proceed through the viewing line. Now, Im not suggesting that when customers chow down on the Obama Club Sandwich at Katzingers Deli they consciously envision themselves as helping to absolve the President of his venial and/or mortal sins. But I would suggest that the grassroots phenomenon of Obama Burgers, Obama Fish Sandwiches, Obama Fried Chicken, and so on is an afrmation of community support that does, like all afrmations of support, invest the recipient with an enhanced ability to choose well and act ethically. In other words, knowing that people support you, and that they will continue to support you when you falter, makes you lessnot morelikely to falter in the rst place. Moreover, the fact that this grassroots support is conveyed by bestowing Obamas name on food itemsas opposed to hardware items, or tennis racquets, or paint colorsis not trivial, just as putting a persons name on a birthday cake or a persons initials on a doed koek is not trivial. The inscription on the food implies, as the food is consumed, an incorporation of the other person, a symbolic acceptance of his or her beingfor every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. If it were somehow possible for Obama to share a meal with every one of his millions of supporters, there would be, I suspect, no profusion of homespun foods named after the President. But in the absence of that kind of personal opportunity to pledge support by breaking bread with their Commander in Chief, eating an Obama Burger might be the next best thing.g

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feast for the eye | amy mi l ler dehan

An Apt and Noble Gift

Gorhams Rebekah Pitcher

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In 1854 cincinnati banker Lewis Whiteman bought a stately silver pitcher for his youngest daughter, Louisa, to commemorate her marriage to the physician William Carson.1 A silver pitcher for the table or sideboard was a very appropriate gift for a new bride, to equip her with one of the proper tools required of a genteel hostess. Yet the symbolism in the design of Gorhams Rebekah Pitcher instilled it with particular meaning for its time and carried special signicance as a gift from father to daughter on her wedding day. The grape, leaf, and vine motif used in the design of the pitchers handle and spout suggests that this pitcher was intended to serve not water but wine, a beverage that has marked the celebration of marriages even before the New Testaments famed Wedding at Cana (John 2:111, King James Version). The expertly repouss chased vignettes on either side of the pitcher reference another biblical union, the Old Testament marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 24).2 The vignette illustrated on page 16 shows a young woman standing near a well, tilting a water jug down from her shoulder to give a traveler a drink. This woman is Rebekah. The traveler is Eliezer, the eldest servant of Abraham.3 Abraham had sent Eliezer from Canaan to Mesopotamia, the land of [his] kindred, to nd a wife for his son, Isaac. According to the scriptures, as Eliezer neared Abrahams native city of Nahor he saw the daughters of the men of that city walking to the well to draw water. Eliezer prayed to God, asking him for a sign: And let it come to pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also: let the same be she that thou hast appointed for thy servant Isaac (Genesis 24:14). As Eliezer prayed, Rebekah, the granddaughter of Abrahams brother Nahor, lled her pitcher. Eliezer approached her for a drink, and she responded as he had hoped, thereby identifying herself as Gods chosen bride for Isaac. The scene on the opposite side of the pitcher (p.15) illustrates a man assisting a veiled woman as she dismounts

from a camel. This is the moment described as Rebekahs rst encounter with Isaac upon entering Canaan with Eliezer: Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she lighted off the camel. For she had said unto the servant, What man is this that walketh in the eld to meet us? And the servant had said, It is my master: therefore she took a veil, and covered herself (Genesis 24:6465). Although we do not know where or from whom Lewis Whiteman acquired this pitcher, we do know that it was designed and produced by the Providence, Rhode Island, silver rm of Gorham Manufacturing Company (est. 1831). As evidenced by its early makers mark (Gorham & Co.) and its reproduction in a company advertisement of 1852, the pitcher was one of the earliest hollowware forms produced by the rm.4 It is therefore reasonable to deduce that Whiteman did not commission the piece from Gorham but rather purchased it as a stock piece, possibly in the rms Rhode Island retail shop or in Cincinnati from a traveling salesman or local agent. He had the inscription Louisa J. F. Whiteman from her Father, Oct. 12, 1854 added to the rococo revival cartouche under the pitchers spout. Gorhams choice of the Rebekah story as decorative subject for one of their earliest pieces is not surprising. While artists ranging from the Italian master Paolo Veronese to the Chinese decorators of export porcelain wares have portrayed scenes from the Rebekah story for centuries, the subject assumed particular signicance in the last half of the nineteenth century.5 During this time biblical subjects were found on a variety of common household objects, as the renement and morality of a woman (and her family) had come to be measured by the way in which she decorated her home. Plenty of objects incorporated images of Jesus and the apostles. But the interest in gender roles and sentimentality

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Right: Pitcher, made by Gorham Manufacturing Co., Providence, Rhode Island, ca. 1852. Silver; height 13 in.
cincinnati art museum, gift of angeline russell faran, 1978.267. photograph by scott hisey.

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.9, no.4, pp.1418, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2009.10.1.14.

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in Victorian literature, coupled with the fact that those buying for and making the home were women, fostered increased demand for depictions of female biblical gures like Rebekah. Perhaps the strongest example is found in the mass-produced ceramic teapots featuring a molded design of Rebecca at the Well.6 Cloaked in a brown, mottled glaze known as Rockingham, these teapots began to populate tables across America just prior to the Civil War and continued to be produced in variation for decades. Believed by some historians to have been the most popular vessel in nineteenth-century America, the universality of these Rebecca teapots has been equated to that of apple pie.7 Gorhams choice of Rebekah for the decoration of a beautiful serving pitcher was apt. The overriding favor for Rebekah, as opposed to other biblical heroines, at this time may be, in part, tied to the establishment of the Degree of Rebekah by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (ioof), an international fraternal organization that sought

to improve and elevate the character of man through good deeds as modeled by gures of the Bible. While the ioof had long identied Rebekah as a gure key to their philosophies, the ofcial Rebekah Degree, formed as an auxiliary group for female relatives of ioof members and founded upon the principles of faithfulness, hospitality, purity, and dedicationas portrayed by women characters of the Bible, was not established until September 20, 1851.8 Gorham surely recognized the growing demand for Rebekah items, as many early ioof members were craftsmen, including silversmiths. It is no stretch to believe that the decoration for this piece could have been determined and executed by an Odd Fellow, perhaps with one of his own Rebekahs in mind.9 With regard to our pitcher, it is not known whether Lewis Whiteman was an Odd Fellow or his daughter Louisa a Rebekah.10 Designers of silver most often found inspiration in printed sources. The depiction of Eliezer and Rebekah at

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the well is based on the oil painting Rebecca la fontaine (1835) by Emile Jean Horace Vernet.11 Best known for his nautical history paintings, Vernet (17891863) traveled to Africa with the French army and while stationed there conceived of a series of pictures portraying biblical subjects in their national costumes and with national characteristics.12 Vernets Rebecca la fontaine was displayed at the 1835 Paris Salon, and despite some critical reaction the painting was wholeheartedly embraced by the public.13 Through the consequent production and mass dissemination of engravings by Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet and J. Rogers (above),14 the popularity and use of Vernets image was rampant. The number and range of objects produced in the second half of the nineteenth century using this particular image as a design source testify to its popularity.15 In addition to Gorhams Rebekah Pitcher there were enamels set in gold snuff boxes (ca. 1850)16; Union cases to house and protect daguerreotypes (1850s)17;

above: cincinnati art museum, anonymous gift, 2004.138. photograph by scott hisey. above, left: cincinnati art museum, gift of angeline russell faran, 1978.267. photograph by scott hisey.

cameos (ca. 1850)18; a stained glass window designed by John LaFarge (ca. 1884)19; a Staffordshire spill vase (circa 1850)20; and Berlin wool work (ca. 1860).21 Gorham had a fantastic design library, where the rms designers and artisans likely had access to one of the books or print collections that included this engraving after Vernet.22 Their delity to their source is impressive. In choosing this fantastic pitcher, pregnant with the meaning and relevance of Rebekahs story, Lewis Whiteman was making quite a statement. He was not merely wishing his daughter to be a gracious and fashionable hostess, but also encouraging her to lead her new life in a way that

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Above: Steel engraving by J. Rogers, ca. 1850, published by W.H. Husk & Co. This engraving was made after Horace Vernets painting, Rebecca la fontaine (1835). Above, Left: Pitcher (detail), made by Gorham Manufacturing Co., Providence, Rhode Island, ca. 1852. Silver; height 13 in.

maintained her worthiness to God (and her new husband), and perhaps to be so fruitful through offspring or example of character that she would come to be blessed as the mother of thousands of millions (Genesis 24:60). An idly chosen wedding gift, I think not.g
notes
1. Louisa Jane Findlay Whiteman (18321859) was the daughter of Lewis Whiteman (17961862) and Jane Findlay (18041847). Lewis Whiteman was president of Cincinnatis Chamber of Commerce (1839 ca.1841) and part of the delegation appointed to escort the body of President William Henry Harrison home to Cincinnati in 1841. His daughter Louisa married Dr. William Carson (18271893), a graduate of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (1846) and the University of Pennsylvania (1850). In June 1850 Dr. Carson established his practice in Cincinnati on East Third Street, near Broadway. Sadly, Louisa died just ve years into their marriage, while bearing their son, Lewis (18591860). Louisa had two daughters prior to her death, Jane (18551936) and Eliza (1857 1939). This pitcher was passed through the family to Eliza (Mrs. James Faran), and then to her daughter Angeline Russell Faran, who presented the pitcher to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1978. See Spring Grove Cemetery on-line burial records, www.springgrove.org, accessed 30 July 2009; Charles Theodore Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati and Representative Citizens (Chicago: Biographical Pub. Co., 1904), 426428, 679, 710, 1019, 1027; and Cincinnati Art Museum accession le, 1978.267. 2. Throughout this article I have chosen to use the spelling Rebekah (except in instances when the alternative spelling Rebecca is used in a documented title of artwork), based on the spelling in the Bible (King James Version). The King James Version was the most widely read translation in the mid-nineteenth century and is used for all quotes within this article. 3. Although Eliezer is not named in Genesis 24 (King James Version), many scholars believe, based on mention of Eliezer as the principal servant of Abraham elsewhere in the Bible (Genesis 15:2), that he is the servant referred to in Genesis 24. 4. There are no other extant pitchers of this design known. The Gorham & Co. mark was used between 1852 and ca. 1855. Gorham did not begin to produce hollowware until 1851. It is not known who, as designer or silversmith, was responsible for the execution of this piece, as it was made prior to the arrival of staff designer George Wilkinson in 1857. The pitcher may have been part of the hollowware Gorham exhibited at the 1851 Rhode Island State Fair, accompanying the well-published Chinese Service (1851) marked Gorham & Thurber, now in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. The Rebecca at the Well Pitcher is imaged with the Chinese Service in an 1852 advertisement. See Charles H. Carpenter, Jr., Gorham Silver 18311981 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1982), 281; and Charles Venable, Silver in America: A Century of Splendor, 18401940 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 25.
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8. The ioof had its roots in eighteenth-century England. The rst American lodge was established in 1819 in Baltimore, Maryland. See The Sovereign Grand Lodge, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, www.ioof.org, accessed 16 September 2004. 9. Stradling, Puzzling Aspects, 334335. 10. The rst lodge of the ioof in the State of Ohio was established in Cincinnati on December 23, 1830. By 1841 there were four lodges in the city. History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio: Their Past and Present (Cincinnati: S. B. Nelson & Co. Publishers, 1894), 82. Per correspondence with Ruth Buehner, Secretary, Ohio Rebekah Assembly, 20 June 2005, there are no extant membership records from the 1850s for the Odd Fellows or the Rebekahs in Cincinnati. 11. The current whereabouts of this painting are unknown. It is not in a public American or French institution. It may have been destroyed or lost, or perhaps it resides in a private collection. Vernet hailed from a family of talented and well-recognized French painters. He was the grandson of Claude-Joseph Vernet (17141789) and son of Carle Vernet (17581836). 12. J. Ruutz Rees, Horace Vernet (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1880), 2224, 45. While Vernet did attempt to portray his subjects in their native dress and setting and true to their biblical roles, the authenticities of his portrayals have borne criticism. Revue des tableaux religieux du Salon de 1835, Annales de Philosphie Chrtienne, 3 April 1835, 310. 13. Ibid. See also Pierre Sanchez and Xavier Seydoux, Les Catalogues des Salons iii (Paris: Lechelle de Jacob, 1999), 204. 14. Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet (17881871) was a well-known French engraver, particularly skilled in aquatint engravings, who was best known for his series of engravings after Horace Vernets battle scenes. See Michael Bryan, Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (London: George Bell and Sons, 1886), 709. J. Rogers was a lesser-known London-based engraver. His engravings after Vernets Rebecca la fontaine appear in Rev. F.L. Pearce, The Altar At Home: or Family Communion for Every Day Throughout the Year (London: Husk & Co., n.d.), n.p. See also Thomas Gosfrey, Talliss Illustrated Scriptural History for the Improvement of Youth (New York and London: John Tallis & Co., 1851), 16; and Title Unknown [English Bible] (1870s), per seller on eBay, item #6204835526, 17 September 2005. 15. The only direct connection known between this image and the Rebekah Degree occurs in a poster published for the ioof in 1872 by J. Hale Powers Co. Fraternity of Cincinnati, and printed by Strobridge & Co. lithographers, also of Cincinnati. 16. Sothebys, Important Silver, Gold Boxes & Objects of Vertu, sale no. lo7661, (London, 18 December 2007), p.14, lot 11. 17. These cases were created by shaping an early form of thermoplastic made from shellac and sawdust in a mold. Vernets Rebecca la fontaine appears in reverse on these Union cases. Its inversion results from the way the molds and cases were created. The Rebekah at the Well case was made by S. Peck and Company in the 1850s. See Clifford Krainik, Michelle Krainik, and Carl Walvoord, Union Cases: A Collectors Guide to the Art of Americas First Plastics (Gransburg, wi: Centennial Photo Service, 1988), 99 plate 155. 18. Brooch, ca. 1850, unknown maker, Italy, Cincinnati Art Museum, 2005.118, Museum Purchase with funds provided by Kim Klosterman. 19. This window, dedicated in 1884 to the memory of Mrs. Ellen Shepherd Brooks, is installed on the south side of the Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. 20. Adrian and Nicholas Harding, Victorian Staffordshire Figures, 18351875 (Atglen, pa: Schiffer, 2000), 37. 21. Dragon-Antiques.com, accessed 3 October 2005. 22. The presence of this engraving in the Gorham design library has yet to be conrmed.

5. Paolo Veroneses Rebecca at the Well (15801585) is part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art. Rebekah at the Well was one of the most popular motifs produced in Chinese famille rose porcelain made for European export in the 1750s, appearing on cups, saucers and plates. See Elinor Gordon, Collecting Chinese Export Porcelain (New York: The Main Street Press, 1984), 59. 6. Most of these teapots incorporated an applied ribbon design bearing the title Rebecca at the Well rather than using the alternative spelling Rebekah. 7. It is believed that the rst ceramic teapot depicting Rebecca was produced in 1850 by the Edwin Bennett factory in Baltimore, Maryland. See J. G. Stradling, Puzzling Aspects of the Most Popular Piece of American Pottery Ever Made, The Magazine Antiques 146:2 (February 1997), 332337.

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On Curing Images and Pork

tung-hui hu

Pernas sallire sic oportet in dolio aut in seria

Cato, De Agricultura clxii

The tender image is cut thinly and with the grain, hung up in curing rooms or draped over water glasses to keep out ies. If you desire the taste for yourself, you must pull a blade laterally across the marbled heart of the negative. Turn the skin inwards, leaving the outside to scratch, seem bitter to strangers, and cover with salt of silver nitrate until fat glistens in the light. Spoiled lm smells of vinegar, but good hygiene will seal it for a decade, enough to last through times of famine: when dust closes in, obscuring the elds, when images are coarse, when soldiers knock at your door, summoning you to service.
2008

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memoir | geof f n icholson

Eating White

Today i ate lunch in memory of my mother. She died about a decade ago, and every once in a while I feel the need to replicate the kind of lunch she and I ate together many times. The meal consisted of a cheese sandwich, made with white Cheshire cheese on white bread, along with a glass of cold milk. If this seems a rather pallid and unexciting meal, then thats exactly the way my mother would have wanted it. I was born and grew up in Shefeld, in the north of England, and my mother lived there all her life. Since I now live in Los Angeles, this memorial meal of mine took a little organizing and may have lacked authenticity. Cheshire cheese, available at any corner grocery in England, is considered quite the gourmet item here in California. The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills, for instance, sells a rich, complex-tasting Cheshire, sometimes with a light blue molding, that I nd just wonderful, but it has almost nothing in common with the cheese my mother would have been familiar with. A more reliable source is Ye Old Kings Head Shoppe in Santa Monica, an establishment that exists to satisfy the tastes of expat Brits; that faux spelling of shoppe says it all, Im afraid. Nevertheless, it is a place where you can buy packaged Tuxford and Tebbutt Cheshire, crafted with care in our award winning creameries, according to the label. Tuxford and Tebbutt make great claims for employing traditional methods, but the end result, at least by the time it gets to California, has a denite processed and industrial aura. This, of course, makes it far more like the product I knew back in the old country. The fact is, some very ordinary Cheshire cheese is sold in England. At its best Cheshire cheese is simultaneously moist, crumbly, sweet, salty, and tangy. When its not at its best its just bland: again, my mother would have had no problem with that.
Left: The authors parents cutting their wedding cake in Shefeld, England, 1951.
courtesy of geoff nicholson

The bread I grew up eating in England has no exact American equivalent: Wonder Bread may be the nearest. Ours was called Mothers Pride, and although I dont think my mom was naive enough to believe she was fullling her maternal duties by buying this brand, I know she appreciated its softness and its snowy whiteness. These days Im a wholemeal man, but I admit theres still some guilty pleasure to be had in eating a slice of unapologetic, factoryproduced white bread, especially when spread with pale, salted butter, the way my mother ate it. As for the glass of milk, full fat of course (my mother would not have seen the point of any other kind), well, that has much of the guilt and very little of the pleasure. If you

Whatever the reason, white food was her idea of comfort food, and it seemed to me at the time, and still does, that as a widow in her late sixties my mother was entitled to find comfort wherever she could.
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grew up in England at a certain time in history, your school, on behalf of the government, provided you with a daily third of a pint of school milk, and we were led to believe we had a moral duty to drink it. The kids who didnt like milk were regarded as a bit strange. If any of them were lactose intolerant they certainly kept quiet about it. Today, of course, I worry about my cholesterol as much as the next man. My mother entertained no such worries. She loved milk, and she loved cream even more: milky coffee, milk puddings, creamy soups, creamy sauces, vanilla
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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.2123, issn 1529-3262.

2010 by geoff nicholson.

ice cream. Perhaps it was because shed been through World War ii, a time when milk and cream were among the many foods rationed in England, a time when there were bigger things to worry about than cholesterol. But I dont think it was the historical associations, and Im not even sure it was the taste of milk that she really liked. I think it was the color. She loved white food just because it was white. My mother wasnt , and never had any ambitions to be, a good cook, but she did care about keeping my father fed and happy. These two things werent absolutely synonymous, but they were inextricably linked, and so she became the cook he wanted her to be, which meant that she provided heavy, overcooked, tasteless English food. I dont suppose my fathers eating habits were especially strange for a white, working-class man of his generation. He liked meat and potatoes in large quantities. Vegetables were

present but irrelevant, dessert was essential but didnt have to be fancy. He didnt want adventure in his eating. He wanted slabs of pork and beef, sausages, pies, suet puddings. Of course, these are not primarily white foods, but there were other areas where my mother could sometimes satisfy both her own and my fathers tastes. She made excellent creamy mashed potatoes, for instance. She made cod, stewed with onions in milk; tripe was served exactly the same way, and it was a long time before I realized tripe wasnt a kind of sh. She cooked cauliower and served it with a white cornour sauce. She served blancmange, custards, store-bought cream cakes. You might think that chicken would have been a natural menu item for my family, but we never ate it. My father
Below: The author enjoying Mr. Whippys vanilla soft-serve ice cream at Lytham St. Annes with his mother, ca. 1964.
courtesy of geoff nicholson

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had briey worked on a farm when he was a boy and had developed a violent aversion to poultry. Equally, although it was permissible to eat rice in a sweet rice pudding, we couldnt eat it in savory form: my father hinted darkly at rice-related experiences hed had in Ceylon during the war, intense and too terrible to be spoken of. As for pasta, well, I think it never really crossed my fathers mind that a man like him would ever eat pasta. I now know that my mother must have been incredibly eager to eat chicken, rice, and pasta, because she started cooking them for herself the moment my father died. When she cooked them for meId long since left home by thenI dropped broad hints that they might be improved by adding a few herbs and spices, but my mothers pantry contained no seasonings except salt and pepper, and will it surprise you that she favored packaged, ground white pepper? Anything else would have adulterated the whiteness. My mother was a catholic ; my father and I were not. Although she wasnt a churchgoer except at Christmas and Easter, Ive often wondered whether she made some connection between food and purity: white food meant a white soul. Perhaps thats a little too obvious. And Im sure you could speculate about why she should want to become purer after my fathers death, but for obvious reasons I prefer not to. Whatever the reason, white food was her idea of comfort food, and it seemed to me at the time, and still does, that as a widow in her late sixties my mother was entitled to nd comfort wherever she could.

Today there is a no white food movement, an alltoo-simple-to-follow diet that avoids white products, partly because potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread are wicked carbohydrates, and also because the whiteness of sugar and our, for instance, indicates that the food has been processed, bleached, made unnatural. There seems to be a lot of good sense in this line of thought, but its one that would have had no effect whatsoever on my mother. She wouldnt touch brown sugar or brown bread. No doubt, my mothers white diet didnt, in itself, kill her: she had a preexisting heart condition, caused by rheumatic fever in childhood. On the other hand, it surely didnt do her health much good. She was found in a chair in her living room by a neighbor one Sunday morning. Her heart had apparently given out, quietly and unspectacularly, some time the previous afternoon. The slices of chicken loaf that she often bought from the local deli counter for her Saturday evening meal, a sort of high tea, were found uneaten in the fridge. My mother had never discussed what kind of funeral she wanted: she and I didnt have conversations like that. By default, and far from sure that I was doing the right thing, I found myself organizing, then attending, a fullblown Catholic funeral. Inevitably I was rather lost when it came to the ner points of ritual, but in due course I found myself joining the line of those receiving Holy Communion. A thin white wafer was placed on my tongue. As it dissolved slowly in my mouth I felt that my mother might have approved of the blandness, the austerity, but she would surely have wanted something smooth, white, and creamy to help it go down, something quite different from the red wine the priest was offering.g
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gender | charlot te druckman

Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?

But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class, and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, or our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our educationeducation understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals.
Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971)1

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It started a few years ago when I noticed that Food & Wines annual roundup of ten Best New Chefs always listed one token woman. And it lingered. In 2007 Michelin awarded French chef Anne-Sophie Pic three stars, making her only the fourth woman in her countrys history to receive that honor (fty years had passed since the last of her sex had garnered that third sparkler).2 The following year, in the United Kingdom, it was considered breaking news when ten female chefs won any Michelin stars at all. The tabloid Telegraph announced: It could be the beginning of the end for the foul-mouthed, macho, and deantly male master chef. The number of women with Michelin stars has nearly doubled in just 12 months.3 Then came the 2009 James Beard Awards gala, held after the ceremony and annually assigned a theme. Women in Food was the chosen motif, but since only sixteen of the evenings ninety-six nominees were, in fact, women, it seemed like a cruel joke. In the end, only two of those sixteen went home victorious, out of nineteen winners total.4 Next, Phaidon announced the publication of its forthcoming cookbook Coco: 10 World Leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs, for which one Alice Waters and

nine of her male comrades each picked ten young chefs whose work they admire. Collectively, these culinary authorities managed to put fewer than ten women on the rosterless than 10 percent of the total talent featured. Finally, in Bravo tvs Top Chef Masters competition, a paltry three out of twenty-four American Masters were women. Really. The It in the pit of my stomach was the sinking realization that female chefs do not attain the same recognition or critical acclaim as their male peers. No one doubts womens abilities in the kitchen. They certainly have skill and creativity. So what is the problem? This conundrum reminded me of something Id read in an undergraduate art history class, Linda Nochlins Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Her article was a watershed not just because it posed such a loaded questiona rhetorical device, as it turns outbut also because by posing that question Nochlin forced academics and feminists to challenge their own practices. She argued that the query is inherently awed because it presupposes a deciency in women and thereby perpetuates the difculties of female painters and sculptors in achieving the status of artist, let alone great artist. Much of the problem, Nochlin maintained, lies in how we, as a culture, dene terms like great and great artist, and also how those of us who examine these termsacademics, journalists, critics, and theoristsshape or champion their denitions by accepting them as the norm. In theory, weve come a long way from the notion that a womans place is in the domestic kitchen, and that the only kitchen appropriate for a man is the professional one. But in practice, things can be pared down to the following equation: woman : man as cook : chef.

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Semiology 101
Before anyone says Thats just semantics, I should note that there has always been a strong distinction between the

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.2431, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.24.

terms cook and chef. The latter is the shortened version of the French chef de cuisine (literally, head of the kitchen) and relates directly to the mtier of food preparation. You can become a chef only after formal culinary training or apprenticeship. A cook is generic, referring to anyone who prepares food, whether professionally or at home. That these terms have gendered associations that are accepted as natural is one of many reasons that Nochlins essay has relevance for the food industry today. If we follow her model,

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it becomes clear that we need to ask not why these semantic nuances exist but where they come from, and whether we might be complicit in perpetuating them. I went to both Food & Wine and Gourmet magazines to see if they could address this elephant in the kitchenthe great male/female culinary divide. The respective editorsin-chief (both women, incidentally) shared the opinion that to give women special attention is to corroborate that an actual difference exists between a person with a penis who wields a spatula and his penis-free counterpart. That fear is what Nochlin purposely tapped into when she slapped her

provocative title onto the article. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? is a trick question, a trap that presumes the need to defend or justify womenan act that inevitably plays right into the gender discrepancy. Evidence of that trap was gamely brought to light at a recent panel discussion on Gender Confusion: Unraveling the Myths of Gender in the Restaurant Kitchen at New Yorks Astor Center. The event centered on an experiment, a meal of six courses, each represented by two dishes sharing a theme ingredient. The panel had to guess which of each pair had been prepared by a female chef and which by a male, based solely on how they looked and tasted. Of course, as the judges themselves predicted and then proved, it was impossible to tellsometimes they guessed correctly, other times not. They cracked predictable, ice-breaking jokes about phallic-shaped cocktail garnishes and tried not to embarrass themselves when explaining why they were guessing a woman had made dish A and a man dish B. They did better when they looked for clues in each chefs personal history and training. The panelists quickly realized that determining who had produced the rhubarb gimlet or crispy sardine salad was not the most interesting question. Rather, why did they assume that certain ourishes or avors were feminine? The evenings message was that men and women dont really cook differently; we just judge their food in different ways. This prejudice operates on two levels. Edible owers on a plate can be said to signify female, while precisely stacked layers and drizzled sauces can be deemed male. But, when a chefs gender is known, we can also describe his or her seemingly neutral dish with different vocabularies. Panelist Gwen Hyman, who writes about gender politics and food, reminded the audience of the old cultural trope Women cook with the heart, men cook with the head because women have hearts and men have brains.5 So, if a male chef serves a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese, it is lauded for its in-your-face, rich, intense, bold avors, while a womans plateful of the same indicates

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homey, comforting fare, prepared with love. The former becomes an aggressive statement, a declaration of ego, while the latter is a testament to home cooking. Conversations about the use of certain adjectives or particular garnishes and what they reveal about gender can easily dissolve into a form of mental masturbation. It is best to acknowledge that these seemingly innocuous assumptions (e.g., if a cocktail is served with a straw, it must be the work of a female mixologist) are actually, in Nochlins words, part of a system of meaningful symbols, signs and signals that has a direct impact on how much (or little) success women artists (or chefs) can attain. Nochlin asks, what denes greatness? For our purposes, we must inquire, specically, what makes a Great Chef? The answers reveal that our signiers of greatness, chefwise, are those attributes considered inherently maleor at least those not generally associated with women. In the United States, especially, success, for chefs, has historically been measured more by business acumen, celebrity, and marketability rather than by what happens at the stove. Who cares if your panna cotta has a female look to it; tell me instead whether you own multiple eateries. Is your personality translatable to a wider audience? Is your restaurant concept something that can be replicated? Do you have a style that both complements and transcends your culinary point of viewas in, are you a serious extremist (a science nerd like Grant Achatz or a purist devoted to technique and ingredients like Thomas Keller or Tom Colicchio); an enterprising French master (Daniel Boulud, Alain Ducasse, or Eric Ripert, par exemple); an unrepentant glutton and camera-loving ham (Mario Batali); a bad-ass genius-rebel who bucks the establishment (David Chang or Anthony Bourdain)? And then, ask yourself, can you think of a female counterpart for any of these?

role is that of mother and, to some extent, backer. Her son, Joseph (aka Joe) Bastianich is the prolic business partner of Mario Batali. Together the two men have built an empire that encompasses multiple eateries across the country, cookbooks, cookware, an Italian wine store, a travel show, and, on the horizon, an upscale Italian market. What people may not realize is that Lidia is also a partner in at least one of these ventures, Del Posto, a bastion of haute Italian cuisine. While Joe gets all the credit for the business success of the Bastianich family, Lidia is identied as the Italian equivalent of Julia Child. She cooks, with love, out of a home kitchen for her pbs audience and is noted for making remarks like food for me was a connecting link to my grandmother, to my childhood, to my past. And what I found out is that for everybody, food is a connector to their

Exhibit A: Lidia Bastianich

Our most preeminent female superstar in this arena is more like a counterpoint than a counterpart to these male archetypes. Lidia Bastianich is a triple (non)threatrestaurant owner, cookbook author, and television personality. She owns four Italian restaurants. Manhattans Felidia, which she originally opened in 1981 with her ex-husband and now operates alone, is the one most frequently associated with her. Im not sure anyone realizes she has three others. Theres Becco, also in New York, and then Lidias Pittsburgh and Lidias Kansas City (confession: I had no idea these places existed until researching this story). Aside from Felidia, Lidias better-known restaurant

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roots, to their past in different ways. It gives you security.6 Lidia is an ber-motheran unfussy nurturerand her latest tv program, Lidias Family Table, drives this point home with its charming vignettes of the chef teaching her grandchildren how to shape pasta. This is not Lidia as restaurateur or recipient of multiple James Beard awards (wouldnt you know, she was the host of the 2009 gala). This is Lidia, great cook and homey chef. Although her food on television seems rustic and simple, in reality she was one of the rst chefs to elevate and rene American Italian cuisine. Dining at her restaurants reveals an overwhelmingly accomplished chef. So why the disconnect between what is behind the scenes and what we see on camera? Lidia is not allowed to be both things at once and, we are led to believe, she can appeal to the masses only by

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portraying the Italian nonna, her feminine side. Lidia Bastianich has all the makings of Great Chef, minus one crucial element: she is not a man. Which takes us back to square one in the search for female correspondents to the reigning male Greats. In Where Are the Women Chefs?, an online article for Gourmets Web site, Laura Shapiro seeks these female counterparts and nds herself at a loss. She looks at two chefs who had similar plans of action that yielded very different results:
When Gabrielle Hamilton opened a tiny, uncomfortable place called Prune in 1999, her idiosyncratic menu caught on, the restaurant became successful, and today shes a much-admired gure on the scene. When David Chang opened a tiny, uncomfortable place called Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004, his idiosyncratic menu caught on, the restaurant became successful, and today hes a much-admired gure on the scenewith numerous awards, scads of magazine proles, two more restaurants and a public that worships him. However you account for the difference between these two career trajectories, its got to include something besides the food.7

Exhibit B: Bay Area versus SoCal

Hard-pressed to nd female equivalents of the Changs, Batalis, or Kellers of this world, Shapiro goes to the one place where there is a notable number of female-chefowned restaurants, the San Francisco Bay Area.9 Waters, of course, is considered responsible for the burgeoning of this school of West Coast chefswomen who own small, independent restaurants that serve homey, Waters-inspired food. When people talk about accomplished female chefs, they often look to California to prove that the phenomenon actually exists. While the East Coast is notoriously unfriendly to enterprising women of the whisk, the West Coast is seen as a hotbed of culinary girl power. But lets take a closer look. Generally, the Bay Area chefs own one restaurant apiece, and its a casual affair neither the chefs nor their restaurants are household names or internationally acclaimed. Michelin has probably never heard of most of them. Their botes are local charmers appreciated by fellow chefs and nearby foodies. Also worth noting is the communal spirit evoked when describing this band of West Coast women. Their success is limited to their context, which still feels very much bound by a gendered framework. Shapiro might have found a more compelling template had she extended her scope a bit farther south, to Los Angeles, where professionals like Nancy Silverton and Suzanne Goin have quietlywith much consistent hard workbecome insider favorites (what youd call chefs chefs). Yet both have kept relatively low proles. Silverton, beloved for her skills as a pastry chef, opened her rst venue, La Brea Bakery, in 1989 with her (then) husband, chef Mark Peel, with whom she later opened Campanile. She has recently teamed with Batali and Bastianich to open Mozza and Osteria Mozza. Goin launched her rst restaurant, Lucques, in 1998, with business partner Caroline Styne. Four years later, AOC followed, and in 2005 Goin opened The Hungry Cat with her husband, chef David Lentz (theyve since added a second outpost in Santa Barbara). A few months ago, Goin and Styne opened a new venture, Tavern, an eatery with a takeout shop and bakery. Both Silverton and Goin have received James Beard awards and penned cookbooks; they own multiple venues, each of which has been heaped with praise. You can nd them proled in food magazines or, in Goins case, making an unremarkable cameo as a judge on Top Chef. But whatever exposure theyve received is far from celebrity. Goins culinary skills sometimes play second ddle to her good looks and chic-seeming lifestyle. She and hubby Lentz were

This is where oppositions like head : heart and chef : cook begin to have serious repercussions. If women are thought to work from their hearts, and men with their heads, which of them will be taken more seriously in the context of business? Or as a heroic renegade? A chef is, at the minimum, the leader of a professional kitchen. Beyond that, a chef is a risk-taker, the face of a company or concept, a television personality, and, above all, an expert. Being a cook is a much more blue-collar gigit means being a nose-to-the-grindstone worker, a cog in a wheel, a hearthtender. The chef is a professional who goes through proper training and rises in the ranks of a military system. The cook is self-taught, home-schooled, working by instinct. If this sounds oversimplied, I encourage you to look at how the achievements of female chefs who have found relative success are represented. You will begin to see that gendered dichotomies are very much at play. Lidia Bastianich is a prime example. Alice Waters is another. The mother of American slow food, Alice is depicted as a nurturer. She has dened herself (not to her credit or that of her female peers) as a cooka self-taught Francophile whose initial goal was to open a simple little place where we could cook and talk politics, a restaurant born from the counterculture.8 Her role is that of an educator, a caretaker, a protector of what is natural and of the earth. These characteristics are all stereotypically female.

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shot by Annie Leibovitz for a Vogue prole that gushed, How is it that celebrated chef Suzanne Goin can surround herself with the most avorful food and still have an Audrey Hepburn-like gure; can care so little for trends and always look cool?10 Its as though the very idea of an attractive, stylish woman who can hold her own in a professional kitchen and even possibly out-cook the men is untenable, an impossible dream. Somehow, being in Vogue seems to undermine her cooking chops. A male chef would not be discussed in these terms. When Esquire does a prole on David Chang, no one is writing about his favorite clothing labels or his weight. Then theres the piece that Cookie (an upscale glossy for sophisticated parents) did for its Homefront section. Here, Goin is the devoted mother of twins, shown, porchside, with her babies, husband, and dog. The article delves into what sort of food she prepares for her fteen-month-old daughters and catches her before a weeklong family beach holiday, an indication, we are told, that Goin has shifted her priorities. This chef sacriced 18-hour days and years with no time off to reach the ultimate goal, a life in which family trumps the restaurant world. 11 Again, how often do you read such a story about a male chef? And is there any mention of Goins husband turning his attention away from the restaurant or changing his priorities? Nope. Despite the quality of the coverage Goin or Silverton receive, relative to their peers up north these women have greater credibility as restaurateurs and, for the most part, as serious chefs. Still, what they do share with the ladies of the Bay Area is a lack of widespread fame. Outside of Los Angeles, media hub New York, and the inner circle of the food cogniscenti, these SoCal ladies remain unknowns. When the average out-of-towners go to Mozza, theyre going either because theyve heard the pizza is killer or because its a Batali joint. They are not coming to pay homage to Nancy Silverton. We are left with Shapiros initial posit: Im thinking in particular of a question that always bothers me when I read stories about chefs winning awards, chefs opening spectacular new restaurants, chefs starring in yet another new tv seriescongratulations, but why are all of you male? Where are the women?12 And her disappointing answer theyre in California. Why disappointing? Because, despite their achievements on the West Coast, these women have not been able to follow the recipe for Great Chefdom. As Shapiro herself admits, they have not been showered with awards or founded dining establishments spectacular in nature (whatever that means).

Of TV and V-Necks
Although I generally agree with Shapiros assertions, I take issue with the media question. Just turn on the Food Network: women are everywhere. The problem isnt lack of airtime. Its the quality of that time and the way in which the women are portrayed: as cooks, not chefs; as pretty faces who do easy meals for families or casual parties. Take Paula Deana larger-than-life southern mother hen who squawks, I graduated magna cum laude from my grannys kitchen!13; Giada de Laurentisan alluring (cleavage-bearing) girl-next-door who likes to cook simple Italian-ish meals for friends and family; Rachael Raya no-fuss, 30-minutes-or less everywoman who is everything but a chef (and who insists she is not one); Sandra Lee a table-decorating, cocktail-sipping ditz who cooks with semi-homemade products and matches her appliances to her outts14; the Barefoot Contessa Ina Gartena caterer-turned-lifestyle guru who loves throwing parties and preparing sophisticated versions of comfort food; and Anne Burrell, the only professional of the bunch. Although she is Mario Batalis sous chefassistanton Iron Chef, on her own show she dumbs down her restaurant dishes and is shown not in chefs whites, but in low-cut, V -neck sweaters, at a residential kitchen counter. In fact, all of these women have a home kitchen as their backdrop. Two years ago Elaine Louie wrote an article for the New York Timess Dining In/Dining Out section titled Frump-Free Cooking: The Look That Sizzles, in which she observed the V -neck as a trend for televised female stove-tenders. She cited deadpan expert opinions from fashion personalities like Simon Doonan, creative director for Barneys New York:
[He] called the current style updated wench chic and said it successfully solves the dilemma faced by women in the cooking world. They have to exude competence, but they cant be frowsy, he said. The old housewife-like era of Betty Crocker and Julia Child is out, he said, because the culture no longer allows that kind of happy frumpiness. Everyone has to have a little bit of hootchy, he said. But the trick is not to have it go too far, because if it becomes too overly sexual, issues of hygiene come into play.15

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The look, Louie surmises, was likely initiated by uk food deity Nigella Lawson, the original vampy homemaker who suggestively sucks chocolate batter off her nger before popping cake pans in the oven. Louie also sought out a Vogue editor, who addresses the bosomy costumes potential as an antidote to the dowdiness of aprons and the prudish

crewneck.16 Then theres Nick Sullivan, fashion director of Esquire magazine, who talks about the fties-style retro charm of the outt. He comments on Nigellas maternal appeal, citing her come over here and lick my spoon kind of approach,17 because a come-hither aura is essential to emitting motherliness, right? Louie never questions what all this means, tidily summing up the current uniform for televisions female food personalities as sexy meets utilitarian.18 She doesnt bother to write about what the male tv stars are wearing, or whether theyre showing their biceps in the kitchen. Speaking of men, the Food Network consistently portrays them as serious chefs, experts, adventurers, competitors. Except for the necessary place-ller Cat Cora, all the Iron Chefs are male. Bobby Flay, one such Iron force, also participates in Throwdown challenges, while his Iron colleague,

no dinner table set for a nal scene of dishing out to friends and family. Next up is a new show called Chefs vs. City, billed as the ultimate foodie tour, in which Mexican food authority and multiple-restaurant owner Aaron Sanchez and his cohort, offal expert Chris Cosentino, challenge locals to nd the best culinary haunts around town. These men are fearless mavericks, the women domesticated goddesses. But back in the restaurant kitchen, women who wish to be taken more seriously forego virginwhore style in favor of androgyny. They are generally unfeminine, short-haired, and makeup free, often quite muscular, even manly, in appearance. Its as though the only way to gain legitimacy as a food force is by hiding all traces of femininity. Proof positive, you have Suzanne Goin, who, when portrayed as feminine (compared by Vogue to Audrey Hepburn, or to a happy, gourmet hausfrau by Cookie) is simultaneously downplayed as a culinary talent to be reckoned with. Male chefs are inherently sexy; female chefs, sexless. This assumption runs counter to the media-friendly women of the tv cooking shows that, by putting beautiful homemaker types on screen, reinforce the male-is-to-chef what female-is-to-cook identication. The defeminization factor is another byproduct of the frat-like culture of the professional kitchen.

Kitchen Culture: In the Trenches

Most twenty-rst-century back-of-houses are testosteronefueled, aggressive, male-dominated spaces. Thats the reality disseminated by chef Anthony Bourdain, who describes the roughness of the restaurant kitchen and its surly, tough, ball-busting guys. In his wildly popular book Heat, Bill Buford recounts his experience in the Batali-owned Babbo galley and the orange-clogged maestros own early run-ins with bad-boy chef Marco Pierre White. His message: the kitchen is a place where only the strong survive. Competition is constant. Women are not often welcome therenot because they cant cook but because theyre not taken seriously as competitors. When asked how men and women differ in the kitchen, Batali says, Its in womens nature to be better because they dont cook to compete, they cook to feed people. Back in Italy, the best chefs are never dudesits always the grandma. There are two ways to make someone happy both are by putting something in themright now were talking about food!19 Batalis point of view is disconcerting, and not because of his crass double entendre. The grandmothers of whom he speaks do cook to feed people, but its also true that some women cook to compete. His observations

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Michael Symon, does double duty in Dinner Impossible, another against-the-clock thriller. Rock-star-impersonating Guy Fieri tours the country making clown-like pit stops at rough-n-tumble diners. Ironically, the one pastry chef on the network is male, but even he, the Ace of Cakes, is presented as a bad-ass punk. Otherwise, Alton Brown is a didactic science nerd. Pretty boy Tyler Florence may have shown up at the homes of desperate housewives to solve their 911 food emergencies, but his portrayal was more as a prince-charming-pro-to-the-rescue than as a paterfamilias. On his new show, Tylers Ultimate, Florence is in a residential kitchen (even if it is industrial in style), but he still plays the role of educating guru, having found and perfected the ultimate recipe. Theres no corner cutting for quick meals,

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raise another question: If most women dont like to compete, does that mean they cant be Great Chefs? Do you have to be a competitor to have the success of a Batali? To survive one of his kitchens, it would seem so. The generalization that, professionally, women make love and men war is implied by V -neck pundit Nick Sullivan in his adoration for Nigella Lawson. Elaine Louie writes: He contrasts her warm, nurturing style of cooking with the Gordon Ramsay style of cooking, which he described as war.20 Gordon Ramsay, meanwhile, is given a reality show where his culinary expertise allows him to put chefs through their paces, taunt them, and decide their fates. His tyrannical, tantrum-throwing tendencies are encouraged; they make him all the more compelling to watch. Quietly, on another channel, Nigella the home cook lovingly frosts a cake for her childs birthday, with a little swivel in her hips. Serious restaurant kitchens are organized according to the brigade system. The military terminology is not accidental. Although it traces back to the fourteenth century, Georges-Auguste Escofer is often cited as the chef who brought the system out of the barracks and into restaurant industry at the end of the nineteenth century. At the top of the pecking order is the chef de cuisine, who acts like a drill sergeant to keep his staff in line, by whatever means necessary. The system is extremely hierarchical; underlings and newcomers are often subjected to hazing. As relative newcomers to the professional kitchen elite, women often nd themselves in subservient positions. And, since their lack of ability or desire to compete is presumed from the start, they are often hazed harder than the boys. More problematic, perhaps, than this military system of organization are the ergonomics of the Francocentric restaurant kitchen, which create an environment both psychologically challenging and physically grueling. Women arent given any special dispensation. They have to endure the same conditionsheat, heavy pots, equipment stacked to the ceiling, standing on your feet all day. With less muscle mass to start with, women arent generally as tall or as physically strong as their male counterparts. So, although the setup isnt particularly friendly to anyone, its harder on females. If given free reign, would women chefs invent an alternative operational system or utilize the space of the kitchen differently? Probably. Alison Vines-Rushing, winner of the 2004 James Beard Rising Star Award and co-owner (with her husband) of the New Orleans restaurant MiLa and Dirty Bird To-Go, a Manhattan fried chicken canteen, happily recalls the kitchen of her previous restaurant, Longbranch: We painted the walls blue to make it home-

likeit was the opposite of industrial.21 She also made structural adjustments to accommodate her smaller size. Anita Lo, executive chef and owner of Annisa in Manhattans Greenwich Village, also designed a nonstandard kitchen after having worked at traditional, haute restaurants like Bouley and Chanterelle. Although she didnt have many options due to her galleys size, she chose an L-shape in lieu of the traditional rectangle with one central aisle down the middle. That way she could participate in the cooking and feel like part of the staff. Most executive chefs arent usually in the kitchen, she explained. They stand at the pass and make sure all the dishes look alright going out. But I wanted to be in there cooking. Women chefs tend to prefer teamwork.22 This small detail denotes a signicant shift in mentality.

What to Expect
Will such newfangled, anti-brigade kitchens be perceived as amateur in the eyes of the James Beard or Michelin judges, even if the food they turn out is sensational? More to the point, can women who choose not to play by the same rules as the boys; who are equally ambitious culinarily but prefer different lifestylesa slower pace, a more communal spirit in the kitchen, motherhood, less manic hours, or one restaurant where they cook as opposed to ten they oversee from afarstill vie for the same trophies as their male counterparts? As long as success is measured by the male status quo, women will likely remain overlooked. Alexandra Guarnaschelli, executive chef at New York Citys Butter, agrees with Laura Shapiro that When women chefs get media attention, its for bucking the normhow about we just become part of the norm? Can we qualify for norm status?23 Her comments remind me of something Linda Nochlin said two years ago in an interview regarding the expectations for womens art: the trope of woman as exception has always been popularPeople dont know exactly what to do with woman as exception. Theyre like some odd bird out there that has done something unusual.24 Categorizing a female talentartistic, culinary, or otherwiseas an exception, an unusual spectacle, removes her from any comparative realm. After all, how can you fairly compare an exception to those who follow the rules? If she is the odd woman out, she cant be considered according to the standards of her profession; she can be judged only against fellow oddballs. And then, by virtue of being eccentric, she technically becomes incomparable. So bucking the norm and getting attention for difference does not help women achieve. Unfortunately, the

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16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.

women must conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity or cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.
25

18. Ibid. 19. newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/05/beard_awards_the_chefs_speak.html, 5 May 2009. 20. Louie, The Look That Sizzles. 21. Phone interview with Alison Vines-Rushing, 13 August 2009. 22. Conversation with Anita Lo, New York City, 29 July 2009. 23. www.gourmet.com/restaurants/2008/06/womenchefs, 12 June 2008. 24. Barbara A. MacAdam, Where the Great Women Artists Are Now, ARTnews, February 2007. 25. Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, 151.

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norm isnt an option, either. The question remains: Can women qualify for great status? Can the West Coast model, for example, become another paradigm for greatness? Cant talent and deliciousness count most? Must the traditional combination of a certain training, experience, and behavior be the only yardstick against which greatness is measured? The issue, of course, is not really about qualifying for the norm or for great status. Its about expanding and redening what the standards are, to make them more inclusive. Thats what Nochlin was trying to do when she turned the tables on her fellow academics. The questions, and the manner in which they are asked, are what need amending. In the food industry, both the portrayal of female chefs in the media and the ergonomics of professional kitchen design need to change. The criteria for choosing Best New apparently favor the male culinary experience. Are there really no wildly creative, innovative young female chefs to be found? What about Rising Stars? The James Beard Foundation gives out an annual award to A chef age thirty or younger who displays an impressive talent and who is likely to have a signicant impact on the industry in years to come. How are impressive talent or likelihood of signicant impact measured? Over the last eighteen years only four recipients of this honor have been women; the most recent, Alison Vines-Rushing, received her award seven years ago. The requirements of eligibility need reevaluating. But not necessarily on Nochlins terms. Forty years after her treatise appeared, its time for reassessment. We can no longer simply identify the problemthat women are considered incapable of doing the same as men, or that they do things equally but differently. The very denition of problem is at issue, and the question remains as relevant as when Nochlin rst posited it. Then again, some things have changed. Nochlin wrote:

Today, women chefs have embraced their equal value and have faced the facts of their situation. But because they remain isolated and pigeonholed by the media, by culinary institutions, and sometimes even by their male peers, women dont have the inuence, numbers, or respect to change the reality of restaurant kitchens. The women who ought to question their culpability or power to effect change are those with agency and cloutthe members of social institutions like the media and culinary organizations. Better to try and fail than do nothing. Its already 2010. The status quo is unacceptable.g
notes
1. Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971), reprinted in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1989), 150. 2. Euan Ferguson, Michelin Women, The Guardian, 25 March 2007 (Recipes & Features, p.26). 3. Adam Lusher, A Womans Place Really Is in the Kitchen, The Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 2009. 4. www.eatmedaily.com/2009/04/might-as-well-be-barefoot-and-pregnant-womenat-the-beard-awards, 2009. 5. Gender Confusion: Unraveling the Myths of Gender in the Restaurant Kitchen. Panel at Astor Center, New York, 8 June 2009. 6. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Bastianich, 2009. 7. www.gourmet.com/restaurants/2008/06/womenchefs, 2008. 8. topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/w/alice_waters/index. html (Alice Waters News, New York Times, 2009). 9. Ibid. 10. Sally Singer, The Tastemaker, Vogue, April 2006, 350353. 11. Nicole Alper, Mother of Invention: Suzanne Goin, Cookie Magazine, July 2008. 12. www.gourmet.com/restaurants/2008/06/womenchefs, 12 June 2008. 13. As stated on the Food Network program Chefography: Paula Dean. 14. www.newsweek.com/id/210852, 2009. 15. Elaine Louie, The Look That Sizzles, New York Times, 27 June 2007, Dining & Wine section.

rituals | carol f ield

Rites of Passage in Italy

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Every day in italy people are celebrating. Somewhere townspeople are parading down a winding medieval street to the piazza at the heart of the city while church bells are ringing. Somewhere bakers are frying ribbons of bread dough. Somewhere else men are measuring out vast stores of polenta. On the hillsides bonres are ablaze as citizens drink hot spiced wine in the cold night air. It is a known fact that Italians are highly sociable. Wherever they gather, whatever festivity is going on, you can almost always count on the fact that they are eating special dishes associated with the day. But what happens at less-public celebrations, in those pivotal domestic moments after the ceremonial crossing of a threshold? Are there specic rituals of passage for birth, marriage, and death? Have special foods traditionally been served for those events, or are the familiar traditions being lost? Is chocolate now creeping into everything? Do brides prefer the chic of an all-Brazilian menu or street food served from carts to many courses of traditional dishes? Do the articles and illustrations in American magazines nonnas in the kitchen, organic farmers in the elds, Slow Food initiatives at work in societyreect the realities of contemporary life in Italy? What is really cooking in Italy today? This article is the result of my observations, which are in no way systematic or complete. They are, in fact, completely idiosyncratic, based on what Ive noted over the years and amplied by conversations with friends and others Ive met in a variety of situations. To start at the beginning

Birth
Where births are concerned, medicine and superstition still happily, or not so happily, coexist. Home births are a thing of the past. All mothers-to-be now go to a hospital or clinic where midwives are more likely than a doctor to call the shots. But before the blessed event, some country people

still insist that if a pregnant womans craving is satised, it will take away a labor pain (toglia una voglia, levi una doglia). If the yearning persists, unsatised, they believe the child might be born with a birthmark. This is why it is not uncommon for an obviously pregnant woman at the greengrocer to nd people lling her hands with fruits and vegetables, just in case they are tastes she might crave. Neighbors and friends have traditionally brought homemade chicken broth to new mothers. The connection of poultry to feeding a new mother can be traced to the Renaissance, when we know from the meticulous accounts of Ser Girolamo, a Florentine notary, that he went to buy a fat pigeon and three fresh eggs for his wife while she was in labor.1 Much more recently a friend in Assisi received a nutritious chicken soup made with una vecchia gallina, an old hen that had cooked slowly over the re all day (as opposed to a young chicken that would give up its mild avor in no time), made with odori (carrots, celery, onion, and parsley) and chicken parts such as beaks and heads that couldnt be used in making chicken cacciatore. In southern Italy neighbor women traditionally gave the new mother pigeon soup, brodo di piccione, and, as a gift, they always brought a milk-fed pigeonso young it hadnt yet begun to sprout featherswith which to make more of the delicate soup. The broth, nutritious and easily digested, was believed to have helped bring in the new mothers milk. A friend in Molise reports that a newborn child used to be given eggs and salt, symbols of knowledge and competence. Needless to say, the practice of raising pigeons and the tradition of offering chicken broth or eggs and salt have mostly disappeared from Italian life. In their place, for quite a while, farm families substituted packaged cookies or bags of sugar or coffee to give the new mother energy. These were extravagant gifts from rural people who depended on honey from their bees for sweetening their own food. What hasnt changed is the tradition of giving confetti, sugar- or spice-coated seeds or nuts, on the occasion of a new babys arrival. As long ago as the Renaissance,

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.3237, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.32.

friends and relatives who came to see the new baby would have received almonds covered with a thin layer of sugar icing. Today, when a big blue or pink ribbon on the front door announces the arrival of a boy or a girl, it is still traditional for parents to welcome visitors with confetti that is colored blue for boys, pink for girls. These days, however, the interior of the confetti may very well have a ne layer of chocolate between the nut and the sugar glaze, or it could be all chocolate or perhaps hold a hazelnut or even a dried cherry. As children are now routinely born in hospitals and special dishes for new mothers are no longer required,

used by permission of the buitoni / stefanini heirs

beliefs about special rites for new babies are disappearing. Until recently no one would have given a baby shower for fear that presenting gifts before a baby is born might attract the evil eye, but the baby shower is beginning to catch on. A grandmother in a tiny town in Le Marche whispered conspiratorially to me that parents used to rub a baby from head to toe with sapa, a concentrated grape syrup as thick as molasses and dark as espresso, to give him force and strength. No one would do such a thing now.

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Above: Adriana Nelli Stefanini with her newborn baby, Livia, in Rome, November 1933.

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Marriage
Although some things have changedbridal gowns used to be green, invoking fertility, and veils were red to turn away the evil eyeweddings are still the biggest event in the lives of country people. They are a chance to pull out all the stops and create immense, lavish feasts for hundreds of guests. Even in this time of tight budgets and austerity, people with modest incomes spend enormous amounts of money and often choose to go into great debt rather than skimp and lose face. Tuscans even have a special expression, referring to such a skimpy wedding as baccala,2 dried cod, by which they mean that the event was extremely meager no gifts, no celebratory meal, no confetti. In the past, local customs associated specic dishes with the bridal banquet. In Tuscany, for instance, special cialde, at wafers, and berlingozzi, an orange-avored sweet bread, were served; in Abruzzo guests ate la grazia, a small pastry dipped in mosto.3 In Sardinia and Sicily crowds once threw wheat at the newly married couple in a ritual reminiscent of the ancient Roman ceremony of scattering wheat over the brides head. The wheat, which symbolizes fertility, has long since been replaced by showering the newlyweds with rice, each grain resembling a coin to bring them prosperity and good fortune. In Calabria and the South weddings always took place in the winter months. The nuptial meal, served at lunchtime, featured homemade fusilli made the day before by friends and relations who wrapped the pasta dough around a knitting needle to form its shape. It was served with a sugo di capra, sauce made from the meat of a male goat. No one brought gifts to the church. Instead, friends and relatives arrived the next day with food. They cooked for the newlyweds for as long as local tradition prescribed. Weddings are still bound by ritual. The two most important things are the brides dress, which the bride often chooses with her mother and future mother-in-law as much as a year before the ceremony, and abundant food, which begins with a rinfresco, a gathering of intimates before the ceremony, with Prosecco and hot and cold antipasti served as nger food. As many as twelve to fourteen courses offer more than almost anyone can possibly eat. The meal itself depends on whether the food is rustic or elegant, offering traditional or newly chic dishes. It also depends on where it is heldin the North or the South, in the country or city, in restaurants, large hotels, private villas, or clubs. Rarely are
Left: Livia Stefanini on the day of her wedding to Paolo Buitoni, Rome, 1962. A portrait of her mother, Adriana Nelli Stefanini, hangs in the background.
used by permission of the buitoni / stefanini heirs

wedding feasts held at home, and then they would always be catered. The courses are often rich and are comprised of at least three antipasti, two or three pasta dishes, and two or three second courses and dessert. Wine ows freely. Long tables covered with white linens may be full of endless platters of such local delicacies as lled pastas and meats think of the opening scene of The Godfather. A more elegant setting inside a historic castle or villa may feature waiters offering tagliatelle or ravioli or risotto from the cavity of a huge wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano. These days some Italian wedding feasts are distinctly non-Italian. Because ethnic cuisines are chic at the moment, the menu may be entirely Japanese or Brazilian. A few years ago you couldnt go to a wedding in Sicily without eating a tris di maresmoked salmon, smoked swordsh, and smoked tuna, but raw sh, pesce crudo, is now all the rage. For her daughters wedding a friend in the Sicilian countryside set up a buffet with small tables offering street food, a trend that started in Palermo and became popular outside the city shortly after. In recent years some weddings have become so informal that food is likely to be served at buffet tables. I recently heard about a wedding with a huge frying station, where guests lined up to watch experts fry tiny sh and a variety of vegetables, which they were then expected to eat on the spot. There is also a trend toward evening weddings now, perhaps because more and more people are watching their weight and dont want the temptation of a long meal. The tradition of a wedding cake is fairly recent in Italy. The only requirement is that it be white. It can come in a single sheet or in layers or tiers; the interior and lling can be made with any avor the couple chooses. Traditional local sweets associated with public holidays like Christmas and Easter do not appear at weddings, although there are instances of small towns with specic sweets like i dolci della sposa, the dessert of the bride, a bign made with white icing and tied with a white ribbon. A new tradition features a dessert buffet with a selection of such individual desserts as crme caramel, an, crme Catalan, and mousses served with the wedding cake. An even newer trend at summer weddings is an ice cream cart provided by artisan gelato makers expanding on their usual repertoire, or avant-garde gelaterie creating new colors and avors, such as gs and burnt almonds; chocolate and peperoncino; and Greek yogurt, pistachios, and honey. Whatever the style of the wedding, no guest leaves without a bomboniere or a tulle bag lled with white confetti, three for children, and ve for adults. The odd number brings good luck.

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Death
The ritual for funerals begins with large, black-bordered posters pasted on walls all over town announcing the death of a family member. Though the posters predate the Internet by centuries, they reach a huge audience in less than a day. Soon telegrams and phone calls begin arriving at the family of the deceased. A new piece of etiquette does allow younger people to send condolences by e-mail. In northern Italy there is no tradition of serving food, no ritual wake or special meal connected with a death. Instead, as one woman told me, cooking is part of the mourning process, a way to process grief. Intimate friends and family bring whatever they make to the family before and after the funeral. In the south of Italy life and death are marked differently. Families and intimate friends gather at the house to set out for the funeral together. In some places friends and neighbors used to make a bollito as the base of a ritual meal called u cunsulo for the family in mourning. Maccheroni, considered the food of weddings, could not be served. Any bread or pasta eaten during the time of mourning must have been purchased, not made at home, since the family was spared from any cooking during this time. Traditionally, mourners were forbidden to light the re or cook for anything from three to thirty days, so others brought them everything, including forks and knives and glasses. The neighbors washed up as well, being careful not to break anything or leave even a speck of dirt a sign of bad luck that could come to the family or bring future deaths and mourning. Chrysanthemums, the ritual ower of death, must never be given as a gift. No one wants to invite death into the house. Instead, chrysanthemums, cut or in pots, are set as a centerpiece on the family tomb in Sicily where people lay out a banquet on November 2, I Morti, the Day of the Dead. At home, meanwhile, families set the table for relatives who are said to rise up from their graves on the night between November 1, All Souls Day, and November 2. They then sack all the pastry shops and toy stores in town to bring gifts to the house. When children get up the next morning they run around looking for the presents; as they come upon gifts, they shout out thank yous to their dead ancestors. Sweets for the occasion include pupi di cena, tall, brightly colored dolls made of melted sugar poured into molds and painted. For years they were in the form of the knights Roland and Tancred, but now contemporary gures like Batman and Spiderman have entered the local pantheon and are more popular.

In Sicily and southern Italy fava beans are considered the emblematic dish of death. Ancient Greeks saw the black spot on the leaves as the stain of death and refused to eat them, while the Romans acknowledged the connection of favas and death and served them at funeral banquets. Today favas are honored on the Day of the Dead in the form of fave dei morti, dead mens cookies, and ossi dei morti, bones of the dead, both made with ground almonds and egg whites.

Italy Today
Traditional food still appears in public and private rituals, but the Italy of today is a far different country than it was before the end of the mezzadria, the sharecropping system that essentially indentured families of agricultural workers to the landowner for whom they worked. Once they were freed to move wherever they liked and nd wage-paying jobs (which happened in Tuscany only in the late 1960s, and even later elsewhere), many Italians faced an entirely new way of life, sometimes better but sometimes dislocating and more difcult. I knew some of the members of a four-generation family who worked on a farm in Tuscany that belonged to their landlord. Their stone house had small, glassless windows and a replace that provided what heat they had. The family ate beans and potatoes with whatever herbs and wild greens they found nearby, made rudimentary pasta with a little oil, and lived with unrelenting scarcity. When the mezzadria was nally outlawed, the husband continued working for the landlord, but now with wages. The wife was hired to cook in the landlords trattoria, and for the rst time she used such ingredients as aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, pancetta, and prosciutto. She was cooking authentic Tuscan food. Long before Italy was awash in arugula or balsamic vinegar, many people lived like that family, or in a somewhat less modest situation, making do with what they grew or what was available locally for very little money. La cucina povera was the basis of the Italian diet. Ritual food was local food; traditions did not change for decades, even centuries. The Italy of today has seen dramatic social changes in the last thirty years. Supermarkets are overtaking mom-andpop shops. Convenience has become an important value to women who have paying jobs but who must still feed their families, look after the household, and carry on whatever traditions are meaningful to them. Meanwhile, regional borders are ever more porous. Italians are curious about new chefs and cooking styles. Food comes from all parts of the country. Trucks carry the breads of Puglia to the north of Italy and return with special forms

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4. Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, quoted in John Dickie, Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food (New York Free Press, 2008), 313. 5. Dickie, Delizia!, 284.

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of pasta once made only in a small group of villages. Industrial products of multinational companies are changing the tastes of long-recognized cheeses, meats, and even herbal preparations. Slow Food, an organization born in Italy, is dedicated to preserving the products that carry the avor of the terroir of individual villages and towns, and to educating people about the importance of making consumption and agriculture local once more.4 It is working to help preserve the values of the past in a rapidly changing Italy. Birth and death, two of the great turning points in the intimate life of a family, carry with them an immense emotional valence. Foods served to acknowledge those momentous events were and sometimes still are offered within the context of genuine and authentic tradition. Yet Italy has become a richer country. Neighbors no longer feel it necessary to cook for new mothers or grieving families. Instead of bringing food to a family with a new baby, women now bring a little outt. The celebration of weddings, the most public of the three rites of passage, keeps changing the most. Ive heard about incredibly luxurious wedding dinners that are almost like competitive events. There is extravagant spending beyond the wildest dreams of most people, but the spending does not have much connection to authentic Italian food. On the other hand, such weddings are sometimes showcases for some of the best chefs in the country, a chance to taste the food of now, the trends that will sweep across a country in love with two spouses: novelty and traditional cuisine. I often have mixed feelings about changes in Italian ritual. I realize that some of the practices and the food that accompanies them derive from times of poverty. Certainly I wouldnt wish poverty on anyone, but I am always happier to taste the genuine food of a village, a city, a region and feel part of the continuity of the countrys social and culinary history.

Its not only foreigners who want Italy to continue embracing family and friends with its delicious food. But to be that Italy, the Italy that many of us love and want to continue knowing, requires that Italian food can only reinvent itself by pretending it has stayed the same, as John Dickie writes in his excellent book Delizia! Change only comes in the guise of continuity; novelties must be presented as nostalgic relics.5 Italys passion for eating artisanal, traditional, handmade food is genuine, as is the ingenuity of some large-scale industrial producers who bring everything from wheels of cheese to ethically made pastas to the Italian table. The food and form of weddings, for instance, are constantly changing, while Slow Food is promoting a modern Italy with ancient values. Ads feature old men surrounded by multigenerational families in the shade of trees, presenting pictures of an earlier Italy even though, in some cases, they are actually using an emotionally charged context to promote the food of large companies. Yes, private rites of passage may change and incorporate new ingredients and dishes, but the Italians continue to value the past and its deep connection to food. What seems old may be new and what is new may seem old. Both make legitimate claims on their place in tradition.g
notes
I would like to thank the following people who helped with my research for this article: Gianna Bertelli, Viola Buitoni, Marina Colonna, Rosetta Costantino, Marcella Croce, Maria Dito, Carla Melchior, Fred Plotkin, Anne Robichaud, Valeria Rumori, and Mary Taylor Simeti. 1. Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1999), 40. 2. Paolo Toschi, Invito al Folklore Italiano (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1963), 112, 202. 3. A. De Gubernatis, Storia Comparata degli Usi Nuziali in Italia e presso Gli Altri Popoli Indo-Europei (Sala Bolognese: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1990 [reprint of the 1878 Milan edition]).

forum | anne e. mc bride

Food Porn

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Now it cannot escape attention that there are curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes.5

Anne E. McBride

Anne E. McBride: Is there such a thing as food porn? For some reason, the term food porn took off, while gastro-porn never did. Today, food porn generally evokes the unattainable: cooks will never achieve the results shown in Will Goldfarb: No. Its a meaningless, articial term. Porn is a replacement for sex, while food is a consumable item.

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.3846, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.x.

marilyn minter, chewing pink , 2008. c-print. courtesy of the artist and salon 94, new york.

The very idea of food porn is contentious. Academics presumably like the term because it attracts more readers than less sexy topics (pun intended), while the general public uses the term broadly to describe mouthwatering images in magazines, on tv, or online.1 A certain shock value can account for its popularity with both groups. But people who actually work with food generally ignore the label and focus instead on their jobs. Is the term food porn, then, simply a creation of commentators on the sidelines? Why does it have such continuing appeal? And what does it actually mean? Although he did not specically use the term, Roland Barthes discussed what is essentially food porn in his 1957 collection, Mythologies. Commenting on the food-related content in Elle magazine that offers fantasy to those who cannot afford to cook such meals, he writes: [C]ooking according to Elle is meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense.2 The actual words food porn rst appeared in 1979, when Michael Jacobson, cofounder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, opposed healthy and unhealthy foodsRight Stuff and Food Pornin the Centers newsletter, Nutrition Action Healthletter.3 Jacobson later explained that he coined the term to connote a food that was so sensationally out of bounds of what a food should be that it deserved to be considered pornographic.4 It is not known whether he knew of journalist Alexander Cockburns 1977 use of the term gastro-porn in the New York Review of Books:

certain cookbooks, magazines, or television shows, nor will they ever master the techniques. In fact, portrayals of food have been so transformed by food styling, lighting, and the actions of comely media stars that food does seem increasingly out of reach to the average cook or consumer.6 As with sex porn, we enjoy watching what we ourselves presumably cannot do. Critic Richard Magee points to a performative dimension in food that also links it with sex: Food, when removed from the kitchen, becomes divorced from its nutritive or taste qualities and enters a realm where surface appearance is all-important. The interest here is in creating a graphic simulation of real food that is beyond anything that the home cook could produce.7 By involving visceral, essential, and eshy elements, this performative aspect invites obvious and usually facile comparisons with sex8as do the many food-show hosts, usually women, who lick their ngers or use sensual terms to describe what they are doing. A second level of comparisons also exists. Cockburn writes about culinary pastoralism vis--vis gastro-porn, while Magee pits Martha Stewarts food Puritanism against Nigella Lawsons food porn.9 It is difcult to move beyond such rhetorical play. But the tenth anniversary edition of Gastronomica offers an appropriate occasion to reexamine the meaning of food porn. The forum presented here grew out of a meeting of Menus in the Media, a working group funded by New York Universitys Institute for Public Knowledge that studies the culture of cooking from both academic and practitioner perspectives. Our original discussion was led by Frederick Kaufman and Alan Madison; here, other academics and chefs contribute to the conversation.

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Krishnendu Ray: I am skeptical, because I nd that food porn is used primarily by writers to condemn cookingrelated entertainment on television and in magazines. It is mostly used to attack beautiful food in the name of good food. What makes me doubly skeptical is the easy, uninterrogated consensus it has generated among so many graduate students. It reminds me of the old exaggerated critique of mass culture.10 Once you call something pornographic, you bring down moral opprobrium on it. You poison the topic and stop the discussion from going any further. But the issue is worth pursuing. Instead of food porn
GASTRONOMICA

marilyn minter, i

u , 2008. c-print. courtesy of the artist and salon 94, new york.

Except for the fact that theyre both on television I dont see the two as related. Its all about delivery systems. The Food Network makes food look pretty so that consumers will go out and buy a blender. But you dont watch porn to buy the mattress on which the actors are having sex. Sex is not consumable in the same way. Where porn is a substitute for the real thing, food television is not a substitute for food. People complain that tv and magazines make food sexy to sell it, but where exactly is the porn in food television? What is the act? Because I dont understand what the term means, for me it doesnt exist.

we could borrow more productive and subtle categories from studies of visual culture.11 Alan Madison: The use of food porn to describe professionally photographed food in magazines and on tv demonstrates a lack of understanding of what pornography is, how it is produced, and for what purpose; it dilutes the meaning and seriousness of the word pornography. In our society half-naked, airbrushed, pristinely photographed models appear on billboards to sell everything from socks to suitsis this fashion porn? We use images of female soccer players wearing only their sports bras, with looks of ecstasy on their faces, and of male basketball players wearing short shorts to sell everything from sneakers to Viagrais this sports porn? The use of sexy, highly stylized images and pictures as advertisements is the bread and butter of advertising and marketing. How do any of these differ from the highly stylized, cleanly lit images of food tv or food advertising? If the food porn advocates want to say that our society as a whole is pornographic, I would go along with that. But to single out food for this pejorative is disingenuous and hypocritical, since the use of such a charged word as porn is just intended to attract interest.

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Chris Cosentino: The idea of food as porn has been around since the days of the ancient Romans. There were huge feasts with vomitoria so diners could go back and gorge some more. It was about opulence and decadence: oysters and bee pollen are great old examples. When you look at things now, were not far from associating eating with the Seven Deadly Sins. Using words such as luscious, unctuous, creamy, and decadent to describe food brings to mind the so-called sins of gluttony and lust. I think about food differently. For me its the immediacy of experiencing the food itself. Theres not all that much difference between lusting over a person or over food. Frederick Kaufman: When a culturally conservative venue such as the New York Times casually categorizes Julie and Julia as food porn, we know theres something out there. AEM: How do you dene food porn? FK: Since food porn has become a cultural term taken for granted by bloggers and mainstream media alike, its origins have rarely been revisited. The terms staying power has a fair bit to do with the edginess and controversy that continue to encircle the idiom. We may never be able to nail down a precise denition of pornography, but like sex porn, we know food porn when we see it. There was wisdom in the Supreme Courts 1964 Community Standards ruling, which created a metric for the term pornography through cultural reception, a tactic that could henceforth locate all manner of porn within historical frames. Food porn gained its initial linguistic traction in the 1980s and accelerated throughout the 1990s and 2000s to attain its present vaunted status. Why did the idea of food porn emerge at this particular time, and why did it persist despite the explosion and fragmentation of food media? As with most neologisms, the story has as much to do with the cross-disciplinary inuence of politics and technology as with whisking and frying. One could just as easily place the credit or blame for food porn on the Internet and Jenna Jameson as on Giada De Laurentiis and her mozzarella, raspberry, and brown sugar panini. Indeed, it was only a matter of time before a desire as essential and physical as food would be co-opted by capitalisms most protable avenues of distribution and sales. And as most students of history understand, slippage of denitional terms becomes particularly acute during periods of political and social crisis, periods in which decadence, sonorescence, and the collapse of previous orders are widely perceivedall of which marked the American landscape from which food porn emerged.

KR: I dont dene it, but from what others have argued it seems reasonable to assume that food porn means the following: (a) it is porn when you dont do it but watch other people do it; (b) there is something unattainable about the food pictured in magazines or cooked on tv shows; (c) there is no pedagogical value to it; (d) it hides the hard work and dirty dishes behind cooking; (e) there is something indecent about playing with food when there is so much hunger in the world. I think there is some value in all these criticisms, but the term food porn closes off discussion rather than opening them up to closer inspection. For instance, take the critique that porn is when you watch it but dont do it. There is some merit to arguing that we lose something of our culture when we dont practice it. Culture is not only about representation but also about doing it. We practice culture, and it takes a lot of practice. This tactile, embodied conception of culture is a useful corrective to culture understood primarily as representation or artifact. AM: Pornography has nothing to do with the enhancement and increased valuation of image and action and everything to do with the devaluation of the image and the actions it depicts. Porn is designed to subordinate by pictures or words, not to elevate or deify. Porns images are graphic, not stylized; real, not enhanced. Pornography does not idealize sexquite the opposite, it diminishes it. Sex porn contains no art, and the making of it contains little, if any, craft. It is the cheaply made, documentary recording of straightforward actions. Its point is to leave as little to the imagination as possible, so that one can easily insert oneself into the scene for the ultimate purpose of self-gratication. If there were an accurate denition for food porn it would not be chefs on food tv creating delicious dinners, or recipes in food magazines augmented with sumptuous close-up photography. Instead, food porn would be the grainy, shaky, documentary images of slaughterhouses, behind-the-scenes fast-food workers spitting in their products, or dangerous chemicals being poured on farmland. Such documentary evidence of food-product degradation is the closest imagery to food porn and, just like regular porn, some want to outlaw these imagesin this case, the food industry. If food porn did exist, the analogous shot to the all important cum shot in sex porn would be to graphically show the end result of eatingdefecatingnot the process of making a perfectly roasted chicken. CC: To me, food porn is the ability of food to elicit a positive and euphoric reaction, as well as to make others covet what

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you are eating. It encompasses everything. Its not just in magazines or on televisionits also the experience of dining. WG: I dont have a denition for food porn since it doesnt exist. AEM: How useful a metaphor is porn as applied to food? CC: Not a great one, though it denitely gets peoples attention. Sort of like rubbernecking at a highway accident: It makes people stop and look. If the term porn brings people to food, I dont care what it means. The more we can get people to pay attention to food, the more changes are going to be made to the food system. Every day I send out pictures of food that I cook. These pictures might change peoples perception of what food is and send them to a farmers market, but some viewers might nd my pictures of raw meat offensive. The word porn is just risky enough to make some people look, but it will make others turn away. WG: The term porn is unrelated to food, since it traditionally applies to esh vending rather than the high art of customer nourishing. Alans comments about the low grade of porn production undermine any similarity even further its about sex, stupid, not high-production value. Making food for a purpose other than pure nourishment is usually done solely for art, which is why people will pay one hundred dollars for a fancy restaurant and two dollars for McDonalds, when both have the same calories. FK: As a trope, food porn can tell us a great deal about who we are and the culture in which we live, even if it doesnt tell us very much about the enduring qualities of food. Pornographys cultural explosion can be traced to the advent of the personal computer and subsequent reign of the Web, which enabled a new perception of privacy and new horizons of alienation. At the same time, porn as a cultural artifact gained legitimacy through identity politics (which emphasized personal experience over larger moral and social codes), body and gender theory (which emphasized physical difference as a form of empowerment), and an economic climate in which anything deemed attractive could be relentlessly repositioned and commodied as a luxury itemall the better to be consumed by the young urban professional. The years of the yuppie coincided with the years of the foodie, and many of the same cultural fetishes apply to both. The subsequent Bush years and post-9/11 politics ushered in a national post-traumatic stress disorder that has swung between poles of aggression and

passivity, worship and withdrawal, dialectics that ironically serve the purposes of both nesting and porn. AEM: Then why do you think the term food porn is so widely used? WG: Because sex sells. Articles that mention sex are an instant hit. When I was at Duke, my sociology professor changed the name of his Consumer Marketing class to Consuming Passions; enrollment quadrupled. Its like throwing around the term molecular gastronomy without digging any deeper into what it really means. The term food porn has no meaning in any context in which its used, but it has become a sound bite for everyone. Its just sexier. AM: I personally dont think the term is widely used. It is used by a slight sliver of academia to describe the use of idealized images of food in its marketing, and often it is used facetiously by those who create that marketing. However, in the spirit of this discussion, the short answer is: money. The term food porn is provocative and is used in print to help sell articles. Sex sells, and to attach a sexual connotation to any article attracts more eyeballs, thereby yielding more money for the publisher. Some use food porn in their title for the same reason that some womens magazines always have the word orgasm on the cover: to attract readers. In the future, we will see more sensationally glib food articles like The Chicken Holocaust, Terrorist Farmers, The New Racism: Brown and White Eggs, White Chocolate Slavery, and The Foie Gras Abortion. Obviously, words matter, and some are loaded with historical meaning and deep emotion. Words can titillate and offend; when misused, they have the insidious side effect of diluting and perverting the words historical meaning. Food porn is one such case. It serves to diminish the meaning of pornography and its potential to degrade human sexuality. Although pornography can be harmful to both sexes, by and large it debases women in particular. Using the word porn in connection with food photography desensitizes us to the pejorative meaning of the word and thereby makes sex porn seem not really so bad. CC: Food magazines, with their rich food photography, have become the brown-paper-covered magazines that people used to hide, except now its okay to be a foodophile. Its okay to indulge and go to this restaurant and eat this food, to gorge oneself on that cheese. Theres nothing wrong with that.

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KR: I am not convinced that the term is widely used, with the exception of some elements of the virtuous literary crowd and those who mimic them. They have this quaint idea that we should learn something from tv, presumably just as we do from books, especially books without lovely pictures. The presumption is that we should work hard at watching, not just have mindless fun. In my judgment, the pedagogical value of any form of commodied culture is suspect. Entertainment on tv reproduces all the problems of popular culture, and few of its promises. Food tv carries the same burdens. So the critique of food porn is too narrowly focused on food. But let me argue the exact opposite of what I have said so far. Let us for a moment assume that most of the coverage of food on American tv is pornographic. Following the critic Don Kulick, in a slightly different context one could argue that if it is pornographic it is a progressive kind of pornography. Thats impossible, right? In pornography the depiction of womens pleasure has always been more difcult because there are no photogenic equivalents to the erect penis and ejaculation. Hence the so-called money shot is almost always about the man; womens pleasure is

much less convincingly portrayed. Visually, the state of the phallus drives the plot. In food porn the position of the phallus as the ultimate source of all pleasure is usurped by food. Hence, if food tv is pornographic, it is much less phallocentric. Kulick notes that
Luce Irigaray has made much in her writing about the power that a womans two lips might have to parler femme (speak woman) and thereby displace the male phallus from its Freudian throne as the supposed source of all erotic joy. The two lips Irigaray refers to are vaginal lips. But maybe we should, instead, consider those other two lips and what they can do. And perhaps those intensely mouthy pleasures of lapping, licking, slurping, and crunching that we see depicted are some version of parler femmea language of pleasure, power, and supreme disinterest in everything the phallus has to offer.12

Think of that the next time you are distracted by Giada De Laurentiis licking her ngers as she greedily swallows some freshly made doughnuts. AEM: Why does food invite such voyeurism?

marilyn minter, amoeba , 2008. c print. courtesy of the artist and salon 94, new york.

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CC: Because it provokes such a visceral response. KR: I dont think food is particularly prone to voyeurism. Sex is much more compelling, happy families more enticing, murder absolutely gripping; all these things work as entertainment for precisely the same reason. In our culture most of these thingssex, bliss, and deathare expected to be contained within the private realm in some ridiculously ideal world, while in reality they either leak out or we hope to transgress in our dreams. Much of cooking on television is in fact domesticity on displayequivalent to families on display, romance on display, reality on display, order (in cop shows), or dramatic cures (in doctor shows). They are one-dimensional caricatures, useful precisely because of their simplicity, clarity, and idealization. So we dream up these ways to contain sex, happiness, and death, reminding ourselves of our social ideals. We see more and more cooking on tv as we ourselves cook less and less. But if our problem with cooking shows is that they are voyeuristic, then almost everything on tv is pornographic. Why target cooking shows? Television has allowed cooking to be born as a public image. Marshall McLuhan saw that coming long ago when he wrote: In

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marilyn minter, gimme , 2008. c-print. courtesy of the artist and salon 94, new york.

audile-tactile Europe tv has intensied the visual sense, spurring them toward American styles of packaging and dressing. In America, the intensely visual culture, tv has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the non-visual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts.13 Food on tv and in colorful magazines is also about domesticity as an iteration of nation building. It gives us a way to imagine a collective public by watching cultural practices as deployed across a diverse but unied territory that we call a nation. All those endless barbecue shows are a good way to imagine the extent of the nation and its myriad variety. But domesticity is not the whole story. There are also contradictory claims of masculinity and professionalization. Food on tv portrays the virtues of professionalization. Even Rachael Ray is defensive when she goes on Iron Chef. I am just a cook, not a chef, she says. Chefs can do stuff I cant. Surgeons can do stuff no healer can. Cops can do stuff that you or I cant. These folks can save the world. So, you see, we must concede our world to the expert, each in his (or her) eld. Not because we can do it, but because we cant. So the point of food on tv is not that we can do itthe presumption behind the critique that food porn is

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mere unproductive, voyeuristic, funbut that we cant do it. That is the source of its pleasure. FK: Voyeurism hinges upon projections of the private and the personal into the public realm. From this perspective, the publication or broadcast of a private activitybe it coitus or cookingcreates structural equivalents. Food porn, like sex porn, like voyeurism, are all measures of alienation, not community. As such, they belong to realms of irreality. Irreality, of course, is attractive to anyone who may be dissatised with the daily exigencies of his or her life. Hence the compelling nature of visceral experiences from food and sex to the Weather Channels blatant exploitation of disastrous storms and oods, all of which can be vicariously consumed through the multifarious screens that have come to dominate our lives. WG: Food is unique within the realm of high art for involving an actual commodity internalized by the consumera special relationship that cannot be found in any other expression of personal values. Once an art of survival, food has evolved into a ne art, with a pleasure disproportionate to its nutritional value. Images of naked women nearly having sex can be considered ne art; depending on the style of photography, they are not considered pornography. Why? The only way to argue that point is to make the What is Art? argument successfully. By analogy, it is not a stretch to say that there is such a thing as ne art that distinguishes the preparation of food. Therefore I dont understand the notion of voyeurism in food. Just because people like watching other people do things, that doesnt make it voyeurism. AM: Your question assumes that watching food on tv is voyeuristic. That is absurdthat would make watching anything on tv, or in the cinema or theater, voyeuristic. Cant someone watch just to be entertained or educated? If all watching is just tawdry voyeurism, then all performances are nothing more than cheap exhibitionism. This question also shows a complete misunderstanding of the artice of food television, which does not employ any of the visual styles that imply voyeurismhidden cameras, poor lighting, shaky cinema vrit camera work, or a single wideangle view of the action. There is no pretense to make the experience real or documentaryquite the opposite is necessary to create a successful food show. Most shows are taped with three to seven cameras in proscenium style, sometimes with a full audience; the aspiration is theatrical, to create high drama from the ordinary. Stylistically speaking, creating food television has more in common with

opera than with pornography or voyeurism. In formal visual terms, the invitation is not to watch secretly but to join the community of the audience to celebrate and applaud in public, not to masturbate in private. If you are mistakenly conating voyeurism with viewership based on statistics, that just doesnt work. On tv, for example, the voyeurism food invites is dwarfed by professional wrestling, non-cooking housewives in New Jersey, singers trying to become idols, and hundreds of other subjects from animated sponges to real-life bounty hunters. An academic looking to make broad cultural critiques based on tv-viewing habits would be better served by watching nascar than by watching someone saut artichokes. AEM: Does food porn function as a substitute for actual cooking? WG: There is no question that the act of cooking invites many enthusiasts, some of whom may have little desire to actually cook. So the question is, does being a fan diminish the value of the experience? Is Roger Federer less brilliant because his spectators dont all play tennis? The answer, I hope, is painfully obvious. I still dont know what food porn is. But lets say for the sake of argument that it has to do with the presentation of food. There are two kinds of people who watch food porn: either they cook or they dont. There is no way that watching food on television will make people cook less. Most of the Food Network shows are designed to encourage people to buy things to cook, so they have the opposite effect from food porns presumed onethat people watch and dont do. Food on television doesnt take away the desire to cook from those who have it, but it does make people who dont cook want to buy food. Its a net gain, not a net loss. Thats why I love food television. The concept of food porn exists only for people who dont have any relation to food in preparing, cooking, or serving ittheyre only interested in analyzing it. Thats the replacementthe replacement of the real with the abstract. The people analyzing the watching of the cookingthats food porn. They are the ones who have replaced the act of cooking with the act of watching. FK: Through interviews with food-media producers, directors, onscreen talent, and Food Network executives, I learned that practitioners of the genre understand food television as the equivalent of an anti-anxiety drug, that cooking on television presents an idealized, alternative reality, and that the more people watch, the less they cook. Rachael Ray goes over beautifully in a sports bar: The men drink beer,

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munch chips, and watch the game, while one television over, virtual wife smiles and prepares virtual dinner. Again, the alienation and technological intervention particularize a larger cultural shift in which virtuality has gained ground. And virtuality, in turn, engenders a wide variety of reactions, including this exchange. Our dialogue about food porn is a way of reckoning with a perceived threat, which may explain a fair bit of denial. CC: If you dont cook, yes, food tv allows you to live through others actions, just as porn does. A lot of people want to feel the same passion that chefs do, and tv is the closest way to get to that. Cooking shows are full of fervor, of drive. Others live though our passion for food and experience joy in our meals. For people who dont normally cook, food porn is a great substitute. AM: This question, like all of the others, assumes that food porn exists. But it doesnt. The implication is that viewing regular, old-fashioned sex porn alone satiates desire, which of course it does not. Porn incites to action and is worthless if it does not. If the metaphor is to be taken to its logical conclusion, food porn in itself cannot sate desire; it must inspire to action. So, just as a healthy dose of regular porn might leave you lying in bed trying to catch your breath, one would assume that food porn would incite you to breathlessly whip some egg whites until they became a very stiff meringue.g
Chris Cosentino is executive chef at Incanto and co-creator of Boccalone Salumeria in San Francisco. He was one of the nalist chefs of The Next Iron Chef and is now the co-host of Chefs vs. City, both on Food Network.
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Alan Madison has traveled around the world producing and directing food shows for television. He has worked with chefs Emeril Lagasse, Rocco DiSpirito, Jacques Torres, Rick Bayless, Charlie Trotter, Sara Moulton, Rachael Ray, and hundreds of others. Early in his career he worked as a production assistant in the porn industry. Krishnendu Ray is a sociologist and assistant professor of food studies at New York University. He is the author of The Migrants Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households; his essay Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television (Gastronomica, Winter 2007) argued against the existence of food porn.

notes
1. An August 2009 search for the term food porn on Flickr.com yielded 22,753 results. 2. Roland Barthes, Ornamental Cookery, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 78. 3. For example, the JulyAugust 2009 issue of nah featured kfcs Kentucky Grilled Chicken (the grilled alternative to its fried chicken that kfc launched in spring 2009) as Right Stuff and Baskin-Robbinss new line of premium sundaes as Food Porn. See http://cspinet.org/nah/index.htm. 4. As told to Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. E-mail correspondence, May 2009. 5. Alexander Cockburn, Gastro-Porn, New York Review of Books, 8 December 1977, at www.nybooks.com/articles/8309. 6. Molly ONeill discusses this in Food Porn, Columbia Journalism Review, SeptemberOctober 2003, 3845. 7. Richard M. Magee, Food Puritanism and Food Pornography: The Gourmet Semiotics of Martha and Nigella, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 6:2 (Fall 2007), at www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/ fall_2007/magee.htm. 8. See, for example, Andrew Chan, La grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography, Gastronomica 3:4 (Fall 2003): 4753. 9. In the nal paragraph of his essay, however, Magee avows that Lawson transcends any simple binary: She rejects the patriarchal oppression of the kitchen while embracing domestic comforts in the same way that one may embrace the pleasures of sex while turning away from the essential falsity and potential oppression of pornography. 10. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (New York: Routledge, 2001 [reprint of original 1944 edition]). 11. See, for instance, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12. Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, ed. Don Kulick and Anne Meneley (New York: Penguin, 2005), 92. 13. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 54.

Will Goldfarb is the chef-owner of WillPowder and WillEquipped, sources for specialty products and equipment for restaurant and home kitchens. He was nominated for Best Pastry Chef by the James Beard Foundation, and Pastry Art & Design named him one of the Ten Best Pastry Chefs in America. Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harpers and a professor of journalism at the City University of New York and the cuny Graduate School of Journalism. His essay Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography (Harpers magazine, October 2005) expanded the concept of gastro-porn.

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slice of life | frances baca

Sweet Tooth Nation

Fabrico Prprio and the Portuguese Pastry

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Im going to lisbon. Is there anything I can bring back for you? asked my friend with a sly smile. She already knew my answer: a dozen Pastes de Belm. Named after the Lisbon caf that closely guards its secret recipe, these heavenly custard pastries are, for me, the ultimate taste of home. My mother, meanwhile, longs for the spongy, buttery Madalena that she grew up eating, while my friend chooses to smuggle back as many chocolate-covered Pirmides as can t in her carry-on bag. Though our tastes may differ,
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.4749, issn 1529-3262.

Above: Dating from 1829, the Confeitaria Nacional is one of Lisbons most beloved pastry shops.
photograph by soraya vasconcelos

2007

there is one thing that we share: an obsession with the pastries that are common in our childhood home of Portugal. The countrys larger national obsession with these treats is chronicled in a quirky and beautifully illustrated book, Fabrico Prprio: The Design of Portuguese Semi-Industrial Confectionery. The young graphic designers Frederico

2010 by frances baca.

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Duarte, Rita Joo, and Pedro Ferreira conceived of Fabrico Prprio after living abroad and developing a erce homesickness for the pastries they were accustomed to eating back home. This new appreciation for their native sweets led them to research and promote the art of confectionery in Portugal. And so Fabrico Prprio (or Own Production, named for shops that do all their own baking) emerged, to celebrate the variety and artistry of Portuguese pastries and stimulate greater interest in their production and consumption, both at home and abroad. Artists, chefs, designers, and journalists were invited to collaborate on the project. Their contributionsincluding an essay on cafs in Mozambique, a brief history of Portuguese sponge cake in Japan, and reections on favorite cakes and childhood memories enrich Fabrico Prprios pages and provide complex portraits of pastry and life in Portugal and the lands of the Portuguese diaspora. As the authors note in the introduction, We, the Portuguese, cannot live without cakes. Indeed. Fabrico

Prprio identies no fewer than seventy-eight pastries found in cafs and bakeries, in addition to several rare specimens of cakes whose fanciful formsamong them a tiny rabbitshaped sponge cake and giant butter-cake mufnare lovingly rendered in colored pencil. While the variety of pastries illustrated in the book demonstrates great imagination and skill on the part of the pastry chef, the authors bemoan the gradual disappearance of many of these traditional sweets. The decline of caf culture is cited among the principal reasons for this ebb in demand; new tastes for fast food are slowly usurping the publics appreciation for older, time-honored avors. Sure-re sellers like Pastes de Nata, Palmiers, and Bolos de Arroz are commonly stocked in favor of some of the more unusual cakes. Nonetheless, Fabrico Prprios vibrant images and inspired writings are a giant step toward reviving popular enthusiasm for the art of pastry in Portugal. Photographs of several cafsfrom the retro-chic Pasteleria Mexicana to the homey Confeitaria da Pontetempt readers with images of prominently displayed sweets and tidy, inviting

interiors. As we learn from an essay on Cakes at Dawn, an odd but beloved custom among night owls is to troll several of these cafs and bakeries in search of an early-morning bite. An engaging photo essay on beach vendors of Bolas de Berlim (sugar-coated doughnuts either cream-lled or plain) chronicles the same kind of sugary cravings, now fueled by the hot summer sun. As I delight in Fabrico Prprios appetizing pages, my thoughts turn to the Pastes de Belm delivered directly from my friends suitcase to my eager hands. Rich and smelling of cinnamon, the pastries inspired a bittersweet nostalgia, making me long for a lazy afternoon in a Lisbon caf, espresso in hand and a delicious cake of my

Clockwise, from Far Left: A small selection from Fabrico Prprios Cake Encyclopedia: Bolo de Arroz (Rice Cake), Sabia (Savoy), Jesuta (Jesuit), Maravilha (Wonder), Orelha (Ear), Pirmide (Pyramid), Pata de Veado (Deer Hoof), and Pastel de Nata (Custard Pastry).
photographs by soraya vasconcelos

2007

choosing on the plate before me. Although the dozen Pastes disappeared in two days, the sweet memories of Portugal lingered on.g
note
For more information about Fabrico Prprio and its accompanying workshops and presentations, please visit www.fabricoproprio.net.

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fashion | becky e. coneki n

Another Form of Her Genius

Lee Miller in the Kitchen

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In 1949, when julia child enrolled in the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Lee Miller, another feisty, intelligent, expat American woman, was making a new life in the English countryside of East Sussex. Spending weekdays in London (which she preferred), on weekends Miller commenced her country life at Farley Farm in Muddles Green with the help of a very small staff, gardening, canning, cooking, hostessing, and facing new postwar challenges, such as butchering her own pigs and making her own butter. Less than a decade later Lee Miller also attended the Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school for a six-month course. But the comparison between the two women ends there. Unlike Julia Child, who achieved public renown through her cooking, Lee Miller left the public eye to work mainly privately in her kitchen.1 Born Elizabeth Miller to a middle-class family in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, she was, as her dear friend and sometimes lover, Life photographer Dave Scherman, put it, the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century renaissance woman.2 Miller was certainly an impetuous beauty, who even from an early age was often photographed nude by her father. Her childhood was marked by tragedy when a family friend raped her at the age of seven. She had to endure excruciating treatments for recurrent gonorrhoea administered in the days before penicillin. As a teenager she watched a beau die of heart failure while showing off for her by jumping into a freezing lake from the side of their rowboat.3 By the winter of 1926 Miller was in New York City, studying lighting and theatre design at the Art Students League. One day, as she stepped into trafc, she was scooped up by Cond Nast. He was struck by Millers beauty and offered her modeling work for Vogue. Just shy of her twentieth birthday Miller appeared as Vogues cover girl for the March 1927 issue. She was later photographed by leading American photographers Edward Steichen and Arnold Genthe. When she moved to Paris in 1927, she became George Hoyningen-Huenes favourite model for

Paris Vogue. By early 1930 she had her own apartment and studio in Montparnasse and was regularly working with leading couturiers Chanel, Patou, and Schiaparelli. As an armless classical statuetied up, draped, and covered in a mixture of our and butterMiss Lee Miller played the leading lady in Jean Cocteaus rst lm, Blood of a Poet.4 In this role, as was so often the case in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lee Miller was simultaneously active and passive, subject and object. Miller famously became Man Rays student, model, muse, and lover, regularly appearing in the pages of Vogue as both model and photographer. She also helped him perfect the photographic process known as solarisation.5 But by October 1932 Man Rays jealousy and competitiveness led Miller to return to Manhattan and set up what proved to be a successful photographic studio of her own. In the May 1934 issue of Vanity Fair she appeared alongside Moholy-Nagy and Cecil Beaton as one of the most distinguished living photographers.6 But later that year Miller abruptly ended this phase of her life by marrying Aziz Eloui Bey, a charming, wealthy Egyptian with whom she had been involved in Paris. They moved to Cairo, where Miller took some of her nest photographs. But she found the Cairo social set, which she referred to as black satin and pearls, stultifying,7 and in 1939 she and Eloui Bey parted amicably. Miller then took up with Roland Penrose, the British surrealist painter, collagist, collector, and one of the founders of Londons Institute of Contemporary Arts. Initially they traveled throughout Europe, but when Hitler invaded Poland and war was imminent, they settled in Hampstead, North London. A number of British Vogue photographers had joined the war effort late in 1939, and Miller likewise joined the London staff. From New York Cond Nast himself cabled his delight that her INTELLIGENCE FUNDAMENTAL
Right: Lee Miller, 1930.
photograph by man ray.

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man ray trust / adagp-ars / telimage 2009.

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.5059, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.50.

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GOOD TASTE SENSITIVENESS [and] ART VALUES

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would be put to use for Vogue once again.8 In addition to her magazine work Miller produced photographs in 1940 and 1941 for two books: Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire and Wrens in Camera.9 At the end of 1942 she became an accredited u.s. Forces war correspondent and throughout the rest of the war in Europe submitted extraordinary photojournalism to Vogue, ranging from images of Henry Moores work as an ofcial war artist in Underground air-raid shelters to the liberation of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. Frustrated by the anodyne prose that too often accompanied her photographs, Miller in 1944 convinced her editor, Audrey Withers, to let her write her own stories. These are some of the most arresting articles ever to have appeared in Vogue. Just as she had earlier ignored the presumed boundaries between artist and model, and ne art and commercial fashion photography, Miller now broke down the barriers between fashion and news journalism. Her pieces overow with rich, sensual impressions of the war and speak to her extraordinary eye, honed by her two-decades-long experiences at the epicenter of art and fashion. Throughout 1945 and into 1946 Miller tramped across Eastern Europe to what she called destinations as inhospitable as possible, including Vienna, Bucharest, and Budapest, where she photographed the execution of Laszlo Bardossy, the fascist collaborator and ex-prime minister.10 Meanwhile, Roland Penrose was in London, drifting towards a serious relationship with another woman. Dave Scherman cabled Miller two urgent words from New York: GO HOME , and a week or so later she did. But she had a hard time adjusting to life after the war; Scherman worried that sooner or later she is going to break all to pieces like a bum novel.11 When Miller and Penrose returned to the States in May 1946 to visit her parents, she was in a gloomy state. It was then that she discovered what was to become one of the central pillars of her postwar life. As her father noted in his diary with some surprise, Miller sought to lift her spirits not only by taking drives with Roland up the Hudson but also by cooking.12 Miller and Penrose married in 1947 and, at the age of forty, she bore her only child, Antony. By 1949 she had embarked on her new life at Farley Farm, though she remained on the staff at British Vogue until the early fties, half-heartedly taking fashion photographs and writing some features. Audrey Withers tried to get Miller to fulll her contract to produce eight features a year for British Vogue, even encouraging her new love of cooking and allowing her to publish her original recipes and plan for the thirteen

meal long Christmas in 1952.13 But writing was a struggle, and Roland Penrose wrote secretly to Withers: I implore you, please do not ask Lee to write again. The suffering it causes her and those around her is unbearable.14 Withers believed that Miller had come into her own during the war. It had an extraordinary effect on her. Afterwards, nothing came up to it. She was not meant to be married, have children, or live in the country. She thought she wanted security but when she had it, she wasnt happy. She couldnt write.15 By 1953 Withers felt she had no choice but to hire another cookery writer to write monthly columns for British Vogue. That writer was Elizabeth David. Ironically, Miller now turned all of her creative energies to her own quirky forms of cooking and hostessing. Withers later noted that Lee took to cooking with all the passion and professionalism she had brought to her reporting16; years later, Miller described herself in an interview as a compulsive cook.17 Millers son, Antony, believes that food saved his mothers life after the war, when she was drinking too much and was terribly depressed. In The High Bed, her April 1948 piece for British Vogue, Miller offered her tips, as wise as gay, on what to take with you for comfort, amusement and good looks, and what to demand from friends when checking in to the maternity hospital for a fortnight.18 She told readers that she had advised a friend to discard all shyness and dive into this list:
Tomato Catsup, Worcester-type Sauce, Horseradish Sauce, and real Mayonnaise (theyll do wonders to a hospital menu). Smoked trout, pt de foie gras, red or black caviar, a tin of Nescaf, evaporated milk, tins and tins of grapefruit juice or tomato juice, lump sugar, lemons, a pepper mill, home made biscuits, a freshly washed green salad matched with a bottle of French dressing, a standing order of ice-cream from Selfridges with a jar of chocolate sauce, a constant supply of ice-cubes in a large-jawed thermos jugFinally, unless you want all your visitors to tear off to the nearest pub at opening hours, dont forget the bottle of gin.19

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Millers piece on Bachelor Entertaining from March 1949 lays out various single male friends secrets for successful dinner parties, complete with recipes and cocktail advice. Miller enjoyed her quirky entertaining at Farley Farm. She also enjoyed the foreign travel that often motivated her subsequent culinary experiments. Cooking was fun, creative, and even a bit sexy for her. Katharine Reid, a much younger friend whose father was director of the Tate Gallery, remembers laughing a lot when Miller taught her to cook. She also recalls that Miller was driven. She did

the cooking with the same spirit as the photography. Miller encouraged Reid to learn how to cook. As she wrote to her, with typically idiosyncratic punctuation, Had dinner with your parents last night (chez Sainsbury) and they told me you are already cavorting in Paris = How super.-! I had a thought. = The Cordon Bleugives afternoon demonstration classesThey do a three course meal in front of you The rst one is on me, as a present, -.20 Reid later said, I really feel one of the reasons she taught me to cook was that she wanted to make my life more exciting.21 (Reid also remembers Miller giving her tips on how to make her hair look shinier.) Miller had attended the Paris Cordon Bleu in 1957. It was later in Paris, at a restaurant party, that she met her

Above: A gathering at Farley Farm, Summer 1966. From left: Lee Miller, with James Beard behind her; Patsy Murray, Katie Laughton (in chair), Tommie Lawson, and Bettina McNulty.
photograph by henry mc nulty

bettina mc nulty and used by her generous permission

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future best friend, Bettina McNulty, a contributing editor to the American edition of House and Garden. (Bettinas husband, Henry McNulty, represented the French Champagne and Cognac Federation and wrote all the small, elegant cocktail books for British Vogue.) From that rst meeting Bettina McNulty and Lee Miller became good friends, fellow cooks, and co-conspirators in menu planning, reading, dinner parties, travel, and, sometimes, practical jokes. McNulty recalls that We had more fun than our guests did. Most hosts dont have fun; they do it, but they dont

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have fun!22 The McNultys introduced Miller to their friend James Beard, the pioneer of American gastronomy. An evocative photograph from that time shows Lee Miller, Bettina McNulty, and James Beard in a striped apron enjoying a picnic at Farley Farm (p.53).23 (Dejeuners sur lherbe were a repeated theme in Millers life. One of her most famous photographs from the 1930s features a simple meal eaten outdoors in Mougins, France, during the rst summer she spent with Roland Penrose and fellow surrealists Paul Eluard and Man Ray, with their lovers Nusch and Ady Fidelin when the group was visiting Picasso and Dora Maar [above]). Lee Millers cooking style has been characterized as deant, and in many ways it was.24 She did not cook the

Above: Lee Miller, Picnic, le Saint-Marguerite, France, 1937.

lee miller archives, england, 2009. all rights reserved.

English food her husband or son preferredtraditional fare like Sunday roasts, Yorkshire pudding with lashings of gravy, and plum pudding. Nor were her menus to the liking of the households only indoor help, housekeeper and nanny Patsy Murray, for whom Miller obviously made considerable extra work. Yet, Miller often conceived her meals as gifts to those in her house, from vegetarian dishes for Murray to meals comprised of dishes from a guests national cuisine.25 Some menus recalled trips she and a guest had taken together; others were food paintings or references to a guests own works of art.26 One evening, as the hour grew

late and the guests had already downed a number of stiff drinks, Roland Penrose lost his temper and marched into the kitchen, demanding to know when dinner would be ready. He came back chastened and announced that Miller was making a blue sh in homage to Mir, and that everyone just had to wait.27 Millers original recipes reveal remarkable knowledge and attention to detail, as do the scant remaining traces of her meal planning. We can also glean her style from the photographic evidence in a 1973 House and Garden spread titled How to Make an Art of the Happy Weekend: The Personal Strategy and Beautiful Food of Lee Penrose, by Bettina McNulty. The article explains that for Miller the presentation of food is as important to her as the taste, and she likes to nd just the right container to show off a dish to its best advantage. McNulty goes on to describe how Miller would make three simple and quicktraditional English dessertsfruit foolsin mango, gooseberry and raspberry, all melting pastels, and that she always asked for the lawns to be mowed on Monday or Tuesday so daisies will have popped up by the weekend.28 Lee Millers acute visual sense and aesthetic interests clearly contributed to her style of cooking and entertaining. That same year Miller was interviewed for American Vogue, where she was dubbed the inventor of Surrealist cuisine and the creator of food pictures.29 Her concoctions included Penroses, Muddles Green Green Chicken, Goldsh, Bombe Surprise, Pink Cauliower Breasts, and cream pies and snowballs stored in the deep freeze in case a zany guest wanted to throw either of them in June. Penroses consisted of mushrooms stuffed with pink mousse de foie gras and seasoned with paprika and Madeira to resemble Farley Farms rambling roses. This recipe won rst place in a smrgsbord competition run by the Norwegian government tourism board. (Miller actually won rst, second, and third prizesthe second and third being for open-faced sandwiches.) The rst prize was a trip for two to Norway, on which Bettina McNulty accompanied her. The Muddles Green Green Chicken, named after the village Miller and Roland lived in, was, according to Miller, a happy accident. Ninette Lyon, a cookery writer, friend, and sometime lover of Roland Penrose, wrote for American Vogue that Miller had been attempting to cook the Belgian classic waterzoie [sic] for a friend who had spent his childhood in Brussels. Miller explains that she was
still a novice and did not understand all the cooking terms. Three stalks of parsley became a whole bunch, a few leeks became a bundle. I knew it was advisable to put a piece of bread in the cooking water of

vegetables to keep down cooking odours. For some mysterious reason, I strained this bread along with everything else, celery, parsley, leeks, getting a thick green sauce, highly perfumed.30

Millers Goldsh was a whole 5 or 6 pound cod, including head, covered in coarsely grated carrots and onions to form the orangey scales. Bombe Surprise she invented to put Cyril Connolly, the critic and editor of the English literary and art magazine Horizon, in his place. Connolly had spent a weekend in the early 1950s as a guest at Farley Farm, joining Roland Penrose in disparaging America and Americans. At one point Connolly declared that Americans have the moral strength of a marshmallow and will drown themselves in a sea of that revolting beverage Coca-Cola. Miller said nothing and returned to her kitchen. Connolly, impressed by the dessert Miller produced at the end of the meal, congratulated her, whereupon Miller announced that its chief ingredients were marshmallows and Coke.31 Bettina McNulty later called this act Lee Millers ag-waving rebuttal to British critics of American cuisine.32 John Golding, a London artist afliated with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, was one of Farley Farms talented guests who was allowed to serve as Millers souschef on weekend visits. He brought her exotic herbs from his travels and enjoyed spending time with Miller in her kitchen. She was funny about cooking, he recalled. She pottered around the kitchen laughing and swearing. Food amused her.33 Miller told Ninette Lyon that her cooking seemed so effortless because she wasnt bothered, as most cooks seem to be, by people in my kitchen. And then I make things which dont require continual hovering around the oven before the meal. Her kitchen was very much her domain, where a bottle of something was always open for sipping. She despised people pinching my cooking wine. If I nd that bottle has disappeared, I march into the sitting-room and replace it with a bottle of the best [my husband] has in the sideboard.34 Millers kitchen was lled with the latest equipment. She had the rst deep freeze and rst microwave of anyone in her English set. Miller declared that all gadgets amuse me. The one I nd indispensable is the blender. I can be dressed in an evening dress and, while I am waiting for a taxi, I can, thanks to this marvellous instrument, make a chocolate mousse for ten people.35 Miller not only championed kitchen gadgets but also ingredients prepared in advance, such as toasted lberts, roux, and claried butter. She reveled in the challenge of rethinking her menus when four extra weekend guests

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arrived at the spur of the moment. She always preferred easy-to-serve dishes that might surprise her guests to traditional joints of meat.36 She liked to make one-implement desserts because they keep the conversation going.37 Miller told Ninette Lyon that her passion for cooking rst developed during her Egyptian period, when she was living in Cairo. We were always off on expeditions into the desert, looking for new oases, for lost villages, for traces of unknown civilizations. The Bey family chef would not allow Miller into his kitchen, but he taught her how to embellish the canned foods he had packed for their travels with herbs, condiments, spicesit was a beginning.38 (Another embellishment on at least one desert trek was a huge, insulated container lled with iced Martinis, a big surprise for the parched party.39) Dejeuner sur lherbe was the title and the theme of a 1966 article McNulty wrote for the London Times, in which she regaled readers with reminiscences of her favourite picnics. One meal in March 1963, in the Egyptian desert, featured that at Arab bread which splits to form a hollow bowl to hold our food, foul medames, described by McNulty as a sort of national bean dish, and hummus, which the Middle East uses instead of butter. Tomatoes with fresh basil and cold, soft-boiled eggs were topped off with kakadeh, a lovely drink made by infusing hibiscus owers. Deep pink, this drink was a perfect thirst-quencher in the hot Egyptian sun, even without ice. McNultys companion for this picnic was Lee Miller, who had returned to the desert on a tour organized by the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ica). On a visit to the monastery at Wadi Natrun, where she had photographed Coptic churches thirty years earlier, Miller joked that the monks had to eat the same old loaf of dry bread that she had seen in the same trough on her earlier visit.40 After returning to England, Miller and McNulty decided to throw a July dinner party for the other members of that ica tour who had shared those Egyptian experiences, including Martin Butlin, then director of the Tate Gallery, Sir Clifford and Lady Norton, Mr. and Mrs. Ashley Havidden, and Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose Applebe. Lord Anthony Nutting and his wife, Ann (nee Gunning), who had been a famous fties fashion model in Paris and London, were also invited.41 McNultys notes indicate that she and Miller planned to offer guests their own idea of what Egyptian food should be. Their shopping list included aubergine, mint, butter, peanuts, carrots, egg, our, milk, spices, chicken, meat, grape leaves, chickpeas, sesame oil, yogurt, cucumber, onions and tomatoes. This list may not seem remarkable

today, but in early 1960s England it was largely exotic fare. Miller and McNulty cooked at the Miller/Penrose at in Horton Street, Kensington, but they served the meal by candlelight at the McNultys larger at on Chesham Place in Belgravia. Most of the female guests appeared in galabiyas they had bought on the trip. First came meze type things for starters, including silver dolmas stuffed vine leaves, tabbuleh, carrot and cumin salad, and foul medames. (The tabbuleh may have been more Lebanese than Egyptian, admits McNulty, but she and Miller didnt care. They were just having fun!42 ) For the main course the duo invented gold chicken to give a properly pharoic cachet to the meal. This dish consisted of a whole chicken covered in edible gold leaf, as the Indians do. There were also a hubble bubble or sheesha that didnt work, but according to McNulty, no one cared, since there were plenty of Lebanese pastries, Volpolichelli [sic], Turkish coffee, halvah, and a specially concocted dessert called Persian Carpet, made of orange slices, grenadine, Ribena, and candied violets, artfully arranged on large silver platters. It was a great hit, especially with Lee and me, writes McNulty. We thought it a hoot! Miller herself made detailed notes of the meals she planned and enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s, religiously recording in small black notebooks recipes found or invented and meals eaten at restaurants and dinner parties. These notebooks survive in the archive overseen by her son at Farley Farm. On September 1, 1970, Miller began recording the tapas tour of Spain she and McNulty took with their friends ceramicist Jenny Guth and her husband, Francis 43 (to whom the McNultys had been introduced by James Beard in London). McNulty still has a map marked with the route they covered. Starting in Barcelona, they drove south down the coast to Murcia, eating at tapas bars rekkied [sic] by ne-bouche Francis.44 At a restaurant in Tarragona they had squid rings in fritter batter, cold; cooked octopus with raw onion, marinated in vinegar and oil; big at cooked mushroom = setas raw at sprat lets in too strong vinegar called Boccarones; red and green strips of peppers cooked and cooled in marinade; Olives = Calamares a le riojana [wine sauce]; and then Yumas = sugar yolks in pastry shop. The next days tapas included Deudria dried octopus and out of season until Jan. pimientos verdes, almondes morales, Meson del Puerto at San Carlos de la Rapita = Zanzuelas = and razor clams. The next stop was Virguines Bar Hotel in Castellon, where they ate Sea dates, peppers, langostinas, tuna sh salata, ham, eel, squid. Breakfast the next day consisted of Churros (sweet) and tortilla de Zucca, washed down

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with coffee milk. Valencia featured not only a swimming pool but calamares, cuttlesh, 3 kinds of paella = one with ne short cut maccaroni, one made entirely of pig meats (sausage, ham, etc) + Valencian nice shellsh red and yellow[illegible word] sorbet in narrowglass [sic]. In Murcia at the Ramblas Bar they enjoyed stuffed peppers deep fried, eggplant, ditto; ratatouille; chicken livers, hot with little pea sized saut potatoes; egg + tomato like a cold pepperade Brain salad, empanades, el caparrones, morros. And watched a young man lard the meat. From Murcia they travelled to the Guths Renaissance palace, Medinillas in Ubeda, where they met a surprise. As wealthy connoisseurs of Japanese and Chinese cuisine, the Guths had made numerous trips to Japan and China and brought back masses of recipes and crates of products to magic them up with. This had backred the time we arrived with Lee, McNulty recalls. They discovered that an infestation of mice had been having an ongoing esta with hundreds of packets, boxes and cartons of the precious stuffs. So Francis and Lee rolled up their sleeves, while Jenny and I paid calls on the local gentry and Don Satornio, local priest.45 Miller recorded the lunch that they managed to make around the clean-up: cold white garlic soup = (garlic, almonds, bread crumbs), served with beans, (a

Above: rsvp s to Lee Miller and Bettina McNultys Egyptian dinner, July 1963.
courtesy of bettina mc nulty and vogue

the cond nast publications ltd.

regional classic), with 2 kinds of sausages chorizos and blood, Oxtail stew, fruit cup, biscuit. Francis made this soup with garbonzos [sic], white wine and toasted almonds. More food notes follow: Cascigos = peaches in wine, crulladillas, lamb sweetbreads = (mollegas), calmares fritos. The tapas tour culminated in Madrid. At Valentin, Calle San Alberto, the group ate ajo blanco soup; tortilla de courgettes; 3 chorizos, pumpkin soup, tomato juice, pork, ham and sausages, pesto costado, green peppers salteados, grilled eggplant slices, pepper sauce, Antonellas chicken.46 According to Millers notes, this last dish seems to have involved oil, olives, mushrooms, and parsley. Torcino del Cielo topped off the meal. Miller had bought sprigs of tarragon in Tarragona and was already making shopping lists with McNulty so that they could get the necessary provisions for a tapas dinner party on their return to grey, chilly England. Their list for Jacksons of Piccadilly included green peppercorns, sesame oil, pine nuts, celeriac, and canned gs.47 Only occasionally did Millers fashion and photography past directly intersect her gourmet present. In December

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1974 she and Roland Penrose ew to New York for a Man Ray retrospective at the New York Cultural Center. One of the ancillary events was a re-creation of Count and Countess Pecci-Blunts 1930 Bal Blanc in Paris, when Man Rays infatuation with Miller had been at its height. John Loring, assistant to curator Mario Amaya, asked Miller to help him prepare an all-white dinner for one hundred special guests. They cooked all afternoon, with the help of multiple martinis. Loring remembers Miller that day as ebullient, having the presence of a woman who has always known she was beautiful. With the rst course, brandade de morue, they were up to their ears in cream, olive oil and codsh. Miller shouted, More garlic! More olive oil! More martinis! The rest of the menu consisted of veal with cauliower, rice, and endives; and vanilla ice cream with lychees. The actress Lillian Gish claimed it was the rst acceptable meal she had eaten, but the cooks concluded that food of one color made them uneasy.48 In any case, this dinner was Millers swan song. By the mid-1970s, she was no longer cooking or entertaining the way she had a decade earlier. So many of her dear old friends had died, including Picasso, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. On July 21, 1977, Miller herself succumbed to cancer.

Epilogue
A number of years ago, in Gastronomicas pages, Laura Shapiro wrote about how in postwar America, thanks largely to the food industry and concomitant innovations in agriculture, processing, and packaging, home cooking was portrayed in advertising and the press as an irrational vestige of the dim pastsomething only pathetic, hardworking Grandma insisted on doing.49 Unfortunately, many of Millers family and weekend houseguests seem to have shared this attitude, expressing surprise to nd their talented friend engaged in such a seemingly menial activity. For years Miller had kept scissors in her handbag, just in case she came across a recipe when she happened to be at the hairdresser or in the waiting room of her dentist. She called this constant clipping of recipes her work. Yet, many of those around her did not appreciate her cooking, much less her clipping. Roland Penroses rst wife, Valentine, who often lived with them at Farley Farm, was overheard asking Miller: What is this you call workthis business of tearing up a lot of magazines and going to sleep on them?50 Antony Penrose has written that even Lees own family were often less than sympathetic to her efforts.51 One houseguest, the young theatrical agent Priscilla Morgan, also concluded that she was witnessing a hugely

creative person who wasnt fullling her potential.52 Another weekend guest, Princess Jeanne-Marie de Broglie, for whom Miller prepared a complicated sauce from southern Poland to honor her ancestry, was likewise disappointed and dismayed by Millers love of cooking. She felt that the time spent in the kitchen was a denial of Millers past, as if all she had done had never happened.53 Even Carolyn Burke, the biographer who has come closest to doing justice to this period in Millers life, feels forced to state that a passion for cooking, whether complimentary or deant, was not a way of life.54 Yet Lee Miller belonged to that small and select world of cookery experts of the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, when chefs were not yet like hairdressers and designers; only Escofer and Carme were famous.55 Miller devoured cookbooks the way some people get through novels and often scoured tens of cookbooks for different ways to prepare a dish.56 Yet, unlike Julia Child or Elizabeth Davidwhose rst big break came because Miller couldnt fulll her contract with VogueMiller never wrote the cookbook she had been planning for a decade or more.57 She certainly could have been a keen interpreter of exotic cuisines to American and British audiences. By the time she died in 1977, she had collected at least two thousand cookbooks; added to this was a similar sized library of magazines and countless box les with cross-referenced recipes of her own creation.58 Only friends like James Beard and Bettina McNulty, who understood the importance of talking about meals, inventing creative recipes, and preparing dinner parties, appreciated Millers efforts. They saw them not as a waste of Millers talents, but, in McNultys words, as another form of her genius.59

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Penroses
This recipe comes from the notes Bettina McNulty made for a Lee Miller cookbook, which was never published.
16 very fresh, closed mushrooms, 2 inches in diameter Olive oil Salt and pepper Madeira or Marsala Mousse de foie gras or other delicately avored liver pt Paprika 16 slices white toast 1 bunch watercress Thin strips or zests of carrot, for garnish Remove the stems from the mushrooms by cutting carefully; do not pull them out, as the mushrooms will collapse in cooking. To retain juiciness, saut the mushrooms open side down rst, then upside down.

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Add salt, pepper, and Madeira or Marsala to taste, and cook until tender. Cool. Pipe or ll caps with a spiral of pale, pinkish mousse de foie gras or other pt; sprinkle paprika into the grooves. Butter and carpet bread with watercress; arrange mushroom roses on top; sprinkle with a few strands of raw carrot. Serve two per person.g

26. Gold and Fizdale, How Famous People Cook: Lady Penrose, the Most Unusual Recipes You Have Ever Seen, u.s. Vogue, April 1974: 187. 27. Princess Jeanne-Marie de Broglie, 2001, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 338. 28. McNulty, How to Make an Art, 70, 71. 29. Gold and Fizdale, How Famous People Cook. 30. Miller, quoted by Ninette Lyon, Lee and Roland Penrose, A Second Fame: Good Food, u.s. Vogue, April 1965: 140. 31. McNulty, interview with the author, 13 August 2002. 32. McNulty, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 378. 33. John Golding, 1996, quoted in ibid., 338. 34. Miller, interview with Shirley Conran, 1966, quoted in ibid., 328. 35. Miller, quoted by Lyon, Lee and Roland Penrose, 140. 36. McNulty, How to Make an Art, 87. 37. Ibid. 38. Miller, quoted by Lyon, Lee and Roland Penrose, 139. 39. Penrose, Lives, 70. 40. McNulty, reminiscences of 1963 ica trip to Lebanon and Egypt, written and given to the author, June 2006. 41. McNulty, telephone conversation with the author, 19 September 2009. 42. Ibid., and McNultys July 1963 notes on the London Egyptian dinner party. 43. Lee Millers black notebooks, number 5, September 1970, 110, photocopy. Original notebooks are in the Lee Miller Archive. 44. McNulty, reminiscences of the September 1970 tapas trip, in an e-mail to the author, 17 August 2009. 45. McNulty on the Guths and tapas tour, e-mail to the author, 25 August 2009. 46. Lee Millers black notebooks, number 5, photocopy. 47. Undated postcard from Miller to McNulty from Spain (McNulty had already returned to England). Burke records Millers tapas tour with McNulty as the early 1960s, which is clearly a mistake. See Lee Miller, 341. 48. John Loring, 1998, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 361. 49. Laura Shapiro, My Problem is Watery Custard, Gastronomica 1:4 (Fall 2001): 49, 54. 50. Valentine Penrose, quoted in Penrose, Lives: 200201. 51. Penrose, Lives, 198.
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notes
1. I would like to dedicate this article to Bettina McNulty, whom I am extremely lucky to call a friend as well as an inspiration. She is very much like her dear, departed friend Lee Miller, a genuine original. (Bettina dubbed Miller a genuine original in an interview with Carolyn Burke on 8 August 1997, as quoted in Burke, Lee Miller [Boston: Little Brown, 2005], 340.) By the time Miller embarked on the road to becoming a gourmet, she had already lived many lives in the public eye. Tellingly, her son, Antony Penrose, titled his biography The Lives of Lee Miller (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002). Hereafter referred to as Lives. 2. David Scherman, Foreword, in Lee Millers War, ed. Antony Penrose (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 13. 3. Penrose, Lives, 12. 4. Vogue Paris, Octobre 1930: 9091. 5. Around 1929 Miller and Man Ray perfected the Sabbatier photographic effect often referred to as solarisation. For Millers description of the discovery see Mario Amaya, My Man Ray, Art in America, MayJune 1975: 57. See, too, Becky Conekin, Lee Millers Simultaneity: Photographer & Model in the Pages of Inter-War Vogue, in Fashion as Photograph, ed. E. Shinkle (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 7086. 6. Thus Do Tastes Differ, Vanity Fair, May 1934: 5152. 7. Miller, quoted in Penrose, Lives, 78. 8. Quoted in ibid., 98. 9. See ibid., 102104. Grim Glory illustrated Londoners resolve during the Blitz. With a preface by the prominent American broadcaster Ed Murrow, it met critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The books unabashed aim was to encourage the United States to join the war. 10. Penrose, Lives, 145176. 11. Letter from Dave Scherman to his brother, July 1946, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 289. 12. Burke, Lee Miller, 293294. 13. Miller, Plan for a Thirteen Meal Christmas, British Vogue, December 1952, 5, 114, 116. 14. Roland Penrose, quoted in Penrose, Lives, 193. 15. Audrey Withers, 1996, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 313. 16. Ibid., 312. 17. Miller in Bettina McNulty, How to Make an Art of the Happy Weekend: The Personal Strategy of Lady Lee Miller Penrose, House and Garden, June 1973: 87. 18. Miller, The High Bed, British Vogue, April 1948: 83. 19. Ibid., 111. 20. Miller, postcard to Katherine Reid; photocopy given to the author by Reid. 21. Katherine Reid, interview with the author, 12 May 2004. 22. Bettina McNulty, interview with the author, 13 August 2002. 23. James Beard also loved picnics. Bettina McNulty recounts an impromptu picnic with Beard in a Howard Johnson parking lot where we got out the Baccarat glasses and damask napkins and the grand food from Jims larder and ate ravenously in the car, because something kept us from our original plan. E-mail from Bettina McNulty to the author, 17 August 2009. 24. Unnamed friend of Miller, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 338. 25. Penrose, Lives, 191, 198.

52. Priscilla Morgan, 1996, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 339. 53. Princess Jeanne-Marie de Broglie, quoted in ibid., 338. 54. Burke, Lee Miller, 339. 55. McNulty, 2002, quoted in ibid., 348. 56. Ibid., and McNulty, How to Make an Art, 87.

58. Penrose, Lives, 198. 59. McNulty, interview with the author, 25 May 2006.

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57. For more on this story and the instructive comparison of Miller and David see Becky Conekin, She Did the Cooking with the Same Spirit as the Photography, Photography and Culture 1:2 (November 2008), 145164.

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investigations | suzanne toczyski

Jean-Baptiste Labat and the Buccaneer Barbecue in Seventeenth-Century Martinique

In late 1693 a rotund dominican priest left the French port of La Rochelle, headed for the Caribbean colony of Martinique. He took with him, among other things, an ample supply of liqueurs. The missionary, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, arrived on the island in early 1694, having consumed a great deal of food and drink at the captains table en route. The ships breakfast, Labat recorded, often included ham, pt, a stew or fricasse, cheese, butter, and fresh bread, not to mention a very good wine. A typical midday meal consisted of soup with boiled fowl, followed by Irish brisket, biscuits, and fresh mutton and veal, accompanied by a chicken fricasse. The main course included a roast of some sort, as well as two different stews and two salads (made with beets, purslane, watercress, or cornichons conts, and either lettuce or wild chicory [chicore sauvage] grown on board in crates lled with earth). Labat writes that The crates were guarded night and day by a sentinel to prevent rats or sailors from damaging them.1 The meal ended with a cheese course, stewed and fresh fruit, chestnuts, and preserves. The evening meal closely resembled the noontime repast, although later in the day wine and alcohol owed more freely: Since we were well stocked with liquor, we didnt spare it (p.26). Remarkably, this constant feasting notwithstanding, Father Labat landed in Martinique with an appetite. In his gastronomic exploration of Caribbean fare he rapidly progressed from culinary tourist2 to full assimilant into island culture, broadening his perspective as he cultivated his palate. Born in Paris in 1663, Father Labat taught philosophy before serving in the French colonies of the Caribbean, then known as the West Indies, where he would remain until 1706. His account of this missionary voyage was published in 1722 in a lavishly illustrated set of six volumes entitled Nouveau voyage aux isles franoises de lAmrique;3
Left: A slave holding a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Labat. Frontispiece from Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage aux isles de lAmrique (Antilles), 16931705 (Paris: LHarmattan, 2005), volume ii (facsimile edition).

he later expanded this edition, adding material on a wide variety of topics.4 Building on a missionary foundation established by many predecessors, most notable among them Father Du Tertre, Labats work in the Caribbean ranged from standard missionary service (baptizing the converted, saying Mass) to overseeing building construction, rum production, and military interventions against the British. Labat even worked hard to perfect the processing of sugarcane and has been erroneously credited with inventing the process of distillation.5 Like those who went before him, Labat recorded his adventures in copious detail in one of the many early travel narratives published by priests, clerics, explorers, and buccaneers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 Moreover, although his primary responsibility in Martinique and its environs was to serve the regions multiethnic population as a spiritual leader, work he describes in great detail, Labats memoirs also chronicle his diverse culinary experiences, as he literally eats his way around the islands, learning to prepare such delicacies as roasted manatee, cacao cont, and monkey head soup. References to food and to food culture can be found on virtually every page of Labats chronicle; there are at least eighteen references to chocolat (as a beverage) in the abridged edition of 1993, as well as an entire chapter on cacao and another on caf. Labat is aware of the unusually thorough nature of his culinary exploration, remarking, in one lengthy description of food preparation, One might say that this is quite a lot of culinary documentation for an apostolic missionary (p.188).7 While his initial experiences with island cuisine may be inscribed within the conventional frame of culinary tourism, Labats openness to the Caribbeans remarkably diverse food cultures eventually allows him to construct new social, cultural, and symbolic meanings that inform both his personal and spiritual identity. Labat begins to pay attention to the culinary arts per se early on, shortly after he established himself in his new parish at the northern tip of the island, in the region known as

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.6169, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.61.

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Macouba. There, he dines frequently with his more well-todo parishioners, M. Michel and M. Pocquet. While touring the latters new sugar manufactory, Labat is invited to dinner with Pocquet, a man who prided himself on order in his affairs, sparing nothing at his table or in his furnishings (p.61). In this residence of privilege, Labat does not fail to signal the superlative nature of the feast. The pice de rsistance is a plastron de tortue, or turtle breast, the preparation of which Labat describes with extreme care: the breastplate of the beast is detached from the animal with three or four inches of meat and fat attached and is cooked slowly in an oven over a low re, seasoned with what Labat will come to recognize as classic (and ubiquitous) island ingredients: chili peppers, lime juice, cloves, salt, and pepper.8 His appreciation of this delicacy is palpable: Never have I eaten anything so appetizing and with such good avor (p.61).9 The turtle is accompanied by several dishes of sea and river sh, and the meal ends with the sumptuous cacao cont. Labat again recounts its elaborate preparation, explaining how to select the right cacao berry (when not yet ripe, not yet yellow), dip it in water, and wrap it in slices of lime peel and cinnamon. The fruit is then immersed for several days in stronger and stronger batches of warm syrup made from the most beautiful sugar (p.62); the nal immersion is augmented by essence of amber, musk, or other fragrances. This confection is deemed by Labat the most delicious preserve one can imagine, and which surpasses, in my opinion, the very best of Europe. He notes, nally, the exceptional nature of this occasion: This preserve, as one can see, requires great care, and uses a great quantity of sugar. Island chefs rarely make it; and, at one cu per pound, they simply cannot undertake the process or make it as it ought to be made (p.62).10 What does this culinary experience reveal about Labats gastronomic aspirations? First, that the missionary is curious and has an acute eye for detail as well as a keen epistemological mission: the collecting of, among other things, documents de cuisine through intimate culinary exploration. He is a true gourmand, with the intellectual goal of recording all the information necessary for recreating his gustatory experiences. We should note that this is a meal of privilege, ne dining at its best; Labat has not yet begun to negotiate the different foodways that existed on the island.11 The dynamic here is that of the unexamined touristic gaze, by which the familiar can begin to approach the exotic and the exotic become familiar, but the true process of indigenization, the process of becoming native to the colonial environment,12 will require a great deal more exploration. At the home of M. Pocquet, Labat confronts

Otherness only at the level of ingredients; no novel techniques are invoked, nor does Labat seem concerned with the notion of authenticity related to the experience. Indeed, if not for the slightly unusual ingredients involved, Labat might well be enjoying Sunday dinner in France: roast meat and, in an especially privileged home, a sweet dessert, shared with respectable peers.13 However, remarkably few of the truly interesting meals whose preparation Labat chronicles in the Voyage aux isles are meals of privilege, consumed with equals. Yes, he is often invited to dine with the habitants, the local plantation owners, but for the most part, Labat simply notes what was eaten, forgoing the culinary details, presumably because these simply echo French cooking practices of the time. When he tries to cook for himself, Labat will, initially at least, similarly apply European cooking techniques to exotic animals. Having purchased a particularly annoying parrot, for example, a bird that seems wont to screech in a disagreeable fashion rather than learn to talk, Labat has the animal killed: I had it put in a casserole; its meat was very good, delicate, succulent (p.154).14 He likewise praises the islands amphibians, the most beautiful frogs in the world. Although they do not look like French frogs, their size and tender esh make them particularly desirable. Extolling the bounty of this creature, Labat explains, we prepare them like a chicken fricasse; and those people who arrive on the islands are often mistaken, imagining that we are serving them meat when in fact we are giving them a frog or lizard fricasse (p.102).15 (The missionarys slaves, knowing that Labat is especially fond of this treat, hunt for the frogs at night, croaking to attract them to torches made from dried sugarcane. Labat pays them well, noting that they must compete with voracious snakes to meet his request.) Indeed, while still relatively new to the island, Labat receives as a gift a large lizardone and a half feet long, not counting the tailwhich he prepares in the same fashion, en fricasse, giving us a remarkably early reference to the clich tastes like chicken16: We ate the one I had been given as a gift, prepared like a chicken fricasse; I would have thought it was one if I hadnt seen it prepared myself, as its esh so resembles that of chicken thanks to its whiteness, its tenderness, its good avor, and its delicacy (p.83).17 Given the size of the creature, which had to be restrained so that it could neither escape, bite, nor whip its tail, it is amazing that Labat attempted to prepare the dish at all. But he is still, in this instance, hardly straying from the mode of culinary tourist, procuring unusual ingredients and preparing them with essentially European culinary techniques.

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Writing for a French public, Labat is concerned with nding comparative language that will allow his readers to appreciate his gustatory experiences vicariously. If lizard en fricasse tastes like chicken, the avocadorelatively unknown to the French but ubiquitous in the islandstastes like a marrow pie (p.92) and, when underripe, may be sliced and eaten with salt and pepper, like peppery artichokes in a vinaigrette whose avor it shares (p.92). Palm hearts are also compared in taste to artichokes and, like artichokes, may be eaten with a white sauce. They may also be battered and deep-fried, like doughnuts, or pan-fried, like sh (p.101). When he explains the process for salting an abundance of birds felled by a hurricane, Labat evokes a related French practice: Ifone could put them in lard, as one prepares goose thighs in France in their own grease, I think that they would be even better preserved (p.167).18 When he makes a sauce for crab using the animals own taumalin (or tomalley, the green substance found in the body of shellsh), plus water, lime juice, salt, and crushed peppers, Labat uses as a point of comparison a common French practice: When everything is cooked, we eat the esh of the crab by dipping it in the tomalley, as one eats meat with

Above: Fantastic sea creatures, including eels and flying fish. From Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage aux isles de lAmrique (Antilles), 16931705 (Paris: LHarmattan, 2005), volume i (facsimile edition).

mustard (p.156). Whenever possible, that is, Labat caters to his inexperienced and untraveled French readers by developing comparisons to which they can relate.19 Because he was the consummate traveler, Labats peregrinations often took him far from the kitchen and out into nature, occasioning yet another culinary experience: meals prepared and consumed en plein air,20 an important rst step away from Frenchied meals of privilege and home cooking. Labats outdoor dining experiences are frequently mentioned throughout the Voyage aux isles; in these descriptions Labat does not identify his dining companions. When traveling, the priest is often accompanied by one or more of his slaves; at other times, he takes his meals with members of the Carib Indian population.21 For the most part, on these occasions food is prepared simply: game, birds, or sh are grilled over a recooked primarily en brochette (on skewers).22 One of the most interesting incidents in the Voyage involves a shing expedition during

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which a river is dammed and essentially poisoned with what Labat calls inebriating wood (p.100),23 so that the sh and eels in the river seem to become drunk and are easy to capture. Labat evokes the joys of feasting on this catch: We ate our catch on the riverbank, where we dined; this is a part of the pleasure one enjoys fairly often in the Islands, and which is quite charming (p.100). He does not say who we arethe only other individuals mentioned in the chapter are a carpenter stung by a scorpion, Labats slaves, and a company of infantrymen from the region who attend a procession of the Blessed Sacrament near Labats new church. The soldiers seem to be only of passing interest to Labat, so it is unlikely that they aided him in his

Above: Papaya tree. From Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage aux isles de lAmrique (Antilles), 16931705 (Paris: LHarmattan, 2005), volume i (facsimile edition).

shing endeavors; we can assume that Labat is breaking bread on the riverbank with individuals who work for him, rather than with his peers. What this passage and others like it make clear is that, while Labat enjoyed the more rened French dinners served him by the plantation owners, a good deal of his culinary exploration took place in spaces that we can tentatively identify as loci of indigenization. Not content simply to Frenchify his ingredients, Labat eventually sought out

more authentic island culinary practices, most of which he learned from unnamed sources, presumably either his slaves, the Carib Indians, or local buccaneers and pirates.24 One such instance occurs in the chapter containing the drunken eels anecdote described above, when Labat notes, I was given palm worms to eat (p.100). He does not name the person who gave him the worms. This omission, along with the nature of the food under consideration, suggests, again, that Labat is sharing the food of his cultural inferiors,25 a gesture of intimacy that involves true attention to, perhaps even a quest for, difference as a value. Labats description of the palm worm makes it clear that, after some initial disgust, he recognized the value of this source of protein:
These worms are about as thick as a nger, and about two inches long. One cannot see any signicant organs, neither their entrails nor their intestines. The way to prepare them is to thread them onto a wooden skewer and to turn them over the re; when they begin to get hot, one sprinkles them with grated bread crust mixed with salt, a bit of pepper, and nutmeg; this powder retains all the fat it soaks up; when they are cooked, one serves them with orange or lime juice. It is very good to eat, and very delicate once one has conquered the repugnance one ordinarily has for eating worms, especially when one has seen them alive. (p.100)

saut them in a frying pan in a butter roux, with onion chopped very ne, and parsley; after which one puts them in a casserole dish with a bunch of nes herbes, pepper, orange peel, and egg yolks thinned with orange or lime juice; when one is ready to serve them, one grates a bit of nutmeg on them; its a very good dish. (p.156)

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Just as interesting is Labats subsequent statement about how crab functions as a cultural equalizer:
The Carib Indians live on virtually nothing else. Slaves live on [crabs] instead of salted meat, which their masters often neglect to give them, either because it is rare or because it is dear. Whites do not overlook [crabs] either, and one can see, by the different methods of preparation that I have just described, that they are served on all sorts of tables. (p.157)

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An even more detailed culinary discussion may be found in the chapter in which Labat presents the catching and preparation of the tourlourous, a lagoon land crab (Cardiosoma armatum). Labat records three modes of preparation. First, the crab can be cooked whole, either in boiling water or on charcoal, then simply opened and eaten with salt. Second, a taumalin sauce can be prepared from the crabs tomalley, as described above, mixed with water, lime juice, salt, and crushed peppers. Or, third, after removing the meat from the boiled crabs, one can

The taste for crab is universal in the islands, and while the various demographic groups might not often eat together, they do have something in common. Or so Labat suggests, before going on to refute the universality he has just posited, by claiming that crabs are difcult to digest, can cause moodiness and hypocondria, and even the dreaded mal destomac, which can end in incurable swelling or dropsy.26 Consequently, Labat concluded that this food was good for the Carib Indians who are used to it, or for the slaves whose temperament is strong and robust, if it is good, I say, for these sorts of people, I do not nd it at all good for Europeans, whose constitution is not as hearty (p.157).27 It is almost as if, having noted the equalizing effect of his own words, Labat feels compelled to differentiate his fellow (European) creatures from the island Other (or Others), to the detriment of the weaker Europeans. If Labats move from culinary tourism to engagement with the process of indigenization seems only tentative, at least as far as crab goes, his willingness to embrace one fundamental island culinary practicethe Caribbean boucanis irrefutable. The word boucan is, as Jean-Pierre Moreau has explained, an Amerindian term designating the place where meat is smoked,28 which came to be associated with the boucaniers or buccaneers, French adventurers who, when chased by the Spanish from the smaller Caribbean islands to the larger Saint-Domingue, became hunters and hommes de la brousse, or bushmen. (Barbecue, by contrast, derives from an Arawak term, barbakoa, and is more akin to what we call grilling.29) The rst recorded French attribution of the word boucan dates from 1654, and the technique is still a ubiquitous culinary phenomenon in Martinique today. According to the pirate Alexandre Oexmelin, the buccaneers were hirsute, tanned, and disheveled. They hunted wild cattle so they could cure the hide for leather, and wild boar so they could smoke and sell the meat. They lived in the forest, slept on the ground, wore blood-soaked clothing, and ate primarily wild fruit and game, with a particular taste for the hot marrow of a fresh kill.30 Although they had existed in the islands for only about fty years before Labats arrival in Martinique, their primitivism had already made them a subject of legend.31 Labat makes multiple references to impromptu boucans throughout the Voyage aux isles.32 Two rather lengthy sections of the text merit closer attention, due to Labats detailed descriptions of the culinary techniques involved. The rst, entitled A Turtle Boucan, is recounted at something of a remove, since the process takes place in the company of various plantation owners and is carried out primarily not by Labat himself, but by slaves. They are

again referred to by the indeterminate French pronoun on (either one or we) but are this time contrasted with the we (Labat and company) who will partake of the feast. The cooking process is fascinating in its combination of traditional French ingredients and island condiments. The meat of two large sea turtles is mixed with hard-boiled egg yolks, nes herbes, spices, lemon juice, salt, and a good quantity of chili pepper, then the mixture, or pt, is stuffed back into one of the turtle bodies. The whole thing is smoked in a hot sand pit under charcoal. Aesthetic considerations are not neglected: a special table is built to accommodate the dish, which requires the strength of four men to transport it, and the table is decorated with leaves and owers.33 The experience of eating this marvelous pt exceeds Labats ability to portray it in words: hardly had they lifted it than an odor a thousand times better than I could possibly say emanated from it; in a word, never has the odor of pt tickled the smell more delicately than that which spread all around us as the turtle was opened (p.188). Curiously, Labat apologizes to the reader for his penchant for recording every new cooking practice he encounters:
One might say that this is quite a lot of culinary documentation for an apostolic missionary; to which I must respond that when one is obliged to take care of ones household, one is simultaneously obliged to instruct oneself about many things, things with which I would not have burdened my memory if I had still been in my cloistered monastery; but obedience having employed me in this state, I have been at the same time obliged to become familiar with all that this state depends upon, taking into consideration the necessity we have of staying alive, and often of preparing for oneself that which is necessary to sustain life. (p.188)
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This statement, coming as it does toward the middle of the Voyage aux isles, points to an apparent tension, if not contradiction, between Labats epistemological enterprise and his apostolic mission and, as such, warrants further attention. First, Labat is conscious of the role place plays in this process: if he had remained in his cloister, none of this encyclopedic culinary documentation would have been necessary, as his needs would have been met by simple monastic fare. He therefore couches his apology in terms of obligation and obedience to his order: he is obliged to take care of his household, he is obliged to become an autodidact, all this because he has obediently undertaken this mission, and is thus obliged to acquire, accumulate, and, of course, record knowledge essential to the continuation of life. Hence, Labat constructs an identity for himself according to which he lives in the tension between the need for

knowledge (which, on the one hand, appears self-indulgent but is, in fact, evidence of his self-reliance) and the deprivations conventionally associated with life as a Catholic missionary. It is perhaps not surprising that Labat also feels compelled to justify his willingness to consume both lizard and various fowl during Lent: far from French bishoprics, he tells us, missionaries, in consultation with doctors, must adjust the categories of acceptable dietary restrictions to t the circumstances of daily life in the islands (p.182).34 Nowhere does Labat connect his work as culinary documentarian to the greater tradition of his own church, although he must certainly have been aware that the Christian tradition is profoundly grounded in commensality,35 in fellowship at table, both at the Eucharistic altar and in the meals afterward, meals like those that follow his own apostolic interventions at parishes throughout the islands. Nourishment is a fundamental metaphor in Christian life; Christ ate with the marginalized, an inclusive public activity that made present the Kingdom of God on Earth.36 However, as Labat appears unwilling to explore this apologetic option consciously, one wonders if he has embraced the notion of Christian fellowship through food as part of his apostolic mission. Does his unwillingness represent a glimmer of resistance to true communion with the Other, especially an inferior Other, or it is merely an oversight? It is a question worth pondering. One nal example of Labats move toward indigenization, an example that combines elements of his social, cultural, and religious identities as priest, party animal, and would-be pirate, can be found in the ceremonial boucan de cochon, which can be loosely translated as pig roast. In the chapter entitled A Pig Boucan, Labat narrates his own negotiation of a food realm that is eminently Other, a realm already, in a sense, indigenized, born in the bush as a combination of Amerindian, African, and European cuisines, the legend of which he has absorbed in detail.37 This time, Labat is the orchestrator of the feast, and his quest for authenticity is palpable. In preparation for the event Labat has an ajoupa (thatched hut) built in case of rain; he has a pig trussed38 and delivered to the riverbank along with wine to be chilled there. (Labat was particularly fond of Madeira, which he imported regularly, although he also enjoyed a wide variety of mixed drinks and fermented beverages.) In addition to his repeated use of island terminology (ajoupa, balisier, cachibou, and so on), Labat insists that his guests follow a strict set of rules associated with the legendary buccaneers. Among other stipulations, no metal utensils may be used; no liquids may be mixed (that is, water and wine); guests are called to table using

two gunshots; and empty-handed hunters are punished for their failure to contribute appropriately to the meal. Given what we can surmise of the disorderly lives of the true buccaneers (based on primary accounts), this attention to the rules of the boucan seems a cultural construction, a conation of elements of primitivism in the buccaneer legend with the rigors of Labats own monastic training a provocative example of indigenization. Labat insists on industry as a value: each guest has a job to do, be it carving skewers, making napkins out of leaves, constructing the boucan,39 building the re to make charcoal, or hunting for game to complement the meal. This emphasis on industry is also explicitly linked to Labats indigenization of the missionary life: guests are separated into initiates (les anciens) and novices; hunters who bring back insufcient game are made to do penance (of an uncommon sort: they must drink as many glasses of wine as the best hunter has brought pieces of game); and so on. Grace is said. In true apostolic fashion, the master buccaneer serves his guests, then teaches them to serve each other as well.40 In this buccaneer feast Labat clearly combines elements from several registers of existence: the buccaneer lifestyle,41 island cuisine, slave culture, and monastic rigor. It is perhaps the best example of Labats transformation from culinary tourist to intimate assimilant into island culture, all through the mediation of food.42 In Solibo magnique, the contemporary Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau anchors his islands colonial past in culinary tradition:
Culinary references areinscribed in our history. Salt pork speaks of the maritime epoch, when boats fed us during the sweats of the rst plantations. Then came the colonial period during which the bk tolerated our garden plots. Then we ate yam, dasheen, and grew peas and maniocO king manioc!which weaned us from the breast, with its milk and cream.43

cultural product, is multi-vocal and polysemic, and new meanings can be recognized in new contexts.44 In one sense, Labats performance of indigenization through curiosity and cuisine ultimately resembles not the rened cacao cont of his initiation, but rather the pt of the boucan de tortue: Labat does not eat the Other, he strives to become Other, a polysemic richness that reects the ample diversity of Caribbean culinary culture to the present day.45g
notes
1. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage aux isles: Chronique aventureuse des Carabes, 16931705, ed. Michel Le Bris (Paris: Phbus Libretto, 1993), 26. All quotations from Labats text have been taken from this 1993 edition; page numbers appear in the text within parentheses. All translations from Labat and other texts in French are my own. 2. Lucy Long, in Culinary Tourism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), denes culinary tourism as the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other. The phenomenon is one in which food is both a destination and a vehicle for tourism (p.2) and a vivid entryway into another culture (p.1). 3. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de lAmerique. Contenant lhistoire naturelle de ces pays, lorigine, les moeurs, la religion & le gouvernement des habitans anciens & modernes: les guerres & les evenemens singuliers qui y sont arrivez pendant le long sjour que lauteur y a fait: le commerce et les manufactures qui y sont etablies, & les moyens de les augmenter. Ouvrage enrichi dun grand nombre de cartes, plans, & gures en taille-douce ., 2 vols. (The Hague: P. Husson, 1724). 4. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de lAmerique: contenant lhistoire naturelle de ces pays, lorigine, les moeurs, le religion & le gouvernement des habitans anciens & modernes: Les guerres & les evenemens singuliers qui y sont arrivez pendant le sjour que lauteur y a faitNouvelle ed. augment considrablement, & enrichie de gures en tailles-douces, 8 vols. (Paris: Chez Thodore le Gras, 1742). 5. Annie Hubert, Drinking in La Runion: Between Living, Dying, and Forgetting, in Drinking: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Igor and Valrie de Garine (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 228. 6. Labat was a slave owner as well, a fact that is not mentioned in the brief Catholic Encyclopedia article about him. See Ignatius Smith, Jean-Baptiste Labat, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), at www.newadvent.org/cathen/08718a.htm (accessed 6 September 2008).
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7. For Labats beverage consumption, see Suzanne Toczyski, Navigating the Seas of Alterity: Jean-Baptiste Labats Voyage aux Isles, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 67 (June 2007): 485509. 8. The Taino people seasoned their food with chili peppers as early as the thirteenth century. See Lynn Marie Houston, Food Culture in the Caribbean (Westport, ct: Greenwood Press, 2005), 1. 9. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the consumption of turtle was reserved for the wealthy. See Madeleine Ferrires, Nourritures canailles (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 178179. 10. Labat records another possible preparation of the cacao: When one wants to dry them, one takes them out of their syrup, and, after letting them drip, one plunges them into a bowl of very clear syrup fortied with sugar, then one puts them immediately into a drying oven, where they are candied. (62) 11. Labat will have similar experiences dining on a craysh potage with M. Michel (83) or roasted baby manatee la broche, consumed with M. Bouchard (163). 12. Doris Lorraine Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2005), 132. 13. Ferrires, Nourritures, 1516, has noted the scarcity of sugary desserts in the early modern period: Does one receive guests? Then, respecting the rules of hospitality, one offers them that rarity: sugared preserves. Honorable individuals had the right to sugared preserves; people of middling worth would have those,

As Chamoiseau asserts, Caribbean history is intricately linked to the diversity of its culinary traditions, which are traceable over the centuries in parallel with historical memory itself. In his negotiation of new experiential food realms, the missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat is an integral part of that history, framing the food experience as a cultural artifact in context, naming and translating elements of that experience for an audience that is both like him and Other, explicating the process from a native perspective, adapting his textand his culinary practicesto meet the needs of both his readership and the extended Caribbean community. As Lucy Long has suggested, Food, like any

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less costly, made with grape wort; as for the little people, they had marmalade which couldnt be preserved at all, or nothing! As one might imagine, according to Houston, Food Culture, 1314, Many European settlersadamantly did not want to relinquish their European food customs while living in the Caribbean. Those who came to the Caribbean hoping to strike it rich often desired to reproduce and emulate the lifestyles of the European upper classes. This being the case, the middle and lower classes from Europe who settled in the Caribbean are the ones directly responsible for the beginning of the creolization of cultures that gives Caribbean cooking its unique avor. 14. The reference to casserole is en daube, an expression dating to about 1640, from the Italian addobbo, seasoning, from addobbare, meaning to cook, a way of cooking certain meats by braising them in a closed pot. In the 1724 edition of his book Labat similarly makes reference to a group of birds resembling amingos (amands), which, when they could not be tamed, were killed and eaten, although the preparation of the meal is not described (Labat, Nouveau voyage, 480). 15. Labat adds that, to European eyes, these would be called crapauds, or toads (102), living as they do in trees rather than in water, and having gray skin with yellow and black stripes or spots. 16. Scientist Joe Staton has studied in detail, from an evolutionary perspective, the question of why most cooked exotic meats taste like cooked Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken. He proposes (tongue in cheek) that a more apt expression might be tastes like a tetrapod. See Joe Staton, Tastes Like Chicken? Annals of Improbable Research 4:4 (JulyAugust, 1998): 9. 17. Houston, Food Culture, 114, cites fricasse de poulet as one of the classic French Caribbean staple dishes, although after arriving in Martinique Labat virtually never mentions this banal preparation for chicken. Ferrires, Nourritures, 417, notes that the rst ofcial reference to the technique dates to before 1385. In the original, seventeenth-century version of the classic fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, by Charles Perrault, small children are prepared en fricasse (Ferrires, Nourritures, 123). 18. This is also the occasion for Labat to learn a new culinary technique: But the quantity [of birds] that I had would have been entirely useless if I hadnt been taught the secret of preserving them by marinating them (167). While, according to the Petit Robert, the verb mariner has existed in France since 1552, Labat had apparently never preserved meat this way before. 19. It is also in this context, and others like it, that Labat, echoing his religious training, refers to certain ubiquitous and nourishing food sources as a veritable manna for the country (101); he makes this assertion regarding palm hearts (ibid.), tourlourous or lagoon land crabs (157), and diables or diablotons, the devil-bird or coot (180). 20. The modern term pique-nique has its roots in the 1694 idiom repas piquenique, from pique and nique, a little thing without value; however, Labat does not seem to be familiar with the word. 21. See Toczyski, Navigating the Seas. 22. This style of preparation has been known in France since the twelfth century; the term en brochette, from the word broche (ca. 1121), a small spit used to roast or grill small pieces of food, dates from about 1180. This method was often avoided because it entailed a signicant loss of fats and oils, desirable for their high caloric content at a time when few were privileged enough to eat meat on a regular basis. See Ferrires, Nourritures, 120121. 23. This substance, called bois enivrer (literally, inebriating wood), is also known as mort aux poissons in French. It is made from the roots of the shrub Tephrosia cinerea or ashen hoarypea, which have a thick outer peel that is crushed with some of the plants leaves and then mixed with quicklime. When the mixture is thrown into the water, the sh seem to become inebriated, rising to the surface and throwing themselves against the rocks on shore. Its use is attested in many Amerindian contexts; for a reference to one such plant in Martinique see Franoise Hatzenberger, Paysages et vgtations des Antilles (Martinique: Karthala, Coll. Espaces Carabe Amriques, 2001), 254. 24. On board a sea vessel with Captain Trbuchet and a group of pirates, Labat enjoyed shark in the open air. Becalmed between Saint-Christophe and SainteCroix, the men pass the time shing for sharks, which they prepare and eat for dinner; however, because there is such an abundance of the carnivorous sh, for sport the men also cut off the dorsal n of several of the animals, attach an empty barrel to their backs to prevent them from diving, and re-release them into the water, occasioning a shark frenzy no doubt terrible to behold, although Labat describes this activity as entertaining (324).
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25. The nineteenth-century American writer Lafcadio Hearn, who visited the islands from 1889 to 1890, states that palm worms were one of four holiday luxuries of the poor. See Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), 357. Labat also hunts coots with his slaves; see Toczyski, Navigating the Seas. In Voyage he details various preparations for them, including one using Jamaican allspice (180182). 26. Labat claims to have witnessed severe symptoms in Europeans who had eaten crab (157158): they become pale, yellow and puffy, their feet and legs swell; they experience an extraordinary lassitude, with a weightiness of the head that causes them constantly to wish to sleep; their belly and their stomach swell, and they nally fall into an incurable state of dropsy. 27. Labat extols the medical virtues of many of the food items he encounters (and consumes) during his stay in the islands. Turtle meat is cited as very nourishing (62). Similarly, the apricot is excellent for the chest, very healthy and most nourishing (91), while the avocado is even more remarkable: it is very good for the stomach, warm and most nourishing. The use of this fruit stops the runs and dysentery; but since it tends to warm one quite a bit, it also provokes unhealthy sexual appetites (92). Labat even comments at length on the European habit of overcooking meat, a method that removes some of the nutritional benets of fowl, for example: The woodpigeon should be eaten half-cooked, and still rare, so to speak. Doctors insistence that most meats should be eaten so cooked, roasted or boiled that they have lost almost all juices, is an error (388). It should be noted that this question had been posed well before Labats time, for example, by Laurent Joubert, personal physician to Catherine de Medicis, in his 1578 treatise Erreurs populaires; see Ferrires, Nourritures, 27. 28. Jean-Pierre Moreau, Pirates: Flibuste et piraterie dans la Carabe et les mers du sud (15221725) (Paris: ditions Tallendier, 2006), 20. 29. The nineteenth-century English admiral James Burney inaccurately conated the two terms: The esh of the cattle killed by the hunters was cured to keep good for use, after a manner learnt from the Caribbee Indians, which was as follows: The meat was laid to be dried upon a wooden grate or hurdle (grille de bois) which the Indians called barbecu, placed at a good distance over a slow re. The meat when cured was called a boucan, and the same name was given to the place of their cookery. Pre Labat describes viande boucanne, to be meat dried over a small re and smoked (viande seche petit feu et la fume). See History of the Buccaneers of America (1816; London: George Allen & Company, 1912), 48. 30. Oexmelins text is cited at length in Hubert Deschamps, Pirates et ibustiers (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 4041. 31. The Carib Indians, Labat tells us, also used this method to smoke the appendages of the enemies they had slain, which they then offered as gifts. Arriving on a bacassa (a type of boat), forty-seven Caribs pay Labat a visit; their craft is decorated with a marmosets head en relief,with the arm of a man who has been boucan, that is to say, dried over a small re and smoked, attached next to the marmoset. They offered it to me most civilly, telling me it was the arm of an Englishman they had killed a short time ago during a raid they had carried out in Barbuda (128). Later, the gentleman M. Collet asks a group of Caribs to break off commerce with the English: All of which they did; they handed over the hostages and massacred the rst Englishmen who fell into their hands, and brought some of their boucan members to Fort Royal to show us that they had entirely broken off with our enemies (161). 32. For example, during a hunting trip to Saint-Domingue in the company of three pirates, Labat says, Never have I found the hunting more abundant, the parks of Versailles are nothing in comparison. We killed in less than a country league seven wild boars and as many of their young, as well as common hens and roosters that had become wild; also grouse, pigeons, woodpigeons, and goats, as many as we could wish for. We made a big re, and enjoyed the great boucan and lived it up all night long, and the pleasure it gave us hardly permitted us to sleep (325). Later, he speaks of the unique opportunity of enjoying pork boucan in long thin slices, adding, I found this meat to be so excellent, and having a very different avor than that of the pig or the wild boar one eats in Europe (331). The 1724 edition of his book includes a lengthy description of how to prepare a boucan of wild pig in long strips, so that it can be stored for later consumption (Labat, Nouveau voyage, 223224). At a stop on the small island of Coffre--Mort (so named because, from a certain angle, the landscape resembled a corpse stretched out on a table), Labat and his men seize as much as they can of the provisions of Spanish shermen on the island: We dined on shore at their expense. We had two turtles cooked in boucan, and other meat as well, as much as we thought we would need until Saint-Thomas (365). Clearly, le boucan is an expedient way of meeting the needs of a traveling entourage.

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33. Labat is very sensitive to aesthetic considerations in the exploration of new foods. He speaks, for example, of the beautiful green color of the avocado and of the very vivid red esh, scented with small seeds of prickly pears (365366), but he also records this disconcerting vision of monkey soup: It is true that at rst I experienced some repugnance when I saw four heads on the soup resembling the heads of small children, but as soon as I had tried it, I easily ignored this consideration and I continued to eat with pleasure (321). 34. Ferrires notes that such considerations had already been debated in France: [Frogs], as far as canon law is concerned, are meat one is allowed to eat during periods of abstinence, and it is also an option during periods of non-abstinence. Frogs and eel are eaten year-round, except for in the summer, when, because of their supposed love affairs with toads and serpents, they are considered venimous (Nourritures, 59). Labat nevertheless suggests to his readers that his power to control Lenten practices is particular to his situation: Those who will read these memoirs will no doubt be surprised that we ate birds during Lent. But they must be warned that the missionaries who live in the islands and who, by an apostolic concession, exercise in several areas the power of bishops, after a mature deliberation and serious consultation with doctors, have declared that lizards and coots are acceptable Lenten fare, and that consequently, they could be eaten at any time of year (182). Labat identies the lizard he fricassees as an amphibian (83). 35. See, for example, Matthew 8:11, where Jesus says: I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the kingdom of heaven; or, the story of the road to Emmaus: So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to him. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him (Luke 24:2931). 36. For more on this subject see Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2003), 91 and 179. 37. Houston, Food Culture, 91, links the phenomenon of jerked meats to the boucan: African hunters, brought to the Caribbean as slaves, brought with them their style of pit-cooking meatSince the mid-eighteenth century, when the rst written accounts of jerking were recorded, the dish has come to be known as a staple of the Maroons, the runaway slaves, and subsequently their descendents, living in communities in the mountain highlands of Jamaica. Although Maroons would wrap a marinated pig in leaves and steam it in its juices by burying it in a hole surrounded with hot stones, or grill a pig 12 to 14 hours over an outdoor re of green wood, now jerk is often made on a barbecue grill, in the oven, or with a stove-top smoker.

38. In this instance the pig happens to be a domesticated one, although Labat seems quite clear on the superiority of the cochon marron, due, in part, to the animals diet. He notes, There is a region on the isle of Saint-Domingue [present-day Haiti/Dominican Republic] where, amongst other fruit trees, one nds an innite quantity of avocados and apricots of the most marvelous thickness and length. The wild pigsgo there from all around when these fruits are ripe and fall from the trees, either because of their ripeness, or because they are shaken off by the wind. Then, these animals grow marvelously fat and their esh develops an excellent avor as a result (92). 39. Labats description of the boucan de cochon makes it sound more like a barbecue grill than an efcient and enclosed smoker, and images from the period suggest that the boucan de cochon was prepared this way by the buccaneers themselves. For one such reproduction see Jean Merrien, Histoire mondiale des pirates, ibustiers et ngriers (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1959), 149. The turtle boucan is more clearly smoked as in a smoker. 40. One is reminded of the Last Supper, at which Jesus said: If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one anothers feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should do also (John 13:1415). However, at the end of this elaborate boucan, the guests have so depleted the pigs carcass that there is no cochon boucan left for the slaves, who have to content themselves with the other food we had brought (241). Clearly, the last are not yet rst. 41. Labat does not insist that his guests don the blood-stained clothing of their models: a small linen jersey, and shorts that came only halfway down their thighdrenched with the blood that dripped from the esh of the animals they were in the habit of carrying. See Oexmelin, quoted in Deschamps, Pirates, 41. 42. Ultimately Labat was forced to leave Martinique because his coreligionists found him overbearing and intolerable. In fact, he remains the bogeyman of the island. Grandmothers still warn their grandchildren, If you dont go to sleep right away, Father Labat will come and get you! See Aurlia Montel, Le pre Labat viendra te prendre (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1996), 179. 43. Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo magnique (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 141. The word bk is an abbreviation of the term blanc-crole, often used in a derogatory fashion and referring to francophone island inhabitants whose ancesters were white. 44. Long, Culinary Tourism, 35. 45. Pierre L. van den Berghe, Ethnic Cuisine: Culture in Nature, Ethnic and Racial Studies 7:3 (1984): 396: [E]thnic cuisine could well be the ultimate reconciliation between a diversity we cherish and a common humanity we must recognize if we are to live amicably together.

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invest igat ions | a.f. robert son

Conviviality in Catalonia

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One way we anthropologists seek to establish our credentials is by bragging about our gastronomic experiences. During the course of my career I have eaten elephants trunk and hippopotamus steak, pretty little birds and very plain-looking rats, exotic fruit like the stinking durian, and many different species of insect. These were usually offered as a test of interethnic stamina, the reward being the assurance that youre really one of us now. But in each place I have learned more from consumption of the daily staple that is the essential meaning of the word food in most languages: rice in Asia, steamed banana and cassava in East Africa, pounded plantain and yam in West Africa. Raised on oatmeal and boiled potatoes in Scotland, I have a high tolerance for plain fare, but I am bound to agree with the African elder who told me long ago that the only thing that really improves with age is your appreciation of food. So when I embarked on eldwork in rural Catalonia twenty years ago it was a bonus to discover how much good food matters in this corner of Europe, whether you are in a farm kitchen or the worlds top-rated restaurant, being offered a humble bread-and-tomato snack or the virtuoso performance of mar i muntanya, sea and mountain, a rich stew of pigs trotters, snails, squid, and any other creature that comes to hand. With serious gastronomic interests of her own, my wife Francesca needed little inducement to make a homeaway-from-home in the village where I had set up a eld base. For my research on family relations in times of drastic change I chose Mieres for its apparent ordinariness: a depopulated, unrefurbished rural community, neither sequestered in the mountains nor engulfed by the seaside economy. Set in a valley in the lower reaches of the Pyrenees about an hour from the Mediterranean, the village was visibly in decline. Many of its houses were falling into vacancy, disrepair, and ruin; its elds and meadows were neglected. The younger generation was moving to the towns and cities, and by the early 1990s their parents and grandparents had come to believe with the visceral certainty

of their own aging bodies that life in the community as they had known it was coming to an end. Mercifully for the village and for me, Mieres has not died, and its regeneration soon became the more cheerful focus of my research.1 Among the most obvious signs of vitality is the astonishing abundance of festive activity, from religious parades to sporting contests, from civic celebrations of the elderly to parties for the expanding contingent of village children. Food and drink play a fundamental role

The hearth, the llar del foc , is the emotional core of the Catalan home, and the centripetal attraction of warmth, food, and intimate company would be familiar to people all over the world.

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in all of these events, creating and sustaining social interaction and rebuilding a sense of community. This gut response is deeply rooted in the traditions of the region. Out walking one afternoon early in our stay in Mieres, we came upon a classic Catalan scene: a merry throng, glasses raised, kids milling around, and knives ashing over the corpse of a huge pig. In Catalan lore the annual slaughter, the matana del porc, or simply mata-porc, was a close family affair. Nobody, I was told, would want to kill a pig just to feed the neighbors, but since it took place outside the house on the threshing oor or in the street, it was an inescapably public statement of family prosperity, solidarity, and good husbandry. Rich families could do this two or even three times a year, around Christmas and again

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.7078, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.70.

in March, but poor families could manage it rarely, if at all. Our neighbor Montse, a recently widowed farmers wife, described the fun with happy smiles and nostalgic sighs. The animal was strung up by the ankles on a tall tripod, and its throat slit by one of the men (el matador) who knew how. It was bled into buckets for blood sausages, gutted, and then hauled to a big trestle board to be thoroughly butchered. Hams were dried and cured, and sausages of different consistencies and gauges hung up in the kitchen. The offal and enough of the prime cuts to make the event memorable were grilled and eaten on the spot, in what one Catalan author describes as a pantagruelian feast.2 The mata-porc remains a visceral, earthy memory of a way of life that has yielded to rural depopulation, formal hygiene regulations, and the cold-shelves of supermarkets. These days, to kill a pig requires a special permit from the municipality, and samples cut from two different parts of the carcass have to be sent to the veterinary ofcer for inspection. Rural people who have never actually killed a pig take pleasure in shocking squeamish townies with such scenes. I asked our neighbors how they felt about the bloody orgy. Amid the indulgent laughter and sanguinary memories, a couple of the women agreed that there could be twinges of regret about butchering an animal that had

Above: A street supper in Can Calo, Mieres.

photograph by a.f. robertson

2002

been cosseted for many months. It was not done thoughtlessly, said Carmeta, who had never killed a pig but was well practiced in wringing the necks of chickens and rabbits. God has put these creatures in our charge for our benet. But the conversation turned quickly from the tragedy of the lost friend to the technicalities of fattening-up (special feed, expensive vitamins and medicines), and then, as always, to ham sliced nely from the bone and lip-smacking recipes for pigs hock stew. In bad times, people have had little more than these memories to sustain them. The epoch of wretchedness extending from the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 through to the 1950s, which scarred the lives of more than a generation, is known simply as the misria. As Republicanism yielded to Fascism, the agonies of partisanship and suspicion splintered communities and families. My efforts to extract a coherent account of who did what, when, and to whom in this traumatic period have always reduced my informants to passionate near-speechlessness. People dont talk about it because life was so grim, even for those who were children at the time. The most vivid,

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visceral memory of the misria is hunger. However much I pestered people for details of the war and its long, miserable aftermath, the conversation always reverted to food.3 Food production was curtailed by the conict and squeezed by all partisans, left and right. Hungry families from the towns and cities would descend like locusts on relatives in the countryside. The Republican authorities collected food for resale at a depot in Mieres, but much of it was barely edible (calabashes, maize). People foraged in hedgerows and woodlands, eating whatever they found, where they found it. My wife and I brought some arbutus fruit home from a walk one day and showed them to Maria: We used to eat these in the misria, she said unenthusiastically. We thought we might make jam but found them dry and tasteless. A particular hardship was having to eat maize chicken-feedwhich was used to augment the bread our. People were cheerier about eating foxes, even the ferocious pine martens; certainly rats, and cats, but not dogs (they are our friends). I asked about snakes, which generated interesting debates between those who claimed to have eaten certain types, and those repelled and shamed by the idea (dont say you did that). Those laborers and small artisans without farmland or allotments fared very badly. Some who survived childhood in the 1930s have legs and spines bowed by rickets. Malnourishment measures this cohort off against those that followed. Their grandchildren, like rising generations the world over, tower above them. The pride this generates is often tempered with fear: the physical bulk of these offspring can be intimidating, and the volume and richness of what they eat inspires awe. So too do their clothes, phones, and other possessions, and their manners, what they talk about, the things they know. One elderly neighbor conded that she simply could not cope with daylong visits from her grandson, a very ordinary ten-year-old who appeared to her quite alien in his physical proportions and demeanor. Food is the essence of conviviality in Catalonia, and although its processes are so ephemeral, the sensual intensity of eating together has a binding power that is everywhere apparent in the social life of Mieres. Food pulls strings and ties knots. Witness the huge Sunday lunches that draw scattered family back home to the valley, or to strategically sited restaurants. The counterpoint to this is a sense of discretion about where, when, and with whom one shares a meal, but food itself is the subject of copious conversation. Neighbors are as likely to enquire about ones fare for the day as ones health or the weather. Early in my stay, as I was clearing rubble in the basement of our house, our elderly neighbor Caterina stooped to greet me through the

window grille. She began by teasing me about being in jail, but the next question followed smoothly: Had we had lunch yet? No? So what were we planning to eat? In other places I have lived and worked such questions would be considered rather rude. Food everywhere is heavily invested with moral meaning, set about with rules, conventions, restrictions, taboos. Eating is often regarded as a private bodily function, but in Catalonia this seems to make it more rather than less interesting. Caterina listened with pursed lips, palms on her knees, as I mumbled something about a sandwich. She then responded with a detailed description of the dish she was planning for herself. She was, we soon discovered, a wonderful cook, and it was our ambition to track her with a camera over the several days it took to plan, prepare, and serve one of her classic family Sunday lunches. People like Caterina who lived through the misria seem particularly disposed to deliver themselves of lip-smacking recipes, which was probably as close as they could get to a good meal in the bad old days. But her enthusiasm was far from unusual. Having lived and worked in communities where men are conspicuous by their absence from the kitchen, I was struck by the care with which our elderly bachelor neighbors in Mieres prepared their meals, and the relish with which they talked about them. Although Catalan has a rich vocabulary for eating to excess, attitudes to food are certainly not brutishly simple.4 Food weaves its way through the social fabric inside and outside the home, and it soon became apparent to me that if I knew more about its meanings I might understand more about social life generally in Mieres. It also occurred to me that questions about our own diet were our neighbors way of getting to understand us better, part of the negotiation of more intimate relationships. Sharing meals has been part of the privilege of being drawn into the family circle of our immediate neighbors. How we do this has been a continuing and always illuminating process of exploration. In my notes from as late as May 2004 I recorded that my wife had casually invited Maria, who lives opposite, for coffee one morning:
The conceptual gap was soon evident: she asks, did we mean breakfast? No? Well then, just a drop of coffee (cafetita). We sit in the loft, looking across at the owers on her own windowsill. She talks happily for a couple of hours, but insists on just a quarter cup of coffee with lots of milk, and a digestive biscuit. When she goes, she says she has enjoyed the sentada, sitting together. Maria knows our house well and has charge of it while we are away, so coming in and out is not a problem. No hesitation on the threshold, as with other neighborsshe calls out and walks in. She and Pep have eaten here a couple of times, and

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we in their house, but these maneuvers always have an experimental feel to them which is much less apparent when we eat together in restaurants. For all of us, its a process of discovery: they ask us over for a snack, and it turns out to be a wonderful fully-edged Catalan lunch; we take over a bottle of wine, which they accept politely though theyre a bit bafed. When they return the compliment by coming over for lunch with us, Maria brings a bottle of wine because its the English custom. For one lunch we produce cheese, ham, sausage, salads, and Pep sets about it all with his own sharp pocket knife, picnic style, paring off chunks of bread and eating with knife and ngers. I remember those ethnographically confusing situations in Africa, MalaysiaBut entertaining our vegetarian friends in California has been a LOT more confusing than entertaining Maria and Pep.

The hearth, the llar del foc, is the emotional core of the Catalan home, and the centripetal attraction of warmth, food, and intimate company would be familiar to people all over the world. When Teresas brother made sweeping modernizations to the house around them, the elderly spinster would not allow him to touch the old replace. In tune with her long, frugal life it was primevally simple: no grate, just sticks in a small pyramid on the at stone; a narrow ue to draw away the smoke; a water pot swung over the embers on an iron crane; and on each side a tiny bench, barely large enough for the buttocks of two wiry Catalans. The new butane gas cooker and oil-red central-heating radiators installed by her brother seemed to back away discreetly from this anachronism, this swath of the living-room wall blackened with soot and tar. Robert Hughes evokes the scaled-up and elaborated version of this sacramental space in the casa pairal, the classic Catalan patrician home, and the little hierarchic society that clustered around it:
The llar had a replace hood the size of a small room, under which a whole family could sit; a swinging crane of oak, from which a cauldron hung on chains; a battery of grills, pokers, and spits; a row of pots and earthenware basins on a long mantlepiece; and straight-backed wooden chairswith arms and a drawer under the seat for the avi, or patriarch, of the clan and his wife, the mestressa or padrina, and plain ones for the rest of the family, starting with the hereu or heir, the oldest son, and the pubilla, or oldest daughter, and going down the xed line of rank and seniority to the stools for youngest children and farmhands. The same undeviating order was observed in the bench seating around the table at meals.5

For them, the hearth is the most potent symbol of autonomy and identity. The presence of more than one family in a house is signaled to the wider world by the number of chimneys. In the past, these provided a ready reckoning of population: in 1553, Mieres was recorded as a village of forty-one hearths rather than so-many souls. Smoke rising from a chimney still announces presence, life, activity. In winter months this is how people round about get to know that my wife and I are back home in Mieres. As the focus of food-preparation the hearth has been most closely and singularly associated with a woman. There is a strong sense of proprietary interest and hierarchy, dominated by the mother or mother-in-law, the mestressa, the mistress of the house. Sharing a hearth is a legendary source of tension. When we shared our house for several years with our Spanish friends, the greatest mystery of cohabitation to our neighbors was how the two women could live amicably with the one small gas cooker. Why did one of them not take over the living-room chimney for a stove of her own? We explained that we ate together but took turns at preparing meals. It amused us to think that in California, the bathroom would have outranked the kitchen as the unshareable facility. As we husbands elbowed each other at the sink after meals, we wondered why nobody seemed to regard this as a zone of contention, probably because no respectable Catalan male would be seen dead there. When I joined our neighbors outside on summer evenings after a postprandial session at the sink, Pep would declare: If they made me wash dishes Id smash em all. His wife delivered her retort to the night air: Next time, Im going to marry an Englishman. For years I have joked with anthropology students that you cant begin to understand other people until you know what they have for breakfast, that most idiosyncratic of meals. It can range from nothing, to scrapings from last nights supper pot, to the hearty meal of porridge, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, and tea with which my mother set us up for the day in Scotland. A reading of the supermarket shelves in Catalan towns over the last fteen years indicates a shift in the younger generation toward the international norms of confectionary cereals, but older Mierencs still start the day by killing the worm gnawing at their gut: the trenca el cuc is a piece of chocolate, a little bread, and a sip of water, wine, or milk taken on rising at about six oclock.6 Isabel reminisced:
When we were children, we drank milk, and ate pieces of chocolate.

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Although in idea there may be a simple link between a family and a house, in reality many buildings have been shared, especially by poorer tenant and laboring families.

Honestly, our parents brought us up well. Every Tuesday my father went to Banyoles and brought back bananas for us, oranges. Nothing was lacking. My father always got up very early to work in the elds. He

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would bring us bread and chocolate in bed. He was very, very fond of children, my father. And my mother too. But there was a lot of work, too. Bread and chocolate in bedwell, honestly, people dont do that now.

For working people, breakfast proper is around ten in the morning, a substantial meal with pantomquet (bread or toast smeared with garlic, oil, and squeezed tomato) and perhaps a grilled sausage or lamb chop. For professionals and ofce staff who no longer take the three-hour afternoon break that has until recently been the Mediterranean norm, there is a tendency for the later breakfast to merge with lunch at around one oclock. The proper time for this main meal of the day is nearer to three, still the favored time for big family lunches at the weekend. Descriptions of everyday lunch menus tend to become very expansive; never, I was told, less than two courses for hard-working people, beginning with soup or meat, then rice or potatoes with a piece of pork or a sausage, then a salad. At night there was a light supper of bread, cheese, or dried sausage. Our daily breadel nostre pa de cada diais basic to the diet. Even modest village houses had cavernous ovens set into their walls, and a remarkable object in the larger household was the pastera, the big cofn-like box in which

the dough was set to rise. Milk has always been important, drawn fresh from the cow in the good old days, before regulations about pasteurizing and homogenizing led to the variant now being sold in shrink-wrapped, multipack, liter cartons. People still cook mainly with lard (sagi). It is striking how little olive oil is used in this region, now mainly in salads or on pantomquet. For working people lard did not translate into surplus body weightthe rigors of manual labor took care of that. I have never seen a fat peasant farmer anywhere (fat landlords or overseersyes) and archive pictures of the small, wiry people at work in the elds indicate that Catalonia was no exception. People like to say they ate well, but descriptions tend to get exaggerated by culinary nostalgia. All meals become the meal as the whole repertoire collapses into a single carnivorous collage, in which the mundane cabbage or carrot bears no mention. When conversation turns to the bleak times of the misria, older people often make a virtue of enforced frugality, excoriating todays extravagances and dilating on how a very simple diet of home-produced vegetables can
Below: Neighbors celebrate a special event at a revetlla in Mieres.
photograph by a.f. robertson

1997

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be augmented with skill, imagination, and the addition of foraged snails or mushrooms. The care with which they still assemble meals owes as much to die-hard habits of poverty as appreciation of latter-day abundance. Entering into the alimentary spirit of Mieres meant trying to decipher the rules about eating in private and eating in public. In the ordinary run of daily life families do not eat outside the house. I was told that however much people might like to talk about food, the everyday frugal reality should be kept behind closed doors. This resonates with my own upbringing, so I was surprised to see neighbors straying from the table out into the plaita, eating an apple or an ice cream. In my childhood even that was considered decadent (the thrill was smuggling tidbits from the table to share with our friends outside), and at my draconian Scottish boarding school we got thrashed for it. In Catalonia, kin gather from far and wide to eat together, but there is no tradition of inviting neighbors in to share a meal. For that, people go out into public spaces, where a degree of formality applies. Thus, our neighbors occasionally carry a trayful of cake, soft drinks, and rataa out into the plaita for a verbena (or revetlla in Catalan) to mark an anniversary or special event, and we have learned to do likewisefor example, when we inaugurated our new doorway. Participation is dened very pragmatically by the same group of people who gather outside their homes to chat on long summer evenings. Even so, maintaining reciprocity is something of a problem, and it is noticeable that those who are uneasy about this intimacy tend to keep their distance. There is no lack of enthusiasm for eating outside when it is properly sanctioned. Communal feasting is a venerable Mediterranean tradition, the formal opportunity for a big blowout, freed from anxieties about reciprocity or the quality of the fare.7 In Mieres, alfresco dinners have become one of the principal ways of asserting community membership and local solidarity. They may involve preparing food together, or buying a ticket for a catered meal, as at the nale of the annual Fiesta in August. Events like this provide newcomers and expatriate Mierencs with an immediate point of purchase on the community, and it is often they who have taken the initiative in a new variant of public feasting in Mieres, the barrio dinner party (sopar de barri). I know best the sopar that celebrated the neighborhood that includes our house, and thus ourselves. The most immediate precedent for the party was a supper organized in 1987 to raise funds for the repair of the barrio chapel. On that occasion word went out to everyone who could trace an association with the neighborhood, and a memorable evening raised almost enough to pay the repair bills. The

next sopar was held in 2001, with about fty participants, including ourselves. The moving force has been the mostly expatriate middle generation, the sons and daughters who were raised in Mieres, who left to get jobs and raise their own families elsewhere, and whose Mieres parents are either elderly or deceased. In this new tradition the plaita was decorated with festive bunting, mostly Catalan ags, crisscrossed among the houses from drainpipes, balconies, and electric cables. Trestle tables and a big barbecue grill were rented from the municipality. The central rite of the sopar was a shared dinner consisting mainly of carns a la brassa, the Catalan bestiary of barbecued chicken, lamb, pork, and sausage, accompanied by bread and a salad. Afters (postres) were cake (coca) and (instant) coffee. Copious amounts of red wine, champagne, and bottled water were followed by muscatel, whisky, cognac, and gin. The salads were prepared in the afternoon by several of the women, and around 8 p.m. the men red up the grill, and the meat was ready for a prompt 9 p.m. start to the dinner. We brought our own chairs, crockery, and utensils, and families established themselves in groups around the three ranks of tables. During the course of the meal people wandered around, greeting one another and changing places. Toward the end of the evening, the costs were calculated and subscriptions collected in cash from the participants. The toasts were brief and spontaneousthere was no obvious master of ceremonies. The party wound up around midnight, the local residents folding up the tables and sweeping the plaita. Next morning, all that remained was the bunting, rustling in the breeze. The mood is sentimental, and the sopar is a viscerally satisfying way of asserting that life goes on in a village threatened with depopulation. But the inspiration for this new genre is drawn largely from urban experience, the street parties of the towns and cities that serve essentially the same purpose of expressing local esprit de corps. The success of our sopar animated the other barrios of the village, and very soon the people on the main street got permission to close the thoroughfare to trafc, set up tables, and hold a dinner that reportedly outdid ours in attendance (120 people), conviviality, and fare. The rst two years a subscription was collected, but in 2004 people brought their own food and drink out into the street to eat and share: freshly made pizza, sauted snails, salads, and desserts. They have organized a supper each July since, a matter of satisfaction to the streets residents, especially since ours ran out of steam after three years, mainly because two of our elderly sponsors had died. In 2006 I went down with my camera to investigate the mainstreet party, and although I

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was welcomed by friends and acquaintances and invited to eat, the sense of privacy in the closed-off street was palpable. Back in our own barrio ten minutes later I was debriefed on what felt very much like an espionage mission. The little screen on my digital camera was scrutinized to see who was there. Was there music? What were they eating? The idea of taking your own food out into the street rather than preparing it together was derided, but a sense of regret about the loss of our own sopar hung heavily in the air. The Mieres municipality understands the political virtues of providing drinks and snacksrefrigerisand serves them gratis at the various civic events. Even quite modest development projects like the inauguration of a new septic tank are the occasion for a mini-esta, of which there may be three or four in a busy year. In 2001 I attended the ofcial opening of a half-kilometer stretch of repaved road near the village. The mayor delivered a substantial speech to a dozen of us, and a colleague from a nearby town cut the yellow tape. A gang of children had gathered in a shady ditch freshly lined with white cement, in anticipation of the main attraction: a buffet catered by one of the local restaurants. As soon as the signala burst of amplied Catalan musicwas given, they swarmed over the treats. The adults made the most of the champagne, wine, and beer, an odd little party in the middle of a road junction out in the open elds. A farewell ceremony for the outgoing mayor was held in the huge new village sports pavilion in November 2006. After half an hour of speeches the citizenry fell on a memorable buffet dinner. In our barrio the next day we discussed at length what we had eaten, and agreed that in a long string of civic entertainments this was a grand climax. In the interest of fomenting culture the municipality also subsidizes refreshments at other social events, for example the annual reworks party for the Feast of Saint John. It was started by the people of the newest barrio, but in 2004 a notice in the shop window announcing municipal refrigeris opened the event explicitly to all comers, and people in the other village barrios felt they had the right, and maybe also the duty, to participate. By 2006 the noise and fun had increased exponentially, and a new social institution was evidently locked into place. The counterpoint to everyday frugality is the massive restaurant blowout, in which Catalonia merits truly global ratings. For epicure dining Catalonia boasts a galaxy of Michelin stars. Ferran Adri is considered by many the worlds greatest chef, and if you want a seat in his El Bulli restaurant on the Costa Brava you should know that there are already 250 people in the queue ahead of you. Away from the tourist zones the countryside is dotted with excel-

lent restaurants catering to a very exacting popular clientele; and they serve as strategic meeting-points for fragmented extended families. On the pretext of one anniversary or another, the families pack themselves in at the weekends to stuff themselves, shedding signicant chunks of disposable income on the pretext of sparing the labor of the womenfolk. People feast at long refectory-style boards or on tables ganged together, relatives rubbing shoulders with strangers, familiarity expanding as course follows course. These restaurants are monuments to conviviality (Mieres, with a resident population of about 350, has two of them), and because everyone talks so much about food they have become familiar even to people who have never eaten there. Inspired by this hearsay, we joined the throng one Sunday at Can Tura in Sant Aniol, a gastronomic outpost tucked into a small valley over the ridge from Mieres. We were accompanied by our Spanish friends, a couple from Madrid who were as dazed by the experience as we were. Post-recovery, I composed the following ethnographic notes:
There was nothing in the least nouvelle or minceur about the cuisine. It was cuisine pig-out, every peasants dream of what lunch really ought to be. When we opened the door of this farmhouse establishment at 2.30 it was already jammed with people yelling cheerfully at each other. A young man with a fancy keyboard kept the decibels pumped up. The menu reminded me of village feasts in places like Kashmir, with its relentless succession of carnivorous dishes. This, I think, is part of the peasant heritage: people who eat cabbage and beans every day of life make sure these are banished from sight on high days and holy days. These folk, gorging themselves on meat and sh, were denitely not the Catalan elite, they were farmers and provincial clerks, smalltown laborers and shop assistants. As lamb followed duck, and duck followed sausage, we would have killed for a bit of green vegetable, but the scraps of bruised lettuce under the anchovies was as much as we ever saw. If they had been truly hungry and very determined, our vegetarian friends in Santa Barbara would have been able to do nothing more than sh out the odd mushroom. The style was table dhte, which I think was not meant to imply that the chef made authoritative choices on the diners behalf, but rather that she served her clients every creature they could conceivably wish to eat, ying, walking, swimming, or slithering, in a relentless procession. Dishes presented as individual courses quickly yielded to bowls stacked up on each other on wicker trays. There was certainly enough to provision two couples like ourselves for a week of gluttony, though everyone else around us ate as if there was no tomorrow and a great many empty yesterdays. Six young people at the next tablewe guessed that one couple had just got married, or might be about to do so if they survived the mealstuffed themselves with great whoops of glee. The fellow in Levis and T-shirt facing me was pure Breughel

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from the neck up. Every two or three minutes he threw his head back like a stallion, and my eye was drawn into the great ivory-encircled, bellowing maw. If my glutted memory serves me, the anchovies were accompanied by a board with white, blood, and garlic sausages and a dish of ham cut freshly from the cured hock on the sideboard. We each had a small loaf to help lay the foundations for the meal. Then came the ller, a bowl of savory rice with chicken giblets. We ate this cautiously, because all around us there were intimations of the excesses to follow. Then came a big pan of snails in a rich sauce, perhaps the most luscious part of the meal. I counted 22 shells on my plate when I was nished. Hot on the heels of this came the champagne and the stack of earthenware casseroles of duck, lamb, beef, and pigs-feet. Each distinctive, and each adequate for an ordinary dinner for the four of us. As we agged, the staff gathered round to nd out what ailed us. We apologized for our wretched performance, but this did not prevent the arrival of the hake, the craysh, and the shrimps. This was the only part of the meal, we had been told, which was not reared on site. Certainly the sunny world outside these crammed rooms was full of mooing cattle and cackling poultry. By this time, the other diners had risen to shake their lunches down into their legs. A matron in a dozen meters of oral fabric danced in her spouses arms with immense solemnity, tilting a little beyond the vertical at the end of every second bar. Dishes spun through the establishment with increasing intensity, while people with

Above: The restaurant Can Met in Mieres.

photograph by a.f. robertson

2003

large bottoms and ushed faces whirled round between the tightly packed tables. It was scary to think of all those lunches in motion never have so many snails been made to move so fast. The oorboards heaved alarmingly. To avoid looking so conspicuous, we staggered to our feet and cavorted a little to an international medley. The next run of courses, from the cheeses to the gateaux, are a blur. The staff who egged us on with cheery cries and little squeezings of our arms had certainly noticed the mounting anguish with which we received each new offering. Incredulous, we asked if anyone ever ate the whole meal, but it was already apparent that they did. The wispy little teenager at the next table ate fourteen times her body weight while we picked and poked. The host told us that after one family had wiped their dishes clean, he asked if they were still hungry. They orderedand were servedfreshly grilled steaks. At around ve-thirty the joviality reached a climax when the staff abandoned their duties and dived into the throng, spinning and stamping and whooping with the rest of them. Just when one might expect them to be on their last legs, they were only beginning to nd their form. I was stuck in a corner watching the young man whop the keyboard, but through the veil of Havana smoke I could vaguely discern Francesca and Elisa spinning across the ceiling from one set of brawny Catalan arms into another.
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It was extremely difcult to extract a bill from Mine Host and Hostess, so absorbed were they in these sacraments. Eventually we found that several thousand pesetas had been slashed from our account, we suspect because they had tactically skipped the odd course.

notes
My special thanks to Francesca Bray, Ramon Guardans, Elisa Martin, Juan Gamella, and all our foodie friends in Mieres. 1. See A.F. Robertson, Regeneration in Rural Catalonia, Archives Europennes de Sociologie/European Journal of Sociology 49 (2008): 147172. A book on Regeneration in Mieres: Making History in Rural Catalonia is in press. 2. Xavier Valeri and Josep Oliveras, Arrels i llavors de Mieres (Girona: Ajuntament de Mieres/Ediciones Ecuador 21, 2002): 72. 3. The space left by the self-repression of collective memory was lled with food and other consumables. Helen Graham, Popular Culture in the Years of Hunger, in Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 241242. 4. The Garrotxa word fartanegaeating to excess, getting stuffedis especially graphic. See Ramon Llongarriu, Un any a pags: La comarca dOlot: Una agricultura cerealista i de subsistncia (Girona, Llibres de Batet, 1995), 112. 5. Robert Hughes, Barcelona (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 101102. 6. The Spanish have long been lusty consumers of chocolate, a byproduct of their colonial interests in Central America. 7. Freeman discusses the signicance of communal dining as a denitive feature of estas in Spain. In the Sierra Ministra of Old Castile it is a ceremonial expression of their common bondstemporarily making of the comn a family. Susan Tax Freeman, Neighbors: The Social Contract in a Castillian Hamlet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 90103.

In retrospect I am surprised that after this convivial glut I had the stamina to relive the experience in so much detail. But that is the way with memorable mealswe continue to feed off them long after they have been digested. So often, recollections of a particular place and time proceed outward from the visceral memory of a particular dish, eventually embracing the company of particular people. One canap or a freshly picked apple may be all it takes, but the Catalan Sunday lunch, like the mata-porc before it, argues unashamedly that the bigger the blowout the fonder the embrace.g

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archive | lynda k. bundt zen

Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops

Sylvia Plath and Food

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When i tell people that I am a Sylvia Plath scholar, they say, Oh, shes the poet who killed herself, and Wasnt she very young? Or, if they are at all familiar with her poetry in Ariel or her novel, The Bell Jar, they might say something about her iconic status with feminists and depending on how they feel about feminism, either say something about how man-hating she soundsWasnt she the one who said I eat men like air?or express a shared outrage toward her unfaithful husband, Ted Hughes. In either case, I often tell them that they might be surprised
Above: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in their Boston apartment, 1958.
photograph by james coyne for black star. sylvia plath collection, mortimer rare book room, smith college black star.

by the Sylvia Plath who emerges with startling frequency in her letters and journals. In the A & E biography of Plath, Kate Moses smiles and says, She out-Marthad Martha Stewart, remembering the passages where Plath describes in impressive detail the meals she plans, the curtains she sews, the furniture she paints and decorates with hearts and owers. Plath enjoyed casting herself in the role of

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.7990, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.79.

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domestic goddess, but one who did not see such a big difference between the art of composing a poem and the skill of preparing a good meal. In one of her strange reections on battering out a good life, she declares, I want to be one of the Makaris: with Ted. Books & Babies & Beef Stews.1 This line is most likely an allusion to Scottish poet William Dunbars Lament for the Makaris, Quhen He Wes Sek (ca. 1505), where only poets are esteemed as makaris (makers), as in the noble Chaucer, of makaris our. Here Dunbar is not thinking so much of battering out a good life but of meditating on last things, because the refrain of the poem is timor mortis conturbat me (fear of death confounds me).2 When Plath thinks of being a maker, she gives priority to her marriage with fellow poet Ted Hughes, and then their partnership in making books, babies, and nally, for her at least, beef stews. And, we know from Hughes, other culinary delights. While on their Cape Cod honeymoon in August 1957, Hughes writes to his brother that though Plath is the princess of cooks, she has cloyed his appetite with her efforts: I have made a pact with Sylvia that when I dont want cream-chiffon pies & all the other fairy palace dishes its not because she isnt an exquisite cook but because she cooks for relaxation while I eat only by necessity so that there must come occasions when the most Himalayan heaps of porkcannot so much as brighten my eye. He also reveals what will become obvious to a reader of Plaths Journals, that cooking was an all-tootempting diversion: when shes faced by some tedious or unpleasant piece of work she escapes into cooking.3 Hughes was probably describing Plaths procrastination from thinking about the forthcoming year of teaching at Smithher rst and last year, it turned out. At the same time, though, she was seeking relief from one of her frequent and painful bouts of writers block. While Hughes seemed to be having no trouble settling down to write on Cape Cod, Plath was anxious and restless. As Hughes would write years later to Frances McCullough, the rst editor of Plaths Journals, Our main programme was her writing. That was absolutely the dominant themeit was our big invalid.4 We know from her journals that she is stricken with a chill paralysis because it is almost August, and no lesson plans, no grammar studied, and she is desperate to get into novel deep enough so it will go on at the same time. Her hope is that she will be able both to teach and write at the same timean impossible ambition, as we shall seeand what does she do? The answer: After Friday of cooking, whipping yellow oil into yellow egg yolks to make mayonnaise, white sugar into white egg whites to make meringue, yellow butter into yellow custard, and whipped cream folded in to

make yellow and white custard, and on and on, I am back to a certain stoic stance: to begin again and write and read in the afternoons and to hell with the beach for awhile. In addition to the compulsive whipping of oil, egg yolks, egg whites, and cream that she cites, Plath has been luxuriating in tanning herself on the beach. She scolds herself: Any idiot can waste summer getting tan only to lose it (J 292). Vowing to leave these self-indulgent pursuits, Plath begins to outline a story she proposed to write a couple weeks earlier, titled THE DAY OF THE TWENTY-FOUR CAKES , about a woman who cannot stop baking cakes:
Either Kafka litmag serious or SATEVEPOST aim high: woman at end of rope with husband, children: lost sense of order in universe, all meaningless, loss of hopes, quarrel with husband: loose ends, bills, problems, dead end. Wavering between running away or committing suicide: stayed by need to create an order: slowly, methodically begins to bake cakes, one each hour, calls store for eggs, etc. from midnight to midnight. Husband comes home: new understanding. She can go on making order in her limited way: beautiful cakes: cant bear to leave them. Try both styles: do it to your hearts content. (J 288)

A Kafkaesque Martha Stewart run amok? Or simply a desperate housewife? She ultimately decides on the latter version, and even has her protagonist think of leaving Jock, her strong-willed, taciturn but loving husband [who] is a salesman of ofce furniture, rising fast (J 292). It is the womans compulsion, though, to leave something for [their] children that stops her ight, and thats when she begins to start baking: feels the need to keep on, orders four dozen eggs, confectioners sugar, measures out vanilla, baking powder: sense of order, neatness, creativeness. Born homemaker, sense of dignity, richness, knowledge that shes what Jock really needs and wants. When Jock comes home to nd her in the kitchen, she is vital, ushed from baking, at peace with herself (J 293). Even Norman Rockwell might gag over this. Before I give you the impression that Plaths fondness for cooking was really a personality disorder, I need to give you a sampling of Plaths hearty appetite and aesthetic appreciation for food. She is quite able to make a reader drool over the simplest menus. Invited to a family dinner by her boyfriend Dick Norton, she waxes rhapsodic over the meal. As she describes the atmosphere in her journal, the table is luminous with warm, glowing aqua candles, bright
Right: Sylvia Plath on the lawn of her home in Wellesley, ma, August 1947.
helle collection of plath family photographs, mortimer rare book room, smith college estate of aurelia schober plath.

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sudden pink-petaled yellow-centered asters. Swordsh and sour cream broiledHollandaise and broccoli. Grape pie and icecream [sic], rich, warm. And port, sharp, sweet, startling gulped with a sudden good sting behind the eyes and a relaxing into easy laughter. Good scalding black coffee. And Dick and I at home an evening, mutually warm, rich, seething with peace. What an odd mixture of pleasure and pain: sharp but sweet; startling gulped but with a good sting; scalding coffee; and a mood seething with peace. Eventually Plaths romantic reverie turns to whether Norton is really the mate she seeks: The long prosaic loaf of daily bread. But who to eat it with, and when to begin? (J 148). Norton, as most Plathophiles know, was the model for the all-too-prosaic Buddy Willard of The Bell Jar, and no match for Plaths alter ego, Esther Greenwood.

Above: Sylvia Plaths diary for the week of 25 February3 March 1962, showing one of many pages containing entries about food.
sylvia plath collection, mortimer rare book room, smith college

estate of sylvia plath.

Much later in her journals Plath describes another meal with Ted Hughes that has a totally different aesthetic pitch. After a brisk walk with Hughes in freezing temperatures, they come home ravenous, to devour seared steak, quenching chef salad, wine, luxurious lucent green gs in thick chilled cream (J 338). In one of her most enticing descriptions, as if she were insatiable Laura in Christina Rossettis Goblin Market,5 she worships a honeydew melon as wild cold honey-avored melon-esh; creamy texture, refreshing, sweet the way sunlight would taste, coming through the clear glassy green bulk of waves (J 258). One must pause to

reect on why a salad is quenching, what a lucent g looks like, or what sunlight might taste like, and then on how it might taste if reected through ocean waves. Finally, celebrating the prize-winning publication of Hughess rst volume of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, the couple rst had salad & ham & clear pungent cider at the Eagle pub for lunch, and later a gala supper in a restaurant where she would love to order Escargots? Oh yes, madam. And pheasant. & venison, but of frugal necessity and at the end of resources, settled forchicken soup, good & creamy, delicious stuffed tomatoes, turkey with the usual unredeemed chip potatoes & overcooked dried peas, or canned. All is not lost though, because for dessert, Chablis & iced lemon mousse transgured it all. We idled, nibbled, dreamed aloud (J 271). For her own culinary endeavors Plath relied heavily on the Joy of Cooking, no less a sacred text for her generation than Julia Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) was for the next. Before the baby boomers, and long before Child made French cuisine au courant in America, there was Irma Rombauers Joy, self-published in 1931 to create income after her husband committed suicide. The rst edition was illustrated by her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, with a dramatic cover of St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, wielding a sword over a soon-to-be-slain dragon. It does stir the imagination to wonder what St. Martha of Bethany had in mind for dinner. The subtitle for this rst edition promised a Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat, and, in the Depression era, many of those reliable recipes were for game like rabbits, squirrel, and opossum. The casual culinary chat offered instructions on canning and preserving fruits and vegetables from the garden. It is doubtful that Sylvia Plath saw this rst edition, but she may have been raised on one of the several commercially published editions that followed, and we do know for certain that when she wanted to get serious about cooking in graduate school (as a Fulbright Fellow in Cambridge, England), she suddenly needed to have her 1953 edition.6 Breathless with the excitement of her new love for Ted Hughes and probably determined to impress him with her cooking skills, she writes her mother: Ted is teaching me about horoscopes, how to cook herring roes, and we are going to the worlds biggest circus tonight. God, such a life!If you have a chance, could you send over my Joy of Cooking? Its the one book I really miss! (April 26, 1956).7 She reminds her mother again on May 18, 1956, could you please send my Joy of Cooking (LH 253). Aurelia Plath apparently remembered to bring the Joy when she came to England in June.

A year later nds Plath reading her blessed Rombauer (J 249) as if it were a rare novel, when she should be studying Locke for her Cambridge nal exams. She then chastises herself: Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity & stie yourself by falling headrst into a bowl of cookie batter. But, she reasons, even the Big Ones like Virginia Woolf nd comfort by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her (J 269). The Joy even went with her and Hughes to Spain after their swift marriage in June 1956. On August 17, Hughess twentysixth birthday, she records the contents of Mr. and Mrs. Hughes Writing Table, including an open cookbook at Teds right elbow, where Id left it after nishing reading out recipes of stewed rabbit for his birthday dinner, and close by on her side of the table, a ragged brown covered Thesaurusclose to Teds red covered Shakespeare (J 259, August 17, 1956). Her preparations for this rst birthday dinner she will cook for Ted as his wife are lovingly documented. The morning is devoted rst to shopping for rabbit and myriad garnishes for gala stew (J 256257) in their honeymoon Spanish village, Benidorm. Then, undaunted by the one-burner petrol stove, she creates a feast. She must rst dress a rabbit, and the 1953 Joy of Cooking still has the Depression-era illustration for this delicate operation. But it is late afternoon, and Plath has just awakened from what she describes as a long deep nap, dropping off end of pier into hypnotized sleep. Now she must pull herself up from the depths and gird her loins for the task:
Cleared head with washing and cold drink of water; sweaty, reserve of energy growing. Gulped scalding coffee, like surgeon before difcult new operation to be performed for rst time. Got out ingredients from larder: Ted lit carbon re, glowing to red coals in black oven, after much smoking and glowering clouds; scraped carrots naked, cut onion, squushy [sic] tomato; cooked down strips of salt pork, oured pink tight rabbit esh; seared rabbit to savoury brown, chunked in big kettle; made rich dense gravy from drippings, adding our, salt, boiling water, two packets of condensed soupvegetable and beef and chicken, glass and a half of wine at Teds insistence; added sauce to kettle with can of peas, onions, tomato & carrots. Boiled and bubbled, savoury, steaming and delectable. (August 17, 1956; J 258)
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The wine at Teds insistence is an ingredient Rombauer says the French like to add. But a reader might pause over some of these detailswhy should carrots be violently scraped naked? Or, why does Plath portray herself as a surgeon, aying a bunnys skin to expose pink tight rabbit esh? After a few years, Plath seems more comfortable in the kitchen than she did assembling this rst birthday meal

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for her husband. Entertaining friends for dinner and playing the part of competent hostess, Plath is swept into a sensual haze while she nishes preparations. She titles the journal entry a moment, caught, in the stillness of waiting for guests and attempts to re-create the moment impressionistically. She revels in her own scent and colorsmy own tigress perfume & the dull-avocado green of my skirt and bright turquoise & gold-lined & white & black paisley patterned jersey warm & snug on mewhile she puts the nishing touches on her cake. A glass of wine gives her the necessary brio: the white wine drunk during smoothing on thick white marshmellowy [sic] frosting singing thin in my veinsoh the absolute free willingness unleashed which wine brings. The apartment clean-carpeted and empty, bowls of sour cream & onion, pots of tomato & meat sauce, garlic butter, hot water, waiting, waiting. The moment comes to a crashing halt, however, and we never learn how the dinner party unfolded. From wine singing in her veins and unleashing an exuberant free willingness, Plath suddenly turns to after, after, to hell with Sophocles, I shall pick you up & go on with you, to catch up (J 329), and begins a long complaint about never catching up with her teaching preparations. A journal entry that begins with heady excitement descends even further into a nightmare to record, mingling images from paintings of suffering Christs & corrupt judges & lawyers by Roualt with images from newspaper clippings about the Holocaust: three men behind barbwire at a Concentration Camp clipped from the Times from a review which I read about tortures & black trains bearing victims to the furnace (J 330). The passage is reminiscent of Keatss Ode to a Nightingale, where he rst extols the liberating effects of wineThat I might drink, and leave the world unseen with the nightingales songand then plummets downward to Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/And leaden-eyed despairs.8 Throughout her year of teaching at Smith (19571958) Plaths happier moments revolve around food, reveries to interrupt classroom anxieties and the familiar drudgery of pedagogygrading papers, preparing lectures, reading exams. In the middle of a long journal entry wondering, What is it teaching kills? and self-agellation over her own sense of fraudulenceAnd I: what am I but a gloried automaton hearing myself, through a vast space of weariness, speak from the shell speaking-trumpet that is my mouth the dead words about life, suffering, and deep knowledge and ritual sacriceshe will suddenly turn to the calm of preparing dinner, paring potatoes into cool white ovoids, carrots into long conical spears, onions slippery glossed & bulbous popped & cracked from their rattle-paper skins

(J 346). In answer to her sense of being trapped between two unachieved shapes: between the original teacher & the original writer: neither, Plath turns to the serenity of those cooking shapes, so easily achievedovoids, cones, bulbs. Occasionally she simply pats herself on the back for company-pleasing dessertsa trusty angel-topped lemon meringue pie (J 323) or runny but delicious custardmeringue raspberry pie (J 383)while at other times she seems to revel in hearty meals inspired by her reading. Hence, after rereading Moby Dick in preparation for the exam deluge tomorrowam whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergrismiracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan she made a huge sh soup. The next day she interrupts her boredom from sorting exams for a senior professor with steaming & savory sh soup for lunch, smacking good all onion-essence, chunks of soaked sh & potato steaming, hot, bacon bits, buttery crackers foundering in it (J 370). Ahabs ship foundered, we know, but crackers? In contrast to the year of teaching at Smith, marked by many journal entries expressing pleasure over cooking and food, the following year (19581959) is principally devoted to Plaths Panic Birdher writers blockand trying to ferret out its neurotic roots in her sessions with psychoanalyst Ruth Beuscher. There are very few lengthy journal entries about cooking from this yearbrief mentions by a harried housewife of chicken & squash ready in the oven for Teds return from the library, back achey (J 423) and also complaints by Ted about apparently too-light meals (J 421). Plaths longest entry records a day when she had been sitting at an abstract poem about mirrors & identity which I hated, followed by a rejection from The Kenyon sealing hopelessness. This gloom over her writing extends to her efforts in the kitchen and, as the following passage shows, nearly threatens Plath with being cut off like her heroine in The Bell Jar:
Where, how, with what & for what to begin? No incident in my life seemed ready to stand up for even a 20 page story. I sat paralyzed, feeling no person in the world to speak to, cut off totally from humanity in a self-induced vacuum. I felt sicker & sicker. I couldnt happily be anything but a writer & I couldnt be a writer: I couldnt even set down one sentence: I was paralyzed with fear, with deadly hysteria. I sat in the hot kitchen, unable to blame lack of time, the sultry July weather, anything but myself. The white hardboiled egg, the green head of lettuce, the two suave pink veal chops dared me to do anything with them, to make a meal out of them, to alter their single, leaden identity into a digestible meal. I had been living in an idle dream of being a

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writer. And here stupid housewives & people with polio were getting their stories into the Satevepost. I went into Ted, utterly shattered, & asked him to tackle the veal chops. And burst into tears. Useless, goodfornothing. (J 405)

What is most curious about this passage is the attribution of suave to veal chopsas if they were worldly, sophisticated, and debonair young men mocking a young girl of no skill or experience to Make something of me! There is also the convergence of composing a poem about identity and the leaden identities of the cooking ingredients, in need of the same kind of magical inspiration from her to turn them into a digestible meal. Still in a bleak mood months later, Plath says, Im not working, only studying to change my ways of writing poems. A disgust for my work. My poems begin on one track, in one dimension and never surprise or shock or even much please. To get out of her doldrums, she reads other poets and then blends her taste in poetryher aesthetic preferenceswith the gustatory pleasures of drink: Read [Richard] Wilbur and [Adrienne] Rich this morning. Wilbur a bland turning of pleasaunces [sic], a fresh speaking and picturing with incalculable grace and all sweet, pure, clear, fabulous, the maestro with the imperceptible marcel. Robert Lowell after this is like good strong shocking brandy after a too lucidly sweet dinner wine, desert [sic] wine (J 465). Wilbur, like those damnable veal chops, sounds a little too suave for Plath, who was looking for a way to surprise or shock that would not come until Ariel.9 We dont have the two journals Plath kept after she and Hughes moved back to England in 1959 because Hughesinfamouslylost one of them and destroyed the nal journal, he says, because he did not want her children to have to read it (in those days he regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival).10 The earlier one, with entries covering 19601962, is presumed stolen, since Hughes left it out for anyone to read in the Devon home he returned to after Plaths suicide. Plath kept a nal journal after she moved to London in December 1962, and this is the one Hughes says he destroyed. From her letters to her mother, though, we know that Plath continued to take great pleasure in being a homemaker and mother. When she was pregnant with Frieda and Nicholas, she seemed to give up on her writing altogether and devoted her time to nesting, feeling, she says, quite cowlike and interested suddenly in soppy womens magazines and cooking and sewing (LH 439). She is ecstatic when she receives a big Christmas parcel from you [mother Aurelia] with the two Ladies Home Journal magazines, which I fell upon with joythat

magazine has so much Americana, I love it. Look forward to a good read by the wood re tonight and to trying the luscious recipes. Recipes in English womens magazines are for things like Lard and Stale Bread Pie, garnished with Cold Pigs Feet or Left-Over Pot Roast in Aspic (LH 438). Like the Joy of Cooking, this magazine represented for Plath an Americanness which I feel a need to dip into, now Im in exile, and especially as Im writing for womens magazines in a small way now. I shall have fullled a very long-time ambition if a story of mine ever makes the LHJ (LH 433). Plath may have seen the feature by fellow American poet Phyllis McGinley, Cooking to Me Is Poetry, in the January 1960 issue, where she compares the skills of cooking to those of composing poems and supports good old-fashioned recipes,11 conrming Plaths own aesthetic perceptions about traditional cooking in the American moldand her antipathy for English cooking. Indeed, for Christmas she spurns the English goose, instead roasting her rst simply beautiful golden-brown turkey with your [Aurelias] bread dressing, creamed brussels sprouts and chestnuts, swede (like squash, orange), giblet gravy and apple pies with our last and preciously saved own apples (LH 441). Before the birth of her second child, Nicholas, she tells her mother, Each day I bake something to hide away for Ted and Frieda when Im recovering from the new baby. I have a box of sand tarts cut in shapes, trimmed with cherries and almonds, a box of Tollhouse cookies and a fruit cake. Tomorrow Ill try an apple pie with the very last of our apples (LH 442). What could be more American than Tollhouse cookies and apple pie? Only nine months after Nicholass birth, Plath is contemplating divorce from Ted Hughes, who has deserted her and their two children for another woman. She is also writing like madhave managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terric stuff, as if domesticity had choked me (October 12, 1962; LH 466). These are, of course, the Ariel poemsPlaths October miracle. If we had only the evidence of these poems, then we would probably assume that Plath had never found any joy in cooking. Domesticity in Ariel is both dangerous and scary. In A Birthday Present the speaker imagines something monstrous hiding just behind this veil that shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me, and When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking.12 In Cut a Freudian slip of the knife turns a kitchen accidentWhat a thrill--- /My thumb instead of an onion (A 13)into an epiphany of self-hatred: Dirty girl, / Thumb stump (A 14). And then theres the coffee-klatch of two housewives in Lesbos, the title itself ironic because there is no love lost between these

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two women. The rst line exclaims, Viciousness in the kitchen!/The potatoes hiss (A 30), while they complain to each other about their livestending small children, putting up with boring husbands characterized as An old pole for the lightning (A 31) or hugging his ball and chain (A 32) as he heads off to work. And meanwhile theres a stink of fat and baby crap and the smog of cooking, the smog of hell (A 31) hovering over the women. The suffocation of housewifery closes in as one woman leaves and looks back: I see your cute dcor/Close on you like the st of a baby (A 32). Even the rabbit Plath dressed and stewed to perfection for Hughess birthday returns in Totem, but the pink tight rabbit esh now looks like an aborted baby: Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice, // Flayed of fur and humanity (A 75). Before Ariel, though, and even while Plath was still writing those rosy letters to her mother about domestic bliss with Ted Hughes and singing the praises of Ladies Home Journal, she was writing her novel The Bell Jar, much of which is an outright repudiation and satire of 1950s norms for women. Plath did not want her mother to read The Bell Jar, characterizing it as a potboiler of no artistic merit, and she published it under the nom de plume Victoria Lucas. It is as if Plath split herself in two: for her mother, she was the sentimental Sivvy of the letters, in love with soppy womens magazines; but in The Bell Jar she is the proto-feminist Esther Greenwood, who suspects maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state,13 an epiphany that Esther arrives at after her boyfriend tells her that she wont want to write poetry anymore after she has children (BJ 85). As for cooking, Esther is purposely hopeless: My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left everything to them. They were always trying to teach me one dish or another, but I would just look on and say, Yes, yes, I see, while the instructions slid through my head like water, and then Id always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again (BJ 76). One episode of the novel in particular suggests that Plath regarded womens magazines like Ladies Home Journal as poisonguratively speaking. Plaths heroine, Esther Greenwood, is a college guest editor for a posh womens magazine, just as Plath herself was for Mademoiselle in the summer of 1953, before her rst breakdown and attempted suicide. On one of their jaunts Esther and the
Left: A drawing by Sylvia Plath from her journal, June 26, 1956.
sylvia plath collection, mortimer rare book room, smith college

other guest editors in The Bell Jar are invited to a banquet by Ladies Day magazine, a portmanteau combining Ladies Home Journal and Womans Day. Esther is thrilled with the food being served by the staff of the Ladies Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks, neat hairnets and awless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color (BJ 25)a far cry from the kitchens stink of fat and baby crap in Lesbos. Esther tells the reader, I love food more than just about anything else and No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight; so when she sees the yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar(BJ 24), she pigs out. And I do mean pigs out. She greedily strategizes the placement of one of the caviar bowls, guring that the girl across from her couldnt reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit, and the girl next to her would be too nice to ask me to share it with her if I just kept it out of the way at my elbow by my breadand-butter plate(BJ 26). While everyone else is behaving decorously, Esther knows that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, not only can you get away with it, but everyone will think you are original and very witty. So Esther dispenses with the cutlery altogether:
I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my ngers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldnt ooze off and ate them. (BJ 27)

Nor, in this porcine depiction, does Esther stop with one plate of chicken and caviar. She polishes off a second and goes on to tackle the avocado and crabmeat salad, announcing, Avocados are my favorite fruit. She especially loves them with melted grape jelly in French dressing, lling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. Only after she has thoroughly gorged herself and is no longer worried about competition over my caviar, does Esther begin a conversation with her fellow guest editor Betsy (BJ 28). Later, after a very bad night of continuous waves of nausea and diarrhea, Esther passes out on the bathroom oor. She feels limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over (BJ 44). Informed the following morning that the crabmeat was chock-full of ptomaine, Esther has
a vision of the celestially white kitchens of Ladies Day stretching into innity. I saw avocado pear after avocado pear being stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise and photographed under brilliant lights. I saw the delicate, pink-mottled claw meat poking seductively through

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its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess. Poison (BJ 48)

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The poison here represents a sickeningly coquettish domesticity. The crab claws poke above the mayonnaise like a coy woman peeping over a blanket, and the avocado holds its poison lovingly like a mother cradling a baby. Plath also suggests that the hygienic purity of the kitchens and the stafffemale role models of domestic engineering with their smocks, hairnets, and peach-pie perfect makeupmasks an underlying toxicity for women, and that the American magazine genre typied by Ladies Home Journal is sinister propaganda. Nothing terrible seems to happen to the bright, efcient, stay-at-home-moms in their pages, and if something does, there is always the good advice of the monthly feature, Can This Marriage Be Saved? The problem, as Plath explains to her mother (in a letter signed Sylvia, not Sivvy), is that It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies Home Journal blither about those. Yet in the same letter she assures her mother that she is still a super-efcient hostess, preparing a roast beef, potato and corn dinner with apple cake for guests (October 21, 1962; LH 473). She explodes again, a few days later, stop trying to get me to write about decent courageous peopleread the Ladies Home Journal for those!I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it. That is why I am going to London this week, partly, to face all the people we know and tell them happily and squarely I am divorcing Ted, so they wont picture me as a poor country wife (October 25, 1962; LH 477). Instead of being a poor country wife, she tells her mother that she wants to be the most loving and fascinating mother in the world with a at in London, where Frieda and Nick shall have the intelligences of the day as their visitors, and I the Salon that I will deserve (October 23, 1962; LH 475). Despite Plaths apparent scorn in The Bell Jar for the representations of ideal homemakers in American womens magazines and her eventual revelation of this scorn to her mother, she was not immune to its consumer fantasies. In her memoir, Vessel of Wrath, Dido Merwin takes it as a warning shot across the bows when Plath rejects her offer to provide Plath and Hughes with most of what they need to furnish their apartment in London: But if the Hughess [sic] elected to go splurging on a posh cooker, refrigerator, and bed, what the hell? Never mind if it made no sense to a couple of ea-marketers like Bill [W.S. Merwin] and me.

Dido goes on to deride Plaths need for morale-boosting toys as a sign of her deep-seated insecurity.14 In December 1962, when Plath was once again equipping a London at this time aloneher visiting friend Clarissa Roche reports that her kitchen was full of American-style gadgets. Even though the rooms were tidy, the beds made, and the kitchen spotless, Clarissa suspected Sylvia rarely prepared the meals so carefully planned on her weekly menu (BF 286). There is an odd pathos to how often Plath is reported to have eaten heartily in her nal days. We have two accounts of Plaths last weekend before she committed suicide: Jillian Beckers testimony in the Anne Stevenson biography Bitter Fame, and Beckers own memoir Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. Despite some discrepancies in tone, both versions portray Plath as deeply depressed, but most composed and sociable when dining. Both, however, depict something incongruous or off-kilter about someone as sick as Plath quite evidently having such a healthy appetite. Plath calls Becker on Thursday, February 7, 1963, and, according to Stevenson, is hysterical and desperate, asking for asylum for herself and her children with Becker (BF 292). In Beckers own account she simply notes that Plath asked, May I come round with the children?15 When Plath arrives, she immediately withdraws for a nap, ignoring the presence of one of her erstwhile friends (GU 1). After her nap, Jillian Becker invites her to stay the weekend with the children. According to Stevenson, At dinner Jillian was surprised to see Sylvia eat her steak with enormous relish, commenting on how wonderful it tasted after her diet of mince. Had she forgotten how often the Beckers themselves had taken her out, Jillian wondered (BF 292). Becker more generously describes Plath enjoying her menu of chicken soup, grilled large rump steaksmashed potato with plenty of milk and butter, and a salad: She ate heartily. She always did and it always pleased me; not only because it was a compliment to my cooking but chiey because eating well was bound to make her feel better. Like most Jewish mothers, I believed in the therapeutic power of good food (GU 4). Stevenson notes that however distraught Sylvia seemed at other times, she always appeared dressed for meals, was calm at table, ate extremely well, and was warmly appreciative of the food Jillian served (BF 292). After what is clearly a harrowing night according to both versions, Plath somehow devoured a good breakfast (GU 7), and in Stevensons version ate a hearty breakfast, and returned to bed (BF 294). Plath was on a cocktail of drugsboth sleeping pills and an antidepressantand the Becker and Stevenson versions differ on how much medication Plath consumed. Becker claims that she carefully

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monitored the dosage, making sure that Plath did not take more than the two prescribed sleeping pills, even though she woke at 3:00 a.m. begging for another. Plaths sleep medication, according to Becker, didnt seem to make her somnolent or even soothe her (GU 5). Stevenson, however, reports that Jillian described Plath swallowing pill after pillwhat seemed to her far more than a safe dosebefore lying back to rehearse the litany of anguish that was to be repeated day and night throughout the weekend (BF 292). If we believe Stevenson, Jillian Becker regarded Plath as a tiresome house guest, foisting her childrens care onto Jillian, alternately eating heartily and sleeping, and

photograph by ted hughes. sylvia plath collection, mortimer rare book room, smith college estate of ted hughes.

subjecting her to a middle-of-the-night rodomontade, which always trailed round the same course: she hated her mother; she hated Ted for betraying her; she (Sylvia would never speak [Teds mistress] Assias name) was hateful; the Hughes family had rejected her, and so on and on. As for her listener, She might just as well have been a mask hanging on the wall, Jillian says, as Sylvia poured out chaotic memories and obsessions in a feverish delirium

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Above: Sylvia Plath camping at Rock Lake, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada, July 1959.

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(BF 293). Because Stevenson makes Jillian Becker sound irritated and unsympathetic, and Plath monstrously selfabsorbed, Becker may well have written her memoir as an antidote to Bitter Fames barely disguised venom. On the Sunday before her suicide, Stevenson says that although it was a bitterly cold day, Sylvia had not thought to dress [Nicholas] warmly before sending him off with Jillians husband to an outing at the zoo, and then Sunday lunch came and went, with a joint of meat and Sylvias usual exclamations over its excellence. After eating heartily, Sylvia went up to rest (BF 295). This combination of details suggests that Plath was sick enough to be a careless mother but not sick enough to refuse another hearty meal from her gracious hostess, and then, behaving discourteously, to leave the table suddenly to nap. But in Beckers memoir, Plath joined us at the table for our usual ample Sunday lunch of soup, roast lamb or beef with all the trimmings, salad, cheese, dessert, wine. I remember that she enjoyed it, saying it was wonderful or marvellous or something of the sort. She helped Nick with his food, and seemed, I thought, a little more cheerful, a little less tense. Becker also says that everyone lingered at the tablefor an hour or so after the coffee cups had gone cold, talking about something that has left not a trace of memoryand the wine we had drunk made us sleepy too so we all went to lie down (GU 9), which sounds far more benign than Stevensons version. This is really the last meal we know Plath had. She insisted on returning to her own London at after she woke up. After putting Frieda and Nicholas in their upstairs bedroom, opening their windows and placing bread and milk next to their high-sided cots, Plath stuffed towels and cloths under their door and the kitchen door, and turned on the gas in the stove. The following morning she was found sprawled on the oor, her head on a little folded cloth in the oven (BF 296).g

notes
1. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 269. Subsequent quotes from Plaths journals are taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically as J. 2. William Dunbar, The Poems of William Dunbar, vol. 1, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: Laing and Forbes, 1834), 4953. 3. Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 108109. 4. Quoted in Stephen Ennis, Introduction, No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry (Lunenberg, vt: Stinehour Press, 2005), ix. 5. Christina Rosetti, Goblin Market, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., vol. E, ed. Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 14661478. 6. Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953). All subsequent references are to this edition. 7. Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 19501963, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 242. All subsequent quotes from Plaths letters are taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically as LH. 8. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Keats, ed. Harold Edgar Briggs (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 290293. 9. There is another journal entry where Plath compares her various boyfriends to food. Thinking about Richard Sassoon, her greatest love before Ted Hughes, she says, he cant swim, he is weak in a certain sense, he will never play baseball or teach math: that orange juice and broiled chicken solidity is utterly lacking and it is what Gary has and Gordon has (in the story: Dark Marauder, there will be a contrast between the delicate snail-and-wine taste of Richard and the plain steaksteak and potatoes-with-nothing-done-to-them taste of Gary (J 566). 10. Hughes adds: The earlier one disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up). Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Her Journals, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (New York: Picador, 1994), 177. The prime suspect for the journals theft is Brenda Hedden, a competing mistress described by Assia Wevill as an emaciated Marilyn Monroe. Hughes also suspected her of trying to burn down a house he bought when he broke up with her. The journal he burned was from the months after Hughes left her; I personally suspect he burned it at Assias behest because she read it and found it very disturbing in its attacks on her. 11. Phyllis McGinley, Cooking to Me Is Poetry, Ladies Home Journal 86 (January 1960): 6667. 12. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 42. All subsequent quotes are taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically as A. 13. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 85. All subsequent quotes are taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically as BJ. 14. Dido Merwin, Vessel of Wrath, Appendix ii to Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame (Boston: Houghton Mifin/a Peter Davison Book, 1989), 325. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically as BF. 15. Jillian Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (London: Ferrington, Bookseller and Publisher, 2002), 1. Subsequent quotations will be cited parenthetically as GU.

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consumption | michele f ield

Like Your Labels?

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant Success in circuit lies
Emily Dickinson

At least half the world eats food without text and gures, but those who seek reassurance from labels are increasingly worried or confused by what they read. The topic of food labels is largemy study alone contains fteen linear feet of related les. Here I would like to share some impressions from my monitoring of United Kingdom, United States, and European Union labels (other examples are not considered here). Surprisingly, there is no international referee for food labels, even though labels for all products are changing rapidly. At least Twitter has taken over some label monitoring. What better small-scale critique could there be? Most consumers are nonplussed by the inscrutable chemical abbreviations on labels, the distinctions between gures for salt and sodium, the suggestions of hazards when something is unwashed or E-numbered. Labels try to avoid the apprehensions that anthropologist Mary Douglas explains in Purity and Dangerthat a label on our foreheads listing all the chemicals in our bodies, or our bacteria content, would frighten us away from chewing our ngernails. Labels try instead to appeal to our sense of responsibility, as well as to our inquisitiveness. However, most people who read labels cannot recall much of them later, unless they were looking for allergy warnings. We tend to glance at labels to feel conscientious. They are like formulas that a dull teacher has written in chalk: we simply put them aside, or we intend to eat only two taco chips instead of twenty. Here I present a few traditional concerns of labels, followed by some more recent subjects that label writers are addressing, based mainly on environmental regulations. Cooking times. Carefully worded labels once declared a broad cooking time for a fresh turkey or a heat-and-serve
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.9196, issn 1529-3262.

meal, but issues of liability have produced a new genre of nannying. The New York Times made a crusade out of the sixty-ninecent Banquet readymade meat pie, for which a four-step diagram instructs the cook to insert a particular thermometer to test in several strategic places that the heat of the pie has reached 165 degrees. Of course, this absolves the manufacturer (ConAgra in this case) of liability should someone fall ill from eating a preprocessed, undercooked meat pie; it also makes the label intimidating. The upscale uk supermarket Waitrose includes a label instruction on pork to cook until the juices run clear (difcult to judge if you are stir-frying) and until there is no pink meat, relying on denitions of pink that rival President Clintons use of the word sex. In regard to succulence, labels nowadays push us to err on the side of caution, saying we should overcook game, duck, chicken, pork, shellsh, and sh. Pink has become a scare-word for some children, and when faced with cured ham on his plate, a friends child frowned and asked, Is it raw? Water added. This labeling battle was fought and temporarily lost. Sometimes a label will tell you that the weight of a product includes a certain amount of injected water, but the days when water oozed from bacon as it fried or when chicken breasts deated like balloons may have passed. This labeling is not unimportant, however: Water content is an index of quality. Certain beer used to be called small beer because it was made weaker by water. Many labeled foods are now small in this sense. Ironically, the consumption of fresh water required for a food to emerge is a statistic many people now seem to want. They have been warned by reports on water shortages that say Asian rice, even more than beef, is to be avoided for environmental reasons. It may also be better to dress in cowhide than in cotton, if water consumption is on the label. Fat content. The separate listing of trans fats has made buyers more aware, but what is next best? Palm oil? Fish fats that taint other avors? I like Salvador Dals description of his creativity as frying up my thoughts and liberally use

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nadeem hadiary, the food of art, 2007. based on roy lichtensteins cubist still life , 1974 from the national gallery of art, washington d.c.

a variety of oils, but their labels offer poor guidelines on what is best to use and when. Neither do they compare the nature of butterfatused so lavishly by Julia Childto that of generic vegetable oil. The simple-minded will say that olive oil is all good. Certainly the big winner in the label wars has been the fat from olives. California restaurants are now required to put fat gures on their meals, and concerned customers have even been known to chide strangers whose children they see enjoying macaroni and cheese. This is the kind of guilt management that labels privately encourage at home. But I am reminded of friends in my childhood who encouraged me not to sing certain lines in certain hymnsbecause theyre not true. Labels are there to be mentally edited. There is further confusion over the viscosity of fat suspended in dairy. In different countries cream is variously labeled as single, half and half, clotted, and so on, but no labels explain just how thick and palatable the product is. Shoppers would like some indication of the creams sensory quality, but how do you describe mouthfeel in label talk? (It sticks to your teeth?) Labelers have never agreed on how to describe sour cream created without cultures. Ice cream labelers have a problem, tooeven sorbets are now described as smooth and creamy! There is a level of fat-citing that takes nutrition to the extreme. Various labeling proposals for the uk and the eu would impose a system of trafc lights for fat content. Skin-on chicken pieces might get a red alarm, while the skin-stripped portions would get a yellow light. Some advocates concede that supermarkets might zealously trim fresh meat the way they do in Finland, to avoid all fat pitfalls (and set gastronomy back for centuries). Others say that the trafc lights should apply only to processed foods, which may mean that it is all right to cook your whole pork belly with skin, but if the same content is in a pork sausageno. When labeling starts being judgmental in this way, when the nutritionists succeed in saving us from chicken skin and sausages, it is no wonder that good cooks may decide to ignore the labels. Country of origin. The favorite origin is more than one country. However, even if a specic country is cited, the designation says very little about the quality and taste of a product. If you were offered Spanish beef or Mexican rice, which questions are relevant before purchase? The fantasyland of food labels is more than thin wool pulled over our eyes. The Marks and Spencer chain cites the Scottish Loch Muir as the source of its sh (no such loch exists), and its Willow Farm label is the equivalent of a lm credit to one of Hollywoods stock ctions. Marketing

departments are running amok. Automobile makers in Europe are now advertising their models based as much on where the components come from as on where the car is assembled and painted. But the food industry has problems with the psychology of sourcing. Dates. Sell by and use by dates are so exible in their denitions, and often so inscrutable in their numerical codes, that most consumers check this information only on packaging with which they are familiar. More interesting, I think, are the irrelevant dates used to imply a vintage (an analogy with wine). The quality of olive oil from a particular estate will not change much from year to year, though very young green oil might be distinctive. The Chinese like to put vintage ages on everything from cured eggs to condiments. Dates on labels are probably true, but we rarely know what to make of them. Artice. In order to make a territorial claim for a product (and these claims are growing faster than cucumbers, as local politicians enjoy helping anything that puts their districts name in lights), that product must either be exclusive to a place (usually difcult to prove) or incorporate a traditional skill. The uk agricultural agency Defra has begun encouraging producers to seek more exclusivity for their products, although the motive seems largely to protect label names rather than high quality. For instance, an Indian chili pepper, the Naga, has grown wild across northeast India for hundreds of years. Farmers in Dorset, England, tried to stake a claim to the unique Dorset Naga so it could not be grown elsewhere. Luckily, they failed. Most of these accreditations are simply selsh, but they give good label, as a friend of mine salaciously said. Weight. Most of us buy by our eyes, or by the heft of a package in our hand, not by the gures on the label. Possibly we mistrust the weight as a printed statistic, but the heft can be unreliable, too (I recently purchased a box of Iranian saffron that had a gift inside, a key ring!). Currently of interest is the consequence of manufacturers move to much lighter containersaway from glass, into thin plastics to save transportation costs and mitigate greenhouse effects from fuel expenditure. This move puzzles consumers who judge by feel; if given a choice between lighter or heavier packaging (on the same shelf, with the same net weight on the label), they will often still buy the heavier. Recent research published in Psychological Science shows that the heavier an object, the more seriously a person takes it. Labels are not supposed to be marketing or rhetoric; they are intended as crutches for rational minds. Plato believed that all senses lead to deception. The written information on a label platonically conrms that we may

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be deceived by incidentals like our eyes that sense looks or our hands that sense weight. (During the Renaissance it was against the law to use candlelight in shops in broad daylight, as this changed the appearance of the meat. Perhaps we should introduce lighting laws in our supermarkets to give eye evaluations a better chance.) Food labels stand squarely in the center of debates about why we shop the way we shop. The u.s. Food and Drug Administration is now conducting research on how attention to labels changes with age, using thirty-ve as the arbitrary before and after. I expect they wont answer the interesting questions. Environmental issues. Label advocates generally fall into two camps: those who consider nutritional facts crucial (particularly the free from admonitions, as in fat, sugar, and additives); and those who believe labels should reveal how much the purchase has depleted the environmentas all food purchases inevitably do. Yet, according to various surveys, about 35 percent of English-speaking people nd a simple green declaration on labels sufcient to salve their conscience. Future labels could go into more detail by explaining how a certain fruit or vegetable variety measures up on issues of biodiversity. An even-longer text might reveal the amount of fresh water used to pump up a fruits succulence; the plants growing season (and whether you are buying outside that season); the life cycle of a farmed animal; and a long list of other environmental impacts, such as how the waste from oil-pressed olives is recycled. Labels like these do not obstruct our access to anything, but they do add considerations about food that go beyond just human weight gain and nutrition; they display important consequences for future generations. Organic. Most government authorities make the interesting distinction between plants that can be described as organic and those that cannot. Nature may have been the sole contributor to the process from seed to harvest, but only with a particular level of human supervision can a plant become organic. If you want to label a crop of chestnuts from the trees that thrive in your backyard organic, you must start taking notes on what you have not done. In the United States there are now 245 nonorganic substances you can add to food and still call it organic. Every ve years the usda must listen to arguments about why a particular item has no organic equivalent; elsewhere in the world parallel debates are taking place. The problem is that if an organic equivalent should be discovered, continuing with the nonorganic substitute will disqualify a product from organic certication. This naturally makes a few people nervousbut only every few years. In most of the world the number of organic certiers is increasing, because there

is nobody to certify the certiers. The system was originally seen like banknotes (one currency for one area). However, although you can convert the price on a label to another currency, you cant translate all the claims. There is a tension between a romantic view of sourcing and an irritating air of nagging. The work of a label writer is tough, because the demands of the genre grow worse every year. Natural. Though this claim is well worn, it has no real denition. In label language ham is as natural as a plovers egg. For instance, there is a legal controversy over the label for Pepsi Natural, where instead of sweeteners the drink contains crop-grown sugar. The German chemical company basf is working with natural sugar growers to develop genetic varieties that will increase yields by 25 percent. That complicates the space of a label. I am not saying that Pepsi uses anything but the sugar that your mother bought, but in that same natural bottle are acids for the bite in your mouth, something for the color, and so on. As with any food that carries a supermarket label, there has been more manipulation than Mother Nature would naturally do. Local. The Country of Origin designation is a clumsy tool, and it is often used jingoistically. If a Londoner calculates local food miles, the gure should include produce from northern Europe, especially the riches that grow just across the English Channel. Local would not include Scottish beef, and I assure you that in Scotland no local food has traveled from England. At a cocktail party my attempt to dene local turned into a heated debate. I suggested that labels could use a simple diagram, a spot in the middle of a circle representing the source of the product and the radius being clearsay, one hundred kilometers? Or why not the ve hundred miles the American government uses to dene local for prison populations? I thought I was making a joke, but guests began agreeing with me. I decided theyd had too much to drink. Private labels. The irony of label reassurances is that they only increase the drive toward individualism. Very few afuent consumers want to purchase the average, wellknown brands. The desire for distinction creates markets for new brands, for imported versions of the too-familiar, and even for retailers more expensive lines, promoted in the uk with slogans like Taste the Difference. Retailers private down-market, economy labels have ourished in this recession (although, interestingly, not with pet food). The signals from the plain packaging are clear, but how do the labels show what other mechanisms are at work? For the famous brands, selling low-priced single portions of coffee or shorter loaves of bread has become a way to keep the label but change the price.

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Waste. Labels avoid listing more than one part of an animal or plant. For example, the minced ears and noses of mammals almost always add succulence to meat products, but labels usually do not refer to parts of an animals anatomy that are not sold independently at the meat counter. While the British government table-thumps about food waste, it skirts the easy avenue of redening this waste as delicious and using labels to explain. Most people are squeamish about a which bits? discussion. A publisher I know once decided to reset a book because the author had referred to eating pigs feet, when as we all know you can only eat trotters. There is just as much waste with crops. I buy an expensive raspberry-leaf tea and wonder where the rest of the foliage has been mulched. In many parts of the world you can buy beet greens on their own, but the leaf is now hard to nd in the uk. Where has it gone if it is no longer attached to the beetroot? I grow a variety of radish solely for its salad leaf, and also a carrot-leaf variety. Courgette owers that were once considered waste are now more expensive than lilies. Labels are the rst road into this mind-changing geography, but their wise words are scarce. I recently saw a label for hot chili paste that declared No Seeds, because many recipes advise removing the seeds before slicing the chili. But what aversions (and waste-making) are these label writers creating? Acceptable waste. In many places labels now warn about the avoidance of waste, yet such information does not take into account what is accepted as unusable. For example, when you buy whole sh, about 60 percent is unusable, compared to 0 percent for sh sticks. Who will peel a banana if it comes with a 50 percent waste label? The amount discarded does lead to extra cost down the line, which consumers ultimately pay for. Food producers are especially wary now that European appliance manufacturers are facing weee, a regulation that makes them nancially responsible for recycling their machines. As a result food labeling is moving toward unrealistic no-waste assurances. It is interesting, I think, that labels themselves are always waste in the end. Mary Douglas makes the point that unless we feel something belongs in our lives and shares our identity, we feel ne about consigning it to the rubbish. Food that we have cooked and refrigerated as a leftover, or a meal on which we spent a little more than usual, is harder to waste than any label, which is usually the rst thing to land in the trash. New American legislation on childrens toys requires that the label be imprinted and last as long as the toy itself. This may change the relationship between label and product.

Sustainable and traceable. Perhaps your can of tuna should not simply say sustainable; perhaps it should also give some gures. Every time a label tells me something was harvested by hand I feel like suggesting that they at least admit to using secateurs. It is unusual for the labels on some crops to describe how they were reaped, but for others the information is there in words like foraged or mown, just as sh are baited or day-boated or otherwise enticed (as long as they are not netted). How a bird or animal dies is usually not label-worthy, although I have seen from our own abattoir a few times. In earlier times a meat-eater may have wondered whether the creature was killed for the table or whether it had died a natural death. And, if the former were true, whether there was trauma involvedjust as Addison recoiled on hearing that the pork on his plate was a pig that had been whipped to death (Tatler, 21 March 1709). The role of death in our food supply is tricky to describe. If you buy a farmed sh, do you want to know which other sh died to provide its diet, and how the sh itself was killed? Even as the word sustainable grows ever less meaningful, a wobbly concern for traceability is now evident on food labels. If you are buying goat meat in London, do you want to be told home-raised goat (sad, because I myself once had that pet) or wild goat meat (possibly sad, too), or goat raised like a pig? The possibility of tracing every product we eat is close at hand. However, when at a London market I bought a shoulder of lamb along with that lambs gorgeous lambskin for my cats basket, I felt I was bringing things too close. A few weeks later the farmer mailed me a photograph of hismylamb. That was just too much information. I looked at the cat basket and began to rethink traceability. Manufactured products (not food) now offer several Web sites where a name or isbn will tell you more than a label ever could about the sources of all components, the environmental costs at each stage, and so on. The work at www.grantadesign.com in Cambridge, uk, is a model. The eu, which has an eco-label schemethe ower label intends to add processed food and feed products to its surveys in the future. If in-depth surveys can ower detergents and shoes, then store-bought mayonnaise will be easy to assess, though you need to be linked to a Web page. In fact, there are now barcode readers for personal computers, and this is where labels are going soon. The eco-indexing at EnvirUP has looked at the environmental merits of everything from Special K to Ribena, but their research remains limited to one hundred products.

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There is a useful expression among winemakers the label drinker, which usually refers to someone who aspires to drink a certain label of wine. In the world of food, perhaps the counterpart is the person who buys based on the prestige of a brand rather than according to the words that appear on a label; label eater has a nice acid to it. Label-eating makes the purchaser feel better about herself in the same way that buying the best brand once

did. Labels can reassure the buyer that her choice was astute, both nutritionally and environmentally. In any case, the evolution of label details supports Margaret Vissers oft-quoted line, food is never just something to eat. The food label may be the equivalent of sending your child to primary school with his or her rst c.v.g

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americana | robert dickinson

Moxie
A Flavor for the Few

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photograph by peter dutton

If you grew up anywhere but New England, youve probably never heard of a drink called Moxie, yet it is the oldest continually produced soda in Americaand quite possibly the worst tasting, as well. Moxie inspires erce devotion in its fans, which have included presidents, baseball stars, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and confused disbelief among its detractors, who just cant fathom what anyone would see in the stuff. I discovered Moxie while doing a little routine Web browsing, and after reading its

illustrious history, I knew that I had to have a taste. I was particularly curious as to why, if Moxie really does taste like a telephone pole, as one Web site claimsor dirt, or battery acidthe drink has such a passionate following. Unfortunately, Moxie isnt sold in the Southeast where I live, so I turned to the Internet to try to track down a can. Several Web sites actually specialize in regional sodas and can ship you a case of Moxie or Cheerwine or Boylan Grape any time you get a hankering. The problem was that

2008

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.97101, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.97.

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these specialty stores dont just give away the Moxie, and being thrifty on the best of days, and given the high probability that I wouldnt actually like Moxie, I was hesitant to place the thirty- to forty-dollar minimum order that the online soda merchants require. It occurred to me, though, that the folks who actually make Moxie must be quite proud of a soda that can produce such varied and extreme reactions among its drinkers; since only a few companies currently bottle Moxie, it stood to reason that one of them might be happy to send a can or two to a benighted, Moxieless southerner if he asked in just the right way.

the pride of New Englanders, who know that not just anyone can suck down a Moxie and stick around to tell the tale. Which brings me to my point. I would like to try my rst Moxieto be an initiate, to take a side. But, as you may know, none of the stores in my town of Nashville, tn, sell Moxie. I propose a traderegional treat for regional treat. I will send you a box of Goo Goo Clusters (delicious blend of caramel, marshmallow, peanuts, and chocolatemy friends from New York City always ask for a box when I visit), a picture of Elvis, AND a bag of pork rinds, for a 6-pack of your nest Moxie. Please consider my offer and respond via post or email. I hope youll nd my terms acceptable, but in any case, please keep doing what you do, and rememberIf youve got Moxie, youve got taste. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Robert T. Dickinson

A Proposition
So, on a cold Nashville day in the winter of 2007, I composed the following letter and mailed it to the Catawissa Bottling Company of Catawissa, Pennsylvania, and to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England, Inc., both of which bottle and distribute the beverage in question:
Dear Sir/Madam: As a southerner, Im no stranger to the charms of a nice, cold soda pop, although we often just call it coke, no matter what the brand. Until a few days ago, however, I was completely unaware of the existence of one of your products. It started innocently enough. A friend wanted to know what the state dog of Tennessee was (there isnt one). A few clicks on the Internet later, and we learned that the state drink of Maine is a mysterious brew called Moxie. Now, like everyone whos seen a gangster movie, I was familiar with the term, but not, as Ive said, with the drink. Not content to let it rest at that, and not anxious to go back to
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Since 1876
While I waited to see whether anything would come of my proposal, I went back to the Internet to conduct more research and found references to Moxie lurking in sources ranging from the New York Times to etymology blogs such as www.word-detective.com. Americans have been drinking Moxie since 1884, although a similar drink rst appeared in 1876 as a patent medicine called Moxie Nerve Food. Were all familiar with moxie as a slang term for nerve or spunk (e.g., Say what you will about that Al Capone, the mans got moxie), and when I discovered the drink, I could only assume that slang preceded soda, that Moxies name was the result of a slick young marketing man bathing his product in the allure of the speakeasy. Surprisingly, however, it was the drink that was apparently so chockfull of bubbly refreshment that its name was later used to describe that indenable quality of folks who just seem to know the score.4 Until the early 1920s Moxie was one of the most popular soft drinks in America and was enjoyed by some of our nest citizens. The story goes that Vice-President Calvin Coolidge toasted his ascendance to the presidency with a glass of Moxie. E.B. White, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Charlottes Web, had high praise for the soda as well. Moxie contains gentian root, White said, which is the path to the good life.5 Even Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, got into the act as a Moxie pitchman in the 1950s.6 Despite such an impressive history, however, people in most areas of the country have never heard of Moxie, let alone tasted it. Moxie was once nationally distributed, but

work, we dug deeper and uncovered a whole subculture of Moxie lorestories, memorabilia, rumors, testimonials. A sample: They say it takes nerve to drink a Moxie. I learned you can throw all of your normal conceptions of soda out the window when it comes to the taste of Moxie.1 History has known only a few standards that cleanly divide Earths population into irreconcilable camps. Moxie is one of these. No one is apathetic in the matter.2 I grew up in mid-coast Maine where Moxie was more beloved than mothers milkand more widely consumed.3 Its clear that Moxie is more than a drink, more than the longest continually produced soda in our great nations history, more than the source of a great word for nerve, spunk, chutzpah. Moxie is the uidic substance of the collective memory of a people, the taste of childhood,

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due to the vagaries of free-market economics, including competition with Coca-Cola, the soda took a smaller and smaller share of the soft-drink market over the years until it became a regional curiosity, unknown to Tennesseans, even ones who are pretty well traveled. These days Moxie distribution is concentrated in New England, although Cornucopia Beverages, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England (itself a subsidiary of Japans Kirin Brewing Company), began selling Moxie in Florida through Sweetbay Supermarkets in October 2007.7 As unknown as it is in most of the United States, Moxie has developed a ercely devoted following in the areas where it is sold. Case in point: the Moxie World Web site (www.moxieworld.us). Here, devotees can nd a detailed listing of retail outlets and restaurants that carry Moxie, links to collectors sites, and lists of Moxie-related events, such as the twenty-sixth annual Moxie Days Festival held in July 2009 in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Fans even have a governing body of sorts in the Moxie Congress, a group of memorabilia collectors and Moxie connoisseurs whose mission is to promote and celebrate their favorite soft drink. Moxie displayed its real-life political clout as well when the Maine legislature made Moxie the states ofcial drink in 2005.8 Curiously enough, however, a large contingent of naysayers holds the equally strong opinion that Moxie is, well, not very good. To wit:
The taste of Moxie is hard to describe, but if you have some really old sarsaparilla or birch beer around the house, mix it with a little battery acid and youll get the general idea.9 Have you ever licked a telephone pole or railroad tie? That is about what Moxie tastes like.10

If nothing more, my research had shown that Moxie refuses to be lumped in with the ubiquitous carbonated sugar waters that ll our grocery stores and vending machines, and I was even more anxious to take my rst sip.

Contact
Less than a week after I made my offer, I received my rst response from Paula at Catawissa:
Hello Robert, I really appreciated the letter you sent. I had to pass it around the ofce. I hope you dont mind. Our company has been in business since 1926 and often the barter system was used. So sure, Ill send a couple of bottles and cans of diet and regular. We also make our own line of soft drink avors and are known for our famous Big Bens Blue Birch Beer, along with 16 other avors. Samples will be included. Respectfully, Paula Clark Catawissa Bottling Company Since 1926

True to her word, Paula sent the following to my apartment in Nashville:

1 can Moxie 1 can diet Moxie 1 bottle Moxie 1 bottle Big Bens Sarsaparilla 1 bottle Big Bens Birch Beer 1 bottle Big Bens Cream Soda 1 bottle Big Bens Ginger Beer
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Its not a syrupy fruit or cola, and its not a trendy California dill avored monstrosityits the grandpappy of all of those! Its been marketed as a health elixir, it is the reason we say that kids got Moxie! and its history in a bottle. And I adore it!11 There is nothing ner than smoking a ne cigar and having a snifter of Cognac, aged Scotch, a Tawny Port Wine, dry red wine, a harsh warm Guinness Stout or a cold glass of Moxie.12

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The phrase acquired taste also appears quite frequently. But for every slur against Moxie, youll nd a glowing tribute, a paean to Moxies wholesomeness, a erce defense of its good name:

Judging by my shipment, Catawissa seems to specialize in the quaint sodas of yesteryeardrinks that evoke rst dates at the soda shop, zoot-suited gangsters, or old West gunslingers. Put another way, many Catawissa products are drinks that have little chance of grabbing a very large share of most markets. According to Beverage Digest, a beverage industry trade journal, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies controlled a 75 percent share of the carbonated soft drink market in 2005, selling over 7.6 billion cases of soda. In the same year the Atlanta-based Monarch Beverage Company, which owned Moxie before selling the brand to Cornucopia in early 2007, commanded a 0.1 percent market share and sold approximately 9.8 million cases of all of its products combined.13 Nonetheless, Catawissa was clearly

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proud of its own carbonated wares, even if many of its products dont generate the same eye-popping sales gures as the corporate behemoths that it competes with for shelf space. The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England also came through with a shipment of Moxie. The following letter was enclosed:
Dear Mr. Dickinson, We are well aware of the regional distribution of Moxie and the pride this product instills in Maine. We are also well aware of the problems nding Moxie south of the Mason-Dixon line. Snowbirds commonly complain about missing Moxie during their winter pilgrimages down South. Enclosed you will nd not six cans of Moxie as requested, but twelve cans in a convenient fridge pack designed to help better t in your refrigerator and enjoy this beverage ice cold. In return, we are interested in trying your favorite regional treatif you want to send the mentioned Goo Goo Clusters, that would be outstanding. Please let us know what you think of Moxie and thank you for your interest in our hidden gem! Sincerely, Justin J. Conroy Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England

Like the sludge at the bottom of the barrel that youre supposed to just throw away. But Moxie is a complex beast, and once the initial shock wears away, the bitterness mellows, and one is left with a bittersweet taste that isnt so bad and may even qualify as, dare I say itpleasant. In the spirit of scientic inquiry, however, I was eager to get a more representative sample than just myself, so I decided to share a little ice-cold Moxie with my friends. Here are a few opinions:
Don: It was like nothing I have ever sipped before. That says it all. It was OK , but that aftertaste was [he trails off here] Laura: BLECH ! Jeff: Since I was a young man, Ive tried to live my life the right way, set my goals and life expectations on the straight and narrow path. Moxie was not the right way. Philip: Its different, but I didnt think it was too bitter. Id denitely buy a case occasionally if they sold it around here. Elizabeth: It was awful. At rst, youre like, this is ne, but then the aftertaste kicks in. Matt: I like the bitterness. Its good. Victoria: I dont think Ill be drinking the rest of this.

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Of course, a good southerner isnt one to back out on a deal. I had promised an assortment of Tennessee treats and was ready to make good on that promise. In the spirit of regional good will, I sent not one but two boxes of Goo Goo Clusters to the Catawissa staffone regular (with peanuts) and one deluxe, which replaces the peanut with the slightly more upscale pecan. I also enclosed a bag of Golden Flake pork rinds and a postcard of Elvis circa 1970 with full muttonchops, taken during a recording session in Vegas. Finally, the Catawissa folks got Polaroids of myself and two friendsone smiling, and one grimacing in pain after taking a sip of Moxie. To the Coca-Cola Bottling people I sent the same two boxes of Goo Goos and a photo of a young Elvis astride a motorcycle. I had had a change of heart about the pork rinds. They are, after all, pretty unhealthy. Ill have to hope that the younger, better-looking Elvis made up the difference.

The Tasting
The moment of truth took place on Tuesday, January 23, 2007. At rst sip, Moxie is reminiscent of a weak root beer. Not bad, but not memorable either. Then the bitterness takes hold. Like medicine. Like the tar on a telephone pole.

Overall, Moxie wasnt the biggest hit in my study group, but comparisons with battery acid and railroad ties may not be quite fair either; some of the group, after all, did enjoy it. My nal assessment, therefore, is that Moxie is a soda, and, like other sodas, some people like the taste and some people dont. The cult of Moxie, however, isnt so much about taste as it is about history and place. In other words, drinking a soda isnt just about quenching your thirst and getting a caffeine x. Just as much as an accent, what a person drinks is a badge of identity. For someone raised on it, sipping a Moxie is a symbolic act, a performance of ones Maineness. Its the Louisianian sucking the head of a crawsh. The debate over the relative merits of Memphis, Texas, and Carolina barbecues. The Tennessean passing on an iced tea in a chain restaurant because its not sweet tea. I suspect that my trades with these companies were so satisfying because, in addition to swapping Goo Goo for Moxie, sweet for bitter, they were an exchange of two cultures and a recognition that these traditions have an intrinsic value that transcends the monetary values attached to a soda and a candy bar. Paula and Justin had mailed me a small piece of New England, I had offered a taste of my own heritage, and we had found the deal mutually agreeable.g

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notes
1. www.amazon.com/Moxie-Soda/dp/B0002BQLIM (accessed 11 May 2008; not currently posted). 2. www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/ARN08JJ0DXOAK (accessed 11 May 2008). 3. Ibid. 4. Paul Lukas, Surviving By Fizzy Logic, New York Times, 23 July 2003, at www.nytimes.com/2003/07/23/dining/23SODA.html?pagewanted=all (accessed 19 October 2009). 5. Scott Elledge, E.B. White: A Biography (New York: W.W Norton and Co., 1986), viii. 6. Jenn Abelson, Can A Bitter Taste Find Sweet Life Again? Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/08/05/can_a_bitter_taste_nd_ sweet_life_again (accessed 11 May 2008).

7. Personal e-mail correspondence with Justin Conroy, marketing analyst, CocaCola Bottling Company of Northern New England, Inc., 17 December 2007. 8. Abelson, Can a Bitter Taste Find Sweet Life Again? 9. www.word-detective.com/111097.html (accessed 11 May 2008). 10. www.roadfood.com/Forums/tm.aspx?high=&m=10927&mpage=1#10943 (accessed 19 October 2009). 11. www.exoticsoda.com/moxie.html (accessed 19 October 2009). 12. www.moxie.info/editoral.htm (accessed 11 May 2008). 13. Beverage Digest 48:7 (8 March 2006), at www.beverage-digest.com/pdf/top10_2006.pdf (accessed 11 May 2008).

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identity | prisci l la parkhurst ferguson

Culinary Nationalism

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Culinary nationalism is an old story . For the West, France supplies the most striking example of a culinary country, one where cuisine and nation are seen to coincide. But, how does culinary nationalism work? I suggest recipes as primary indicators of identity. To be sure, cookbooks and their recipes point toward practice. Yet, as we all know, recipes reach beyond practice to a vision of good food and the good life associated with that food. By what recipes exclude as well as include, in what they assume as much as what they specify, cookbooks dene what is appropriate and what is not. They tell us what is French or Italian or Provenal or Tuscan, and what is not. Culinary consciousness raisers, cookbooks tie food to place, and they do so whether or not we put the recipe in the oven and on the table. Actually executing the dish may be the most obvious mode of using the recipe, but it is by no means the only one. As much as we read recipes for instructions, we seek a sense of particular tastes and foods and places and how they t together. Just as we can read far more than we can eatwhich explains the prominence of food criticism and commentarywe are able to read innitely more recipes than we are ever in a position to cook. To twist Claude Lvi-Strausss dictum that food must be good to think, really good recipes have to be good to read. I shall make my case with a relative unknown. Just before the outbreak of World War i in France, in 1913, Les Bons Plats de France: cuisine rgionale came out under the name Pampille (a kind of decorative fringe for furniture and clothes). The ideological import of this cookbook stands out all the more given the authors marked political afliations. Pampille, aka Marthe Allard Daudet (1878 1960), was the wife of journalist and politician Lon Daudet, the director of the royalist newspaper, LAction Franaise. Mme Daudet collaborated with her husband on the journal for many years and was known for her culinary writings, particularly this cookbook.1 Marcel Proust, a good friend of Lon and the Daudet family, was a big fan of Marthe,

whose delicious books and incomparable recipes he thought those of a true poet.2 Pampille is such an emblematic gure because of her sense of herself as the culinary consciousness of France, a defender of tradition under siege in a rapidly modernizing world. All her work over a half century casts women as the guardians of those traditions. Hers is the voice of culinary France. She does not write as a creator. At outset Les Bons Plats de France warns us that the recipes that follow are not, in fact, in any ordinary sense hersI dont claim to have invented anything. She has simply recorded what friends and acquaintances have passed on and what she herself has observed.3 Yet the ostensible, even ostentatious, modesty of the persona that she cultivates belies Pampilles ambition, for she aims at nothing less than dening France through its cuisine. That culinary country is not to be found in the extravagant creations of celebrated (male) chefs in fancy modern restaurants but rather in the unpretentious, familiar dishes made every day in ordinary kitchens by ordinary cooks. The building blocks of this culinary country, she shows us, are the dishes from the provinces, none of them creations of any individual, all of them products of the land itself. Pampille insistently xes the nation in its parts, in the regional products and dishes that make the whole that is French cuisine. The very title of the cookbook tells us as much between these covers the reader will nd the good dishes of France, which take us from the modern metropolis to the countryside. Pampille assigns national status to some dishes that cut across class as well as regionpot-au-feu (boiled beef), onion soup, chicken soup, cabbage soup,
Right: Consider the power of culinary nationalism in this revision of the Panthon in Paris. A giant oven-chef bestrides the frieze in place of the usual classical dome, and the motto now reads To Cuisine, the Grateful Country in place of To Great Men, the Grateful Country.
engraving from eugne briffault, paris table (paris: j. hetzel, 1846), p.8.

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.102109, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.102.

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leek and potato soup, potato salad, chicken fricasse, stews, omelets. These are the foods of peasant and bourgeois alike. Professional training has little to do with making these dishes what they are. The poor sherman on the Mediterranean coast prepares bouillabaisse quite as well as the cleverest Marseilles chef. The local becomes the national, with the result that to taste one of the four soup poems is to partake of what is most authentically French. The part and the whole coincide. Pampille is not shy about promoting French recipes and does not hesitate to call on historical and literary tradition to validate her recipes. Good game, for one striking example, can be found only in France. Why? Pampille reaches beyond the usual explanation that locates superiority in French soil and climate and growing conditions. It seems that the animals themselves possess an uncommon culinary consciousness and sense of duty. The hare, partridges, quail, and pheasants all eagerly participate in the culinary enterprise of which they will be part. They seem to know that they appear in traditional French fables and chronicles. You might even say, Pampille speculates, that they are trying hard to justify their reputation for excellence. Over the top? Tongue-in-cheek? Of course, but Pampille is dead serious about the indissoluble link between history and cuisinethat is, French history and French cuisine. It is not just their (apparently uncontestable) quality that makes these products so essential and so French. For these ingredients do more than compose an exquisite dish; they transmit a landscape. Every grain of the special salt that connoisseurs recommend for the pot-au-feu contains a miniature landscape. Whats more, the diner belongs in that landscape. No less than the producer the consumer must be rooted in the land. Pampille anticipates the discussions we are having today by including the consumer in the culinary equation. Thus, to truly savor the bouillebaisse of the North known as matelote, this sh stew has to be consumed on the banks of the Seine. Pampille is categorical: if the lyrical landscape that she has just sketched isnt part of the dish, the matelote falls at, its not even worth tasting. The meal has to be consumed in the right spot on the banks of the Seine for the matelote, the south for bouillebaisse that is really good only in Marseille. The sh do not travel, so the consumer must. But a journey may not be enough to make the culinary connection. Pampille pushes the connection to place further stillso far, in fact, that she comes close to negating her whole project of spreading the good news about the good dishes of France. Even the most genuine bouillebaisse, made on the shores of the Mediterranean by a Marseillais

chef, does not sufce for a true appreciation. To properly enjoy this dish from the South, she tells us, you really have to be born there. Why does this Parisian born and bred exclude herself along with most of her readers? Why provide a recipe for something whose consumption and production will necessarily fall short? The answer lies beyond ingredients and directives in the sense of place conveyed by the recipe, in an understanding of history, and a conviction of the absolute necessity of authenticity. Manifestly here, more subtly elsewhere, ideology trumps instrumentality. These recipes are denitely meant to be read. France has long been known for its promotion of local venues. The appellations dorigine contrlesa system of patents on distinctive wines and foodstuffswas put in place in the 1920s and institutionalized in 1935.4 Part of this same revalorization of the local, Curnonsky [Maurice Sailland] and Marcel Rouffs gastronomic tour of the French provinces in the 1920s emphasized the homey virtues and bounty of the land. Resolutely set against the fast changing, visibly modernizing world of the postwar years, Curnonsky and Rouff will not, they tell us in the introductory volume, say a word about the cosmopolitan hotels where one goes for the latest craze. For gastronomy is a Great School of Regionalism and Traditionalism, which makes us feel, understand, and love the prodigious variety, all the fertile diversity, of French soil.5 The recourse to tradition, to cultural values, to culinary practices and political principles of the past, responded to pervasive worries of loss of identity. The devastation of World War i exacerbated those fears, but they were present well before 1914, and Pampille is by no means alone in the nostalgic construction of French cuisine and country. Moreover, despite the apparent afnities of her culinary values and the nationalist program of LAction Franaise, the culinary nationalism that she displays is not exclusive to the political right. The great chef Prosper Montagn (best known as the author of the Larousse gastronomique) sounded many of the same themes in Luvre, a journal situated far to the left of LAction Franaise.6 Such promotion of culinary values across the political spectrum makes it clear that culinary chauvinism, in France as elsewhere, reaches far and wide. Cuisine and food, it would seem, whatever the form, bring together regions and nation, left and right, old and new. The natural culinary supremacy of France is one of those ideological constructs that have become so much a part of our lives that we take them for granted. As Roland Barthes showed us over a half century ago, this nely tuned culinary consciousness turns food in France into French food,

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Culinary Nationalism Today

In our twenty-rst century, culinary nationalism is alive and well, though it looks rather different than it did a hundred or even fty years ago. The geographic and political boundaries that sustained culinary singularity have been all but abolished by rapid, reliable modes of transportation and technological innovations of all sorts. Producers and consumers routinely travel great distances and return enthused by the culinary cultures they have encountered. Pampilles unabashed chauvinism and evident distaste for anything contemporary have little currency in todays aggressively modern culinary world with its jet-setting, celebrity chef-entrepreneurs, specialty foods own over vast

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the expression and afrmation of a national identity that somehow exists outside of history. The general returning to France after defeat in Indochina who tucked into a muchphotographed dinner of steak and French fries had it right and his critics wrong. The general chose his foods well. The alimentary sign of Frenchness broadcast delity to French traditions in a language that every French person would understand.7 The hegemonic, absolutely conventional culinary discourse constructs a nation without history, without politics, a nation rooted in terroir and tradition.

Above: The Bocuse dOr competition in Lyon, France, January 2009.

photograph by francis mainard / sirha

2009

distances, and hyper-sophisticated consumers who share information and judgments in an endless stream of journals, newspapers, and blogs. Yet, more than ever food and cuisine are tied to place. The movement of goods and the blurring of borders notwithstanding, more and more countries propose culinary distinction as a marker of identity. From Austria to Singapore, from Norway to Brazil, aspiring culinary countries vaunt their edible traditions and indigenous foods to promote both tourism and exports.8 Paradoxically, the gastronomic adventures upon which we embark at home and abroad bring us back to place. Whether or not we actually talk about terroir, we seek connections between taste and place. We want French food to be recognizably French, Japanese cuisine to be identiably Japanese, whether in Japan or abroad. Even hyphenated cuisinesFranco-Italian, Chinese-Peruviandepend upon connection to a place or a tradition and usually both. Because it is a social construct, that is, of our making, authenticity is not the property of an object as such. Which is precisely the dilemma of national identity. What xes it? Who xes it? When? Then, how does identity

France Gold 6

Belgium 0

Norway 4

Sweden 1

Denmark 0

Luxembourg 1

Silver

Bronze Total

1 9

4 7

1 7

0 4

1 3

0 1

ta b l e 1 . p ri n c ipa l b o c u s e d o r win n e r s 19 8 7 2 0 0 9
accommodate change? If clear denitions provide security, by the same token they arrest change. In the twenty-rst century we cannot escape the transformations that Pampille feared. Any claim to national singularity, much less eminence, must contend with the permeability of boundaries between countries, regions, places, and products. It must also take into account the value placed on individual creativity. Culinary countries must balance innovation and tradition, individual creativity and time-honored conventions, the singular and the collective. To see how such negotiation works out in practice, consider international culinary competitions. The best known of these contests is probably the Bocuse dOr, a biennial mega cook-off held in Lyon, France, founded in 1987 by much-celebrated French chef-entrepreneur Paul Bocuse.9 With sponsors ranging from Perrier and San Pellegrino to All-Clad cookware and the City of Lyon, the Bocuse dOr in 2009 brought together twenty-four chefs from Singapore to Sweden, South Africa to South Korea, the contestants having been chosen in preliminary trials for Asia, Latin America, and Europe. (Canada and the United States entered in the individual category.) The teams work according to strict guidelines, with the base ingredients specied only at the moment of competition. The slick videos show just how much the Olympics supply the model. The national teams enter pumping their sts, the audience in the stadium waves ags and cheers frenetically when their teams are introduced. The Oscars come to mind with the media-hyped presentations and the gold, silver, or bronze statuettes of Paul Bocuse brandished by the winners. Beyond the three main prizes, additional prizes went to Best Assistant [commis] (Canada), Fish (Denmark), Meat (Denmark), Best Poster (Brazil), Best Publicity (Czech Republic). As with the more artistic Olympic events such as gure skating or ice dancing, questions arise as to the standards used to judge these culinary productionsperformances, really. Despite the formidable organizational work and the everwidening reach of the Bocuse dOr into Asia, Australia, and the Americas, the competition retains a noticeably French inection. Even more than the actual prizes won (see Table 1, above), French cuisine gures importantly in the training and work of many of the competitors and notably the winners.10 Should we expect otherwise? French culinary techniques and base preparations continue to play a big role in the training of chefs around the world. Moreover, the French, to quote a previous silver medalist, have a culture of competitions. Competitive cooking is also something of a French specialty. Many of the French contenders, for example, have already won the rigorous Meilleur Ouvrier de France [Most Skilled Worker in France] for distinction in culinary preparation. When they come on stage, the competing chefs proudly sport the mof blue, white, and red ribbons and medals. As New Yorkbased French chef Daniel Boulud has noted, it takes a good year of honing competitive skills to make a viable candidate. In contrast to some of the Europeans who had been preparing for years, the American team (for which many, including Paul Bocuse, were rooting) had only a few months to prepare after winning the trials in October.11 We may well ask whyand howFrench cuisine maintains its edge in such an emphatically international enterprise. What is the nature of that edge? To be sure, the French origins and organization of the contest along with the long-standing prestige of French cuisine offer a partial answer. A more compelling explanation reaches beyond the specics of the culinary encounters to the character of French cuisine itself. More emphatically than for many, even most other cuisines, the governing principles and practices of French cuisine structure a system. Unlike foods tied to place, that system travels easily. It is, to use the language of economics, highly portable.

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A French restaurateur in New York a number of years ago invoked solfgethe rules of harmony. Once you learn the basic rules and understand the whole system, then and only thenyou can start cooking wherever and with whatever. Codes dene French cuisine, not place, not products, and not people. The roster of winners of the Bocuse dOr conrms that you do not need to cook in France or use French products or, for that matter, be French to cook in a French mode. Concern for national culinary identity is hardly limited to France and the French. The Japanese are every bit as concerned over authenticity and the denition of our food. What is the status of rice imported from the United States? Is it Japanese? Is it Japanese enough? Here, too, techniques confront ingredients. Nobu Matsuhisa, the highly successful chef-restaurateur-entrepreneur, comes down squarely in favor of savoir-faire. So long as you keep your feet planted in the techniques of Japanese cookery, new Japanese dishes can be created anywhere in the worlda conviction that explains the many non-Japanese cooks in his many Japanese restaurants.12 Open to innovation yet mindful of tradition, this culinary model would seem to strike the requisite balance between old and new. But incorporation into a tradition depends on the ease of conversion. The more foreign the foods, the more essential a translation of the exotic into a familiar, or at least recognizable, gastronomic lexicon. To what degree can, or should, authenticity accommodate the demands of new publics? Should we insist on pits for a real clafoutis? Is a California Roll with avocado real sushi? What is its status when it turns up in Japan? As individuals and communities move about the globe through travel and immigration, culinary habits move with them and change. The musical analogy alerts us to the constraints of this model and our capacity to welcome difference. Ever since the mid-eighteenth century when the term rst appeared, nouvelle cuisine has been dened against, and also in terms of, the old cuisine. But what do we do when confronted with tastes for which we have no reference? When nouvelle is not just new but incomprehensible? Neither in cuisine nor in music are the rules of harmony universal. The very concept varies with the context. The more aggressively different the foodthe greater the yuck factorthe less likely it is to be adopted. Taste works from and to the familiar. Just as it takes will and effort and time for Western ears to appreciate Oriental tonalities, so culinary acculturation is a complex business and we remain highly selective of what we take from the

exotic Other. Taste works from and to the familiar. While they may now eat frogs legs with gusto and nd quiche and croissants as familiar as apple pie, most Americans steer clear of other bona de French culinary delights, such as blood sausage and tripe. Even within a country regional specialties can run up against implacable resistance. My favorite childhood dessert, Indian Pudding, doesnt even make it out of New England. Few would consider it in any sense a truly American dish. French cuisine has long drawn great strength from its capacity to translate the exotic into familiar terms. That very success, however, has produced competitors. By making the foreign palatable, by introducing new tastes and pointing consumers elsewhere, any modern cuisine necessarily undermines its claims to culinary singularity. Which is why recipes remain so important as identity markers. Along with other texts and images, they connect food to place. Thus, the Bocuse dOr imposed as ingredients not simply cod, scallops, shrimp, and beef but specically cod, scallops, and shrimp from Norway and beef from Scotland. Or, take menu descriptionsas conventionalized a designation as sauce bordelaise takes us to the wine country of Bordeaux, a Tarte Tatin puts us in Normandy even if we make the tarte with Golden Delicious apples from Oregon. And so on, for any cuisine. The further we are from the origin of the product, the more likely we are to associate the place with the nation, not the region. Seen from afar, the nation subsumes the regions. Bordelaise sauce, Tarte Tatin are French dishes, spaghetti alla Bolognese is Italian. Whether in recipes or on menus or in food writing generally, names like these help us imagine the whole. Every nation must, in the end, be an imagined community.13

Le Grand Chef
To literally see culinary nationalism in action, and to follow the process of culinary identication, I propose a lm, Le Grand Chef [Sik Gaek] from South Korea (2007).14 Based on a popular tv series, itself based on an equally popular graphic novel, Le Grand Chef tells the story of the culinary competition for a legendary knife that had belonged to the last Imperial chef. So intense was his devotion to the Emperor that, rather than practice his art for the Japanese occupiers, the chef chopped off his hand. The Japanese conquerors conscated the knife. The lm has melodrama and comedy, good guys and bad guys, a love story, lial devotion, great shots of food preparation, and wonderful lyric landscapes. Beyond the story of the culinary contest

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Le Grand Chef shows how culinary nationalism works to identify cuisine and country. Very much like the Bocuse dOr in its media frenzy, a series of trials pit the best chefs of Korea against each other (in sh, poultry, game, beef, the best coal [sic], and butchering a cow). Not until the nal trial do the high stakes of this competition become apparent. It is nothing less than re-creating the soup that made the last Emperor weep just before his death, as the Japanese advanced to destroy the royal dynasty. In a complicated twist, the two nalists, the Hero (Sung-chun) and the Rival (Bong-ju), are grandsons of apprentices of the last chef and have been adversaries since their own early days as apprentices. The Rivals grandfather, who had cooked for the Japanese, became chef-owner of an immensely successful, high-end restaurant, while the Heros grandfather, who remained staunchly Korean, retired to the countryside and gave up cooking. The Rival prepares an exquisite soup, but he uses a recipe left by his grandfather, which had therefore been approved by the Japanese. With soy sauce as an ingredient the soup, not suprisingly, tastes Japanese. Its creator cannot be worthy of the knife that represents the nation. The winning soup is far more ordinary, prepared lovingly following the recipe bequeathed the Hero by his grandfather. This is the soup that made the Emperor cry, and the Japanese businessman (son of the ofcial who had tasted the exemplary soup, who is returning the legendary knife to Korea) explains why. The foreigner draws the lesson. The Korean judges offended by such an ordinary dish presented in competition could not appreciate what was so evident to the outsider, namely, that this humble soup contained the very essence of Korea. As the Japanese emissary points out in detail, each ingredient is tied to the land, to this people, and to their history.15 It takes an exceptional chef to put it all together. Le Grand Chef touches on all aspects of contemporary culinary nationalism. Most obviously, and in a striking change from Pampilles conception of French cuisine, the international context denes the national identity. The Japanese outsider recognizes the Korean-ness of the dish, and the lm articulates this identity to the outside world where it must compete with other cuisines and with other lms.16 That competition drives the lmthe ambition of the gentle Hero to be the best, the skullduggery of the rapacious Rival who fears losing his restaurant empire, the media that promote the contest on national television, the journalist hoping for a scoop. Korean cuisine is clearly a function of ingredients that are themselves part of a landscape that includes the viewer.

The lm lingers on the lush countryside, on the abundance of country markets and the generous sociability of the people.17 The nation subsumes those landscapes, their produce, and their inhabitants. (A key shot zooms in on Koreas national ower, the Rose of Sharon.) This lm casts viewers as consumers of a nation imagined through its food and what its great chefs and humble cooks do with that food. It is a recipe writ large and turned into images. Virtually every frame of the lm impresses upon us that cuisine, indeed, is country. Surely the bottom line of whatever we consider food studies is the belief that what and how we eat is essential not only to the way we live but also how we think about life, about ourselves, and about the worlds that we inhabit. Every day each of us produces a culinary self out of the interplay between the local and the national, the material and the symbolic, between, in short, culinary place and cultural space. What, then, are we to make of culinary nationalism? How do we assess claims to culinary singularity? French cuisine has traditionally based its claims to distinction on a remarkably adaptable set of rules and principles. To what extent do other major culinary modes say, Chinese or Japanese cuisines or Koreanwelcome difference? How portable are they? How do they deal with unfamiliar products? The more a cuisine is dened by products and the more tied to place, the more limited its inuence. Conversely, the more generalizable a culinary modetake stir-fryingthe greater both its utility and its prestige in our world of competing culinary countries. Over the past decade Gastronomica has made a point of exploring those identities and taking us on journeys of discovery to culinary countries that most of us barely knew existed. More important still, its scholarly articles and reportages of events, the histories of particular foods and techniques, the interviews with chefs, not to overlook the vibrant photographs all made connections between the culinary and the cultural, between the particular culinary places that we inhabit and the larger, innitely varied world of food. In the exceptionally mobile culinary world of the twenty-rst century, these texts and images enable us to choose our culinary country even as we create our own culinary identity.g
notes
1. LAction Franaise began publication in 1908 as a royalist newspaper and soon became notorious for its opposition to the Republic, fervent Catholicism, rabid antisemitism, xenophobia, and virulent polemics. Unfortunately, I have found little information about how much or in what capacities Marthe Daudet contributed to the paper. It seems a classic case of disdain for the concerns of everyday life, and especially those associated with women. See my article, Chroniques de la vie ordinaire dans LAction Franaise, af iii: Le Maurrassisme, la culture et les milieux culturels, ed. Michel Leymarie (Paris: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2010, in press).

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2. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1982), 2:521, 2:931, 3:29. 3. Mme Lon Daudet [Pampille], Les Bons Plats de France: Cuisine rgionale (1913, 1927, 2008). See also Shirley King, ed. 2005 [1996], Pampilles Table: Recipes and Writings from the French Countryside from Marthe Daudets Les Bons Plats de France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press) and the recent edition of Les Bons Plats de France, with my introduction (Paris: cnrs ditions, 2008). 4. See Amy Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 5. Curnonsky [Maurice Sailland] and Marcel Rouff, La France gastronomique, 27 vols. (Paris: F. Rouff, 19211928). Quotes from Le Prigord (1921), p.22; LAlsace (1921), p.21. 6. On this other culinary discourse I draw on Denis Saillard, Discours gastronomique et discours identitaires 18901950 in Gastronomie et identit culturelle franaise: Discours et reprsentations (xix-xxi sicles), ed. F. Hache-Bissette et D. Saillard (Paris : ditions du Nouveau Monde, 2007), 253254. In the same collection, see also Kyri Watson Clain, Le Retour la terre aprs la Grande Guerre: Politique agricole, cuisine et rgionalisme, 215237; and Julia Csergo, Du discours gastronomique comme propagande nationale: Le Club des Cent, 19121930, 177201. 7. Steak and Chips, Mythologies [1957], trans. A. Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). The Michelin Guide is no doubt the clearest expression of French culinary nationalism veering into chauvinism. See Bndict Beaug and Sbastien Demorand, Les Cuisines de la critique gastronomique (Paris: Le SeuilPresses de Sciences Po, 2009). 8. On the explicit construction of national identity through food see Igor Cusack, Pots, Pens, and Eating Out the Body: Cuisine and the Gendering of African Nations, Nations and Nationalism 9(2) (2003): 277296. For the same reasons local and regional governments support food festivals in prime vacation time. 9. Elaine Sciolino, Norway Wins the Bocuse dOr Competition, New York Times, 28 January 2009; see www.bocusedor.com/2009/index.php, which includes videos of the 2009 competition as well as selections from previous competitions. The prize monies are not unimportant (20,000/$28,000; 15,000/$21,000; 10,000/$14,000), though they do not come close to the investment needed to bring any team to the competition. (The American team raised $500,000, and the candidate and his assistant had a four-month leave to train for the competition.) On the World Pastry Cup, held just prior to the Bocuse dOr in the same venue, see www.cmpatisserie.com/2009/en/. (France won the 2009 World Pastry Cup.) The World Bread Cup (Coupe du monde de la Boulangerie) is held every three years in Paris to promote artisanal breadmaking. With 578.31 points, the u.s. team placed fourth in the 2008 competition, well after France (607.92) but tightly clustered with Taiwan (579.49 points) and Italy (578.77 points). The Bread Bakers Guild of America sponsors the American team. See www.bbga.org/PDFs/ April%202008%20Bread%20Bakers%20Guild%20Team%20USAPR.pdf. 10. For competitors French connections see Bazil Katz, How International Is the Bocuse dOr, Diners Journal, New York Times, 28 January 2009. Besides Bocuse himself as founding president, the honorary president of the Bocuse dOr is New York French chef Daniel Boulud. Thomas Keller, president of the American team and one of the judges, apprenticed in France and runs the kitchens at his restaurants, The French Laundry in Napa and Per Se in New

York, like a French brigade. (See the Disney/Pixar lm Ratatouille for its translation on screen.) French chefs Roland Hnin and Philippe Moucell coached the American and Australian teams. The Swedish silver medalist Jonas Lundgren spent three years at The French Laundry and currently works in the Michelin three-star Paris restaurant Pierre Gagnaire. The twenty-two-year-old Estonian commis Andrey Korobyak was working at a restaurant in France when he was asked to compete. Elaine Sciolino, The American Chef Comes in Sixth, Diners Journal, New York Times, 28 January 2009, dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes. com/2009/01/28/the-american-chef-comes-in-sixth/. 11. Elaine Sciolino, With Cowbells and Oxtails, Culinary Olympics Begin, New York Times, 28 January 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/28bcuse-1. html?_r=1 (for the medalists quote and the reference); and The American Chefs Assessment, Diners Journal, New York Times, 28 January 2009, dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/the-american-chefs-assessment/. The culture of competitions works against outsiders generally. It is hardly surprising that the twenty-four contestants should count only one female chef, the woefully underfunded and undersupported contestant from South Africa. 12. Quoted by Merry White, Writing Food as History in Japan, paper presented at the American Historical Association, 3 January 2009. 13. The classic discussion of representations as constitutive of national identity remains Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 14. www.google.com/search?q=Le+Grand+Chef&ie=utf-8&oe=utf8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:ofcial&client=refox-a. The director is Yun-su Jeon. I am indebted to Katherine Han for Sik Gaek: Family, Legacy, and Identity in a Korean tv series, paper for Food and the Social Order, Fall 2008, Columbia University. 15. There is more than a little wish fulllment in the formal apology of the Japanese emissary for the conduct of his ancestor, his country, and for removing the knife from its rightful home. 16. Similarly, Babettes Feast (1987), the great lm of the Danish director Gabriel Axel, identies the Frenchness of French cuisine from afar. The lm, which takes place in Denmark, denes French cuisine against the very different local culinary practices. Other lms also make use of the culinary outsider, from the Mexican Like Water for Chocolate (1992) to the American Big Night (1996) and the German Mostly Martha (2001). 17. The television series particularly emphasizes the countryside, with several episodes taking the Hero to different rural regions of the country. Koreas national cuisine has inspired more than lmmakers. In 2009 the government of South Korea embarked on a Korean Cuisine to the World campaign, allotting ten million dollars to promote Korean cuisine abroad and at home. There are scholarships for South Koreans to travel and to attend culinary school, a research lab, and support for various food festivals. The u.s. is a prime target market, as it was for Chinese, Japanese, and Thai cuisines, whose success the South Koreans hope to emulate. See Julia Moskin, Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi, New York Times, 22 September 2009, at www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/ dining/23kore.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=First%20Lady%20of%20S%20Korea&st=cse. A similar preoccupation drives the current campaign to have French cuisine recognized by unesco as part of the worlds intangible cultural patrimony.

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identity | a.v. crofts

Silver Lining
Building a Shared Sudanese Identity through Food

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Sudan is a country with an image problem. If you and I were to talk about food in Sudan, you might understandably expect our conversation to focus on the shortages brought on by decades of civil war or the crop failures caused by a heartless Mother Nature. In the absence of peace, reports on Sudan and food often focus on basic sustenance and security, not on celebration or the transfer of traditions. Food scarcity grabs headlines. But I would like to invite you instead to pull up a chair and partake in the bounty of Sudan. Paradoxically, foodways now under threat in Sudans remote regions of conict are enjoying broad appeal in the countrys urban centers, thanks to the efforts of resettled Sudanese to maintain their culinary traditions in the face of upheaval. Yet the humanitarian crises that grip the country easily eclipse reports on this new intermingling of Sudanese foodways.1 In the dehumanizing environment of war and forced resettlement, the culinary conservatism of the often reluctant new urbanites must be understood as a mark of self-preservation. The displaced of Sudan are disproportionately female, and many are responsible for dependents. For those settling in the capital, Khartoum, their livelihood depends on carving out ways to earn money in an urban area that is experiencing tremendous growth from the millions of recent arrivals. When confronted with the immediate need to provide for their families, women turn to a skill universally expected of them: cooking. Khartoum is now home to a thriving microeconomy of food vendors who produce their regional dishes for hungry urbanites. By selling these dishes in the capital, they broaden the culinary horizons of the city while preserving their own food traditions. Making the best of a bad situation, these vendorsmostly women but some menhave inadvertently become culinary ambassadors. Their growing numbers provide an opportunity for regional foodways to gain wider introduction, adaptation, and, nally, adoption. Perhaps more surprisingly, these same vendors facilitate a nascent sense of a shared Sudanese identity and nationalism.

For established Khartoum urbanites, the denition of Sudanese food (and, by extension, what it means to be Sudanese) expands as street-vendor fare moves to restaurants and becomes more widely available throughout the city. As urban Sudanese slowly overcome their preconceptions and discover a taste for regional cuisines, meals have the power to function as unofcial diplomacy during this turbulent time in Sudans history. According to Amna Ibrahim Ahmed El Hag, a consultant with the National Council for Child Welfare, this phenomenon is the silver lining of displacement.2

Among the Most Hospitable Countries on Earth

On a sun-bleached afternoon in Khartoum, Amna and her driver, a jovial man by the name of Adel Mohammed Morsi, pick me up outside my hotel for a tasting tour of regional foods, all within the city. At the conuence of the White and Blue Nile rivers, Khartoum, like Sudan itself, is a natural crossroads. Sudans geographic location on the African continent is historically strategic as a gateway to the Middle East. This straddled identity is evident in the people, the music, and, of course, the food. When I walk the streets of Khartoum, I can imagine myself in Cairo; turning a corner, I could be in Kampala. We drive well beyond downtown to the neighborhood of Haj Yousif in Khartoums Sharq Ah-Neel, or Eastern Nile, district. Haj Yousif was originally one of the many camps for Internally Displaced Persons (idp), a term used to dene people obliged to ee their homes within their own countrys borders. It is now enveloped within Khartoums city limits and is, for all intents and purposes, a permanent neighborhood. The original name of the former idp camp was Al-Wehdah, Unity in Arabic, a choice no doubt based more on wishful thinking than on reality, given the fractured history of modern Sudan. Through unanticipated food channels, however, the original meaning may resonate more accurately today than when it was rst devised.

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.110116, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.110.

Morsi slows our pace as we approach our destination Al-Wehdahs central market, where many regional food vendors work. Shiny new rickshaws with sewing machinestrength engines angle for space among passenger cars, overloaded long-distance trucks, and nimble pedestrians weaving in and out of trafc. idp camps, and the neighborhoods evolving from their design, are dened by their expected impermanence. Personal privacy is a forgotten luxury in such crowded quarters. Living spaces that house entire families are no wider than Kobe Bryants armspan, with neighbors just inches away or even sharing walls. Formal street addresses are unknown, making it nearly

photograph by a.v. crofts

2008

impossible for residents in former idp camp neighborhoods to receive mail or list a mailing address on employment applications. The unexpected longevity of these camps has sorely tested their inhabitants. Our rst stop after threading our way across the teeming thoroughfare is a female bakoumbah vendor, who holds court on a small corner patch of ground with sturdy little stools for customers. Bakoumbah is as satisfying to eat as it is to pronounce: bah-KOOM -bah. The dish, originating

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Above: A bakoumbah vendor prepares her fare in the Haj Yousif neighborhood of Khartoum, Sudan.

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in the vendors home region of Darfur, where it is called umjinjer (oom-JING -jer), combines boiled millet, yogurt, custard powder (think yellow cake mix), ghee, sweetened sesame paste, sugar, and raisins. In Khartoum the dish is often made with wheat instead of millet as the base ingredient and swaps milk for the yogurt used in Darfur. I grew up eating umjinjer, the vendor says. My mother gave it to us to keep our hunger down. A decade-long drought forced her to migrate to Khartoum from Darfur in 1982, as if foreshadowing the manmade horrors that would unfold there some twenty years later and force Darfurians to resettle once again.3 Our bakoumbah vendor started her business in 1997 as a way to support her family. She is living proof that idp camps have raised generations. We scrape our kindergarten-size wooden stools closer for front-row seats. The vendor speaks to us without interrupting her routine, blending the ingredients in a large aluminum bowl to the consistency of lemon-colored rice pudding. Once the mixture is ready (the wheat is already boiled, so no cooking is required), she transfers a generous serving into a fresh metal bowl, pokes a spoon into the top, and hands it to an eager customer. When I moved from Darfur I adjusted the ingredients, she explains. The newer ingredients like wheat and milk are more popular in Khartoum. Served at room temperature and hovering between hot cereal and a cozy dessert, bakoumbah is at once nutritious and heavenly for those with a sweet tooth. The soft consistency makes the dish easy to digest and suitable for all ages. The vendor soon hands me a serving, and I taste my rst rich bite. The sesame paste, ne custard powder, and generous spoonfuls of sugar create a sweetness that, after my time in Sudan, no longer comes as a shock to my system. (I teasingly tell my Sudanese colleagues that they enjoy a bit of tea with their sugar.) The boiled wheat provides welcome bulk and elevates bakoumbah to the status of comfort food with a purpose. One of the good things is that all the ingredients for bakoumbah are inexpensive, the vendor says. So I can sell it for an affordable price and still make a prot. A bowl of her bakoumbah costs one Sudanese pound, the equivalent of fty cents u.s. While we speak with her, business is brisk, and, despite the crowd, she responds to questions and happily talks about her trade. In a classic demonstration of Sudanese hospitality, she adamantly refuses money when I move to pay for our meal. It is no wonder that the travel writer Edward Hoagland referred to Sudan as among the most hospitable countries on earth.4

An Improved Culinary Fluency

The story of relocation is deeply familiar to many Sudanese. Mass internal migration, in many cases for self-protection, presents one of the most challenging byproducts of war. In Sudan, war and natural disasters combine to create what the scholar Mark Dufeld calls a permanent emergency,5 which in turn contributes to rapid urbanization. The result is a country in transition from a majority pastoralist country to one with unprecedented urbanization. Sudanese caught in conict zones often seek out the cities or are relocated to them under government resettlement programs. According to demographic data from 2005, 40 percent of Sudanese now live in urban areas.6 Khartoum best exemplies this hyperurbanization. As idp camps have mushroomed in recent decades on its outskirts, the citys population has ballooned. Intended temporary residences have in many cases become permanent, with the result that Greater Khartoums borders have widened as the city haphazardly absorbs the idp camps. Because the origins of some camps reach back to the beginning of the rst civil war (19551972), generations born and raised within these makeshift communities know no other life. According to recent population estimates, forty million people live in Sudan, with one-sixth located in metropolitan Khartoum.7 To fully grasp this ratio, imagine the population of metropolitan Washington, D.C., swelling from ve million to a staggering fty million. Unfortunately, the central government has not responded to the explosive growth in Khartoum with conscientious efforts toward integration. Newer idp camps from more recent conicts are generally inhabited by individuals whose yearnings for home trump any interest in assimilation. Thus, as the city grows to encompass the camps, stress fractures in Sudanese urban society have emerged. Lawlessness, lack of access to basic services, alarming health indicators, and an unbroken cycle of poverty all plague idp camps to varying degrees, even as Khartoum enjoys a reputation as one of the safest capital cities on the African continent. Despite the absence of infrastructure and services, informal social arrangements,8 in the words of development economist William Easterly, tend to ourish in these marginalized neighborhoods. Necessity breeds inventiveness and, in turn, investment. Writing on the urbanization of Khartoum, sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone states:
Many of the so-called lacksof amenities, infrastructure, livelihood, markets, and governancebecome occasions for residents to assemble ways of working together that otherwise would not be occasioned given

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existing cultural norms, political practices and urban experiences Despite disparate distribution patterns and impoverishment, as well as the fact that many urban residents in a given city would rather be somewhere else, city dwellers do make concerted efforts to invest in an urban existence.9

Above: Citrus, goddaym berries, and carbonated drinks in Khartoum, Sudan.

photograph by a.v. crofts

2008

Habits of Coexistence
Eventually, family kitchens move outdoors into neighborhood markets like Al-Wehdah. Fortied by our helpings of bakoumbah, Amna and I venture deeper into the market,

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In Sudan, these concerted efforts most often manifest themselves in the preservation of foodways and culinary traditions. A desire to retain a cultural identity in the face of displacement, combined with the need to earn money, motivates immigrant populations. Because of the rubbing of shoulders necessitated by living in densely populated city environments, food vending provides a natural point of contact between Sudans diverse migrant population and the already-established Khartoum urbanites. The result is an improved national culinary uency. As historian Donna Gabaccia so aptly puts it, When people of differing foodways come together, whether cooks or merely eaters, they will almost invariably peek into one anothers kitchens.10

navigating a maze of narrow passageways that separate vendor stalls hawking everything from vehicle tires to kitchen utensils. Amna gently steers me toward a larger food operation with a modest number of indoor seats and two outdoor grills that lure customers with the mouthwatering aroma of barbecue. A young man wielding tongs works two separate grills, each representing a distinct regional style of meat preparation. The rst grilling technique, mandee, reveals the young mans western Sudanese roots. Originally composed of heated rocks set into the ground, the grill in Khartoum has been transformed into a low metal apparatus that forces our host to bend deeply at the waist to check on the grilling rack of ribs. He moves between this larger grill and a tabletop model used for the grilling method called salat, from eastern Sudan. Salat utilizes a punch-bowl-size trough made entirely of carved salt rock from the large saline deposits in central and eastern Sudan. When lled with river rocks interspersed with lighted charcoal, the ercely hot surface is perfect for grilling thin slices of meat, which become infused with the salty residue of the natural receptacle. Our host quickly

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points out that the salt bowls benet goes beyond avoring: The salt keeps the coals and rocks as hot as possible for as long as possible, he explains. This particular eatery offers delicious lamb and beef that has been marinated overnight in citrus juice, onion, and salt. The meat is served with slices of fresh purple onion and a wedge of lime on the side, which adds an addictive pucker. We return to a napping Morsi. Although we are stuffed, Amna insists on one more stop. The car pitches and heaves down an uneven alleyway until we reach a quiet T-intersection. Here Amna and I get out to approach a shy goddaym (gah-DIE -am) berry vendor, who pures the delicate, rust-colored berries from western Sudanno larger than immature crabapples and just as tartinto a delicious drink diluted with fresh orange juice. After processing the fruit, the vendor serves the goddaym juice in metal bowls with a miniature iceberg bobbing to the surface to cool the frothy beverage. Although oranges are a relatively recent Khartoum addition, goddaym has a long culinary history in Sudan. The berries are thought to possess antimalarial properties and to stimulate the bodys natural production of hemagglutinin. Many dishes in Khartoum undergo similar transformations as they are mixed with new ingredients. So, too, do resettled Sudanese, who are as diverse as the country is immense. A fundamental gap in the worlds understanding of Sudan begins with the deciencies of modern cartography. Sudan is the tenth largest country in the world, covering an area roughly equivalent to the entire United States east of the Mississippi. But because most maps shrink equatorial regions, the true breadth of this enormous tumbling chunk11 of the continent is misrepresented. The sheer magnitude of Sudan, combined with its rugged terrain and relatively few paved roads,12 means that historically the various populations have remained isolated, which complicates the creation of a national identity. Academic studies of the Sudan are nearly as deeply affected by the divisions of the country as are Sudanese themselves, writes the historian Douglas H. Johnson in his seminal work, The Root Causes of Sudans Civil Wars. Scholars often display a difculty in recognizing the Sudan as a collection of regions.13 The countrys regional nature is also due to the autonomy of many of Sudans distinct populations, who speak more than one hundred dialects. Such a rich collection of peoples, while hindering unity, leads to a wide variety of culinary traditions, and Khartoum is the nexus of this Sudanese buffet. Here Amna and I discover how regional foodways become increasingly mainstream as the economy develops. The number of

cranes crowding the skyline tells the rst part of the story. New buildings climb higher than their older counterparts and often feature a mixed-use design with ground-level shops surmounted by ofce space or housing. As disposable income rises, the dishes that got their start as street food nd new homes in restaurants. One of these dishes is madeedah (ma-DEE -dah). Served by the stainless-steel bowlful, madeedah is a blended fruit and grain smoothie produced in variations throughout Sudan. Like many traditional foods, madeedah originated as restorative fare, in this case provided to postnatal women to rebuild their strength. Now, trendsetters of both genders in urban areas enjoy it. The increase in purchasing power of some Sudanese has contributed to the spike in eateries such as the one where Amna and I enjoyed madeedah, with its high ceilings, marble countertops, laminated menus, and throng of waiters. It stands in stark contrast to the bakoumbah vendors modest solo operation. The menu here offers a cross-country culinary tour of madeedah. While many ingredients overlap (sugar, ghee, and honey), regional madeedah specialties reect available crops. For example, bellah (date) madeedah is a specialty of the North, where dates are plentiful. I learn that helbah is the madeedah from central Sudan, whereas in the West, milletthat regions stapleis swapped for the wheat, just as it is with bakoumbah. Eastern Sudans version combines wheat, bananas, heavy cream, sweet sesame paste, honey, raisins, and sugar. Never one to turn down dates, I opt for bellah madeedah. Our mixologist lls his blender with hunks of date cakes made from dates that have been combined with a small amount of our, boiled, and poured into a shallow baking pan to set. He follows the dates with generous spoonfuls of sugar, ghee, and milk, along with a scoop of yogurt thickened with wheat. After blending the concoction for a minute, he transfers it to a bowl and dresses it with shaved coconut, raisins, and delicate threads of honey. My serving is too thick to drink easily with a straw and too thin for a fork, so I raise the bowl to my lips for a satisfying slurp. The trio of natural sweetenersdates, sugar, and honeysteals the show. Even in its gussied-up form for sophisticated Khartoum consumers, the drink still possesses the hearty components that reect its original nutritional identity. I polish off the bowl quickly. Amna next promises me kisrah (KEES -rah), a spongy pancake used as both an edible platter and a utensil for scooping stews into the mouth. This food tradition from central Sudan is a good example of how dishes are transformed when introduced to the city. Kisrah is traditionally made with a variety of sorghum our called fetareetah

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(fat-ah-REET -ah) that gives the pancake a distinctive rosecolored hue. It is cooked on a large griddle over an open ame, much like a crpe. According to Amna, fetareetah is not widely available in Khartoum, so when vendors rst opened small kisrah stands within the city, they adjusted the recipe by mixing some wheat our in with the sorghum our. The change was well received, because many customers in the city were wary of the original versions pinkish tint. We travel on to the neighborhood of Bury Twon. Unlike the newer Eastern Nile district, Bury Twon is one of Khartoums more established sections. Our destination is a small open-air market surrounded by working-class apartment buildings. There we meet Mastora Ali, who runs her open-air cafeteria with a winning smile and six aluminum cauldrons of food. Originally from Kordofan, the area of central Sudan famous for its kisrah, Ali has lived in Khartoum for fteen years. She serves us heaping metal platefuls of food: generous folds of kisrah topped with waykah (WAY-kah), a translucent sauce made of okra our. (Alis ruddy kisrah is made using fetareetah, perhaps an example of a headstrong chef sticking to the authentic. The line waiting to be served at Alis stand is evidence that her business is in no way suffering.) To accompany the centerpiece dish she scoops up a serving of dark green boiled millet our (aseedah) and ladles two types of moullah, or savory stew, over it. The rst is made with sharmut (shar-MOOT ), dried beef jerky that originated with nomadic populations in Sudan as a way to preserve meat over long periods of time. Yogurt, or rob, gives the second moullah its distinctive, tangy avor. The meal is further enlivened by spicy shohtah (SHOW -tah), a yogurt condiment made with green chilies; plates of sheeariah (shee-ARE -ee-ah), sweet angel-hair noodles; and gurassah (goor-AH -sah), a atbread similar in size and shape to an unadorned pizza crust. Amna, Morsi, and I dig in. Between bites, Morsi tells me that at feasts in Sudan kisrah and waykah are often served after the main meal. They are such popular dishes that if they are offered earlier, people will not eat anything else. I do not have the time to make kisrah, but I can just go to the market and buy it, adds Amna. Selling food in the market has become a popular activity. Food creates an integration of cultures; it is one way that we mix together. Food breaks down barriers and we become like one person. I ponder this unexpected benet of the hardships the Sudanese have endured, which allows them to showcase their foodways and their famous hospitality.14 While it would be nave to think that the introduction of distinct regional foodways in Khartoum can alone ensure a new,

shared Sudanese identity, this mingling represents an example of what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to as the habits of coexistence.15 Even in the absence of ofcial integration policies and efforts, cities afford residents the opportunity to live together and learn from one anotheroften through foodin ways that lead to a greater understanding of what it means to be Sudanese. There is no question that the decades of displacement, crumbling infrastructure, disease burden, natural disasters, lack of government transparency,16 and guerrilla militia movements repeatedly combine to sabotage efforts toward rebuilding a peaceful and well-fed Sudan.17 Yet, as Sudanese from across the country meet in Khartoum and share their food traditions, their efforts at self-preservation both honor their distinct regional identities and, at the same time, help to build a more inclusive identity for all Sudanese.g
notes
If I were to repay with meals those who helped me bring this article to life, I would be cooking for quite some time. People deserving special mention are food writer Cheryl Sternman Rule; Vicki Aken of umcor-Sudan; Daniel W., Betsy, and Sarah Crofts; Samantha Bailey and Jessica Esch; Sudan expert and heavyweight Alex de Waal; Soa Fenner for her Arabic transliteration; food historian Cindy R. Lobel; and last, but by no means least, my colleagues in Sudan: Amna Ibrahim Ahmed El Hag, Hanan Satti Ali Ibrahim, Noha Gibreel, Kawther Alaa El Din Badri, Hallo Mohamed Konso, Louis Tindil Morgan, and Sami Ahmed Mohamed. Finally, while this article represents the involvement of many people, any errors are entirely my own. 1. International media coverage of Sudan has grown substantially over the last six years, owing to reports on the violence in the western region of Sudan known as Darfur. However, two equally bloody civil wars took place within Sudans borders over nearly the entire second half of the twentieth century, though the outside world took little notice. Both wars were waged between the North and South of Sudan and were responsible for the deaths of more than two million Sudanese. These civil wars are regarded as some of the longest in the history of the African continent. A fragile peace accord known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (cpa) was brokered in 2005. It now appears vulnerable to unraveling before scheduled national elections in 2010. The near-perpetual state of unrest in Sudan has exacted a high toll. Sparring factions have capitalized on governmental mismanagement, using food to control populations during times of war: to control food distribution is to control power. In some cases, food is leveraged as a tool of recruitment; in others, factions target food distribution channels to weaken enemy forces or to punish civilians viewed as collaborating with the enemy. During my research for this article I created a computerized search mechanism to track news items that included the keywords Sudan and food. At the time this article was written, the search had identied over one hundred articles, and all but three reported on food security as it related to war and natural disasters. Floods threatened crops in Sudans southern region; drivers delivering food aid to relief camps in the West were killed by rebels hijacking supplies; overextended international relief agencies cut food rations. Of the remaining three articles, one reported on an agricultural expo in Khartoum in October 2008; the second was an online recipe collection of Sudanese food; and the third was a brief announcement on a food Web site about a brand of nonalcoholic beer starting sales in Sudan. 2. Interview with Amna Ibrahim Ahmed El Hag, 1 May 2008. 3. The conict in Darfur is not the only reason Sudan has attracted the modern media spotlight. Recent discoveries of valuable oil deposits (Sudan is now the sixth-fastest-growing economy in the world, thanks to this lucrative new export) and geopolitical negotiations around terrorism have often made Sudan the center of international attention. 4. Edward Hoagland, African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan (New York: Random House, 1979), 5.

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A story in a recent travel guide to Sudan attests to the unparalleled hospitality of the Sudanese. A German motorcyclist biked his way across Sudan in 2004. One day in the Nuba Mountains he spotted a Sudanese man on the horizon, running toward his campsite. When the man nally reached the motorcyclist and caught his breath, he explained that he had run ten kilometers across the searing desert in pursuit of the travelerto invite him to dinner in his home. For those of us fortunate to have spent time in Sudan as guests, this story is not surprising. We could all likely contribute similar tales of our own, though perhaps none quite so dramatic. 5. Mark Dufeld, Urbanization and the Future of SudanNew Perspectives, Making Sense of Darfur Blog, www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/category/darfur/, 14 February 2008. 6. Munzoul Asal, Urbanization and the Future of Sudan, Making Sense of Darfur Blog, www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/category/darfur/, 29 January 2008. 7. u.s. Department of State, Bureau of African Affairs: Sudan Prole, www.state. gov. Accessed July 2008. In 2008 Sudan conducted its rst ofcial census in ten years, but results will not be fully tallied and released until later this year. 8. William Easterly, The White Mans Burden: Why the Wests Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 87. 9. AbdouMaliq Simone, On the Importance of Urban Intersection, When Integration Is Not Necessarily on the Cards, Making Sense of Darfur Blog, www. ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/category/darfur/, 18 March 2008. 10. Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6. 11. Hoagland, African Calliope, 6. 12. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/. Accessed 21 August 2008. 13. Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudans Civil Wars (Oxford: James Curry, 2003), xxi.

14. My work in the eld of global health makes for a ne collection of visa stamps in my passport. April 2008 found me heading to Sudan, my second trip to the country in three months. From the backseat of a taxi to the airport, I chatted with the driver about my upcoming itinerary. At the mention of Sudan, his eyes lit up. He explained he was originally from Ethiopia, and, like many Horn of Africa immigrants in the Seattle area, where I live, he had spent four years in Sudan after escaping the escalating violence in his homeland during the 1970s. His opinion of the Sudanese gave voice to an emotion I had experienced after my rst visit to the country but felt a poverty of words to capture: If you took the one hundred nicest people in the world and put them all into one room, he said, ninety-nine of them would be Sudanese. 15. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), xix. 16. Investigative reports suggest that Sudans central government is directing newfound oil revenue wealth into ambitious agricultural initiatives that create swaths of emerald farmland growing crops for export that rise out of the sand like mirages (Jeffrey Gettleman, Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells a Food Bonanza, New York Times, 10 August 2008, a1.) While many Sudanese go hungry, the central government of Sudan heads to the bank after shipping foodstuffs out of the country at the same time as aid agencies unload international grain donations of equal volume. In a perverse logic, Sudan is achieving its food production potential but, instead of feeding its citizens, it is capitalizing on the open market as food prices soar. 17. Millions of Sudanese share the experience of losing their access to familiar means of food production, let alone having enough to eat. Scant food resources have forced generations of Sudanese to rely on international relief programs or face starvation. In the early 1990s the aid community referred to three southern Sudanese temporary settlements in Kongor, Ayod, and Yuai as the hunger triangle (Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudans Civil Wars, 116). The indignity of such circumstances is particularly painful, given the enormous extent of Sudans fertile farmland straddling the White and Blue Nile rivers. Sudan could feed Africa! Hallo Mohammed Konso, program director of the nonprot organization Islamic Relief in Sudans Blue Nile State, told me with equal parts exasperation and exaggeration when we met. There is no question, however, that Sudan could feed itself and have plenty left over to share. Yet misguided agricultural policies, the sustained negative impact of civil war, catastrophic weather conditions, and government corruption undercut the ability of local subsistence farmers to feed their families.

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futurism | kay sexton

Losing the Space Race

courtesy of advertising archives

When i was young , food was going to be eradicated. In 1975, when Queen made the rst music video and British women (like my mum) were given the right to equal pay (but, also like my mum, not the equal pay itself), futuristic tv dramas like ufo and Space 1999 showed a meal that was no more than a pill, popped on the tongue and swallowed by elegant, mini-skirted women with silver eye makeup and purple hair. The earthy, or earthly, business of chewing and digesting (and, presumably, excreting) would be wiped out, like smallpox and open sewers. This was the future, and I looked forward to the purple hair and elegant moonlashes, which were as silver as the skirts and about the same length. My enthusiasm was based on domestic logic: I would not have to cook or wash up dishes, ergo, I would have plenty of time to deal with my silver accoutrements, and with invading aliens keen to harvest my food-free organs. The future began to move into the present with almost indecent hasteufo was still in its rst tv season when the rst space food arrived. It was called Smash. Smash required only the addition of boiling water to convert from pure white potato meteors to mashed potatoes; it was advertised on television by robots from space who mocked our

primitive behavior in peeling, boiling, and mashing the humble tuber when all we needed to do was open a packet. I watched my mother prepare Smash a couple of times a week, avid not so much for the transformation of the food as the impending transformation of the parent. I hoped to catch her in the interim stages: moonlashes emerging from the straight black roots of her original ones, or skirts receding up her legs in a silvery outgoing tide. To my disappointment her hair didnt even develop a hint of purple. The removal of boring terrestrial food from our diets didnt happen either. Over three decades on from extraterrestrial Smash we have reversed our trajectory, falling back into an ever closer orbit around the earthy, necessarily chewable foods we once thought would be abolished. In fact, so obsessed are we with the provenance of our foodstuffs that even international transport is frowned upon, let alone interplanetary transfer. I am no longer disappointed by this failure to achieve nutritional liftoff, because it was my generation that was experimented on in the name of future (and futuristic) food, with unexpected and unattractive consequences. I must admit that some of the experimentation was fun: Space Dust was a sweet, granular in form, that exploded

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.117118, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.117.

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in the mouth, battering the soft palate with chemical force. It was said that the right combination of Space Dust and carbonated drink (variously claimed to be Coke, Tizer, R. Whites Lemonade, or Lucozade) would blow your tonsils right off. Id had mine removed, aged six, so could not take a full part in the experiments, and cant now remember why we thought explosive tonsillectomies would be a good idea. But we proved beyond doubt that a well-shaken zzy drink plus a goodly mouthful of Space Dust would unfailingly cause the bubbling mixture to rise up the sinus passages and ood down the nose to horric visual effect. Space Dust was followed by the powdered orange juice RisenShine. I realize now the name referred to happy morning behavior, but at the time I took it as an invitation to escape our planets gravity and shine like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Anyway, it looked beguiling in the advertisements, where it promised the instantaneous taste of tropical oranges via mundane tap water and the application of a spoon, so we children begged and nagged our mothers to buy it. The adverts lied. Nine times out of ten RisenShine clumped into ugly orange reefs around the base of the glass and delivered only repellently avored water. It was like drinking laundry soap, with the occasional tongue-searing clot of soggy powder that burned the gums like caustic soda. Worst of all, though, in the era of food that wasnt foodlike was tvp. It wasnt exactly advertised; it appeared on adult tv programs of impeccable intellectual pedigree like Tomorrows World (the future, but for grownups and without moonlashes or mini-skirts) or the Six OClock News, and that alerted us, the tomorrow generation, that this wasnt going to be a fun food. tvp was shown in vats, like pale grey porridge. It was invented by the Japanese, a endish nation who, according to my father, were already taking over the world by means of electronic typewriters and calculators. Finally, and worst of all, tvp was going to be the food that fed the starving of India, but not by being shipped out to them for their dinnersinstead, it was going to be cunningly hidden in our dinners, and the meat it replaced would be given to them. So, at least, I understood the scenario, and so too did many of my schoolfriends, who took to raising already unidentiable pieces of meat on their forks and demanding of the teacher on duty: Is this tvp, Miss, is it? Cos Im not eating it, if it is. You can send it to India cos they dont care. The starving Indians were already our collective bane at school or home, any food left uneaten was garnished with the unappetizing statement that the poor starving children in India would be glad of that. The generous suggestion

that it should therefore be sent to them immediately was condemned as ungrateful cheek. It could be difcult to respect the adult world when its response to the imminent arrival of space-age nourishment was to tell you that it couldnt even manage to send your unwanted dinner to somewhere as nearby as India. The starving of Africa had not yet emerged to trouble our collective consciences nor had the idea that we in the West contributed to their terrible conditionand it seemed to us preteens that the space-pill meal couldnt come soon enough. When it did, the starving Indians and our inept parents would presumably both disappear and wed be able to stay up as late as we liked, as the sun never sets in space, and we wouldnt need to brush our teeth before bedwhy should we, when wed only taken a pill? When tvp actually arrived on our school lunch plates we did not need to ask questions. It made itself known as a vaguely spongy, dubiously glistening presence that tried to harmonize with minced or chopped beef but gave itself away by rising to the surface of every dish as if it contained tiny otation tanks. It exuded vast amounts of gravy when pressed with a fork, before bouncing back into its original shape in a way that real meat never could. Also, it tasted of nothing. Chewing tvp was like eating greasy cushion stufng. The sinister tvp was the last of the nonfood foods inicted on us. Convenience turned out to have a cost. There were more stories on the Six OClock News about starving childrenbut they turned out to be us! Somehow the Food from Space had left us nutritionally deprived, attention decient, and full of dangerous chemicals. We youngsters huddled together, clutching our packets and bottles of tartrazine-packed, additive-enriched, unnatural food, expecting at any moment to be corralled into some kind of kid quarantine, or maybe, just to fall apart as a result of our terrible diets. It came as a surprise to many of us that we survived into adulthood with most of our faculties, if not our teeth, intact. Today my family eats potatoes grown in our own garden, buys smallholder-raised free-range meat, and drinks locally grown and pressed apple juice to reduce our carbon footprint. Smash is relegated to the cheapest supermarkets, and RisenShine has disappeared altogether. As for Space Dust, its constituent E-numbers have mainly been outlawed. Only tvp, least loved of all the space-age foods, has survived into the mainstream modern diet, but now it appears in its raw-food state, emerging as the new natural superfood edamame, rather than the old unnatural space food Textured Soya Protein. So the Japanese won the space race after all!g

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photographs | kathleen laraia mc laughl in and h. woods mc laughl in

The Color of Hay

The Peasants of Maramures

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The Harvest, Srbi, Romania, 2000 Even as the European Union accepts Romania into the fold of twenty-rst century life, there are valleys in the far north of Transylvania where a familys food moves straight from land to larder. The Romanian language does not yet have a word for quaint their experience of waterwheels, horse and carts, and grandmas sitting at the front gate are too current for that. Its real, its alive, and its disappearing. While peasants have deep pride in their local traditionsour land is blessedthey also carry a gnawing
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shame at their povertywhy would anyone bring children into this? Their conicted feelings fuel a rush to consumerism. American Cola now sits proudly at the table alongside their clear, homemade plum brandy. With new rights to travel, and new needs to pay for modern goods, fewer men work the land. More women, like Maria above, ll that role, marking the turning point when the immaculate elds of Maramures , once maintained by whole families, will begin to fade into recent memory, and nally into history.

2010 by kathleen laraia mc laughlin and h. woods mc laughlin.

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The Millers Boy, Srbi, 1999 There was a time when the millers son would learn to manage his fathers mill and thereby be guaranteed a life of wealth and status. But now, when families buy household electric grinders and make their own cornmeal, the millers future is less secure. Still, descendants of the wealthy will retain heightened stature down to their great-grandchildrens generation.

Easter Bread, Srbi, 2000 Easter marks transformation. Spring demonstrates the earths resurrection in imitation of the Lords. Greetings change from Good day, where are you going? to the formal exchange Christ has risen! followed by the necessary response, Truly he has risen! For women, Easter is a onceyearly opportunity to show off their artistic air as they rival the gate carver with decorated breads.

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Plowing the Field, Srbi, 2000 An acre was dened in the seventeenth century as the amount of land a man could plow in a day. Now a good farmer could handle four acres with two horses and a steel plow, but his land is always dotted around the countryside in small strips, usually about an acre in size. These plots make up a patchwork of family historypassed down from grandfather to daughter to husband to nephew, cobbled together by marriage and torn apart by family feuds. In the high valleys of Maramures some villages were never collectivized. This history remains as intact as the memories of those who still guide the plow on land farmed since Roman times.

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The Shepherd, Ocna Sugatag, 2000 Villagers complain that shepherds are lazy because in summer they only stand by their sheep while everyone else has to make hay. No one complains in winter.

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Slaughtered Calf, Breb, 2000 Matusha never had children of her own and channeled her affections into the care of her animals. She named her latest calf Flower. Three times a day she milked the mother and fed the calf by hand. She couldnt afford a nipple bottle, so she started the calf suckling on her ngers, and then dribbled the milk from the bucket through her ngers into the calfs mouth. When she took Flower to market, she held out a long time, looking for a buyer who would raise her to be a milking cow. But in the end she had to sell her by the kilo.

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After the Funeral, Va leni, 2000 After the body is buried and mourners return to the deceaseds home, it is the bereaved familys duty to provide a feast for all who attended the funeral. Since the service typically lasts four hours, appetites are piqued, and no manner of bad weather will discourage the crowd. When a popular community gure has died, rumors sometimes circulate that providing the funeral feast forced the dead persons family into ruin.g

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prose | ton i mi rosevich

A Pinch of Finch

To the memory of my mother

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Her hands are moving again . My mother lies in bed, her new permanent home, eyes closed, doing work in a world I have no access to. She, who has been unable to raise her head from the pillow or a cup to her lips, lifts one hand, then the other, her hands as weightless as feathers. What should I make of these easy, airy gestures? If, as a nurse friend trained in Death and Dying suggests, you need to listen to the symbolic language as a person is leaving this lifegone now, the normal sentence structure, gone the proper grammar, long gone the logical thought processes, now only a word here, a word there, for us to decipherwhat then of my mothers symbolic gestures? When my partners sister was near the end and moving towards the light, she too was instructed to listen for the symbolic. She waited at her sisters bedside, primed for any utterance. On the doorjamb of death, in what looked like a deep sleep, her sister suddenly rustled, and offered up one barely audible word. Closer, she whispered. A second later. Getting closer. Then, with the anticipated last breath? Aw, forget it, and with that she woke up, sat up, and went on to live three more days. No Ph.D. needed in Sign, Symbol and Signifying to gure out that one. Outside my mothers bedroom window there are birds in the trees. Robins, blue jays. A woodpecker. Given the circumstances, maybe short-scripted is good. Flitting from one branch to another, as the mind its from one thought to another, these birds would never light long enough for an extended oration. Theres no doubt about it. She is doing something with her hands. She raises one, then the other. She continues her work. She could be screwing on a lid, packing a tuna tin, or pouring an imaginary cup of tea for me. I watch her in her labors. But which labors?

Is she back serving food in the hospital cafeteriathe work she found after my father shed his last sh and died young? Is she spooning up the Daily Special for a hospital administrator, waiting there, impatient, possibly callous, as his ngers, free of callus, beat out a tense drumbeat on the counter? Or, is she back in our kitchen, her right hand lifting the knife, inserting the tip at the throat of the salmon, one swift slice down the underbelly, cleaning the sh my father netted, sh who just the day before were swimming towards unseen squares of twine oating in a green sea? Or even further back, on Terminal Island, the cannery years, standing with all the other girls on the line, these shy Rockettes, as the silver tuna ashed down the conveyer belt, the slice again, just the right amount to t into a can. What knife technique! The number of cans equaled the number of punches on a work card equaled the pay you brought home to the widowed mother waiting there, her hand out as you climbed the porch steps. Or back farther still. Were her hands ever idle? I remember the safety pins she attached, one to another in a line, then pinned to the front of her housecoat, this silver strand her set of worry beads. How she took the last pin between the thumb and forenger and continually clicked the pin open, then shut, open, then shut, over and over, click, click, click. Unfastened, how can I escape the image of the safety pins open hook? If I put that hook on a line, what memory could I catch? A month ago, in her apartment. Shes telling that story again. The same one she tells so often these days. The story about her very rst job and the nice Italian lady who lived down the street. She wore a wig that sat high on her head like a birds nest. And she smoked these thin cigars. She smiles as she says this, puts an imaginary Tiparillo to her mouth and puffs. Every day, after school, I walked home, kissed my mother, then ran down the street to her house. Yes, quickly, the need to escape home, her old-country mother forever in black after her husband died young and

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left her with seven, quick, escape the cruel uncle who came to stay, escape the demanding boarders, the shrouded house. Who wouldnt ee to the sunnier Italians, so like the Slavs, like kissing cousins, with so much in common but from the happier side of the Adriatic? How she tells the tale: The Italian ladys husband was a small man who followed orders. He did what he was told. And he was good with his hands. He could make a satchel out of a sows ear. He could make a silk purse with compartments! But his greatest gift? He could take his wifes ideas and make them esh. Like this one: In their backyard, near the grapevine, near the garden plot of greensthe broccoli, spinach, kale, bordered by a row of pink sweet peas for colorone extravagant gesturethere, his wife told him, rig up a net that will stand up straight to the wind. Like a soccer net. A net that would be hard to see unless you had a birds eye. Lucky for them, the birds in that part of town were nearsighted. Oh, the vulnerable birds. Oh, the little clueless birds, says my look. Oh, the Depression, says her look in return. With no food on the table. With the hand-me-downs and no money. With the mother climbing down the embankment to the

Above: The Rockettes on their lunch break outside the Starkist Tuna cannery at Terminal Island, California, ca. 1939. My mother, Pearl (Skich) Mirosevich, is fourth from the right.
photograph courtesy of toni mirosevich

railroad tracks to pick up the spilled corn from some railcar, tomorrows polenta. The idea worked. The birds ew straight into the net. He caught them as easily as his wife caught him years ago. With her shy smile and that wig hat. What kind of birds? I ask. How do I know? The kind of birds that would y into a net. What did she do with them? I ask, not wanting to know and wanting to. She took the birds and made a sauce out of them. Best sauce youve ever tasted. Bird sauce. She tells me she cant describe the taste, just that it was delicious. What does ight taste like? How would you know when the sauce needed a pinch of nch? All Im left with is the undifferentiated main ingredient. Whats a person to do with a recipe that has no instructions? So, what was your job? How to stop the mind from imagining her straining the sauce, picking out the tiny bird bones. She made ravioli, the best in town. Enough for the family and to sell to the Italian deli. It was my job to pinch

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the ravioli, to go around the rim. She paid me by the number I pinched. Thank God, it had nothing to do with the birds. I can picture her, in that warm kitchen, that second home, the pasta dough rolled out on the board, can see the Italian lady lift an empty wine glass, turn it upside down. In a single perfect gesture, she presses the rim into the dough, perfect moons, then spoons just the right amount of lling into each center. My mother begins her job, her most important labor, folds the pasta over, and with her ngerher serious work, her diligent workthe pressure just right, presses down around each ravioli, leaving the imprint of that nger, the small half circle. Here she is now, in bed, her index nger, rising up. To make a point or reverse course and make an indentation? Is that what she is doing now, is she that far back, her hands going around the white crescent, the small indent with her small nger, a childs nger, just the right size for the edge of the ravioli? Are there smells returning in her world, the bird sauce on the stove, and there by the kitchen window, a crazy Italian lady with the cigar and a hair hat? Is she escaping to that world before she escapes this one?

My mother has lifted off, she is sailing. Where is the opening in the net so I can join her? Where is the door to her house, the door with the porthole that you could open to look out as if you were on the sea, or look in on her life? Where is the kitchen, the brodet simmering on the stove, the table laid out with kruha, the place where the wood box stood, where a shoe kicked a barrel and black olives turned slowly in the brine, one clean revolution, where bakalar hung like bats from the ceiling, where the hrustule was rolled onto the board, the dough sliced in ribbons, knotted and tied in bows, each knot a regret. Or a wish. If ravioli contains lling and, in each soft pillow, a wish, this is my wish for her: To have it easy as she leaves this life. For my mother to be saved from her labors. Our D and D friend says that timing is everything and nothing. That when a woman labors to bring a child into the world no one can pinpoint the exact time of birth. And at death, it is the same. No one knows the exact moment your loved one will be born into the next world. She awakens, stares out as I stare in. She asks for some water. I take my hand and cup the back of her head. This is what I can do with my hands, I who cannot cook, this is my gesture. I cup her head, the white downy hair there at the back, pour some water in her glass, and bring it to her lips. She takes a small sip. Then she closes her eyes. Shes own away. She was here just a minute ago. Shes own away again.g

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terroir | bill nesto

Discovering Terroir in the World of Chocolate

Over the last several years I have noticed that chocolate bars are increasingly identied by the variety and origin of the cacao they contain. One company, Valrhona, even lists vintages on its Estate Grown chocolates. Coming from the world of wine, I wanted to learn whether chocolate, like wine, could carry me from an appreciation of its taste back to its origins. I wanted to discover whether terroir exists in the world of chocolate. So I contacted Robert Steinberg, who in 1996 joined forces with John Scharffenberger, a former California wine producer, to form a boutique chocolate company, Scharffen Berger.1 I knew that terroir has many denitions, which is appropriate for anything magical. The way I wrestle it, terroir

Above: Claudio Corallo prunes a cacao plant on the Terreiro Velho plantation on the island of Prncipe.
photograph by bettina corallo

2004

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is the web that connects and unies raw materials, their growing conditions, production processes, and the moment of product appreciation. How can I understand terroir in chocolate? I asked Steinberg. He began by warning me about the road ahead. Though he loved chocolate, particularly the blending of avors to make a balanced product, he had lost faith in the business of chocolate. When he purchased cacaothe raw materialfrom merchants and even from individual farmers, he had no assurance of provenance or quality. The chocolate industry from bean to bar existed,

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.131135, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.131.

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and continues to exist, in a regulatory void. Steinberg cautioned me not to take on face value the claims of chocolate companies, who either stretched the truth or remained silent when public mistruths beneted them. He felt let down by the very best journalists and authors whose pens had chosen hype instead of substance. If I wanted to learn something real, he told me, I would have to understand the genetic realities that undercut varietal claims and how the impact of growing conditions and every detail of processing from bean to bar inuences terroir. This article is the result of my effort. The key circumstance that obstructs the expression of terroir in chocolate is the distance, both real and conceptual, between the farmer growing cacao and the factory that transforms the cacao into chocolate. In the wine industry the roles of grape farmer, winemaker, and marketer can be lled by a single person, a family unit working together, or an association of collaborating technicians. Vineyards are usually situated in proximity to wineries, and wineries are usually close to markets. The short market chain from grape to wine is well dened and well regulated by both governmental and trade organizations. But chocolate factories in

Europe and North America get their cacao through a market chain that reaches thousands of miles to peasant farmers working in tropical rainforests in the Third World. Distance, duration, and the multiple transfers of property complicate the cacao-to-chocolate chain and sometimes compromise quality. Cacao farmers see their harvest as a cash crop. They want copious, stable yields and waste little time and expense in presale processing. Processing involves splitting open the brightly colored cacao pods and removing the mass of sweet, white pulp and hard, bitter seeds inside. Processors amass the pulp and seeds of many pods in a container, after which fermentation ensues. At the end of fermentation the pulp liquees and drains away. Fermentation denatures the seeds and transforms their chemical compounds into ones that in smell and taste hint of the nished product. Some farmers skip the fermentation process (to the detriment of the nal product) and go straight to the next step, drying the beans. This drying should be done gradually, before the
Below: Workers shell roasted cacao pods at the Nova Moca factory on the island of So Tom.
photograph by claudio corallo

2009

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cacao is bagged and delivered to a merchant. Farmers or initial processors, remote from the chocolate producers, are concerned only with satisfying minimum standards for sale. Furthermore, to get more money for their cacao farmers commonly exaggerate the varietal strain of their cacao.

Chocolate Varietals
I put the word varietal in quotation marks because the conventions for placing cacao plants into varietal categories such as Criollo, Forastero, and Trinitario sharply diverge from the genetic reality that should support these groupings. For wine, the observable traits shared by vines tend to mirror underlying genetic similarities. But the same cannot be said of cacao. Cacao pods sport a variety of colors and surface textures and take on a variety of shapes loosely resembling a childs football. The pods contain sugary white mucilage; buried in this mucilage are a varying number of seeds. The seeds, too, vary in color from white to purple. A single tree of Theobroma cacao (the cacao trees botanical name in genus-species format) produces pods that reach maturity independently of one another. Not only do the pods not look alike, they contain seeds that can differ radically from pod to pod. This is because in typical plantings the pods are genetically different from each other. By contrast, every grape on every bunch of a Vitis vinifera vine variety is genetically identical to every other grape on that vine. (Vitis vinifera is the genus-species botanical name for the family of vine varieties that produce grapes for quality wine production, such as cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, and pinot noir.) Vitis vinifera varieties have hermaphroditic owers. Each ower pollinates itself so easily that it maintains individual genetic identity over time, provided that neither mutation nor natural or induced cross-pollination occurs. Over the centuries grape farmers have selected plants that best serve their needs. They propagate them not by collecting seeds and planting themas cacao farmers did and largely continue to dobut by burying vine canes (year-old shoots) or cuttings. Grape farmers could and can do this because vine canes can self-root. Cacao shoots and cuttings do not easily do so. Although vinegrowers throughout the centuries did not know it, they were using clonal propagation. This process further stabilized genetic strains, allowing for the gradual evolution of clear-cut varietal groupings. Moreover, for the past century grapevine farmers have increasingly planted vineyards dedicated to single varieties. This tendency further stabilized varietal groupings by making cross-pollination even more unlikely. The vinegrower therefore has won control over his vines genetic constitution

though at the cost of creating monocultures that lack genetic diversity and hence are very vulnerable to disease. Modern fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, and sophisticated viticultural techniques help sustain these fragile monocultures. The reason for such chaotic genetic diversity in Theobroma cacao is that most of the strains, particularly those originating in the Upper Amazon region and loosely called Forastero, are self-incompatible. This means that the pollen of a given ower cannot fertilize the stamen of the same ower or that of another ower on that cacao plant. The pollen has to come from another plant. This situation results in substantial genetic diversity. Thus cacao pods on the same plant may not only look very different from each other but may also have different genetic makeups. Some cacao strains, such as the subtly avored Criollo cultivated by ancient Central American civilizations and favored today by many chocolate connoisseurs, are self-compatible, which makes these strains less genetically diverse and hence more susceptible to disease. Because genetic diversity favors greater plant vigor and yield and more resistance to disease, farmers and scientists advocate intermarriage of strains. Even though the rainforest environment fosters greater disease and insect pressure, the patchwork of small, isolated farms of genetically diverse cacao plants, along with minimal use of systemic chemical sprays, allows many small cacao farms to be easily deemed organic. By contrast, to grow vines organically vinegrowers need a combination of favorable growing conditions and sophisticated viticultural techniques. These different conditions mean that the word organic is more often seen on gourmet chocolate bar wrappers than on the labels of quality wines. In 2008 genetic researcher Juan C. Motamayor and colleagues proposed a classication of cacao plants into groups they called clusters based on their degree of genetic similarity.2 The ten genetic clusters proposed Maraon, Curaray, Criollo, Iquitos, Nanay, Contamana, Amelonado, Purs, Nacional, and Guianacould be adopted as the basis for a varietal scheme for labeling cacao. Equating these clusters with varietals would not negate the identication of a subgroup such as Porcelana within the Criollo grouping or variety. However, whether these clusters should become synonymous with varietals is a determination that scientists must make. In all likelihood, it will take decades to accurately organize cacao plants into varieties and subgroups, since any such categorization will require the concerted collaboration of scientists, farmers, merchants, chocolate factories, and governmental organizations. Nevertheless, a scientic basis for the use of varietal labeling in chocolate is badly needed.

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The present situation remains murky. If chocolate producers were to adhere to restrictions regarding the use of varietal groups until such classications were proven scientically valid, they would sacrice the value of all the varietal marketing they have done so far and risk losing the (false) condence of consumers. An analogous situation exists in the world of wine regarding the use of screw caps and corks. Cork has been the traditional closure of choice for quality wine. However, cork seals can alter the avor of wine and sometimes impart musty, avor-destroying smells. Producers around the world, particularly in Europe where consumers are more conservative, have resisted the move to screw caps, even though they are the all-around better closure. However, in 2000 producers in the Clare Valley of South Australia banded together to bottle all their Rieslings in screw caps, and in 2001 New Zealand wine producers adopted the New Zealand Screw-Cap Initiative. Now, 90 to 95 percent of New Zealand wines are under screw caps, and screw-cap use is spreading rapidly throughout the world. Though changing from corks to screw caps is a simple mechanical change compared to the varietal chocolate revolution that I am suggesting, this example shows that traditional marketing messages can be changed relatively quickly, even on an international scale, and even in the very traditional world of wine.

Labeling Cacao
The labeling of raw-material origin is much more accurate and advanced for grapes and wine than it is for cacao and chocolate. Because of the vineyard discrimination that developed in Burgundy during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, place labeling in wine can be as precise as the delineation of a tiny vineyard. For example, RomaneConti, one of the celebrated crus of Burgundy, is a mere 4.445 acres in size. Wine labeling around the world largely honors this tradition. Although there were periods, such as the late nineteenth century, when the Phylloxera louse infestation caused unscrupulous wine producers to print phony place names on labels, twentieth-century wine laws throughout Europe enshrine location of production as a fundamental principle. Working out of younger traditions, wine industries in the United States, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa have established their own regulations regarding place names. At least in terms of accurate geographic labelingthe fundamental information of terroirthe wine industry is a model of responsible marketing. Cacao is different. It has always been sold to merchants according to port of departure, region of production, and

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(more rarely) plantation of origin. Because chocolatiers believed that blends of various cacao origins made more balanced chocolate, and because there was no demand for origin-labeled chocolates, single origin chocolates did not appear until 1984. In that year the French chocolatiers Raymond and Nicole Bonnat issued Mappemonde (Map of the World), a special box containing seven pureorigin chocolates from Puerto Cabello, Chuao, Maragnan, Trinidad, Madagascar, Ceylon, and Ivory Coast. This selection reveals the confusion over how to label chocolates according to origin: Puerto Cabello is a Venezuelan portof-origin chocolate, while Chuao, also from Venezuela, is a plantation chocolate. The Bonnats son Stephane believes that Maragnan was once a small, isolated plantation in Brazil, but today it is loosely considered a varietal chocolate. Trinidad, Madagascar, Ceylon, and Ivory Coast are country-of-origin chocolates. Bonnats use of the word origin was elastic, as was the words overall denition at the time. Clients and chocolate professionals advised Bonnat that single-origin bars would have no future. But in late 1994 Venezuelan chocolate company El Rey began producing a line of bars called Carenero Superior, after a type of cacao sourced from the mountains east of Caracas (Carenero also refers to the port from which the chocolate was shipped). In 1998 Valrhona introduced a single-origin and vintage-dated bar, Gran Couva, its rst Estate Grown or Domaine chocolate labeled with a precise location and harvest year. Gran Couva is a plantation in Trinidad in its fourth generation of family ownership. Valrhona used domaine to describe it, a term from the wine industry referring to an estate that bottles wine from grapes produced on its own property. Because the company headquarters lie at the foot of the famous wine cru Hermitage, Valrhonas intimate connection to the world of wine makes its choice of terminology natural. But what do all these terms mean to the consumer? When purchasing a single-origin chocolate, it is important to read the wrapper closely or consult the producers Web site to decipher the meanings of such labels as Single Origin, Single Bean Origin, Origin, Cru, Grand Cru, Grand Cru de Terroir, Estate Grown, Plantation, 1er Cru, Single Plantation, and Cru Hacienda. There is no ofcial or industry denition of these terms. Thus some chocolate producers ascribe terms like cru and origin to areas as large as a country. This kind of labeling is misleading and could be easily avoided, since cacao sources are typically concentrated in particular areas. For instance, nearly all the cacao from the island of Madagascar comes from the Sambirano Valley. However, Venezuela presents a problem, since there are many regions

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where cacao is grown. Although researchers have identied similar avors in the cacao liquor and country-of-origin chocolates arising from controlled sources in Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad, and Venezuela,3 country-oforigin labeling would have more meaning if the indications of origin and the terms used were more precisely dened.

Preserving Terroir in Chocolate

Location is the starting point for terroir. The smaller and more precisely delimited a chocolates origin is, the more opportunity there is for a producer to express its identity. As in wine production, mans interaction with the raw material, in this case cacao, also shapes the nal product: through the choice of when to harvest, the selection of the best cacao pods and seeds, the controlled fermentation of the sweet mucilage surrounding the seeds, and conching until the chocolates aroma and texture reach the desired point. Here is where cacao processors practice their art. The chemical changes that occur in chocolate during the conching process are still not entirely understood, although the process and sensorial effect appear to mirror the maturation process for red wines, when the bitter, coarse, astringent avors associated with phenolic compounds change into softer ones. A similar change seems to occur during the conching of chocolate. The more control man has over the entire chain of production from plant to product, the better man can preserve terroir. In wine there is a long tradition of the vigneron, who oversees every aspect of wine production from tending the vines, to making the wine, to selling it to merchants or consumers. Something analogous is now taking place in the world of chocolate, where producers are gradually moving closer to the cacao plant, shifting quality control closer to the farmer to gain better control of the raw material. Some companies, such as Pralus and Valrhona, have purchased cacao plantations or groves in the tropics. Others, like the Grenada Chocolate Company and Kallari, are farmers

cooperatives. Grenada Chocolate owns and operates its own chocolate factory, completing the link between farming and production. The company that best approximates the role of a vigneron is Claudio Corallo, a family-owned, plant-tobar producer on the two-island country of So Tom and Prncipe off the coast of West Africa. The excitement and energy such small-scale, artisanal producers bring to the chocolate industry will likely showcase terroir even more. Wine can make itself. If you pick several bunches of grapes and put them in a pail, in two or three days you will have wine. But to make high-quality wine, a wine producer must start out with excellent grapes and move the natural process toward a stable endpoint. If the harvest originates from a particular place, the only way to preserve the sense of that place in the nished wine is for man to intervene as little as possible in the processing. Winemakers have understood this for centuriesif not on paper, then in their hearts and in their wine. Although putting some cacao pods in a barrel will not naturally yield bars of chocolate, starting out with site-specic, quality cacao will yield a bar imbued with terroir if the processing is minimal and sensitive. If the chocolate industry were to engage in some individual and collective introspection and discover real varietal and place distinctions, then tasting terroir in chocolate could become a reality. Anyone for a blind chocolate tasting?g
notes
I wish to express special thanks to Robert Steinberg for putting me on the road to understanding terroir in chocolate. Robert passed away on September 17, 2008. He was generous with his wide knowledge to the end. 1. A physician turned chocolate maker, Steinberg enjoyed a reputation for scientic rigor and forthrightness. 2. Juan C. Motamayor et al., Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree (Theobroma cacao L), available at www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2551746/. 3. See D.A. Sukha and D.R. Butler, Trends in Flavour Proles of the Common Clones for the cfc/icco/iniap Flavour Project, Annual Report 2005 (St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Cocoa Research Unit (cru), University of the West Indies, 2005), 5561.

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design | al len s. weiss

Guinomi

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This past new years eve I participated in my rst tea ceremony, at the Senbon Yenmado tea room in Kyotos Injoji Temple. I must admit that I accepted this generous invitation with much trepidation, since given my almost total ignorance of the Way of Tea, I didnt want to risk troubling the proceedings. Thus, rather than experiencing the sense of peace, harmony, equilibrium, and distance from the cares of the world that one should have when entering a Japanese tearoom, I was lled with anguish. Only my epistemophilia saved me. As I watched the splendid gestural choreography of the tea mistress from the school of Ura Senke, I realized that all I need do was observe others to learn at least the rudiments of the proper gestures. As the superb antique Karatsu bowl was handed to the rst guest, I studied his attitudes, gestures, and reactions, and when the bowl was then passed around for admiration, I offered my best silent appreciation. It is said that it takes over thirty years to learn the profundities of tea. But having calculated that this rst bowl of tea took upwards of ten minutes to be made, drunk, and examined, I felt relievedas the ninth of eleven participants, I would have over an hour to learn enough to offer at least a vague simulacrum of the proper behavior. However, my entire system of self-education soon broke down, for this was but a semiformal tea where the mistress would make only the rst bowl. A host of young assistants immediately entered the room and one by one placed an already prepared bowl in front of each participant. Within thirty seconds a bowl was set before me! Looking around for help, I realized that the person from whom I sought guidance was himself looking elsewhere, and so forth. It turned out that there was only one true tea acionado among us. I acquitted myself rather well, I suppose (nothing broken, nothing spilled), though I learned less about tea than about the differences between observation and participation, the formal and the informal, the ritualistic and the quotidian. In any case, Im a wine drinker rather than a tea drinker, and as I sipped on a cup of sake later that evening, I relished the relative casualness. While there are an estimated
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.136142, issn 1529-3262.

ten million practitioners of tea worldwide, there are many, many more sake drinkers. Yet tea has been the subject of endless commentary, aesthetic and otherwise, while the study of sake drinking has basically remained the domain of sociology. I would thus like to offer a few reections. In the West, wine drinking is a transparent affair. The enthusiast well knows that in order to appreciate the color of the wine, the only acceptable glass is one of absolutely clear crystal. The purist will even frown upon the nest cut glass, as the added sparkle denatures the visual experience. That is why drinking from the rarest vessel, be it a Tiffany Favrile oriform goblet or a Gall cameo glass beaker, a silver chalice or the Holy Grail itself, is oenologically superuous, even counterproductive. Such beautiful glasses are too fragile, too rare, too decorative. Their particular beauty detracts from that of the wine, such that their use is pure ostentation. In Japan, the opposite is true, for it is that countrys wine, sake, that is crystal clear,1 giving center stage to Japanese drinking vessels, most notably the traditional pottery sake cup guinomi, and the smaller shot cup, choko. The guinomi shares most of its aesthetic characteristics with its larger and more famous counterpart, the chawan (bowl) of the tea ceremony. The fundamentals of tea, couched in a centuries-old system of highly codied, almost choreographed, Zen-inspired ritual, are harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility (wa-kei-sei-jaku), which guide all considerations of beauty. These are codied according to three central notions: wabi (tranquility, unobtrusiveness, humbleness, asymmetrical harmony, elegant rusticity), sabi (patination by age and use), and shibui (incompleteness, imperfection, understatement, restraint, rened simplicity, noble austerity). The tea ceremony fundamentally seeks a state of mind guided by these factors and circumscribed by centuries of ritualized gesture.2 Since Zen Buddhism is at the core of Japanese culture, and since tea is one of the ceremonial keys to Zen, the tea bowl is at the height of the Japanese aesthetic hierarchy, making it an object of the utmost prestige.3

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2010 by allen s. weiss.

Though the guinomi is often referred to as a mini-chawan, its use is neither codied nor ritualized, governed not by arcane ritual rened over centuries but by the commonplace rules of quotidian etiquette and politesse. Removed from the aesthetic expectations demanded by the tea ceremony, the guinomi is less bound to tradition and thus more amenable to experimentation. In behavioral and gestural terms, sake drinking is a secular activity circumscribed by the contingencies of the gastronomic context. One might add that the intoxicating effects of sake are most certainly deritualizing, to say the least. The guinomi exists as an individual entity (and not as a type, as is most often the case for Western wine glasses), which makes all the more unfortunate the recent trend of serving sake in Westernstyle colored crystal shot glasses. Pottery sake cups share all the aesthetic principles of the tea bowl, though to different effect. While the value of a tea bowl is in part determined by the manner in which it highlights the color and texture of the frothy, light green, powdered tea particular to the ceremony (thus limiting the acceptable chromatic spectrum), the colorless transparency of sakepermitting all forms, motifs, and colorsmakes of it the ideal liquid to reveal the beauty of the cup itself. The chawan is best admired empty; the guinomi is most intriguing half full. Are we not at the center of a Zen paradox, where the same aesthetic reveres both the opaque and the transparent, the brightly tinted and the colorless, the stimulating and the intoxicating, plenitude and the void?4

Above, Left to Right: Shimizu Yasutaka (Kyoto) 1.5" h x 2.25" w x 2.25" d; Koie Ryoji (Shino) 2.38" h x 3.25" w x 3.25" d; Kimura Nobuyuki (Kyoto) 2.25" h x 2.38" w x 2.38" d.
photograph by sylvia lachter

2009

Certain philosophers would insist that to fully grasp any single object, one must know the entire universe. This holistic approach is central to Japanese aesthetics, where each and every art form shares certain central principles, most notably a strong link to the seasons. Each season, divided into several equal parts for added renement, is gured by highly coded norms of motif, color, and form, often expressed in the most subtle allusions, metaphors, and correspondences. To begin with a guinomi in the palm of ones hand and end up imagining a garden, poem, or painting reveals the richness inherent in Japanese aesthetics.5 Yet the most immediate context in which to grasp (guratively and literally) the guinomi, which is, after all, a drinking vessel, is that of gastronomy, the art of the table. While table settings in the West tend to consist of matched sets of identical dishes, Japanese cuisine valorizes unmatched ensembles chosen not only to celebrate the beauty and rarity of individual objects, but also according to numerous ambient exigencies: the complexities of seasonal cuisine (where many foods are traditionally matched to specic forms of pottery); the unique decor of the restaurant (including woodworking, painting, calligraphy, ikebana ower arrangements, kimono fabric patterns); the seasonal state of the local and regional landscape.

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Japanese cuisine reached its peak in the kaiseki meal, which was originally part of the tea ceremony, and which consequently evolved into the haute cuisine of Kyoto. Kaiseki is a multicourse meal whose complexity, always attuned to the locale and season, offers a microcosm of Japanese cuisine. It will typically include dishes representing all styles of cooking (boiled, braised, sauted, fried, grilled, steamed), all modalities of rawness (simpliciter, dried, smoked, salted, sugared), and all sources of food (mountain, eld, ocean). As in all Japanese art, such meals take part in a complex representational matrix, suggesting the landscape, season, climate, and even time of day by a subtle yet codied set of analogies and juxtapositions. The perfection of each element (food, sake, pottery, etc.) is made even more complex by the dynamic and nonhierarchical relationships among the varied elements. This culinary aesthetic is manifested, in a highly condensed version, in the Japanese lunchbox (bento), which in its most sophisticated examples features kaiseki cuisine. The holistic-cosmological symbolism of the bento is evident in its form, as is attested to by the shokado lunchbox, whose square shape with four equal compartments approximates the Chinese ideogram for the rice paddy, the core of Japanese agriculture. Sometimes the representational allusions are purely metaphorical, sometimes literal, as in the sashimi served in the Kyoto restaurant Karyo-an one evening in December 2007, which arrived in the form of a winter landscape, igloo and all. The guinomi is an integral part of such culinary scenography; ideally, each is chosen to function within such wonderfully complex sets of elements.6 This sense of microcosm, of aesthetic condensation, is perhaps best expressed by Hannyabo Tessen, an early

chief priest of Ryoan-ji, who, in a remark that stresses the essential intertwining of representation, miniaturization, and abstraction in the Zen garden, claimed that Thirty thousand leagues should be compressed into a single foot.7 This passion for the diminutive is typical of Zeninspired aesthetics, where the cosmos can be compressed into the form of a small garden, the garden reduced to the disposition of food on a plate, and the plated landscape represented by the patterns on a guinomi, whose constituent features derive from the macrocosmic ve elements of the Shinto and Buddhist cosmos: re (kiln), wood (ash), earth (clay), metal (glazes), and water. Representation implies both abstraction and metaphorization, such that the profundity of metaphor depends upon both the specic beauty of each of the terms and the vast range of qualities that simultaneously link and separate the termsjust as the qualities of each morsel on a plate are enriched by its relation to adjacent foodstuffs. That said, the appreciation of the guinomi must begin not in metaphor, but with its uniqueness as an object. It might seem superuous to stress that the guinomi has a front, back, lip, interior, and foot. But since the particularities of Japanese aesthetics, especially in relation to pottery, diverge greatly from Western forms of connoisseurship, these terms take on different signicance in each context. If the conventions of aesthetic judgment are different in the West and in Japan, so too are protocols of etiquette. In the West, it is generally considered ill-mannered to turn over the dinner plates in order to investigate their mark of origin, and to refrain from commenting on the table setting is in many circles considered a mark of renement. In the tea ceremony, to the contrary, close observation is part of

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the ritual, and to neglect to do so would be disrespectful. Politeness demands detailed, prolix examination and praise, not silent appreciation. Every aspect of the chawan must be observed and commented on, and contrary to most Western pottery, the foot (kodai) and the interior (mikomi, pool) are essential. Thus, while a strictly formalized procedure does not exist for examining and appreciating guinomi, in fact the experience is not unlike that of examining a chawan, though without the ritual. Such heightened attention spans the difference between the functional and the aesthetic, bringing connoisseurship into the everyday realm. One nds, for example, that the front and back of a guinomi are often equivocal, variously determined by visual cues, by a curve or thickness appropriate for the placement of the lip, or by the very form of the piece; that the stonelike inertness of pottery is often made dynamic by an inner spiral that forms a veritable whirlpool, or through glaze drippings that suggest continual melting; that the formal features of the interior are transformed by the mobile yet transparent presence of the sake, with its shift from horizontal surface at rest to diagonal ows and eddies, as well as by its slightly refracting optical quality. The aesthetics of tea bowls and sake cups demands total visibility. If we wished to reduce visibility to its rhetorical dimension, it might be said that in the West the perception of an object depends upon a unique perspective (a sort of synecdoche, where the whole is intuited from a single view), while the Japanese tea aesthetic demands panopticism and even pansensorialism, of the sort only available through manipulation of the object. These different epistemological and ontological protocols result in the fact that while much Western pottery bears only one surface meant

Above: Jeff Shapiro (usa) 1.75" h x 2.25" w x 2.5" d. Above, Far Left: Suehiro Manabu (Bizen) 2.2" h x 2.0" w x 2.0" d.
photographs by sylvia lachter

2009

to be primarily visible, most Japanese pottery is created to be seen from every possible angle. Furthermore, tactility is of the essence, a fact well expressed in Cees Nootebooms novel Rituals, where one of the characters obtains an extraordinarily precious tea bowl by a potter of the famed Raku dynasty, only to ultimately smash it to smithereens and commit suicide in an immaculately decorated all-white room destined for this event. As he rst handles the bowl in an antiques shop, he explains to the protagonist: There are also rules about the shape, all of which were drawn up by Rikyu, how the bowl should feel when you hold it, its balance, the way it feels to the lipand of course the temperature. The tea must not feel too hot or too cold to your hand when you hold it, but exactly as you would like to drink it.8 The curiosity of a work of art whose appreciation is in part determined not just by touch, already rare in the West, but by the caress of the lip, is striking. The great specialist of Japanese folk art, Soetsu Yanagi (one of the founders of the early twentieth-century Mingei folk art movement), speaks of the beauty of intimacy, exemplied by the fact that tea masters embraced the shape and kissed the thickness of the chawan.9 Such intimate tactility suggests a dimension of Japanese aesthetics most distant from Western art appreciation. For after all, how many works of art in the Western canon really need to be licked in order to be appreciated!? The main tenets of tea aesthetics (wabi, sabi, shibui) articulate pottery connoisseurship, privileging certain types of material effects and representational forms, guiding both

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the hand of the potter and the eye of the collector. A high point of Japanese pottery connoisseurship is the appreciation of materiality, of the varied clays, glazes, slips, and ash that are responsible for the myriad of effects and styles. Emblematic of this passion for materials is the particular importance of the favored technique of leaving exposed small areas of undecorated clay to reveal the clay avor (tsuchi-aji) of the work. Yet beyond the many conscious manners of treating the clayspinning, molding, throwing, carving, cutting, incising, texturing, inlaying, impressing, dipping, dripping, trailing, glazing, underglazing, overglazingare those accidental features so cherished in Zen-inspired art, a perfection of the imperfect inherent in effects particular to the art of pottery, such as nger impressions, spur marks or shell imprints from stacking, scratch marks, ash deposits, ring cracks, glaze crackling, fusings from adjacent pottery, scorch and re ash marks, breaks caused by tooling, glaze drippage, running slips.10 Aleatory and partially indeterminable ring effects are of the essence, and certain subsequent damages, even occuring after centuries of use, are often considered to be aesthetic (and not merely contingent) effects. This is stressed by the fact that repairs on Japanese pottery are customarily not made with the invisible mends required by Western restorers, but rather with a lling of urushi lacquer mixed with 23k gold dust, so as to highlight the crack. A breakage may even, in some instances, increase the value of a piece. Matter is indissociable from form. Semiology has taught us that every trace of human activity is a gesture, a sign, a symbol. Perhaps nowhere is this taken to such an extreme as in the experience of Japanese pottery, where manifestations of materiality, chance, and symbolism are inextricably intertwined, as when a spontaneous, unintended crack reveals the interior of the clay, or suggests a kana (syllable) or kanji (ideogram), or even a landscape

Above: Sato Satoshi (Kyoto) 1.5" h x 3.5" w x 3.5" d.

photographs by sylvia lachter

2009

feature, parallel to what poet Gary Snyder suggests in a beautiful metaphor, the gleaming calligraphy of the ancient riverbeds.11 The crack (or any other surface feature) may be experienced on the empirical level, for what it explains about the materials and mode of production; or in relation to formal properties within an aesthetic context; or as a representational sign; or it may even be a manifestation of a Zen revelation. Pottery runs the gamut from simplicity to complexity, regularity to irregularity, and all combinations thereof, and each instance bears its own representational and symbolic possibilities. Guinomi are produced by practically every one of the over one hundred major kilns (and over fty thousand minor ones) in Japan, utilizing almost every possible technique, in traditional, folk, and experimental styles, ranging from the purely decorative and abstract through such stylizations as sharkskin, oilspot, hares fur, and sesame spot glazes, to full-blown guration and calligraphy done in underglaze or overglaze painting. Following the tea aesthetic, many connoisseurs prefer works from those kilns (such as Bizen, Hagi, Shino, Karatsu, Iga, Shigaraki) that emphasize the more or less aleatory effects caused by natural ash glaze, undecorated mineral glaze, or re on unglazed surfaces, where guration, if any, exists in the form of the most subtle similitudes. Though the guration and symbolism in individual cases may occasionally seem either overly simplistic or unduly remote to the outsider, it must not be forgotten that the representational value of a piece, which exists in a complex aesthetic web, is but one aspect of its existence. Given the potential richness of something as primary as the ssure, perhaps the zero-degree image, it is clear that

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Zen-inspired representation is a dynamic system oscillating between abstraction and guration. The representational value of pottery depends on factors spanning the entire period from production to use: the potters work in conceiving and creating each piece within a specic tradition and an individual style; the kiln effects that are partially planned and partially aleatory; the potters choice of which pieces are worthy of display after having survived the generative violence of the ames; the collectors vision which, through the arcana of connoisseurship, recontextualizes the work by positioning it in both everyday experience and in the never-ending history of pottery, with all the complexities of changing taste, temporary fads, aesthetic revisionism, international inuences, etc. It is the collectors vision that in great part determines the destiny of a chawan or guinomi, especially in regard to the ineluctable seasonal symbolism. Pottery specialist and collector Robert Lee Yellin describes the many surface effects that create the landscape (keshiki) of a piece: Keshiki involves how the glaze ows, stops and pools, the color of the clay, the creating process, or how kiln occurrences play out on the surface.12 Not only is there an aesthetic imperative to view certain traces within a representational framework, but many pieces are even named according to such resemblances, for example the celebrated Fujisan (one of eight chawan designated as national treasures) created by the legendary potter Koetsu Honami (15581637), where a subtle effect of slip and ash vaguely resembles Mount Fuji. Precisely this vagueness is the key to such a representational sensibility, exemplied by the perennial Japanese fascination with images raried by fog and mist, smoke and shadow. One might go so far to say that Zen aesthetics is exemplied by the attenuation of the literal by the indistinct, the shadowy, the obscure, the hazy. For some contemporary examples, consider the names given by Yellin to several of the guinomi in his collection: The Cup of Humanity, named for a small crack in the form of the Japanese character for person; The Grand Canyon, so called because its colors reveal those of the canyon walls at sunset; The Lizard Spirit Cup, describing a shape on the interior suggesting that of a dead lizard.13 The name or image of a piece, however abstruse, will often have a bearing on the choice of time of day and season in which it will be exhibited or used. The representational value of pottery lls the entire spectrum from abstraction to guration, and each object must be considered according to the specics of both its surface and its three-dimensional form. Japanese conventions of viewing pottery are quite different from those in the West (where pottery is still for the most part deemed craft) and are made even more com-

notes
1. While there exist sparkling sakes, unltered sakes of milky opacity, and even red sakes colored by a particular strain of rice, they constitute a small minority. 2. For a primer on the aesthetics of Japanese pottery, see Allen S. Weiss, Guinomi, Cabinet 30 (2008), 710, from which part of the present article is derived. 3. An excellent introduction to Zen art is Stephen Addiss, The Art of Zen (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989). 4. Among the most informative sources in English on contemporary Japanese pottery, including many examples of guinomi and chawan, is Anneliese Crueger, Wulf Crueger, and Saeko It, Modern Japanese Ceramics: Pathways of Innovation & Tradition (New York: Sterling Publishing/A Lark Ceramics Book, 2004). 5. For excellent introductions to the Zen garden, see David A. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987); and Guenther Nitschke, The Architecture of the Japanese Garden: Right Angle and Natural Form (Cologne: Taschen, 1991).

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plex by the profound interconnectedness of all the arts in Japanese culture.14 While there are viewing protocols and modes of connoisseurship specic to pottery, pottery also shares, to differing degrees, viewing conventions from the other arts: painting, calligraphy, sculpture, cuisine, gardens. Although the guinomi may be appreciated as a sculptural object in itself, it often serves as a surface for painting and calligraphy: irregularities enhance guration, curvature suggests depth, play of light evokes motion. The guinomi may reverberate with landscape allusions (both seasonal and thematic), thus playing a central role in the arts of the table by articulating food and drink, pottery and decor, ikebana and landscape. A discussion of all the possible contexts for appreciating guinomi would ll an entire book, so a single emblematic example related to landscape must here sufce. While determinate, central, guiding perspectives constitute a major design feature of most gardens, they do not necessarily imply the primacy of a single xed viewpoint, from which the garden would appear as a picture. In the Zeninspired garden there exist controlled views, framed views, partial views, multiple views, counter views, hidden views, and, most famously of all, borrowed views (shakkei), which have entered garden design the world over. The borrowed or captured view is a manner of relating proximate and distant space, created by opening up a foreground or middle-ground perspective such that the distant landscape is precisely framed, and consequently integrated into the garden. In a greatly reduced sense, the guinomi landscape may exhibit such a borrowed view every time it is examined or drunk from. As the cup is raised, its lip serves as the horizon that links the proximate scene on the front to the distant landscapebeyond the lake of sakewithin. That the sake is transformed into a cascade as the elbow is bent and the guinomi is tilted is rarely an unwelcome effect.g

6. See Kenji Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (Cambridge, ma: The mit Press, 1998). A superb volume on Japanese food presentation and its relation to pottery is Yoshio Tsuchiya, The Fine Art of Japanese Food Arrangement (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002); for more avant-garde possibilities, see Hisayuki Tekeuchi, Nouvelle Cuisine Japonaise (Paris: Agns Vinot, 2003). 7. Teiji Itoh, Space and Illusion in the Japanese Garden (New York, Toyko and Kyoto: Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1973), 73. 8. Cees Nooteboom, Rituals, trans. Adrienne Dixon (1980; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 134135. The gesture of smashing the invaluable tea bowl might be considered as an ironic statement on the Japanese passion for the aleatory effects of breakage, but this would probably constitute overinterpretation. 9. Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman, adapted by Bernard Leach (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972), 193. 10. An excellent introduction to the material and technical aspects of Japanese ceramics is Herbert H. Sanders with Kenkichi Tomimoto, The World of Japanese Ceramics (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967). 11. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 17.

12. For a detailed illustrated list of such effects, see Robert Lee Yellin, Keshiki: Ceramic Landscapes, on his extremely informative Web site, e-yakimono.net. Given the types of effects and degree of metaphorization at stake, it would seem that the Gestalt theory of perception, especially where it deals with issues of pattern recognition in the hands of an art historian such as Ernst Gombrich, might serve as an extremely useful tool for the study of pottery. 13. Robert Lee Yellin, Ode to Japanese Pottery (Tokyo: Coherence, 2004); this is one of the rare texts in English devoted to guinomi and tokkuri (sake asks). 14. We are currently in the midst of a major museological shift, in great part affected by the dissolution of hierarchies motivated by the discourse of postmodernism, where the distinction between art and craft has been considerably lessened, if not totally abolished. The result is that many museums, exemplied by the Muse dOrsay in Paris, now exhibit craft and art side by side, to the great benet of both. This innovation in Western aesthetics, which has greatly beneted the arts of the table, should help in our appreciation of Japanese art, where the line between art and craft has been drawn very differently, and with radically different consequences.

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chefs page | bill yosses

Executive Pastry Chef

Washington, D.C.

When i first began visiting france, I was amazed at the quality of the produce, especially at Rungis, the large food market outside of Paris. The chef I worked for at La Foux dAllose, in the sixth arrondissement, was a man of Rabelaisian dimensions and appetites, and working for him changed me forever. Each day Alex Guini would meet me in front of the restaurant at 3:00 a.m., and we would drive his little Renault deux-chevaux to the market to buy provisions. The pavilions at Rungis are the size of airplane hangars and are lled with the best products Europe has to offer, from Spain, Germany, Italy, and beyond. Several acres of primeursfruits and vegetablesare displayed like jewels; the purveyors eye each new customer suspiciously.

Above: Pastry chef Bill Yosses puts the nishing touches on a cake for the Fourth of July celebration at the White House, July 2008.
photograph by chris greenberg

2008

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In Rungis there is almost no hawking or yelling as in the street markets of Paris, where brash female stall keepers cry out Buy my raspberries loudly enough to break your eardrums. For them, purchasing the berries is not a suggestion; its an order. But in Rungis everything is mute, and the signs are illegible to outsiders. Most buyers have frequented the same stands for years, and the merchants participate in a charade that goes something like this: I have saved the best for you, dear buyer. Of course I am cutting my own throat with this price, but since we are friends Each day,

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.143144, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.143.

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after a little half-hearted haggling, Alex and I would transfer cases of fruits and vegetables to his deux-chevaux. I have since witnessed the same scene in many markets around the world: the Fulton Fish Market in New York, Tsukiji in Tokyo, Munichs Grossmarkthalle, even the glorious retail market, Pecks, in Milan, where the staff seem more like accomplices than salespeople. The sort of secret family of people involved in food, from farmer to chef, is deeply satisfying to me. We all recognize how hard everyone works in this competitive business and give each other credit for our laborseven if we dont always give a discount. I am lucky to have started cooking in Paris, and especially to have found the purveyors of Rungis. Now, thirty years after my rst visit to France, I am gratied that farmers markets in the United States are beginning to offer a similar level of quality. Recently I witnessed the establishment of a farmers market in Westport, Connecticut, by Michel Nischan, an eloquent spokesman for sustainability. His market, which follows the French model, was an instant success. It struck me that its only tting to fashion our markets after those that have existed in France for centuries after all, much of Americas founding philosophy comes from the exchange of ideas between the lumires of France and our own rst statesmen, especially Thomas Jefferson. On a recent visit to Jeffersons estate, Monticello, I was amazed to discover that most of the vegetables in the thousand-foot garden there derive from our third presidents own heirloom seed stock. Peter Hatch is the affable gardener who has cultivated this garden for the past thirty-two years. He likes to quote Jeffersons prescription for healthy eating, which hardly differs from what we counsel today: I have lived temperately eating little animal food and that, not as an aliment so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet. Jeffersons concern for gastronomy is well documented. In seeking a maitre d he considered the indispensable qualications to be honesty and skill in making the dessert. For his chef he chose his slave James Hemings (the brother of his mistress, Sally Hemings) and sent him to Paris to study cooking. Hemings eventually became Jeffersons chef at his residence on the Champs Elyses, and later at Monticello. I like to think about Jeffersons attention to his kitchen and garden and remember that American cuisine, with its bounty of tomatoes, potatoes, chestnuts, and corn, was not always reliant on convenience and processed foods. I am thrilled to be in the food business at this point in history when American palates are returning to elemental tastes and good food.

It is a special privilege to make desserts at the White House. I am proud that the rst family has chosen healthy and locally sourced ingredients for their meals. Desserts can be healthy, I am convinced, if they are made with quality ingredients and served in judicious portions. I use less sugar and butter than I used to, and I often replace some sugar with honey, or add herbs as an interesting counterpart. Peaches and lemon verbena are one of my favorite combinations these days. When avors are robust and layered, people dont miss the sugar, because there are other elements to satisfy their taste buds. I often replace some butter with a good oil like grapeseed, olive, or argan, which carry less saturated fat and have their own important nutrients. The kinds of desserts I make at the White House are the traditional American favorites like pies, cobblers, and crumbles, prepared with whatever fruits are in season. These are the desserts I grew up with, and they satisfy my American palate. But after baking for so many years, I am able to understand traditional recipes and adjust them toward a healthier nished product. This past summers bumper crops of peaches, cherries, nectarines, and plums were a joy to bake with. My years of cooking in France got me started as a chef; and it was in France that I rst enjoyed the conversations around food that make dining so much more than just a meal. I love to recall past meals and think about their contexts. Exploring the past also helps me prepare menus with specic themes, as we must do for all large group events at the White House. I work hard to coordinate the many different parts of the mealthe owers, invitations, decorations, and table settingsto create a beautifully orchestrated moment that reects my interest in balance as well as the experience of eating. Taste and texture are important, but temperature and environment are factors, too. Some contemporary chefs use lighting to change the color of the walls with each course in order to inuence the guests pleasure. We havent tried that at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but why not? Our national conversation about food has been going on for hundreds of years. Now, more than ever, it is important that we make good choices for ourselves and our children. The First Ladys example of a vegetable garden on the South Lawn has reverberated around the world and inspired many home gardens. What a terric time to be a chef at the White House! I am proud to be part of a country that is now showing deep respect for nature and its innite diversity, and I am hopeful that our attitudes and actions will continue to celebrate the spirit of Thomas Jefferson.g

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review essay | joanne mol ina

Aesthetics and Alchemy in the Contemporary Kitchen

Alinea Grant Achatz, with essays by Nick Kokonas, Mark McClusky, Michael Nagrant, Michael Ruhlman, and Jeffrey Steingarten
Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008 416 pp. Illustrations. $50.00 (cloth)

Any food that is not eaten in its raw, natural state requires the alteration of its molecular structure by a cook, as in the roasting of goat (re), the boiling of herbs (water), or the curing of ham (air and salt). In On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen Harold McGee writes, Foods are mostly built out of just four kinds of moleculeswater, proteins, carbohydrates and fats. And their behavior can be described by just a few basic principles.1 The explicit manipulation of food by means of elemental properties is fundamental to its most basic preparation, whether were talking about chefs inspired by the cuisine at El Bulli, familiar dishes recreated with empirical zeal by Alton Brown, or a mothers home cooking. This molecular manipulation can also be witnessed in recipes that are geared primarily toward visual stimulation and pleasure. In the fourteenth century a recipe in the Secretum Philosophorum turned water into wine by soaking bread in red wine, drying it, and then immersing the bread in water.2 Melitta Weiss Adamsons Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays also speaks to the mutability of substance and form by illuminating a diverse and expansive history of trickery in the kitchen based on practical jokesoften derived from treatises on magic, chemistry, and warfare.3 She mentions Penn & Tellers How to Play with Your Food, which cites numerous precedents in culinary tomfoolery. This sort of culinary trickery was widely practiced much, much earlier and includes their own Swedish Lemon Angel cookies, in which lemon juice and baking soda combine to create an unexpected avalanche of lemon-egg foam mixture.4 As the research of Harold McGee and others has shown, even the culinary trick of

imitating snow by creating a basic egg foam has a long and diverse history.5 All of these transformative practices in the kitchen relate back to alchemy, that medieval art of transforming something common into something special by a transmutation that appears inexplicable and mysterious. Alchemy was intimately connected with art, literature, science, and philosophy; its virtue and legacy lie in its multidimensional aims, its ability to connect a variety of disciplines that goes beyond the transmutation of properties as a mere parlor trickmanipulation for manipulations sakefor purely practical results. The practitioner reads and interprets the visual elements to nd their metaphysical or philosophical basis that was previously unknown or concealed. Thus alchemical texts were written primarily in a symbolic code that relied largely on interpretation, as opposed to a mere translation or duplication of rote knowledge. The secrecy surrounding the processes involving these materials and any grander, metaphysical aims was maintained by means of visual codes. As Alexander Roob discusses in his richly illuminated book Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet, the chemist J.C. Barchusens Elementa Chemicae constituted a series of more than seventy-ve engravings intended to explain how to create the Philosophers Stone (gold): Normal gold is represented by a lion; a dragon represents mercury; a descending bird indicates the distillation of mercury; the activity of work is represented by a dove; and a mysterious black material is represented by a toad.6 Many of these same alchemical recipes were also used to create the actual pigments used by artists. In Promethean Ambition William R. Newman reminds us, Alchemy had long preserved the very recipes for pigments that were the daily bread of those who composed their own painting media.7 It is no coincidence that representations of alchemy in art, such as medieval Austrian court painter Jehan Perreals The Alchemist Talking with Nature (1516), should illustrate Nature advis[ing] the aimlessly wandering

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.145148, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.145.

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alchemist to leave the narrow circle of mechanical laboratory chymystry.8 To the alchemist, the laboratory was a scene for combining and purifying elements that would elevate the human experience. In the legend of the elixir of life, for example, the libation was believed to have the power to reveal truth or wisdom to the one who produced and consumed it. In the sixteenth century this belief led alchemists to create aurum potabile, drinkable gold, as well as a liqueur called Royal Usquebaugh, a saffron-colored spicy liqueur containing actual ecks of gold leaf.9 Given the need to heat, liquefy, cure, distill, and vaporize herbs, spices, grains, meat, and dairy products in the medieval

Above: Miniature painting by Jehan Perral, painter at the court of Margaretha of Austria, 1516.
from alexander roob, alchemy and mysticism: the hermetic museum (los angeles: taschen, 2003), p.154.

kitchen, the use of the mortar and pestle, crucible, alembic, retort, and sand bath were not uncommon. What distinguishes alchemy from a mere manipulation of molecules is the ability of the manipulator to see beyond the realm of the visible and understand the potential and meaning of elements beyond their immediate use and comprehension. Suggesting that alchemy is a process of discerning, clarication, and purication, Roob begins his

volume with a quote from Democritus (also attributed to Bolos of Mendes) from Physica et mystica: It will be apparent that it is difcult to discern which properties each thing possesses in reality.10 The pre-Socratics used the elements of earth, re, air, and water to explain the essential components of the natural world and to answer, in part, the philosophical question, What is? But deciphering the metaphysical qualities of these four elements involved observing their effect on each other and on other materials found in the natural world. Roob explains how Aristotle, in attempting to understand the transmutation of elements, added the idea of a prima materia that would combine with the four qualities of dryness, coldness, moisture and heat, thus developing the four elementsaccordingly, the work of the alchemist lies only in the rotation of the elements.11 This rotation of preexisting elements is, ultimately, the sole tool a chef has at his or her disposal. And so, with the publication of his book, Alinea, chef Grant Achatzs approach to cuisine becomes visibly aligned with the aesthetic project of alchemy. The alinea, a medieval typesetters symbol suggesting the beginning of a new idea or thought, is certainly an obvious metaphor for the contents of the book. Within its pages Achatzs interpreters and interlocutors attempt to translate the codes of his cuisine, the symbols that designate his new ideas and experiences. In owner Nick Kokonass aptly titled section How to Use This Book he writes: here is a way to approach food, to think about life, to evoke an idea. The experience is singularly yours. Enjoy it as you make it your own (p.37). Fully in the alchemistic tradition, and using food as his prima material, Achatz has deliberately created vehicles for interpreting and understanding his cuisine (p.27). By means of eGullet and now the Alinea Mosaic, a Web-based experiment that is experimental, uncontrolled and ever changing (p.49), he has carefully documented his process, not for the sake of duplication, but for the edication of those who take the food arts seriously. As he writes in Alinea, What you hold in your hands is our interpretation of [the dining experience] in book formBy intent, we left much open to interpretation (p.49). This approach makes sense, given the fact that even Achatzs process is rooted in a deliberate form of creativity that could yield an unforeseen outcome. To explain this thought process he considers what ingredient, what manipulation, and how many permutations. The equation becomes more complicated, and usually takes a few wrong turns, before we nd the answer. But it all boils down to the same logical process that can only be identied in hindsight (p.28).

The volume resembles an alchemical text in its ambition and idiosyncrasy. Like many cookbooks, it comes with glossaries of equipment (ranging from everyday tools like a spice grinder to Pacojets and an Antigriddle) and of ingredients (from the Asian staple, agar, to the Pure-Cote b790). With their postmodern bent these lists of ingredients and utensils might appear to fashion the volume as more of a scientic manual. But thats not the case at all. The information is not presented simply to enable others to duplicate Achatzs cuisine, using mechanization for mass production; that is not part of his project. Instead, he guides us through a process that melds science with the rigor of constant and voracious practice and application: experimentation, not just technological innovation. After explaining to readers how he used Achatzs Hot Potato, Cold Potato, Black Trufe, Parmesan recipe to inspire his own home-friendly version of the same, Kokonas writes, Experiment rst and worry about the technology later is a primary rule of the Alinea kitchen, and it should be yours as well (p.38). The spirit of experimentation, the foundation for the singularity of each dish and dining experience, is best explored by Achatz in the avenues and approaches we use to conceptualize dishes (p.28). Instead of just thinking about the chemical components of each item, he is equally committed to nature (where food comes from and how it arrives, and how the essence of an ingredient can be understood by pairing it ironically with other ingredients) and art (how the form of food is mimicked and experienced on the plate). These notes introduce the reader into a complex world with its own language and imagery; the goal is not instruction, but interpretation. In his essay, Experiencing Alinea, Jeffrey Steingarten is quick to note that in his culinary experiments Achatz eschews the smoke-and-mirrors tricks of a magician. His reversals are more considered than clever. Describing a spherical egg yolk injected with avor, Steingarten notes, Grant has left the old calcium chloride/sodium citrate spherication trick in the dust (p.8). Although he likens Achatzs cuisine to a spiritual experience, Steingarten doesnt fetishize the chefs technique but, rather, explores the philosophical underpinnings of his work (p.8). Mark McClusky, products editor at Wired magazine, begins his essay by offering a dialogue with Achatz about parsley sauce. To make his own version of the sauce McClusky would take parsley and pure it with olive oil, let it sit for awhile to infuse the color and avor of the herb into the oil, and then strain it. Grant smiled. Then youd have parsley oil. It will taste like parsley and oil (pp.1516). Achatz wants something that tastes like the herb without losing the visual

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and textural dynamics of a sauce. So he cook[s] the parsley, season[s] it, run[s] it through a blender, and then thicken[s] the liquid with a modied food starch called Ultra-Tex 3, which imparts the same viscosity as oil (p.16). To retain the herbs essential avor Achatz had to add a manipulated version of starch to make a sauce pleasurable in both texture and form. McClusky also points to Achatzs deft use of hydrocolloids. At Alinea, spheres of butter that have been spiked with additional calcium are bathed in a sodium alginate solution until a gel forms on the outside. Then the spheres are heated, melting the butter in the center and served with cake (p.17). Extracts from red algae are manipulated to create an aesthetic moment. As McClusky writes, The effect for the diner, who breaks what looks like an egg yolk of molded butter over the cake, is magical (p.17). But magic should not be confused with fantasy or novelty. Kokonas writes, We challenge our guests to think and reect on the meal even while it is happening[m]ost restaurants seek to help their guests momentarily escape from engagement. We insist on the opposite (p.37). Michael Ruhlman captures the essence of Achatzs project as aesthetic when he states, [A]rt is something else. It entertains, it provokes, it makes you think, and it can change the way you view the world (p.4). Indeed, because aesthetic experience is not only about beauty, but about something sublime something that lifts one out of ones selfRuhlman really gets to the heart of Achatzs cuisine: And so it is to my own surprise that I nd myself using those very words of art to describe a meal at Alinea. How many chefs intend to make a diner feel uncomfortable? (p.4). The aesthetic experience of Achatzs cuisine ultimately becomes sublime in the eighteenth-century sense, in that as the act of dining lifts both the amateur and the expert out of a familiar zone, forcing them to reevaluate the very experience of eating. As Steingarten asserts, Grant is like a painter whose palette includes every color and every avor in the world, every avor in the mind. I think Im getting overwrought (p.13). He points to the ways in which Achatz uses familiar ingredients, dishes, and vapors in deliberately unfamiliar fashion to evoke and perhaps challenge the basic ways in which the diner evaluates his food (memories, tastes, forms). A course consisting of a peeled grape dipped into tempered home-

made peanut butter and wrapped in a micro-thin sheet of bread toasted with a heat gun is unfamiliar. Or is it? Its more banal manifestation is actually a staple, often tied to strong childhood emotions: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Reaching for affect beyond the scope of novelty, Achatzs contemporary alchemy in the kitchen reects the power of emotion, chemistry, and a philosophical need to reorient our relationship with food. As part of a lineage that includes sous vide practitioner Bruno Goussault and mentor and French Laundry proprietor Thomas Keller, Achatz is well versed in the idea of the new. But in some ways he is part of a much older historical tradition, one that uses the manipulation of foods essential properties to yield a better and more profound understanding of both the dining experience and the food. To see Achatzs project solely as postmodern technological innovation or even as yet another example of experimental fare fails to take into account a conscious philosophical commitment to the methodology, language, and optimism of the alchemic tradition.g
notes
1. Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Scribner, 2004), 4. 2. For a wonderful discussion, translation, and explication of the function of magic in this ancient text see John Friedman, Safe Magic and Invisible Writing in the Secretum Philosophorum, in Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger (Penn State, pa: Penn State University Press, 1998), 7686. 3. Melissa Weiss Adamson, Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays (New York: Routledge, 1995), 188. 4. Ibid. 5. McGee, On Food and Cooking, 101. See also www.medievalcookery.com/recipes/snow.html, 2009; and www.godecookery.com/engrec/engrec22.html, 2009. 6. Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2005), 38. 7. William Newman, Promethean Ambitions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 119. 8. Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism, 154. 9. www.historicfood.com, 2009. 10. Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism, 7. 11. Ibid., 15.

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review essay | sidney w. mi nt z

Food Enigmas, Colonial and Postcolonial

Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture Barry Higman
Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2008 xix + 580 pp. Illustrations. $70.00 (cloth)

Puerto Rico en la olla: Somos an lo que comimos? Cruz Miguel Ortz Cuadra
Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles, 2006 385 pp. $40.00 (paper)

The Caribbean Multilingual Dictionary of Flora, Fauna and Foods in English, French, French Creole, and Spanish Jeannette Allsopp
Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak Publications, 2003 lvi + 184 pp. Illustrations. $55.00 (paper)

LAlimentation des Noirs Marrons du Maroni: vocabulaire, pratiques, reprsentations Kenneth Bilby, Bernard Delpech, Marie Fleury, and Diane Vernon
Cayenne, French Guiana: Institut Franais de Recherche Scientique pour le Dveloppement en Coopration (orstom), 1989 xiii + 393 pp. Illustrations. Available online at http://horizon. documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/divers09-10/010010226.pdf

The caribbean islands and their surrounding shores, although famous for sunshine, hurricanes, and outrages some acknowledged, others forgottenare not famed for their food. But the many-stranded and entangled story of food there is full of conundrums; and, like everywhere else, people there had to eat. The region stands out in world history because it was the rst place, ever, that adventurers from empires stretching across oceans, both east and west beyond Eurasia, could set out to produce food, far from Europe itself, which they would then peddle back home, with huge success. To do so,

though, they relied upon coercion and then slavery for their labor force, putting in place systems of chattel labor to which hereditary status was added. Those institutions lasted for 350 years. That brutal fact is closely linked to Caribbean food. Who came to the islands, and what they ended up eating, were outcomes that turned upon the organization of the pioneer societies into which they were, for the most part, dragged. These bits of seized land, thenthe early agricultural equivalents of todays foreign-owned mines and oil wellsbecame tropical outposts in newly conquered lands, agrarian food factories for the delivery of desirable consumer goods not producible in temperate climes. Yet those who produced them would remain in chains for centuries. Because they depended on coercionviolence, and its constant threatthese colonies were odd mixtures of the technically modern on the one hand and the socially ancient on the other. The insatiable need for cheap, politically defenseless labor led, over the course of centuries, to the importation of millions of culturally varied peoples from sub-Saharan Africa, and great masses of other newcomers, some from South Europe and its outliers (e.g., the Portuguese colonies, such as Cabo Verde), and many from different parts of Asia (such as China and India). Hence the islands and their surrounding shores were settings for the rst multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural human conglomerates of the post-Columbian world. Those peoples represented a dizzying variety of culturally specic food knowledge and food preferences. Defenseless in new lands, they did what they could with what they knew culinarily, some of it remarkable. But they did so with difculty. The slave-based plantations gave a distinctive shape to the societies in which they became an everyday reality. Agrarian, deeply divided into free people and slaves, the islands were also divided by foods for export versus foods to eat. The people who did the growing were typically landless. Living in societies where whites were groomed to disdain even stooping to pick up a handkerchief, their labor was as degraded as they. (In the u.s. South, what

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this really meant is still expressed by a familiar phrase there: to work like a nigger.) The production of local foods varied in time and space, from island to island, and on nearby shores. Plantations were rarely locales for the production of local food. Where slaves were allowed to grow food for themselves, usually on inferior plantation land, they did so, at times with great success. Once free, they went on doing so in places like Haiti or Jamaica. The three islands that remained Hispanic longestCuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Riconurtured sturdy peasantries of their own. Today, these peasantries are disappearing under the combined pressures of rural poverty, quixotic Cuban reforms, food dumping by countries with subsidized agriculture, the seductions of McDonalds, and other miracles of modernity. Jamaica, the subject of Barry Higmans masterful work, was a Spanish colony until 1655, and then a British colony until 1962. It was the largest, most protable, and economically most important Caribbean colony of the United Kingdom. Though a great deal has been written about Jamaican history at large, few scholars ever looked seriously at its food history or the eating habits of its people. Higmans book lls a real void, and does so handsomely. Nowhere in the literature known to me is there any historical conspectus of the food of an entire society that rivals Jamaican Food in completeness or in clarity. What Higman does is uncover the connections of food to the rest of life: in his own words, he tries to understand why Jamaicans eat what they eat, how they dene Jamaican food and how their choices changed over time [because] [t]hese are important questions that provide insight into the social, cultural, agricultural, economic and political history of Jamaica. In everyday life, these choices are at least as important as decisions as to whom to vote for and what to have faith in (p.xvii). The bulk of the book consists of twelve simply written, enormously rich chapters, the titles of most of whichsuch as Roots, or Stems, Leaves or Molluscs, Crustaceans, Insects, Reptilesare self explanatory. Chapter 11 is entitled Salt, Earth, Water. The concluding chapter consists of ten and one-half pages of text, plus two pages of illuminating historical world maps, Jamaica at their center. Except for the Rev. John Lindsays ne-colored natural history plates of 17701775, and a couple by W.J. Titford, the materials accompanying the text are elegantly simple drawings, showing, for example, the named parts of the inside of a mango; the anatomy of the green turtle; the edible parts of a pig; the processing equipment needed to prepare and detoxify Manihot esculenta, called cassava, or manioc; and some

reader-friendly graphs and charts. An appendix lists the foods mentioned, by popular and scientic names and, very helpfully, their dates of introduction to Jamaica. So lucid is this book that the reader may be lulled into thinking that the text itself is unsubtle. It is not. Fundamental lessons in biology are intermixed with more sophisticated lessons in history and food sociology. Let me mention only three, the rst being Higmans gentle but remorseless examination of what Jamaicans actually do eat. That may sound silly, after what has been said here already. But Higman slowly untangles what Jamaicans actually eat from what they like, and from what they are said to eat. He lists what surveys dating from the late 1990s found to be the most commonly eaten foods, including callaloo, rice and peas, chicken, yellow yam, and green banana. Some of these commonly eaten foodschicken in many forms, and rice and peasare also among the most popular foods: people both like them and eat them. Better said, people like them and can afford to eat them regularly. On the other hand, ackee and salt sh (dried cod)so loved by the tourism folks and touted relentlessly as the genuinely authentic Jamaican dish, loved by many if not most Jamaicans, and known to just about anyone who has spent even a few hours as a tourist in Jamaicaare not on the common food list. Salt cod costs too much. Price always gures heavily in how taste is accommodated. There is irony here. Sir Eric Williams, the great Trinidadian historian, refers to the dependence of the Newfoundland shery upon the shipment of dried salt cod to the West Indies and quotes an eighteenth-century writer who describes salt cod as t for no other consumption but by slaves.1 By the twentieth century, however, bacalao or baccal (as we gourmets have learned to call it) was becoming too expensive for most Jamaicans. A second case lies in Higmans approach to the subject of callaloo, in which he demonstrates that exemplary care is the constant companion of his zeal. Describing and quoting historical works on Jamaica in which callaloo is discussed, he shows how the term has been used over time for several different plants from widely different botanical families amaranths, chenopodiums, and phytolaccasspreading thus across a vast botanical space. (Modern cookbooks may suggest spinach, which is a chenopodium, as a substitute; or collard greens or kale, which are brassicas.) The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors he quotes were not slouches; a number of solid early botanical identications were made. But these wild, weedy plants are all edible; they are normally peeled, cut small, and stewed with many other ingredients; and there is no doubt that all were used

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in such stews. The stews themselves were also called callaloos. Today, because a stew is composed of various things, callaloo is also used to mean an object or situation in which different ideas or substances are mixed together, more or less randomly. Cassidy and LePages dictionary lists seven sorts of callaloo, noting that in recent usage, any green that is eaten may be called it.2 As Higman launches into the story of callaloo in Jamaica, historically and taxonomically, he makes clear that

Above: Rev. John Lindsay, Coconut Tree, 1766.

from b.w. higman, jamaican food: history, biology, culture (uwi press, 2008), plate 7.

Jamaicans use the term both for almost any green leafy vegetable and for a particular plant (p.104). There is a plant called callaloo, which people grow in their gardens, identied by botanist C. Dennis Adams as Amaranthus viridis, and of which, Higman writes, it iscertain that when Jamaican talk about callaloo with specicity, they

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mean A. viridis (p.106). But Adams identied two other plants called callaloo by Jamaicans, plants which are also amaranths and are also used in callaloo stews and otherwise (A. spinosus and A. dubius). Adams identied a fourth plant that locals call callaloo that is not even an amaranth: Phytolacca rivinoides. Over more than two centuries, Jamaicans have been using all of these plants in their stews. There are no confusions about the separate botanical identities of these plants. But the term callaloo, used both as a local label for a particular plant, and as a handy name for plants of that sort, is indeed confusing. (In other places, of course, such as Trinidad, callaloo means yet other things.) The callaloo that Jamaicans buy in markets or grow themselves today Higman describes as a fast-growing, weedy plant that can be peeled, chopped, and cooked, adding nutrients, vitamins, and a pleasant bitter taste to other foods. It is both popular and (I assume) affordable. I infer these leaves and stems are primarily A. viridis; but I dare to suppose that a bunch of such leaves might also contain one or more botanically different plants. And, nally, there is Higmans examination of manioc (cassava). This is a rhizome or tuber, which is to say, its food material is stored underground. There were once said to be two types of manioc, bitter and sweet. But in truth there were varying quantities of cyanogenetic glucosides to be found in manioc plants; those with large quantities could be deadly if eaten undetoxied. Once thought classiable into bitter and sweet varieties, it is now known that toxicity can vary with age, climate, and soil. There is only one species to which all varieties belong. This tuber the worlds only major poisonous food staplewas brought to the Antilles from the South American mainland by Arawakan-speaking pioneer farmers, after 500 a.d. North Americans know one widely used cassava product: its our, called tapioca and sold as seeds or pearls of starcha common modern pudding ingredient made from the detoxied juice of the plants underground tuber. The manioc itself was the single most important domesticated food source in pre-Columbian Amazonia; it is still a core feature of Brazilian cuisine, a major food of Native Amazonia, and the leading tuber food source in Africa today. The aboriginal arrivants in the Antilles brought detoxication technology and tools from Amazonia, too. Higman supplies a ow chart of Jamaican cassava processing, with nice sketches of the processing tools. Detoxication is absolutely necessary, if there is any doubt about the quantity of cyanogenetic glucosides, to avoid death or physical damage. Interestingly, when manioc reached Africa, the effective detoxication method diffused unevenly with it, or

not at all. Among the documented negative health effects in Africa are nutritional neuropathies, chronic endemic goiters, and, in the worst cases, death from acute cyanide intoxication. Once the chief bread of the Jamaican people, cassava meal baked into bammy cakes, only faintly altered from the ancient Arawak originals, was swiftly disappearing at the time when I was doing eldwork in Jamaica in the 1950s. Higman points out that, though still greatly prized, the cassava our won by much labor from this tuber could not compete with imported minute cereals and other less laborintensive breadstuffs and porridge bases. But Caribbean migrants abroad still consume quantities of cassava our. Higmans conclusions take note of the local preference for salty, sweet, fat, and spicy hot, and the partial congruence of Jamaican taste with the fast foods that have diffused rapidly and globally. Though Jamaicas own fast foods add the hot-spicy tastebased to some degree on the capsicums, such as the Scotch Bonnet cultivarto the other tastes, the similarities of their fast foods to the worldwide corporate specialties are many. Jamaican fast food ourishes alongside international fast food; and chicken (including feet, back, and gizzard) has become the esh of choice. The Jamaican liking for animal protein is strong. That it has settled upon chicken more often than on pork or beef is largely to be explained by differences in cost. The chicken has become the rib steak and pork chop of the Caribbean poor. In terms of available animal protein, the outcome could, of course, be worse, as I have suggested in the case of the Marianas and Papua New Guinea.3 Higman calls attention to the way Jamaicans think of their dishes as potent national symbols, but he also makes plain that most Jamaicans must choose their daily foods in terms of their available time for shopping and cooking; their energy; and, of course, their pocketbooks. As a historian, particularly of the British West Indies, who lived and taught in Jamaica during much of his professional life, Higmans grasp of that islands history is unparalleled. His book is a rich repository of knowledge, and because food is such an intimate and inescapable feature of daily life, one gets here an inside look at the food of a people, brought alive through time. The book is a handsome model for anyone who might aspire seriously to do the food history of a whole society. I urge its reading upon all students of food. Like Higmans study, Ortz Cuadras Puerto Rico en la olla, Somos an lo que comimos? (Puerto Rico in the Pot: Are We Still What We Ate?) is a pioneering work, one unfortunately not yet available in English. It is the rst history of the foods and eating habits of the Puerto Rican

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people, whose existence, if once in doubt, has recently been veried by the conrmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a u.s. possession (estimated 2010 population: 4.1 million), seized from Spain in 18981899. The island is one of those Caribbean places that had sugar cane, slaves, and plantations as early as the midsixteenth century but was not a plantation colonyas I use the term hereuntil the end of the nineteenth century. For the preceding four hundred years there was a large population of free white and colored Spanish-speaking people, and slaves never exceeded 13 percent of the population. Sugar plantations became important after 1815 but then declined, only to be revived in wholly new form after the United States seized the island. Plantations have largely disappeared once more. Unlike Jamaica, from the beginning Puerto Rico has had a substantial rural farm population growing a signicant fraction of the islands food. While this type of farming was never completely eliminated by the plantation system, the proportion has been declining since 1899. On both islands, the talent for killing off local food production with cheap food, made possible by federal subsidies to agricultural producers in the United States, has been at work. In Puerto Rico especially, weve had a roaring success, because the farm subsidies on the mainland are backed by an ever-larger program of federal food stamps on the island. Our success can be measured in obesity and diabetes rates, tness-club fees, ephedrine use, and other indices of modern life. Ortz, keenly aware of all this, traces the history of Puerto Ricos major foods: rice and beans; the aroids called yauta and malanga (one Old World, one New, which deserve a book of their own); the love/hate herb North Americans now call cilantro (Coriandrum sativum) along with culantro, an entirely different plant, equally essential to the magical (and somewhat mysterious) bundle of ingredients composing the sofrito, without which rice and beans are, well, rice and beans; and the staggering increases in Puerto Rican per capita meat consumption, which began rising in the 1950s. Ortzs book, published two years before Higmans, is organized in chapters that slightly resemble Higmans; but the two are very different. Ortz seeks to tell us about the Puerto Rican people through their food in a noticeably more humanistic style than Higman employs for the Jamaicans. In considering the history and changing place of various foods in succession he makes frequent use of materials, much of it from novels, and from early reports.

Near the end of his story, Ortz asks whether Puerto Ricans really are still what they ate. Whether one judges by the number of automobiles or tv sets, or by the number of families receiving governmental assistance (including food stamps), or by the foods once eaten that have now disappearedsome of which even this comparative newcomer wistfully recallsthere has been a sea change in the nature of Puerto Rican daily life. The grandchildren of people in the countryside who were suffering from malnutrition when I began working there in 1948 are suffering from obesity and diabetes today. Now there is little or no scarcity of food on the island. But there as here, a sorrowful decline of home cooking has been accompanied by decreases in physical activity; increases in salt, sugar, and fat consumption; and the loss of many traditional and once-loved foods. Puerto Ricans may still be what they eat; but what they eat is surely not what they ate before. Near the end of his story Ortz wonders whether Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are will be replaced by Tell me where you eat and I will tell you who you are; or even Tell me when you eat and I will tell you who you are. Charming and learned, his book is also bittersweet. In both of these ne works one ends up wondering whether, nally, the question has to be: Who really determines what choices are available? This is a region of many languages, not only those of the European settler/conquerorsSpanish, French, English, Dutch, among othersbut also the creoles spoken by Haitians, Surinamers, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and others. Sechium edule, the pale green cucurbit we North Americans have learned to call chayote (from Nahuatl chayotl), is called chocho in Jamaica, christophene in the Eastern Caribbean, militn in Haiti, etc. Jeannette Allsopps Caribbean Dictionary is a valuable rst step toward the mastery of such complexity. A slim paperback, it represents sheer mountains of scholarly cooperation and years of work. Though understandably incomplete, it begins to bring some order to a veritable calal of cuisines, and weirdos like this reader will nd it a joy to browse. Like Allsopps Dictionary, LAlimentation is the product of untold hours of cooperation, in this case among two anthropologists, a botanist, and a sociologist. It is a lexicon of the alimentation (perhaps best translated as foods and food habits) of the Maroons of the Maroni. The Maroons of the Maroni are three named tribes (Ndyuka, Aluku, Paramaka) descended from slaves who ed the seventeenth-century sugar plantations of Dutch planters on the Guianese mainland. These people, who speak a creole language heavily inuenced lexically by English,

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now live in the Maroni/Marowijne River region. The river is the uncertain boundary between French Guiana and Suriname. This work is a thesaurus of the everyday culinary (and, partly, both material and religious) life of these remarkable people. Only students whose daily work brought them into close association with the Maroons could have produced it. It should be mentioned that this was a product of unpaid, spare-time cooperation by people devoted to Maroon welfare, and working on medical research. Though primarily a lexicon or specialized dictionary, LAlimentation is a source of valuable information at the junctures of food and religion on the one hand, and food and illness on the other. Though the book is catalogued by the Library of Congress and a copy of it reposes there, it is, to say the least, a difcult work to come by.

My aim here, beyond describing and sketchily evaluating these books, is to call attention to the richness and variety of food studies of a certain sort. All four of these works are by authors who had accuracy of reportage much in mind, and were willing to work mightily to achieve adequate detail. None of them is going to become a bestseller. Their authors deserve the praiseand warm thanksof gastronomes everywhere.g
notes
1. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 59. 2. F(rederick) G. Cassidy and R(obert) B. LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 3. Sidney W. Mintz, Afterword, Ethnology 47:2 (2009): 129135.

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the bookshelf | Author Name

Books in Review

In This Issue
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination Paul Freedman Cooking and Dining in Medieval England Peter Brears La noblesse table: Des ducs de Bourgogne aux rois des Belges/The Dining Nobility: From the Burgundian Dukes to the Belgian Royalty Edited by Paul Janssens and Siger Zeischka Arboreal Archeology: A Diary of Two Fruit Explorers Isabella and Livio Dalla Ragione Edible Ideologies: Representing Food & Meaning Edited by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America Frederick Douglass Opie Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico Maria Elisa Christie Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mothers Kitchen Matt McAllester Pacic Pinot Noir: A Comprehensive Winery Guide for Consumers and Connoisseurs John Winthrop Haeger Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry Jean-Robert Pitte. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie Siaron Hughes Sex, Death & Oysters: A Half-Shell Lovers World Tour Robb Walsh Picnic Playground Putumayo World Music, 2009

Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination Paul Freedman
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008 x + 288 pp. Illustrations. $30.00 (cloth)

The title and subtitle of this book say it pretty well. This is a history of the relation between spices and medieval European thought. In six chapters Freedman looks in turn at spices and medieval cuisine (the title of Chapter 1); spices as drugs; spices as creators of aroma; spices in trade; scarcity, abundance and prot (perceptions of rarity and value); and spices and moral danger. Chapters 7 and 8 explore both the medieval mystery of where spices came from and the resolution of this mystery in the early sixteenth century, when the distant homelands of nutmeg and cloves were at last revealed. Then comes a brief, sad epilogue: no sooner had Europeans found their way to the sources of these prized aromas than their perceived value began to fall. European cooks lost their love of spicery; physicians lost their trust in the curative powers of exotic natural products. The reader of Chapters 1 and 2 occasionally wonders whether certain digressions might more wisely have been omittedyes, its true that spices dont gure on every pagebut the reader who completes Chapter 8 will give Freedman credit for having told his story well. In the end, it all ts together. The range of reference is very wide. The authors doctoral studies were on Catalan literature, and his special knowledge is put to good use, on Francesc Eiximenis, for example, a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar who wrote extensively about gluttony. Some other sidelights: on aromas, we learn that the phrase odor of sanctity was to be taken literally; the spice-laden aroma of a corpse was taken as strong evidence that the departed denizen was a saint. By contrast, one of the worst things about Hell is the awful stench (so say the fourth-century Apocalypse of Paul and the twelfth-century Vision of Tundale). Elsewhere we learn of Raynald of Chtillons Red Sea expedition in 1182; if

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, pp.155166, issn 1529-3262. 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.155.

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successful, it might, as Freedman says, have substantially interfered with the spice trade. We learn that the Grain Coast (the coast of Liberia and Sierra Leone) was named for grains of paradise, one of the forgotten spices of West Africa. From time to time, throughout the book, wellchosen keynote quotations from medieval sources are set apart from the text, and they make lively reading. Of course, Freedman uses some sources indirectly; how could it be otherwise? This produces a few imprecisions. The ancient navigator Eudossus (p.183) who may or may not have circumnavigated Africa is Eudoxus of Cyzicus; he intended to exchange Spanish dancing girls for Indian spices, with what success is not known. Italian sorghum (p.196) is somebodys mistranslation; foxtail millet (Setaria Italica) is intended. Columbus hoped he had found myrobalans but in fact found American plums, as Freedman calls them (p.210); more accurately, these were Spondias purpurea, mombins or hog plums. Forget such minutiae: this reader is truly grateful to Freedman for mentioning (and misspelling) Walter of Bibbesworth, medieval author of an English-French glossary, and then turning to a discussion of mawmeny, a medieval European delicacy with an Arabic name. Thanks to this lucky juxtaposition, I suddenly saw the solution to a puzzle in Walters text (which I am currently translating). Walters maumerie is not an early form of Malmsey, as the Anglo-Norman Dictionary implausibly suggests; its a misspelling of mawmeny. Freedman is right to doubt whether the cultural exchanges of the Crusade period were enough to turn medieval Europe into a spice-loving society: spices were already at the heart of European cuisine long before, in Roman times, though there must have been periods after Rome fell when the supply of eastern aromatics temporarily failed. He is also right that the theory of the four humors led directly to steady demand for spices in medicine, and his guide to humoral theory (pp.5153) is really handy; as to its effect on our vocabulary, he might have added that this is the reason why we call peppers hot. Spices were extravagant luxuries yet good for you, a combination that no food now duplicates, he argues; there is no modern equivalent to spices in their medieval sense as luxuriously healthful (p.60). Any reader likes a challenge of that kind, and some will come up with possible refutations: walnut oil? fresh apple juice? is organic the new spice? But I believe Freedman is right, and he has shown us the way to the mysterious and exotic place where spices met the European imagination.
Andrew Dalby, Saint-Coutant, France

Cooking and Dining in Medieval England Peter Brears

Totnes: Prospect Books, 2008 557 pp. Illustrations. 30 (boards)

For those without a prior interest in the cooking and dining practices of medieval England, and whose notions of these subjects may have been casually acquired from movies, Peter Brearss book will prove a source of enlightenment and delight. It is a work of great erudition that examines all aspects of domestic administration in the production and service of food in, for the most part, large households, in which a hierarchy of ofcials regulated and audited everything from collecting rents, acquisition and release of ingredients and fuel, maintaining the security of storage areas, and cooking in all its separate departments, through to the elaborate etiquette for service at table. Using archaeological and architectural sources to dene the disposition of various storage and work spaces, Brears sheds much light on the ergonomics of producing food on a large scale with maximum efciency. What also emerges is that the interpretation of archaeological remains can often be enhanced by a knowledge of cooking practices. The workings of the dairy, brewhouse, bakehouse, pastry, and boiling house are described in successive chapters, and a selection of recipes is given for each. Then follow accounts of the kitchen, kitchen furniture and equipment, and pottage utensils, with separate chapters on the products of the main kitchen organized by preparation methodpottages, leaches, roasting, and frying. It becomes clear that the level of sophistication in cooking could be very great. Well over two hundred and fty modernized recipes are included, representative of some fteen hundred late-fourteenth- and fteenth-century originals. The most basic procedures went unrecorded, with the implication that those written down were for dishes not prepared frequently enough to be remembered in detail. To make good this deciency the author draws on a continuing English cooking tradition and his extensive experience as a reconstruction cook. Those trying the recipes reproduced will nd themselves most pleasurably rewarded. The most basic item of the medieval diet was undoubtedly bread, used also for trenchers. In the small domestic environment baking was done over the re on a at bakestone, or in an improvised oven inside a pot around and over which embers could be heaped. By contrast, the bakehouses of large houses had stone or brick ovens. In the medieval period pastry was essentially disposable cookware and not intended for consumption. Pre-prepared crusts

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were lled for baking as required for the table. Many of the pastries were recognizably similar to the tarts and ans of today, albeit using what we might consider unusual combinations of ingredients. Others were elaborately constructed. Flampoints were ornamented with pointed pieces of pastry, but most impressive of all was the castlette, comprising a round keep with four anking round towers all being battlemented. Each tower had a separate lling, and the whole construction was served amb at great feasts. Pottages were no more than dishes cooked in a single pot, from the simplest cereal gruels to the richest stews; they make up half the total number of recipes in the book. Meat used for a pottage might have been prepared by roasting, frying, or parboiling. Again, this was a device for facilitating its quick conversion into a range of different dishes by simmering in different stocks, with much attention being given to their consistency, texture, and color. Roasting was too time-consuming to be practiced in small households, but frying could produce food rapidly, and with little fuel consumption. Wine, wafers, and sweetmeats were served at the end of a meal. In the greatest households, where the feast was conducted as an expression of wealth, power, and status, the ostentatious culmination was the exhibition of subtleties. These were table sculptures on a particular allegorical or symbolic theme produced in the confectionery. Initially made from edible materialssugar, marchpane, pastrythey came to be constructed from more durable ones, such as wax, paper, tinfoil, or wood. One cannot fail to be impressed by the skill and ingenuity of the medieval cook, and by the variety and sophistication of what was produced in facilities which today would be considered limited. The volumes illustrations are either original drawings by the author or his redrawings from various sources. Although they are very informative, few are referred to in the text. For the most part they appear near where they are relevant, but it would have been helpful to have drawn attention to them. The accounts of dining in chamber, and of great feasts, both include cartoon-strip representations that are especially helpful in succinctly conveying the elaborate ceremonial involved. It is a matter of regret that this ne book is marred by inconsistencies, errors, and omissions in the end materialnotes, bibliography, and indices. For instance, the bibliography contains lapses in alphabetization and is incomplete, while the generally useful index of recipes bizarrely lists a recipe for vegetable pottage under Beef. The usefulness of the general index depends on readers

already knowing the class of subject they are looking for; thus, pimps and shides are to be found only under Fuel. Although individually trivial, the errors are cumulatively unacceptable and should have been eliminated by an attentive editor.
Michael Hobbs, London

La noblesse table: Des ducs de Bourgogne aux rois des Belges/The Dining Nobility: From the Burgundian Dukes to the Belgian Royalty Edited by Paul Janssens and Siger Zeischka
Brussels: VUBPress Brussels University Press, 2008 266 pp. Illustrations. $39.95 (paper)

This book, the second of three volumes in the Social & Cultural Food Studies (fost) series devoted to a study of luxury cuisine and drink of the country that is now Belgium, is the only one at least partially written in English. The other two are in Dutch, the rst being focused on aristocratic food, meal organization, domestic help, and associated social customs in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury chateaux in Belgium; and the third focusing on the history of dessert and the use of sugar. Although written in English and French, the predominant native language of the authors is Dutch. This is an important point, as the language at times gets in the way of clarity. The linguistic disparity among the articles suggests the lack of a nativespeaking editor for a few of the English portions. Even the title exhibits some sign of this problem: table does not really translate to dining as an adjective. More comprehensible titles would be Nobility at Table or Nobility at the Dinner Table. The title also leads one to think that the book will be a history of dining in Belgium from the fteenth century to the present day. However, after the initial two commendable essays in the rst section (Lilliane Plouviers Spcialits Bourguignonnes dans les Pays-Bas mridionaux [xve sicle] and Kenneth Albalas Ludovicus Nonnius and the Elegance of Fish) and Plouviers opening essay on the Burgundian court in the second, the remainder concern themselves with nineteenth and earlytwentieth century Belgium. This is logical, since the book relies heavily on a collection of over six thousand menus belonging to Didier de Meester de Betzenbroeck as the source for many illustrations and comments about aristocratic cuisine. Since individual menus for diners date from the mid-nineteenth century, they inevitably dene the

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chronological focus of this book. Unfortunately, this focus leads to a huge gap, from the mid-seventeenth century to the nineteenth, when many culinary changes occurred along with changes in vessels and atware. It is hard to feel that the subtitle from the Burgundian Dukes to the Belgian Royalty is justied, considering this gap of almost two hundred important years. Organized into a preface and two parts, Dishes and Wines and The Organization of Festivities and the Selection of Guests, Dining Nobility has thirteen chapters by eleven authors. Following a brief preface, Chapter 1 is, in effect, a second preface by the editors, who give a synoptic preview of coming attractions and offer analytical comments to dene the volumes themes of gastronomy and conviviality. Sophie Onghena, the author of the fost volume on desserts, contributes an essay on exoticism in nineteenthcentury dessert culture, which is one of the most interesting for those not primarily interested in Belgian history. Although the author focuses on the Belgian upper classes, she does so with a much broader European brush, touching on the enthusiasm for exotic travel, architecture, and imported foods encountered elsewhere. The use of the collection menus is responsible for much information, some repetitive, about the Belgian royalty and their meals at public functions, hunting, and elsewhere, including their participation as guests. An analysis of how much these menus differed from their counterparts in other European countries and, in fact, from important honorary American functions would be useful and would help the authors better dene specically Belgian characteristics while giving the work a broader context. While the menus make wonderful illustrations and supply us with some information on the wines and foods served, there is no attempt to compare them with those in other collections, such as the Buttolph collection at the New York Public Library, which has over twenty-ve thousand examples from the same period. For culinary historians, these essays provide some interesting nuggets, especially for those who read more than menu French, though most will not need to revisit the change to service la russe. This volume should be looked on not as the sum of its parts, but for the details in its separate parts, read selectively, according to ones own particular interests.
Sarah Cofn, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, ny

Arboreal Archeology: A Diary of Two Fruit Explorers Isabella and Livio Dalla Ragione Translated by Cecilia Galiena
Perugia: ali&no editrice, 2008 151 pp. Illustrations. 14 (paper) Available at www.fedcoseeds.com/trees.htm

The adventures of plant hunter Livio Dalla Ragione in the abandoned farmsteads of Umbria and Tuscany have been reported in the Italian media for well over a decade and outside of Italy have come even to the notice of the American magazine The New Yorker. In 1997 Livio and his daughter (and fellow explorer) Isabella were able to tell their own story in Archaeologia arborea: diario di due cercatori di piante. But in a nation with many centuries of comedic tradition, it was all too easy for Italian journalists to caricature their pastime and the almost apologetic vocabulary of the books introduction as una bizzarreria rustica, rather than recognizing their work as a valid, and useful, offering. Livios and Isabellas hobby of plant-hunting (the books English subtitle better describes it as fruit exploring) is more common and widely pursued than the urban public might believe. Committed individuals contribute to our fruit patrimony by searching out, identifying, and preserving our many varieties of fruit, both greater and lesser, from certain oblivion. Livio Dalla Ragione discovered that in Italy, as in the United States, there is no governmental repository with encyclopedic collections of the traditional apple and other fruit varieties of the countryside. Rather, the countryside itself is the repository, and as it degrades, so too does the collection. By comparison, the admirable French system of regional conservatories of traditional fruits and useful plants endeavors, with varying degrees of effectiveness, to preserve both the indigenous varieties and their folk uses in cuisine, husbandry, and industry. Livio succumbed to the cult of fruit two decades after World War ii when he purchased a ruined church in the area of Umbria bordering Tuscany. San Lorenzo in Lerchi was a hillside property, with many grapevines planted in cultura promiscua, that ancient art of training vines up fruit trees that allowed wheat to be grown between the rows. Livios trees were, for the most part, dead, but he wanted to restore the plantationand the original varieties. This project required searching other near-abandoned sites, which by the early 1960s were common in Umbria. And so an arboreal archaeologist was born. Livio would inquire of any sympathetic villager, Where are the old fruit trees? Abandoned monasteries were prime sources, but

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private farms could yield a better harvest of both varieties and accounts of their traditional uses. After visits to both sides of the Tuscan-Umbrian border, Livio had collected several hundred fruit varieties and their histories. Arboreal Archaeology is chiey his account, as recorded in his diary, of the individual varieties, their natural history, and how he encountered them (hence the title of the Italian original). He eventually propagated nearly all of the varieties and added them to the orchard at S. Lorenzo. The present book is an embellishment of the 1997 original, the passage of time having afforded the authors a more mature reection upon their work, as well as an update on particular fruit varieties that they believed had been lost. This is encouraging news. Over the intervening decade Livio and Isabella were able to cover more territory and interview more landowners than they had for the rst edition. The illustrations of each of the outstanding varieties they found make an important contribution to the record of the traditional fruits of Italy. A countryside that has been cultivated for two millennia necessarily yields up many and diverse local fruits and makes for a big assignment. But there is something unique about fruit exploring in Italy: the court of the Medici, never far from its native soil, delighted in fruits, and for over two centuries commissioned the greatest documentation of fruit varieties in the history of horticulture. Soderini, Micheli, Trinci, de Crescenzi, and above all Mattiolus, all patronized by the Medici, form the foundation of fruit science, and the family commissioned the earliest translations of Theophrastus, Cato, Varro, and Columella into a modern tongue. Most outstanding of all are the immense oil paintings depicting some thousands of fruits grown in the several Medici properties around Florence, which Cosimo iii ordered Bartolomeo Bimbi to produce (they are now at the Pitti Palace and the Museo Botanico dellUniversita). All of these sources are available to fruit explorers there; we in the States have nothing like that. Some of the fruits Livio found will be recognized in this country (Kadota g, Vicar of Winkeld pear) while many others are new even to those who live not far from their place of discovery. The orchard at S. Lorenzo remains today, but additions are now fewer and less frequent. The Italian countryside is much emptier of fruits now than when Livio began his collection; fruit trees do not survive their owners forever. Along with the farmers who chose a life of subsistence farming, the farms and fruit trees are also now gone. Livio died in 2007. Isabella continues to hunt for fruits.
C. Todd Kennedy, Esq., San Francisco

Edible Ideologies: Representing Food & Meaning Edited by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato
Albany: State University of New York, 2008 xiv + 252 pp. Illustrations. $24.95 (paper)

In their introduction to Edible Ideologies the volumes editors make a recurrent assertion about hegemonic power and challenges to itfor instance, representations produce both power and pleasurerepresentations actively produce cultural sensibilities and the possibility of transgression (p.2). Well, Im tempted to reply, maybe yes, maybe no. To assume that wherever power appears, resistance automatically arises is to forestall analysis before it starts. Putting it bluntly, the problem with power is that it pretty much is everywhere, while the problem with resistance is that it can pretty much be imagined to be everywhere. Despite the editors declaration a few pages in that French philosopher Michel Foucault serves as a theoretical guide throughout the book (p.3), their contrast of repressive power and opportunities for pleasure is not Foucauldian. Pointedly, Foucault himself, in his classic History of Sexuality, strongly critiqued conceptions of power as repressive: for him, power was productive of pleasures, and that explained how power pulled ordinary social subjects into its web, making adherence to it seem desirable and fun. In specic instances power may in fact cultivate opportunities for pleasure, all the better to discipline them (which is not the same as repressing them). Thus, in Edible Ideologies, Kathleen Banks Nutters essay on chocolate chronicles a shift in advertising from sweets as something offered by women to others (a beau, for instance) to something consumed lasciviously by oneself, thereby pinpointing a new twist in the dynamics of power, whereby collective advancement (of women) actually becomes a narcissism of individualized, isolated enjoyments. Likewise, Jean P. Retzingers contribution on the rhetoric of healthiness in ads for chain restaurants salad bowls shows how such ads invoke a strong and hip consumer, though at the cost of exploitationfor example, African American women are often depicted in such ads as the epitome of Cool and thereby exoticized. Indeed, a number of the essays in Edible Ideologies suggest that in cases where they empower the consumer, food representations do so by disempowering others. Thus, the exoticism that Retzinger trenchantly uncovers in the salad-bowl ads compares to the invocation of Sephardic cuisine that Eric Mann pinpoints in new Jewish cookbooks that mythologize Sephardi culinary practices as proto-global counter-representations of bland and backward-looking

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kosher food. Comparable exoticism appears too in the packaging for the Canadian food line Presidents Choice, which, as Charlene Elliott shows, pretends to scour the world for new tastes all the better to reinvigorate the values of the dominant culture at home. In these essays, the attribution of culinary pleasures to exoticized others enables the dominant culture to revitalize itself by playing on consumers investments in the ever new and the ever special. In complementary fashion, Lynn Fallwells contribution, on the image of German food in English-language travel guides, deftly shows how cultural empowerment can operate through a kind of self-exoticizing: the guides frequently present German food as fatty, meaty, and too wedded to a brutish past, therefore necessitating the intercession of other nations to bring it into the modernity of new, better cuisine. In similar fashion, Amanda Cozzi shows how dominant Victorian representations of London dining (as, for example, in Dickens) dealt with the threat of social enfranchisement of the working classes by imagining that workers who acceded to the pleasures of the table were alien upstarts incapable of appreciating the real values of English cuisine. To be sure, the premise that power needs the panache of pleasure can become no less an a priori theoretical dogma. In this respect, some essays in Edible Ideologies do deal usefully with historical situations in which the cultivation of pleasure might indeed have seemed transgressive. For example, Marie I. Drewss essay on the Holocaust cookbook In Memorys Kitchen examines how in the camps the invocation of gustatory delight was a resilient resistance to attempts to crush spirit as well as body. Here, indeed, power and pleasure might be seen as irreconcilable contraries but only because of the irreducible specicity of this particular (and particularly horric) historical case. In a different vein, Celia M. Kingsbury studies food restrictions during World War i, when there was little pleasure, just a blunt sense of spartan, communal sacrice in service to the state. These cases represent unambiguous assertions of relentless power. Many of the essays, then, treat power (and pleasure, too) as historically variable rather than as a xed a priori concept. Not for nothing did Michel Foucault speak of the spirals of power and resistance. Here, Nathan Abramss essay, on the role of Jell-O in the spy case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who used a cut-up Jell-O box as a contact device), is particularly intriguing. On the one hand, Jell-O was an all-American product that signaled assimilation into the national project. On the other, in a complicated twist, by using ersatz products like Jell-O in her supposedly Jewish kitchen, Ethel proved her inauthenticityas dutiful Jew, as dutiful mother and housewife, and therefore as dutiful American.

The contributions to Edible Ideologies show a richness of concrete argument that theoretical simplicities simply cannot account for. Even LeBesco and Naccaratos own essayon the ways Julia Child and Martha Stewart play on democratic offers of culinary skills only to maintain boundaries between their celebrity privilege and actual culinary opportunities for ordinary citizensdemonstrates a complexity of analysis that complicates simple power/pleasure binary opposition. Vividly and vibrantly, the essays in Edible Ideologies reveal multitudes of meaning when they stay close to concrete cases and read them for their historical complexities. Through diverse examples and divergent methods of cultural analysis, the essays offer rich interpretations of multifarious resonances of food in modernity.
Dana Polan, New York University

Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America Frederick Douglass Opie
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 238 pp. $24.95 (cloth)

Scholarly explorations of the importance of soul in black American culture often carry an elegiac tone. Just as Peter Guralnick has waxed nostalgic about the brief owering of southern soul music, so the African American Review dedicated the entire Winter 2007 issue to the post-soul aesthetic that Bertram Ashe and others espied in the more anxious and ironic cultural works that followed the exhilarating breakthroughs of the 1960s. Soul itself, as it emerges from these and other studies, can look like a meteoric phenomenonlike a phenomenon that ared brightly but briey in the Civil Rights era, leaving behind traces that we cannot repeat but under whose glow we remain caught. Soul, these studies suggest, might well have grown out of the ordeal of white supremacy; but, precisely because of this, it provided practitioners and audiences alike with opportunities for spiritual recovery, offering a sense of belonging and togetherness that can feel somewhat absent from the culture of our own period. Frederick Douglass Opies new history of African American cooking, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, in some ways demurs from this common view. Three of Hog and Hominys best chapters are devoted to the rise of soul food in 1960s ghetto communities, and, while Opie is no less successful when chronicling the critics of this phenomenon than he is its advocates, the

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strength of his historical narrative itself conrms that soul holds as much fascination for him as it does for, say, Peter Guralnick. And yet, whereas Guralnicks fascination with soul music leads him to lament its all-too-brief span, and to treat it as a kind of cultural buttery too beautiful to last long, Opies fascination with soul food leads him, by way of contrast, to push it backward and drag it forward chronologically, and to suggest that it grew out of the associated foodways of people of African descent over hundreds of years (p.xii). Indeed, Hogs and Hominy argues that what came to call itself soul food following the Great Migration was only an especially explicit and exuberant manifestation of a tradition of soulful cooking that, always in ux, stretches back to preslavery West Africa even as it continues to evolve and ourish today. Questions of nomenclature, of Hogs and Hominys sense of historical responsibility, do perhaps arise here. Early on the work announces that it will demonstrate that the concept of soul in African American foodways appeared long before the name soul food was coined (p.xi), but Opie never quite delivers on this tantalizing promise. Too little of his history, I think, is devoted to the period before 1900, and the books reliance on Alex Haley and Olaudah Equianos Interesting Narrative (which Vincent Carretta has shown is no more reliable than Roots) seems an unpromising basis from which to explore diverse West African traditions. The historical nuance that Opie brings to his exploration of African American foodways after 1900 can seem a little lacking in these early pages; here, Opie can be a bit quick to speak of a single African identity and is sometimes prone to view Africas present as a window on its past. Despite these misgivings, few would challenge the fundamental tradition that Opie is proposing here. Academic research by Karen Hess, Jon Edward Philips, and Ronald Segal, cookbooks by Verta Mae Grosvenor and Jessica Harris, and literary works such as Ntozake Shanges If I Can Cook / You Know God Can, have all long since illuminated the many culinary echoes that one can nd among all the farung communities of the African Diaspora. This literature, indeed, has laid a foundation onto which Judith A. Carney and Psyche Williams-Forson, among other younger scholars, have been able to build their brilliant case studies. And in many ways Hogs and Hominy can be thought of as a useful gateway to these studies, a good rst port of call for any student or general reader who is becoming interested in African American cooking and who wants to nd out more about its full diasporic history. Innovative in its combination of historical and oral materials, informative in the diasporic connections it develops, Hogs and Hominy

certainly does a good job of introducing such readers to a particularly vibrant and challenging area within the eld of food studies. Its second half might be far stronger than its rst, but Hogs and Hominy provides a denitive history of the grand social forces and unforgettable personalities that have revolutionized African American cooking since the twilight of the Jim Crow system.
Andrew Warnes, University of Leeds

Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico Maria Elisa Christie
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008 xxi + 308 pp. Illustrations. $50.00 (cloth)

Kitchenspace is an evocative read that brought back to me many similar experiences I have had in Central Mexico over the years. The author, Maria Elisa Christie, conducted her research in three communities, all semi-urban villages typical of the region where most of the Mexican population lives. She describes the villages characteristic histories, focusing on specic women as they cook for local estas and their families daily meals. The title, Kitchenspace, refers to the indoor kitchen and the outdoor space where much of the food preparation, cooking, and eating is done, including space for growing herbs and edible plants and raising pigs, turkeys, or a few chickens. The books subtitle, Women, Fiestas and Everyday Life in Central Mexico, more precisely denes its subject. Christie was accepted into the Mexican womans world, and she shares a vision of life focused around the preparation of food and its changing role in Mexican society. Christies writing skills are impressive, but this remains rst and foremost a thesis, making for an engaging but disjointed narrative. The rst part of the book explores aspects of Catholic folk celebrations in the communities. In Xochimilco, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City famous for the last remnants of the vast chinampasoating gardens surrounding the ancient Aztec capitol of TenachitlnChristie totally immerses the reader in descriptions of the yearlong celebrations surrounding El Niopa (Child of the Place), a hand-carved wooden image of the baby Jesus that for centuries has been venerated and treated as a live child, receiving gifts of clothes and toys. This practice grew out of the traditions encompassing the child-being of the ancient Aztec god of war and protector of mothers. After describing several other festivals in Xochimilco, the author turns to the

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Palm Sunday and Day of the Holy Cross estas of Ocotepec in the nearby state of Morelos. She then turns to largely mestizo Tetecala, which has little to do with the more indigenous traditions of the other two communities. Christie offers glimpses into a quinceaera, a esta marking a young girls entry into womanhood on her fteenth birthday that is often a more elaborate ceremony than a wedding. She also describes an elotada, a family celebration of the corn harvest. The second section of the book focuses on private conversations in the intimate kitchen spaces of women from these three villages. Christies interviews demonstrate that the kitchen remains their center of cultural reproduction and at the heart of family and community relations (p.153), but they also make clear the womens dilemma: all bemoan the passing of some of their traditions and methods of cooking even as they praise such laborsaving devices as the blender. Despite the authors close observation of the foods of this region, I found several basic errors, especially regarding mole. Christie writes, for instance, that mole is believed to have originated in a convent in Puebla. Not so. Moles are of pre-Hispanic origin. Only the famous mole poblano can be traced back to the Puebla convent. Such errors may partly be explained by the fact that her extensive bibliography contains only a few references that have to do with actual cooking. Christie, a gender equity specialist at Virginia Techs Ofce of International Research, Education, and Development, began researching this book at the beginning of the new century, a century that will exacerbate the split role of women in the Mexican village kitchens. It is her nal chapter, Food for Thought, that I found most poignant and revealing, thanks to her strong personal voice. She knows that while she has connected with these families, especially the women, she can walk away and not share their bittersweet emotional lives, lives in which everyone counts on you to make things right in the kitchen, no matter how things are outside or how you feel insideEverybody says that it is important to be happy in the kitchenregardless of whether or not you want to be therebecause a cook must prepare her food with love for it to taste good and nourish and satisfy the people who eat at her table (p.265). For anyone interested in the role women play in the panorama of present-day Mexican village life, this book is well worth reading, for Christie observes and listens with her heart as well as with her eyes and ears.
Marilyn L. Tausend, Culinary Adventures, Inc.

Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mothers Kitchen Matt McAllester

New York: The Dial Press, 2009 216 pp. Illustrations. $25.00 (cloth)

If you need to keep the book open, youre not really cooking, Matt McAllesters mother, Ann, admonishes him on the rst page of his affecting new memoir, Bittersweet (p.1). Her tragic descent into madness and alcoholism and McAllesters resuscitation of her memory through cooking her recipes are bookended by Anns culinary mentor Elizabeth David, who serves as a guide to portals he had forced himself to forget. Eventually McAllesters uninhibited and ercely loving mother battles back to some semblance of mental health toward the end of her life, gaining a brief rapprochement with her children. In the memoir genre, writers such as Claudia Roden have written of the quest to rejoice in our food and summon the ghosts of the past. Loss lends itself to grasping at the concreteness of small details that we tend to ground ourselves in to cope with an unbearable grief. While moving through the numbness of sorrow over the death of a loved one we sit at a table with those who remain, pushing around grains of salt or sugar. At his best McAllester counts these grains for us, naming them and telling us which mattered, and deftly guiding us through the aromas and avors of his mothers kitchen, sensations inextricably linked to the time when his family was whole and happy (p.20). Some of this reminiscing is exquisitely rendered: watching tv in pajamas with his sister while anticipating their surprise supper, a whimsical Sunday night riff on leftovers that will feature french fries carved into the shape of the rst letter of each family members name. While Bittersweet does not fall into the unfortunate genre of My Mothers Death, McAllesters prose at times can be at: favorite restaurants serve up an incredibly great time over food and wine (p.97). But his chronicling of his mothers demise is riveting. It comes late, and we understand in a way that wasnt as urgent, visceral, or revealing earlier in the book why he exiled himself to war zones brimming with others heartbreaks and the exhilaration of danger as a way to anaesthetize himself against her unraveling. McAllester realizes that she had to die before he could initiate this parsing of her life, her old identity melting away like the chunks of chocolate she was heating in a mixing bowl that was sitting in a pan of boiled water (p.168). After her death McAllester, a war correspondent, abandons his showy kitchen displays in pursuit of learning to cook with love as she did, to feeding people rather than dazzling them (p.62).

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McAllester admits that his efforts have not yielded understanding but that in accepting her death he must now make his own feasts, and life, with the wife with whom he is trying to start a family, and not just vainly strive for a happy, snow-globe past. Meals are a source of life, not an echo of death (p.163), he notes. Elizabeth David said of her good friend Norman Douglass writing that whoever has helped us to a larger understanding is entitled to our gratitude for all time. Certainly McAllesters mother deserves this tribute that he has paid to her in Bittersweet.
Doreen Schmid, Napa, ca

Pacic Pinot Noir: A Comprehensive Winery Guide for Consumers and Connoisseurs
John Winthrop Haeger Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 xli + 454 pp. $21.95 (paper)

John Winthrop Haegers Pacic Pinot Noir will prove useful, informative, and entertaining to anyone who enjoys pinot noir winesfrom the occasional consumer to grape growers and winemakers. This book is an updated and in some ways expanded version of Haegers earlier North American Pinot Noir (University of California Press, 2004). The stunning growth in pinot noir production since the movie Sideways brought the variety widespread acclaim has led to major upheavals, most notably in the rise of numerous new, much lauded producers. In response, Haeger has tripled the number of producers proled in this edition. He has also changed his criteria for inclusion. As he explains in About This Book, he selected the producers for North American Pinot Noir on largely subjective grounds, opting for producers who were pioneers or had a proven history with the variety. For Pacic Pinot Noir Haeger compiled lists from restaurants and retailers with very serious and intelligent wine programs (p.xiv) and other sources, ultimately selecting those producers who featured on at least three of the thirty-odd collected lists. Haeger admits that this methodology is imperfect but believes that it is biased in favor of qualitative superiority adjusted for price performance, which seems a reasonable outcome (p.xv). Intriguingly, his own preferences did not factor into the inclusion decisions, though he indicates his favorite producers with an icon. With three times as many producers to cover, Haeger has less room to discuss the history of pinot noir, the clones

and selections used today, the regions where the grape variety thrives, barrel selections, and the like. He argues fairly that such information is little changed since 2004 and refers interested readers to his earlier book. Nevertheless, Haegers skill as a writer allows him to include a tremendous amount of information on these subjects in the rst brief sections, About This Book and the introduction, which contain sufcient technical information to satisfy most readers. The introduction is also a wonderfully thoughtful essay on the history and current state of pinot noir production and its future, framed largely on the question of whether the Sideways-induced pinot boom is sustainable, and what it will mean for producers and consumers if it is. Haeger is quite good on winemaking. Much of the introduction focuses on pinot noir styles and the winemaking decisions behind them, such as the maximum fermentation temperature allowed, whether to add cultured yeast, and when to press the wine off the skins (p.xxxvi). Here he also elaborates on the consensus protocol for pinot noir winemaking. By clearly explaining how pinot noir is typically produced, Haeger frees himself to discuss only how producers diverge from the consensus protocol in each prole. His clear descriptions are sufciently detailed to satisfy winemakers; lay readers, too, will easily understand them, especially with the help of the comprehensive glossary. The core of the book consists of thorough and descriptive proles of pinot noir producers. Each entry provides an overview of the producer and describes grape sources and stylistic decisions. The Wines and Winemaking Notes section is technical but clear. Winemakers and serious wine geeks will delight in the candidness with which most of the producers discuss their winemaking. Rather than relying on clichs such as wine is made in the vineyard, the producers provide detailed information on, for example, the strains of yeast they use, how they select barrels for blends, and the criteria on which they base their picking decisions. Only a few producers decline comment, as when Merry Edwards states that some of my winemaking techniques are proprietary and not up for discussion (p.262). Yet even Edwards is happy to address acid adjustment for overripe grapes. For the winemaking professional, this information is invaluable. The book has inspired energetic conversations among winemakers wishing to learn more about each others techniques. Quibbles with the book are minor and have to do with the inevitably ephemeral nature of its subject. Most of the wines discussed are already gone from the market. The discussion of vintages, ranging from 1999 to 2006, is largely irrelevant to a new buyer. The roster of pinot noir producers

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will naturally continue to evolve. However, the strengths of this book are timeless and greatly outweigh these complaints. Pacic Pinot Noir is recommended to anyone who has discovered the joys of pinot noir wines.
Matthew Reid, Calistoga, ca

Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry Jean-Robert Pitte. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008 xiv + 246 pp. Illustrations. $24.95 (cloth)

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Most of us have had a charming someone in our lives who had the ability to take a bit of mental uff and spin it out into an amusing and seemingly endless thread. That the thread was absolutely unweavable into more serious cloth was of no consequence: the pleasure of his (and its always his, isnt it?) company lay in the elegance of the spinning. If you didnt have an Uncle Joe who brought out his ddle to accompany after-dinner drinks, you had an old school friend who dined occasionally with the Kennedys, or at the very least you had the televised version of William F. Buckley. This sort of elegance-without-substance is especially appealing in the world of wine writing. Those of us at the fringes of the wine worldthe writers, the waiters, the wannabesrevel in pretended intimacies with those at its center: the winemakers, the viticulturalists, the owners of grand estates. If the writing that pretends to take them down a peg also aggrandizes them, so much the better. All of us today love our slightly soiled saints. So here we have a book that treats two of the idols of the wine world, Bordeaux and Burgundy, with an easy familiarity, pointing slyly to the weaknesses of their partisans while genuecting dutifully to the wines themselves. There are two layers to argument in this book. The rst is intellectually respectable: there is more of history and culture in each bottle of wine than there is geography. This is, of course, a heresy in the French wine world. If our soil is not unique, then where lie our claims of greatness? Or the value of our real estate? However you react to this assertion (and the author himself backs off from it a bit), you have to admit that its worth discussion. The second layer involves the pathetic fallacy, the odd notion that inanimate things or even generalizations about things have feelings. You see, it seems that the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy dont get along. They are at opposite poles of a world of French culture and, indeed, opposite ends of the French soul.

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You can imagine the dichotomies: the Bordelaise are temperate, the Burgundians lushes. The wines of Bordeaux are cerebral, the Burgundies sensual. Bordeaux is masculine except when its feminine, and Burgundy is feminine except when its masculine. Bordeaux favors the aged palate, Burgundy the young. One promotes urination, the other copulation. Bordeaux is Protestant (the very Jewish Rothschilds aside) and Burgundy Catholic. And so on. The reader imagines the author straining for effect, being more sly than serious even when he hedges and qualies. The effect is inherently droll, and you are to smile, but not to laugh. In between all the stories about dinners and revels the author has enjoyed and the overreaching in the personication of the two wine regions he reminds us of some very sound anti-terroir arguments. He also reminds us that wine culture as we know it is relatively recent. For instance, in the eleven-thousand-year history of wine, serving the stuff undiluted became established only at the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a provocative bibliography for those who would pursue one of these details. The average wine consumer may be dazzled by all this, but she would be right to be a bit puzzled as well. Is there not more to wine than these two? Is there not Alsace and Chianti? What about the Langhe and Rioja, not to mention Napa and Coonawara? Are we to forget that the best of these two French contenders produce wines that are so expensive that most of us will likely taste them only once or twice in our lifetime? We could just as reasonably listen in on the quarrel between the Lamborghinistas and the Ferraristas and then retire to our Camrys and drive off. But to demand too much of this book is to miss out on the fun. Theres a raconteur here, a wine-lover with stories to tell. Best to let the tipsy uncle play his violin and best for us to raise a glass of, lets say, Zinfandel and sing along.
Lynn Hoffman, author, The New Short Course in Wine

Bookends
Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie Siaron Hughes
New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2009 128 pp. Illustrations. $24.95 (vinyl)

Just as the whiff of fast-food fried chicken might be its most powerful attribute, the rst thing that strikes readers of Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie is the powerful aroma of its catsup-red cover. Perhaps heavy-gauge vinyl was chosen because a good

percentage of Chickens readership will likely be comprised of fast-food devotees in need of grease-resistant reading matter. Siaron Hughes, a Welsh graphic designer currently living in England, has divided her extensive aesthetic effort into four sections, shop fronts, names and branding, menu graphics and display, sign makers and designers, and graphic language, overlaying hundreds of photographs with interviews of restaurant workers and advertising suppliers. Like birds slaughtered under halal conditions, the pages of Chicken are fully bled, printed edge-to-edge on heavy magazine stock commonly used for color takeout menus. A critical mass of British imagery bombards the reader with blazes of red, white, and blue that possess a homage to America (p.4) and industry standard-bearers like Colonel Harlan Sanderss kfc. London may be known as The Big Smoke, but who knew so many chickens gave their lives to darken its skies? Chicken also made me realize theres an awful lot of brown, yellow, and taupe in fast food and the accompanying deluge of graphics that never seems to succeed in glorifying the leap of broiler ames, the addictive crunch of golden fried chicken and chips. Hughess longest interview is with Morris Cassanova, an upbeat man whose three decades of designing and fabricating Londons poultry placards has earned him the sobriquet Mr. Chicken. The remaining fourteen interviews are brief and, all told, sad. The interviewees invariably bemoan the trials of working in low-end food service and regularly go off topic to irt with Ms. Hughes. Only one interview, the rst, is with a woman, Ewelina Swierczek, who believes they dont have fried chicken in China! (p.34). Hughess inspiration for Chicken was a fast-food yer that read Dunk Your Dipper! (p.4). She nds enough titillation in such suggestive restaurant come-ons to devote the back cover and eight pages to a repetitive list of similar ndings, like Tender Loin and Taste Me. As claimed, Chicken presents an exhaustive exploration of a vernacular design culture, and its grease-and-ink-resistant cover will make this half-kilo a functional reference tool in the oftgrimy shops of menu printers and sign makers.
Harley Spiller, aka Inspector Collector, New York, ny

Sex, Death & Oysters: A Half-Shell Lovers World Tour Robb Walsh
Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009 268 pp. $25.00 (cloth)

with the oyster long before the recent acionados of the irresistible bivalve, the so-called Great American Oyster Renaissance of the last twenty years has occasioned a mixed bag of oyster lit. To his credit, Texan food writer and restaurant critic Robb Walsh avoids narrating in detail the occasion of eating my rst oyster and concentrates his passion for oysters in writing about various geographical breeding locations, oyster bars and restaurants, and oyster celebrations, festivals, and feasts. His book begins with a thoroughgoing exploration of Galveston Bay, its real and ctitious pollution problems, and the astonishing 6.8 million oysters harvested from its waters in 2003. By interviewing oystermen, wholesalers, retailers, environmentalists, and oyster-bar habitus, Walsh tracks down Gulf oysters in San Leon, Texas; Apalachicola, Florida; and New Orleans, Louisiana, before going on to sample half-shells and collect oyster lore in Ireland, France, England, and the American oyster-growing areasin Washington State, California, Oregon, New England, and the Eastern Shore. Pinning his search for what he celebrates as a perfect-tasting oyster on geography, environmental factors, harvesting skills, and reputation, Walsh samples Irish natives in Galway, Colchesters in London, Marennes in Paris, Olympias in Seattle, Blue Points in South Norwalk (Connecticut), and Malpeques on Prince Edward Island. Ultimately, he tastes his way through hundreds of oysters to a genuine enjoyment of his native Texas C. virginicas, but not before meeting the leading experts in each oyster location, learning how to shuck oysters, and uncovering questionable practices such as phony labeling, marketing hype, and prejudice. One of the most dramatic scenes in the book is Walshs account of visiting Raymond Carvers grave with oyster advocate Jon Rowley. On a chilly overcast morning in Port Angeles they shucked a few oysters, passed a bottle of Jack Daniels, and saluted the writer who had been Rowleys neighbor. Complete with famous recipes and a list of notable oyster bars, Robb Walshs foray into oyster literature is revealing, well researched, and eminently readable. He concentrates his attention on popular oyster myths like the unfortunate and false suspicion that Gulf oysters must be cooked and are dangerous when eaten raw. He reafrms the seasonality of oyster consumption and advises against consuming them during the R-months. In the end Walsh concludes that provincialism is intrinsic to the oyster business.
Joan Reardon, author, Oysters: A Culinary Celebration

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Although writers such as Lewis Carroll, Eleanor Clark, and, especially, M.F.K. Fisher, shared their romance

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Picnic Playground Putumayo World Music, 2009

$14.98

www.putumayo.com

Putumayo has made it cool to be international. The companys new cd, Picnic Playground, features music from all over the world in a special recording for kids. Each song is food themed, with cute titles. Mes Parents sont Bio (My Parents are Organic) explores the difculties of growing up in an organic-only housethe singer wishes that he could have a big hamburger! I know the feeling. For my seventh birthday my mom threw an international party at which she invited some of her foreign friends to tell a bunch of second graders about their cultures. She also served what my friends thought was strange food. Needless to say, I felt embarrassed at the time. But now, looking back on that day (and many others like it!), I realize how good it was for me to get an early taste of other cultures. Picnic Playground exposes young children to the importance of other cultures and other languages in one of the most important ways possible: through food. Food, after all, represents identity, and by presenting different traditions this way, the people at Putumayo help children understand what each culture is really about. Each song focuses on a particular type of food. Some are familiar, like ice cream, cherries, and chocolate chip cookies, but other, more exotic foods are also introduced, like the saliva-inducing Bolitas de Arroz con Pollo (the chicken, roasted/ with cassava and marinade/is tasty, hot/and delicious for you, as the lyrics, translated from the Spanish, tell us). Many songs also stress the importance of healthy eating, in particular the catchy rst song, Eat Like a Rainbow.
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All of the tracks are fun and easy to listen to, and I soon found myself singing along. Kids will love Bowl of Cherries, an adaptation of the old plantation song Bale of Cotton. They are also sure to respond to Ice Cream, whose chorus goes, Ice Cream, you scream/Everybody screaming/Ice Cream, ice cream The cd includes songs in French, Spanish, Danish, and German. I liked the insert even more than the songs. Many cds offer only pictures of the artist in the insert, and perhaps a few lyrics. Picnic Playgrounds insert contains not only all of the lyrics but also mini-descriptions of each song, translated into French and Spanish. These descriptions are accessible and often quite funny. Like the songs, they stress the importance of healthy eating, as in the description for Eat Like a Rainbow: If you eat hamburgers and French fries and drink soda all the time, you wont have the energy to play and dance! One great idea to help you eat well is to eat as many naturally-colored foods as possible. The insert includes two extremely simple recipes for eating like a rainbow: rainbow fruit sticks and garden veggie rolls. Besides being healthy and easy to make, these snacks from Mexico and Japan encourage children to think about other culinary traditions. I loved this cd and only wish there had been something like it when I was seven. I have a feeling it would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.
Leila Crawford, Williams College

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lagniappe | ardat h weaver

Collard Leaves for Misery

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Portraitist mary lyde hicks williams of rural Duplin County, North Carolina, documented postCivil War plantation scenes of shucking corn, churning milk, preparing aspic salad, and picking strawberries. In this painting collards serve up a healthy dose of folklore along with antioxidants and vitamins. These greens, a leafy variant of cabbage, are known for their pungent oils; early European herbals recommend the use of coleworts against inammation. In North America the treatment of ailments with leaf poultices was a common folk remedy.
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.10, no.1, p.176, issn 1529-3262.

Native Americans bound a green poultice to aching heads, while African Americans often parched the leaves rst. Recorded folk sayings include Wilted collard is good for headaches and Collard leaves we put on head for misery. Even though much of collards original pungency has been bred out of the plant, the smell of the greens simmering in a modern kitchen can induce a headache. But eating collards at the New Year with black-eyed peas is a sure prescription for wealth.g

2010 by ardath weaver.

mary lyde hicks williams, woman with collard leaf to cure headache , ca. 18901910. oil on wood. courtesy of north carolina museum of history.

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10
years

cover

p8

ga r r y m c l eod
Placemat, 2005 www.garrymcleod.com p1

max sher
Masonry Stove, Vologda Region, Russia, 2007 www.maxsher.com p9

el i nor ca r ucci
Cherries I ate by myself, 2003 www.elinorcarucci.com p2

r i ch a r d l e a r o y d
Dead Hare, 2007 Courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York p10

z a ch a r y z av i sl a k
Fish with Fruit, 2001 p3

jessi c a c r a i g - ma r t i n
Cancer Benet, Southampton 2006 [Small Bites], 2007 Jessica Craig-Martin/trunkarchive.com p11

r a l f sch m er b er g
Lunch with Darius Khondij, TM Cafe, Paris, 2005 p4

a l ex l u c k a
Food and Beauty, 2003 p12

l uo da n
14 May 2008, Shaanxi Xunyang (from the North South series) Courtesy of the Taiss Gallery, Paris p5

er w i n wu r m
Outdoor Sculpture, Series: Taipei, 2000 Courtesy of Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna p13

z w el et h u m t h et h wa
Untitled (from the Sugar Cane series), 2007 Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York p6

dav i d s h r i g l e y
Hotdog, 2002 p14

hen we launched Gastronomica ten years ago, we envisioned a journal that would feature not only thoughtful and provocative writing but also bold visual imagery. To commemorate Gastronomicas tenth anniversary, we present here seventeen new photographs that beautifully embody the qualities we admire. Each is witty, contemplative, unnerving, or gorgeous. Each invites us to look a little more deeply at our rich and complex relationship with food. We hope you will savor these images as we do.

sca r l e t t h o o f t g r a a f l a n d st ev e coh en
Espresso Diary, 2005 www.stevecohenphoto.com p7 Lemonade Igloo, 2008 Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Contemporary, London p15

va l r i e b e l i n
Untitled, 2007 Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Contemporary, London p16

p r i sci l l a m onge
El Deporte es cosa de vida o muerte (Sports are a matter of Life and Death), 2005 Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Darra Goldstein, Editor in Chief, and Frances Baca, Design Director

k a t h r y n pa r k e r a l ma n a s
Cauliower, 2006 www.kathrynparkeralmanas.com