NOT FOR BREAD ALONE WRITERS ON FOOD, WINE, AND THE ART OF EATING Edited by Daniel Halpern Contents Introduction / Food as Gesture 1 Rose Macaulay / Eating and Drinking 5 Wendell Berry / The Pleasures of Eating 10 Charles Simic / On Food and Happiness 17 Joyce Carol Oates / Food Mysteries 23 Judith B. Jones / A Religious Art 36 M. F. K. Fisher / One Way to Give Thanks 40 Barbara Kafka / Tempest in a Samovar 45 Colette (tr. Derek Coltman) / Wines 49 Michael Frank / The Underside of Bread: A Memoir with Food 53 James Seay / Our Hands in the History of It 61 William Corbett / To Carol Braider’s Kitchen 68 Michael Dorris / The Quest for Pie 73 Evan Jones / Delmonico’s 81 Alice Waters / The Farm-Restaurant Connection 94 Paul Schmidt / What Do Oysters Mean? 103 Francine Prose / Cocktail Hour at the Snake Blood Bar: On the Persistence of Taboo 110 Betty Fussell / On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine 118 Harry Crews / On Food 123 Alexandre Dumas (tr. Alan and Jane Davidson) / Mustard 129 Madeleine Kamman / Of Gardens, Herbs, and Wines 136 Harry Mathews / Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double) 139 Charles Lamb / A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig 152 Edward Steinberg / The Vines of San Lorenzo: A Proposal 159 About the Editor Cover Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION Food as Gesture There are ways to think about food and its preparation beyond its actual consumption: thus the essays in Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating. My idea was to put together a collection that celebrated both the nourishing (and necessary) act of eating, as well as that part that goes beyond merely eating to live—that is, the various social, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical gestures in the non-consuming aspects of food and rituals of eating. Eating our slice of daily bread, but not for the intake of that slice alone. I entered the resplendent realm of cooking one very early Sunday morning in Seattle, circa 1952, at the age of six or seven, when I served eggs I had poached for an hour or two to my sleeping parents. I had watched my mother poach eggs and understood the technique perfectly: the poaching trays, the arrangement, the proper allotment of water. However, the notion of time was yet to enter my burgeoning culinary repertoire. Even then, or especially then, it was gesture that made an impression on me: the act of serving “the prepared” to another. But to me cooking did not truly matter until I used food to do my bidding in the court of women. It was the late sixties and I was under- going a post-puberty period in Los Angeles, a Valley Boy living in a cheap but rustic apartment rented from Apache landlords in Laurel Canyon, just down the street from “the log cabin,” where Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention posted rent and held extravagant parties, where I turned up many of the young women I nourished during that time. My small kitchen had a square table with a plastic checkerboard tablecloth, two wicker chairs, and a view of what I liked to describe solemnly as “deep forest.” My intention was to give the view a kind of eerie mystery—to set my guests on edge, but to what end I now wonder? I had rehearsed a number of good-looking, if moderately accomplished dishes, but settled on two that seemed to win for themselves the neces- sary regard. The meals began with spicy corn fritters. I served these with a little crème fraîche and, 1 depending on the intensity of my feelings, a splash of red lumpfish caviar. I followed with a leg of lamb, shank half, injected with garlic splinters and rubbed with olive oil and rosemary. And throughout, plenty of inexpensive zinfandel from Napa, finishing with a simple dessert that would not unduly prolong the evening. A short time later, I found myself living in Tangier, Morocco, where I taught English and began cooking with a certain earnestness. I lived in the apartment below Paul Bowles, who served as a sort of post-graduate mentor to me. On our afternoon walks through the covered food markets of the Socco Grande, where we shopped for our dinners, we discussed music, literature, stateside gossip, and the mysterious Moroccan culture. It was in Tangier that I was first seduced by the richness of the dark spices—cumin, clove, cinnamon, turmeric, paprika, cardamom—and one fresh herb in particular, kosbour (coriander), whose aroma still conjures up those intense, profuse, and honest markets, where nothing was masked or disguised. Paul and I often ate together and one of the dishes he most enjoyed was a chickpea dish I made with my two favorite ingredients: cumin and coriander. We ate this with our favorite tagine, a stew of chicken rubbed with freshly ground cumin, prunes stewed with ginger, and onions sautéed with cinnamon and topped with toasted almonds. When I left Tangier for Italy, to visit my mother and sisters in Florence, Paul suggested I stop in Venice to see Peggy Guggenheim. As her guest at the Guggenheim palazzo/museo, it came to pass that I had the opportunity to help her, using the few culinary skills I had managed to acquire. It was one of those languid, mid-summer days on the lagoons of Venice; we were looking at various obscure churches in the small back canals in her chauffeured gondola, talking about her support of Djuna Barnes, one the expatriate stars of the twenties, and of Italian food. She mentioned she had invited a number of friends to dinner, but was going to have to cancel because her chef had taken ill suddenly. Naturally, in a gesture of foolish generosity, I asked if I might help out by preparing a modest meal for her friends. She and I then put together a list and, via gondola, “shopped.” This meant we went from hotel to hotel, where Peggy was friendly with the head chefs who happily supplied her. 2 / Daniel Halpern An hour after the appointed hour, the guests began to arrive: local artists and politicians, exiled Brits and Americans, a banker, a beautiful Eastern European jeweller, and (Peggy had neglected to prepare me, a hopeful writer of verses), Ezra Pound. Later in the evening, after a quantity of Veneto red (an Amarone produced by Quintarelli), I re- minded him that we had met once ten years earlier on a vaporetto plying through a rainy December night from San Marco to Accademia. I had asked, innocently, if he might be the poet Ezra Pound and he had replied, “Nope”, in perfect English, keeping things simple. He now said, quietly, “Yes, but you see that wasn’t me.” I prepared the meal. Red and yellow peppers stuffed with a purée of tuna and various aromatics and followed by simple but enthusiastic fusilli tossed with sausage and three kinds of tomatoes. For a meat dish, I grilled pork tenderloin (the kind that in this country comes packaged in cellophane) marinated, à la Tangier, in a blizzard of brown spices. To close, I presented with immodesty a local thigh-food specialty known as tiramisu. Peggy told me the dinner was well-received. She knew by the invita- tions at meal’s end—gesture for gesture. I left the next day after a lunch on her terrace overlooking the Grand Canal, sitting in the shadow of Brancusi’s Bird in Flight. As we ate (leftovers), Peggy told me the story of its painful acquisition from the artist himself. They had been “seeing each other in a serious way,” as Peggy put it. When the moment even- tually arrived for them to break up—which I gathered, from the stories she told me about her many close encounters with the most important men of the first half of this century, was something she got rather used to—she agreed to purchase his Bird in Flight. At the appointed hour, she went to fetch the piece. Brancusi came out of his house carrying it in his arms. I asked Peggy if it weren’t too heavy for him to carry alone and she replied, “Oh no, he was an extremely strong man.” And she added, “You know, he had tears in his eyes, it was very moving. But to this day I don’t know whether those tears were for me because I left him or because he was losing his beloved Bird in Flight.” I like to think, these many years later (and given this context), their final encounter was like a last supper, bird in hand—betrayed first by his love-in-flesh, who in turn robbed (albeit purchased) him of his love-in-silver, both now in flight. But this is not the gesture I wish to end with. Not with a gesture of parting, but one of arrival. As in introduction. It is reported that Genghis Not for Bread Alone / 3 Kahn said the first thing one man gives another is his hand. I’m thinking of gatherings of friends and relations, and how the hand and cheek are certainly the first to be put forward. But we expect this gesture of formal greeting (among friends) to be quickly followed by the question that makes coming together such a welcome thing, that pregustatory interrogative we have come this distance to be offered by our good and thoughtful hosts: “What can I get you?” DANIEL HALPERN 4 / Daniel Halpern ROSE MACAULAY Eating and Drinking H ere is a wonderful and delightful thing, that we should have fur- nished ourselves with orifices, with traps that open and shut, through which to push and pour alien objects that give us such pleasurable, such delicious sensations, and at the same time sustain us. A simple pleasure; a pleasure accessible, in normal circumstances and in varying degrees, to all, and that several times each day. An expensive pleasure, if calculated in the long run and over a lifetime; but count the cost of each mouthful as it comes, and it is (naturally) cheaper. You can, for instance, get a delicious plate of spaghetti and cheese, or fried mush- rooms and onions, for very little; or practically anything else, except caviare, smoked salmon, the eggs of plovers, ostriches and humming- birds, and fauna and flora completely out of their appropriate seasons, which you will, of course, desire, but to indulge such desires is Gluttony, or Gule, against which the human race has always been warned. It was, of course, through Gule that our first parents fell. As the confessor of Gower’s Amans told him, this vice of gluttony was in Paradise, most deplorably mistimed. We shall never know what that fruit was, which so solicited the longing Eve, which smelt so savoury, which tasted so delightful as greedily she ignored it without restraint. The only fruit that has ever seemed to me to be worthy of the magnificently inebriating effects wrought by its consumption on both our parents is the mango. When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve. Satiate at length, And hightn’d as with Wine, jocund and boon, Thus to her self she pleasingly began. O sovran, vertuous, precious of all trees In Paradise, of operation blest…. And like both of them together: As with new Wine intoxicated both They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel 5